Monday, Aug. 4, 2025--San Antonio
The Foreign Student by Susan Choi won a prize as the best first novel from an Asian-American organization. I enjoyed the book very much. It really is two stories of two different people with limited interaction between the two. One of the characters is a young girl named Catherine just coming into womanhood at the age of 14 with a major crush on a professor twice her age or more who is a friend of the family. The professor takes advantage of the situation--establishing a sexual relationship that continues summer after summer as she and her family keep returning to their summer home in Tennessee. Eventually the mother learns of the relationship and tries to sever ties, but the girl grows into a woman still maintaining the relationship with the professor who is the only person she has ever had as a sexual partner. But as a maturing woman in her mid-20s, a strain is developing between the two of them. The other main character is a young man from Korea named Chung. After WWII, because he can speak English, he is working with the US Information service in Korea helping translate local news stories to English for the foreign reporters about the unrest and back-and-forth movements in the line between the communist forces and the American-backed Korean forces. His story involves a close friendship with a communist sympathizer his age, a perceived close friendship with his young American boss, What is happening in this long war is tragically covered in detail in the novel as Chang gets caught up in it. After the war ends, Chang applies for scholarships at many American universities and eventually is accepted on a full scholarship to The University of the South (Sewanee) which is where Catherine is continuing to live and have her troubled affair of a decade or more with the professor and where Chang continues to be called "Chuck" as he was in the USIA office in Seoul. Sewanee is a small university that is its own town and only has one small general store, so everyone there knows Catherine and the gossip about her relationship with the professor and everyone is curious about the "Chuck" (who they think is Chinese or Japanese but reference him as an "Oriental") who is new to this southern Tennessee town. During his first year at the university there is very limited interaction between Catherine and Chang. They seem to be drawn together as outliers in the community who have sympathy for each other and may even find the other fascinating, but no real relationship develops between them. The very end of the novel is when everything starts goes to pot. Catherine goes to New Orleans because her mother is dying and because it is a good excuse to think about whether she really wants to marry the controlling professor who she has somewhat forced to propose to her. Chung has taken a summer job in Chicago--a miserable, dirty job thumbing through old books to remove anything inside, ripping the binding off, and sending the book upstairs for the edges of the pages to be trimmed and a new binding attached. How will they tolerate this summer of unhappiness? Will Catherine return to her professor? Will Chung, who keeps being accused by his supervisor of stealing the money that is often in old books rather than giving it to her, keep putting his own limited money into books? What can happen to change their circumstances with the book almost ending? I gave the book 4 1/4 stars out of 5.
