Q&A With Hyeseung Song 

A few months back I received an early copy of Hyeseung Song’s memoir Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl. The past few days I sped through the memoir and enjoyed it a lot. I am honored to be doing this Q&A with Hyeseung! 

Q: Hyeseung, would you please give a brief description of Docile for those who haven’t read your story?

A: Docile is a coming-of-age memoir about growing up as a first-generation Korean American in Texas with a beautiful but domineering mother and a father with billionaire dreams. After a series of businesses land us in bankruptcy, my family moves to the wrong side of a white and wealthy neighborhood in Houston, where I decide to earn my visibility among my peers through academic achievement. The model minority myth takes me to Princeton, Harvard Law School and Harvard Graduate School, until mental illness lands me in a psychiatric hospital, forcing a reckoning of my self-worth. In the hospital, I decided I must choose and heal myself. I leave the hospital, leave Harvard, disappoint my parents, move to New York, and become an artist, finding unconditional self-expression in art. Docile is the Asian Girl, Interrupted. It’s my journey to form an identity outside the model minority myth, heal from mental illness, and find redemption in art. 

Q: How long did it take you to write Docile, & why was now the right time to write and release it? 

A: I started writing what would become the first chapters of Docile when I was 20 and in college. I thought I was just writing stories about my family, but after college and into my 30s, I kept writing. About ten years ago, I realized what all that writing amounted to, was actually a full-length project, a book. The writing process has been long, partially because I needed to live more life before I could locate an end to the story. Structure eluded me for years: the earliest iteration of Docile was a memoir-in-essays. A few years ago, after my mother died and I’d lived a while without her, I finally saw the end of my book, and revised the manuscript to reflect the structure the story demanded. A week after I finished that first revision, I started querying agents. The rest of it happened pretty fast. 

Q: Which parts while writing Docile, were the most painful to revisit? Did you feel that writing your memoir was also healing because you released all your feelings out there and the journey you went from trying to please your parents, mainly your mother to then doing what you wanted by pursuing your art and writing career? 

A: It is simplistic to say that I was merely trying to please my parents with my life. I internalized the demands of the model minority myth. So much so, it might not even be fair to refer to it as a “myth,” but a reality. My parents, especially my mother, and I were very intertwined. I saw their pain as my pain, and when I could, I tried to make them whole for their sacrifices. 

The most painful parts of writing Docile? Maybe the parts about the end of high school (writing about adolescence always feels hard), maybe the experiences leading up to my hospitalizations. I have been in and out of therapy now for almost 26 years. There were things I couldn’t even bring myself to speak about in therapy. But the page was different. The page was never going to judge. Writing about these painful experiences was difficult of course, but the page received it all.

 Q: What lessons do you hope readers learn after reading Docile? What emotions do you want readers to feel after reading the book?

A: I don’t purport to ask readers to feel anything specific after reading my book. I thank them for spending time with my story. If there are lessons from Docile, it’s that the lesson of art is the same as the lesson of love. If I create and care about anything, I must let it have its own life in the world. I am not directing its existence.

I do have one spectacular hope for Docile however. Readers will see that there are many times I could have not have survived had I not had someone to encourage me or see me as I was. We are all not so lucky—there’s not always a brilliant psychiatrist practicing culturally competent care, there’s not always a college roommate with the wherewithal to push us to the infirmary. I hope that Docile can at times be a stand-in, and that someone who is struggling can see themselves in my story and might even find relief. 

Q: Is the second book you are writing now going to be another memoir, or will it be fiction this time around?

A: I’m writing a second memoir, about grief, mental illness and artmaking.