How We Find Ourselves in Language

A baby was left at nine months old in Seoul, South Korea. No name on record. No family story. No origin she could verify or return to.

She grew up. She was adopted, raised in the Chicago area, in a language not her birth language, in a family not her birth family, in a country not the country she was born in. She became a poet. She became an essayist. She became an award-winning writer in English — a language she had to acquire rather than inherit.

Tomorrow, July 28, 2026, she publishes her memoir. The author is Sun Yung Shin. The book is Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration, Belonging, and How We Find Ourselves in Language. It is the inaugural selection of the Immigrant Writers on Immigrant Writing Series at Black Lawrence Press in Minneapolis, where Shin now lives.

The subtitle carries the question her life has been answering: how we find ourselves in language.

Not how we express ourselves. How we find ourselves. The distinction is the whole story.

Shin had no inherited story to express. She had no origin narrative to begin with. The first language she spoke was not the first language she heard. The name she carries is not the name she was born with — because she was not born with a name anyone kept.

She wrote anyway. She wrote because writing is not the delivery of a self already formed. Writing is the act of forming the self in the first place. The memoir is not the report of who Sun Yung Shin is. It is how she found out.

In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston published a memoir called

In 1976, Maxine Hong Kingston published a memoir called The Woman Warrior. She had grown up in Stockton, California, between two worlds she could not fully reconcile: the Cantonese her parents spoke at home, full of talk-stories and ghosts and obligations she only half understood, and the English she was learning at school, which had no room for any of it.

The memoir opens with a command. Kingston’s mother tells her a family story and then says: “You must not tell anyone what I am about to tell you.”

Kingston told everything.

She wrote “The Woman Warrior” to make sense of the inheritance she had received in a language she had to acquire. She worked with the gap between what her mother told her and what she could verify. She worked with the stories she had been given and the stories she had to make when the given ones ran out. She wrote: “I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.”

She did not write to report who she was. She wrote because she did not yet know. The writing was how she found out.

The Woman Warrior won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976. It has been one of the most widely taught books in American universities for fifty years. It is a record of someone writing their way to themselves through the gap between two languages, two worlds, two sets of stories — one inherited and one invented — and discovering the self does not live in either set alone.

 

Shin started with no stories. Kingston started with stories commanded to silence. Both wrote their way to identity. Both understood what the subtitle of Shin’s memoir names: you find yourself in language. The self is not something you have before writing. It is something you discover through writing.

The Power of Authors teaches: writing from genuine purpose means writing toward a reader who needs what only this book can give them. But before the reader, there is the writer. And the writer who waits until they know who they are before they begin will wait a long time. The writing is how you find out.

You may have a story you have not written because you are not sure you have the right to write it. Because you do not know enough. Because your identity feels unresolved, your origins unclear, your authority uncertain.

Shin began with no name. Kingston began with a command to silence. Both picked up the pen anyway.

The self you are looking for is in the writing.

Begin.

Discover why purpose is the foundation of every sentence worth writing in The Power of Authors by Evan and Lois Swensen.

The Power of Authors is available from Amazon or your favorite bookseller: http://evanswensen.com. If you’d like an autographed copy, you can order it here: http://bit.ly/4pgmzjM.

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