Building Character: Susan Choi re-emerges with her second novel, American Woman
August 29, 2003
In many ways, Susan Choi’s life has been a series of un-premeditated choices. “I didn’t set out to bring my life into line with a writer’s life,” she says. “Although I was good at writing, I never considered it as a career. I flirted with any number of inappropriate career choices — film, art, being a professor. I didn’t do much of anything to turn myself into a professional writer.” As effortless as she makes it seem, Choi is today a critically acclaimed author.
Born in South Bend, Ind., to a Korean immigrant father and a Russian Jewish American mother, Choi spent her first eight years there, until she moved with her mother to Houston after a brief stint in Japan. There, she lived in a predominantly middle-class Jewish suburb — “I was a Jewish kid,” she says — and went to an arts high school until she headed to New Haven to study at Yale.
“I didn’t do a lot of research on schools. I just applied to good schools I had heard of,” she says. “Yale didn’t even have a major in creative writing, which was my idea of what I wanted to do, but I hadn’t even bothered to find that out before I applied.” After graduating with a degree in literature, Choi drifted for a while, moving to Chicago, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Nashville and back to Houston in just 15 months. “I was wandering aimlessly with friends,” she laughs. “I was uniquely not worried about what I was going to do with my life.”
She applied to grad school by default (“It was always something people expected me to do,” she recalls) and found herself doing a double MFA/PhD program at Cornell, an option extended to only one candidate a year. She found that doing both was personally “not a viable option.” She finished the MFA, but dropped out of the PhD program, which set the rest of her young life in motion: “I ended up with a writing career by default.”
Like all the most promising writers, Choi headed to Manhattan, tried two “terrible jobs,” then got “a divine call” from The New Yorker. She spent the bulk of three years as a fact checker there, in between taking breaks to write her first novel, The Foreign Student, which debuted in the fall of 1998 to rave reviews.
Choi left her day job a few months later, although she returned to co-edit Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker with David Remnick. She continued to write and also teach, working on what would become her current novel, American Woman, which debuts next week.
Based loosely on the Patty Hearst kidnapping, the story of American Woman centers on what Choi refers to as an “odd footnote” to the famous case — a young Japanese American woman found with Hearst who disappeared almost immediately from the headlines. In Choi’s memorable new novel, the lost “footnote” is born again as a renegade, idealist Japanese American woman with a historic past.
AsianWeek: How did life change when The Foreign Student came out?
Susan Choi: I feel as if it didn’t change my life in a radical way, but that’s not really true – it’s certainly upgraded the sorts of teaching jobs I’m able to get. Before Student, I couldn’t have quit my day job, and although I’ve still had to cobble together projects, I have been able to quit. Now the desire is to not have to cobble together so haphazardly.
It’s also been the end of being able to write without having people pay attention. I can’t write a book on weekends and evenings anymore while thinking that if it doesn’t turn out well, no one ever needs to know about it. When I was writing American Woman, I was worried about what my agent and my publisher would think. Writing The Foreign Student felt like I was stealing time. Now when I write, I feel like everything is taking so long, and that people are tapping their feet, waiting, saying ‘where is it?’
[Having a published book has] made me self-conscious. But this is what I wanted before the first book came out. I have a career now. It’s mine to blow it. Suddenly people take me seriously as a writer, and now it’s up to me — I either continue to produce or I choke.
AW: So what about American Woman?
Choi: I decided from the beginning that the protagonist had to be Japanese American, she had to be from California, she had to be the daughter of someone who had been interned. There was no other background she could have. I had discovered a real-life analog to that character in magazine stories about the Hearst kidnapping in the early ’70s.
I was researching another idea — that idea would never have worked — but in the course of researching that idea, which also involved kidnapping, I read Patty Hearst’s memoir. I was mostly reading it for entertainment. I was under the impression that it could not possibly be a reliable account of what had happened to her. The book had to conform to the story she told during her trial, so I read the memoir as an artifact, not truth. By the end of it, I was aware of all the omissions, especially the huge amounts of time that were not accounted for. There was a fleeting mention of this other woman and when I read a second book about the case, I became aware that this other Japanese American woman was present during much of that missing time. I liked the idea of her, and found her much more interesting than Patty Hearst for every reason. By the end of 1976, the world had forgotten she existed. People had only been interested in her because she was arrested alongside a famous person.
I wanted to know her story, to find out what she was like. But I would never have interviewed her or sought her out. I recognized her for her novel potential. This woman offered the space for me to make a character. The book is about Jenny. I didn’t want to get into a situation in which [Wendy Yoshimura, who inspired the character of Jenny] would ever think the book was an accurate biography of her.
AW: Would you want to meet the real-life Wendy/Jenny now that the book is coming out?
Choi: I don’t know. Chuck in The Foreign Student was inspired by my father and his experiences, but the book is not about my father. Ultimately that was all OK because he’s my father.
[In this case] I don’t know how the real woman would feel about the book because I never called her or established any sort of contact with her. My imaginings were of someone perhaps like her, but not her. Although [Jenny is] certainly recognizable enough that she could feel strange about [the book’s existence.]
AW: Like some of your characters, would you consider yourself an activist?
Choi: I wish I could, but I’m more like an armchair despairing person. I’m always dissatisfied with my own actions. I don’t know what I can do, and so I feel paralyzed. I’ll go out and march, but these days that feels more like a pro-forma exercise. Everyone is willing to do it, but no one believes that it will change anything. I’m a depressed, horrified onlooker to what’s going on with current events.
Comments
Got something to say?