A Conversation with the Author:

Q: Crossings is a departure for you from your Allen Choice noir trilogy, isn’t it? What led you to write this novel?

A: I was considering writing another Allen Choice novel, but a trilogy seems so neat and contained, and I ended the last one at such a good place for Allen that I didn’t want to contrive a new story for him. I wanted to leave him in some peace. Instead, I began thinking about what other kinds of stories and characters intrigued me, and I began writing about Unha, one of the characters in Crossings. The opening of this novel was something that came to me very early on, and I couldn’t stop thinking about her. It’s hard for me to dictate what to write—often the material rises to the surface, and I am compelled to write about it.

This novel isn’t that much of a departure, given my previous novels. It has some connections to my first novel, The Fruit ‘N Food, about Korean immigrants, and in many ways Crossings has links to the secondary and tertiary characters in the stories revolving around Allen Choice. His parents were immigrants, for example.

Q: So Unha, one of the main characters, was the impetus for this novel?

A: The very first inkling came when I read about a large FBI bust of a string of massage parlors in San Francisco about four years ago. It was called Operation Gilded Cage. Approximately 100 Korean women, illegal immigrants, had been trafficked into the U.S. and forced into prostitution. I had seen some of these places in San Francisco, and it astonished me that this was still going on. Some of the reports were deeply disturbing and alarming, and the fact that this still happens now, in my hometown, made me want to write about it.

Q: What about the other main character, Sam?

A: When I was very young I met one of my uncles who drove a truck for a grocer, a recent immigrant, who had a very difficult life here. Eventually he married and found some stability, but I remember hearing about his struggles, and seeing the weight of everything on his hunched shoulders. I remember how sad he often looked. There was something about that expression of slogging through life here that stayed with me for many years. When I began writing Crossings and began to think about Sam and his brother, something about my uncle seeped into Sam’s character. This is fiction, of course, but fiction informed by glimpses and memories, snippets of people I’ve known and wondered about. Also, a good friend of mine recently lost someone very close to her, and that loss reverberated through her in a way that deeply affected me. I began thinking about personal loss and the consequences, and how this impinges on our decisions and our lives. All these things contributed to the slow development and birth of Sam and the other characters.

Q: What about the element of organized crime?

A: I did quite a bit of research about Korean jopok some years ago—“jopok” loosely meaning gangsters. The research led me to some interesting information about organized crime in Korea and the connections to the U.S., particularly in California and New York. When I began working on Crossings, some of that research found its way here in a very limited way.

Q: I noticed that Crossings is different in a few ways from your other works—one way in particular is your approach to punctuation and style.

A: This was something I’ve thought about for a long time. You’re talking about the use—or lack thereof—of quotation marks, I’m sure, because others have remarked on it. Essentially, I struggled with the idea of two languages being spoken in the novel and how this should be represented textually. It becomes cumbersome to label whether something is spoken in one language or another, especially when you’re dealing with bilingual characters. Some writers resort to the awkward “he said in Korean” and “she replied in English” kind of tags, but that was, for me, very ungainly, especially if the characters switch back and forth often. Other writers have used italics or some kind of textual differentiation, which was jarring in its own way. I asked fluent bilingual speakers about how they think and speak, and how dialogue might be rendered in their own minds, and the interesting thing is that the switching from one language to another, for a fluent speaker, is often seamless and almost unconscious. They have triggers, the language being spoken to them, that toggle their own responses, and they may think in one language and speak in another, but it’s often very unwitting. My parents, both bilingual, switched back and forth depending on whom they were speaking to: Korean to each other, English to the kids. Now if you compound this with the fact that dialogue in text is kind of an artificial construct anyway—all text is on some level—why not represent the intent and meaning without worrying about how it’s rendered on the page? As soon as I started doing this I was freed from the distraction of laying out in a painstaking way which line was English and which was Korean. To bilingual speakers who understand both, this distinction is less important than the meaning of what is being said. Hence the removal of quotation marks. Believe me, it would’ve been easier to leave them in, but this way worked better for the characters.

That is a long explanation for punctuation, but I didn’t make the decision lightly. There’s a reason why this novel took a long time to write.

Q: This novel also seems to have a wider view than your others, a wider cross-section of characters.

A: Yes, that was something I’d been meaning to do ever since my first novel. An early draft of The Fruit ‘N Food had many other characters, but in the revisions I whittled it down to the core of the story I wanted to tell. For Crossings, I allowed more characters to come in. It’s still a pretty focused novel, but I needed more voices.

Q: A few early reviewers commented on the harshness of your vision. Can you comment on that?

A: Well, I think there’s always a redemptive and sanguine quality to all my works that isn’t immediately obvious, and I know this because I am a pretty optimistic and hopeful person, and it invariably seeps into my work, no matter how dark the material may be. That being said, I’m not sure if I would be doing the characters and the stories justice if I were to embroider difficult situations with contrived sentiments. I feel a sense of deep responsibility to render and reveal characters and stories as truthfully as I can. Some of the stories about human trafficking and illegal immigration are harsh, and I’m not sure if anything but the honest depiction of some of the characters would be, well, right. I would’ve been negligent and remiss to be anything but forthright. Anyway, I remember when my first novel came out and a few reviewers were struck by the harshness of the story, and then a man I knew who worked in Korean groceries and knew many people like those characters read the novel and felt I wasn’t harsh enough. Since then I’ve learned not to worry about what people think and just write the best novel I can.

Q: One of the characters in the novel, David, becomes an Academic, a professor. You end with him, which is an interesting choice. Why?

A: David is a spiritual center of this novel. But I hesitate to reveal too much. I'll let readers decide for themselves.

Q: One final question. What’s next?

A: I wish I knew. I have a couple projects percolating, but this novel exhausted me. I may try another form, another genre, something that pushes me outside my normal comfort zone. Don’t ask me what that is, because I’m still figuring it out. That’s the wonderful thing about writing—you have so many areas to explore. I’m starting something right now that may take me in more of a non-fiction direction.