An Interview with Mary H.K. Choi, Author of Emergency Contact

Emergency Contact is such a strong depiction of different kinds of relationships. I absolutely adore Penny and Sam, so, putting them aside, what relationship in the book was your favorite to explore? Which one was the hardest? 
Obviously I loved writing about Sam and Penny’s burgeoning cahoots since it was sweet and thrilling and made me swoon at my desk, but my favorite and in some ways the hardest relationship to explore was Penny and her mom, Celeste. Everyone’s deal with their mom is fraught. It’s to where you almost need a trigger warning for when yours calls you on the phone (as long as your moms are still with us; I would lose my mind if I lost mine). Your mom is the first person you fall in love with, so it’s loaded forever and carries all this baggage. There’s almost always a communication barrier in place. In my case it’s a language and cultural barrier, but other times it’s because your mother’s love is conditional or because you’re fundamentally different. It’s a theme I’ll definitely revisit. In fact, anyone who’s familiar with my writing knows how frequently I write about my mom. I’ve often said I love mine a “not normal amount.”
Penny and Sam barely know each other when they become each other’s emergency contacts, but it’s clearly a great fit from the start. What do you think makes someone an ideal emergency contact, and what made them such strong fits for each other at that point? 
It helps that they’re thrust into each other’s lives with little time to lollygag. But it’s also that their relationship is hastened by how compatible they are once the dynamic is stripped of the expectations and pressure of hanging out IRL. They’re both consumed with social anxiety so the fact that they don’t have to worry about what they look like or how they’re being perceived is a salve. In order to be a good emergency contact you need a lot of friend-patience and empathy. Often this comes from personal experience with anxiety, trauma, and depression. If you can relate to what another person is going through while giving their experience room to be its own discrete thing, you’re probably a crackerjack emergency contact.
Clicking with and trusting people is something that’s very hard for Penny, yet it’s specifically distance that helps her relationship with Sam grow so strong. What role do you see social media and modern technology taking in the way we forge relationships now?  
It’s been interesting to me to get so many questions about how these two can become so close over text, as if to imply that somehow iMessage is inferior to phone calls or in-person meetings by dint of the conduit. It all has to do with the intent of the message and the circumstance. You’re absolutely right that Penny has serious trust and abandonment issues and they’re particular to her upbringing and also trauma in her past. The fact that Sam is a friend first where there aren’t complicated rules of engagement inherent in flirting or, and pardon the hoary word, but “courting”—where you fret about who texted who last and how long ago—fosters intimacy and trust in a safe space. It’s about her agency and that small but crucial barrier of Sam being available on her own terms—in her pocket but not in her face—that helps her let him in. For people who deal with anxiety or depression or can’t be in large social groups cognitively, emotionally, or even physically, phones help bridge the gap. On one hand people are always harping about catfishing, but there is a positive flip side to that of getting to know someone unencumbered by sometimes insurmountable challenges of what I call “meatspace.” I kind of skewer social media, though. Depending on my mood I sometimes think it’s an instrument of self-harm.
I love that Penny’s an aspiring author, and that she discusses having grown up without seeing major authors and heroes who look like her. Obviously now she’d have Emergency Contact; what other recent and upcoming books would she be psyched to add to her shelf? What books and authors have been instrumental to you on yours? 
Oh, my goodness, I love this question. So I recently went to Teen BookCon and was just so geeked by the melanin quotient of the authors and readers. It was invigorating. Growing up I only had Claudia Kishi from The Babysitter’s Club or maybe Alison Monceau from Judy Blume’s Just As Long As We’re Together, who was adopted. Amy Tan is the G.O.A.T. but if I were filling Penny’s library I would include Dhonielle Clayton, Gloria Chao, Sabaa Tahir, Angie Thomas, Tomi Adeyemi, Marjorie Liu, Sandhya Menon, Marjane Satrapi, Junot Diaz, Celeste Ng, Octavia Butler. The thing is, Penny’s about a half-semester away from J.A., her writing professor, cracking her world wide open.
I also really loved getting an eye on Penny’s work; there were definitely assignments she discussed that I was dying to see in their entirety! Any chance of seeing longer versions of those, or at least hearing more about them and their inspirations? 
I’ve often thought about how funny it would be to have a fishbowl play about the billionaire climate-change deniers who made their great escape from a dying planet earth only to be trapped aboard a spacecraft. I’ve also always wanted to write about a college entrance process so cutthroat you have to get away with literal murder in order to get in. It’s all inspired by the news. I’m constantly gobsmacked by the state of reality. If I see something, I add it to the list. I have this enormous note in my phone of ideas I find amusing or captivating for one reason or another. Who knows if any of it will see the light of day, but I would be shattered if I lost it or it got deleted. The other thing is the rapid obsolescence of speculative fiction. It’s like with every passing day what you thought was a dystopian future is very much the present, so half of my list is moot or pedestrian.
Sexual assault is a major facet of Penny’s life experience, although it’s something both Penny and the reader are slow to realize. What was important to you to convey in Penny’s handling of her trauma? 
The thing about sexual assault and the narrative that gets played out so often is that it’s a deadlock. It’s what one person said vs. what another person said. It’s just that my personal experience as a survivor is incredibly muddied. I was very young and had such a crush on the person. I willingly obliged so many preambles to The Moment. I felt incredibly complicit. My self-gaslighting was so sustained and calcified that I wasn’t entirely sure if it “counted.” At the time it wasn’t something I would ever have felt secure declaring as assault if the burden of proof lay with me recounting everything about my intentions vs. the other person’s. We talk about consent and it’s important to define, but it’s never this hard and fast yes/no pact that’s then committed to the stenographer. This has been examined a great deal with the #MeToo movement, but the liminal spaces of how wobbly consent can feel and the systemic bullying and even how men and women are hardwired to be at cross purposes with each other when it comes to sex has been incredibly eye-opening, but these aren’t things Penny would necessarily metabolize in the same way. That’s what I wanted to explore. Penny is so insular and doesn’t have a support system to help her navigate her feelings so she puts them all in a folder and shoves them in a deep recess of her brain. I wanted to imply that this happens. And that if this is what you’re doing that you’re not alone. I wanted to talk about sexual assault without assigning a value judgment to the way someone handles it.
There’s definitely been a rise in college-set YA, but it’s always been somewhat controversial. What made you feel like YA was the place for Penny and especially older Sam, and what was getting it published like?
The lovely thing about being completely green is that I didn’t know it was A THING to set a book in college. Every time I visit a college campus I’m floored by how young a college person is as opposed to how worldly and evolved I felt when I was a freshman. I loved exploring the age and definitely consulted Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl to see how to do it without cynicism. Simon & Schuster didn’t bat an eye, honestly. I remember one publisher asked me to slide everyone’s ages down a tad but I politely objected and ended up going with S&S because I loved my editor Zareen Jaffery so much when I talked to her.
Between journalism and comic books and podcasting and more, you have experience in such a great variety of media. How do you feel each one, including your first novel, works to get your voice and message across in a different way? 
I will always be a little scattershot and peripatetic when it comes to the different little units of story I feel like making. I always have a lot of browser tabs open in my brain, so each sates a different type of hankering. Podcasts are immediate. We don’t tape live but I rarely edit. Comic books are all math! It’s like trying to write a pop song in terms of the rhythm particular to it. This novel was definitely the most polished of my work, and the freedom of being able to make things up is liberating. It’s a very different pacing for me. My publisher’s going to eye-roll when I say this, but this book isn’t for everyone. It’s a slow burn and it’s kind of like Seinfeld in that it’s a thing about nothing. There are very few car chases (none!). But it’s been so fun to work with this kind of restraint and have the real estate to build characters even if what they’re physically doing is tapping into a tiny machine with their thumbs in the dark. It’s all about interiorities and it’s rare that you can just sit inside a character’s head. Journalists try to do it when they’re writing magazine profiles but it’s not at all the same thing.
What’s up next for you, and where else can we find you while we wait?
I have more dates on my book tour in April. I’ll be at Texas Library Association, North Texas Teen Book Festival, LA Times Festival of Books, and I have an LA event with streetwear impresario and famous Korean Bobby Hundreds. I’ve also just finished a second novel and am working on a third. I really hope I get away with writing books forever.
Emergency Contact is available now.