Angie Myung
Angie Myung is the co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Poketo. Angie started Poketo with her husband Ted Vadakan in 2003, with the mission of bringing art and design to the everyday. Her team designs everything from stationery, housewares and accessories. Poketo has 2 retail locations in Los Angeles and works with retail partners around the globe.
If you could recommend 3 books to anyone, what would they be?
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
Being a person of color, I'm intimately aware of systemic racism in our country, especially against brown and black people. This book's premise is that racism in the US is like the caste system in India — which places people into different categories that are indifferent to individual achievements. It’s something that you cannot escape, and there’s a cruelty in requiring that there is always the bottom rung of the society.
Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance
It’s an autobiography by a former Marine and Yale Law School graduate from a Rust Belt town in Ohio. It tells an honest portrayal of the poor and downtrodden white working-class people in his town including his family, and especially his mother. We've all seen and heard the affliction affecting the white working-class through alcoholism, drug addiction, hopelessness from lack of opportunities, the anger felt towards the coastal elites, and the "liberal media" which led to the election of the former president, Trump. As a Californian, living on the west coast all my life, it's not often that I get to hear viewpoints and intimate personal histories of someone from the white working-class Rust Belt area and made me see more clearly the problems facing America.
Other books that I read that are closely related are Educated by Tara Westover, a fascinating autobiography, and Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, a fiction about a girl living in the poor South.
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo
This book was apparently written by the author over a few days and became an instant bestseller in Korea, Japan, and China. I read this in one sitting since it's fast and a short read of just over 160 pages. I can see how she could have written this over a mere few days because this is a very familiar story that most women in Korea endure. Even though Korea is one of the most economically advanced countries, the country is still a very male-dominated conservative society, rooted in Confucianism.
The protagonist grew up in a strict patriarchal family, worked in a white-collar desk job facing overt and underlying harassment from male colleagues, and had to quit her job to take care of her child full-time. The novel and the film adaptation came out around the same time when the #metoo movement took hold of Korea. Many women came forth accusing key figures in politics, art, and entertainment spheres, making the film a target of the protest with hateful comments directed against the author and the actress portraying the protagonist.
What are you reading now?
I just finished Breast and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, another book that I would highly recommend, and Haruki Murakami's Men without Women, a collection of short stories. I am going to start reading Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell.
I download most books that I read through an online app, Libby, free through the Los Angeles Public Library, so I'm waiting for several books to become available. One is Kim Jong-Il Production by Paul Fischer, a true story of the former dictator's kidnapping of the most famous director and his wife, the most famous actress in 1978. The other is Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. And when my husband Ted is done with A Promised Land by Barack Obama, I will read that too.
Just to note, my favorite book of all time is Pachinko by Minjin Lee. If you haven't read it, put that on your list!
Whose reading list are you most curious about?
"The Obamas’!”
— Angie Myung
