Kaitlyn Choe (she/they) writes fiction and nonfiction and is often hacking at the line between the two. She is interested in the resurrection of bodies via a blending of essays and stories that challenge traditional narrative and form. In particular, Choe aims to translate the complex connections and disconnections that emerge from the clustering of bodies in the Home, as well as the ways in which colonization propagates its effects in these domestic networks through intergenerational trauma.

Choe roots her writing simultaneously deep inside the flesh and far away from it. Woven through her pieces is fascination with sensation: the sharp crunch of a rusty spine on an old, slanted mattress; the ache of a swollen breast in a hand-me-down bra; the piercing smell of a drop of blood, evaporating into the nostrils in front of a dirty mirror. As often she is narrowing into a patch of skin, though, Choe is just as often deconstructing the world around her at large. Playing with distance unites her work, as she finds she comes closer to liberation in writing the farther she reaches inward and outward, all at once. Choe writes in part and always for her family, who is both her most steadfast and restless subject.

Nine: Stories from a Four-Generation Korean Household in the South explores Choe’s home of nine in suburban Georgia. This collection, which ranges from essays to flash fiction, interrogates what it means to coexist and to care for one’s family and self in the face of widening intergenerational gaps. Nine captures this complicated, shifting emotional terrain from a variety of angles: religion, language, politics, sexuality, violence. In one series of essays titled Halmeoni, Choe depicts how inheritance supersedes language barriers, rising when least expected. In other pieces, Choe zooms into the body, both hers and others, in terms of chronic pain, slow death, queer pleasure, and enduring isolation, moving fluidly between body horror, eroticism, and realism to capture the ways in which a congested household adds intense friction to these physical experiences. Choe also zooms out, positioning her Korean Christian family in the context of the Bible Belt and Korean history, investigating the ways in which colonization infiltrates the home at the expense of parent-child trust. Finally, Choe concludes with the ways in which the pandemic has acted as a pressure cooker for these dynamics.

Overall, Nine challenges the boundary between fiction and reality as a way to unravel the complex web of truths that sustain and erode a family.