The Brooklyn Rail

Every morning, Ed Park sits at his typewriter for twenty to thirty minutes to write. He throws on a vinyl record of some sort. Usually, it’s classical music, like a Johannes Brahms piano trio or a Georg Philipp Telemann compilation. If it’s going well, he repeatedly hits “play” until he runs out of steam.

His desk is small, tucked away in a corner of the Upper West Side apartment that he shares with his wife, Sandra, and their two sons. There are no windows. In the closet to his left, the washer and dryer stand guard.

Park’s creative process is intentionally analog, purposefully hermetic. Outside of that curated authorial space, the world buzzes and distracts. So he avoids the temptation of Wi-Fi’s swirling void of pixels. He avoids the risk of lyrics, their pesky tendency to entangle an author’s literary thoughts as they travel to the page.

And though he could move his desk to another room, one with a view, he chooses not to. Like Soon Sheen, a character in Park’s latest novel Same Bed Different Dreams, he enters his own “Little Eden” and basks “in the unwiredness, free from all communication.”

“I think sometimes when you’re writing,” he explained, “you just really want to be in an enclosed space with not that much outside you.”

To an onlooker, such a creed of solitude comes to make perfect sense when she reads the literary mammoth that is Same Bed Different Dreams. It’s impossible to understand how else Park could have managed to unsnarl and decode the obscurest fragments of history, memory, and emotion whirling around within him, much less within everyone else.

The “wild, sweeping novel”—as its publisher, Random House, anoints it—almost evades summary. Its timeline jumps from dates between 2016 CE and thousands of years in the past, its setting from Korea to Russia to Switzerland to the United States, and its cultural referents from Marilyn Monroe to Tim Horton and Kim Il Sung.

And at first glance, Same Bed Different Dreams’ division into three alternating and recurring sections—“2333,” “The Sins,” and “Dreams”—appears mind-boggling. However, with patient attention and an appreciation of Park’s crisp prose, a reader can see patterns emerge. The “2333” chapters follow Parker Jotter, a war veteran and science-fiction author. “The Sins” centers on Soon Sheen, an employee at an omniscient technology company. The “Dreams” present themselves as parts of a mysterious, unfinished manuscript. Park’s throughline is the Korean Provisional Government (KPG), a pro-independence organization formed in 1919 in opposition to Japan’s occupation of Korea that began in 1910. He imagines that it still exists, far beyond its supposed dissolution in 1945.

“The KPG lives on—working behind the scenes, laying the groundwork. As long as the country is split in two, its people divided, the Korean Provisional Government will be the sole sovereign body acting on behalf of all Koreans,” Park writes. “Sometimes even the secret-secret members don’t know they’re members.”

Through Same Bed Different Dreams, then, Park reinvents and re-contextualizes monumental swaths of Korea’s traumatic past, one scarred by colonization and an ideological rift that broke the country into North and South. He fashions an alternate, restorative history not only for himself or other Korean Americans, but especially for his parents, who left Korea in 1966.

His father, S.K. Park, recalled being born into a country violated by its neighbor to the east, allowed to speak “only in Japanese at school during the occupation, even though Korean was [the] spoken language at home.” He was nine when Japan surrendered to the US in the denouement of World War II, earning Korea its independence.

When the Korean War broke out in 1950, he and Park’s mother, Yonzi Park, “experienced grave uncertainties just like many others,” the elder Park noted. An estimated two to three million civilians died.

In 1960, S.K. and his peers at the Seoul National University College of Medicine took part in the April Revolution, a movement that aimed to end the tyranny of South Korea’s first (and American-backed) president Syngman Rhee, who had tweaked the constitution to allow himself unlimited terms. Nearly two hundred people were killed and another six-thousand injured in the two weeks of protest.

Rhee figures as a prominent character in Same Bed Different Dreams. So do other political personalities like Kim Jong Il, General Douglas MacArthur, and the controversial Unification Church leader, Sun Myung Moon—to name only a few of the sprawling, historical cast.

Park and his sister, Aileen Park, grew up with the stories of these people and the revolutions and unrest they ignited. Though S.K. denied credit for Park’s “obsession on Korean themes,” Park said that his father’s recollections transformed Korea into a mythical space, “the source of everything.”

“I wasn’t born in Korea,” Park said. So Same Bed Different Dreams “is maybe a portrait of what it meant to be a child of Korean immigrants…. You are fitting in as best you can, but there’s something different. And there’s a larger history that’s looming behind you.”

A smaller personal and literary history loomed behind Park at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn on November 7, 2023. He stood, in khakis and a blue button-down shirt, before an at-capacity crowd of some 140 people to celebrate the novel’s official release.

“It’s been a long time since 2008,” he joked, in a self-effacing reference to the fifteen years that had passed since the publication of his first and only other novel, Personal Days. “It’s great to have another book. I’m on the William Gaddis publication schedule, apparently.”

He spoke with the same precise, comedic rhythm I’d come to recognize as his default cadence, which his closest friends and family had seen develop decades before.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in the 1970s, Park had shown literary inclinations at an early age. “His devotion [to] reading was so obvious from the start that I knew he would be a scholar,” S.K. told me. “At one point, he wrote to us that writing was his destiny and it was like his ‘religion.’”

Park’s droll wit was less apparent at home, though. It wasn’t until a parent-teacher conference at Nichols School, where Park attended high school, that his parents became aware of his reputation as jokester.

“He was always just quietly hilarious,” David Kirkpatrick, a staff writer for the New Yorker and a classmate of Park’s at Nichols, said.

Kirkpatrick and Park were part of a close-knit, studious group. They kept a low-profile socially, but that changed somewhat when Park began editing the humor page of the school’s newspaper.

To other childhood friends like Jared Hardner, he “was the person that introduced me to different authors when we were growing up—different comedians, funny films.” Park recalled, for example, that they all went to see Sam Shepard and Patti Smith’s absurdist one-act, Cowboy Mouth.

“Something about it was so—it felt like it was breaking all these rules,” Park mused. “I was so inspired by it that I wrote a play.” He titled it Rough Beast and, with the help of a faculty member, got it produced at the Franklin Street Theatre in downtown Buffalo when he was seventeen years old. Kirkpatrick starred in it.

“In general,” Kirkpatrick said, “anyone who knew Ed, knew he was going places.”

About twenty years later, Personal Days revealed the satirist to the wider world and proved Kirkpatrick, among others, right.

Named one of Time magazine’s top books of 2008, it follows an ensemble of characters who are co-workers at an unnamed, New York-based company. Things take on a strange, vaguely unsettling tilt when “the Firings” begin. “Our company was once its own thing, founded long ago by men with mustaches. After several decades it wound up, to its surprise, as the easternmost arm of an Omaha-based octopus,” Park writes in the first chapter of Personal Days, “Can’t Undo.” “Lately we hear that some Californians want to make us their easternmost outpost. We base this conjecture on an opaquely worded one-inch paragraph on the fifth business page of the Times that appeared last month.”

Park found inspiration in the Village Voice’s unraveling: he was serving as editor of the alternative newsweekly’s literary supplement when New Times Media bought it in 2005. As greater and greater numbers of his colleagues were laid off, he hastily scribbled short paragraphs describing what he saw and heard. Brief, humorous notes evolved into a slim novel, a striking portrait of an anxious workplace culture.

Reviewers proclaimed Park a literary successor to the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo, and Joseph Heller. Colleagues saw themselves in its pages.

“I remember reading it and hoping that one character was me. And thinking another character was someone else. And seeing familiar jokes resurface,” Rachel Aviv, a New Yorker staff writer and mentee of Park’s at the Village Voice, said.

Eventually, Park himself fell victim to the layoffs that plagued the paper. But that hardly put a stop—or even a slight pause—to his creative and professional output.

Let go from the Village Voice on Labor Day in 2006, Park gave himself until Thanksgiving of that year to finish Personal Days—and surprised himself by meeting that deadline. Meanwhile, he continued editorial duties at The Believer, a cultural journal that he’d co-founded in 2003 with Heidi Julavits and Vendela Vida. And looking through the “Parkhives,” his self-named oeuvre, one discovers a vast, breathtaking amount of Park’s fiction, criticism, and journalism, featured in publications like the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Bookforum.

Meanwhile, he played high-profile roles in the literary world as a senior editor at Amazon Publishing and an executive editor at Penguin Press. And he mentored the next generation of writers, like Aviv and Hua Hsu, a 2023 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. (Park continues to offer his counsel to Gen Z, too, as a professor of creative writing at Princeton.)

“He cultivated so many young writers and gave them opportunities,” Aviv said, “that no one else would have given us. I feel like there are many people who feel like they wouldn’t have had a career if it weren’t for Ed."

All the while, the seeds of Same Bed Different Dreams sprouted, watered by the biographies he read, the people he met, and the childhood memories he unearthed. “I didn’t start out thinking, I’m gonna write this gigantic book and it’s gonna cover every single thing,” Park said.

Rather, he started out for fun. “I was amusing myself writing that first long chapter, that dinner party with all the literary folk,” Park said. “I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

Neither did Sandra Park, his wife and avowed “president of The Ed Park Fan Club.” (Other members include the usual: their sons, his parents, and his sister. Plus, Sandra added, Park himself.) About six years ago—one or two years after he received the deal to write Same Bed Different Dreams—Sandra did a quick calculation about his pacing. Sandra told him “he had to leave his job” at Penguin Press “or else he was never going to finish his book.” She promised to support the household as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

“At times, I thought that maybe he wouldn’t finish—he did spend a lot of time doing the NY Times crossword puzzle,” Sandra joked in an email.

When Sandra read the completed manuscript, she was surprised at how quickly he’d woven together its many complexities: “His writing is precise, clever, loaded with double meanings, obscure references, jokes, unconventional names, historical facts, personal memories, and much more.”

Like Park, she told me that she saw Same Bed Different Dreams as a “book that really bridges a gap of what has been missing,” a “point of connection with our experience and the histories that are known and told,” for Asian Americans, specifically those who grew up in the US in the 1970s and ’80s.

In this way, Park’s work recalls the concept that scholar Marianne Hirsch developed in her seminal Family Frames (1997). She asked what relationship one, like Park, might have “to the traumatic events of one’s parents’ lives—horror? ambivalence? envy? a negative nostalgia?” She called this internal battle of emotions “postmemory.”

A decade later, Korean-American poet and scholar Seo-Young Chu used this question as a base for molding the concept of “postmemory” to reflect Korean experiences. She tacked han onto Hirsch’s term, a word with no equivalent in the English language. It’s generally thought of as a

unique form of Korean grief, and Chu argued that second-generation Korean Americans may experience “postmemory han” particularly strongly.

In our correspondence, Chu acknowledged that “some Koreans believe han is (or should be) obsolete—that the concept of han promotes ethnonationalism and/or that han prevents Koreans from moving past a victim mentality.” But, she declared, “I reclaim han.”

Same Bed Different Dreams is Park’s “postmemory han,” his own reclamation, made tangible.

Take, for example, the “dinner party with all the literary folk.” Soon Sheen, a character Park defined as a “stand-in” for himself, is invited out to celebrate a new (and purely fictional) author, dubbed the “enfant terrible of South Korean letters.”

“Tonight would have been a rare treat,” Park writes, “if not for all the Asian American literati who threatened to show up as well” and remind Soon Sheen that his last novel came out years earlier.

“I didn’t write anymore,” Sheen repeats four times. Here—like in the myriad references to Buffalo lore—Park the author is unabashedly present.

Through this presence, Park places himself—and his contemporary, second-generation Korean American peers—into the timeline, into the fray of what it means when, in dreams, one’s parents speak to one in Korean, even if “They’d stuck to English while alive.”

“The life does inform the book or the art,” Park said. “There’s a reason I wanted to write about Korea and think about it and somehow turn it into the kind of fiction that I like to read.”

That internal sentiment was reiterated to Park when he traveled to Washington, DC in October 2023 to appear on a panel about storytelling for the Council of Korean Americans. He spoke about Same Bed Different Dreams, a “life’s work,” and the process of turning a lineage into a fiction.

Looking out into the crowd of first- and second-generation Korean faces, he felt like he was going to “start bawling.” He apologized, asked the audience to give him a minute. He had thought he was sort of tough, he said, but a vague, overpowering sensation choked him.

“It was something about seeing all these people,” he said. “And to kind of see, broadly, what Koreans have achieved here. But also, why are we here?… What was lost and why was it lost? To what extent was it a failure of whoever was in charge of Korea, but also of the world? How was it that all these things happened that compelled people like my parents to leave?”

As Park recalled the moment, he paused: he was thinking of his paternal grandmother, whom he knew only through a single family photograph. She died of tuberculosis in Korea when Park’s father, S.K., was young.

In another, simultaneous flash of remembrance, Park thought of Yi Sang, a favorite Korean poet of his whose entire life was marred by the Japanese occupation.

“Maybe that’s why I’m so interested in Yi Sang,” he said. “It’s not just because he wrote this radical, brain-melting poetry. It’s because he was in Korea at the same time, died of the same disease” as his grandmother. As ever for Park, literature, history, family, and memory dovetailed.