Interrogating the text (2019) | Tra Tran / Unsplash License
Author Gina Chung finds herself interrogating real life through fiction—so much so that she curated a collection before realizing the stories were obsessed with the same things. She’s the author of Sea Change (Vintage Books, 2023) and most recently Green Frog (Vintage Books, 2024), the winner of the 2025 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction. In her conversation with Mikayla Emerson, Chung divulges about the inheritance of storytelling, the compromises needed to marry different languages, and what it’s like to have your parents at book launches.
Mikayla Emerson: I was touched by the initial dedication to your mother as your “first storyteller.” Throughout the collection, I found this running “love letter” to different storytellers, like the grandmother in “Rabbit Heart” and the mother in “Green Frog,” down to the final line in the acknowledgments: “thank you to all the storytellers of my life.” There’s this chain of storytelling about storytelling. Was this a natural development?
Gina Chung: I never set out to have a collection. But they represent ideas and stories and themes I think about a lot as a writer, including, as you’ve identified, matrilineal storytelling—the kinds of stories we inherit from our families or our heritage community.
A lot of the stories in the collection, while they don’t necessarily have a one-to-one relationship with specific Korean folktales and fairy tales, are inspired by the impact they had on me. That was why it was important to dedicate the book to my mom and to acknowledge that the only reason I’m a storyteller is because of the stories I first heard from people like my mom, who heard them from her mother, and so on.
When it came time to put the stories together, I realized those common themes even though they were something I was already thinking about as a writer.
Emerson: There is a quote in “Presence” that goes, “Everyone who comes here is running away from something. The body reveals everything if you know how to listen to it.” I was thinking about lived pasts as a storyteller—specifically memory. How do you see the relationship between personal memory and the stories we tell?
Chung: Memory is another theme that continues to come up for me as a fiction writer. It’s to the point where sometimes it’s even a crutch for me as a writer—if I don’t know where this character’s going to go, I start writing about their childhood. That’s partially for me investigative work to really get to know my characters and what is informing their actions in the present moment of the story.
Most of the things I’m writing about are not necessarily real, but they are. It’s my way of interrogating the meanings of my own memories.
So much of storytelling itself is building upon layers of time. I say in the classes I teach that time is the fiction writer’s number one ingredient. With other forms of writing, there’s the ability to collapse time or freeze it. You can certainly do that with fiction, but the reason we read fiction is to have a story, and a story is all about the passage of time. Time and memory are inextricably linked in fiction writing.
Emerson: I also noticed this relationship between characters and the Korean language. There is the line in “Rabbit Heart” when the granddaughter learns how to say, “Please be healthy and live a long time” in Korean to her grandmother. What is the role of language in your storytelling?
Chung: Like any writer, I’m obsessed with language and interesting words and turns of phrases. As someone who speaks and writes in primarily English and who also grew up in an immigrant household, I’m really interested in forms of English that we would call “broken English.”
I would call myself a heritage speaker of Korean. This is a term I learned recently—“heritage speaker.” It’s used to describe someone who grew up fluent in a mother tongue—the language of their parents or country of origin—but as they get older, their facility for the language diminishes or stays the same as when they were a child. I make do with what I have. My Korean is quite broken at times.
I don’t necessarily consider myself a translator. My goal when writing, say, the experience of speaking Korean as someone who’s not fluent, is how that clumsiness can be rendered on the page in a way that’s truthful while still also having emotional texture.
With that line you mentioned from “Rabbit Heart,” I was thinking about one of the earliest phrases my parents taught me to say on the phone with family members living in Korea. The phrase literally translates to, “Please be healthy and live a long time.” It looked awkward on the page in English, but it felt like the truest way to describe not just the phrase but also the sentiment behind it. It’s the only way you can convey your love and feelings for someone that far across the world.
Emerson: In an interview with Idaho Review, you said, “A lot of my writing in general comes from an image or a question I have.” Could you share what that image or question was for “Rabbit Heart”?
Chung: I took a class online in 2020 with the writer K-Ming Chang. She taught this class all about myths and stories and family.
We read a story that combined mundane details about a family and then something unusual happening, which is something that happens a lot in her work. I started thinking about the image of a child getting to know their grandparent and not having a lot of time with them, and what it would look like to magically be able to extend that time.
Some of it is based on personal experience—my maternal grandmother had a brain aneurysm and was in an unresponsive state for over 10 years. I often found myself, as a kid, wondering what it would be like if she could wake up and resume activities as normal. The story would not have been born without that initial prompt, but it also came out of early childhood wounds and questioning.
Emerson: I’ve noticed on your social media that your parents have been able to attend your book events. With such vulnerable, sentimental and enduring themes of family in your stories, what has that been like?
Chung: My family is very proud. They’re very supportive. To my parents’ credit, even when I was growing up, there was never any overt pressure to do something “practical.” Like a lot of immigrant parents, they were always concerned about my ability to provide for myself. In addition to being proud, I think they’re also relieved. They’re like, Oh, there’s something happening here. She’s not just being crazy alone in a room.
It’s been very lovely to have them be part of things. They don’t always understand all the ins and outs of the literary world and what it means to be a writer in 2025, but they’ve always been very supportive.
It also felt extremely vulnerable, as you said, especially when they were coming to events for my novel Sea Change, which has a lot to do with family strife and intergenerational trauma, especially within the immigrant family context. I still don’t know if my mom has read my novel. My dad did. When I asked what he thought, he replied, “it’s very cinematic.” And then we didn’t really discuss it, but he was very proud of it.
Click here to read an excerpt from “Rabbit Heart,” a short story from Gina Chung’s Green Frog, courtesy of Vintage Books.
