sity as an English major. Longing to move to the
United States to study, she applied and was ac-
cepted at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New
York. After passing an intensive government exam
in order to obtain a visa, Choi left for the United
States in September 1958. Upon graduating from
college, she began teaching in the New York public
school system, where she has taught literature and
creative writing to high school students for more
than 20 years.
In 1991, 10 years after the death of her hus-
band, Mark, Choi wrote her first novel, The YEAR
OF IMPOSSIBLE GOODBYES, an autobiographical
novel about a young Korean girl, Sookan, and her
life under the Japanese occupation of her coun-
tr y. Year won numerous awards including the
Judy Lopez Book Award by the National Women’s
Book Association in 1992, and was selected as a
Notable Book by the American Library Associa-
tion. In 1993 Choi followed The Year of Impossible
Goodbyes with a sequel, ECHOES OF THE WHITE GI-
RAFFE. The novel continues Sookan’s experiences
in Korea under Japanese occupation, and details
the pain of a forced separation from her beloved
father and older brothers. Echoes was placed on
Tennessee’s State Book Award Master Reading List
as recommended reading for young adults. Choi’s
third novel, GATHERING OF PEARLS, follows the story
of Sookan, who has finally realized her dream of
visiting the United States. Gathering won the 1995
Books for the Teen Age Award from the New York
Public Library.
Choi is also the author of many picture books
for young children. Her first, Halmoni and the
Picnic, was published in 1993 and is a poignant
tale of young Yunmi’s Korean grandmother who
comes to live with Yunmi’s family in America.
Yunmi is embarrassed by her grandmother’s
Korean traditions but later recognizes their value.
In 1997 Choi published Yunmi and Halmoni’s Trip,
in which Yunmi and her grandmother travel to
Korea. Yunmi experiences a culture shock, which
enables her to better understand her grandmoth-
er’s struggles to acculturate in America. Choi’s
focus changed somewhat with the publication
of a third picture book, The Best Older Sister,
which explores Sunhi’s unfavorable reaction to
the arrival of a new baby brother. Choi’s works
have been included in numerous anthologies and
have been translated into five languages. Choi
lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she
writes full time.
Debbie Clare OlsonChoi, Susan (1969– )
A Korean-American writer born in Indiana, Choi
spent most of her childhood in Texas before at-
tending school in the Northeast. With a B.A. from
Yale University (1990) and an M.F.A. from Cornell
University, Choi is currently on the editorial staff
of the New Yorker magazine. In addition to her
two published novels, The Foreign Student (1998)
and American Woman (2003), Choi has published
short stories in Iowa Review and Epoch and, with
David Remnick, edited Wonderful Town: New York,
Stories from “The New Yorker” (2003).
Choi’s first novel, The Foreign Student, received
critical acclaim and enjoyed commercial success.
Winner of the Asian-American Literary Award for
Fiction in 1998, The Foreign Student is set both at
the University of the South in Sewanee and the
war-ravaged Korean Peninsula during the 1950s. It
charts the arrival of former translator Chang Ahn,
a Korean national fleeing Seoul on a scholarship
from the Episcopal Church Council, in Tennessee
and his subsequent encounters with the xenopho-
bia and insularity of the U.S. South and with Kath-
erine Monroe, a wealthy and equally conflicted
young woman from New Orleans.
As the novel moves constantly back and forth
in time and from Korea to Tennessee, “Chang
and Katherine, as they slowly fall in love, find
that they—and the cultures they represent—are
not that different after all, both subject to linger-
ing issues of class, family, race, and civil war” (Lee
194). Translating not only between languages but
also between cultures, in all of their manifest com-
plexities, functions as one of the main tensions
throughout the novel. As Choi writes, “Chang had
done enough translation already to know that thereChoi, Susan 47