After four years at Amherst, Kim is satisfied with his decision to attend a smaller school. "I definitely would have had a different experience at a bigger university. What Amherst did for me was two-fold: It provided me with an interdisciplinary education in order to make connections between my studies, and it gave me the confidence to talk with professors and faculty about my writing and articulation of ideas," said Kim.
Romancing two languages
Kim, a double major in English and Asian languages and civilizations, is passionate about both literature and the Chinese language. "I took up Chinese once I got here for superficial reasons, and I ended up getting into it. I always wanted to be an English major, though. Reading and analyzing literature is my 'passion' really more than creative writing," said Kim. His favorite English writers are the high modernists such as Pound, Joyce, Eliot and Proust.
Kim studied abroad in Beijing, China, for six months during his junior year, in the summer and fall of 2004. "I decided to go study abroad because my study of Chinese was getting more serious. There was no place to learn the language better than China itself," said Kim. "It was a great experience and I have a more nuanced understanding of women after going to China," he said.
Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations Paola Zamperini, who has known Kim since January 2004 when he joined her seminar on the 18th century Chinese novel, "The Story of the Stone," has since then served as Kim's academic advisor and worked with him on his Asian languages and civilizations thesis. "Upon his return from China, in January 2005, John declared his double major in English and Chinese literature, and joined my class on the six senses in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism. In the fall of 2005, John asked me to be both his advisor as well as his senior honors thesis advisor," said Zamperini. During the current academic year, she worked with Kim for both semesters on his senior thesis.
Looking down the navel
Kim's 170-page, interdisciplinary thesis was an ambitious comparative study of English and Chinese literature. According to the abstract that Kim submitted to the Amherst Association of Students, his Asian languages and civilizations thesis, entitled "And Then Went Down the Navel... : The Opacitization of Language in Chinese and English Poetry and Literature," "examined how the triangulation of classical and modern Chinese poetry and High Modernist Anglophone writing constellates around a lingual abyss (the Freudian "navel") by means of literary language's trans-historical and cross-cultural hypostatization (drawn from Foucault)."
"I discuss how language becomes an opaque object, which relates to Foucault's theories. I examine that phenomenon with respect to this triangular relationship," said Kim.
In his thesis, Kim additionally examines Chinese poetic history, comparative readings, short stories and novels and the psychoanalytic theories of both Freud and Lacan. "I raise more questions than I answer. I will try to prove the answers in graduate school and further define my interest in the future and also question what I want to be pursuing," said Kim.
Professor Zamperini recalls a particularly light-hearted moment while working with Kim on his thesis. "As of now, my fondest memory of John is his expression when I asked him out of the blue, during his thesis defense, to read out loud in Chinese two poems-one ancient and one modern [that he analyzes in his thesis]. My prime motivation in doing so had been totally innocent and scholarly, as his two readers, [Professors of English] Jack Cameron and Andrew Parker, do not know Chinese and thus could not appreciate the depth of John's analysis," said Zamperini.
She continued, "So I had no mischievous intent to begin with. But upon seeing John's face, I found his look of sheer surprise (and perhaps also a bit of panic) so amusing that it will last in my memory for a long time. Plus, I now have something to tease John about for the rest of what I expect to be a brilliant academic career as a scholar of comparative literature."
But Kim didn't let his mentor down. "It goes without saying that, after the initial shock, John went on to read the two poems in (almost) flawless Chinese," said Zamperini. Other than that, I will always remember with extreme fondness our bickering over obscure English words that I often accused him of making up just to confuse me, because I am not a native speaker of English. I did learn some new words and did expose some creative inventions in terms of his literary English, so I would say we are pretty even."
The future Dr. Kim
In the fall, Kim will attend graduate school at Harvard University in order to continue his studies in comparative literature. He was in the unique position of choosing from seven of the top programs within his field of choice. But, his success hasn't gone to his head as he still has trepidations about the transition between college and graduate school. "Relatively speaking, Amherst is a 'kiddie' pool. Going to graduate school will be like being thrown into the deep-end from the high dive, landing on your face, trying to tread water-learning how to swim and not drown," he said. Kim has hopes of becoming a professor and joining the world of academia after earning his Ph.D. from Harvard. He also wants to travel the world.
Professor Parker taught John last fall in a seminar on Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches to literature. Parker also served as one of three readers for his senior thesis. "Professor Cameron and I joined with Professor Zamperini to work with John on his thesis since his topic considered modernist writing in English as well as Chinese-a truly comparative project," said Parker.
"The thesis was the most ambitious and most fully realized of the many I've read in recent years," said Parker. "With all his brilliance and impressive accomplishments at Amherst, John somehow has never relinquished his modesty. I expect to stay in touch with and to continue to learn from John as he begins graduate school next year at Harvard," said Parker.
Kim was Professor Cameron's student for a pair of courses in his junior and senior years: James Joyce and Proust. "He says in his thesis that in studying Joyce, he understood a resonance between the attitude toward literary language in Western modernism and what was happening to traditional Chinese literary language in the early 20th century," said Cameron. "This description should indicate the extraordinary ambition of the thesis; it was a challenge which he met with his extraordinary intellectual and academic intelligence, discipline, and, let's say, passion."
"He is poised and modest and warmly friendly, a scrupulous student, and likely, to become a major literary scholar as he goes on to graduate school," said Cameron.
The Duprees Duprees of today
The qualities that best describe John in Professor Zamperini's eyes are "his quiet but relentless brilliance and his understated but quirky sense of humor." "As a faculty member, I can say that John constitutes a very good model of what an Amherst College student can be: a fun and kind person, engaged with the world around him, willing to go abroad, learn at least one new language and to push the boundaries of his cultural horizons; he is hardworking but seldom complains," said Zamperini. "In short, he is an intelligent person with the gift for communicating-clearly and without arrogance-his original and insightful ideas."
Kim is well known by his friends and professors for his intelligence, sense of humor, quick-wit, loyalty and modesty. "There are 400 more qualified people than me to be profiled for this Commencement Issue," he said.
Danielle Lewis '07E has known Kim for four years. "I call him John Kim. We lived next door to each other in the old North. We bonded over our uncanny ability to quote the Simpsons appropriately at any given time and place. We then discovered our love for things such as irony, salt and vinegar chips and post-irony," she said.
"What I will always remember about John is this one time freshman year when I was in a really bad mood, he and I were eating in Valentine Atrium. I was feeling quite morose and John knew exactly what to do," said Lewis. "He did an impression of Bill Cosby when he was on the Simpsons: 'Y'see! the kids these days! They listen to the rap music, which gives them the brain damage! ... Jazz is a lot like Jell-O pudding!' I think I laughed so hard I cried and probably peed my pants."
Arvind Sabu '07E has also been friends with Kim through all four years of college. They met during orientation at an Asian Students' Association event. "His fraternal manner and undeniable pleasantness, which partially cloaked a jittery, pathological self-reflectiveness, formed the foundation of our friendship which would continue in some fashion, uninterrupted for all four years," said Sabu.
Sabu ws happy to discuss Kim's work at the College. "His greatest contributions to Amherst have no doubt been his epic, brilliant, and quite possibly pretentious thesis on the opacitization of language in classical Chinese and modern Anglophone poetics, his gradually progressing and sincere ping pong game, his devotions to the college radio station WAMH, and his expansive, fraternal social presence that has won him the friendship and admiration of many Amherst students and professors," said Sabu.
"My fondest memory of John does not concern a crazy night out or a day spent rock-climbing, but involves the conglomerated memory of our daily breakfasts at Valentine-an imprinted pastiche of his selves as clown-mystic and scholar as we ate scrambled eggs, drank coffee and mimed our farcical friends. When I looked over during such breakfasts I saw a friend as consistent as a brother, as smart as or smarter than most of my Amherst professors, and as absurdly transcendent of this world as the medieval clown-mystic Duprees Duprees," said Sabu.
Jessamyn Conell Price '06 has known Kim since freshman year and was one of his neighbors in North. "John is wisecracking, all-American, easygoing, obsessive and kind. He is a tight-rope walker on the fine line between pretension and charm; if I had my way, he'd tumble off the tightrope into my charmed arms. Dr. Kim will definitely be the cool cat of the 'comp. lit.' department someday, someday soon," she said.
Price described a memory concerning her friendship with Kim. "He had me edit his essays for one brief glorious month-there is no greater joy than the joy of manipulating the sweet melodies and pedantic phrases of John Kim's writer-ly voice," said Price.
Kim who claims to "play a mean game of ping pong," also collects fortune cookie misprints for grammatical errors. During this past winter, John also won the IM basketball championship with his team-the Service Road All Stars.
Planning for tomorrow
Kim plans to come back next year to visit faculty and friends. "Since Amherst is so close [to Harvard], it will be a shame if I don't come back over during a semester to visit," said Kim. In terms of his studies, Kim "wants to keep at this triangular relation among classical Chinese, modern Chinese and modern Anglophone writers." He added, "I also want to incorporate French literature and poetry, Korean poetry and literature and Japanese and German writings into my studies."
Kim remains grateful to faculty and friends that have made his college experience a successful and pleasant one. "The faculty, people and students have made this experience what is it and I am forever grateful to them." he said. "You begin to reflect too late in College what those people have meant to you. It is starting to hit me that you find yourself leaving with more regrets than things you are satisfied with," concluded Kim.