A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful-yet-domineering mother whose resentments about her own life compromise her relationship with her daughter. With her parents at constant odds, Song learns more words in Korean for “hatred” than “love.” When the family’s fake-Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. On her first day, a girl asks the teacher: “Can she speak English?”

Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother’s dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, “Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don’t have the talent and drive to go after real success.” Years of self-erasure take a toll on Song as she experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania. A thought repeats: I want to die. I want to die. Song enters a psychiatric hospital where she meets patients with similar struggles. So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything.

“A celebration of resilience and a testament to the power of art to heal and transform” (Chloé Cooper Jones, two-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and author of Easy Beauty), Docile is one woman’s story of subverting the model minority myth, contending with mental illness, and finding her self-worth by looking within. *

Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl resonated with me and allowed me to delve into the life of someone from an immigrant family like mine. Over a series of emails, Song and I discussed the book’s origin story, main themes, and how she intends to help others by sharing her story.

Josephine Taylor: I looked up the definition of “docile” and discovered that it derives from the Latin verb “docēre,” which means “to teach.” Someone who is docile is usually thought of as someone who is willing to accept control or instructions. How did you choose the title for your book?

Hyeseung Song: The book was once called Worth. I changed the title two years ago, but I still think of Docile as the other side of Worth. My book is, among other things, about finding self-worth through repudiating the model minority myth, the belief that all Asians are docile, STEM-excelling achievers who play the violin and piano and have the “right values” of hard work and self-reliance.

The word “docile” comes up only once in my book, when my college roommate, a white legacy at Princeton, observes I’m nothing like her “docile” Asian friend from boarding school. “Yoko never says anything,” she tells me. “Docile” is a very racial, gendered word; it immediately conjures a submissive young woman of Asian descent. When I decided to change the title from Worth to Docile, I wanted to lean into this stereotype and confront it head-on.

The decision led to great marketing opportunities, too; after all, a book’s title is an author’s primary marketing tool. When people see the cover of Docile, for example, they get it: the author is mistaken in the culture as docile, but she is neither passive nor submissive: she, like the cover of the book, is loud and unruly.

JT: Creativity can manifest in various forms, such as visual art, written words, or spoken poetry, which is why many artists are also writers or poets. Can you describe a moment when you were first exposed to writing that allowed you to experiment with various mediums?

HS: My immigrant mother had many fears, and those fears led her to teach me to read early. I didn’t learn how to write the Korean alphabet, however, until I was first fluent and reading in English, but we spoke Korean at home. In some ways, Korean is my native language; in other ways, it is English. It was in English that I wrote and made up the stories I illustrated as a child. In elementary school, my mother helped me sew my own books, the covers of which I designed. Throughout middle and high school, I wrote plays. Now looking back as a writer and painter, it makes sense that I was so obsessed with plays—where the visual and the verbal intersect.

JT: In your memoir, you divide each chapter into smaller readings labeled 1–6 that discuss a specific memory. This format made your book very welcoming. Was that your intention when creating that structure?

HS: Docile is structured so that the numbered subunits provide spots of relief for the reader to sit within what I hope is a very propulsive book. I don’t think of the numbered sections as “specific memories,” but rather scenes that connect and build upon under the heading of the larger unit, corresponding to a step on my journey. The unit change often coincides with a change in geographic location propelled by my questioning. For example, the first unit, “A Magical Sounding Place,” represents the hope of the child narrator that Sugar Land and her family’s new American dream home will provide salvation for them. All numbered sections in that unit are meant to develop this idea. Similarly, the seventh chapter, “Veritas,” which takes place at Harvard and McLean Hospital, is titled after the Harvard University motto as well as for the truth about my life that I’m searching for through the discipline and study of philosophy. 

JT: A key part of this memoir comes from your family history. You go into great detail on the hopes, sorrows, and love of an immigrant family. I, too, come from an immigrant family, and something I related to is when you wrote, “I heard and saw everything, as immigrant children are not shielded from much; in some cases, they are the shields themselves.” A shield has one main purpose: to protect. How would you say having to be a shield at an early age has impacted you?

HS: I live in New York, and sometimes in a store or on the street, I will see an immigrant child shield her parents—maybe the child hears a slur that her parents miss and ushers them away from the offending person, or maybe she’s doing something more quotidian like translating the cashier and counting out the cash—and it makes me want to sob.

There is a cost to being the shield. In some ways, it may have helped predispose me to mental illness or at least instability, but it also probably made me more empathic. I was relied on to translate things I saw from an early age for my parents who didn’t have the space or energy to edit themselves much in front of me. Even as a child, I stood at the complicated nexus of the wants and needs of competing parties and understood the dynamic perhaps better than anyone. I tried to manage situations so that my parents would not lose, because they so often did in American life. When I was older and a teenager, I got resentful, and the burden of the management felt more complicated and unjust. 

My mother and father did not mean to burden me with this particular responsibility, which is also a superpower—if you asked them, my job was to go to school and be healthy. But immigrant children, especially the oldest, are often assimilating with the parents, and then faster than the parents. The children leave their parents behind. The relationship of course gets inverted: the parent is in some contexts the child; the child is in many important ways the parent. I’m not young anymore, but I have my dad, and our main dynamic is still my translating the culture for him, a culture foreign to him after forty-three years, making it amenable, and protecting him. Like a shield. 

JT: Dialogue plays an essential role in your memoir. What was your process of recalling what was said by whom?

HS: The family dialogue was the easiest to recall because it was imprinted on me from a very early age. I don't know if it was because my mother was deeply intelligent or because she had a musical ear or both, but the things she said to me were so unforgettable, statements like, “Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they can’t get anything real.” How can you hear something like that once and ever forget?

I have been a great journal and record-keeper for years, so for some of the more recent dialogue, I revisited how I felt by reading my entries and then approximating the dialogue as best as I could in the memoir.

JT: In the memoir, you describe a scene directly after your parents argued. You write: “The smashed Corelle plates, the bright red juices of the Korean food bleeding into the downy white of the carpet like a thousand small wounds, the chair overturned on its side, looking dead and given up. From this spot on the floor, I thought about the world—how you are supposed to build things, not tear them down, and how when one person breaks something, a different person might stay to clean it up.” I truly like how you create worlds through deeply observed details and poetic storytelling. Can you talk about the significance of language and word choice in your work?

HS: Thank you, I did think a good deal about diction and imagery when writing the memoir. My work as a painter influences my language, which I’ve been told is very filmic. But perhaps even more than that, I’m someone who has been reading for more than forty years. Over time, I’ve honed my own sensibility and unshakeable taste for what moves me in language—that of course informs how and what I write.

JT: Throughout your memoir, we read many scenes with you and your mother. One of the most powerful moments for me was when a girl walked into your living room and announced, “Oh. You’re poor.” While you allowed it to bother you, your mother didn’t want it to. We learned that while she hated being poor, she wasn’t afraid of it. Neither did she think anyone was better than she was. I applaud this and my question is, how did that brief encounter shape you?

HS: My mother was a very proud woman; she was accomplished and well-educated in her country. She understood that our being poor in this country wasn’t because we didn’t have the knowledge, drive, or desire for more financial stability, but rather because my father chased a very specific dream that we as a family had to pay for. The reason for our relative poverty was complicated to explain to ourselves and others, and it didn’t align with model minority stereotypes about Asian Americans. But for my mother, our financial underachievement in America didn’t erase the hard-won successes she attained in Korea, nor did it have anything to do with what her children would do in the new country.

JT: Docile is, among other things, a firsthand account of struggling with mental illness. In the memoir, we learn that it never occurred to you that there was any mental illness within your family. You write: “We don’t even have a working concept of mental illness. If we can’t name it, then it can’t exist.” My family was the same way as well, which often made it difficult for me to bring up things regarding my mental health. My question is, are there any ways to help family members become more knowledgeable about mental health?

HS: As a nurse, my mother had firsthand experience with people suffering from mental health issues. Many of her cancer patients had depression, and she saw the two problems as linked: you had cancer, so you were depressed about it. She struggled with my mental health problems because she saw no causal link; according to her, there was no real or legitimate underlying issue. But mental illness doesn’t really work that way—just like sometimes there’s no clear reason why you end up developing a physical illness like cancer.

I do think my mother knew, deep down, that I had some mental illness. Of course, at the end, she comes to reconcile herself to it, but looking back, I see there were years when the inkling pricked her a good deal because her worth was so tied to my apparent thriving and performance. It was sad that she succumbed for so long to shame and stigma, something that both American and Korean cultures share around mental illness. That hurt both of us.

If there is a mental health moral to Docile, it is to allow stories like mine to find the light. There is sterilization in the light. Fortunately, it’s becoming more commonplace to share these stories, reducing the destructive power of stigma, so we can save more people. Stigma is not a first-order pain; it’s a second-order. What I mean by that is if you suffer from depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia—those illnesses are the primary issue. Then if you have pain about that primary pain—i.e., stigma—that second-order pain renders it even more difficult to get help for the primary issue. Stigma and shame are altogether unhelpful in clearing the pathway to improved mental health; it keeps the real pain, the primary pain, in the dark and festering.

JT: In the acknowledgment section, you wrote: “When you are experiencing mental health chaos, the last thing you are doing is making art.” This stuck out to me because, while dealing with mental health is challenging, you were able to overcome some of your challenges and produce something beautiful. Can you give some advice to someone who is struggling with mental health?

HS: What I was referring to in that section of the acknowledgments was the conception of the mad artist, the idea that you must torch your whole self for your art and that great art is borne of great sacrifice. That’s a silly myth that Hollywood regurgitates: the tortured male genius who creates prescient art in the studio thanks to his unmanaged mental illness and garbage personal life. This romantic conception of mental illness doesn’t occur in real life. If it does, it’s because the artist can do the work despite the mental illness, not because of it. Great art does not come out of that kind of disorder.

I also want to make it clear that no great art, or any art, has to stem from mental struggle as a justification for pain; a rose does not have to blossom from shit. Contentment, enoughness, connection with ourselves and with humanity—that is more than enough. People struggle with mental illness. Period. It doesn't have to have anything to do with art. But art can be a tool for connection and mental health as my friend, the doctor Jeremy Nobel, wrote in his book Project Unlonely. Art and connection can help with loneliness and alleviate mental health struggles. But, no one has to ever create anything to justify the suffering they went through, in my opinion. The idea of productivity as a justification for our lives is another myth fed to us by late-stage capitalism.

I don’t have any advice that someone with more information and education hasn’t given before. I will just say that if you are on the rocky road, do not go at it alone. If possible, when you are well and have your druthers, find your people who will be ready to hold you when it’s hard again. 

JT: Do you believe there will come a time when mental illness is treated in society as any other physical ailment?

HS: I was at a lunch a couple of years ago when mental health and suicide came up. Someone remarked that “suicide is selfish,” and I was astonished that anyone would still believe that load of crap in this day and age. It was like saying the world is flat after sending astronauts to the moon.

Unfortunately, more education—and education tailored to different communities—is necessary before mental illness is understood for what it is—not something mysterious, frightful, or contagious, but something that many people suffer from in silence. That silence is not necessary, and it makes the primary pain even harder to bear. In Asian American communities, for example, stigma around mental illness is still very prevalent, and it costs us lives every year. Probably because of that stigma, Asian Americans are three times less likely to use mental health services, but they are more likely to contemplate suicide and attempt it. I think it’s obvious that those two statistics are causally related.

I hope one day soon, our culture will advance beyond this Western idea that the brain is one thing and the body is another, to understand that the brain is housed within the body. We’re taking slow steps, but until we realize this working assumption is just another idea—and that other cultures have other ideas that are perhaps more helpful—we won’t see mental illness and physical illness enjoying any parity.