Poured Over: Bora Chung on Your Utopia

Jenna Seery

“The peril actually comes from us — our prejudice, our biases, and our conceived threats, not from artificial intelligence, so we need to reconsider what is human and how we’re treating other human beings…”

Unsettling and chilling, Bora Chung’s Your Utopia is a story collection featuring robot vehicles, sentient elevators and futures both hopeful and terrifying. Chung joins us to talk about the dangers of human influenced A.I., caring for our future robot overlords, adding humor to horror and more with guest host, Jenna Seery.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Jenna Seery and mixed by Harry Liang.                 

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

Featured Books (Episode):
Your Utopia by Bora Chung
Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung
R.U.R. by Karel Čapek

Full Episode Transcript

Jenna Seery

I’m Jenna Seery, a bookseller and the associate producer of Poured Over and today I am so excited to be joined by Bora Chung, who is an author, professor, scholar and the creator of stories that will keep you up at night and keep you thinking long after you have finished. So Cursed Bunny was a collection of stories that is currently a finalist for the National Book Award for literature in translation and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. It is spooky and scary and wonderful and all the best ways. But today, I am so excited to be talking about Your Utopia, which is sort of different sort of similar, the themes are very different, but I think they’re going to keep you thinking just the same. And so I am so glad that you’re here with us.

Bora Chung

Thank you for having me.

So this story collection, managed to make me feel a lot of things, I was just saying that it made me feel a compassion and love for an AI elevator that I could not have ever imagined those words coming out of my mouth. But there were also times where I was like legitimately frightened, and also times that I laughed out loud. And that’s what I want in a story collection is something that’s going to make me feel so many different things. But there’s also a real sense of urgency in so many of these stories and a sense of hope, in a weird way that I think is going to provide readers with an experience that they’re not quite used to. So we’ve got AI, we’ve got climate danger, we’ve got disease, we’ve got aliens, we’ve got so many things that seem prescient in a lot of ways for where we are right now. But I’d love to hear you describe this collection for our listeners.

So Your Utopia is a collection of eight short stories. At least one of it is a little bit longer than your average short story. It was my attempt to examine what it means to be human, and what it means to find humanity or humanness, how we define humanness in this era of post humanity. And when we are reaching, maybe the end or the transcendence of the human era. So that will be the summary of all eight stories. But we have zombies and robots. So none of them are really human. That’s the thing.

It’s all about humanity. But so often, the characters or the themes that you feature are not quite human themselves. But I think it sort of reflects back a lot of what we’re staring down right now in society from AI and deep fakes, and, you know, the replacing of so many things with technology, and yet we’re in this very interesting space with nature as well, and where they sort of bump up against each other with humans right in the middle. I think that the thing that I wonder is, first of all, is how this collections sort of came together and started Did you have a story that you wrote first that sort of kicked things off? Or did you know you wanted to sort of tackle this subject and started there.

Cursed Bunny, I wrote the stories in Your Utopia in different times of my life, so I didn’t have a coherent collection in mind. But a lot of them came from the science fiction class I used to teach. I no longer teach. I quit teaching in 2021, when my husband was diagnosed with cancer again, that was a very personal decision. And it was before the Booker nomination, before the NBA nomination, it was just because of his disease, and he is now in remission. Before that, when I was actually teaching, I used to teach science fiction every spring for about seven years. And one of the big topics in my class was what it is to be human. And that goes back to the 1920s and Karel Čapek’s classic of all classics R.U.R. or Rossum’s Universal Robots. And in the end, I don’t want to spoil but the book is 103 years old. So I think that can spoil. So in the end, spoiler alert, two robots fall in love and the last human on Earth, kind of blessed them as the new humans. So there is this age long century long idea of robots becoming human, robots replacing humans, robots kind of organically acquiring the ability to love and care for each other. And then then replacing us with somehow make the world a better place than then a worse place. So Čapek must have really hated us as a species. Anyways, so I talked about that with my students every single spring for seven years. And my students gave me a lot to think about and a lot of good ideas. So if there is one overarching coherent under stream that is my students and the science fiction class.

I did have these moments as I was reading that. I felt like what if there would be someone who is better at being human than we are? And I think that so often, we get sort of caught up in this idea of like, oh, replacement and what comes next? But I think it’s like, well, what if? What if they just do it better?

What if they take care of us and love us? And you know, miss us when we’re gone?

There is definitely moments where you’re like, I know, I shouldn’t be assigning feelings to these beings that have varying degrees of sentience, but I’m the kind of person where even if I feel like my microwave looks sad, I am upset. And so I’m like, Well, I think they’re already starting to work on me in that way.

Then I clean the microwave. That’s what I would do.

I know like, I love you. So when you take over, don’t come for me, because I care.

I have a fellow science fiction writer who is actually currently teaching fiction, and he always says always charge your phone to the fullest because when the A.I.s come to rule us, you can actually like, your phone is going to vouch for you. This human never made me hungry.

See that’s a really smart way of looking at, it’s just these little things you can add into your life that maybe will come in handy later on. I hope. I think that as I was reading, I was wondering, I mean, the structures that you create are so interesting with your stories that in true short story fashion, I think you have to be ready a little bit to do a little more work as a reader to catch up in certain ways. I think with a lot of your characters. Your narrator’s specifically, you don’t give us a lot of information always on who they are. They’re often unnamed, or they’re non-human. So we don’t relate to them in exactly the same way. But I wonder how you find these sort of entry points into the stories to shape who our narrator is going to be for that little bit of time.

So the title story, Your Utopia, I actually, I actually got the idea when I was in the US in 2018, there was a World Science Fiction conference. And I cut one day and went sightseeing. And there was this Tesla shop, and they had this exhibition of the structure of a Tesla car. So they dismantle the car and show various parts that were disassembled. So I wanted that car to be my hero, my protagonist. So I have, like a character could be human, could be non human could be a zombie robot. And then I figure out a final scene where everything comes to an end. And then I go back to the beginning and figure to figure out how the story starts to reach that end. And then if I have a starting point, the end point and a title for the title, I need the protagonist, because the title has to kind of show what the protagonist is doing or where it or he or she is going, then I can figure out the story in the middle. So that’s how I do it. And the client, the end is the climax, and the ending scene is the most important. So I don’t begin in the beginning, I begin, I begin with the end.

And I think that that really lends to a sort of propulsive-ness in your writing, it always feels like it’s building to that next thing, and then you hit the end. And I feel like so often with your stories. It’s just like, oh, okay, that’s the end. And I think that’s the beauty of short story in so many ways. There’s so much that can be done with tense, like with tense moments, and this driving something forward because I think a lot of these ideas both in Your Utopia and Cursed Bunny could have been expanded out into full novels, maybe not all of them would have the exact same punchiness or the exact same feeling but I I think a lot of them other writers might have said, Yeah, I could make a novel out of this. So why short stories? Why do you keep coming back to sort of this form,

I just like short stories. And it was it was because mostly because of time constraints, I had been a teacher for 12 years, and I only have winter break and summer break. That’s when I really get to sit down and write. And other times I, I do write a lot, but mostly I have to write on the fly. And I was preparing for class grading, homework, grading exams, grading quizzes, a lot of grading and answering student questions, etc. And then, in the midst of all that, if an idea comes to me, I have to make the best of it before it goes away, because it will go away if I don’t act on it. So I was always in a hurry. And that reflects in the size and scale of my stories.

I think that it makes it so much of an accessible thing. These like stories that are dealing with these huge topics, and yet you manage in like 30 or so pages to be like, here’s what you need to know. And here’s what you need to feel. And that will sit with you forever afterwards is how I feel about some of these stories that they are now in some part of my brain forever, in the best way. But I think a lot of people are nervous about short stories. I don’t know why, but I think they don’t, they aren’t sure maybe we aren’t taught exactly how to read them as well as we’re taught how to read novels. But I think if anyone with the amount of like scrolling and like swiping we do as a culture, it’s like you can sit down, if you can watch a 20-minute YouTube video, you could read a short story. And I think that there’s so much especially in horror or sci fi, there’s something so scary about something that you only need a little bit of time to tell.

With horror, especially short stories work a lot better, because the more you explain, the less scary it gets.

That’s true, you don’t need a lot of time to make me really worried about I guess like a robot that’s coming to get me or like a plant planet or a cannibal disease, like you’ll get me quick on any of them. Something that also really strikes me in all of your work is this idea of humanity. It’s the idea that there is something within all these non human entities that stares back at us sort of in that uncanny valley way of like, Is this really what should scare us? Most of all, is like we aren’t afraid enough of certain things that we are sort of barreling ahead at this rapid speed of advancement and aren’t maybe stopping and thinking really fully about AI and what it could do I keep saying ai ai but I mean, just like technology in general, do you think that we are responding to it in such a way because we think that nothing we ever made can really hurt us.

First of all, I think human beings aren’t the worst. If anybody’s coming to get me it’s gonna be a human, like homosapiens human, not a robot. That’s my thinking. And I this was all also for class, I read an AI report from artificial intelligence Institute of New York University, I can’t really remember the name of that research institute. But it was something like artificial intelligence or smart intelligence, something like that. They say that they also say the most, most dangerous species is human. And it’s because we’re feeding our prejudices and our own experience and our own biases into all these artificial intelligence, how their decision making process and their data, especially the data, and according to that report, the most advanced technologies require that kind of devices and software and to be able to afford that kind of devices and software, you have to be rich, you basically have to come from a very affluent background. So every single people who are the representatives, or the movers and shakers of this field of artificial intelligence, technology, robots, etc. They are mostly very affluent people from privileged backgrounds who are I’m sorry to say this as a non white person, but they’re basically white male, able bodied, cisgender heterosexuals. That feeds into the prejudice and bias. This is not me being racist, this was the concerns, very legitimate concerns of that New York University Institute Research report that AI needs a lot of data to be able to learn and be able to make decisions like humans do, on the level of humans do. And the most of the data like 80% to 90% of the data that is fed to artificial intelligence comes from white, heterosexual cisgender able bodied men who are from mostly affluent, privileged background, who have higher education, and who cannot imagine a world outside their privileged background. And that is a very dangerous thing. And the example they said was, what if a Black person or a transgender person wanted to be an Uber driver not, I’m not prejudiced against Uber. Any kind of rideshare application has a flaw when it comes to recognizing transgender humans or people who are not white, they very often have problems or they have more problems than white person or a cisgender person wants to register as their driver. But if you think about it, white, able bodied cisgender people statistically have an easier time getting a job, whereas the black transgender person, they will really need this job as an Uber driver. And the Uber application will not register them as a driver, because they cannot decide whether this person is a person or a male or a female. And that that is a real problem. So that was the example. And this Netflix documentary Coded Bias. That was the title, there is a Netflix documentary about an MIT student who is of African heritage, it started off as a very small project, a class project where she wanted to make a smart glass, a mirror where she could just wake up and you know, see herself and the mirror would tell her, mirror on the wall with tell her like, Well, today’s weather is such as such, so you should wear this and that, put on some orange lip tint to make yourself look brighter or something like that. And the software would not recognize her face, because she is not white, and the software very ironically, would recognize her face when she put on a white mask. So the software recognizes something that is not human as human face, but would not recognize, just flat out refuses to recognize something that is a real human face. So that was really scary, by the way. That is the perils of artificial intelligence. And the peril actually comes from us our prejudice, our biases, and our conceived threats, not from artificial intelligence. So we need to reconsider what is human and how we’re treating other human beings, like real human beings on the streets, and who we can actually like, encounter in this three dimensional world.

I think that so often, especially in sci fi, that’s like this trope is like, the real horror the whole time was just us. And we have to reckon with that. And I think that’s something that we are so like, as a species, it obviously is challenging, not just like, because our lizard brains, like don’t want to recognize ourselves as threats, but also because we’re all socially conditioned to be like, no, there will be something else that is scarier than what we offer to each other. And I think that it’s almost counterintuitive to be like, creating these systems and these programs that, like you said, we have to teach what it will know what it will do. And we see from what we teach our own children and our own societies that historically we’re not very good at doing that. And that when we look to these things in a book and or in a movie, and we can recognize like, Oh, of course that was what was scary all along. Or of course we have to do better. And yet we miss that step and like incorporating it back into what we are doing and teaching and maybe that’s because the people who really need to be reading or watching these things aren’t reading or watching them. But I wonder what about these stories of what makes us human? Whether they’re horror based, which you know, is so often where we end up or sci fi or speculative anything like that. I wonder if you have a thought on what drives us to create and engage in these stories.

Because we’re human. We always want to know what makes us human. Whether being human is better or worse than being some something else, I think it’s worse. But anyways, because we’re human, we like to explore humanity because it’s what we are.

I feel like so much of Your Utopia really fits into a model that I’ve been living recently. And I’ve mentioned about other books, but it’s just like I have to laugh, or smile or be scared because or otherwise, I’ll just cry all the time, because the universe seems so crazy and heavy and spooky and strange all on its own. So maybe if I engage with something, I can control it. But so much of your work is sort of got this absurdist dark humor, there are like legitimately several moments in this book where I laughed, and then judged myself a little bit for laughing, but then laughed a little bit more anyway. And I wonder how you balance those tones of talking about some like really intense, heavy things. But in a way that is a little humorous.

I don’t really think of balancing anything. And I think our lives are very complex, very multi dimensional, we are not flat. So moments can be like, real moments in real life can be scary and funny at the same time. And we as human beings are capable of feeling all those emotions all at the same time. It’s not one way or the other, we can feel everything all at the same time. And we sort them out later in our dreams. But that’s what sleep does for us. So you do have to get enough sleep. That’s the lesson you have to take away from, from today’s interview, you have to get enough sleep or you will go crazy.

You have to get enough sleep and you have to charge your phone so that it loves you. Those are the important things. I think also like humor and horror, strangely, always work so well together, because I was just talking to the K-Ming Chang recently about her new novel Organ Meats and how there it is often horrifying and humorous at the same time, because they both kind of come from this like play of boundaries. And I think that that comes in a lot in your work too that like we never quite know exactly where we sit with a lot of your characters and a lot of your themes until you show us exactly where we sit. And sometimes that comes in in literally the last page of your work. But I just think that those two plays so well. And it makes it also not so unbelievably terrifying to read. Because there are definitely passages, especially in Your Utopia, where there’s just so much movement, and there’s like this chasing element. And I was like, Oh, I’m going to I’m going to lose my mind right here right now. But I didn’t. I’ve also been talking about this book with everyone and everyone sort of has a different favorite story and a different piece that like settles with them just really heavily. I know I’ve talked about this elevator story, A Song for Sleep, which really sat with me because if you just looked at the description of like a sentient elevator caring for one of its users, you’d be like, okay, but then it really like settles in and you’re like, Oh, this is something but I think the story that sits with me the most is Maria Gratia Plena which I cannot get out of my head. And I wonder if you have sort of a story that you can’t get out of your head either after you wrote it.

They’re all my babies.

Yes, asking you to pick a favorite child is not kind.

I guess just Song for Sleep, too, because I miss my grandma. The elevator is me, I miss my grandma.

I think there’s something in all of these that sort of sits with us as we read that they’re not just what you may get on an initial reading. And I think especially you have an afterword in this book, that honestly reframed a lot of what I thought as I had originally read, because it puts a different spin on sort of where you were at as you were writing, and I wondered why you felt important to include that with this work.

Oh, that was Anton’s idea. I just completely trust my translators and Anton is the best translator of Korean to English translation, hands down. Plus, I don’t have any sense of marketing. I studied Russian literature which doesn’t market very well to begin with. I study 1920s Soviet literature which is like anti-capitalist, anti-market. So my taste of whatever may sell or may not sell is like completely gone. And Anton said we have to include the writers afterword because this will wrap up the whole story very nicely. So I said, Okay, I guess.

I also wonder what working with Anton is like, because you have worked with him on Your Utopia and Cursed Bunny, both of which are incredible works in translation and have such amazing voices that come through that sort of weave these stories together. And I wonder what that translation process looks like a little bit.

Translation process from my end looks like I say, yes, he translates. And that’s it. He works his magic. And I translate from a Russian and Polish to Korean. So I know what translation looks like. I mean, I know what the nitty gritty everyday work looks like. So the best thing is, do not touch the translator. Like don’t bother your translator, trust your translator. And if the translator has questions, and I may answer but Anton is a native speaker of Korean, so he doesn’t really need any explanation or answers. So like, Yeah, he does his work. And I say, yay.

So the rules now are get a lot of sleep. Plug in your phone and always trust your translator. I wonder too. You obviously have a lot of influences from Slavic literature. Because you study it, you have done a lot of work sort of with fairy tales and folklore. And now you have this speculative sci fi element as well. What are some of the other literary influences that you have sort of working with you as a writer and some other things that either influenced your utopia or just some things that you love, I would be happy for any of it.

Actually, utopia was the topic for my doctoral thesis. And because 1920s Slavic literature in general, I studied Polish and Russian. And they are both very heavily influenced by the idea of Utopia, because the Russians just took down literally an empire with their own hands, and Poland was liberated from that very empire. So they were both in different ways. But Poland and Russia were both facing a future that looked like a terrifying wasteland without any guidelines or could be full of freedom and hope and happiness, which is what they hoped for. So everybody went crazy. Because it was there Utopia late like literally, they had built their own utopia, and they could decide what the utopia could look like. But that all comes to an end when Stalin becomes the first secretary in 1927. And the mass purge of peasants, the red bourgeois peasants began in 1928. And then the real purge begins 10 years later. So everything became horrifying dystopia, what they hoped would be a better world. So I know that process itself is very dramatic. And I think that kind of worldview, knowing what happened and history influenced my concept of Utopia, and also a lot of Slavic writers from that period, just flat out, come out and say, are human beings are not compatible with utopia, we are dynamic beings that change constantly and feel different emotions and feel different sensations all the time. And utopia is supposed to be perfect, and therefore it’s static, it stays perfect. And human beings are not static, we do not stay the same at all, each and every one of us have different ideas about what perfectness looks like or feels like. Therefore, there is no utopia for us, there are only moments of happiness and possibly a road towards what we believe might be utopia, and the process of trying to get there and talking to people or having a relationship with people who are like minded who want the same thing as I do. And hoping that this urge towards Utopia will not die out and hoping that when I as an individual die, the urge to use Utopia the willingness towards Utopia will live on with the friends my comrades, my group of people, and just enjoying that those little moments that may be like the best we can get that that moment is utopia. But there is no like permanent, ideal society that where that we can just settle in and live happily ever after we are not that kind of species.

No, and maybe the thing we create might have something a little bit closer to that. But there are these moments of hope and of progress that we can look towards and move towards. And that does come through in your work as well, even when sometimes it is in result of something truly horrible. But yet we can sort of have this moment of well, if enough of us try.

We can all try until our faces are blue, but there is no ideal society. We are all doomed. I’m sorry.

And that’s the fourth rule of today. It’s translators. It’s charge your phone. It’s get enough sleep, and it is we are all doomed. But at least we can read good books along the way. You’ve got these stories coming out. You’ve got Cursed Bunny in run for prizes. Do you have anything on the horizon that you’re working on next?

Well, there are things that Anton is working on into English. So those are secrets, I can’t really talk about them. What I’m working on right now is sea creatures. I have a cycle of six stories. Each feature different sea creatures. So the first one is octopus. The second one is king crab. Third one is shark. Fourth one is jellyfish. The fifth one is ocean sunfish. And the last one is a whale. And each of them. These are real protagonists in the story. And there’s me as the narrator and my husband. So my husband is like really looking forward to this. I’m working on the final revision,

Are ocean sunfish, the ones that look like just a giant head? Like they’re just kind of yeah, oh, yeah, then I’m very excited because those are weird, and I like it. So I’m very excited for that. I cannot wait for all the sea creatures and for the secret things too, because I bet they’re also going to be amazing. But for now, I will just leave all of us with remember the rules from the episode today. And please, please go check out Your Utopia because it is something wonderful. Thank you so much for being with us today. Well, thank you so much.

Poured Over