Pulitzer Prize-Winner Ilyon Woo on Craft Lessons From the Late Filmmaker Dai Sil Kim Gibson

I’ve never heard an Asian woman—certainly not one in her eighties—cuss as exuberantly or continually as the late filmmaker Dai Sil Kim Gibson. I picture her throwing her head back, glass raised, cackling at the sound of her own F-bombs, her wild hair shaking: kinetic iron spirals. She cooked like she lived and filmed, with feeling. She made the best bindaetok, or Korean mung bean pancakes, rushed, hot, and crusted. (Her secret ingredient: kimchi juice.) She was also famous for her Iowa Fried Chicken, based on a dish made by her beloved husband’s mother, only even better, by all reports. (Here, too, a tang of acid—lemon—made it fly.) From this riotous cook, activist, author, and keeper of history—Dai Sil, as she preferred to be called by all—I learned two vital storytelling lessons that are also living lessons, which changed my writing and me. These lessons begin with the Korean word han, which has been called an existentially Korean phenomenon of grief or anguish, one that defies translation—though lately, there has been some contestation over the term and what it means. In her book Silence Broken, about Korean women who were systematically sexually enslaved by the Japanese during the second World War, Dai Sil defines han as: “long sorrow and suffering turned inward.” “Long” is not confined to a single lifetime. It accrues in layers, grows in knots, individually but also potentially over generations and passed down. Dai Sil defines han as: “long sorrow and suffering turned inward.” “Long” is not confined to a single lifetime. It accrues in layers, grows in knots, individually but also potentially over generations and passed down. Han saturates her work—whether Sa-I-Gu , her film about the Los Angeles riots; or A Forgotten People , about Koreans left behind on the Sakhalin Islands; or the film version of Silence Broken . In each of these documentaries, han haunts. And yet, Dai Sil’s power as a storyteller derives from her ability to see the individuals whose sufferings she tells, beyond their collective trauma. My first, vital lesson from Dai Sil on this theme came to me […]

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