Poured Over: Gina Chung on Sea Change

By Jenna Seery / April 6, 2023 at 6:00 am

“Loneliness is such a universal experience for so many of us — and I do hope that the book is a balm for that and helps make readers feel less alone…”

Gina Chung’s debut novel Sea Change explores family ties, grief and growing up through a complicated protagonist that readers will love to root for — and yes, there really is an octopus. Chung joins us to talk about sad girl characters, allowing women to feel anger, how we never stop “coming of age” and more with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. 

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Featured Books (Episode)
Sea Change by Gina Chung
Chemistry by Weike Wang
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Matthews
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
Nuclear Family by Joseph Han
Please Report Your Bug Here by Josh Riedel

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily Austin
More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and wait until you meet Gina Chung. Y’all just wait until you meet this woman Sea Change is her debut novel. Okay, so there’s an octopus. There’s Dolores. But more importantly, there’s Ro and we’ve got to start with Ro. I love this girl. I love this girl. But I, before we started taping, I told you this, I was yelling at her because she did something dumb. She did a couple of dumb things. And I was yelling at a fictional character as if she could hear me through the pages. So, do me a favor, would you introduce Ro to listeners, please?

Gina Chung

Yes, I will be so happy to and first of all, thank you so much for having me on the pod. I’m such a huge fan. But yes, Ro is the protagonist of my novel Sea Change. And yeah, she is an interesting and at times frustrating character, which I also felt in parts while I was drafting the story. So obviously, as a writer I’m super interested in, and a reader as well, I’m very interested in messy characters, characters who made mistakes, can’t help themselves sometimes, and sometimes even knowingly, self-sabotage themselves. And Ro is definitely that kind of character. She’s someone who has really not dealt with a lot of the things from her past, from her childhood, from even things happening before her childhood. And so, I think it’s all kind of piled up at the point at which we meet her in the novel when she’s about 30 years old. Going through a lot of changes in life and dealing with them pretty badly and a lot of different— she has a lot of different coping mechanisms that are not really getting her to where she needs to go in order to actually deal with these issues.

Gina, tequila is not supposed to be a food group. Sorry to sound like your mom. But it’s like I love Ro, but there are times where you’re like, oh, sweetie, just have a cookie.

Yeah, the drinking is definitely a numbing coping mechanism on her part.

But one of the things I do appreciate I mean, here’s this Korean American kid who’s not perfect. She’s not running around. She works in an aquarium in the mall, and I love aquarium. I really, I love aquariums I grew up next to the New England Aquarium and like that was okay. The Penguins smelled really bad. But I loved the aquarium and standing in front of the giant shark tank. It was awesome. But she’s working in the mall. It just happens that it’s the aquarium and she’s quite attached to this octopus. So, Dolores, I mean, octopi feel like they’re a little bit in the zeitgeist right now.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love octopuses. I’ve always been like such a fan of them, because they’re just so weird. They’re like totally alien. And so smart and curious and playful, but so different from us, and like all the ways and so I actually started with the Dolores first. And so I started writing the lines that still open the book about how Dolores is turning blue. And initially I didn’t, I wasn’t quite sure who Dolores was. And I was like, I think she’s an octopus and then from there, Ro’s voice and then the aquarium just kind of came to life for me and I really liked the idea of having this extraordinary creature because Giant Pacific octopuses which Dolores is a Giant Pacific Octopus, they’re pretty cool and themselves, but I wanted to make her even more sort of spectacular and kind of speculative. And then I was like okay, well what is this? Who is this person that’s telling us about Dolores? Why is she so interested in her and that’s kind of how Ro sort of came into being for me as well.

So the color change on the octopus, that is not a thing.

So they do change colors. A lot of times it’s like an evolutionary response to hide from predators or get prey but they do also change colors as like a means of expressiveness. And so, I just wanted to make that especially I wanted to make Dolores especially fluent in that way of communicating.

I have to say I really loved that, and I was hoping it was real. I mean, I spent a lot of time hoping that Dolores was really as special as she felt and I’m okay. True story, I don’t really love animal narrator things, that’s not a device I love I’m Watership Down is not my idea of a good time. And anyone who works with me now says actually it’s kind of… Dolores though, I got really attached to an octopus and I blame you— I care so much about this octopus. The emotion that you’re writing with when you’re talking about her and her connection to Ro it does involve her dad and we’re staying spoiler free obviously in this conversation because this is gonna air really close to publication and there’s so much fun stuff and weird stuff and slightly enraging stuff because Ro, we’re gonna get back to Ro, we’re gonna get back to this girl. But Dolores does have a connection to Ro’s dad and his career. So let’s bring that in for a second. Will you tell us that story?

Dolores is a, as we’ve been talking about, especially special Giant Pacific Octopus and Ro’s father, who was a marine biologist has been studying Dolores and working with her and so the first time she ever meets Dolores is because her dad introduces the two of them at the aquarium. And so she has a special connection with Ro not just because of the fact that they interact every day at Ro’s job, but because of this connect point of connection with her father. And so, yeah, I think it’s through her father, that Ro kind of gets her own sort of sense of curiosity and real love for the natural world and its creatures.

Her parents, Ro’s parents, her mom and dad, mom’s never planned to come to the states, she ends up here because dad gets a scholarship to grad school. And she follows him over and they, they have a rough go of it. They are one of these couples that it sounds like Ro’s grandma had a little hand in it, and there’s a whole you know, we kind of have to be married because we’re that generation where you kind of have to be married and Ro does not grow up in the happiest household.

Yeah, no, she doesn’t really, I think her parents are, they both love her very deeply. And they do love each other, but they I really tried to show and in the course of the book, and trying to stay spoiler free, of course. But I really wanted to show how the two of them start out as these sort of bright eyed young people who, you know, have their differences. There are sort of red flags at the beginning, but do get married and stay together, as you said. But with Ro’s mother in particular, I also wanted to show how this was someone, this was a woman who had her own dreams and aspirations and sort of felt like she had to shelve them in order to live the life of a wife and mother, which is sort of what she had been taught to do as part of her generation. So yeah, Ro grows up with a lot of sort of tension in the household, a lot of things that go unspoken. And I think when the novel opens with her now, as a as a young adult in her 30s, you really start to see the impact that that has had on her and her and how she navigates relationships.

And she has this great guy, Tae, kind of a poster child for great guys. So thank you for doing that. But she sabotages what they have. She just she doesn’t know. And this is partially why I’m yelling at her. I’m like, No, really, he’s a good guy. Like, what are you doing? She just doesn’t know how to trust and be messy. And she thinks if she’s messy in front of this guy, I don’t mean messy in terms of like leaving an empty teabag somewhere. Her dad has this tendency to leave dead teabags around the house, which I think he’s kind of hysterical. But I can imagine living with, it’s kind of gross, but I’m not talking that kind of messy. But she’s afraid that if she actually shows herself to this dude, who’s just a very nice guy, he’s just so normal. It’s just so nice. She’s afraid that it’s all going to blow up. So instead of letting it, instead of showing her belly, she kind of blows it up.

Yeah, she does, in writing their relationship, I really did want the reader to sort of feel all the really good things about their relationship and the things that they do for each other where he’s sort of a problem solver. Tae, he’s learned at a young age, how to be a sort of caretaker. And so it makes sense that the two of them are attracted to each other. But, in order for a relationship dynamic between two people like that to work, one or the other person kind of has to get on the same wavelength as the other one. And there’s a line in the book where Ro was talking about the relationship as she’s introspecting. And she says, a relationship is kind of like a house and you have to try and be in the same room as much as possible. But she finds you know, through her own sort of self-sabotaging tendencies that she can’t help it, she can’t help herself and sort of like trying to drive him away, basically.

Still love her. Still totally love this girl. I just like I mean, I know I said at the top of the show, but really, I was yelling at her. There were so many points where I was yelling at a fictional character, and I should be slightly embarrassed, but I’m not because that’s the fun of it. I mean, full body read, right? Like you’re in the story. And you’ve written kind of a classic coming of age, right? She gets her act together. I’m not really giving anything away by saying coming of age. I mean, you’ll get to the end. But for you sitting down to write now, you said you started with the octopus. You started with Dolores. But I want to talk about this. It’s a really classically structured story, everything keeps moving there are a couple of flashbacks, couple, three, four, all of which are just thinking of the high school party, of course, Ro is, like, why am I here? I don’t really care about the cool kids. Her friend is like, I’m trying to be friends with the cool kids and Ro ends up talking to an eight year old who’s like, What’s that on your face? Mascara? Mascara? It’s eyeshadow. Yeah, it’s stupid. I’m gonna go wash it off. And then they go and look at the fish, which kind of to me sums up Ro. She’s just she’s very much her own person and I don’t know how much she actually wants to participate in all of the stuff that we’re supposed to want to participate in.

Yeah, I think she kind of has this sort of inherent distrust in this idea, this sort of prepackaged idea of adulthood that she’s been sold all her life. I mean, she’s seen with her parents that marriage and family isn’t really what it’s what it’s always cracked up to be. And I think that’s an interesting contrast between her and her best friend Yoon Hee who accompanies her to this high school party that we were talking about. And so she’s someone who I think she doesn’t really believe in the idea of kind of going along to get along. I think she, it’s not only also that she doesn’t believe in it, she like can’t do it. She’s just a very, I think, fortunately, but also unfortunately, at times honest character, and that she can’t ever fake how she’s feeling. And so I think that’s one of the reasons she’s really drawn to Dolores and to the other animals in the aquarium is because an animal is never gonna lie to you in order to sort of get ahead in life or pretend to be something that it isn’t unless it’s for a very particular biological purpose. And so I think that’s why she sometimes feels more comfortable in in an area like the aquarium we’re looking at fish with an eight year old, like, that’s just where she, she feels most at home too.

You start with Dolores; you end up with Ro. How does the rest of the cache show up for you as you’re writing, I mean, are you an outliner?

I am yeah. So I started off with this initial scene where, you know, Ro is giving us a sort of typical day at the aquarium that immediately turns not typical. And I think Yoonhee was actually the next character to sort of pop up because I wanted her to have this foil within the aquarium. And then having them become best friends, while also having them sort of be on not necessarily opposite sides of the conflict that happens there, but they’re sort of like at different cross purposes. Like I think having that tension was really interesting for me as a writer and Ro’s parents, I knew kind of right away that I would need to get into them and who they were in order to provide context for why she is the way she is.

You have a favorite moment?

With Ro’s parents?

With any of them.

I think with, I mean, definitely with Ro’s mother, I really enjoyed writing the scenes of just the two of them alone together, both in the childhood flashback scenes, and in the present day scenes. I won’t go too much into detail about those. But I think that they’re— also just I really enjoyed writing Ro’s mother, I wanted her to be a complex character, not at all the sort of stereotypical withdrawn or overbearing like Asian immigrant mother that we’re often taught to think is the norm. And she has her own kind of emotional problems. I wanted her to be a character that felt like, you know, she had life beyond what we see on the page. And so I loved writing scenes with Ro’s mom. And like writing the teenage sort of flashback scenes with Yoonhee was really fun to just because you he is such a like, why are you like this type of character for both throughout the narrative. And so whenever the two of them together are together, it was easy for me to write like, like funnier kind of warmer scenes as well.

The way Ro is who she is, I mean, Yoonhee is who she is she this, these are her factory presets. She’s having a good time, she wants to have fun, she wants to be part of the world. You know, I’m not saying she’s a follower. She’s not one of these people who just only wants to do what other people wants to do, but she wants to participate. She really, really wants to participate. She wants to have parties and be in parties and wear nice clothes and do fun things and not just stare at a wall all the time. And I mean, our girl is a little overwhelmed. And I don’t think she understands exactly how overwhelmed she is. I think she’s just kind of like, well, what’s the point? You know, there’s a little bit of sarcasm happening and a little bit of snarkiness and all of this, but she’s not as equipped, as maybe her peers are.

Yeah, I think Yoonhee, I think with the two of them it’s so interesting that they both have these incredibly different worldviews. They both meet each other and a lot of ways that, you know, you come to see throughout the course of the novel, and I also in the childhood flashback scenes, I also wanted to provide context for how Yoonhee is the way she is she’s had the benefit of being part of like a sort of larger kind of more stable family structure. She has two older sisters. And so she’s sort of grown up in this sort of joyfully, cacophonous very female centered family. And so for her, there are sort of she grows up with this understanding of like, okay, this is how I’m going to live my life. And I’m going to be totally cool with that. And I’m going to go after what it is that I want. Whereas I think Ro hasn’t always had that kind of reassurance and that sort of stability throughout her own childhood and coming of age.

So they’re knocking heads, Ro’s knocking heads with their parents. Of course, all of this is metaphorically knocking of heads. She’s got Dolores, who she’s very, very fond of. But for you as a writer, you’ve got this outline that you’re working from. When did you realize though that you had the thing that was going to become the novel Sea Change, because you and I both know an outline? Yeah, it’s a perfectly fine starting point. If that’s what you do, great, wonderful, but how much space do you give yourself for, you know, discovery and surprise, and wait a minute, I think we’re going to have to turn left instead of right.

To be honest, I saw, with the outline I basically made. I thought I for whatever reason I was wrong. I attached the number 15 throughout the course of writing the book, and I think it ended up having one more chapter than that. But I liked the idea of having it sort of be alternating past and present. And I was thinking specifically, there are a lot of books that do this immensely well, but one of my favorites is Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett, where that character like also just a lovable mess, and like you see sort of heading the way that she structures the book, how everything that that character is doing in the present days and formed by experiences that she’s gone through both as a child and as a daughter trying to live up to her father’s legacy, and with her brother as well in that book. And so I was thinking a lot about how I could do that for to tell this particular story. And I think what sort of gave me a sense of like, wanting to continue with the story and realizing like, oh, there’s something here was just the fact that rose own voice just felt so potent to me, I started out writing in in first person POV, switched it up a couple times, but always came back to first person just because I think one of the real luxuries of writing in that perspective is that you just really get to just be in the skin of that character and look out at the world through their eyes. And every time I did that, where I really just kind of let myself be and Ro’s head and write what she was seeing. It felt really surprising to me where, you know, she was suddenly expressing feelings and making all these metaphors that I didn’t expect her to be coming up with. And hopefully, I mean, I joke with my friend, that’s friends that this is like a sad girl book. But hopefully it’s also funny in parts. I think she’s also like a character with a sense of humor.

I don’t think it’s a total sad girl, but I mean, there are moments obviously, we’re going to talk about some of that stuff feeding the saddle, but it’s not for me as a reader, it’s not a total sad girl narrative. I think Ro is yeah, she’s definitely funny. She’s definitely funny, but I don’t feel like she’s going through the motions per se. Like she’s really, she’s all angles and elbows. And she’s just, I don’t know, sad girl stories, like, I feel like a lot of those narrators aren’t messy enough. I just kind of feel like the sad girl thing is like the thing and Ro is mad. She’s really angry and we don’t talk about women’s anger. Like, it’s still really unacceptable for women to be visually, actively angry. It makes people really uncomfortable and that’s one of the things I appreciate about her. And here I am saying, you know, I was yelling at a fictional character and also her mom, like her mom is openly and especially for someone of her mom’s generation to be like, No, I’m pissed, I am, and here are all the reasons why. And it’s really kind of refreshing.

Yeah, yeah, I love that. I agree. We don’t really get enough. Like, I think there’s like some more attention now being paid, especially in the arts and cultural space to like women’s anger. But it’s still such a taboo topic, especially for women of color. Asian American women, like we’re not supposed to be vocally angry, the most we can be is like, sad in a very aesthetically pleasing way. And Ro got to really break that and to have the luxury and the space to be messy and all those ways. And you’re totally right at the at the flip side of that sadness that she is experienced is a deep-seated anger at all of these betrayals from her past and all the losses she feels she’s had to go through and not been able to talk about. So yeah, thank you for noticing that.

Well, also, I mean, the fact that there’s this stereotype that Asian Americans can be a little robotic, and you know that we’re not good at processing, verbal emotion, or like, we’re just, you know, like, give us an abacus and we’re fine. Just can we just kick that stereotype to the curb? Like, can we just get there now like, and I think Ro is going to help get us there. I mean, that’s the thing that I like about it, she makes some very bad decisions. She says some mean stuff, just because she’s hurt and like she hasn’t figured out the language because also she has no one to model herself on. I mean, Yoonhee’s adorable, but I don’t think she has the language either because even when she’s getting mad at Ro, she can’t say, I want these things, beyond I want the popular, I want to be friends with the popular kids. Like that’s everything else. She’s saying, Ro is kind of like, well, why can’t you just be normal and Ro is like, well define normal. And, but that’s, you know, I keep coming back to this high school party, but it feels like that’s kind of the one place where Yoonhee’s able to say, this is the thing that I want. And you’re not helping me get there. And you’re my friend like, the other conflicts that they’re having. She’s kind of standing there almost like a mom with her arms crossed going well, why can’t you get this— why can’t you? She means well, but it’s slightly infuriating to have someone like your peer say, why can’t you get this? It’s like well, I don’t know. Maybe I don’t want that.

Yeah, I think they’re both so young. You know, like both in the present day of the novel and also in the in that high school scene and Yoonhee is someone I think, who one of her love languages, I guess, is really trying to fix people from afar. She’s thinking to herself, like, we’re gonna get popular this year in that in that high school scene. And she’s really trying to bring Ro along, you know, there’s this sense that she wants to compete with her, she wants to wherever she wants to go, she wants to bring her best friend with her, which is a very understandable impulse. But in those moments, I think she’s still too young to understand, like, oh, this is maybe not what she wants, this is what I want. And I don’t necessarily have to force this on her. I think it takes both of them a lot of time and some time apart and some maturity hopefully, by the end of the book to her to realize that about themselves and to give each other space to be who they really are, which are two very different people.

I’m not saying, I’m not giving anything away by saying Dolores gets sold. The aquarium, mall aquarium, shockingly, not doing well, needs to sell its octopus to raise some revenue and this is a really special octopus. I do kind of think actually Dolores is one of the levers that gets the women back to where we would hope they might be because their friendship is it’s having a little moment. It’s not broken beyond repair anything but they’re having a moment. That octopus I think is part of what, because they’re coming up from opposite sides completely, Yoonhee is like, we have to do this because otherwise you’re not going to have a job, we’re just all going to be gone like we have to do this. And Dolores has this really emotional response to it. A 20-foot Giant Pacific octopus.

Yeah, I think that’s another instance of I think Yoonhee trying to have like sort of the bigger picture and say, like, look, we need to you need to get on board with this. You’re the person who works the most with her, like, can you help me with this and Ro can’t help but see it as a personal attack and to and to, you know, she doesn’t want to get with the program because this is a creature that means so much to her. And I think in a lot of ways also she sees parts of herself in Dolores and that I mean, she’s an octopus, she doesn’t process emotions in the same way that humans do. And so I think she sees herself in in in Dolores, but also kind of wants to be more like her and without realizing that, you know, she’s not an octopus, she’s a human being and she has to branch out and be around other human beings.

Grief can be tricky to write about in a way that isn’t cliched. That isn’t overwhelming, that isn’t scold-y, I feel like sometimes you read about grief, and someone’s like, well, this is how it should be like, well, actually, grief isn’t meant to be managed, right? Like you don’t make lists to get well, you can try but it doesn’t work, just like get to the other side of grief. And it’s not a one-dimensional thing. I think sometimes in fiction and film and certainly music. It shows up as this thing. And it’s just it’s sorry, it’s more like an octopus squishing itself into spaces where you’re like, how did it get in there? Because you have a moment where Dolores like, is hiding somewhere and apparently an octopus can squish itself into the tiniest space as long as its beak can fit. Hmm, yeah. Okay, so that’s true. Yes. Yeah, that’s just a Gina and making a cool thing. Okay. Your octopus is a really good metaphor for grief.

Yeah, oh, my gosh, I didn’t even think of that. But that’s such a beautiful that is that’s absolutely true. I think grief is this very malleable and changeable thing. And in writing Ro’s experiences of grief, I really wanted to show how surprising grief can be. I mean, it’s just a thing, as you said, that can’t really be fixed or managed. It’s just something you learn to carry with you as time goes on. I wanted to show in terms of her experiences of it, how it surprises her, like she’ll turn a corner and it’s there in some form she didn’t think it would be in and it’s just something that she’s going to have to understand and be gentle with herself about. I think at the stage of the novel where we first meet her she really has not known how to deal with this and part of her is like why can’t I just get over this? Why can’t I just get over the things that I’ve gone through?

You know, and I think this definitely comes back to mama because mama was prickly, but she is again, not that stereotypical and thank you so much for doing this, like she’s not yelling at her kid because her kid got sick, right? Like, okay, some moms can be like that, whatever. But like somehow, we got this moment in literature and to certain extent film where it’s like the yelling immigrant Mom, where it’s like, well, I love you and I’m showing you how I love you by yelling, but Ro’s mom is really trying, just no one ever gave her a chance to learn this language. So how is she going to teach your kid you know, I can imagine that grandma is not teaching either. Grandma doesn’t have the language either, grandma’s just excited that she got these two together and they got married and they had a kid. How do we start changing the conversation? How do we get Ro into the world so she can have that conversation? I mean, is this where we talk about Ro’s cousin? Because Ro’s cousin is kinda cool, but she’s wrestling with some stuff that feels really new to this family.

Yeah, yeah, I’d love to talk about Ro’s cousin. So Rachel, yeah, she’s slightly older than Ro, at a different stage in life. And I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that she’s going through a pretty messy divorce situation. She’s a single mom with a kid, I wanted to include Rachel and Ro’s dynamic as well, because I think it gives Ro a chance to access a different part of herself whenever she’s with Rachel, despite the fact that Rachel is older than her, I think Ro is immensely protective of Rachel because of what she’s going through and the sort of version of fracture relationship that Rachel is experiencing. Ro saw a bit of that in her own home growing up and so I think with the two of them, I really liked getting them together in a scene as well, just because Rachel would often sort of manifest on the page as being like, No, I’m the one taking care of you and Ro would be like, actually, you are not in a position to be doing that, you need to take care of yourself and of your child. In the book, I really wanted to sort of have this kind of female matrilineage, I guess, of sorts of like women in this family, really learning what it means to try and take care of themselves, while also still, you know, having responsibilities to care for their dependents and their children. And I think it’s so true that in a lot of our families, in generations past, there wasn’t this opportunity and this vocabulary to talk about loss and difficult feelings. It was just about getting to the next stage of life, or just even just about plain survival. And so yeah, I think it’s something that Ro really has to teach herself and that Rachel has to teach yourself too.

Honestly, it’s not something that belongs solely to Asian Americans, just to be clear, like, there are plenty of folks in generations prior to this, but it seems to have stuck on to us, like, the post it note. And it’s like, this post it note hasn’t fallen off yet. This is really, this isn’t just us, like I can think of generations of like, I grew up in New England, I and again, plenty of people who didn’t have language for stuff either. And yet, somehow, it’s stuck on us. And you know, we’re not playing pin the tail on the donkey. We’re just all trying to figure out how to get to the next thing.

Yeah, I think it has to do with that stereotype you were talking about where we’re seen as these like robotic, you know, model minorities don’t know how to talk about feelings. And it’s really everyone who doesn’t know what to talk about.

There are times where I’m just, I have nieces and nephews. And sometimes they say the most surprising things. And I’m like, okay, as a species, we are in much better shape than I thought we were. Thank you, 15-year-old, keep going. Keep going, keep going. It’s okay, then 20-year-old sometimes you will get there. I want to talk about you as a reader and as a writer and some of the big voices that influenced you over time and helped get us to Sea Change.

Yeah. Oh my gosh, there’s so many. But definitely one of the first that comes to mind for me is Weike Wang’s incredible novel Chemistry, I’m such a fan of her work. But I read that book, I think back when it first came out, maybe like 2018 or so in it, it really changed my life as a writer and as a reader, where I’d always sort of been writing on and off, but never really took it seriously. And that book was the first I’d ever read of its kind that really showed, like that particular kind of immigrant family dynamic. And that’s kind of what spurred my decision to apply to MFA programs and really try to take the whole writing thing seriously. And so, oh my gosh, Chemistry is such a big influence for me, Jean Kyoung Frazier’s book, Pizza Girl is so good and it’s also I think about not only a young woman trying to deal with the legacy of a pretty complicated father and her relationship with him, but also like, kind of going through the mundane duties and indignities of like a job while also dealing with some pretty extraordinary circumstances of her own. So yeah, loved Pizza Girl as well. And Rachel Khong’s Goodbye, Vitamin too was a really big influence for me just in terms of how that character has such a very unique way of looking at the world and a lot of the sort of emotional exploration that happens in the book. I mean, there’s some really amazing poignant scenes that happened within the family, but a lot of it actually happens when the character is just like looking at things and making observations about the world to herself. So yeah, those are some of the books that I was thinking about that I really kind of held for myself as emotional touchstones while writing the book and then as I mentioned, Kristen Arnett’s Mostly Dead Things, which I think is just so brilliant and tender and funny while also being incredibly moving.

So you’re reading for voice first, language, second, it sounds like, and then story and character, story and character are fine. And yes, you can argue that character is part of voice, but I think voice is significantly bigger than character and I think voice can go off the rails really quickly. I need voice, like I need voice without voice I’m kind of like, okay. But am I right about that? Are you reading for voice first?

I think so. Yeah. I never really thought about that until you just pointed it out. But yeah, I think with all these characters, like you can point out some thematic similarities, of course, but it’s mostly just that I start reading and then it grabs me off the page. I’m like, oh, whatever this person is going through, whether it’s like they’re at a pizza job that they really are not passionate about, or they’re a burned out chemist like I want, I need to know what happens next. Because their way of seeing the world is so specific and interesting. And so yeah, I think language is also pretty important to me, but it’s most it’s usually like a particular perspective, which I think is voice that that kind of carries me through as a reader.

Yeah, I can forgive if the voice is there, I can forgive language in some cases, but if I don’t have a voice, and I’m forced to sort of rely on story that’s quite often absolutely not enough for me. I just, like I need that thing. You know it when you see it, it’s a cliche for a reason. It’s a terrible phrase, but voice really is that thing where you just you feel it and you say, okay, I will follow you down a rabbit hole and I will go, I don’t have to like character. I mean, I’ve admitted multiple times in this episode. Like, I’m yelling at Ro, I do like her, but I’m still yelling at this kid. I don’t care if I like a character, that likability and again, likability, I feel like is a word that gets thrown around more at women authors and women characters than it does with men. And I can come up with a list of male characters and male authors where I’m like, no one’s ever mentioned the word likability ever, ever in X number of years, books, whatever. And likeability is just not a thing that gets raised. So voice

I totally agree with you. I think likability is totally an overrated thing that often gets like, that doesn’t even occur to me when I’m reading a book, really, it’s a but it is a thing that gets lobbed a lot at women writers in particular, especially if they’re writing female characters, where it’s like, oh, I didn’t like her. It’s like, okay, well, what did you think of the story and what she’s going through? And I think it’s, you know, it all it, of course, goes back to gendered expectations of how women are supposed to move through the world, and like, how dare this fictional character act as if she doesn’t care what we the reader think of her. Whereas I am so drawn to that when a character is so completely themselves, no matter the cost to themselves, or to the people around them. And I think with voice for me, it’s just occurred to me while you were talking about this, I think it has to do with a sense of trust, where, which I think is different from the reliability of a narrator, like, a narrator can totally be unreliable, and the writer can get away with it. But I think for me, it’s a voice that I have to want to trust where I will follow you, you know, because what you’re saying to me is so interesting that I will drop whatever it is I’m doing to follow you there.

Without a doubt, without doubt. Do you miss Ro now that you’re done with this? Because I know you’re working on the next thing, and I know she’s not in the next thing. But do you miss her?

I do. Yeah, it’s funny. So I’m working on two different projects. I’m working on revisions to my short story collection, which is coming out next year. And I’m also trying to work in bits and pieces on my next novel, which is going to be pretty different, I think, totally from Sea Change and it’s two very different characters. It’s actually my first time juggling two protagonists for this next novel, I think they have a very different sort of perspective and set of experiences from this character. I do miss her because I was so close to her for all those months than you know, the year that I was working on this book. And she is a character that, I think she’s the type of character that I am sort of drawn to, but I don’t know that I’m going to write a similar one for a while just because I feel like I’ve done so much exploration with her. But yeah, I think in terms of like, thinking about where she might be sort of in the fictional universe of the book, I think that she is doing better, I would hope. And, yeah, I think it was really fun to sort of write with her and stay with her during the times when I was working on it.

I mean, I think she’s still messy. But I do think ultimately, she is better now than where she was when we first met her. I think she is in a really, really rough spot. She gets it. We just got a really excellent novel during the meantime, and it does take her a minute, but I feel like Ro gets it. And I feel like Ro is just one of these voices that I want as many people as possible to me, because if she’s just she’s her own. I mean, there are folks who are just like, well, it’s a coming of age. I’m like, yeah, sometimes coming of age stories are really, really great. And yes, sometimes you’re like, oh, cool, we’ve done this. This is not that book. This is not that book.

Yeah, and I Think with the coming-of-age themes. I mean, I had someone say to me where they were kind of like, oh, well, it’s sort of a like a later in life coming of age, right? Just because the character is like in her 30s. She’s not a teenager. And I was like, that’s so interesting, because to me, I think the process of coming of age never really ends. I mean, I think, you know, for Ro, it’s a particular set of circumstances that she finds herself in, but coming of age, for me just really means getting to know who you are, and coming to terms with that and accepting it and loving it as best as you can and that’s a process that a lot of people are still undergoing, no matter what age they are.

Yeah, and I feel very strongly that coming of age, you can be 70 and we should be applying that particular phrase— better to learn at 70 but not at all. Plenty of people don’t learn anything at all. Let’s not be those people. Let’s read all of the books and continue to evolve and change and learn stuff and you know, have groovy lives because we had an epiphany on the page. I know you can’t talk about the next book. But you are in a place where you’ve had a little free time because your fellowship finished you know, you’re in revision. Read anything good lately?

Oh my gosh, yes. So many books I have been obsessed with. Sarah Thankam Matthews’ All This Could Be Differentever since I read it when it came out last summer. Also, speaking of coming of age, just a beautiful, beautiful coming of age story that takes a lot of turns you don’t necessarily expect from the initial setup. I’m also reading Jonathan Escoffery’s fantastic collection If I Survive You, which I love. I think it’s been billed as a story collection, but I feel it’s sort of more of a novel in stories which there are some differences there, I think. But yeah, I’m really loving it so far. And all the different sort of perspectives that we get from the family, even though it sort of focuses mostly on the younger son of the family. I’m also reading Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family, which is a just a hilarious and beautiful novel of family and, you know, the sort of like, marketing of like Korean diaspora food in the food world and the particular dynamics of Korean Americans in Hawaii, which is not something I know too much about personally. So it’s been really interesting and fun reading that. I’m also reading, Please Report Your Bug Here by my friend, Josh Riedel, which I’m really enjoying as well as sort of speculative, like tech novel.

I have that. I haven’t gotten to it yet, all apologies. If I could read all of the things I want to read, as I’m prepping for the show, my life would be a little outrageously, overwhelmingly great. Not that it isn’t now. But yeah, sometimes I don’t always have time to read all of the things I want to read. Because we’re doing this. Is there anything we missed that you really wanted to talk about with Sea Change, because I know I’ve been such a pain about no spoilers, no spoilers, and there are some, I mean, there are some storylines, we have left out a little bit because they’re so great when you encounter them in the book,

In terms of the process of writing the book, I did want to note that I wrote it during the pre-vaccine era, the pandemic in 2020. And in fall of 2020, was I was when I was sort of really in the thick of drafting it. And I finished the first rough draft of the book, in those three months of the fall from September through December. And I don’t think I would have been able to do that had it been a sort of more quote, unquote, normal time. But I think it was such a concentrated period of my life of grief and loss, and just sort of like existential spinning out and a lot of ways and I think a lot of those themes do get reflected in the book. But I was also thinking at the time of like, you know, just how loneliness is such a universal experience for so many of us. And I do hope that the book is sort of a balm for that and helps make readers feel less alone because that’s one of the main reasons I write and why I read is to see connection and to see, you know, versions of my own emotional experiences reflected on the page. So I hope that that’s one of the things that readers can get from the book.

Yeah, you did it. You did it and also seems like a really good place to end this episode. So Gina Chung, thank you so much. Sea Change is out now. It’s our April Discover Pick, and it’s a trade paperback original. It’s in paperback right now, so you could actually buy a second copy and give it to a friend. It’s really good to see you.

Thank you so much. Miwa. This was so great.