NEW YORK, NY.- R.O. Kwon asks her ancestors for help. Two jade rings in particular, passed down by her mother, serve as a direct line and source of comfort.
Kwon, an award-winning author, wanted to be a Christian pastor or a religious recluse when she was growing up. She had, as she put it, “what felt like a conversation with the Lord going.” But she lost her faith as a teenager. Now, in her writing, Kwon explores the challenge of questioning long-held beliefs.
Her first novel, “The Incendiaries,” tackled religion, while her second, “Exhibit,” out last month, is about hidden desire. She wanted to write a book “centering desire, including queer desire and kinky desire,” she said, because in the past, she has felt “desperately alone in wanting as I do.”
Kwon spoke, in an edited and condensed interview, about how she turns to her ancestral jade rings for strength and the comfort of having them on while she types.
Q: Talk about the rings you’re wearing.
A: They’re double jade rings and they’re from my mother, who received them at her wedding from her mother-in-law. She had them throughout my childhood, but she only ever wore them for very special occasions, like my wedding.
Q: How did the rings eventually go from her hand to yours?
A: There are beliefs around jade for Korean people that the stone can help ward off evil spirits and illness; that it can have healing powers. My mother gave these to me when I was in the depths of a crisis with “Exhibit,” because I worked on it for nine years. She gave them to me to help.
Q: Do you feel that they have healing properties?
A: I feel better connected to my ancestors, and asking my ancestors for help feels much more available to me than asking a God I don’t believe in anymore for help. So yeah, they do give me strength.
I grew up so religious. I thought I wanted to devote my life to serving the Lord. And then when I was 17, I lost that faith. In some ways that’s always part of what I’m writing about. And I’ve thought about how, with the loss of the Christian faith that I grew up with, I’ve also lost in a key way the ability to ask for help when I’m having trouble, because I used to pray all the time.
Q: Do you ever take the rings off?
A: I do. I keep them close by and then I put them on when I especially need help as a sort of talisman.
Q: Is jade considered a “hard” stone, like diamonds, or is it delicate?
A: I’ve actually looked that up because I want to be careful with them. They’re reasonably hard, but they can definitely be carved. I’m not precious about them. I can feel them as I type. There’s something very helpful about having this physical contact that I feel every time I move my fingers.
Q: Is your hope to eventually pass the rings down to someone else, like they were passed down to you?
A: My grandmother on my father’s side, who gave my mother these rings, died a while ago, unfortunately. I definitely don’t plan on taking them to the grave.
If possible, I want a tree burial. I want to return to the soil which we’re made. Being a tree, that sounds great. And it sounds like a mythic transformation in a way that feels very satisfying. So yeah, there’s no need for jade to hang out there.
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
