Crossing Borders

Fiction as metaphor: as travel, that is. To be transported suddenly--the way a moving van lets the furniture fall asleep in one town and wake up in another, seemingly without transition. “Metaphora” is the word painted on the sides of Greek moving vans.

Chang, a Korean student at college in the Tennessee hills in the late 1950s, is such a van. We could travel to Korea half a dozen times and never possess the intimate sense of being there that he provides us.

Wrestling with the strangeness of the American South after living through the horrors of the Korean War, this seemingly awkward and diffident young man does more than give the American reader a view of a foreign place and foreign mind. He implants this foreignness in our American self; in the best of senses, he colonizes us.

In “The Foreign Student,” Susan Choi, a Korean American, 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.

Furthermore, whether intended or not, the roughness is a stylistic match to the book’s theme: the awkwardness with which two estranged people--Chang and Katherine, a young American--come zigzag together. This roughness has something of the effect of a light aberration in astronomy: as with the discovery of Neptune, it serves to reveal an unseen planet.

When they meet, Chang and Katherine have traveled journeys that fractured them in very different ways. Chang comes from a family of prewar gentry. His father, a professor, rose to distinction under the long Japanese occupation; at the end of World War II, he was imprisoned briefly. From childhood, the son has felt alien from his country; a feeling that grows more tormented with the division of Korea into the rival dictatorial regimes of Kim Il Sung in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South.

His best friend, a Communist who worked underground and eventually fled north, Chang finds nowhere to lodge his loyalties. Making do with a dream of America shaped by Hollywood and Time magazine, he uses his fluent English to work for the U.S. Information Services. His bosses treat him with patronizing affability, but when Seoul is temporarily overrun by the North Koreans, they evacuate south, leaving him behind, marked and in peril.

Chang, the man from no-man’s-land, suffers a succession of ordeals. Choi’s depiction of Korea’s seesaw war is nightmarish and angry; its politics more complex and disturbing than we knew at the time. Chang hides for weeks in a cupboard during the Northern occupation; later he hides in caves to avoid conscription into Rhee’s army. Finally, South Korean security agents arrest him as a spy and torture him gruesomely.

Released, he begins a plodding, indomitable effort to emigrate. Applying unsuccessfully to 70 universities and foundations, he finally wins a scholarship to the University of the South at Sewanee.

Katherine spots him there. Like Chang, she comes from a gentry class; her connection, like his, has splintered, and the splinters lacerate. Each summer, her New Orleans family fled the heat for the relative comfort of Sewanee. At 14, she was seduced there by a professor and family friend; at 30, she remains passively entangled.

Fiery, funny and unconventional, Katherine is becalmed and drifting in place. Her widowed mother, bitter over the affair and her daughter’s stagnant life, stays in New Orleans. Katherine takes care of the Sewanee house, goes for solitary drives and involves herself marginally in university life, volunteering occasional errands. One of these has her giving a ride to Chang: just arrived, dazed and all but mute with shyness and poor English.

Over the next year, through advances, retreats and misunderstandings--think of humanity’s first perilous circumnavigation of the globe--Chang and Katherine find the beginning of a reciprocal cure for their different injuries. She is brilliantly vociferous and all the more resonant because her life has been hollowed out (the principle of the drum). He is all but unable to speak out of a life crammed past bearing (the drum stuffed). It is a swap: Together, she will take on life and he a voice.

“The Foreign Student” alternates between Sewanee and Korea. Choi’s narrative roughness is most evident in her account of Chang’s wartime ordeal, where her ellipses, sudden juxtapositions and the occasional arrival of an effect before its cause can be confusing.

Nonetheless, these depictions remain fascinating. More important, their anguish accumulates an unshaped explosive charge for the lovely shaping of Katherine’s life in Sewanee and Chang’s cloudy arrival. They lurch into each other, as jagged as a ship and an iceberg, but the result is redemptive.

If the Korean flashbacks are powerful, the Sewanee sections are exquisite. For example, Choi creates a precarious fascination in the seduction of Katherine by her parents’ friend, Charles. The initial advantage he takes of the bemused child, on a wood-gathering sortie during a family barbecue, is both corrupt and hypnotic. When they return to the party, Katherine’s mother interprets the twigs and leaves on her frock with such a sociable Southern hyperbole that our knowledge flames up grotesquely: “Charles, look what you’ve done to my daughter.”

Yet the portrayal of the fluctuating, 15-year relationship between Charles and Katherine is complex and subtle. A glamorous, charismatic English professor, he lacks the grit and industry to go beyond a local celebrity. He is a weak man, but not entirely; part evil, but not entirely. The damage done to Katherine remains, but she and Charles evolve a kind of respect and even sterile love as his dependency grows and hers dwindles into an oddly decent rupture.

There are other finely realized complexities: Katherine’s mother, seen at first as an empty-headed socialite, ages into incurable disease and redeeming wisdom. The book’s radiant delight, though, lodges in Chang’s puzzling-out of America--Tennessee, with an enlightening side-trip to Chicago--and mostly in his and Katherine’s mutual puzzling-out.

An early venture: Katherine has insisted, despite Chang’s polite refusals, on driving him on an errand to another town. On the way back in the dark, each falls into mute shyness. Rallying to give shyness a shape, she tells him that she is used to driving alone so sometimes she doesn’t talk. But, she assures him:

“I find it easy to be quiet with you. If I was uncomfortable I wouldn’t feel I could have any privacy in front of you and I’d talk all the time. If I’m quiet it’s a friendly kind of quiet. Does that make sense?”

“Yes,” he replies. “I like this idea.”

“That’s good,” she says. “You can go to sleep if you want. Don’t worry about me.”

Politely, he shuts his eyes. Churning, he keeps them shut all the way back “because he thought it would make it more comfortable.”

It is all ups and downs, connections missed, mistaken and made. It is the courtship of the Phoenix and the Turtle, with the former’s swoops and flammable feathers for Katherine. As for turtles, we have to put aside Shakespeare’s dove-meaning and think of Chang encased in shell; and lumbering through memories of national and personal road-kill toward felicity.