Adrift at sea is an apt metaphor to describe what I felt after my first breakup as an adult. A sea of my own tears that separated me from friends and family. Leaving me feeling like the only person in the world. It’s this sentiment that writer Gina Chung captures so well over the course of her newly released novel’s 288 pages — which is as much about heartbreak and loneliness as it is a soulful commentary on what it means to be an Asian American adrift in our world.
“Sea Change” was meant to be a short story. But inspiration — or should I say, a special cephalopod — grabbed Chung with all eight of its tentacles from the moment she penned the first line of the novel: “This morning, Dolores is blue again.” Dolores, mind you, is an octopus. Her caretaker is a Korean American woman named Ro, the narrator and main character of the story.
Like Dolores stuck in her tank, Ro finds herself in her 30s and all alone. Her boyfriend Tae just left her for a mission to Mars, her friend and co-worker Yoonhee has been acting weird around her ever since Yoonhee got engaged, and she just can’t shake the hope that one day her father will return, although he’s been missing for over a decade. And now, Dolores, Ro’s only confidante, is being sold to some ultra-rich collector.
Treading Water as an Asian American
Writing in the midst of the pandemic, Chung drew on her own personal experience of breakups and isolation to color in Ro’s world.
“Breakups suck. There’s no easy way out of a breakup as someone who has also gone through a fair share of them. There’s no way out but through, as the saying goes,” Chung shares. “[Towards the end of 2020,] I was going through a breakup as well — along with all the other changes in the pandemic. During that time, everyone was sort of renavigating and renegotiating relationships, not just romantic ones, but one’s family and friendships.”
The realism in the book is most evident by Ro’s inaction. Through flashbacks, we see how she falls into a relationship with Tae and how easily she falls out of their relationship once he turns his interest towards the mission to Mars. After the disappearance of her father while on a sea expedition, she lets the current take hold, leading her to working at the mall aquarium where her father once worked. Both the breakup and her father’s disappearance slowly unwind for Ro: She still messages Tae on an app that details the goingabouts of the Mars voyagers, and she still believes her father is trying to reach her — lost at sea — when she gets mysterious, static-filled phone calls.
Asian Americans, under the pressure of the model minority myth, are often told that they have two options: sink or swim. But Ro, whether she realizes it or not, is simply treading water. It’s a state that many of us felt during the uncertainty of the pandemic and it’s not only a coping mechanism for specific periods of rapid change (a breakup, a death, or an incident), but also a valid state of being.
Moreover, this simple act of treading water for Asian Americans can be difficult because of the many spaces we inhabit and it’s easy to feel invisible when not fitting the mold.
“I’m Korean American, and so is my protagonist, and so is the family that she comes from. I wanted to write about the type of Korean American community that she comes of age in: Northern New Jersey, which is where I’m from,” Chung acknowledges. “There was the world of my parents and the church that we attended and their family friends, which was mostly Korean folks. And then, there was the world of my day-to-day, which was this very white small town where I was one of maybe two Asian kids in school who got mixed up with each other constantly.”
Alone While Unalone in Asian American Families
More than naming Ro as Korean, the novel explores Ro’s family and what it means to be the daughter of immigrants. When her mother attempts to console Ro after her breakup by saying, “The women in our family have never had luck with men,” Ro is allowed to continue to be pulled along rather than take responsibility for her inaction.
However, Chung notes that there is a legacy in Korean history of the men in the family either going off to war, dying early, or having to separate from their wives for long periods of time. Left behind, Chung was enamored by “the idea that the women just have to carry on right in the wake of tragedy or loss or disaster.”
Chung notes that the circumstances that the women in Ro’s family face remind her of the Korean folk song “Arirang”: “It’s an unofficial national anthem, and it’s a very beautiful, haunting melody. When I got older and actually listened to the lyrics, it’s a kind of diss track for a woman — or it doesn’t have to be a woman, because the singer is genderless — about someone leaving them and saying, ‘How dare you leave me.’ It’s this beautiful poetic song, essentially a kind of individual story about love gone wrong and loss, that at the same time has sort of become this interesting cultural anthem for us as a people.”
Like many wives who immigrate under a spousal visa, her mother’s loneliness in a new country set in long before Ro’s father goes missing. Reflecting on her broken relationship, Ro describes how her mother and father drifted apart after having her:
“…she wished she had never come with him to this country. And I remembered thinking that if that were true, if somehow my mother could go back in time and undo those choices she had made, unmarry my father, unimmigrate to the United States, zipping herself out of her wedding dress, and into her travel suit and walking backward onto a plane that traveled backward all the way across the ocean to Korea, then, I too, would become unmade…”
While many of us have heard the refrain of our parents coming to America so their children can have a better life, this often unspoken conclusion that we are the cause of our parent’s struggle is one that Chung does not shy away from.
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What do the children of immigrants bear as their burden? In Ro’s case, she becomes unattached, afraid to find refuge in family, friends, and relationships. When faced with Tae leaving or the sale of Dolores, she shrinks into a corner unable to fight because she is used to just bearing the weight of disappointment and loneliness.
Humans are Animals Too
As the star of the book’s cover, we cannot forget to mention Ro’s counterpart, a vital character that brings the reader into Ro’s environment. Like Ro when we first meet her, her counterpart Dolores is also very much a creature of habit. Dolores is fished out of a place called the Bering Vortex by Ro’s father and placed within a tank at the aquarium where she has the same routines every day.
Dolores is like any other giant Pacific octopus with the exception that she’s larger than life. “I’ve always been fascinated by them. And one of the things they’re known for is, like, shifting colors and they’re just so fascinating,” Chung says to me and shares that animals have been a great source of inspiration in her writing.
Inspired by the post-apocalyptic Floridian setting of the short story “The Gondoliers” by Karen Russel, the environment of the Bering Vortex was meant to feel “beautiful and surreal, but also terrifying.” While in real life, we currently have giant islands of garbage floating in our oceans, Chung hints at greater ecological devastation that results in the evolution of creatures like Dolores in places like the Bering Vortex.
“Human beings, we often see ourselves as sort of separate and apart from nature, but we are animals. At the end of the day, we’re part of the natural world,” Chung says about Ro’s relationship with Dolores, one of the only anchors in her life.
It is a tall order to pinpoint exactly what Chung’s novel is about. Seemingly disparate themes swirl together: Asian American families, specifically the immigrant experience; how relationships rise and fall; what it means to care about animals, the earth, and one another rather than try to escape it; as well as a steady undercurrent of environmentalism. All in all, “Sea Change” is a multilayered debut that will speak to children of immigrants as the tides of time and change churn around us.
Gina Chung is a Korean American writer. Born in Queens and raised in New Jersey, she is now based in Brooklyn, New York. Available at your local bookseller, “Sea Change” is a novel about climate change, giant Pacific octopuses, and family.
