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Docile
Additional information
| Author | Hyeseung Song |
|---|---|
| Genre | Nonfiction – Memoir, Nonfiction – Science |
| Release Date | July 16, 2024 |
| Publisher | Simon & Schuster |
Description
For readers of Crying in H Mart and Minor Feelings as well as lovers of the film Minari comes a searing coming-of-age memoir about the daughter of ambitious Asian American immigrants and her search for self-worth.
A daughter of Korean immigrants, Hyeseung Song spends her earliest years in the cane fields of Texas where her loyalties are divided between a restless father in search of Big Money, and a beautiful yet domineering mother whose resentments about her own life compromises her relationship with her daughter. With her parents at constant odds, Song learns more words in Korean for hatred than for love. When the family’s fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Song moves to a new elementary school. On her first day, a girl asks the teacher: “Can she speak English?”
Neither rich nor white, Song does what is necessary to be visible: she internalizes the model minority myth as well as her beloved mother’s dreams to see her on a secure path. Song meets these expectations by attending the best Ivy League universities in the country. But when she wavers, in search of an artistic life on her own terms, her mother warns, “Happiness is what unexceptional people tell themselves when they don’t have the talent and drive to go after real success.” Years of self-erasure take a toll and Song experiences recurring episodes of depression and mania. A thought repeats: I want to die. I want to die. Song enters a psychiatric hospital where she meets patients with similar struggles. So begins her sweeping journey to heal herself by losing everything.
Unflinching and lyrical, Docile is one woman’s story of subverting the model minority myth, contending with mental illness, and finding her self-worth by looking within.
About the Author
H
yeseung Song is the author of the debut coming-of-age memoir Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl, forthcoming from Simon & Schuster in July 2024. She is an American representational painter best known for large-scale figurative oil paintings and prints whose visual idioms toggle between resolution and fragmentation. Her work explores creativity, psychological incipience, and the life of the artist.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Song grew up in Texas and studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities. In her mid-twenties, she returned to her childhood passion of art, leaving academia to pursue painting at the Water Street Atelier, now the Grand Central Atelier, in New York City. After completing her studies in 2008, she was awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (again in 2011) and began to exhibit in New York.
Song is a devoted teacher and has instructed at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Queens Council on the Arts’ High School 2 Art School Program as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, during which time she was named among Baltimore Magazine’s “40 Under 40” for her work creating synergies between the science and art communities in that city. She often addresses high school and college audiences, and was a featured speaker at Princeton University at its TedX Conference in 2016 as well as at the Asian American Alumni Association of Princeton’s Leadership Conference in 2021.
She has received residencies at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Brittany, France, Penland School of Arts and Craft, the Vermont Studio Center as well as others, and her work resides in private collections internationally.
Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.
