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Shadow
Novelist
PAGE 2 OF 4
SC: By comparison with Indiana Houston was (and is) vastly more diverse and interesting. For a while I was the only kid in school who didn't own jeans (in Indiana I'd been in a private school with a dress code). Houston was where I really found my independence. It gets a lot of flack as a city, but I loved growing up there.
GS: How did the divorce change your relationship with your father?
SC: We've always had a great relationship. He's supported me in absolutely everything Išve ever done.
GS: What role did being half Corean play in your early life (i.e. through high school)?
SC: Honestly, no role at all. I was in school with Black and Hispanic kids and later, with Jewish kids. Most of my close friends were Jewish. I'm Jewish, and that fact predominated. A holiday Jew, though. As in, we were happy to get out of school for Yom Kippur.
GS: Tell us how you became interested in writing fiction.
SC: I've written stories almost since I could read. It was my earliest impulse and Išm still at it.
GS: What made you choose Yale for college?
SC: Its reputation and my ignorance. I knew it was a good school, and I happened to get in. I never even bothered to look into whether or not you can major in creative writing at Yale, which is what I wanted to do. Note to future students: you can't. I majored in literature.
GS: Give us a picture of your life at Yale.
SC: I was weird and I fell in with weirdos. I lived off campus as soon as I could, took pretentious classes without taking the basics first, and worked in the dining hall. I dated many long haired guys. The usual stuff.
CONTINUED BELOW
GS: What type of fiction did you write at Yale?
SC: Mostly bad short stories. I didn't end up writing that much, actually. I took a fiction course almost every year but there was so much else to dig into that my focus became pretty diffuse.
GS: How did you come to be working at a health food store for two years after graduating from Yale? Were you contemplating a writing career? What did you write and publish during those years?
SC: Well, I was in San Francisco. I think that pretty much explains it all. The other employees were Russian Scholars and ballet dancers, it was that kind of place. I wasn't contemplating much of a career. Also, I wasn't at the health food store for two years, I was there for two months. Then I moved, and moved again; I lived in five cities in about fifteen months when I got out of college. I guess you could say I was contemplating a writing career in that my justification was, I was getting experience. My poor mother was sure I would default on all my students loans but somehow I didnšt.
GS: You've expressed some regrets about having spent two years getting a masters in creative writing from Cornell. Did you not enjoy your time at Cornell? How do you wish you had spent those years instead?
SC: I enjoyed those years at Cornell all too much well, the first two, anyway (I was there for a third year, trying to figure out what to do next). I wish I'd spent those years actually writing. Cornell was extremely supportive, but I needed a kick in the ass more than I needed support.
GS: You've said that while at Cornell you wrote only about 5-8 pages of a manuscript ultimately incorporated into The Foreign Student. Which portion was that? What was your original intention for the fragment?
SC: The scene literally at the end of the book, where Chuck returns to his family and is mistaken for a beggar by his mother, was something I'd written at Cornell in different form and the very beginning, where Chuck is leaving Seoul, was also written at Cornell. I was trying to write a short story but I couldn't get a handle on the shape the story would take. Obviously, I had too much material for a story, but I didn't know that at the time.
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| "I lived in five cities in about fifteen months when I got out of college." |