Growing up, David Hoon Kim imagined himself sketching superheroes as a comic-book artist for Marvel. Instead, the Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate ended up a fiction writer with enough chops to get his first published piece in the prestigious New Yorker in June. A man of many locations (he lived in Korea until he was 8, was raised in the U.S., and lived in Paris for around 10 years), Kim has now settled in Orange County and looks forward to putting pen to paper to finish his novel — with the occasional superhero sketch in between.

 

How did it feel to get your first published story in the New Yorker?

I was obviously surprised. I was kind of in a state of disbelief until the piece actually appeared.

How was the process of getting your work edited?

The fiction editor, who first took the time to read my story and worked with me on it after it was accepted, understood the story and knew exactly what I was trying to do in it.

Why make your narrator a Japanese-Danish adoptee?

I’m not an autobiographical writer, but it’s what I found I could write the most convincingly about. At the risk of sounding disingenuous, it was only after writing the story that I noticed the narrator’s linguistic situation was similar to mine: two dominant languages (English and French) that were also foreign languages, and a first, non-dominant, minority language (Danish for the narrator, Korean in my case).

How did you go from being a comic book artist to a fiction writer?

It just kind of happened. During my adolescence, I really believed in comic books. It was the medium for me. Then I moved to France, [and] I kind of turned the page. I discovered books in France. The French language, for me, is nothing less than literature itself. Not overnight, but I decided to put everything I had into becoming a writer.