The ninth annual Victoria Festival of Authors is approaching, bringing together authors from all over Canada for panels, readings, and nature walks.
Yeji Y. Ham is a Korean-Canadian author participating in the festival panel Let’s Do the Time Warp (or, Time After Time After Time) about speculative fiction. Ham has been writing seriously for around 15 years, but her love for language began as a young immigrant. Learning a new language immersed her in literature, which became a huge part of her identity.
“Growing up, when I was a little kid, I loved writing poems, I loved the language, and I think that set me onto this path of longer form, of using imagination. I was born in Korea, but then my family moved to Canada when I was really young,” she says. “When you have to learn the language, you read a lot of books, and I fell in love with literature, and just indulging myself in genres, imaginative spaces, and then I was like, I want to create something like this.”
Knowing multiple languages allows Ham to have a wider perspective on her experiences, because each language, she says, is like a separate world of culture and meaning to connect with.
“[Being bilingual] gives me I think more fluidity, I think, because I come from both worlds, and I call that a floating space. It is a groundless place, and that kind of mirrors into my writing because I want to find a space where it resists categorization,” says Ham. “Fantastic and supernatural are my language. Usually, I like to write in the language where it’s something that’s not explainable, and I’m confident looking for meaning in that space where it doesn’t make sense, but there is meaning in it, so that’s why I write in speculative fiction.”
Ham’s new book, Invisible Hotel, is a personal look into her own experience as a Canadian exploring her Korean history, and its impact on past and present generations.
“Having been born in Korea, I do carry that weight of history, and the weight of intergenerational trauma,” she says. “My inspiration for this novel was my grandfather. My father told me that he was a North Korean, he had endured torture in the North and he had no choice but to escape during the war, leaving behind his mother, wife, and four children who he never saw again. So I grew up with these invisible yet very gripping ties that bind generations through shared heritage… I felt like always I had my grandfather with me, his history, his pain.”
Coming from such a traumatic history creates difficulties in connection and communication between past and present generations, says Ham, and this is difficult to reconcile.
“There’s a huge gap between what our past generation went through and what our generation went through. Our world has become completely different,” she says. “My Korean generation, we don’t remember the war, but my parents and my grandparents do, and it reminded me, like, we don’t really talk about this with our past generations, do we? It pains them to talk, but also our generation, I think it’s kind of really hard to approach that topic, so it’s that constant tension between the younger generation and the older generation as well.”
This is an aspect she leans into in Invisible Hotel. Our current generation has much different fears and challenges than our grandparents had to deal with, and it can be difficult to feel like our struggles are legitimized in comparison. Yet every generation endures struggles specific to that time in history and culture, and it’s always very real.
“In the book I explore that generational divide because in our generation, our fears are like, can I actually afford a house of my own, can I actually get married, have family, have a stable job,” says Ham. “These are actually our real fears and desires. It’s not something light, either—we’re very serious about this, it’s a very great problem for us, but again, it’s that generational difference, I think.”
Victoria Festival of Authors
Various times, Wednesday, October 16 to Sunday, October 20
Various prices and venues
victoriafestivalofauthors.ca