Docile

Memoir of a Not So Perfect Asian Girl

By: Hyeseung Song

Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

From Texas sugar cane fields, Ivy League halls to her homeland of South Korea and back again this memoir is a journey through identity crises, mental health struggles, and the quest for selfhood.

Born to Korean immigrant parents, Hyeseung spends her early years in the sugar cane fields of Texas, caught between her father's "get rich quick schemes" and her beautiful, domineering mother who is skeptical of Western idealism.

With her parents constantly at odds, Hyeseung learns more Korean words for hatred than for love. When the family's fake Gucci business lands them in bankruptcy, Hyeseung starts at a new school where she's immediately singled out with the question, "Can you speak English?"

Growing up, Hyeseung internalizes Western expectations of the "model" Asian-American, striving for approval and getting into an Ivy League school. Yet, she resents the other high-achieving Asian students she meets and clings to her "token" status among her white peers.

In an attempt to reconcile her identity, she takes a trip to Korea, facing an even greater crisis of self, and after a series of shocking events, she is admitted to a psychiatric hospital and ultimately attempts suicide. Marriage to a doting white physicist and a new career as a painter seem to offer refuge—until they don’t.

Unflinching and lyrical, Docile is one woman’s story of subverting the model minority myth, contending with mental illness, and finding her self-worth by looking within.

©2024 Hyeseung Song (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

“DOCILE is the rarest of things: a scorchingly honest, beautiful, hugely evocative memoir that’s also a proper page-turner. I read it breathlessly in a single sitting, transported and deeply moved. It's at one and the same time the story of a life and a meditation on identity, family, trauma, illness, and the nature of love, art, and success. It’s wonderful.” – Helen MacDonald, author of H is for Hawk

“A work of extraordinary tenderness and depth, DOCILE chronicles an immigrant family’s dreams, losses, and love through Hyeseung Song’s clear-eyed and poetic storytelling. Ultimately a book about the call of art, the bane of mental illness, and inheritances both welcome and not, DOCILE offers a gorgeous glimpse of one seeker’s earnest journey toward selfhood.” – Rachel Yoder, author of Night Bitch

"A savagely beautiful memoir. Skillfully crafted and achingly heartfelt, Docile creates worlds through richly-observed details, told with a powerful narrative drive. Eloquent, often funny, and always unflinchingly honest, Song has created a Portrait of the Artist as a Young AAPI Woman which will be read and cherished for generations to come." — David Henry Hwang, author of M. Butterfly