It was the last day of March in 2026. I started rereading Young-ha Kim’s I Hear Your Voice in Hong Kong, at the airport in the evening. I had a midnight flight to Incheon, where I arrived at five in the morning, got a coffee, and slept at the terminal for a few hours before boarding another flight to New York to attend a residency upstate, a two-hour train ride from the city. I reread bits and pieces of I Hear Your Voice throughout the trip.

Around the same time I reread this novel, I read an essay by Young-ha Kim that was published in the winter 2025 issue of KLN—an essay about his travels, his stay at a hotel, and dreams and memories of his father (or, to be more precise, his refusal to remember his father the way his father wanted to be remembered). Perhaps reading this essay changed my rereading of I Hear Your Voice. On this second reading, the novel said something about masculinity and all the things left unspoken because of it.

I Hear Your Voice narrates the intertwined lives of Jae and Donggyu, two boys growing up in Seoul. Jae’s initial connection with our narrator, Donggyu, who is mute, stems from the fact that the former can “read his pain.” Jae speaks for Donggyu, gives him a voice, until one day, out of seemingly nowhere, Donggyu starts speaking. Although Donggyu makes it explicit that there is no direct correlation, his parents separate shortly after he begins to talk. It is the father who leaves. As the novel progresses, Jae and Donggyu grow more distant. It feels as though parts of them are ashamed of how close they have become. In the latter half of the book, Jae becomes a mystical figure—a leader of a motorcycle gang—seen only through the perspectives of Donggyu, who might have been in love with Jae, and Seungtae, a closeted cop. Jae’s own voice effectively disappears, and it is only through these exterior perspectives that we come to know his lore.

I was thinking a lot about voice while rereading this book. I had just given a talk at a university about the literary voice—something about Bakhtin and heteroglossia and whatnot. The day after my talk, and before I left for the residency, I performed Displaced Nostalgia. In this durational performance, which lasted eight hours, my performance partner and I sat silently in the shadows behind a curtain. Oranges hung above us. We had no watches, phones, or any way to tell time. When my performance partner felt that an hour had passed, she climbed a ladder and began cutting down the one hundred oranges we had installed, which hung from fishing wires attached to the ceiling of the Black Box Theatre at the University of Hong Kong. During this time, I wrote prompts on the overhead projector behind the curtain. Audience members came and went throughout the eight hours we were there, and they responded to the prompts using the projector outside the curtain.

My parents came to see the performance toward the end, I later learned. They had never seen my performances, never attended my talks, nor had they read my books properly.

At the end of I Hear Your Voice, Young-ha Kim turns to the writing of the novel itself. In a documentary-like fashion, Kim introduces a thinly veiled stand-in for himself, an author figure who takes on the narrative voice. He begins to describe how he met Donggyu and came to learn the story of Jae through an ex-girlfriend referred to only as “Y,” who had an encounter with Jae, who, by the end of the story, was believed by some to have grown white wings and risen to the sky before becoming a martyr for marginalized youth who have no voice in society.

There is a moment at the end of the book when Mokran, a former partner of Jae’s and a former biker who stopped riding after losing one of her eyes in an accident, is interviewed by the author figure. They are at the airport, and Mokran, who is about to leave for Vancouver, tells the narrator that her father is happy about her departure because “nothing good ever happened to her here.” Mokran’s father shows up, and the novel ends with even more silence:

He barely spoke to me—whether it was because he was always reserved or because he didn’t like me, I couldn’t tell. She grabbed her unfinished coffee and stood up. As I walked to the parking lot after we parted, I fiddled with the cell phone in my pocket. I debated whether or not to call Y, but finally I decided not to. She had said everything she needed to in her letter, and my novel was my reply.

It is a silence structured by masculinity, by everything that could not be said, or was never learned to be said. This same silence settles across the novel’s many voices: between absent fathers and their children, between Jae and Donggyu, pulling them slowly apart. In this final moment, in a distinctly postmodern turn, the novel I Hear Your Voice—the author figure’s reply to Y—becomes a form that gathers what remains unsaid, along with the affects that accumulate around it.

It was when Displaced Nostalgia ended that a friend in the audience told me that my parents were present. The next day, my father sent an out-of-focus photograph of my mother

sitting in front of the white curtain, in the light that cast my shadow. Next to her were the oranges that had fallen.

My father later told me, via video call, that the place was too dark, that the booklet that accompanied the performance could not be read in the theater, and that from where he sat, he could not see my live writing projected on the curtain. Because of all this, he did not understand why there were oranges, and the sound of them hitting the floor when my performance partner climbed up the ladder to cut them down frightened him. He said all of this jokingly, with a smile on his face, and, to my tired body, which had spent hours installing, de-installing and performing, my father sounded as though he were playing a game of avoidance, actively finding ways not to need to understand the work. My mother, usually talkative, did not complain; just as in the blurry image, she sat quietly.

At the entrance to the performance, all the audience members were given a piece of fabric to cover their watches. Pictures were allowed, but audiences were also asked to turn on airplane mode on their phones. My father said that they waited for exactly an hour before leaving. “You think a piece of fabric can stop me from checking my watch?” he said proudly.

Young-ha Kim writes in the aforementioned essay, “The Waltz of Expectation and Disappointment,” that he wondered when his father first disappointed him, and that even having this thought felt unnatural and heavy, as though he were “defying gravity.”

Though I can’t say I was disappointed by my father upon hearing his reactions to our performance, his almost childish, passive-aggressive rage baiting annoyed me, causing my entire body to feel drained. I had no energy to respond. Some will never hear your literary or artistic voice; during this conversation, I lost complete interest in the meaning of my own art. I wonder how Jae would read this moment of silence, so filled with fatigue, yet emblematic of the relationship between this sixty-three-year-old father and his thirty-one-year-old son.

Now I am far away from Hong Kong, away from any city. I hear birds. It was snowing this morning, but now it is bright and dry and warm. There are deer in the distance, eleven of them standing around in the field, silently. If I walk closer to them, they will run away. Behind the deer are trees that turn golden under the fading sun.

Sheung-King’s Batshit Seven won the 2024 Writers’ Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize and was named one of The Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2024. His debut book, You Are Eating an Orange. You Are Naked., was a finalist for the 2021 Governor General’s Award and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was named one of the best book debuts of 2020 by The Globe and Mail. He forms an artist duo with the artist JeeMin Kim.