Introduction

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Highly acclaimed by critics, The Foreign Student is the story of a young Korean man, scarred by war, and the deeply troubled daughter of a wealthy Southern American family. In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea he will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a beautiful and solitary young woman who, like Chuck, is haunted by some dark episode in her past. Without quite knowing why, these two outsiders are drawn together, each sensing in the other the possibility of salvation. Moving between the American South and South Korea, between an adolescent girl's sexual awakening and a young man's nightmarish memories of war, The Foreign Student is a powerful and emotionally gripping work of fiction.

The year is 1955 and a young Korean man has just arrived at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Chang Ahn has been dropped off at night in the middle of nowhere and left to make his way to the campus on his own: "This was the petrified figure that Mrs. Reston, the vice vice chancellor's housekeeper, found at the door to the vice vice chancellor's house.... You would not have known that the motionless person had just walked two miles straight uphill with a steady and terrified step." It soon becomes apparent that Chang, called Chuck, suffers from more than just fear of the dark. During the Korean War, he was first a translator for the United States and later a prisoner in a Communist internment camp. Even in the U.S. "he could not accept the lack of precaution as a sign that he was safe." On his first day in Sewanee, Chuck meets Katherine, a young woman who lives in town and is the secret lover of a professor who was once a classmate of her father's--and the man who first seduced her when she was 14.

The American South in 1955 is hardly an ideal locale to start an interracial romance, yet Katherine and Chuck are drawn to each other almost from the start. What begins as friendship gradually becomes something more, yet it takes a surprise proposal from Katherine's lover and a summer spent apart to make them face their true feelings. Susan Choi writes this first novel with assurance, weaving Chuck's terrible experiences of war and Katherine's own troubled past into a heartfelt tale of love that demonstrates real talent. Choi is definitely a writer to keep your eye on. --Margaret Prior

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