Joseph Hong, Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs Joseph Hong

I don’t recall when the switch happened. Which is weird, since I should have jotted it down somewhere, right? Maybe it’s the whole chicken-and-egg thing; I can’t write until I write but I can’t write until I ... wait, something isn’t right. Right? Or is it left? Something I left but never remembered to pick up till now? Something left, out of left field? I suppose it was rather sudden, something that went from input to output, reading to writing, a function somewhere in between that jumbled up the words I’d seen and spat them out in a way that made sense. Sometimes. But it’s always been something that I’d done since I was little because

back when all the kids at school had their Nintendo DSes,

GameBoys, and iPod Touches, I had books. Books, because being broke brings budgeting. Buying things that are essential. And essential apparently meant three entire bookcases filled with books. See, my kindergartener mind never connected the dots between Asian parenting–– that is, developing the “ultimate mind” meant to calculate math problems at lightning speeds while somehow also being adept in reading, writing, music, sports, and just about anything and everything you could think of ––and budgeting. I’d say it was because I was so sure we were broke. And being broke brings budgeting, and brings trips to

Barnes & Noble. It’s been years since I’ve seen one, decades since I’ve visited. But when I was in first grade, which by then I had gone through every one of those books on the shelves at home, there were two places that my mom would take me every week without fail: piano practice and Barnes & Noble. “The library for rich people,” she would call it. The latest and greatest books, all with that brand new book smell. My kicking and screaming when going to piano practice and my kicking and screaming

when leaving Barnes & Noble showed which of the two I preferred. And in what I preferred, I found what I enjoyed, and that was

stories. It didn’t matter what kind of story it was. If there was a plot, characters, and my oh-look-a-squirrel mind could hold focus long enough to get past the first few chapters, I would be sitting next to a pile of novels for hours on end. Reading, reading fiction, was extending my sense of self to become more than just the self-proclaimed broke first grader. I was putting myself in the protagonist’s shoes, exploring the world around me––and occasionally cursing in my small repertoire of known “bad words” when I did something that “I” wouldn’t do. And this is where it gets fuzzy, because at some point I thought that I could start writing my own stories to entertain myself, to make characters do what I would do. Which usually meant that the entire plot would end within a few pages as half the cast would either be dead or missing, but that’s about as far as a deranged first-grader’s mind can get you, I suppose. But even if the exact moment where my reading became writing is uncertain, the way I viewed writing changed entirely when I

made someone cry. Or so I was told by Mrs. DeVos in fourth grade, who congratulated me when I had turned in a fun little piece where both the main characters died at the end. It was a romantic piece, or as romantic as a fourth-grader with zero romantic experience could write about romance. Maybe that’s why both characters ended up dying. But regardless of the outcome of the story, the outcome of that moment was a realization of how stories evoke emotion—or more importantly that my story had evoked emotion in someone else. Maybe she was just trying to be nice, or was trying to get me to find a passion for writing. If she was, damn. Fell right into that one. Because that’s when I started writing not only for myself but also for others. And writing became even more important to me, all the more personal, when I

started over. In a new town, in a new city, in a new country, in a new continent. Or was it old, since I had been born there? What I learned, however, was that being born somewhere does not necessarily mean that you will fit in there. As a kid raised in the US with the barest trace of Korean left in his veins, being placed in an environment where everything was Korean was a hit of ecstasy minus the high. In other words, it sucked and I crashed hard. All my friends were back in the States and I didn’t have the linguistic capacity to make new ones. So I turned to my writing again in middle school, but this time writing to an empty audience, and thus I

became a (lonely) writer.

“Well, not exactly.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“You write, but you don’t write well. And you’re not alone. I’m here, too.”

“But I––”

“Also, your chapters don’t go anywhere. The dialogue is empty.”

“But that’s because ...”

“And the plot–– is this just some carbon copy of a show you watched?”

Long story short, I stopped writing. My brother was always

my harshest critic. The moment I decided that I wanted to write for other people, “other people'' disappeared. I was wandering, lost at sea,

my aspirations nipped before they could really bloom. It didn’t help that the only person who read my work––over my shoulder, of course––was telling me I couldn’t do it. It was only when I moved yet again and found a new audience, that I even considered writing again. But time had eaten away at me and my writing. I wrote. I read. Then I erased. I had hit this wall, which I later learned was called writer’s block. I would spend hours on end simply staring at my screen or notebook, not wanting to write because I didn’t know what to write and, even if I did, I was sure that I would erase everything at the end. My writing was like me throughout my childhood–– ephemeral, only existing somewhere for a brief moment before disappearing to who-knows-where. But I had gotten through this. Surely my writing could do the same. I just needed to get something finished, something tangible to prove to myself that I did have what it took. And so now I’m

starting over. It’s hard, of course––the urge to rewrite everything that I’ve written so far. And to be honest I’ve given into that temptation more times than I’d like to admit. But I know that if I want to stay on track, I need two things: a plan and no plan at all. A plan of how the show will go on; detailed enough that I won’t get lost in the storm or find myself at the wall. And no plan at all; free rein to let my characters lead their stories. My frustration as a child was understandable. When a character does something that I would never do––and doubly so if that action causes a problem later on––it’s easy to forget that the characters are, in fact, not me. And that’s precisely what makes them genuine, makes their story genuine. I think about my story––which I sure damn hope is genuine––and about how I got where I am as the

culmination of all my decisions. I started writing for myself, to make characters do what I wanted them to do. Then I wrote for others, to evoke emotions in them. After that, I wrote for myself once more, once

the others in my life had disappeared. And then there was a time where I didn’t write at all. But now I’m sitting here, with a notebook in front of me and a pen in hand. A run-on paragraph, some might call it. A rant, others would say. But to me, this seemingly never-ending trail of half-finished thoughts and fragmented memories is the

story of who I am.