Koreanish

At an early age, people started asking me about how my parents met. As it is a good story, and I knew it, I told everyone who asked me.

Years later, as an adult, I realized most people are not asked this question.

The repeated answering of the question is one of the many things that has made me a writer, though, and so it eventually will be the subject of what I’m calling a nonfiction novel with the same name as this blog. In the meantime, here you’ll find me writing mostly about travel and literature, and occasionals on current events.

Edinburgh is my first novel, in print from Picador. My second, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. You should really read Edinburgh. Here’s some of what people have said about it:

…Alexander Chee’s Edinburgh, fucking incredible son of a bitch…

— Junot Diaz, over at Austinist

Alexander Chee is the best new novelist I’ve seen in some time. Edinburgh is moody, dramatic—and pure.

— Edmund White

Edinburgh has the force of a dream and the heft of a life. And Alexander Chee is a brilliant new writer.

— Annie Dillard

Haunting… complex… sophisticated. [Chee] says volumes with just a few incendiary words.

— The New York Times Book Review

A coming-of-age novel in the grand Romantic tradition, where passions run high, Cupid stalks Psyche, and love shares the dance floor with death . . . A lovely, nuanced, never predictable portrait of a creative soul in the throes of becoming.

— The Washington Post Book World

Chee is a gifted, poetic writer who takes big risks…This novel marks the debut of a major talent whose career will bear watching.

— Publishers Weekly

A striking debut…A complex story told with skill and intensity, but also filled with moments when agony and extraordinary beauty somehow coexist.

— Kirkus Reviews

A complex, sophisticated, elegant investigation of trauma and desire – like a white hot flame.

— Joyce Hackett, in the Guardian UK

Some recent links you might enjoy: My correspondence with Maud Newton on the novels Jean Rhys and Ford Madox Ford wrote after their affair with each other; memory of campaigning for the first Returnable Bottle Bill in Maine, over at n+1. My interview of Sigrid Nunez, over at Memorious. My interview of Ursula K. LeGuin, for Guernica, The New Korean American fiction issue of Guernica I guest-edited, “Korean Enough”.

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The story thus far:

1. Alexander Chee was born in South Kingston, Rhode Island, near the University of Rhode Island campus where his father was studying oceanography at the time. His mother was a Home Economics teacher in the public school system there. Shortly after his father received his degree, when he was 9 months old, his parents took him to live in Seoul, South Korea, at his grandfather’s house, next to the Secret Garden, the palace where the Korean emperor once kept his concubines. From the top floor, he could see an 800-year-old plum tree, if whoever was carrying him could lift him high enough. This was in the Wonso-dong neighborhood of Seoul. His eyes were blue when he arrived, startling his grandparents, as he was the oldest male of the Chee family’s 41st generation, and the putative patriarch, as such.
2. His eyes eventually turned hazel, the color of most of his mother’s family’s eyes, also called “The Goodwin eyes”. His mother did not have these eyes; his mother’s eyes were blue.
3. He lived there nearly three years, while his father worked for his father’s company, Pukyang Fisheries. He was not allowed to play with other Korean children because of his being half-white, and the risk of kidnapping or murder, as half-white children in Korea in the 60s were often the victims of hate crimes. They left when his mother, pregnant with his brother and recovering from tuberculosis, asked her husband if they could return to the US. She gave birth to his younger brother in Maine, where her family was from.
4. Over the next three years, as his parents moved, following his father’s work, he lived in Truk, Kawaii, and then Guam, where he first attended school, learning to sing “Kumbaya” and to snorkel with his father along the reef, riding on his father’s back. When he was 6, the Chee family then moved to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, in November, a move which prompted the young Alexander to draw a black permanent marker mural down the stairs of the new house and all around the living room. This is the one and only time Alexander’s father, a tae-kwon-do champion, physically punished him. It was never needed again.
5. No one at the school he attended there could pronounce either “Guam” or “Korea” and mocked him for being from there. In the lunchroom, a blond boy who would go on to become captain of the tennis team in high school, and the school’s coke dealer, asked if he was a “chink”, to which Alexander dutifully, literally replied, “No. I’m half-Korean.” “Well, what do you call that?” “A Kink,” Alexander said, without thinking. Luckily, this did not catch on, but it was premonitory all the same. Alexander quickly discovered he was ahead of his other classmates in math and reading and began boycotting his homework, which led to recess detentions he enjoyed as he liked to read uninterrupted by the other students. His parents began to be told their child didn’t “live in the real world”, as his teacher seemed unaware of the ruthless way he was exploiting her system of “punishment”.
6. At this writing, Alexander is the Visiting Writer at Amherst College, living in an apartment full of books and graphic novels and teaching fiction writing and the graphic novel. He is almost done with his second novel, and the third is underway.

Thanks for stopping by. For more about my work, check out alexanderchee.net.