UNBEARABLE SPLENDOR by Sun Yung Shin

I have been thinking a lot about language and tongues, and the tongue we were born with thrust into a language we weren’t, and this is the context in which I picked up Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin on a recent Sunday. I read the essay collection, which discusses transnational adoption, cyborgs, Antigone, and a lot more in interrelated ways in several sittings throughout the day, not for the first time—I read the book shortly after it came out in 2016 in order to review it—but the first time purely as a reader seeking pleasure.

My take on the book in a nutshell is that we can read the adoptee, and more specifically the transnational adoptee, as a kind of cyborg, who is either possessed of a part from some other family, from some other country, but then transplanted into a new family in a new country, or as someone who is who they are but then takes on a new part upon the incident of being adopted. And that, more generally, states of being are sometimes in flux, even as we try to fix them. Maybe, even, in direct defiance of our trying to fix them.

That being said, just doing that, saying my take on the book, feels weird, and harkens back to my days as a book reviewer when I approached texts I read in the spirit of trying to find common threads running through collections. Certainly the threads are there, but this time around what I found, perhaps because I wasn’t thinking about synthesis or analysis or even, yes, trying to sound intelligent, was the utter joy of losing myself in astonishingly beautiful phrasings and the making (or perhaps recognition) of meaning more as the process of acknowledging the roots and tendrils easing their way through the rich earth of the text rather than what has, in my experience, sometimes felt like an act of brute force imposed by me, the reader-reviewer, upon the text from the vantage point of outside looking in.

This is not to say I find book reviews bad—I don’t, in fact I often read them and purchase books based upon what I read in reviews—or even that I don’t enjoy reading academic writing about literature—I do. Only that sometimes I don’t read to think but to lose myself. To evaporate into language, which at this point in the pandemic, when I have spoken barely a word of German to anyone in months (other than in basic transactions at the grocery store) and am feeling flustered and rusty (and embarrassed about my rustiness), has taken on added meaning.

Of language as home, or specifically, this language or that as home. Of what happens when we do not find ourselves at home. Of how many parts we are made of and how we do, or don’t, manage to exist as variable and varying entities. Ultimately, my communication style is relational, and I suppose reading can be relational too. So reading Unbearable Splendor becomes both a peek into a state of being utterly different than my own—that of a transnational adoptee from Korea—but also an invitation to ask myself:

Am I also a cyborg? Is my tongue a foreign part? Or at least the parts speaking German? What will it take to stop being a guest in a country where I am an immigrant? (“The Hospitality of Strangers,” which is one of my favorite essays in the collection, delves into the etymology of the word guest.) What will it take / is it possible to reorient the idea of home on the terrain of my tongue? By which I mean, specifically, the part that speaks, as opposed to the rest of my body that flops onto the couch like anyone else after a long day, or putters around the kitchen chopping vegetables for supper. I have a feeling I will spend the rest of my life trying to figure the answers out.