A
Preface by
Christine
Lee Zilka & Jennifer Derilo
Dear Readers,
Welcome to the Spring issue,
the first of the new
year! In honor of this, our seventh labor of love, we pulled together a
Kartika Review like no other, asking
emerging and established Asian
American writers to contribute to what has simply, but affectionately,
been
referred to over the past few months as “The Home Issue.”
A kernel of the idea first
presented itself to
fiction editor Christine Lee Zilka who, while teaching a composition
class
focused on Asian Pacific American literature to mostly Asian Pacific
American
students, noticed a recurring theme of "Home" and its ambiguity to a
community comprised of dissidents, immigrants, and bi-cultural people.
Students
and the writers whose work they read may have shared the common thread
of being
of Asian Pacific Islander descent. However, these students were leading
complicated lives: they lived in America, they were minorities, they
had
immigrated or been exiled, and even if they had been born in the United
States,
they were straddling two cultures.
Asian America and its
literature, fortunately, has
diversified and become richer over the years. For instance, our
literature is
no longer centered on immigration but now spans so many themes
including themes
that have nothing to do with race. Alongside that growth, the
complexity of
identity and where/what to call "home" has not lessened.
The idea of “home” began to
take shape when
Christine discussed it casually via twitter with a friend and writer
you have
seen in the pages of Kartika,
Alexander Chee, not long after his "Portrait of My Father”[1]
had appeared in the pages
of Granta's "Father issue."
Suddenly, Christine wished that she could ask other writers the same
question
about home.
And voila--the idea for this
issue was born: What
is Home?
So, we—fiction editor
Christine + nonfiction editor
Jennifer Derilo—partnered up with the entire editorial staff of Kartika, the four of us (including Sunny
Woan and Kenji Liu) asking at first, friends and then friends of
friends who
all happened to be emerging and established Asian American writers. We
asked
our teachers and mentors, our friends, we asked the friends of our
friends, and
we mustered up the courage and chutzpah to ask writers we didn't know.
We were thrilled when they
agreed to contribute to
our pages. For weeks, as their pieces rolled in, we opened them
like
gifts, ecstatic. These
pieces were magical,
nostalgic, historical, even political. Their pieces
touched us, their pieces thrilled us, their pieces made us squeal, made
us cry,
made us think more deeply about what it is we considered home.
Home, as
you, dear readers, will discover with our Famous Writers, is
everywhere,
sometimes nowhere, is a place or not a place, is constant or always
changing,
is carried in the body via food, love, grief, imaginary worlds, or
secrets.
Home is ever expanding or locatable on a map in one or more grids or
completely
disappeared. Home is sometimes abandoned, other times re-inhabited,
many times
forgotten, but somehow it is always occupied or it occupies you.
Home
doesn't exist anymore or has yet to exist. It can be found in pages, in
myths,
in objects, in a word. Home is a struggle between dealing with what you
cannot
change and finally making it your own. Home is the accumulation of
stuff, brand
new, secondhand, tucked away, inherited, misplaced. Home can never be
revisited--or so most people advise--yet you may be obligated to return
when
time wears out bodies, when something feels like missing, when life
moves
without you.
But
whatever its incarnation, its face, its story, a home lives.
What is home to you?
Christine
Lee Zilka, Fiction Editor
Jennifer
Derilo, Creative
Non-Fiction Editor