Korean Quarterly - Summer 2003
The Inner Detective:
A portrait of mystery author Leonard
Chang
by Martha Vickery/Korean Quarterly
Leonard Chang is writing mystery novels in which the outer
activities of the
character solving the mystery and the inner self-exploration the
character
pursues in the course of the story are equally important.
Chang is the author of two recent novels that use the same
main character,
Allen Choice, a rootless, rather directionless Korean American
guy who works
as a bodyguard. In the first novel of the pair, Over the
Shoulder,
published last year, Choice's partner in the security firm is
killed,
seemingly in the act of protecting a high profile client. In investigating
the murder of his partner, Choice gradually realizes that the
hit may not
have been meant for the client, nor for his partner, but that
it was most
likely meant for him.
The murder investigation leads Choice on a search for the murderer
of his
own father, as well as for his partner, and leads him into a process
of
learning about himself and his family's murky history.
In the second novel of the pair, Underkill, published in May,
Choice
investigates another murder. The brother of the woman he
is involved with
is killed, apparently in a car accident, which, the two discover,
was only
made to look like an accident, and was actually an execution by
a drug ring.
The case takes Choice deep into the drug and organized crime culture
of Los
Angeles.
Chang is also
the author of two other novels. His first
was The Fruit and
Food, (published in 1996), the story of a second generation Korean
American
guy hired by an immigrant couple to work at their store. His second novel,
Dispatches from the Cold (published in 1998), gets inside the
mind of a man
who plots to murder his Korean American boss, and reveals the
petty
jealousies, racism and resentment that motivate the killer.
Until recently, Chang was a visiting writer at Mills College,
located in the
San Francisco Bay area, where he taught master's level students
in an MFA
degree writing program. He is now taking some time off to
write a third
Allen Choice novel.
Chang said the diversity and the high percentage of Asian Americans
in the
Berkeley area was a delightful surprise after growing up on Long
Island,
where his was the only Asian family in their town. Chang went
to Dartmouth
College, dropped out, and later went to Harvard and got his degree.
Asked about subject matter for his books, Chang said he is
trying to balance
between known and unknown subjects. "When I started
writing, it was very
much writing what I knew and who I knew, but then I got better
at it, I
guess. I also got better at things like research, interviews,
and generally
in learning more about other things. The ratio began to
shift. It became a
new skill, writing about other things convincingly."
Still, it's necessary for a writer to know enough about a topic
to be
believable, Chang stressed. "I think at the core of
everything I write,
there is that element of something very close to me. That's
the only way I
can be excited about it, is to have that personal connection."
What he writes about, and what other Korean American novelists
are writing
about, has begun to fill a void he perceives in the world of fiction.
"If
you were to break down the process I go through in starting a
project, one
of the steps is I ask myself what do I, Leonard, want to read? Then I look
around and try to find things I want to read. If I can't
find it, then I
set out to write it."
Chang said he has been an avid reader of mysteries and detective
novels
since high school. "And one of the things I really
wanted to read was a
crime novel that dealt with a Korean American or just an Asian
American
character. There are novels out there that deal with Asian
American
characters. But none quite satisfied me in terms of what
I was looking for.
So, I just tried to do it myself."
Although The Fruit and Food received much positive criticism
as a first
novel from an unknown author, Chang's next major work, Dispatches
from the
Cold, received a number of negative reviews, particularly for
Chang's choice
of the letter narrative form, in which the inner feelings of the
murderer
are known through his letters.
"To some
extent I can really understand where they're
coming from because it
does feel like a contrived device to have those letters," Chang said of
the
spate of negative reviews that followed Dispatches. "But
I really needed
those letters in the whole structure of the novel, in order to
get at the
character of Gordon. Without those letters, he was really
inaccessible."
Chang is philosophical about the necessity of growing through
those periods
of negativism from critics. "One thing I've learned through
reading about
writers I admire, and going back and doing some critical studies
of writing,
is that reviews come and go, and it's almost like one big workshop,
like in
a fiction writing class, which is all about contradictions and
conflict," he
said. "In the end, it's not whether or not there is
any consensus, but
whether you can affect a few of those readers at that table."
Chang is starting to enjoy the idea of a continuing character
in Allen
Choice. The accumulation of experiences in the first two
novels, especially
Choice's self-reflection and his decision to move into a new career,
prepares the character for a new adventure in a novel yet to come.
"It's really,
really liberating to know I have this huge
canvas, and I can
go back to this one character and explore different aspects of
him. I don't
have to limit myself to one short storyline that has to be wound
up in
200-some pages." This second book is, in a way, "like
a big second chapter
of a really big novel." Chang said. He has taken
care to "plant seeds" in
his novels, such as characters or hints of subplots, that he can
pick up as
storylines or subplots in subsequent books.
Chang said some of his favorite continuing characters are John
Updike's
so-called "Rabbit" novels, in the non-mystery genre,
or Ross Macdonald or
Michael Connelly's mystery detective novels. "I'm very
much interested in
such attempts to stretch out this person's life over time and
look at
different aspects of it. Macdonald's novels provided a kind
of a model for
Over the Shoulder," he said.
Some of the characteristics of Chang's main character, Allen
Choice, are
typically Korean American, although many mainstream readers may
not realize
it upon reading the novels. Choice's parents immigrated
"not too unlike
mine" to try to have a better life, he said. The character
of Allen Choice
also has an ongoing "sense of dislocation, of having Korean
parents who had
one foot in the motherland, and the other in the U.S., and that
split was
emblematic of Allen himself," he pointed out. "He
didn't learn the Korean
language, for example. He was Korean American, but not
clearly aligned
with either Korea or America. He had to wrestle with that
and try to
recognize some ethnic, racial, cultural roots within the setting
or
environment of being American, except for his parents and the
way he looks."
Choice cannot remember his mother, and his memories of his
dad are of the
chronically tired, under-employed, quintessentially silent Korean
American
immigrant father. "There was evidence of Allen's father
trying to inculcate
in him the values of being American, so not teaching him Korean,
for
example, could be seen as an effort by his father to help him
be more
American, and he was very much success-oriented in wanting Allen
to succeed
in school."
This was very much immigrant thinking, he said, to equate higher
education
and assimilation into American culture with success. Similarly,
Choice's
aunt In Sook, practically disowns him as a nephew after he drops
out of
college and refuses to achieve in the traditional way of eldest
sons in
Korean American families.
Choice's father does not tell him much about his own immigration,
or the
reasons why Choice is Korean American and not Korean. That
most basic
element of family history is unknown to Choice and ultimately
becomes an
essential part of his investigation. "The most classic
scene in my mind is
when Allen finds out his father once wanted to be a doctor and
had in his
possession all those medical books," Chang remarked. Not only was
this
Choice's father's unrealized dream, it was a dream he perceived
as so far
from reality that he did not even mention it to his family.
The character
of Choice "started out being a lot like
me," Chang said, "but
then as I wrote more about him, he began to really take on a life
of his
own. In many ways, his character began diverging from mine. For example,
I
don't think I'm as insecure as my portrait of Allen in understanding
things
about myself, but I'm very curious about things about my life,
and think a
lot about my relationships with others, and that comes out in
Allen's
character."
"But I'm
not interested in writing autobiography, or about
myself in any
explicit way, but to make the character work, to make the character
real,
you have to inject something of yourself," he observed. "But
now he's so
much his own character. I envision him very separately and
distinctly from
myself."
Allen's last name "Choice" was
a real name of a Korean
American student
Chang met while studying briefly at Yonsei University in Seoul. "This
student said his father actually looked through the dictionary
to find a
name that was close to "Choi" and came up with Choice,
and used that as a
last name, because he perceived it as more American," Chang
said. "That
happened 15 years ago, maybe, and it always stuck with me, so
when it came
time to name my character, that popped back up. Now I'm
stuck with it!"
The name Choice, which is not even a name in either the American
or Korean
lexicon of surnames, is also symbolic of the character, who floats
between
and passes through both cultures, never able to settle in either
one.
Choice's relationship with Linda Maldonado, a Latino American
woman,
continues in the second book, and the two come up against a personal,
as
well as a cultural, divide that Choice has a hard time puzzling
out. On the
one hand, they are both conversant with the role of being a minority
person
in this culture. On the other hand, Linda has a hard time
understanding the
almost complete isolation Choice has from his family, while her
life is
interwoven with the lives of many family members. Choice
finds all the
personal interrelationships and sense of duty that is a part of
her life
burdensome, as well as bewildering.
Another complication of the story and Linda's family interrelationships
is
that the trail of clues left by her brother, Hector, whose death
the two are
investigating, leads to the world of organized crime in Los Angeles,
specifically to the world of "raves," organized dance
parties where street
drugs are purchased.
"Making something
seem as real as possible requires a
certain amount of
participation, so I had to go to a few raves in LA, and it was
very
interesting," Chang said. "It has become a big
business in LA," he
observed. "There are some organizers that get permits and
try to make it
very legal, and don't condone the drug use or anything like that. In some
cases, the whole culture is based on not commercializing it. But the drug
use goes hand in hand with the rave culture in many cases."
Chang agrees there is an emerging genre of Korean Americans
in literature.
He even attended a meeting at UCLA of writers of Korean American
literature
about five years ago, at which he met Chang Rae Lee (Native Speaker,
A
Gesture Life ), Helie Lee (Still Life with Rice, In the Absence
of Sun), and
Heinz Insu Fenkl (Memories of My Ghost Brother). Today,
he said, Korean
American literature is moving to the next level, not so much absorbed
with
defining Korean American identity as it is with creating characters
who are
fully defined and happen to be Korean American, too.
The characteristics of the novels from Korean Americans that
have been
published are "not necessarily representative of what
Korean Americans are
going through," Chang said. " A lot of publishers
are accepting and
publishing only a certain kind of Korean American fiction. I could tell
you
about some really interesting rejection letters I've gotten for
the Allen
Choice and for other novels I've written in which, because the
characters
weren't 'Korean enough,' the publishers didn't want to publish
it."
Chang said he wants to bust the subtle racism of the publishing
world by
presenting a fully actualized Korean American character in a very
attractive
package ---- the detective novel. "One of the reasons
I'm doing a mystery
series is because it's a way to write about a Korean American
character for
whom race is not the sole function of his life. It's unrealistic
that
Korean Americans in novels would think only about their identity
and their
race. We have to kind of negotiate in that terrain," Chang said, speaking
for other Korean American novelists. "These questions
are certainly a part
of being Korean American, but they are not the only part, and
the only way I
was able to explore that is through a long-running series of one
haracter, and the best way to do that is to frame it within
a mystery."
The novel Underkill is about a character trying to find his
place in the
world "but it's not just a function of his race," Chang
pointed out. "While
the identity searching is prevalent, it is not necessarily the
fault of the
authors, but is a reflection possibly of what editors and readers
want. It
is not the only thing that should be represented."
Chang wants to have perhaps six or seven Allen Choice novels,
which all
explore his life and everything about him, to the point where
people look at
Allen Choice not just as this Korean American, but as a fully realized
character who just happens to be a Korean American. "But
I'm not there yet,
because I have not explored enough of him to relay that idea,"
he said. "I
hope I can write enough stories about him that he becomes completely
real to
the reader, and not just a representative of a certain ethnic
group."
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