Chapter 54: K881901 aka Emily Kim Ae Sun Hunter on twins tied together and tossed to tomorrow

May 22, 2020

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In the late 1980s outside of Seoul, South Korea, a woman got pregnant with twins. She was 18 years old, she’d had a one night stand, and she was not able, for reasons we do not know, to keep the babies, so she gave them up for adoption.

Two baby girls were born and they were given the names K881901 and K881901. Because most people who adopt babies want one baby the twins were immediately split up and put into foster homes.

For the first five months of their lives they did not know each other existed.

Eventually a couple from New Hampshire, USA wanted children with siblings and adopted both babies. K881901 and K881902 were reunited and flown over to the United States to grow up under the watchful gaze of their Italian American father and French Canadian mother in a US state that is 98% white.

K881901 was renamed Emily Kim Ae Sun Hunter and what were are about to hear is a story I got to hear live a few months ago when I gave a speech for Manulife at their first ever Global Employee Summit. Manulife is a global financial services company of over 35,000 people with a number of divisions such as John Hancock Financial.

Unfortunately I had to follow Emily onstage! She dropped the mic with her personal story, the one I’ve just started sharing with you here, which received a giant standing ovation from the audience. She talked about finding yourself, navigating your race, being a person of color where you’re always the minority, and about how we discover our identities in a world of grey.

We recorded this conversation at the Manulife Head Office in Toronto between our afternoon speech to the Western hemisphere employees and before our late-night speech to the Eastern hemisphere employees. I want to say a huge thank you to Manulife CEO Roy Gori, Director of Global Communications Brooke Tucker-Reid, and of course Emily Kim Ae Sun Hunter for helping make this conversation happen.

Let’s go!

What You'll Learn:

How do you react to racism?
How do you find yourself when you’re far from where you’re from?
How do you grow your career as a woman of color? (And how do you think of the spectrum between ‘submissive’ and ‘confident’?)
How can you find the meeting point of all your worlds?

notable quotes from emily kim ae sun hunter:

“You can’t take off your own face. It’s so obvious—you can’t hide from it.” – Emily Hunter #3bookspodcast

“We would pinch the bridge of our noses with a clothes pin to try to form a bridge because we knew we never had one.” – Emily Hunter #3bookspodcast

“90% of the time when someone says something rude to me, it’s just because they are afraid.” – Emily Hunter #3bookspodcast

CONNECT WITH Emily:

word of the chapter:

balut

Resources Mentioned:

Emily’s First Book [9:42]
Emily’s Second Book [20:37]
Emily’s Third Book [30:52]
Post Malone
Four Seasons Hotel
Bibimbap dish
PSY - Gangnam Style
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH
Manulife
A Midwife’s Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
PBS - A Midwife’s Tale
The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous by Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson
Meet Emily Kim Ae Sun Hunter
The Evolution Of K881901 – John Hancock Signature Series

Enjoy the show? Use the Links Below to Subscribe:

Neil . Pasricha

May 7, 2020

podcast

Chapter 53: Vivek Shraya is trashing traditional trans tropes

Neil . Pasricha

May 7, 2020

podcast

LISTEN NOW ON APPLE, GOOGLE or SPOTIFY

I was browsing through a book store a few years ago when I stumbled on a small purple book called I’m Afraid of Men written by Vivek Shraya.

Hadn’t heard of the book! Hadn’t heard of Vivek Shraya! But the provocative title grabbed me so I flipped it over. What was on the back? A simple big solo statement: “And men are afraid of me.”

I opened and kept reading the jacket. Here’s what it said: “A trans artist explores how masculinity was imposed on her as a boy and continues to haunt her as a girl, and how we might reimagine gender for the twenty-first century. Vivek Shraya has good reason to be afraid. Throughout her life she has endured acts of cruelty and aggression for being too feminine as a boy and for not being feminine enough as a girl. In order to survive her childhood she had to learn how to convincingly perform masculinity. As an adult she makes daily compromises to steel herself against everything from verbal attacks to heartbreak. Now, with raw honesty, Shraya delivers an important record of the cumulative damage caused by misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia, releasing trauma from a body that has always refused to assimilate.”

Needless to say, I was intrigued. I picked up this small book and it transfixed me. It showed me a view and a lens and a perspective that I had no familiarity with and was opening my mind to a culture and people living with so much oppression. I ended up buying more of Vivek’s books, including her wonderful children's book A Boy & The Bindi. And when her traveling live memoiry stageshow How To Fail As A Pop Star visited Toronto my wife Leslie and I bought tickets and joined the giant standing ovation.

Vivek Shraya is an artist whose body of work crosses the boundaries of music, literature, visual art, theatre, and film. That bestselling book I’m Afraid of Men was heralded by Vanity Fair as “cultural rocket fuel,” and her album with Queer Songbook Orchestra, Part‑Time Woman, was nominated for the Polaris Music Prize. She is one half of the music duo Too Attached and the founder of the publishing imprint VS. Books. A six-time (!) Lambda Literary Award finalist, Vivek was a Pride Toronto Grand Marshal, was featured on The Globe and Mail’s Best Dressed list, and has received honours from The Writers’ Trust of Canada and The Publishing Triangle. And, as if that’s not enough, she’s also Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Calgary!

And now, right in the throes of her book launch for her fiction debut (!) The Subtweet, I had the pleasure of chatting with Vivek from Calgary about a slew of topics I think you’ll enjoy such as how parents can avoid snuffing out their children’s gender creativity and how we might think about using pronouns.

Vivek is able to navigate many complex topics—topics that most people are not even willing to discuss—with a comfort and clarity that shows a deep level of thinking and which is the partial product of the hardships she’s endured and navigated throughout her life. I find her and her work incredibly brave, vulnerable, and important.

I loved talking to her and hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

And now … let’s go!