Secret
$2.50
Excerpt
I was thirteen and living in the southeastern countryside of Korea, on a hill along the coast where the people were first to receive sunlight and start a day’s work. Our town had no tourists, barely enough children to maintain a school. There were twenty kids in my middle school and seven in my grade. To kill time in the afternoons we went to the back mountains. The paths we trudged through were either dangerously thick with trees or so bare that there were no scraps to invent any play. But growing up watching our fathers tilling soil, their finger veins bruised from molding chicken wire to keep out wolves and wild boars, we understood that only at the end of extreme hard work could come reward. Watching them, we applied our imaginations, and the effort required to pretend to be animals, nymphs, or wise and somber kings from past dynasties, made our play feel even more worthwhile.
Cay Kim
Cay Kim is a writer from Seoul, Korea. Her short fiction has been published in Granta, and her first novel, The Future Perfect, is forthcoming in 2026.
Patrick Ryan on “Secret”
One of my favorite things that fiction can do is bring the reader on a journey through a character’s childhood experience and then, within just a few pages, step into adulthood, where a new sense of understanding is possible. Cay Kim’s “Secret” does this beautifully—and even more so because the understanding gained is as mysterious as the experience itself.
Jisu, the story’s narrator and main character, is seduced, as a girl, into the world of Korean singing competition shows. Her grandmother—much to the chagrin of Jisu’s parents—both encourages and helps Jisu in her pursuit, telling her she’ll prevail because she holds “the secret.” When expectation slams into reality, Jisu grapples to understand what’s happened and why. As the years pass, she returns to this notion of “the secret.” Has she ever understood what her grandmother meant? Maybe not, but what she gleans in adulthood is that not understanding something you desperately want to believe can be a kind of hope.
“Secret” is a quietly stunning story of the human need to look back with clarity and to learn who we are from where we’ve been and what we’ve experienced. We’re delighted to be publishing it and hope you admire it as much as we do.
Q&A by Patrick Ryan
- PR: Where did you get the idea for “Secret”?
- CK: While I was growing up, there really was an unending stream of singing competition shows in Korea. I became naturally interested, which took on an intellectual aspect when I became old enough to perceive that their enduring relevance must be due to something about them being resonant with the Korean culture—the brutality of competition, fixation on tangible achievement, etc., all of which has the complicated origin of the Korean War. Then one winter when I was visiting my parents in Seoul, one particular iteration of these singing competition shows had blown up and was impossible to avoid. I watched it with my parents, and the show ended up leaving a huge impression on me. I actually began writing this story right there that winter, in my bedroom while my parents were asleep. It took me years to finish, though.
- PR: You make a step forward in time in the last part of the story. Was this always the intention, or was it something you decided on as you neared the end? What did the time jump provide in the world of the story?
- CK: From its conception I knew the story’s core would lie in the violent rift between the narrator’s in-the-moment experience and her interpretation of it as an adult, but it took me a long time to understand the truth and intricacies of that rift. The first sweep of the story—the beginning until the jump in time, which is the far majority—was easy to write and has essentially remained the same since the first draft, but it took years, much contemplation, and around four meaningfully different drafts to arrive at the last part—which is short but, story-wise, does the majority of the heavy lifting.
- PR: When she first hears of and considers it, what does Jisu, your narrator, understand about the secret her grandmother speaks of? And what does she understand about the secret at the end?
- CK: In the moment, I think Jisu puts her grandmother’s words in the bucket of “Things I am Experiencing but Don’t Understand,” which is most of childhood. As an adult, after she’s gone through the devastating work of understanding many things in that bucket, I think part of her is grateful for the impossibility of understanding her grandmother’s words, because not understanding is a way of holding out hope. Which she so desperately needs at the juncture of her life in which we leave her.
- PR: What are you currently working on?
- CK: I’m working on my second novel. It’s rotten work. People aren’t kidding when they say the second novel is much harder than the first. When not flailing in despair, I’m preparing to release my debut novel out into the world, which is called The Future Perfect, out on June 23rd, 2026. At its core, it’s about the nuanced complexities and depths of one Korean mother-daughter relationship, which faces the natural challenges borne from existing within a brutal, achievement-oriented culture—akin to that of “Secret”—further challenged by the daughter’s exposure to and adoption of countering American values. The language is deeply poetic, and rather than following a traditional continuous narrative, the reader gets dropped into isolated moments in time that gradually connect and form a picture, like a constellation.
- PR: What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever received?
- CK: Very early in my writing education, I had the privilege of participating in a workshop led by Jamaica Kincaid. The very first thing she did, upon lowering her eyes onto the first page of a student’s story, was to underline and go through every single word—and I mean every word: adverb, pronoun, conjunction—and ask out loud: “Why is this word necessary?” This knocked the socks off me, as Americans say. There’s much to learn from applying this lesson literally, learning to be intentional with every word, but even more so, I think, from applying it liberally to every aspect of a piece of writing. To become rigorously intentional about every single move, every single stylistic choice.
