Unusual relationships. I’ve always found myself gravitating towards narratives replete with these and Gina Chung’s debut novel, Sea Change, has one of the most unusual relationships I’ve discovered yet; one between a young Korean-American girl named Ro and Dolores, the octopus. Acquainting us to her book in her own words, Gina shares, “Sea Change is a coming-of-age story about love, loss and cephalopods. Our thirty-year-old protagonist, Ro Bae, is grappling with a breakup (her boyfriend has left her to join a missionto colonise Mars), her changing friendship with her ambitious best friend and her strained relationship with her mother. The one bright spot in Ro’s life is Dolores, a highly intelligent giant Pacific octopus at the aquarium where she works, who also happens to be her only remaining connection to her marine biologist father, who disappeared during a research trip when Ro was a teenager. When Ro learns that Dolores is being sold to a private buyer, she must come to terms with her childhood trauma regarding her parents’ relationship and her father’s disappearance, the relationships she has neglected over the years and her own place in an ever-changing world.”
There are many elements at play in Sea Change, from thematic to structural. Beginning with the book’s structure, the author explains, “I knew, once I had started to think of the story as a novel, what the ending would be but I wasn’t sure how I would get there. So, I basically outlined the story beforehand and I liked the idea of having it follow an alternating past-present structure, which Kristen Arnett does in a really stunning and beautiful way in her novel Mostly Dead Things. I wanted the reader to get to know my protagonist Ro, not just how she moves about in her present day but also how she’d gotten there, what had happened to her and her family, in the past, to shape who she is today. Once I’d created the outline, I split it up into chapters, which I tackled week by week throughout that semester. I also had a running document of facts about octopuses and aquariums that I came across in my research, just things I found interesting or thought would be important for the book and that was helpful as well.”
Furthermore, the thematic concerns of the book are many, from climate change and navigating the ebb and flow of early adulthood, to the Korean American experience of growing up in America and filial relationships, Gina Chung uses her book to tackle relatable issues using extraordinary circumstances. Reminiscing about the book’s inception, she reveals, “I was initially inspired by an in-class writing prompt that I was assigned during one of my writing classes in my MFA program. I wrote a paragraph or two of what later became the novel’s opening and thought I might write a short story out of it. At that point, I didn’t have any ideas for a novel at all. But later that summer, which was the summer of 2020, I revisited it and submitted it as a story to an informal workshop that some friends and I had convened and they all told me that I needed to expand it, to answer the questions that I was laying out. So, the project then became my MFA thesis, which I worked on throughout the fall of 2020. I think a lot of what I was feeling then — grief, loneliness, a sense of disconnection from the larger world around me, due to the losses of the pandemic — really found its way into the themes of the book. To be fair, those emotional themes often preoccupy me as a writer, but I think they came out in a particularly concentrated way while I was drafting the novel.”
The Korean American experience is one that is yet to be exhaustively explored in contemporary literature and Sea Change provides an insightful and nuanced look at it. “As a Korean American and the child of immigrants, who also came of age in northern New Jersey, I’m intimately familiar with the particular world that Ro moves through (although sadly, I’ve never worked in an aquarium or worked with an octopus). I grew up in a small, predominately white town in an immigrant family and while there was very little diversity in my immediate vicinity, my parents always took me to church each week, where we did interact with other Korean American families. And so, I always felt as though I was moving through worlds, navigating from home to school to my family’s church and back again and I think that’s another reason why I was drawn to the idea of an aquarium, which is also a zone where many different worlds meet.”
“I hope the book makes readers feel seen, in whatever way that means for them and feel less alone. I also hope it can serve, in its own way, as a reminder of everything we stand to lose if we don’t care for our planet and the many communities and ecosystems that we are all part of,” voices Gina of her authorial intentions. “It was difficult at times trying to manage my own expectations for myself. I wrote the first draft of this book while working full-time and in a graduate program (I still work full-time outside of writing, as many writers do) and sometimes, I would beat myself up about not having completed a certain word count goal or for not having gotten as much done as I’d wanted. Eventually, I realised that this is not a very sustainable or healthy way to have a writing practice and so it’s been really valuable for me as a writer to give myself the gift of time — also, to remember that inspiration is not something I can squeeze out of myself if I am running low on resources like energy, rest, time spent with myself and time spent with friends and loved ones.” And with that wonderful lesson, we are eagerly looking forward to Gina Chung’s future work. Giving us a glimpse at her projects in the pipeline, she mentions, “I’m working on revisions for my short story collection, titled Green Frog, which is forthcoming from my publisher Vintage in 2024. It’s about Korean American girls and women, animals, bodies and the myths that shape us. It’s been really nice to revisit short stories again. I’m also working, on the side, on my next novel, which I think structure-wise will be a bit of a shift from Sea Change.”
Words Nidhi Verma