In writing her first novel, “We Carry the Sea in Our Hands,” scientist and author Janie Kim got a chance to combine her loves of science and storytelling. Growing up in San Diego’s Scripps Ranch neighborhood meant she was never far from the sea, the beaches, or family walks at Torrey Pines that fed her curiosity in organisms and other forms of life.
The books she’s gravitated toward over the years went from the tales that featured animals as the main characters and the ways that those authors would write from the perspective of another species, to searching for stories that featured Asian or Asian American characters, and women in science. Kim’s book is centered around Abby, an orphan from South Korea who winds up in the American foster care system and is adopted into two families after the first one resulted in abuse and abandonment. Working as a scientist, her story moves between her training in experimentation and fact-finding in the lab, and using those skills to piece together a more complete picture of herself and her identity.
“I minored in creative writing at Princeton and I was majoring in molecular biology. The work that I was doing for my molecular biology thesis, my senior thesis, was actually on bacteria that live inside other cells; in real life, I was working with bacteria and ocean algae,” she said. “I was writing my creative writing thesis at the same time as my mole-bio thesis, so some of that science sort of snuck into my creative writing thesis. I think, in general … I’ve been very interested in how concepts in biology tie into identity and the idea of cells that are inside of cells (and sometimes there’s even another cell inside of that) I found really interesting, both from a biological standpoint and also from a creative writing standpoint.”
Kim, 25, currently lives in Palo Alto where she’s earning her doctorate in biology at Stanford University. She took some time to talk about her book (which one of her mentors, best-selling author Joyce Carol Oates, has called “beautifully composed, stylistically inventive, conceptually imaginative and original”) and some of the parallels between her main character’s relationship with adoptive family and her own relationship with her family’s adopted home. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity. )
Q: Early in the story, Abby has been taken in by her friend’s family and goes searching for a bird’s egg because she thinks it will help her connect with the father in the family, who has a notebook of sketches of birds’ eggs. She finds the egg of a rain-crow cuckoo in the nest of another type of bird. Later, while talking to the father, she says the cuckoo’s egg “doesn’t even belong in that other bird’s nest”— eventually realizing the irony considering her own position in the family. What compelled you to explore these themes of family and identity through this story?
A: I should say first that I am not adopted. Abby is adopted and I was interested in trying to write a character who was adopted. I enjoy writing characters who are different from myself and live different realities. I think, in general, when I write characters who have different lives from mine, I like starting with some sort of similar seed, whether that’s some sort of similarity in upbringing or personality or interests. Then, using that seed as a sort of starting point to explore other facets of identity that I’m not familiar with. In this case, I’m a second-generation Korean American and my parents immigrated here from South Korea. I actually haven’t been to South Korea where the rest of our family is, in 15 to 20 years or so. I’ve grown up with this sort of sense that America is this problematic and complicated adoptive parent, and then South Korea is an equally complicated and also problematic biological parent that I’m not very familiar with. I think I kind of wanted to explore that, but in a character whose life is different from mine in an indirect way.
Q: In a recent interview with “Campaign for the American Reader,” you talk about that perspective of America as “a complicated adoptive parent and of South Korea as a distant and unfamiliar and equally complicated biological parent.” Can you talk a little bit about your experience navigating this place, America, in a way that feels complicated and adoptive?
A: The first thing that comes to mind is in elementary school and middle school, that classic example of bringing your lunch that your mother packed for you and people around you are like, ‘What is that?’ and ‘It looks weird.’ That’s probably a common experience many immigrants have had. Also, reading in English classes. I’m trying to think of whether there was a book with an Asian or Asian American characters. There definitely were not as many as the classic, Western White man stories. Part of the reason I’d written this book was that I wanted to write a story with an Asian American character, and a woman in science because I’ve never really read a story like that. Once I became interested in science, I wanted to look for books with main characters who were women in science. There weren’t a whole lot of them that went beyond the stereotypical scientist image of a sort of cold, aloof genius.
Q: Does South Korea continue to feel equally complicated, as well as distant and unfamiliar?
A: I think it feels just as distant. I do think, during the pandemic, I was able to read more Korean literature and learn more about folk tales and aspects of culture that I just had been really out of touch with, but it’s different reading about it and watching videos about it compared to being there in person. South Korea has not been exempt from the alarming trend of fascist politicians gaining popularity in countries across the globe, and that’s been really alarming. I don’t want to spoil anything, but the story ends quite neatly and I guess I’m still trying to imagine how the ending might be for me if I were to go to South Korea and, in a parallel to an adopted person meeting their biological parents, I guess I would describe the emotions as excited and hopeful and also quite scared.
Q: Abby experiences considerable trauma in the first family she was adopted into, with the arguments that happened between her first set of adopted parents and the ways that their conflict shaped her. What was important to you to convey about the process of recognizing how childhood trauma informs our personalities and what can be done about it?
A: I guess one thing that I was quite focused on in an earlier version of this book, I think it was the version I’d originally submitted as my creative writing thesis, the first set of adoptive parents was much less developed. In subsequent rounds of editing, I was trying to make them more three-dimensional and I think one thing that I was interested in exploring in their relationship was morally gray characters and the difference between things that are spoken or shown explicitly versus things that are not, for whatever reason. I was interested in exploring that the character of Abby’s first adoptive mother. There’s a scene where Abby realizes that something her first adoptive mother gave her as a child was actually a symbol of protection, like a paper talisman. She didn’t realize that was what it was and she thought it was just a meaningless scrap of paper until years later. She sort of puts the pieces together and I was interested in exploring how she comes to realize things that are said versus not said, how complicated communication can be and how she comes to with that.
Q: To switch gears for a moment, you grew up in San Diego, studied molecular biology at Princeton University, and are currently working on your Ph.D. in biology at Stanford University. What kind of influence has San Diego had on your interest in science?
A: The sea, the beaches, definitely. All of the parks and nature around Southern California. Growing up, my family would always go to Torrey Pines for walks, and there’s Mission Bay. I do think just being around the ocean and reading all of these kids’ books about how there are so many unknowns in the ocean definitely kickstarted a curiosity about biology in the sea.
Q: What kinds of books did you most enjoy reading when you were growing up?
A: Growing up, I definitely tended to read books with animals as main characters. I was very interested in how different authors would write the perspectives of different animals. And, there’s just the biology of things. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the “Warrior Cat” series. That was second grade when I came across that series and that catapulted me into reading and writing. Quite a few other people I’ve met who enjoy writing, that was their gateway into reading and writing. I was interested in seeing how authors would write this very different biology of these characters. I was just curious about how different anatomy might lead to different stories and exploring the world in different ways.
Q: What do you find yourself reading now, as an adult?
A: While working on this novel, I prevented myself from reading any other stories with scientists as main characters just because I didn’t want to be influenced by what other people had written. Once I submitted it, then it was just this long spree of reading all of the books I could find with scientists as main characters, and also books written by scientists. There were quite a few authors I didn’t realize had a science background, and after reading a few of those, it was interesting to see what the similarities there might be between these authors who share a science background. Like, I had no idea that Vladimir Nabokov was a world-renowned entomologist. Darcie Little Badger is a YA fantasy author and I learned that she also went to Princeton for undergrad and studied, I think, geosciences (and has a Ph.D. in oceanography). Then, her first book took off and she became a full-time writer. I’m definitely always interested in reading stories written by people who have some sort of interest in science and imagining how their experience in science might have played into fiction writing. I think there are a quite a few commonalities that I’ve noticed between doing scientific research and writing stories. Things like looking for plot holes when I’m revising my own stories, there’s a similarity when I’m combing through scientific literature to look for gaps in knowledge that could lead to a new project or new idea. Planning the narrative arc of a story has similarities to planning the scope of a project, whether it’s an undergrad project or a Ph.D. In general, I really enjoy reading stories that are about identity and how there are multitudes of identity within the same person. Also, the prose is really nice. I’m a sucker for nice prose.
Q: How do you think this has influenced your own approach to storytelling?
A: In the last couple of years, I’ve also been reading quite a bit of something that I wasn’t as into as a child. Korean folklore was something that I hadn’t really had much of an interest in. When the pandemic started and I was at home, isolating with my family, I came across this book of folklore and mythology and that was sort of the first time I became interested in them. It was interesting seeing that there are so many non-Western story structures, or themes that are not common in Western stories. Also, with a lot of these folktales, there’s absolutely no line of logic. I think, writing this book and in other stories that I’ve been trying to write in the past couple of years, it’s been interesting trying to take those aspects of the stories I really liked as a kid-like fantasies with a very clear, three-act structure-and incorporate aspects of less familiar stories I’m reading more and more of these days.
Q: There’s a lot of science in “We Carry the Sea in Our Hands,” as Abby is a researcher on the origins of life in her work with sea slugs. How have you come to understand the connections between science-which many of us outside of the field likely see as rooted in an almost sterile, unemotional pursuit of information-and the more imaginative world of storytelling and fiction?
A: I think I really became interested in science communication around sophomore year of college. There’s this microbiology blog called “Small Things Considered” and I had come across it when I was trying to write a short story about flesh eating bacteria and Googling information about flesh eating bacteria. I ended up reading more of the articles on this blog and liked it, and I emailed the person who runs the blog about writing something of my own in 2018. It’s led me to contributing to the blog. Other microbiologists (who write for the blog) have just been fantastic mentors in science writing. There’s a sense of effervescent curiosity about science and writing for this blog has taught me a lot about how to communicate science to a more general audience. A lot of these things that I try to communicate in these articles and in parts of my book, the scientific concepts are things that people who work in science see every single day and it no longer seems very exciting to them. Trying to write that using a more relatable metaphor to describe that, that inherently makes me excited about the whole thing all over again.
I think that biological research is, generally, trying to figure out how life moves, and creative writing is searching for why that’s important to people and society. I think science communication is a way to communicate aspects of science that have more of an emotional connection to people and that might be a more powerful way for people to scientific concepts. I was trying to get into that as I was writing this book and connecting different scientific things to aspects of Abby’s life and other people’s lives. I hope that worked, I hope readers will walk away with a new scientific fact that they’ve learned, or just a “this seems very cool” kind of feeling.
