In “Flux,” Jinwoo Chong’s riveting and distinctive debut novel, things are not what they seem.
Bo is an eight-year-old boy whose mother dies shortly before Christmas. In his grief, he takes comfort in watching episodes of a short-lived ‘80s cop show, “Raider,” known for its brooding, violent protagonist, Thomas Raider. Despite its caricatured approach to race, the series provides an important piece of representation for Bo, who is Korean-American; Raider, who Bo calls Jacket Guy, adopts a Chinese boy who’s lost his parents to a Chinatown crime lord.
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At 28, Bo goes by Brandon, and he is facing one crisis after another. Haunted by grief and guilt, Brandon is exploring his sexual identity while alienating lovers and family with his distant behavior. Still clinging to the Raider character, Brandon lands a lucrative but mysterious new job at Flux, a corporation that may have malevolent intent… and may even be endangering Brandon’s life with time travel experiments.
Then there’s Blue, as Bo/Brandon is known at age 48. Blue is dragged out of obscurity to help an ambitious TV show doing an exposé looking back at Flux’s misdeeds; Blue ultimately sees this as one last opportunity to set things right in his life, despite the potential price he might have to pay.
The author, a first-generation Korean-American is 27 and lives in Manhattan. He spoke recently by video about the novel’s numerous themes and storylines. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. It’s a complex novel. How did you get started and were you sold on the time travel element from the start?
The seed came when I read “Bad Blood,” a book about the fall of Theranos and decided I wanted to write about Theranos with time travel. Then I couldn’t let it go so even when it got complicated, it would have been like cutting off a limb so I ended up keeping everything.
Q. It’s an ambitious debut. Were you confident about juggling it all?
I was rife with insecurity. I lived with the story for three years in my head so when it came time to write it down I was thinking it makes perfect sense to me but I worried whether someone who was going to read it over just a couple of days would understand things the way I did. Then almost every editor turned it down because they thought it was too confusing.
Q. The marketing copy says this is a book “about a young man whose reality unravels when he suspects his mysterious employers have inadvertently discovered time travel — and are using it to cover up a string of violent crimes …” That’s not how I’d describe it.
The jacket copy stuff is so weird to me. I’d say, “Can you take this sentence out” and the marketing people would say, “It has a word in it that will get picked up by all the search engines.”
I think the book is more about family and the processing of grief.
Q. Brandon suffers a terrible childhood trauma but still, his behavior is immensely frustrating. Was it difficult inhabiting a main character who is so passive that he ends up mistreating those closest to him and even endangering his own life?
My advisor in my MFA workshop told me my stories all have the same problem — the character doesn’t do anything, everything just happens to him. To me, that was the point, these characters observe the world and that made it easier to satirize their community and society. So I pushed back on that. Brandon is passive by design. I created his personal tragedy to legitimize that passivity.
I was never truly disappointed or annoyed by him. Deep down, he’s a good person who is so shut off and damaged that his intentions are almost always muddled by his inability to make his point clearly to other people.
As introverted as I am, I can connect with how he’s very caring but always has the wrong way of showing it.
Q. What would his family and lovers say?
They all think he’s terrible. Even his own daughter gives up on him.
Q. Two characters argue about whether a Korean American character was raised Korean enough. What’s your view?
That is something I struggle with. My parents tried to make me as Korean as possible. They’re both fluent and I’m not. They watch a lot of Korean media but I don’t.
I was born here and at times I don’t even think I’m Asian American, I’m just American. I grew up in Princeton surrounded by White people and with very few Asian people in my life.
I felt forced to find ways to be both. I don’t believe in rejecting either part of it but it’s difficult to always keep both sides of your identity inside you. This skewed heritage is the most interesting thing about me and I was looking to mine in it this book with Brandon. It makes for so much rich conflict.
If I’m lucky enough to have children, I don’t know what I would do.
Q. There’s also a brief discussion of whether two Korean characters need to go to an authentic Korean restaurant. What’s your view on galbi tacos with kimchi pico de gallo?
I’m not very traditional. I don’t understand the offense people take about the perceived authenticity of food. None of us are in Korea, we’re in America— people can do whatever they want with food, and a lot of the times it’s really good.
Q. Your descriptions of “Raider” are so vivid. How much did you plot out the show?
I never write anything if I can’t see it in my head. I would literally have written one for every chapter if I could have made it work. I even did an outline for a bunch of the rest of the episodes even though I speed through them at the end. Those were the most fun parts of the book to write, to get lost in this separate world, I felt like I was directing the show.
Q. Who is your personal Jacket Guy?
Darth Vader. Brandon is so enamored by how idealized and confident Raider is. That’s how I felt about Darth Vader. He’s not a hero but he was the epitome of cool. It manifests in weird ways – he’s the reason I like wearing black clothes.
Q. Are you a fan of “Back to the Future” or like the character who names the corporation Flux, were you being ironic too?
I was a major fan. At a book event, somebody asked me the title and she was laying out what it could mean — the literal definition or in the context of metallurgy — and it was so embarrassing because my answer was that I just thought it was a really cool word from “Back to the Future.”
