Love Across the Color Lines: The Occlusion of Racial Tension in Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student

Abstract

Susan Choi’s The Foreign Student (1998) traces Chuck (Chang) Ahn’s journey from the war-stricken Korea to a small college town in Tennessee in the 1950s; it follows Chuck, previously displaced by the rhetorics of war and racial discrimination, as he searches for a sense of belonging in the heartland of America. Choi’s work is one among many others emerging in Asian American literary arena which stake out the south as another compelling locus of Asian America. Leaving aside for now if we can read Choi’s novel as “southern” (in the strictest sense), contexualizing The Foreign Student within the framework of southern literature not only extends our understanding of this understudied novel but its inclusion in the southern literary tradition reconceptualizes the south as a vibrant “multi-ethnic, polyglot” community, in which various ethnic, racial, sexual, social, and economic perspectives intersect and coalesce. In particular, this essay discusses how Choi’s novel aims to couch the intricacies of interracial intimacy within a heartrending love story. Chuck and Katherine are both compromised of their agency in this confined terrain of the south, weighed down by the history of its dependence on the slave economy, the perpetration and perpetuation of racial injustice, and the commodification of the “southern lady” trope. One is othered by his race while the other is marginalized by her gender. Choi’s insistence on idealizing romantic love inadvertently invites an omission of veiled contention in Chuck and Katherine’s interracial relationship, which is, upon closer inspection, fraught with racial and gender power struggle between these two protagonists.