A Review of Amy Lee Scott’s When The World Explodes: Essays (Mad Creek Books, 2025)

[uttararangarajan]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Mad Creek Books is an imprint of Ohio State University Press, and it has been killing it with the creative nonfictional titles I’ve read thus far. My reviews from this imprint begin with Amy Lee Scott’s When The World Explodes: Essays (Mad Creek Books, 2025). Again, I’ve mentioned in other reviews that I sometimes find the essay collection to be a strangely defined form. Certainly, it seems to be the most flexible of creative nonfictional genres, as the essay collection is not necessarily united by a specific topic, and individual pieces typically do not proceed in linear fashion. The plasticity of the essay collection can be seen in Scott’s wide-ranging and poignant work. The official marketing description helps us understand this form’s pliability: “By the time she was seven, Amy Lee Scott had seen her world end twice: first as an infant, when adoption brought her from Korea to Ohio, and again when her adoptive mother died of cancer. Orphaned twice over, Scott confronts her personal chaos by investigating a litany of historic catastrophes and the disruptions that followed. Witnessing a Cabbage Patch Kid ‘born’ at BabyLand General Hospital inspires a meditation on the history of Korean adoption and her own origins. Recalling her miscarriage as the streets of her Detroit neighborhood flooded, she asks what it means to mourn what would have been. And she remembers her mother’s illness and death amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In this haunting debut, Scott gets to the heart of what it means to wrestle with the grief, rage, and anxiety seething in this tender world. Ferocious and true, When the World Explodes probes the space between personal and global calamities—from Krakatoa to the emotional perils of motherhood—to unearth the sharp ridge of hope that hides beneath the rubble.”

What is most impressive about this collection is Scott’s fearless use of juxtaposition. Perhaps, the clearest indication of Scott’s ability to place things side by side in productive fashion is the aforementioned section concerning the BabyLand General Hospital. When I read essay, I had to stop to look up this BabyLand General Hospital, because when I was perusing what Scott had written, the whole set up sounded really strange. After all, adults had gone to see a cabbage patch kid being born: I kept wondering if this sequence was satire. Apparently, not only does this place exist, but it seems to function as a kind of make-believe world fashioned for these cabbage patch kids. What Scott does with this place is to link it to intercountry Korean adoption. The link is of course something to be considered very loosely but Scott’s point is that you can’t fully disarticulate the rise in Cabbage Patch popularity for the rising transnational adoption rates occurring around the same time. The simultaneity that Scott reads into this essay is at play in other sections as well. For instance, Scott links the apocalyptic nature of the Los Angeles riots to the death of her mother when she is just 8. The point is not to trivialize the riots, but really to relate, however metaphorically, her sense of disaster in her own life to the one unfolding socially. “Theories of Cosmogony” is probably my favorite essay, as it explores various celestial phenomena that have occurred over centuries, while simultaneously considering her relationship with Korea. Scott’s enterprising ability to put so many historical events and occurrences into conversation with what she has experienced personally allows this work to unfold with scalar incandescence and certainly combines scholarly acumen with the accessibility of the autobiographical voice. Another creative nonfictional standout, and I can’t wait for the Asian Americanist cultural critic who decides to take on the essay as a cultural and racial form. We are waiting =).

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