lishers Book Award. By investigating the power of
the English language and questioning the pos-
sibility of translation between cultures, Kim ar-
ticulates her personal and her home country’s
collective memory of lost home and dislocation:
“[W]e cross bridges we did not see being built.”
In her second collection, The Bounty (1996), and
third collection, Dura (1998), Kim expresses a
profound conflict with language, especially about
the way it is taught and translated. In these poems,
the political, historical, and ideological forces at
work in language are exemplified. By juxtaposing
Korean and English throughout the poems in her
2002 collection, Commons, Kim again draws at-
tention to the ways in which languages compete
in her daily life.
Kim’s poems are framed with musical, visual,
and fragmented images of languages. As critic
Zhou Xiaojing maintains, Kim’s poetry is more
often likened to a painting of historical, cultural,
political, and personal emotions toward coloniza-
tion, immigration, dislocation, violent history of
war, loss of the mother tongue, imperial capitalism,
and rampant consumerism. As a poet “transcribing
the interstices of the abbreviated, the oddly con-
joined, the amalgamated recognizing,” Kim defines
the poem as “deciphering and embodying a ‘par-
ticularizable’ prosody of one’s living” to bridge and
reconfigure “disrupted, dilated, circulatory spaces”
shaped by loss and absence (“Anacrusis”).
Kim has received several awards including the
Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative North Ameri-
can Poetry in 1993 and 1994. Kim’s poems have ap-
peared in various literary journals and anthologies
such as Conjunctions, Sulfur and Proliferations.
Bibliography
Kim, Myung Mi. “Anacrusis.” How2 Readings on the
Web. Available online. URL: http://www.scc.rut-
gers.edu/however/v1_2_1999/current/readings/
kim.html. Downloaded on Dec. 3, 2004.
———. “Generosity as Method: An Interview with
Myung Mi Kim,” by Yedda Morrison. Available
online. URL: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kim/
generosity.html. Downloaded on Dec. 3, 2004.
———. “Interview with Myung Mi Kim,” by James
Kyung-Jin Lee. Words Matter: Conversations with
Asian American Writers, edited by King-Kok
Cheung, 92–104. Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 2000.
Xiaojing, Zhou. “Possibilities out of an Impossible
Position: Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag.” Avail-
able online. URL: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/
kim/xiaojing.html. Downloaded on December 3,
2004.
Heejung ChaKim, Patti (1970– )
The author of A Cab Called Reliable, Patti Kim
was born in Pusan, Korea, and immigrated to the
United States in 1974 with her family. She grew up
in the Washington, D.C. area and graduated from
the University of Maryland at College Park with a
B.A. in English in 1992 and an M.F.A. in 1996. A
Cab Called Reliable, Kim’s debut novel published
in 1997, received critical acclaim and was awarded
the Towson University Prize for Literature in 1997.
It was included in the New York Times’s “new-and-
noteworthy-paperbacks” list in 1998. Kim lives in
Riverdale, Maryland, and is said to be working on
her second book.
A Cab Called Reliable is the coming-of-age
story of Ahn Joo Cho, a Korean-American immi-
grant girl who is left to look after her alcoholic and
incompetent father at the age of nine when her
mother leaves her family. The sign “reliable” she
spots on the cab as the cab with her mother and
younger brother speeds out of sight is etched into
Ahn Joo’s memory as she waits for her mother’s re-
turn. In a low-income neighborhood in Arlington,
Virginia, Ahn Joo struggles to find her place in a
world that offers her neither comfort nor under-
standing. Creative writing becomes her only means
of escape from the sordidness that surrounds her,
as she grows up to be a strong young woman who
practically runs her father’s diner by the time she is
in high school in Potomac. Unexpectedly finding
out that the woman she believed to be her mother
is not her biological mother, Ahn Joo’s long wait
for her mother’s return comes to an end as she
leaves home and her dependent father.
Jeehyun Lim148 Kim, Patti