I don’t know if this is really what I want to do, but I want to remember my letter. Does it demean it if I publish it online?
Joonmin said to me after he read it, thanks, it was a good letter, and then commented that there is a virtue in writing a good letter. Letter writing is a lost art. I want to write more letters. Granted, the style that I used is very colloquial and present-day.
I hope one day I write something that causes someone to want to write a letter to me. Hopefully one better than this one. Uh, I should probably work on my JP, but this is so much more fun.
2008.4.4
Really early in the morning
Hi, Dennis. Joonmin. Dens.
I just finished your thesis draft.
I was just going to write you a quick post-it note, “Great job!” or something cheesy like that, but the more and more I read your work, the more and more I realized a post-it note (as much as I love them) would totally, wholly, completely inadequate.
I know I’m quite liberal with my praise (during the course of life) generally, but in all honesty, your work is Very. Very. Very. Good. Fantastic. Wonderful. Epic. (Well, maybe not epic.) I admit, I’ve read a lot in the course of my short life, and this is something that I would have picked up, devoured because I couldn’t put it down, felt a wee bit sick for having binged on such Korean-American (because isn’t that what it is?) writing, and been happy that I had picked it off of a shelf and read it. My standards have raised considerably in the past couple of years, and I had gotten to the point where I felt like I couldn’t read another single book about being Korean or being ethnic or being this or being that (or any book, for that matter), any book I read was soooo boring and uninteresting and I had lost the zeal I had for reading and writing and then I read your thesis and something resonated inside of me. I don’t know if it’s because I know you (maybe) or because I have a vested interest in you (you know why) or because we’re both Korean-American (but very differently and the same at the same exact time) or that you use parentheses (and I adore parenthetical writing) or that we’re pretty much the same person. Or maybe because it’s plain good.
I know that you didn’t give me your thesis to read to fish for compliments or gain confidence in your writing, and I did try to proof for grammar, but honestly, the first time I went through it, it was purely for me. You didn’t exist outside of your pages. For me, when I read, the author doesn’t matter at all, even though it might be an autobiographical work. When I read Harry Potter, I didn’t give a damn about J.K. Rowling. Well, I do, but not in the way that people might. When I read your thesis, it took a life of its own, and without you being there, it was you. Does that make sense?
I guess I’m rambling—that’s what 4am letters do, and when I talk to you I feel like I can be painfully honest. Sometimes I wish I weren’t. Perhaps it’s the mood I’m in today, or the fact that today was really really long and really really lonely in the city. Like I said before, I think that we do think similarly even though we aren’t the same person at all, and I don’t know if other people will react the same way that I did (probably not) but I genuinely enjoyed it. At times, I actually didn’t enjoy it because it was too painful, but it was the kind of papercut bleeding that is good for the soul.
I feel like I should stop writing because 1) it’s become more of a diary entry than a letter to a friend who gave me the honor of reading his thesis, and 2) um, it’s kind of long.
You’re right—the end is rough, and needs work, but that’s all it needs. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if you intentionally meant to leave punctuation in, out, wrong, or misspellings or placings, so I scribbled in a lot of things with question marks. Feel free to ignore whatever I’ve scribbled. Scribble Scribble Scribble. And I realized much later in your explanation about your mother’s account and italics. I don’t know if I will feel totally comfortable meeting your parents again after learning so much about them.
Finally, your writing is the kind of writing that makes the reader want to react. Nope, scratch that, makes the reader react. It makes me want to write and read and do stuff myself, but for the moment, all I will do is read your work and write a letter.
Okay, I will free you of this letter.
Love,
Sumin
