What does intelligence sound like with Angie Kim

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Adam Sockel:

You are listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast. For each week, I'll interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work. I'm your host, Adam Sockel, and today's episode is a big one.

It is with Angie Kim, author of Happiness Falls, which was just announced as the latest Good Morning America, Book Club pick.

You may recognize Angie's name from her incredible Edgar winning Miracle Creek, which was her debut novel. It was also named the best book of the year by the Washington Post, Kirkus and The Today Show, among others.

It was such a delight to get to talk with Angie, not just about her latest book, Happiness Falls, but about her passion. And it was all about this idea of how we think of communication and intelligence and people's ability to speak and communicate, and how those things are related.

Basically, we look at whether or not we consider someone “smart” by the way that they are able to communicate. And this really plays in well with her novel, Happiness Falls. And when you read the book (and I highly recommend that you do), you'll understand exactly what we mean.

This conversation was fantastic, and we also get into her upbringing, how she came over from Korea, moved to the States, and the both struggle and incredible opportunity that that provided. Just a really inspiring, wonderful and just phenomenal story of a human being who is now written two stunning novels. So, you're absolutely going to love this conversation.

And again, if you hadn't planned on reading Happiness Falls, which just came out, you're going to need to, it's just that good of a book.

Another book that I think you should check out, just give you a book recommendation here real quick. I finished up Horse by Geraldine Brooks recently. It’s a really interesting story. It is a book that has multiple timelines, one of them in present day and one in 1850.

It is the story of a discarded painting that a person finds in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history. These three strands are tied together in this really, really interesting story, and there's a lot of it that I didn't know was actually based on true facts, things that actually did happen, which made me enjoy the story even more so after the fact.

So, that's Horse by Geraldine Brooks, I really, really enjoyed it. I think you will as well, and I know for a fact you're going to adore Happiness Falls by Angie Kim.

If you want to get in touch with me, give me feedback on the show, ask for book recommendations or just say hi, you can always do that by emailing me at passionsandprologues@gmail.com. You can also find me on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram and that same name, Passions & Prologues.

I'm doing book recommendations and just general bookish chat across all those different social media platforms.

Alright, that is all the housekeeping. I am delighted to say that I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Angie Kim, bestselling author of Happiness Falls on Passions & Prologues.

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Okay. Angie, what is something that you are super passionate about that we're going to be discussing today?

Angie Kim:

So, I want to talk to you about two different things that are rooted in the same experience that I'm super passionate about, and I'm going to tell you about the experience first. And then I like a little suspense until I say what the passion is.

So, it's all stems from my experience being a Korean immigrant. I moved from Korea, from Seoul to the Baltimore area as an 11-year-old in middle school, and I'm an only child. And back in Korea we were super poor, no running water, outhouse. We lived in the spare room of another family's house, my parents and me, all of that sort of stuff.

So, when we found out that we were going to be moving to the Baltimore area by the sponsorship of my aunt who was living here, and she was a nurse at Johns Hopkins, everybody said, including my parents and me, “It's like we won the lottery.”

Because we went there and sure enough, I was so excited. I had my own bedroom for the first time. I had indoor plumbing, which is an amazing thing when you have never seen it before. Color TVs, which I had never seen, all of this stuff. And it was like a dream come true and I should have been so, so happy.

But a couple of things happened. One is because we were really poor, my parents started running a grocery store in sort of the really bad neighborhood area in downtown Baltimore. And they had really long hours, and it was a kind of store that was … and it's closed in bulletproof glass and all of this sort of stuff. And it was really dangerous.

And so, they actually ended up sleeping in a cupboard in the back because the hours were so long. And so, I never saw them. And so, I went from being in the same room with them, being best friends with my mom to never seeing them and really missing them intensely.

And the other thing that happened was that I didn't speak English. So, I went overnight from feeling like a pretty smart, gregarious, extroverted girl with lots of friends to not understanding or being able to speak anything. And feeling pretty stupid and feeling really embarrassed.

And so, I actually became kind of miserable instead of winning the lottery and having this happy, amazing life. Objectively, my life was great, but subjectively I was pretty miserable, and I longed to go back to Korea. And that's actually a lot of what my first novel Miracle Creek was about.

So, the two passions are, number one is this idea of happiness. Relativity of happiness, objective versus subjective views of happiness. Micro versus macro views of happiness, everything you can think of.

I studied philosophy in college, and I became a lawyer, but even as a lawyer, I studied jurisprudence, which just sort of the philosophy of law. And it's all been rooted in my thinking about these types of things, but what life means and what happiness means, and what we should be pursuing. So, that's number one.

And then the second thing is interrogating the assumption that I recognized in myself in everybody else through this experience. Which is the assumption that I think we as a society have that equates oral fluency with intelligence.

Adam Sockel:

As soon as you said that it clicked, and I definitely know, I am following what you mean. But for listeners, do you want to clarify because it's such a good point and I don't want to step over how you're going to talk about it, but let's do the second one first I want to circle back to the-

Angie Kim:

Yeah, of course.

Adam Sockel:

But can you kind of go a little bit deeper and explain that for our listeners, just so they can kind of help make the connection as to what you're referring to?

Angie Kim:

Absolutely. I think we as a society have a deep assumption that's really, really hard to root out that equates how well you speak and how fluently you speak with your intelligence level. We assume that if you speak fluently and well, and you speak words and talk fast, that you are smart.

And that if you stutter or you have an accent or you can't speak the language, or if you're autistic, or like the character in my novel, Happiness Falls, Eugene, who's 14, he has something called Angelman syndrome, which is a rare genetic disorder. And he also has autism, he has a dual diagnosis, and he cannot speak.

We assume that that must be a cognitive deficit. And we assume that that means that you don't have thoughts. And my experience as an immigrant and being limited in English is obviously not anywhere near the level of trauma that non-speakers have as a result of something like autism or Angelman syndrome because they have that their entire lives and they don’t have any outlet.

Whereas I at least had a little outlet in Korean when I was around other Korean people, even though I didn't really have that in the school that I attended in middle school, which was a very painful experience.

But I'm not saying that they're the same at all, because they're qualitatively quantitatively so, so different. But it is a similar experience and it's something that I have become so passionate about and I've written a novel about it. And also, I have started volunteering.

So, I teach creative writing classes to non-speakers. We use alternative means of communication, methods of communication by spelling words out one letter at a time on the spelling board. And I teach three classes. I've been teaching three classes this summer, one in person and two virtual.

And so, this is something that I am so excited about. I really want to try to figure out why our society has this assumption. I mean, even our president has talked about it, the stuttering thing. And people really assume that if you stutter that you must not be as intelligent.

And even though we know, we intellectually know, my parents who have a really thick Korean accent, sometimes I find myself, and I think about this all the time. I sometimes find myself thinking like being frustrated with them and being like, “Why can you not get the syntax right,” that kind of thing.

Adam Sockel:

And I'm wondering if you have thoughts on why you think society is like that. Because I think about when you were discussing this, thinking about a good friend of mine who has been on the show Kimberly Latrice Jones.

Kim has written a number of novels both with Gilly Segal and then by herself. And she is a spokesperson. She lives in Atlanta, and she works with Warner Brothers, doing production, all these different things.

And she went incredibly viral for this video that came out during the pandemic. She's African American and she was helping clean up after the protests from the George Floyd situation. And this video came out, it was basically her, it was like a “man on the street,” interview with her about why things are going on the way they are. And she was speaking just like a very frustrated human being.

Kim is incredibly intelligent, and she will talk about all the time, and she's told me this about — I'll have a conversation with her in person, and then she'll go up onto a stage and it's like a code switch where she literally knows I have to come off as more.

I have to use a different vernacular. I have to sound more intelligent so people will respect me, even though if I say it the way that I would normally talk to my friends, it's the exact same information. And I definitely understand what she's talking about. And I've seen her do this from time to time.

But I'm curious if you have any thoughts on why our society looks at people who, A, are either speaking a language that's their second or third, or oftentimes fourth language as somehow less intelligent.

And then as you said, people who may not have the ability to speak. Have you seen any research or articles or doing this work by working with these people? Have you had any insight into why you think society is this way?

Angie Kim:

I mean, that's one of the things that a lot of my characters talk about in the novel and something that I've talked to a lot of people about. I think that there are theories of linguistics and things like that that talk about sort of, and certainly of code switching and things like that that go on there.

I do think that it's rooted in the fact that language is something that for a long time is how people expressed intelligence. That's how they sort of discussed ideas and things like that. And so, many of the sort of earlier notions and it's very ableist I think, and also there's a lot of cultural assumptions and racism in it too.

So, for example, one of my characters in Happiness Falls who is biracial, who's Korean and American meaning white, white American, and her mum is a Korean immigrant. And she talks about the fact that it's so interesting to think about the fact that we use the phrase broken English.

But think about it, do we use that for French people who have a really heavy French accent and maybe use weird syntax and things like that. I've never heard it referred to in that context. We refer to it in terms of Asian immigrants, African immigrants, brown, black, yellow people.

And so, I think there is something to the idea of language is such an intimate thing and you sort of use it to judge what a person's socioeconomic background is, and of course that is rooted in our perceptions of intelligence too.

And so, I think all of these things just come together and meld into this weird conception that we have of language and what that means for people. And when somebody can't speak, even the semantics around that, people calling people dumb, used to have things to do with mutism and being deaf and all of that sort of stuff. And so, even the language that we use lends itself to this impression that we have.

And certainly, for a long, long time we didn't know about neurology and things. We didn't know that there could be oral motor issues or that there could be issues with the neuronal delivery of thoughts to your mouth. We just thought, if you can't talk, that must mean that you have nothing to say, because it was very simplistic back then.

And I think it's so deeply rooted that we have trouble letting go of those assumptions. I have friends who are immigrants, who are doctors who have thick accents. And they tell me that people really find it hard to believe that they're educated and that they're doctors because — and even after they say, “Look, I'm a doctor and I went to this medical school or whatever,” people still treat them in a demeaning way. Because there's something about the way you speak that makes you form an impression of that person.

Adam Sockel:

I’m interested, you mentioned, going from being with your family all the time. And then when you moved over here, you were kind of isolated. So, how did you begin to learn English personally? With your parents not around and being isolated yourself? I'm just curious, like from a personal aspect, how did you begin to pick up the language?

Angie Kim:

So, I went to school, they just threw me into the middle school, which seemed like a good idea. Like immersion. So, you just go, and they did have ESL, English for Second Language learners. And so, I did a class and I remember there were two of us and in the school, so you can imagine it wasn't a huge diverse population.

And I remember just going and being really upset the night before because I didn't know how to ask for the bathroom.

And so, memorizing how to say that because that seemed like a really important thing that if I didn't know how to say, might lead to some really emergency situations and then being really upset because my aunt was like, say, “Bathroom,” and I couldn't say it. Korean doesn't have the, th or r sounds.

So, I was like, batudoom. And she was like, “No, no, no, nobody's going to understand that.” So, she was like, “Okay, we're going to go for lavatory.” And I was like, labatody. And so, she was like, “Okay, good enough.”

And then when I got to the school and I'm asking for labatody, they thought that I was asking for the science lab. Because like Asian kid who's a student, those Asians are supposed be good in science.

And so, that led to kind of a — and I remember that night, coming home and just crying and being like I have become this person who doesn't know how to speak, who doesn't understand anything. And then it got even worse when I started learning English receptively to the point where I could understand, but I still couldn't speak very well.

And so, everybody still thought I couldn't really understand because that's what you assume. And so, I realized once I could start understanding what people were saying, I started realizing that people were just like, these kids were talking about me in front of me and making fun of my accent and my weird broken English and all of that sort of stuff.

So, it was a very shameful traumatic experience that I think to this day makes me kind of insecure and so obviously this is something that is really, really close to my heart.

And then when I found out that there are these people who are non-speakers with these diagnoses and we had assumed that they just had severe cognitive deficits and then all of a sudden came to find out that some of them whom I had known even as kids, because I was friends with their parents, that they started learning a different way of communicating that didn't involve oral motor and were able to spell out things, it just broke me.

I just remember just crying and being like, I can't think about anything else. I can't talk about anything else.

Adam Sockel:

I was originally going to ask you how this interest kind of bled into your adult life and then into your newest novel Happiness Falls. But it really does sound like, and you can correct me if I'm putting words in your mouth or if I'm wrong here, but it really does sound like it's something that, like you said, you've been thinking about your entire life and B, learning about these different genetic conditions and situations.

Did it almost feel cathartic to write a character who couldn't convey the things they wanted to verbally because of the experience that you had as a child?

Angie Kim:

Oh, absolutely. I really think that that's what led to my wanting to have a character like that in the book. And also, to doing the work that I do with non-speakers.

And it's something that I actually did think a lot about, like is my making an analogy between my immigrant experience and what my non-speaking students go through, for example, who have autism and those types of conditions. Is that not fair? Am I making an analogy that is offensive to them? Because theirs is so much more involved. And so, I actually asked them for their sort of permission in a way.

I said, “Look, I'm writing an author's note right now about this experience and why I chose to write this book, and I want to know is my talking about that in terms of being somebody who came over from Korea not speaking one language temporarily, it was only for two years or so that I couldn't speak. How does that seem to you?”

And what was so amazing was that they so eloquently said, “What you say is — actually your experience is your experience. And it also helps people to understand what our experience is.” And they sort of said, “Hearing you talk about your experience, feeling like that actually makes me feel less alone, and so please talk about it.”

And that just made me just so relieved and also just so grateful that I have the opportunity to do that, that I have the platform to talk about that through my book and through podcasts like this and things like that.

Adam Sockel:

And I want to get to your novel, Happiness Falls in just a second, but I want to touch on speaking of the word happiness. I want to make sure I touch on that really briefly, that concept of happiness. And this is something that I've been thinking a lot about over the last couple years.

And you mentioned kind of the two years where you were learning how to communicate in English and having that very isolated feeling. And like you said at the very beginning, this idea where in theory you as a family you had more and you should be happy, but it was really, really hard to be happy.

So, for you was the transition to the concept of happiness, to actually feeling happy, did that sort of come along with the ability to once again communicate with the world around you? Or I guess how did that transition to you going from like, “I'm supposed to be happy,” to like, “Oh, I actually do find joy in my day-to-day life now?”

Angie Kim:

That's such a good question. I'm not sure that I fully understand myself, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to write about it, because that's when I write, I write to figure out what I think about something when I don't understand something.

And for a long time, I was, I would say unhappy because of just the feeling less than and all of that sort of stuff and the loss of closeness with my parents and all of that sort of stuff. And eventually, I found my way when I went away to high school, I did theater and music. So, those were moments of joy, of course. I've always found so much joy in the arts and the act of creation. And then going to college and slowly finding a sense of competence and confidence again. So, that is definitely that.

But I think my interest in happiness really does have a lot to do with this concept of realizing that happiness really is subjective and that it's not necessarily something that you can predict.

One of the things I talk about in the novel is the lottery winner study, which I don't know. You probably know about it, and you probably talked about it on this podcast probably. And that lottery winners are not necessarily … like that does not necessarily bring happiness. And there's a light, it's a lot more nuanced than that.

But I remember encountering that in college and thinking back to what people said about, “Oh, you're going to America, that's like winning the lottery.” So, it was really resonated for me. And I think it really made me think about the concept of the relativity of happiness, which is what my novel discusses.

One of the characters the dad goes missing. And the father who goes missing it turns out, was working on a theory of happiness called the happiness quotient theory. Where he is positing that how happy you feel is relative to your expectations and to your baseline. Your conception of your ordinary life, whatever that is.

So, actually the lower you can make your expectations and the lower you can make your baseline view of yourself and of your life, the happier you will be with whatever is there. Because that's sort of what you compare it to.

Adam Sockel:

For me, I think about it a lot of — I think it was Joseph Heller said it like he was at a party with Kurt Vonnegut and there's some hedge fund manager. You know what I'm talking about. There was some hedge fund manager there who seemed miserable but had all this money.

And I think Kurt Vonnegut said to Joseph Feller like, “This man made more money this week than you'll ever make in your life.” And Joseph Feller was like, “That's right. I have something that he'll never have, I have enough.”

And I think a lot about that because I was in a long, long relationship where for the end of it, I was very unhappy all the time. And we had a beautiful house and externally people saw what looked like a very wonderful life. And I was very, very miserable.

And now I'm in a much, much healthier relationship and maybe we have a little bit less, but I am so much happier. And it is like, I think a lot about that the happiness quotient, you're just talking about and not just because I got an advance read of your book, but because it really resonated with me because of that idea of reestablishing in your own mind what you actually want and what you need and how you can achieve it.

And just like all of these concepts of understanding what will actually make you happy versus what you think should make you happy, I think is something that most people don't do, especially in the world today.

Like, every person who publishes a book needs to be a bestselling author, or every person in sales needs to hit the president's club. Everyone needs that greatest thing, where I have found happiness by being like, “This is actually what I want, I didn't really realize it.”

And so, blending that into your novel and I will say for people, I want to clarify there's a lot more in the novel of just like, are people happy or not? Like you said, someone goes missing and there's a whole lot more.

Actually, before we dive in too much more, do you want to give an intro to the novel? Because this episode's going to come out right when the book comes out. So, unless people got an advanced copy like I did, they probably haven't read it yet. So, if you want to describe it?

Angie Kim:

Yes. Okay.

Adam Sockel:

Sorry I got so excited.

Angie Kim:

No, no, I got so excited too. We're both just jumping the gun here. So, Happiness Falls is a story about a family that's thrown into crisis when the father goes missing. They're a biracial family, Korean and American, meaning white, again.

The Korean mother, white father, and they live in the northern Virginia area, and they have three kids. And one of them, Eugene, who's 14-years-old, has a dual diagnosis of autism and something called Mosaic Angelman syndrome, which is very rare, and he can't speak as a result.

And he's the person who was with the father when he went missing. So, obviously it's very, very important that the family and the police be able to communicate with him. And that's sort of the beginning situation, the complication and everything sort of comes out of that.

Adam Sockel:

And something I want to ask you about the structure of the story is people are often drawn to A … people are drawn to clock ticking down type mysteries. They are often drawn to a separate section, which is family dramas. And then a lot of people are drawn to literary novels where they talk about big ideas.

This has all of that in there, all wrapped up into one incredible book. And it's like, as the author who is trying to have these big concepts and these challenging things all while kind of putting it into a mystery, how did you go about — we were talking before about the length of time it takes you to write novels.

And so, how do you go about having a novel that asks and answers big questions while also keeping people guessing, at the end edge of their seat type of situation? What came first for you as the writer when you were putting this all together?

Angie Kim:

So, what definitely came together first for me were the ideas, before I even started … and also the characters, this family. I love this family. I've written short stories about them. Going back, I think I started writing about this family 13 years ago, when I first started writing creative fiction when I was in my 40s.

And so, this family has been with me for a long time, this voice, which is Mia, the 20-year-old kind of hyper, analytical, snarky college student, who's very intellectual. Her voice has been with me for a very, very long time.

And so, the family's been with me, and I knew that I wanted to write something about this happiness quotient idea that I'd been playing around with for a long time.

And so, I had sort of this Venn diagram of like, I want to interrogate a concept of happiness and on the one hand and then I had another circle that was oral fluency. Those two passions that I talked about and they're going to merge together.

And then I thought, “Okay, what is a good container for all of these stories that I have about this family that I want to tell that explore these concepts.” And my first novel was a literary court room drama that had murder-mystery types of you've done it, how done it. Well, I've done it kind of thing too.

And I think I'm drawn to that because I'm not the most patient person, so I get hooked into something like on page one. And then I will have a lot of patience and go through a lot of asides and tangents once I have that question that needs to be answered in my mind, and as a writer too.

So, having a mystery at the core where this character that I really love the father goes missing. And these other characters, the other members of the family are distraught and not knowing what's going on. And I, as a writer didn't know what happened to the father.

And so, I knew that the only way that I could figure out what happened to the father and find out is by getting my butt in this writing chair and going into my writing closet every day and actually writing. And so, it was like an incentive for me as a writer. And also, I do like the idea that you have some urgent question that needs to be answered and that that's the through line for the story.

Because I feel like when you have that as a container for the stories that you want to tell, I think it gives you, or at least I hope this is true, I heard that the readers have a little more grace and patience for some of the tangents and some of the asides that, you might be like, “Why am I hearing this story about these characters when they were five-years-old in Korea running around doing a vulcan mind meld with each other.” Well, it does tie in at some point.

And so, if I tried to tell that as just linked short stories, I'm not sure that it would capture as much of a wide audience. And I guess putting it in the framework of a missing person type of story, I think gave me a little bit of more of a latitude to do that and to do crazy things like put really, really tangential asides and footnotes and things like that.

So, I tried to have this Venn diagram of three circle Venn diagram with a missing person mystery on top and then where they intersect in the middle is sort of hopefully the ending.

Adam Sockel:

Did it feel … because people who may not know, I can't imagine they don't, your first book Miracle Creek was everywhere, it won multiple awards, it's an incredible book and it was your debut novel. And this being the kind of follow up, I'm just curious, did it feel — and you could flat out tell me yes or no, but did it feel like added pressure, stress knowing that people had an expectation now?

Angie Kim:

Oh, completely, in different ways too. So, there was the expectation of there are definitely going to be from a commercial perspective, people who liked Miracle Creek are going to probably want a similar experience. Maybe, I don't know. Miracle Creek had a lot of courtroom drama elements. This one doesn't really, it has a little bit, but not too much.

Are they going to be expecting the similar kind of voice? Miracle Creek had seven POV characters who were telling their stories in third person. And this one has one point of view character who's kind of snarky and can get kind of annoying and how much she overthinks things. And so, there was that kind of a concern.

So, there were all these expectation issues. And also, the thing of is this too much alike my first book? Is it not enough like my first book? So, there are so, so many different things.

And also, for my first book, when I was writing it, I didn't expect that to actually be published. So, I'm sitting in my little writing closet right now and I'm looking up at the sign that I put in front of me that says in big, bold letters, “This is not a novel.”

I put this over my computer screen when I was writing Miracle Creek because I wanted to remind myself, this is my first novel, this is my first attempt at a novel, it’s probably not going to be made into an actual book.

Because I had heard from so many people your first novel, it's your practice. You put it away in a drawer and then you write the real thing later. And so, I felt free to experiment with voices and having seven POV characters and having kind of murder-mystery, not having any idea what actually happened.

And with this one, the pressure as you talk about — because my husband came into the room one day and he was like, “You know that sign that says this is not a novel, that's actually not true. You have a contract, you have an editor who has given you a deadline and so it actually needs to be a novel.” And I was like, “Ah, this is such a good point.”

But I really wanted to keep it up there. So, I actually hand wrote in, “This is not a missing person novel,” just to have something in there.

Adam Sockel:

I love it. Well, the book is amazing. I absolutely adore it. I have one more question before you go. I mean, you've been very gracious for your time, you're very busy right now. So, I always end up episode by having just a recommendation of any kind by the author.

It can be a book, it can be a TV show, it could be a recipe, it could be anything at all. Just something you think more people should know about.

Angie Kim:

I'm so glad that you asked this. So, it's a movie. The last movie that I saw in a theater, and it was unbelievable. And I really want everyone to be talking about it. It's called Past Lives. Have you heard of it?

Adam Sockel:

So, I have heard of it. I'm interested to hear you explain why you love it so much. The reason why is my boss literally told me yesterday, she slacked me. She said, “Have you seen this movie yet?” I said, “I have not.” And she said, “Your homework is to watch it. Because I would need someone to talk to about it.” So, go ahead.

Angie Kim:

Tell your boss that she can talk to me about it. Yeah, it's a debut film by Celine Song who is a Korean Canadian American filmmaker, director. And from what I understand, it's based on her sort of life story.

She's an immigrant. She immigrated from Korea to Canada when she was 12. So, very similar. So, you can see why I might be drawn to something like this. But it was just a beautiful film and it's about these two kids who at 12-years-old, a boy and girl who are sort of at the head of the class, Korea has these crazy weekly academic competitions and you're ranked.

And so, the girl was usually on top, but sometimes the boy would be, and then she would cry because she would be so mad about it. She was very ambitious.

And so, when she immigrated from Korea and moved away, he was so upset that … and they were best friends and they clearly had crushes on each other, and he was so upset that he just didn't really say a proper goodbye.

And so, the movie sort of explores two other times in their later lives when he reaches out to her, through Facebook and they reconnect and it's exploring that. And it is just so beautiful. Just the emotional sort of ups and downs that the movie explores. Just the poignancy and the cinematography is just gorgeous. Just the acting is unbelievable.

There's these scenes where it's the protagonist, the immigrant woman and her husband who is American white having dinner and spending a lot of time with this guy who comes in and who doesn't really speak English very well. And it is just so awkward in the most amazingly exquisite way and what really resonated for me is I had this experience.

So, when I was 11, I had a boy that, we were best friends, and we were kind of had a crush on each other clearly. And we were 11 and we were one and two in the class. And so, it's just the parallels were just striking. And he did reach out to me when I was in college, but I was really busy and whatever, so I didn't actually respond.

And in this movie, the protagonist does respond and so it was kind of a window into like, “Oh, I wonder what could have been-

Adam Sockel:

Like a what if.

Angie Kim:

Might have been. Yeah. And I love the what ifs and the parallel lives and the multiverse and all of that sort of stuff. So, it was really wonderful for me. But my friends that I went with who are not Korean immigrants, they loved it. It's just a gorgeous film and I highly recommend that people go see it.

Adam Sockel:

Well, you are the second person in two days to tell me, so I'll be watching it this weekend. I am very excited for it. And speaking of things that people need to check out, Happiness Falls is so, so wonderful.

I was so excited when your name came through my email and I was like, immediately responded to your publicist saying, “Can I please have Angie on?” So, glad you said yes. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Angie Kim:

Oh, thank you so much, Adam. I loved our discussion and I'm so excited, thank you.

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Adam Sockel:

Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen Podcast and was created by Adam Sockel. It was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen Podcasts, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.