Until recently, I secretly viewed my two passions—writing and translating—as a two-headed snake, each head snapping at the other, wrestling for control. This feels almost sacrilegious to admit, given how much I have benefitted from both. But when one practice thrived, the other withered. I believed they could not coexist, let alone nourish one another. And I carefully built a life which upheld that belief.

Writing was my first love, long before I knew literary translation could be a career, and the focus of my training: a background in English literature, a year-long writing program, and an MFA in creative writing. Translation seemed to arrive out of nowhere, almost too easily—or so I thought. I stumbled into translating Korean literature in 2001 while at university, winning the grand prize in the Korea Times Translation Contest with the first translation I’d attempted. After that high note came a long silence: my first full-length translation did not appear until 2017, sixteen years after I began. Since then, I have published close to thirty books. Yet the older dream—publishing a book of my own—remained elusive.

I didn’t need anyone to explain how translation might benefit a writer, or writing a translator. Translation offers an immersive education in voice, rhythm, style, structure, and story, since no reading goes deeper than the reading required to recreate a work in another language. Writing, in turn, strengthens a translator’s creative range and command of language. I knew the arguments. I simply could not live them. Still, I tried. I studied writers who also translated, and whenever I met one, I would ask: How do you do both? Their advice was always some ver­sion of the same thing: Give more time to the practice you want to see flourish. If you want to write, make room for writing. 

I would nod, agree, then devote all my time and effort to translation. The more I did, the more skilled I became, and the more work and validation I received. Translation came with contracts, deadlines, and payment. My writing came with none of those. I told myself I would return to my writing once I finished the work in front of me, but before one project ended, I would line up another. I had cleverly made sure the work never ended. The truth was, I was hiding behind translation. In the life I had constructed, I needed translation to succeed. To understand why, and what I was hiding from, I have to go back. 

In 2016, I entered what I can only call my “Valley of Death.” Long before that, at the request of Han Kang’s agency, I had devoted years to translating The Vegetarian and other books by Han. Then another translator, Deborah Smith, independently secured a publishing deal for The Vegetarian, and my involve­ment came to an end without my ever fully understanding what had happened. In 2016, when Smith’s translation won the Man Booker International Prize, marking a historic moment for Korean literature, it seemed as though the whole literary world was affirming not only her achievement, but the course of events that had left me behind. By then, I had been translating for fifteen years and had formal training as a writer; Smith was new to both Korean and literary translation. The contrast only deepened my sense of absolute failure.

Days after the win, I learned that Smith’s newly founded press had acquired the UK rights to my first full-length transla­tion, Han Yujoo’s The Impossible Fairy Tale, which was due to be published in the US the following year. I was told this was good news. Yet the person whose success I had come to interpret as proof of my failure was now being presented as my publisher and champion. My grief, shame, and sense of injustice had no outlet. So I swallowed it all. I experienced what happened not simply as the loss of one project or even one author, but as a verdict on every part of me—my career as a literary translator, my calling as a writer, my love of my Korean heritage, even my sense of self. I seriously considered quitting both writing and translating altogether. 

Then, unexpectedly, translation opened another door. An email arrived. A British underwater photographer had come across one of my translations in an anthology and invited me to write the accompanying text for her project on the haenyeo, the sea women of Jeju. Numb and craving distraction, I said yes and began immersing myself in a world I had only vaguely known.

The haenyeo dive and surface for hours at a time, holding their breath and pushing their bodies to the limit to feed their families. Their songs and sayings speak of “diving with coffins on their backs,” descending into the underworld to fetch food for their families. Every dive is a kind of death; every resurfacing, a miracle.

But the real spark came when I encountered a forbidden word: mulsoom—“water-breath.” It’s the sudden catch of breath when a diver spots something precious underwater. Swallow it and you drown; let it go and you live. Mulsoom struck me like a revelation. It became a metaphor for desire itself—in my case, for recognition, validation, and praise. I began to ask: How do you resist what your heart most longs for? How do you leave behind a way of life that is also part of who you are? Out of those questions grew the story of a haenyeo family, one woman in particular, Soom, whose name means “breath,” who tries to outrun her past until tragedy forces her to confront it.

The novel came to me in a flash, but writing it was another matter. 

The trauma of 2016 pushed me into overdrive. After The Impossible Fairy Tale appeared in 2017, more books, honors, and work followed. I was translating, networking, and pitching at breakneck speed, churning out two to four books a year, mentoring emerging translators, and often helping find publishers for my authors. Outwardly, I was thriving. Inwardly, I was trying to overturn the verdict of 2016. If I accumulated enough books, enough honors, perhaps I could prove that I had not failed. Translation was no longer merely the work that kept me from writing. It was also the work I was using to repair the part of me that had been damaged. Maybe heaven took pity on my sick, battered heart. Something began to shift in May 2024. 

I was seeing more of an old friend from my first writing program, who had since become an established author. She reminded me that I understood writing at the level of both sentence and story. Perhaps, she suggested, the analytical part of my mind had become too dominant, and I had to silence it long enough to create. 

Around her, I felt less like a failed writer and more like an artist again. I began to quiet the inner critic that judged every sentence before it had the chance to form. Slowly, in trickles, the writing returned. Then she proposed something almost absurdly small: fifteen minutes every other day. Write anything, she told me. Don’t edit. Don’t judge. She began texting me every other day with one question: Did you write? 

That October, Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and everything resurfaced with astonishing force. I saw how completely I had absorbed what had happened as my own failure. For years, I had whipped myself for my naïveté and foolish trust, for not being business-savvy, strategic, or proac­tive enough. I had blamed my inability to write on busyness, a lack of discipline, even translation—on everything but the truth: what had happened had been beyond my control. Realizing this was like resetting a poorly healed bone. Once I stopped blaming myself, the trickle became a torrent. I had lacked not discipline, time, skill, or even daring, but belief—the belief that I had something worth saying, that my story was worth another person’s time. This didn’t mean believing I was exceptional, but trusting in the value of what I had to share without needing the world to validate it. After all, wasn’t that what I did whenever I translated a work I loved? I believed in it enough to carry it into another language and place it in the hands of readers. I had to learn to extend that same faith to my own story.

By the following May, I had finished a draft of the novel. I revised it, sent it to my agent in September, and a month later, the novel had sold. Next May, Flatiron Books will publish my debut novel, When We Swallowed the Sea, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

Only after finishing the book did I understand why I’d been so drawn to diving. The novel mirrored my own journey: descent, death, and surfacing again. I had to understand what I had lived through before I could carry something back—not as proof of my worth, but in the hope that it might help someone still moving through the same darkness.

Translation was never the enemy of my writing. It taught me the craft, brought me the haenyeo, and gave me the symbol at the heart of the novel. The two practices seemed at war because I pitted them against each other, because I believed one could flourish only at the other’s expense. 

This is new for me, this peace, this friendship between my two passions. How moving it is to discover that they have been allies all along, carrying me toward the same destination.