Dear Reader,
Today's guest author, Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novel Flux, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway and VCU Cabell First Novel awards, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and named a best book of the year by Esquire, GQ, and Cosmopolitan. His short stories and other work have appeared in The Southern Review, Guernica, The Rumpus, Literary Hub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature. He lives in New York City.
Jinwoo's new novel is I Leave it Up to You, a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushithat asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?
A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He's been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it's been ten years since he last saw his family.
Reach out to Jinwoo via: https://jinwoochong.com/contact
Welcome to the book club, Jinwoo Chong!
On Saturdays, my parents would wake my brother and me early. We left the house before nine and drove an hour and a half to Fort Lee, the Korean-American conclave located around the New Jersey end of the George Washington Bridge. There, my brother and I were strung along for a full day of activities: grocery shopping in the banchan shops that sold staples like kimchi, fried anchovies, pork and fish jeon shaped into patties and pan fried in oil, haircuts for the boys in the family and color for my mother, late lunch of naengmyeon and dumplings, then the near-two-hour drive back through traffic, where, if we were lucky, there would be enough time for an hour or two of television before I was shuttled off to bed.
Reader, I hated Fort Lee. It claimed almost every Saturday of my childhood life from age six to twelve. If it wasn’t a haircut, it was shopping for clothes. If it wasn’t groceries, it was browsing the plant nurseries or textile shops for blankets and furniture. Sometimes, I was allowed a toy purchase, something anime- or manwha-themed from the trinket store that I didn’t know what to do with, longing instead for Harry Potter Lego sets or Magic Tree House books.
Jarring as well were the storefronts and signs entirely in Korean, the throngs of Korean people going about their own errands, congregating in churches, filing into the restaurants for meals. In my school, I was one of a sparse handful of Asian students. Being among so many of them was new and disconcerting.
As I’ve grown older, I’m embarrassed to have resented my heritage the way that I did. I’ve understood in the decade or two since then that my dad, who moved to the States at 17, is probably reminded of his own childhood while walking around the storefronts and ordering off the menu. Over time I visited other Koreatowns and felt disappointed in the dearth of options, how small they seemed. I’d been spoiled by a place that is, in actuality, exceedingly rare.
Today, my parents live even closer to Fort Lee than before. They say they will never move, that the food there beats anything in New York’s K-Town. When I visit them at home, I ask often to take our own little trip to Fort Lee. There, I eat my fill, practice reading the signage and the menu to keep up my limited language ability, and remind myself that there is no word for homesickness for a home away from home.
-- Jinwoo Chong
https://jinwoochong.com/contact
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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