The (Un)Real Life: Master Class with Jinwoo Chong
For many, the speculative fiction genre can be daunting—one that they automatically discount when they come across it. However, Jinwoo Chong has been one of the contemporary leaders of the field, with his recent two novels demonstrating how reality can be sharpened in the process of its transfiguration. "The (Un)Real Life" is the perfect class for both fans and skeptics of speculative fiction, undoing its notoriousness thorniness and suggesting its possibilities.
This class seeks to examine the ways in which speculative fiction bends, augments, and either emphasizes or downsizes certain aspects of our reality to make conjectures about human nature, society, and other philosophical ideals. Specifically we are going to look at the real-life inspirations for some example texts and the ways in which they are transformed by the work: the fictional internment of Vietnamese-Americans in Kevin Nguyen's My Documents informed by the real-life internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII; the fictional televised prison gladiator tournaments informed by the real-life American carceral state in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah's Chain Gang All Stars; the fictional School for Good Mothers informed by the real-life judicial disenfranchisement of women caregivers in Jessamine Chan's titular novel; the fictional post-climate crisis utopian society informed by the real-life climate-change debate being waged by scientists and deniers in Nick Fuller Googins' The Great Transition. Over the course of the class, we will discuss the various ways in which the real world influences and shapes the world-building at play in these novels and how these writers push and pull at the facts to reveal a greater truth at the heart of these issues.
Jinwoo Chong is the author of the novels I Leave It Up to You and Flux, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, and named a best book of the year by Apple Books, Amazon Books, Esquire, HuffPost, GQ, Cosmopolitan, and Goodreads. His work has appeared in Guernica, The Southern Review, The Rumpus, LitHub, Chicago Quarterly Review, and Electric Literature.
From the award-winning author of Flux comes a dazzling novel about love, family, and the art of sushi that asks: What if you could return to the point of a fateful choice, wiser than before, and find the courage to forge a new path?
A coma can change a man, but the world Jack Jr. awakens to is one he barely recognizes. His advertising job is history, his Manhattan apartment is gone, and the love of his life has left him behind. He’s been asleep for two years; with no one to turn to, he realizes it’s been ten years since he last saw his family.
Lost and disoriented, he makes a reluctant homecoming back to the bustling Korean American enclave of Fort Lee, New Jersey; back into the waiting arms of his parents, who are operating under the illusion he never left; and back to Joja, their ever-struggling sushi restaurant that he was set to inherit before he ran away from it all. As he steps back into the life he abandoned—learning his Appa’s life lessons over crates of tuna on bleary-eyed 4 AM fish runs, doling out amberjack behind the omakase counter while his Umma tallies the night's pitiful number of customers, and sparring with his recovering alcoholic brother, James—he embraces new roles, That of romantic interest to the male nurse who took care of him throughout, and that of sage (but underqualified) uncle to his gangly teenage nephew.