Korean Quarterly

Giving Voice to the Korean American Community

Sung J. Woo

When parallel lines intersect

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Lines ~ By Sung J. Woo

(Unsolicited Press, Portland (OR), 2024, ISBN # 978-1-956692-50-1

Review by Bill Drucker (Summer 2024)

On a foggy day, in New York City, Joshua Koslov and Abby Kim engage in two possible “what if” scenarios.  In one, the two literally collide by the Washington Square Arch.  They engage, they date, and they marry.  In the second scenario, they pass each other in close proximity in the fog, and do not meet.

With this rather brash premise for a fictional work, Sung J. Woo weaves a set of intricate narratives, one with the protagonists Josh Koslov, a frustrated writer and Abby Kim, a talented artist in a parallel existence; and the second in which they are in an intersecting existence.  The story, in two scenarios,  is set in contemporary New York City, a location familiar to the author, who earned his Master’s of Fine Arts from New York University.

The author explores the characters of Joshua and Abby – their human relationships, their inner lives, and certain chance moments that are seized or passed by.  The story is simple.  The complexities are in the decision-making and impulsive choices they engage in, and their consequences.

Woo has written an engaging, modern love story.  It is, however, a literary exercise in “what if” scenarios with variations of possible opportunities and vagaries of chance. The reader has to be accepting of the technique in order to get into the novel with understanding and enjoyment.

That said, Woo executes this literary exercise with creativity and a lot of emotional detail.  There are themes of fate, blind chance, the butterfly effect, and the popularized “sliding doors moment” all suggest that seemingly inconsequential moments do indeed alter the trajectory of future events.

This literary device has been written about, and played out in movies, such as the Polish art film, Blind Chance (1987), the American Sliding Doors (1998), and the German film Run Lola Run (1998).  All of these works play on a “What if I made this choice” premise. 

Blind Chance is laden with philosophical and ideological gravitas in which the protagonist is given three choices.  Sliding Doors is a slick, Hollywood romance with conditional premise; that the life of the character Helen (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) will go in two very different directions based on whether she does or does not catch a certain train.  As with the novel Lines, there are some significant consequences put in motion through the characters’ simple acts. There are certain bleak and fatalistic premises in these works, as exemplified by the character Josh’s perpetual disappointment with the results of his own actions.

In Lines, the two protagonists are young, educated New Yorkers who both aspire to be successful professionals; Josh as a writer and Abby as an artist. Abby and Josh are a couple in one scenario. In the other scenario, Josh is with Marlene, and Abby is with Ted. They navigate their marriages, their professions, support their spouses, tolerate their respective mate’s self-absorption, talk of children, and various successes and disappointments.

In his writing, Woo shows his knowledge of the young, educated and mobile class of New Yorkers rooted in literature and art.  They are familiar with Hemingway, Tolstoy and Dickens.  They have given their cadre of hi-tech professionals a combined acronym, FAANG or Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google.  This mobile crowd moves in highbrow circles and act like they belong, when they are actually not rich. They get around by riding a PATH (Port Authority-Trans-Hudson rapid transit)  or MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) train, and grab a lot of snacks from outdoor food vendors on their way to fancy events.

Disappointment seems to be a subtext in the life of frustrated writer Josh.  His manuscript has been turned down so many times, he does not even bother to count any more. However, he remembers everything about his debut novel, The Tragic Tolstoys.  He ruminates over how it took nine years to complete and how it was rejected by publishers 26 times.  By the 27th time, expecting another rejection, a little-known publisher offers to take it on with an advance of a paltry $100. It is hardly worth celebrating, but his wife Marlene insists they celebrate.

Josh stews over the success of a fellow writer.  His ego agrees with the New York Times review, which pans the writer’s ability as mediocre, describing her effort as “contrived, schematic, rootless, obvious.” Still, Josh decides to call and congratulate her for getting a review in a prestigious newspaper.

She welcomes the call and says she remembers Josh’s name on an NYU listserv, adding cleverly that he is a “fellow survivor of the creative writing program.” Josh makes a low-handed dig at the negative review.  She cheerfully shrugs it off.  They chat and then she excuses herself to pick up her child.  The reader wonders at this action, since Josh is described as jealous, spiteful, and self-flagellating. He is portrayed as conflicted about and envious of his colleague’s comparative success, while seeming to deny those feelings.

At his book opening, Josh is let down by the small size of his author photo which he perceives as another sign of his insignificance. Although he does not expect a cheering audience of fans, he is disappointed by the small showing.  The presence of Abby the artist, who is now pregnant, lifts his spirits.

In this scenario, Abby has had success on the internet selling her beautiful miniature artworks.  Her titles for her artful disks are fanciful, such as Cycling Guide to Lilliput.  Josh is taken with the marvelous little scenes, and begins to write creative vignettes to accompany the description of the artwork.  Abby’s fans love it, and she emails Josh, complimenting his creative writing.  On the street, Josh gets praise for the little stories but nobody ever mentions his novel.   

As the success of the miniatures rise, and Josh spends more time writing the vignettes, his life gets complicated.  His new pursuit becomes consuming.  When Marlene asks what he’s doing, Josh say nothing and closes his laptop.  Abby’s husband Ted also questions Josh’s literary contribution.  Josh begins dreaming about the tiny paintings.  He wakes up with his wife Marlene but he imagines her to be Abby.  Even when his son is born, he is still preoccupied by thoughts of Abby

In both scenarios, Josh is unhappy with his life, and his writing is stagnating as he turns 40. In both of his lives, as the Josh married with Abby, and the Josh married to Marlene, he falters as a husband and as a writer.  It’s his own doing.  His life with Abby is winding down after five years.  His life with Marlene also ends as Marlene succumbs to cancer.  

At the funeral, all Josh can think of is how his pants are too small.  The barn door could pop open anytime.  Josh looks at a roomful of sympathetic strangers.  Is this what it all comes to?  He suddenly realizes he has been a coward all his life.  Josh gets up to leave. As he hurries to open the doors, he cannot get to the outside light fast enough.

You can’t begrudge a writer who is popular and established from stepping over conventional literary boundaries into a more experimental form and format.  The literary device stretches the mind of the reader just as it does for the writer. This author’s literary shift doesn’t come out of the blue.  Woo’s writing history shows many forays into the unusual; one example is his earlier novel Skin Deep.  That novel deals with tennis and porn, identity and therapy. 

Woo plays with a subtext of geometry.  Each chapter is a parallel or intersecting narrative.  In math, parallel lines never intersect.  Among humans however, parallel lines/paths/lives can and do intersect.

Artist Dina Brodsky incorporates her beautiful miniature scenes into the storyline, which gives the novel another unique characteristic and fun factor.  By themselves, the disk-shaped illustrations are exquisitely detailed artworks.

Woo is a recognized short story writer, essayist, and novelist. His winning novel Everything Asian was published in 2009.  Other novels include Deep Roots, Love, Love and Skin Deep.  His writings have appeared in literary journals and magazines.

Modern complications in family succession

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Deep Roots: A mystery ~ By Sung J. Woo

(Agora Books, Polis (NJ), 2023, ISBN #978-1-957957-37-1)

Review by Martha Vickery (Fall 2023)

Deep Roots is the second novel in a series by Korean American author Sung J. Woo, who chose for his protagonist a Korean American adoptee private eye with the very Irish name of Siobhan O’Brien. Siobhan has inherited her small detective business from her predecessor in a surprising way, which is related in the first novel of the series, and in this story, Siobhan delves into the ancient beliefs of Koreans about the outsize importance of the elder male successor. The story also interrogates the moral and ethical implications of artificial intelligence, and questions what life and personality really are.

Vibing on the ethnic mixology of many transnational and transracial adoptee names, we find out in this novel that Siobhan has an African American adoptee brother, Sven O’Brien. With a title like Deep Roots, readers from a certain Korean American adoptee cultural perspective may easily imagine that our hero Siobhan is going to discover something about her own roots in the course of this story.  But those readers would be disappointed. 

Instead, this author offers only a minor subplot that is a back-story reveal about Siobhan. Building on his first story Skin Deep, Woo explains about Siobhan’s adoptive family, described as an Irish-Norwegian couple from Minnesota. In a mystery series, authors are usually stingy about revealing their hero’s personal history, and tend to give out back-story pieces a few at a time. This author has followed that tradition.

Beyond that, the author has Siobhan play her part straight, at least as straight as the personal soft-boiled detective style novel allows. The title Deep Roots apparently refers to a rich family, the Ahns, who are the subject of Siobhan’s investigation.  There is an entertaining mix of out-there, wacky characters, an exploration of the limits and excesses possible with artificial intelligence, and a cultural exploration that things can go terribly wrong when a family relies on Confucian beliefs about how succession works in a family business.

By so doing, the kingpin of the business ignores the obvious business acumen and good intentions of other family members around him, nearly destroying his family and the business he believes in so completely.

At the center of this mystery is one Phillip Ahn, an elderly billionaire who live on his own island in the Pacific Northwest, along with his two ex-wives, current wife, and their children, three daughters and one son in all, plus two grandchildren. The family members live in an immense technologically-autonomous hideaway full of servants and devices to fulfill every human need, as a condition of their future inheritance. They are all required to make their residence at the estate, Woodford, for a certain number of days per year, and have mandatory meals together. This forced, controlled cohabitation causes problems and rivalries of its own, even before the situation with the business/family succession comes to a head.

The elder Ahn is determined to pass on his business to his eldest (in this case only) son Duke, the youngest of the four children and still a college student. Siobhan does not have to go too far into her investigation to learn that the Duke has neither the skills, intellect or desire to own the business. The elder daughters, particularly Evie, have the skills and experience needed for leadership in the Ahn company.  

Siobhan is hired because the elder Ahn is convinced that Duke is an imposter.  It is a rather extraordinary claim, as everyone in his orbit, from family members to servants, has known Duke all of their lives. If Duke were to be an imposter, Ahn’s entire plan for the succession of his enormous business and careful control of his large and diverse family would both be upended. A lot is riding on the investigation Siobhan is hired to do.

To do the investigation, however, Siobhan would need a working knowledge of artificial intelligence technology, which she does not have.  Siobhan is described as a middle-aged working person – she has learned to be a technology user, but not a natural at the topic. That’s why she needs Beaker, an excessively tall and enthusiastic college student she hires to do things like on-line searches and other modern methods of information retrieval. Beaker is delighted with the technology that makes the Woodford estate run, and his curiosity proves crucial to their investigation. She needs to stay at Woodford to interview its residents and eventually brings him there too.

Siobhan is dogged, has an analytical mind, and knows how to run down an idea. Beaker knows how to get data (about DNA, various family members’ pasts, and other personal information obtainable on the internet), and and Siobhan knows how to assemble the puzzle pieces.  The two of them eventually force the truth from the juggernaut that is the Ahn empire.

The ideas in this story are futuristic, and seem very sci-fi, but in fact, the technological concepts are right around the corner. One example is the personal drones that follow the family members and guests around the gigantic complex that is their home. Everyone is tracked and videoed at all times.  Virtual meetings become the same as in-person meetings.  Everyone can immediately know where one another are located. There is very little the suspects can do to sneak around, like in a normal murder mystery.

Another example is the crux of the story. Right after Siobhan is hired, the elder Ahn promptly vanishes.  He wears an implanted life monitor – because of course he does, as do all of the Ahn family members. When the monitor tracker goes silent, the family members meet about the will, and are eerily not questioning, but rather just assuming, that Ahn has either died naturally or committed suicide. They trust his technology implicitly.

However, Ahn makes several video calls to Siobhan after he is declared missing, providing information and suggesting courses of action in her investigation, but avoiding the subject of where he is and what he is doing. Siobhan still wonders if Ahn is alive or dead, and entertains the possibility that he may have made a sort of  “deep fake” of himself, merging videos of past calls, his own voice, and the sum total of his personality, language use, logic and skills into an AI character that is more a “deep real” than a “deep fake.”

This introduces the very deep and intriguing subject of what personality is, and whether a person with the right technological know-how could extend their life into the future as an artificial being, and what the purpose of such an effort would be. Ahn’s predicament would seem to suggest that one purpose might be to stick around and make sure the succession of one’s family business goes to plan.

Indeed, the question of whether he did this, or whether he is actually alive somewhere, is never answered, and the successful wrap-up of the story does not require it.  The family’s predicament may have been set into motion by Ahn, but it has been exacerbated by a whole different set of perpetrators for their own reasons.

There is a gender-bending conclusion to the mystery as well, which also suggests many social conundrums now under scrutiny – including how binary or non-binary humans are, and whether we in modern society can be expected to observe traditions and laws that were written to elevate one gender and oppress the other.

Woo has used a serial detective structure as a hook on which to hang a lot of current events and issues for readers to contemplate, and has done it in a story that holds our interest and keeps us guessing until almost the last page.  As a mystery story, Deep Roots unravels a mind-bending tale, and we get to follow it through Siobhan’s persistence, inquiring mind, and sharp wits.

The three-legged vessel

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One son’s homage to a unique inheritance from his father | By Sung J. Woo (Spring 2023)

Father and son at the author’s graduation.

When my father passed away in the summer of 2004, it surprised no one.  He’d been sick with kidney disease for years, and frankly, if there was a surprise, it was that he held on for as long as he had.  Initially when the diagnosis came down, his nephrologist predicted at best two years, but Dad ended up living with home dialysis for more than a decade.

If I were to calculate my father’s life strictly on financial terms, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to say that he died a failure.  It’s a limited way of assessing a person’s value, but that very word – value – often, it speaks of money, and I admit, shamefully, that I’ve listened to its callow calls.

The author’s father, Han Jin Woo, receives an award from President Chung Hee Park in 1973 for the operational success of his exporting business – creating domestic jobs and bringing revenue into the country.

But then there are days when I choose a wider view, of the mountain peak he ascended in his prime instead of the downward slope of his elder days.  In my home office I have a photo of my father shaking the hand of  Chung-hee Park, the third president of South Korea, in celebration of the success of his import-export business.  How many people can say they met the president of their country, let alone got an award from him?  Certainly not me.

Anyway, Dad has been on my mind lately because of an object he left me, which I’ve been using with great regularity.  Though it was never formally bestowed upon me as such, technically, it is my inheritance: A tripod.

Looking at this powder-black stand with its grippy knobs and quick-release clamps, you might think Dad was a shutterbug and, I, too followed in his love of photography, but neither is true.  I can’t remember a single instance of him using a camera, and even though I do enjoy taking pictures every now and then, I don’t use the tripod for its intended purpose.  Instead, I use it to hold an iPhone for an app that records and critiques my tennis game.

How did this tripod come into our household?  For that, we need to go back to the mid-80s, when it had been part of a bundled purchase, a purchase that never should have been made in the first place.

The glossy advertisement arrived in the mail from American Express, for its esteemed members – the people who never left home without it.  The only reason my parents qualified as cardholders was because they owned an oriental gift shop that accepted Amex cards, a by-product of subscribing to their merchant services.  And it was only my mother who qualified, as my father at the time had no credit history.  Unlike the rest of our family, who came legally through my mother’s brother, Dad had fled South Korea after his business went bankrupt.

He may have been able to dodge his creditors, but he couldn’t outrun his poor health.  By the time the colorful Amex catalog popped up in our mailbox, he was already on peritoneal dialysis (PD) due to his non-functional kidneys, an affliction that developed due to his congenital hypertension, which itself wasn’t helped by his heavy drinking during his big business days back in Korea.  This treatment type (PD) is a life-changing event, akin to wearing a colostomy bag.  Even though he gained the convenience of filtering his blood at home, he also became chained to the daily process.  A permanent catheter was installed into his belly, and his stomach lining and a sterile sugar solution performed the duties of a kidney.  The half-gallon PD solution was drained and refilled four times a day, which increased to five when its effectiveness waned, which it inevitably did.  PD is not a cure; it is merely a way to buy time.

Almost four decades have now passed since the catalog’s arrival, but I can still remember my father showing it to me and asking for my opinion of the products.  That’s what it was, not a straight-up “what-can-I-get-for-you” interrogation but a sideways inquiry, which made me feel more grown up than I actually was.  Printed on a rich stock of glossy paper, it was nowhere as giant as the old Sears catalogs but a legitimate booklet with a spine.  So many items were well over a thousand dollars, which both frightened and thrilled me.  Our gift store was not doing well in the sales department – it never did, ever – so merely gazing at these overpriced wares felt off-limits.  And yet I desired them, maybe because I knew there was no way we could afford such riches.

When the three boxes arrived from the American Express Company weeks later, everyone was shocked – everyone, that is, but my father, since he’d ordered them.  Even though he had lived in America for more than 10 years, he still struggled with English, so I could only imagine how difficult it had been for him to call that 1-800 number and muddle through to make the purchase.  But he had persevered, and now here they were, his treasures bought on credit.

The first box was outsized, only slightly shorter than my 12-year-old self and three times as wide.  What emerged after prying open the heavy corrugated cardboard was a stationary bike, its metal frame bronzed like a healthy suntan.  The only required assembly was screwing in the handlebars and the pedals, and now here it stood, next to the cracked balcony window of our apartment. 

My mother and two older sisters were left speechless and so was I.  There were only two sports in my father’s world, and I considered neither of them to be actual sports, even if they both showed up on ESPN from time to time: Golf and fishing.  Had I ever witnessed Dad breathe hard from any form of cardiovascular activity?  Nope.  Imagining him balanced on the tiny seat, pedaling away – no.  Never.

Vanity – could that explain it?  It’s a well-known fact that PD can result in weight gain, since the solution is sugar-based.  Not only did my father gradually add to his waistline, when the solution had just been emptied into his stomach cavity, his belly looked as swollen as that of a pregnant woman.  Was that why he’d ordered the exercise bike?  Perhaps his manhood was under assault and this was a desperate ploy.

I don’t think so.  More likely is that for some strange and unknown reason, I’d fingered the bike as something we should get.  Honestly, I can’t remember, and similarly, I can’t recall if I’d suggested the second item, either.  Regardless, it was easy to deduce what the second brown rectangular box contained, as the long white box leaning next to it was straight from the manufacturer and embossed on its side were the words “SLIK 50” and a line drawing of the tripod in its fully-extended glory.

My father had purchased the Canon T50 SLR bundle, which came with not only a portrait lens but also a lengthy zoom that was heavier than the camera body itself, plus a wide angle.  Blower brush, lens cloth, cleaning solution, a fancy gray and black bag with a bevy of zippered compartments to hold them all – this was a kit befitting a professional photographer.

Dad never got on the bike.  Dad never touched the camera.  So why had he dropped more than a thousand dollars on things he never really wanted?  He was never a spendthrift, so a purchase of this magnitude was an extraordinary occurrence.

Perhaps it was an expression of a midlife crisis, or more accurately, a health crisis.  Dad wasn’t the talkative type, so I rarely knew what was on his mind, but if I were to psychoanalyze the purchase of the bike and the camera, I could interpret them as manifestations of opposing forces: The bike as wish fulfillment, a way to gain strength over a failing body, the camera as a memorializing device, to capture his remaining days in the best possible light.

Sung and his father.

Or maybe the answer is even simpler: A father wanting to buy exorbitant gifts for his only son, even if he couldn’t afford them, because for a brief moment, he could, thanks to a shiny green American Express card bearing my mother’s name.  A gift nice enough, expensive enough, to perhaps even be a genuine inheritance.

Sadly, I’m not sure what happened to the bike.  Like most home exercise equipment, it wasn’t long until it served as a coat rack.  When Mom moved out of their apartment after Dad passed away, it was probably abandoned with the rest of the unwanted furniture.  The camera survived, but I sold it on eBay years later; the automatic exposure setting had gone awry, so the only way to operate it was in full manual mode, which was beyond my level of photographic comprehension.

But the tripod?  I still have it.  And I still use it.  According to Merriam-Webster, the word tripod dates back to the 15th century, to describe a vessel resting on three legs.  And the word vessel dates back another century, to signify a container for holding something.

This is all in my head, but then again, what isn’t?  I know what that something is – it is my father’s unspoken love for me, silently communicated through all of his absent years.

The tripod is light, it’s portable, and it’s from Dad, who, along with the iPhone perched on its head, watches over me as I practice my tennis serve.

Appearance vs. reality

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Skin Deep by Sung J. Woo

(Agora Books, London, 2020, ISBN #978-1-947903-95-2)

Review by Joan Thompson (Summer 2020 issue)

In his first mystery, writer Sung J. Woo introduces Siobhan O’Brien, a Korean American adoptee and a new addition to the pantheon of female private eyes.  A former journalist relatively new to her job, Siobhan depends on her boss Ed to teach her the ropes.  However, Siobhan soon finds Ed dead of a heart attack, and his detective agency is her inheritance.  Newly turned 40 and single, Siobhan is unsure of what she should do.

As she contemplates selling the agency, she gets a call that is a blast from the past.  Josie the younger, wilder sister of Siobhan’s long-dead best friend from a Midwestern Korean camp is the caller.  Josie’s daughter Penny, also a Korean adoptee, has disappeared from Llewellyn College, and Josie wants help finding her.  Because Penny has Grave’s Disease and may not have medication with her, Josie is especially worried.  Despite not liking Josie, Siobhan takes the case and finds herself in a world of convoluted motivations and lies.

Llewellyn College in Athena, NY, clearly a town modeled after Ithaca, has recently changed its admission policy to include men.  Feminists on campus, some of whom know Penny, are actively protesting the men’s admission, seem to be keeping secrets, and hire Siobhan to investigate a mysterious new building on campus.  As a journalist, Siobhan had interviewed Vera Wheeler, the new college president and former model.   Now Siobhan finds Wheeler resistant to questioning.  Siobhan soon discovers that Josie lied to her, which makes her wonder if she should continue with the case.

Increasingly odd events, however, make Siobhan determined to find Penny.  Her investigation leads her to a Lenrock University fraternity member with information on Penny’s boyfriend.  Others who knew Penny tell her about an altercation connected with something Penny wrote for a creative writing class.  Siobhan also learns that Penny did not stay with her assigned roommate but instead moved in with Grace Park, the daughter of a Korean industrialist.  Grace is guarded by well-muscled men sporting Korean gang tattoos and is reluctant to discuss her missing friend.  All of these interviews lead Siobhan to search for Penny at a yoga retreat center linked to Llewellyn, where members seem upset by the return of its controversial founder.

Each interview and visit makes Siobhan realize Penny’s disappearance has many complicated threads and the circumstances seem increasingly nefarious.  Along the way she gets the help from Craig, the lawyer from a neighboring office and a potential love interest.  Her former boss and mentor Ed continues to advise her in her imagination as she conjures memories of him and misses his counsel.  

Told in short chapters in Siobhan’s voice, the mystery moves rapidly.  While her approach to solving the mystery is not hard-boiled as author Raymond Chandler used in his famous Philip Marlow mysteries, Siobhan’s quick sense of humor is reminiscent of Marlow’s. 

That this is a mystery about appearance versus reality is clear from the beginning.  Siobhan’s name contributes to this theme; as a Korean adoptee her appearance and name are a mismatch, and she is often questioned about it and mistakenly identified because of her Irish name.

Skin Deep is Woo’s third novel. His first, Everything Asian (2009), won the 2010 Asian Pacific American Librarians’ Association Literature Award (youth category). Love Love (2015) and Everything Asian both describe the struggle, passion and humor of growing up Asian American.  As in Skin Deep, Woo touches on themes in his other novels about  adoption and the definition of family.

In Skin Deep, Woo has created an intriguing female detective as well as a fast-moving and interesting plot.  The book’s title page includes the words, “A Siobhan O’Brien Mystery.”  Fans of women detective fiction will welcome more stories featuring this clever Korean American sleuth with the very Irish name.

A private eye for our times

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Author Interview: Sung J. Woo delves into the detective genre and Korean adoptee identity in Skin Deep | By Martha Vickery (Summer 2020 issue)

Author Sung J. Woo and his latest book Skin Deep.

Writing about the exploits of a single, 40-something woman detective who has a good dose of self-sufficiency and attitude is new territory for Sung J. Woo.  That his protagonist is a Korean adoptee may have given Woo a literary first, as author of (possibly) the first Korean adoptee detective series.

The Siobhan O’Brien Mystery Series, as the inside page of the new novel Skin Deep proclaims, may be a long or a short series, depending on the success of the first two stories, according to Woo.  There will be at least two books, he said, because he has a contract for two, and is writing the second one now.  Woo published two novels before diving into the world of the private eye.  He has also written short stories and essays for The New York Times, PEN/Guernica, and Vox.

Woo lives in western New Jersey.  A virtual launch of his book took place on July 25, sponsored by the Odyssey Bookstore in Ithaca, New York, the city on which his protagonist’s hometown, Athena, is modeled.  One of the institutions named in the book, Lenrock University, is (sort of) a backwards spelling of his alma mater, Cornell.  “It’s so great to see a bookstore, even on a screen,” he told the audience on the Zoom link from his home.

Launching a novel during a pandemic has been low-key affair, much less complicated than some years ago when he made appearances in numerous cities all the way out to the West coast.  The excitement level is muted when there is no travel or face-to-face meeting.  “It’s just not the same,” he admitted.

His first two novels Love, Love (2015) and Everything Asian (2009) both describe the experience of growing up Korean American in the U.S.  Love, Love also contains an adoption theme; it centers around a brother and sister whose parents are Korean immigrants.  The story takes off when the brother finds out he is adopted. He was never told about it by his parents; he finds he is not genetically related when he gets a tissue-type match in order to donate a kidney to his ailing father.

Siobhan, the protagonist in Skin Deep, seems not at all focused on her background as a Korean adoptee, but often describes the reactions of new acquaintances who are alternately curious about or amused by her very Irish name. “I get that a lot” she says at one point when someone asks her how she can have that kind of name.  “I am one of those Irish Koreans I’m sure you’ve heard of,” she says to another confused person.

“This book has been percolating for a long, long time,” the author said in a phone interview.  It started when he was a junior in college, in an effort to emulate some of his favorite detective-story writers, among them Robert B. Parker’s Spencer series (later a TV show Spencer for Hire) and Dick Francis, who wrote a series in the ‘60s about criminal shenanigans in the tony British horse-racing world. 

In his senior year, he was in a year-long class to come up with some kind of substantial piece of writing.  He pulled out the beginning of the detective story he had written the year before.  He worked on it, producing something that was a version of Skin Deep, except about a half-Korean guy.  Like Siobhan, that character’s Koreanness is hidden, but is a central inner conflict.  

“It didn’t go so well,” he said. “Part of the reason was that I was just a dumb kid of course, but the other reason was that the mystery genre is not really something you can do that well in the academic setting.”  Aside from his lacking the life experience for the complexities of the genre, the class was about literary writing, which was what other students produced, and what writing professors know best.  Mystery writing is a slightly different universe.  

In 2009, Woo went on a book tour for his first novel Everything Asian, a funny and touching account of a boy whose father had relocated by himself from Korea to New Jersey, and left his wife and children in Korea.  The novel is from the perspective of the son David Kim, who has to get used to an unfamiliar father and unfamiliar country all at once. 

The story takes from pieces of the author’s own upbringing.  Woo also had a father who moved to the U.S. ahead of the rest of the family when Sung was a toddler, and the family reunited in Ocean, New Jersey seven years later as his autobiographical New York Times essay Saying ‘I Love You’ With Baseball describes. Like the father in Everything Asian, Sung’s father also owned an Asian gift shop.

On the tour of the first book, Woo did a reading at a San Francisco book store. “That is where I met a group of Korean adoptees in San Francisco.  I had never encountered adoptees, at least not in that kind of environment, and it was really lovely talking to them, and discovering who they were and why they were there —- it was to support me, which was wonderful.”

A few years later, Woo said, he and his wife saw the film Adopted, a documentary about a transnational adoptee and a couple about to adopt a Korean child.  “It really opened my eyes to how different things could be if the parents were prepared or not,” he said.

When it came to a third book after the 2015 publication of Love, Love, which also plays with the theme of families and adoption, Woo said he thought he should work again on the detective story he put aside so many years ago.  The half-Korean character “never quite worked in my mind,” he said, and the character of Siobhan, who is (probably, Woo guesses) the genre’s first transnational adoptee woman detective, took shape.

Woo stumbles through an explanation of his creative process. “Most of what I write, I really don’t know where any of it comes from, except that it’s in the back of my head, and eventually, at some point, it just comes out!” The Irish name “just came to me,” he said, adding that he plays with names frequently in his stories, not just in Skin Deep.  The name becomes a way for the character Siobhan to express her feelings about being a transracial adoptee and a Korean American whose birth name is Kim Sibong.  

Now deep into the writing of Siobhan’s second adventure, Woo is experiencing the feeling of exploring the personalities and backgrounds of known characters, while also rechecking to see which of several alternative character backgrounds and story lines finally ended up in the first book. “I had Siobhan as a divorcee and had written a whole other part of her relationship with her ex-husband.  In my mind, she was a divorcee, but then when I was writing in the second novel, I had to go back into it and check on my facts,” he admitted.

The network of mystery writers is out there, but so far, Woo said he is not well connected in it.  “My contacts are in the literary world, so I came into this pretty blind,” he said.  He decided on the idea of a series through his own reading and by scanning the shelves in bookstores.  A lot of authors have penned successive books about the same character. 

The title Skin Deep was suggested to him by the publisher to match a theme about the beauty industry that runs through the story.  However, it also reflects Siobhan’s own attitude about her Korean heritage.  Is being Korean only skin deep for Siobhan or are there hidden longings in her core? The author is parceling out exploration of this enigmatic character so that future stories will have a gradual reveal.  

“I don’t spend a huge amount of time with her dealing with her heritage.  …She is very businesslike and just wants to get things done,” the author explained.  “Who she is, how she is portrayed by the outside world and how others see her is something that is constant, and I will definitely be exploring more of that in the second book.”

Having a sort of double life is something that all immigrants and second-generation adults have to cope with, so putting it into words for his Korean adoptee character is familiar territory for this author. “I certainly feel I have led two lives…  There is me the Korean Sung and there is me the American Sung.  I am a Korean American and the two things don’t always mix.  It is kind of like oil and water.  They can stay in the same glass, but they are separate, and I don’t really always feel that I am a Korean American. I vacillate quickly between a Korean and an American.”

Woo says he struggles with not being Korean enough, having grown up in a very white environment with mainly Jewish friends; he did not have a Korean circle of friends until his college years.  “A lot of that has to do with the [Korean] language.  I speak it and I write it, but my ability to do so is vastly limited.  I came here in third grade, and if anything at this point, I think I am now at a first-grade reading level,” he said. “When you encounter people who speak so much better than you, you definitely feel less Korean.  I think that’s something we all go through.”

Interestingly, Woo became a self-taught computer programmer in the early ‘90s, which still provides a living for him today as he mixes programming and writing from his home office in New Jersey, which he has been doing for 20 years.  He cheerfully calls himself a “corporate drone,” and jokes that the COVID-19 pandemic and sheltering at home —- except for the oddity of a virtual book launch and virtual author appearances —- has not altered his lifestyle at all.

Sheltering at home is his professional life.  The only problem with the programming is that it gets in the way of his reading time.  What he likes best is to sneak away with a new juicy novel.

Woo doesn’t recall a moment when he decided to write fiction, but it had something to do with discovering that he loved to read fiction; first for pure entertainment, and later in college, to study more classic literature.  His list is long on favorites, but his favorite author of all time is Richard Yeats, whose 1961 classic Revolutionary Road was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslett. “Yeats writes with such clarity about human feelings.  So accessible, he is a really easy guy to read and also really hard to read, because he talks about such naked emotional truth,” Woo remarked.

“Why I started writing anything at all is a bit of a mystery,” he admitted.  “I thought I was going to be in the sciences when in high school and I certainly excelled more in sciences than words.  But it just turned out that I was a fan of words as time went on.”  He studied writing, but serious non-class-related writing requires a spark, the mystery ingredient of creativity.  “You get an inkling that maybe I can do that,” he reflected.  “Maybe I’ll try.  Then you try, and it happens.”

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