Choi’s descriptions are strange and powerful....The Foreign Student‘s plot is carefully orchestrated and camera-ready. It takes a war, an epistolary betrayal, and a natural disaster to effect a kiss.
A young war-shocked Korean man falls for a comely southern belle with secrets of her own in Susan Choi’s elegantly wrought first novel, The Foreign Student.
A novel of secrets that unfold like the leaves on an artichoke. The Foreign Student is a mosaic of betrayal in peace and war that marks the debut of a gifted young novelist wise beyond her years.
“A novel of secrets that unfold like the leaves on an artichoke. The Foreign Student is a mosaic of betrayal in peace and war that marks the debut of a gifted young novelist wise beyond her years.” — John Gregory Dunne
“A luminous and accomplished first novel . . . that resonates with compassion-turned-ardor and an addictive melancholy vibrating beneath every line.” — Houston Chronicle
“A powerful and involving book. . . [written in] a style that can accommodate both the broad forces of history and the most intimate of lives.” — Lamar Herrin, author of The Lies Boys Tell
“A young war-shocked Korean man falls for a comely southern belle with secrets of her own in Susan Choi’s elegantly wrought first novel, The Foreign Student.” — Vanity Fair
“An accomplished, perceptive novel, which invites rereading and lingers in the reader’s memory.” — Booklist
“An auspicious debut novel . . . epic in its harrowing accounts of war and intimate in its charged descriptions of the unlikely love affair at its center.” — The New Yorker
"Choi tells her story with meticulous attention to detail and unfailing self-confidence." — The Miami Herald
“Choi’s descriptions are strange and powerful. . . . The Foreign Student‘s plot is carefully orchestrated and camera-ready. It takes a war, an epistolary betrayal, and a natural disaster to effect a kiss.” — New York magazine
“First-time novelist Susan Choi writes gracefully, insightfully and with striking maturity.” — Time
“Richly detailed. . . . Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life.” — New York Times Book Review
“Susan Choi has written a first novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness. Her prose has the feel of a handmade artifact, oddly bumpy at times and startlingly expressive.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review
"This wonderful hybrid of a novel—a love story, a war story, a novel of manners—introduces a writer of enchanting gifts, a beautiful heart wedded to a beautiful imagination. How else does Susan Choi so fully inhabit characters from disparate backgrounds, with such brilliant wit and insight? The Foreign Student stirs up great and lovely emotions." — Francisco Goldman, author of The Ordinary Seaman
“Two very unlikely worlds intersect in The Foreign Student, war-ravaged Korea and the genteel culture of Sewanee, Tennessee. In gracious prose, Susan Choi renders their cruelties, their lies, and their beauty.” — Arthur Golden, author of Memories of A Geisha
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Translation is a tricky thing. Mere transliteration is only a start. Translating a piece of writing, whether literature or a wire news story, takes finesse, for a certain amount of rearranging or restating is necessary to retain the original meaning. Susan Choi elegantly describes this almost morphological process in her ambitious first novel, The Foreign Student: "Sometimes, a line that seemed fine would begin to grow lumpy and poor as more lines accreted beneath it. Sometimes, like a cheaply built house, the whole would have to be completed before it unexpectedly started to sag.... The thing would emerge and begin to grow buoyant, as if it could read only just as it was. This is what he wanted: for the original to vanish. Then you knew it was actually there, bled in, letter by letter."
The main character of Choi's novel is the son of a great Korean translator who flourished under Japanese rule only to be punished for it in the aftermath of World War II. Chang Ahn follows in his father's footsteps, as a translator of news reports for the United States Intelligence Service in Korea's capital during the precarious time between two devastating wars: "He continued to translate, creating his place and becoming increasingly trapped there. Translation was a sure thing in American Seoul; neither side understood the other, but the constant racket of translation gave off an impression of good understanding, or at least of good faith." Like his father, and like Korea itself, Chang is caught between cultures -- between democracy and communism, between America and Russia and China, between the Occident and the Orient, and, after the war, the South and the North.
"He thrived there, in the zone of intentional misinformation, the way that disaster throve in the breach. He had already sensed that, like his father, he had no real place in South Korea." Disconnected from his family and his country, Chang leaves his homeland for Sewanee, Tennessee, and the University of the South, where he befriends Katherine Monroe, a lonely, seemingly independent southern belle who has returned to her family's summer house after the death of her father.
Katherine, too, is caught between forces beyond her control. At age 14, she began her first and only romantic relationship with a family friend, the brilliant but bitter professor Charles Addison, a proverbial big fish in the small pond of Sewanee. Ten years later, she returns to the summer house, only to immediately take up with Charles. Estranged from her socialite mother, Glee, who put an end to the family's summering in Sewanee after she learned of the affair, Katherine is pretty much friendless -- that is, until she meets Chang, who stirs her interest and with whom she feels an inexplicable bond.
Katherine "had spent half her life immobilized by the fear she would lose Charles, and her unhappiness, she realized now, had been passive and essentially hopeful....So long as the power to withhold her happiness lay outside herself, she could wait, and stroke her despair with the intensity of imagining its opposite." Chang, too, shares this trait of passivity, but in a much more tumultuous and politically charged (but no less wrenching) context: "He had realized that in avoiding an allegiance to the Americans he had overlooked his actual problem. No allegiance at all was an allegiance, by default, to the Republic of Korea, a government that only seemed to exist in order that it not be a Communist government, in the same way that his own recurrent desire to join the Communist party arose largely from his contempt for the republic's regime."
Choi structures her novel so as to heighten the central theme of displacement -- moving from Korea to Tennessee, backwards in time to both Chang's and Katherine's childhoods, and back to mid-'50s Sewanee. While the technique can sometimes be confusing, especially in relating scenes from the Korean conflict, in the end it energizes Choi's meticulous prose. Perhaps most of the confusion in the sections set in Korea is due to the fact that the Korean War remains the least known of the major international conflicts of the 20th century -- to Americans and Koreans alike. In weaving together these two very different lives, the results are bumpy, full of mixed messages and inarticulateness, advances and retreats. The novel reflects this -- the convergence of lives never results in a seamless whole, and it is to Choi's credit that she portrays reality in this way.
In the end, both achieve a certain freedom, together and apart -- Katherine finally leaves Sewanee to care for her dying mother. Chang's life as a translator now seems to lead to a tangible goal: "His lust to master the language had never been abstract, no matter how fastidious and intellectual his approach might have seemed.... It had always been utterly, ruthlessly pragmatic, driven by his faith in its power to transport him. It had gotten him into USIS, and across the ocean to Sewanee, and then, just as he was in danger of becoming apathetic from accomplishment, it had brought her within view. Every possibility of speech had been a possibility of speaking to her."
. . . [R]ichly detailed. . . .Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi. . . [constructs] an intricate portrait of lovers who must prove. . .that they are survivors.
—New York Times Book Review
Ms. Choi, a Korean-American, did something larger and more original than ingeniously devise a foreigner experiencing America. She devised America through the experience of the foreigner -- an America seemingly strange, largely because our own eyes hadn't known where to look. It was revelation under black light; not replacing daylight's vision but extending it to show crags we took for hills and torrents we knew as streams. — Richard Eder
Initially, their interwoven stories seem as . . .mismatched as they themselves are. . . .in and through each other, they discover a capacity for solace, forgiveness and renewal. . .Choi. . .writes gracefully, insightfully and with striking maturity. . . —Time
While these powerful images may be, by now, gross stereotyping, their
core truth feeds Southern writers on a rich diet of subtlety, profundity and irony lacking in other American fiction, say, the Updike school of high WASP suffering or the McInerneyesque chronicles of People magazine partygoing. So it's good to report that Susan Choi believes in the old-time religion of William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison and Eudora Welty. Her first novel is a strong, graceful piece of prose that stirs war, love, class and culture together in a strange and beautiful alchemy.
The opening of "The Foreign Student" conjures the sort of mythic dream time Faulkner raises in "Absalom, Absalom" or Welty evokes in her Morgana stories, the never-never "before the war" when rich families closed up their townhouses and moved to their country estates. Only this is not Jefferson or Jackson but Seoul, and the war is the Korean War. Chang "Chuck" Ahn is the child of privileged Koreans who lose everything in the conflict.
Barely surviving the ravages of the civil war, in 1955 Chuck manages to escape on a church scholarship to the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn.
There he meets Katherine Monroe, the child of privileged Southerners who is trapped in a destructive relationship with a dilettante professor. Chang and Katherine are hurt, haunted people who manage, almost blindly, to come together and heal each other.
Beneath the threatening summer skies and low-swaying emerald leaves of Sewanee, Tennessee, baroque romantic etiquette and indelible lines cleaving insider from outsider strip-mine the 1950s social landscape. The result? A Southern Peyton Place, but one as sophisticated and absorbing as the best of Mary Lee Settle. At its center Choi details the inexplicable comings and goings of the uncommonly beautiful yet troubled 28-year-old belle Katherine Monroe, who develops an unlikely relationship with Chang Ahn, a young Korean refugee. Enfolding Ahn's memories of war-torn Korea into lushly self-enclosed Sewanee, the novel shares with its characters the allure of an undiscovered country; their attractions are charted in deftly contoured prose, so lyrical at times it approaches incantation. At her best when driving Katherine and Chang apart, Choi only stumbles in an all-too-expected ending that is less convincing than the secrets that preceded it.
Elizabeth Haas
An evocative romance set in the 1950s about the love bonding a Korean student and a young American woman.
A novel of extraordinary sensibility and transforming strangeness.
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
An uneven first novel that elegantly details the love story of two young people, a Korean student and a southern beauty, whose earlier lives have been shaped by war and obsession. Like so many current debut novels, the writing here is stronger than plot or character, but Choi, in giving her male protagonist a Korean background, especially one shaped by a less familiar war—the Korean War—adds a refreshingly unusual dimension to her tale. Set in the mid-1950s, and taking place mostly at Sewanee, the University of the South, the story begins when Chuck Ahn, formerly Chang, meets Katherine Monroe. Now in her late 20's, Katherine, living at Sewanee in her family's old summer home, is in love with Charles Addison, an older professor—he was a classmate of her father's at Sewanee—who seduced her the summer she was 14.
Chuck, who recently served as a translator for the American forces, is there on a scholarship. As the year passes, Katherine and Chuck keep meeting by accident in scenes that alternate with their recollections of the past. Katherine recalls how she came to be seduced, and how her obsessive love for Addison has shaped, or perhaps, as one observer suggests, ruined her life. Chuck remembers the privations of the war years; his flight when the communists retook Seoul, and, in an internment camp, his betrayal of someone who'd once helped him—an act that made him determined to leave Korea. A surprise proposal of marriage from Addison finally makes Katherine confront her confused feelings. In New Orleans for the summer to be with her dying mother, she invites Chuck to visit. He does, and the two at last accept their pasts, and—in the best tradition, thoughthe affair never crackles with convincing tension—one another. While the love story never seems all that credible or affecting, Choi has tried to write a great sweep of a novel that is both moving and intelligent. The result is deserving of praise, and the author of encouragement.
