When I was child, my parents told me to “be smart” at least once a day. Depending on the context, these words stood in for a range of different things: a goodbye when I ran out the door for school, an admonishment when I misbehaved, or a reminder to study harder. In our family, being smart was everything.
According to my father, the smartest person he knew was his youngest sister, my Aunt D. In the late 1960s, she immigrated from South Korea to the United States by herself and eventually landed what my father referred to as a “steady” job. He could never quite explain what she did for the federal government, but he was quick to list the things he coveted. “Good benefits and more money every year,” he often said. “And nobody can fire her.” This last part seemed particularly important to him.
A combination of temperament and language had forced my father to make do with self-employment, which was decidedly unsteady. When he first started out, he taught tae kwon do classes until ten o’clock at night and touched every dollar he made, unfolding the wrinkled bills and occasional check that he received from his students. My mother, whom he sent for a year after his arrival in the States, worked the line in a frozen pizza factory and waited tables until they eventually saved enough to buy her a small business.
The words “be smart” kept ringing in my ears. Trying to be a writer seemed like the opposite of that advice.
For my parents, America was all about the hustle. It didn’t matter if they were too tired or sick or sad to work. Having witnessed the Korean War as children, they understood that life could turn sideways with very little warning. There was no safety net for them in this country—or by extension, for me or my sister. In comparison, my Aunt D., with her nice office job and health insurance and personal days, had reached the top of a ladder they didn’t know how to climb.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I followed my Aunt D’s example and began my career in government after college. By my late twenties, I was living what my parents proudly referred to as “a very smart life.” I had a graduate degree, I owned my apartment in Brooklyn, I was married to a boy from a good family, and most importantly, I had a job that paid well at a major New York cultural institution. If I broke a bone, I had health insurance. If the roof leaked, I had homeowner’s insurance. Unlike my parents, I never physically touched my money, which grew in places I couldn’t see—savings accounts, IRAs, mutual funds, real estate appreciation. In less than a decade, I had safely insulated myself from the kind of risk they’d spent most of their adult lives trying to outrun.
That safety, however, came with a price. My job required me to be in the office twelve to fourteen hours a day, six to seven days a week. I ate nearly every meal at my desk and watched friends drift away after I forgot to return their calls or canceled our plans because a deadline was always looming. While many of my colleagues balked at the long hours, I dug in, having learned from my parents to put the hustle above everything else. How often they reminded me, even as an adult, that immigrants had to be smarter and work harder than everyone else—not just to be successful in this country, but to be seen in a positive light.
It was telling, then, that the one thing I did during my limited free time was attend a creative writing class. I’d signed up for it on a whim, tired of wanting to write since my late teens but never making an effort to try. The class met on Saturday afternoons in a community center with water-damaged ceilings and peeling mint green walls. I often went there after working in the office in the morning and then returned to the office immediately afterward. Despite this, I never missed a class or an assignment. I loved my teacher and classmates, who were the kind of wonderful oddballs the city is known for—a retired locksmith whose stories were always about cat burglars, a shy dental hygienist whose knowledge of books could rival an English professor’s, two Goth kids whose awkward romance bloomed before our eyes. The best thing about the class was how generative writing was. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write.
At the office, I began to imagine a different kind of life, one in which writing was central instead of something I did at the edges of my time and energy. But the words “be smart” kept ringing in my ears. Trying to be a writer seemed like the opposite of that advice. It also seemed like a rejection of my parents’ values, which had laid the groundwork for my adult stability. Still, when faced with the prospect of a three-year contract renewal at work or pursuing a life centered on writing, I surprised myself and everyone around me by choosing the latter. I wish I could say I did it because I was brave or passionate or simply headstrong. But the fact was, I was exhausted, and I knew that three more years on the job would end up feeling like thirty.
Initial reactions to my decision were less than encouraging. When I told a colleague that I was planning to go back to graduate school to study creative writing, she looked at me curiously. “Are you sure?” she asked, emphasizing the word in a way that made me feel like I belonged in a sanitarium.
I wasn’t remotely sure, but I plowed ahead anyway, committed to act fast before I lost my nerve. In retrospect, I was lucky that so many dominoes fell in quick succession, leaving little room to second guess. Within nine months, I applied to M.F.A. programs, quit my job, sold my apartment, and left New York to start graduate school in Western Massachusetts. At the time, I believed that choosing a writing life was the riskiest thing I’d ever done—possibly the riskiest thing I’d ever do—so much so that the promise of frequent rejection and low odds of publication failed to dissuade me. It turns out that I didn’t fully understand the nature of the risk.
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In 2022, during the Justice Department’s trial to prevent the acquisition of Simon & Schuster, Penguin/Random House’s then-CEO, Markus Dohle, said, “Everything is random in publishing. Success is random. Bestsellers are random. So that is why we are the Random House!”
I now understand there are so many forces outside a writer’s control that influence how a book makes its way into the hands of readers—or doesn’t.
By then, I had published two novels that had sold well and been well-received by reviewers, but Dohle’s candid admission unnerved me and countless other writers by acknowledging an element of luck in publishing. The idea of this was troubling, in large part because luck was completely contrary to my upbringing. My parents had worked as hard as humanly possible to be successful, but Dohle’s comments highlighted the fact that effort doesn’t always translate neatly in publishing. If it did, every single author who managed to write and publish a book would be a bestseller, which of course doesn’t happen. Just ask anyone who published on Tuesday, 9/11, or in the early months of COVID-19, only to see the product of their heart and labor disappear into a preoccupied world.
As a mid-career writer, I now understand there are so many forces outside a writer’s control that influence how a book makes its way into the hands of readers—or doesn’t. Often, it’s not even something as world altering as a terrorist attack or a pandemic. The “randomness” that Dohle spoke of can take many forms. A dear friend of mine lost their editor due to downsizing and has watched their once-hot manuscript pass from one disinterested person to the next in search of a champion. Another friend—a serious, thoughtful, dignified human being—all but set their hair on fire on social media to promote their book, but didn’t make a dent in sales. And then there’s the mystery of the established author with a history of bestsellers whose latest book received the same enviable spotlight and resources as their previous books, but for reasons that no one can explain, it “underperformed” (a polite way to say “tanked”) and promptly disappeared.
Writers, in other words, control the page, but the business of writing is subject to forces that even publishers aren’t entirely sure of. And yet here we are, far too many of us to count—published and unpublished, established and emerging, known and unknown, succeeding and struggling—all trying to do this beautiful, heartbreaking, hopeful, inherently risky thing in which success isn’t always determined by how smart we are or how hard we work. Frankly, it’s this first-generation, Type A, mildly obsessive-compulsive immigrant’s nightmare. Still, twenty-plus years after choosing this life, I continue to write because the risks of writing pale in comparison to the rewards—that feeling of accomplishment when I tell a story uniquely my own, or solve a structural problem that a younger me would have given up on, or answer a question that I could only resolve by writing about it.
I experienced all these things with my latest book, a novel titled All the World Can Hold that was decades in the making. One of the biggest challenges I faced early on was how to tell a story about fictional characters running away from their troubled, empty lives in the wake of 9/11, without minimizing the loss of so many real lives that day. Adding to this challenge were the strange circumstances of my own post-9/11 experience, which took place on a weeklong cruise to Bermuda, sailing aboard the ship that was used as the filming location for the ABC television series, The Love Boat. How could I incorporate a completely absurd setting that was meaningful to me in a novel about this tragic and still tender era without making it seem like I was writing a farce? I lost track of how many times I started and restarted this book, not certain if I could get past all my fears about it. I was fortunate—and yes, perhaps even a little lucky—that the muscle memory of my past life in New York forced me back into the chair every morning to do the work because I knew I wouldn’t figure it out any other way. Ultimately, whether I succeeded or failed in my efforts is up to readers to decide. But I know that I wrote a story that I’m deeply proud of, and that’s a reward I wasn’t sure I’d ever earn.
Over time, I’ve come to think of every book I attempt to write as a new life waiting to be born and shaped and lived. Doing so has helped me realize that maybe my parents’ values actually did prepare me to be a writer, more than I ever fully appreciated. After all, the two of them left their homeland in their thirties, crossed an ocean, and remade themselves in a country that promised opportunity at a steep cost. What motivated them, if not a wild, almost reckless, belief in the possibility of a life that might be worth the risk?
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All the World Can Hold by Jung Yun is available from 37 Ink, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
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