Catherine Chung is an Asian-American writer who is particularly known for her novel Forgotten Country. She has published her works in The New York Times, Granta, and The Rumpus.
Background
Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, Illinois, United States, and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Her father was an American professor and her mother was an Asian immigrant academic. So they spoke English in life, but at home, they spoke Korean. She has an older brother.
Education
Catherine Chung didn't know English when she went to school so she felt like an outsider. In the second grade she wrote her first poem.
She graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in mathematics. Then Catherine Chung went from mathematics to writing and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Cornell University.
Career
After graduating from the University of Chicago, Catherine Chung worked at a think tank The Rand Corporation in Santa Monica. When she realized that her interest lies mainly in writing, she started writing poems and stories. She scribbled and scribbled, writing stories and poems, and eventually received her degree in writing. She was lucky enough to meet amazing teachers and friends, and she spent the following years teaching, working on her first novel, Forgotten Country, and moving from place to place. She and her book were given shelter and encouragement at MacDowell, Jentel, Hedgebrook, SFAI, Camargo, The University of Leipzig, and Yaddo. Her brother, Heesoo Chung, also gave her a bed during this time.
The successful debut book written by author Catherine Chung is entitled Forgotten Country. She came up with the title Forgotten Country around the time when she was doing a lot of research into the Korean War, which is also sometimes called the Forgotten War. The book was released by the Riverhead Hardcover publication in 2012. Author Chung has done the story’s setting in Korea and America. This book weaves the Korean folklore inside a modern description of identity and immigration. It provides a fierce exploration of the conflict between freedom and obligation and tries to explain how loss can be inevitable at times.
Other than her 2012 widely popular debut novel, Chung has also written several essays and short stories that have been published in The Rumpus, Granta, and The New York Times.
The Guernica Magazine has also hired her as its fiction editor. Catherine has taught creative writing in America and Germany (The University of Leipzig).
She is currently a Visitor in the Interdisciplinary Program at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and she is working as a creative writing assistant professor at Adelphi University.
Views
Catherine always wanted to be a writer. English is not the first language for her, Korean is her first language. She didn't learn English until she went to school. She feels like her mother tongue is Korean and that English is the language of school.
The writer Alexander Chee had a great influence on her.
Quotations:
"When I became a math major in college, it felt like really a deviation, if that makes sense - like a vacation from my desire to be a writer. Part of that happened - the math - because I didn't realize that being a writer was actually a possibility. I always knew that I wanted it, and I knew that I wanted it more than I wanted anything, and still, it didn't seem like anything I could do, and I think part of it was because I was Asian."
"You know, the people who influence us when we're children or when we're just becoming adults, it's just tremendous influence. It just opened me up in a sort of way that was so important."
"I think I started writing, on the other hand, because it allowed me to actively engage with language in a critical way. When I was growing up, we spoke Korean at home, so I didn’t learn English until I started school. It was very bewildering: all of a sudden I had a name I’d never been called before, and couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Weirdly enough, I learned to read and write at the same level as the rest of my class before I could track even the most basic conversation in real life."
"I think my interest in mathematics was that of a writer: I was always trying to translate it back into a story. The two interests come from the same source though, which is an obsession with language and its capacity to explore things larger than ourselves. I discovered mathematics as an undergraduate, and fell in love with how beautiful it was: it can be so precise and elegant - and asks all sorts of big questions."
"Each life contains as much meaning as all of history."
Personality
Catherine Chung has always been fascinated with the idea of having sisters because she’s always been interested in women and the relationships between them.