Nov 24, 2014 8 Quesions with: Sunyoung Lee of Kaya Press
Of course, I would eventually meet Sunyoung Lee. She and I dove into indie publishing around the same time and have specialized in digging up and sharing Asian and Asian American culture that isn’t lame. And she happens to be the publisher at Kaya Press, which not only released my friend Ed Lin’s badass debut novel, Waylaid, as well as his awesome follow-up and first mystery, This Is A Bust, but has also released the very cool proto-noir fiction Lament in the Night by Nagahara Shoson and Casio Abe’s excellent essays on Beat Takeshi.
Now that we’re pals, I hit up Sunyoung with Imprint’s eight questions. And then she blew me away with an avalanche of words, details, and energy.
How would you describe your job?
I’m not terribly organizational minded, so I’ve always seen my job as being a kind of cheerleader–making everyone believe that Kaya Press and the work we do actually matters. Needless to say, when it was just me working at Kaya, this involved quite a bit of self-delusion! Especially given my previously mentioned lack of organization-building skills. And yet here we still are, 20 years later! Mostly due to luck and delusion! Another victory for the persuasiveness of magical thinking!
The nitty gritty of my particular job as publisher at Kaya is another thing entirely, of course–writing and replying to emails, arranging for contracts, combing through manuscripts, sending out printer specs, coming up with ideas for events, assisting publicity, etc. etc. But most of this other stuff, other people could do better than me. My particular skill seems to be the one I just described–articulating the importance of the work that we’re doing and planting seeds in people’s imaginations! Plus keeping this puppy alive, by hook or by crook. Plus giving a shit. That’s what I think should be our unofficial motto: We give a shit. We really do.
What are some projects that you are currently working on?
You know how there are places in the world where you can see two oceans collide up against one another? Someone was telling me about that recently. Standing on some kind of a mountain or cliff where they could see two different oceans: Two different colors of water, which I also imagine to be undergirded by differently paced currents with different temperatures, bumping up against one another. That’s kind of like the way things work in publishing, too. There are two different seasons in every year (Spring and Fall) but at any given time the two are always running up against one another.
So, for example, when you’re working on promotion for your Fall season–as we are currently in the midst of doing–you also need to be working on editorial and production of the Spring season.
Right now, we’re working on promoting two titles that came out this Fall: Fox Drum Bebop, the debut novel by 81-year-old Gene Oishi about the PTSD afterlife of the wartime incarceration on a Japanese American Nisei, and American Canyon, an experimental hybrid prose meditation (text and four color video stills and photography) on the layering of cultures (an Indian American family building a life on the remains of an American Indian settlement in a Northern California suburb) and memory (family histories overlaid with present-day experiences) and filial impulses (undertaking a Hindu pilgrimage, despite American-bred skepticism, at the request of one’s mother).
At the same time, we’re working on editorial and production (design, printing, etc.) for our forthcoming titles: Crevasse, a collection of poetry by Hong Kong based queer poet Nicholas Wong, who uses English, his second language, to write about the glories and betrayals of the body, and Lydia’s Funeral Video, a performance piece by comedian and playwright Sam Chanse about an apocalypse-obsessed young bank teller who’s being given directives by her unborn fetus. LFV has been an interesting design project, since we are always trying to figure out new ways of getting the nuances of performance–e.g. expressiveness of voice and face and gestures, lighting, etc.–onto the printed page. The idea is to try to make the reading experience analogous to, since it’s obvious that it can’t replicate the experience of the performance.
And that’s not even mentioning all of the other working pieces that need to be kept aloft and in motion–all of the event planning, administrative tasks, etc. that we’re always working on. (If I’m going on too long here, it’s just because it can be a bit overwhelming!).
Anyway, going back to the beginning of this answer, not sure that that ocean metaphor really works in this instance but it does address the feeling of what it feels like in the midst of this work, and I guess also specifically publishing Asian diasporic writings within the context of the larger world of publishing. Like feeling two oceans butt heads with one another, or watching the seam that forms at that moment of impact.
If there is such thing as an average work day, what does it look like?
It’s very static. A lot of peering at a less-than-perfectly clean computer screen from a hunched position. Or, to put it another way, my average work day looks like a gelatinous blob-like creature, semi-transparent with strange, semi-frictionless skin, which is the only way I can explain the way that time dissipates off it so confoundingly with rheumy, bloodshot eyes that gaze into the emptiness and the emptiness looks back.
Ha ha. Actually, there is also a lot of meeting up with people and shooting the shit and exchanging ideas. That’s actually the fun part, but it goes by so fast and so easily that it doesn’t feel like work. The work part of the day looks as described above.
Where do you find inspiration outside of books?
People. People are endlessly fascinating.
Do you have a favorite post-work destination?
Holing up at home! Or retreating into myself. Though, to be fair, that’s probably only right now and only because I’ve been mostly meeting with people recently. So being alone seems like a pleasure that I’ve had too little of.
As a kid, what did you want to be when you grow up?
I was obsessed with the Tom Wolfe book The Right Stuff at one point and wanted to be an astronaut. I don’t know why this seemed more of a possibility to me than becoming a baseball player, which was my other preoccupation as a kid. I had stumbled onto the book The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn and was so mesmerized by it that I became obsessed with Jackie Robinson, Joe Black, Roy Campanella, and backwards in time to Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, and then forward to Roberto Clemente–who, I would find out later, wrote poetry!–and Bob Gibson, etc. Oh, I remember why. I sucked at even just softball, perpetually assigned to right field, stuck at the end of the lineup, as if by delaying my appearance at the plate as long as conceivably possible. I might in fact conveniently manage to disappear before I actually took a hack at the ball (something that I also, in my heart of hearts, longed would happen). But for some reason, it seemed perfectly plausible that I could, somehow, become physically fit and tanned and good-looking enough in aviator glasses, with a little wicked smile and a crew cut, and good enough at a subject at which I actually always sucked at, math, to become an astronaut. Or at the very least a fighter pilot, a la Chuck Yeager, breaking the sound barrier and all. (Somehow the being white and male thing–this was way before Sally Ride, so I was mostly picturing myself in the 1960s and 1970s world of U.S. aeronautics–never fazed me. My junior high school was named after Alan B. Shepherd, Jr. which might be what made the whole enterprise seem more possible.) Then I realized that you had to have better than 20/20 vision to be an astronaut and my hopes were dashed.
What are you reading for pleasure at the moment? (Is there such thing?)
Haven’t had time for anything over the last couple of months, though I distract myself all the time with the unnecessary perusal of online news and the endless rehashings of the serial story about Hae Min Lee and Adnan Syed on reddit. The most recent books I read were: Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita and A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. The Bulgakov book is crazy. You have to just read it and think, what the hell was Bulgakov thinking? How could he possibly have conceived of this particular story and structure? And how the hell does it work? Where does its punch come from? Because it does punch you in the gut somehow. Or at least it did me. Ruth’s book is, as a mutual friend succinctly put it, written as if her heart had been broken. I guess I could say that about both of the books, in fact. And actually, this morning (the virtues of getting up early!), I just started Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward which is blowing my mind already and I’m just about 15 pages in.
Are you a book collector? Do you have a prized possession or holy grail?
I know people who organize their books in multiple ways, by subject, author, size, color, etc. I have friends who lovingly wrap their books in cellophane covers and have a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the contents of their personal library. I am not that way. So I would say, although I have a collection of books, I am definitely not a book collector. Hmmm. Maybe I’m a book hoarder? That might be a better description of the chaotic piles of books that exist in our house and that are only occasionally arranged in some modicum of organization by the grace and generous efforts of my husband.
That said, I do have a couple of rare, first edition signed copies of Younghill Kang’s books (East Goes West, which Kaya republished, and The Grass Roof), thanks to Steve Doi, collector and purveyor extraordinaire of Asian American books and paraphernalia. But I prize those as much–and in fact probably more–for the fact that they were gifts as for their inherent value.
I’m pretty sentimental, so my most prized possessions are always things that have been given to me–probably because the gifting itself adds another layer of history to them–it makes them precious in and of themselves. Otherwise, I prefer to not get too attached to one particular specific instance of a given book. I’d much rather buy again and again and again my favorite titles and give them away to friends whenever I can. There’s something comforting in knowing that my favorite books can be bought over and over again–that I don’t have to be too attached to any specific instance of them. For example, whenever I go to a used bookstore, the books I always look for: the Library of America edition of James Baldwin’s essays, edited by Toni Morrison (open that book up to any page and you’ll get a lesson in precision and urgency in language that you will feel like an electric charge), Isaac Babel’s Selected Stories (the Penguin edition with the greenish spine and the photograph of a bespectacled Babel grinning maniacally. I love in particular Babel’s childhood stories), and the Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. (Those last two, to my mind, are some of the most brilliant articulations of an Asian American consciousness–or rather, of an Asian American consciousness that I can relate to–that I’ve ever read, though neither of Babel nor Ishiguro are Asian American.)
Sunyoung give props to managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee, board member and development specialist Jean Ho, publicity ace Zoe Ruiz, and undergraduate helpers from USC. Find out more about the books and the business at kaya.com. And for more articles, events, and announcements, follow Imprint Culture Lab via Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.