The Confines of Masculinity Are Killing Us: A Conversation with Joe Milan Jr.
Joe Milan Jr.’s debut novel, The All-American (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023), is a wry, propulsive, heartfelt exploration of an immigrant boy’s journey toward manhood. Milan questions our culture’s conceptions of identity, citizenship, and masculinity by turning the expected narratives on their head.
Bucky Yi is an awkward seventeen-year-old Asian misfit whose work ethic and dreams of making it to the NFL are shattered by U.S. immigration policy and world events beyond his control. Bucky has grown up in the United States with a foster family in a mobile home, after his biological father abandoned him as a baby. He feels no connection to the place of his birth—he cannot even pronounce his own Korean name, Yi Beyonghak—but a domino effect of events lead to his deportation and eventual conscription into the South Korean army. Unable to speak Korean and understand cultural and social expectations, Bucky is forced to contend with interior and exterior enemies that threaten his survival.
Raised in Washington state, Milan is a second-generation Korean American who taught in South Korea for nine years before writing this novel. He currently teaches creative writing at Waldorf University in Forest City, Iowa. We first met while we were Black Mountain Institute PhD fellows at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Over Zoom, we spoke this spring about The All-American, the ideals that define culture, writing toward a version of his younger self, and the heartbreak that is the divided Koreas.
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The Rumpus: What were your influences, as a writer, for your debut novel?
Joe Milan Jr.: I didn’t really get started reading seriously until I graduated college, which is embarrassing.
I always look to the writers who surprise me. For example, Korean writer Kim Young-ha’s I Have the Right to Destroy Myself, and Chinese writer Ding Ling. Some Americans I’m into are Amy Hempel, Charles Portis, and George Saunders. I love the Russian [writers], Isaac Babel, Dostoyevsky, all them cats. In a [South] Korean bookstore, there is a broad selection of books available in English, not just American literature.
Rumpus: Your main character is a high school running back with dreams of making it to the pros, and a strong work ethic, yet he doesn’t fit the stereotypes of young adults or teens that aspire to be football players. How did Bucky come to be?
Milan: I actually started with the question: “What would be the most American character I could think of?” I was teaching a class in Korea called “American Culture,” [which taught] the basic ideals of American culture, so that no matter what profession they go into, when they are interacting with American culture, they can understand it better. The American interculturalist, L. Robert Kohls, wrote a paper entitled “The Values Americans Live By.” One of the values is future orientation, where Americans are inherently optimistic the future can always be better than today. Another [value] is the accident of birth—we don’t give credit to where we were born but treasure the idea of rising through the social classes. Hence, you get these sort of bizarro ideas that are tied to that idealism: if poor people would just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work harder, they will succeed.
One day while teaching, I thought, “What would happen if a character embodied all of Robert Kohls’s ‘American Values?’ Well, he would be an immigrant. He’d be poor, but unlike other immigrants, he’d be completely separated from his home country because he would only be picking up the cultural norms of being American.”
When you’re Asian American, you’re always asked, “Where are you really from?” That’s the microaggression that maintains the idea that you’re an immigrant. What if, instead of asking, we got straight to, “Get out of my country.” People like Bucky have been deported. Even if you have all these American ideals and you grow up on this land and you buy into everything, it is still possible for your life to be dictated by forces that have nothing to do with you.
Rumpus: Because Bucky considers himself American, he keeps believing these ideals are going to save him. Yet the novel is filled with twists that prove otherwise. It speaks to an element of surprise but also questions these ideals that Bucky holds.
Milan: One of our American values is individuality. We really cling to this idea of the individual being at the top of the hierarchy of how we understand ourselves. When you have that belief, you focus exclusively on things over which you have control. You can’t spend your life worrying too much about what you cannot control, but for a character like Bucky, everything happening to him is outside of his control. Even some of his impulses, like how he blows up and gets in fights. He does all these stupid things and you can see it from a mile away—”Don’t do it, bro!”—but he does it because he’s trained that way.
He’s a football player, encouraged for calculated violence. He cannot recognize the system. Every wrong thing he does is easily explained by naievete, being young. [He doesn’t have] the opportunity to make this mistake and learn from it.
Whether he’s deported, conscripted, or just trying to get a date, these are the expectations and structures we know are there. We don’t believe [these systems] exist as Americans because if we wholeheartedly believed these systems have a far greater control over our lives than we do, it would be to surrender values [that are] central to us being Americans. We believe we grant access to our lives to others; I think that is an illusion.
Rumpus: Bucky is in this immense drama caused because of entanglements in bureaucratic paperwork, which he has to learn to navigate. It made me realize how much paperwork is involved in being a human in society.
Milan: It’s incredible how big the immigration process is. For Bucky, the whole reason he gets deported—why other people have been deported in similar scenarios—is because the United States, for so long, had no policy on what to do with children brought into the country for adoption or otherwise. Up until 2001, internationally adopted children were not granted citizenship automatically. The adoptive parents had to apply. In a scenario like Bucky’s, where there is a bounced check, that would mean the adoptee could not become naturalized. It would automatically be considered the crime of overstaying their visa. In the last twenty-five years of America’s increasingly anti-immigrant stance, any sort of crime can be considered [grounds for] automatic deportation.
So these people who were adopted later realized they weren’t naturalized as Americans. They end up getting deported. It’s absolutely insane. It still happens.
Rumpus: The All-American is set in a small fictional town in Washington and ventures across the world to South Korea, when Bucky is deported to Seoul, a bustling city, and into remote locations that ironically remind Bucky of his rural hometown in the States. What led you to write about these places through an immigrant experience lens?
Milan: I’m not an immigrant, but I did have a residency card, similar to a green card, in South Korea. I lived there almost ten years, most of those years as a legal resident. I couldn’t vote, and my residency was always tied to three-year intervals. I was basically an immigrant and could remain there indefinitely, if I chose. So I had that experience of going through the process. It was very hostile, very new—they had never seen someone like me before. I didn’t have both a Korean mom and dad; my father was from rural Tennessee.
In the past, they would never have let someone mixed-race, like me, become Korean. They had changed the laws and I was one of the first to do it. The person in charge threw the paperwork back at me, refusing to sign-off because he was racist. He didn’t believe me. He thought I was not Korean, that it wasn’t appropriate or legal, and that the documents were forged. Thankfully, some of the other people there took me aside and said, “Don’t worry about it, he’s going to retire next week, so he’s just pulling a tantrum.” They took care of it. Still, facing that in Korea, it really made me think about my mother, who went through the immigration process. All these people that come to America experience this, and worse, very often.
Initially, I didn’t have the deportation narrative, but I returned to the U.S. in 2016, the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump era. I started hearing some of the stories and did some digging about deportation centers. A lot of those details in the book are from the articles I read and from friends I talked to who are involved in immigration law. It’s just bizarro, like, “This is America?” We’re doing this to people who cling to rail cars, who brave deserts, who bake in shipping containers, all with a very significant possibility of death to get here to work? This is how we treat them?
Another experience that informed the novel is being a child of someone who was raised poor/working class. My father came up in a poor rural area, and now I live in a rural area. I know that all across the developed world, we keep a lot of our have-nots in rural spaces, and we don’t talk about it. We talk about the bustling metropolises, like L.A. and New York, Seoul, Paris, but when you go into these rural areas, these people have been forgotten.
The first time I saw a rusty refrigerator in front of a house in Korea was in a dying town, where a subsistence farmer is still having a go at it because that’s what thirty-five generations of his people have done, and it’s the only thing he knows. He was so proud to send his children off to school, so they would no longer be farmers. All that pride in that little town is just gone with that generation. I saw that there and I see that here. I’ve seen that in England. It’s everywhere. And yet when I read, I don’t see that—which is bizarre!
Rumpus: Another major theme in the story is masculinity, as Bucky tries to figure out what that is. How did the concept of gender inform Bucky’s story?
Milan: Bucky tries to embody every idea of what it means to be masculine, as much as he can, the best he can. The “masculine” I was raised around is reflected in a lot of the stuff going through Bucky’s head. I think it’s pretty generalized in the American psyche what our version of masculinity is. Only in the last few years has our culture begun to acknowledge that it’s absolutely insane. The idea of masculinity is so confining that the only responses a man is raised to believe in are either violence or retreating into yourself. It is this belief that emotions are treacherous, except for violence and anger.
At every turn, American masculinity doesn’t help Bucky. That’s something I really wanted to make a point of. A lot of the problems, like the self-inflicted wounds he creates, are because he’s trained to be that way. I think all of us [men] have been trained to be that way, and it’s killing us. What’s worse is [that] I don’t think American men are being presented with a better alternative. We, as a society, haven’t gone that extra step to ask, “What is a better alternative?”
I’m guilty of that too. In the book, I don’t have the direct answer, and maybe I’m just perpetuating that whole, “Well, here are all the problems.” I think the only game in town that has any hope for men is feminism. The characters in the book who have any sort of solution that might actually help Bucky are women. Even if they would not articulate feminism, it’s feminist ideals, and Bucky can’t hear it. He’s dismissive, thinking he’s got to fix it because men are supposed to fix it on their own.
Rumpus: The women characters he’s dealing with—and there are quite a lot of them— are trying to teach him to see them differently. I see them trying to teach him some lessons about different parts of himself that he might be able to access, and I think you leave a little light at the end for him to do that.
Milan: I hope so. I tried really hard not to have these characters be there to be a teaching moment, but I think whenever you choose who the protagonist is, all the other characters are going to be in relation to that protagonist and how he sees them, especially with the choice I made of being so tied to his mind. He’s indulgent, like all the rest of us, in believing that the world revolves around him. So we only truly get his worldview, which is skewed, but you know he’s trying.
Rumpus: You wrote a really beautiful essay in The Rumpus about the divided Koreas. That situation is something significant in this novel as well.
Milan: There’s nothing more heartbreaking than knowing that half your kinsmen are trapped in a dystopian horror, like North Korea. It’s like watching somebody across the street—your cousin—just dying in the most horrific form possible, and there’s nothing you can do. It’s so, so remarkably sad.
Rumpus: North Korea is a bit like a specter, haunting most of the novel, removed from Bucky’s reality.
Milan: I tried really, really hard, not to make the North Koreans how we imagine them to be. You have these generations of people who’ve been starving and have not been educated, but some of the most successful hackers in the world are coming out of North Korea. It speaks to a technological prowess we don’t want to acknowledge. We don’t know what they’re like, and that’s even scarier. I imagined, “What kind of people would it take to still make that place function and still be devoted to it?” Because they must look at us with the same sort of bewilderment. Why would people in South Korea give up everything that it means to be Korean? For what? Faster internet? Doors that open automatically?
I’m trying to imagine something that is not so dispiriting like what I personally feel, which is just an overwhelming sorrow. Maybe that’s why I have such a particular sympathy for immigrants coming to the U.S., because I feel like “Oh, my God, these are people we know about—who we could help in some way—fighting for their lives to get here to work! And we’re going to insult them the way we do?”
Rumpus: The use of language, or not knowing languages, is something you portray a lot in the book.
Milan: I have struggled to learn Korean ever since I became an adult, and I’m still not a very good speaker. I’m far worse now than I think I’ve ever been since before I started learning Korean. I’m so isolated from other Korean speakers except for my wife and now my children, who are correcting me on my own Korean pronunciations, which is humbling to hear a three-year-old translate something. And you’re like, “Wait a minute! I was the one who taught you that!”
One thing I’ve always thought is weird is when I sense Korean words are Anglicized in ways that don’t make sense to me. I don’t think it will hurt or offend American readers’ eyes to see Korean written in the Korean alphabet, Hangul. I always hated how some characters study a language and within two chapters they’ve learned it. Having tried to learn languages myself, [I know] it’s never done, and it’s never exact. Even when you get comfortable enough where you can complain about your job—you can open a bank account, you can watch some bad TV in another language—you also realize there are all these other barriers beyond just speaking a language that prevents communication from happening. I wanted to represent that difficulty.
I think one of the best bits in the book is when a minor character, Lieutenant Father, makes fun of how English speakers laugh because other countries don’t laugh that way. Something that you never think of when you come up in the United States is that even something as simple as how you laugh is different in different languages.
Rumpus: What are you working on next?
Milan: I was always given advice that you shouldn’t talk about it, but what I’ve discovered by finally finishing a book is that, no matter what I say today, it doesn’t have any bearing on what comes out two months from now.
So I’m working on a retelling of Rip Van Winkle but from a perspective of a mixed-race Korean American granddaughter, whose grandmother is a North Korean sleeper agent who came to the U.S. Then things go awry with the sudden arrival of dementia, and so the granddaughter is basically trying to find Grandma, who thinks she’s a spy again. Fortunately or unfortunately, two of the characters from The All-American, Bucky and Junho, are there to try to help her on this mission. Unfortunately, they have gotten in more trouble because they can’t catch a break.
Rumpus: How are you finding writing in the female perspective with this next project?
Milan: Liberating. It’s very hard, but it’s wonderful to not be in Bucky’s head anymore, at least not the adolescent head. I never really thought about this, but when you tie yourself closely to the perspective of a character, you can’t shake their voice, which sounds like I don’t like him or something like that. But there’s a certain point at every family gathering, maybe at Thanksgiving, and two days later you’re still haunting the guest room and you’re like, “I gotta get out of here!” I guess that’s how it feels.
Because a story is not a life, I guess it’s really hard for me to hang out with somebody that sounds even remotely like the seventeen-year-old me. It’s not because I find all seventeen-year-olds insufferable, but it’s reliving that innocence, in a way.
Also, because it’s our job as writers to push characters to a breaking point and put them in scenarios that you would never wish for another human being, part of the reason why we do this is to explore “Why do I feel so bad about these things?”
If I was a character popping up in the book, I think I would probably be that guy at a bar or whatever, saying to Bucky, “Dude, you just gotta chill out, man. You’re holding everything too tightly.”
Maybe it’s also that idea that as Americans, we define ourselves by the work we do. I don’t know if this is an American thing uniquely, but Bucky defines himself on whether or not he can be a running back, and I think that’s so sad because if he wasn’t so wound-up, he would realize he’s not a bad dude.
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Author photograph by Taufik Bonaedy