Catherine Chung was born in Evanston, IL, and grew up in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Writing has been her life-long passion, but as an undergraduate she indulged in a brief, one-sided affair with mathematics at the University of Chicago followed by a few years in Santa Monica working at a think tank by the sea.
Eventually she attended Cornell University for her MFA, and since then she and her books have been given shelter and encouragement from The MacDowell Colony, Jentel, Hedgebrook, SFAI, Camargo, The University of Leipzig, VCCA, UCross, Yaddo, Civitella Ranieri, The Jerome Foundation, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Constance Saltonstall Foundation. Her brother, Heesoo Chung, has also given her a bed and fed her lots of ice cream at criticał times.
She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She was a Granta New Voice, and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, which was a Booklist, Bookpage, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. The Tenth Muse was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and was on many best books lists. In 2015 Buzzfeed named her one of 32 Essential Asian American Writers. She has published work in The New York Times, The Rumpus, and Granta. She lives in New York City.
Press & Interviews
“What It Means to Live In a Body”: Interview with David Cotrone for Used Furniture Review
“Chung: May I tell you a story? Recently, my friend Lauren Alleyne told me about a guy named Jackson Katz who teaches a class on sexual violence to college students. He begins by asking all the men in the classroom what steps they take on a daily basis to prevent themselves from being sexually assaulted. And at first, he says, there’s always a really awkward silence as the men try to figure out if it’s a trick question. He says they laugh nervously, and one guy usually says he tries to stay out of prison, and then there’s more silence until someone admits it’s not something he thinks about, and usually at that point all the other guys agree.
So then Jackson Katz turns to the women in the class and asks them the same question, and the women start raising their hands and answering, and the men sit in a sort of stunned silence as Jackson writes down on the board all the safety precautions the women recite as part of their daily routine. Here are some of the things they do: they hold their keys as potential weapons, they look in the backs of their cars before they get in, they carry their cell phones at all times, they lock their windows when they go to sleep, they watch what they wear, they don’t drink too much, they have alarm systems, they don’t make eye contact with men on the street, they make aggressive eye contact with men on the street, they don’t enter elevators with only men in them, they avoid parking garages, they don’t leave their drinks unattended, they always watch their drinks being poured—and the list goes on and on, and the board fills up, and they stop before the women have run out of all the things they do every day to protect themselves from being sexually assaulted by strangers. Katz says at the end of this exercise they compare the list of things men do to keep themselves safe to the long and far-from-finished list of things women do, and the men are shell-shocked, and the women are overtaken by a kind of growing fury. And then he reminds them that these things that women do are only to protect them from strangers, which make up only 18% of rape cases.
What I’m trying to get at with this, of course, is how part of what makes your question so difficult to answer is how the bodies we live in change where it’s possible to start our conversation, and determines to a large extent what kind of conversation it’s possible to have. As women, our bodies are susceptible to the world. We are not only constantly aware of it in ways we don’t even realize, but are also reminded of it over and over, and we change what we do and how we act because of it. And I think it’s similar if you’re a person of color or part of any marginalized group.” Read more here.
“I Want To Embrace The Things That I Am”: Interview with Kat Chow for NPR’s Code Switch
“The thing about Chang-rae Lee that was such a revelation was not that I was hungry to read about what it meant to be Asian-American, but that he actually gave words to a part of my experience … that I had never seen expressed before and that I didn’t even know was possible. And that was incredible to think that, oh, there’s this writer, and he writes beautifully and movingly, and it’s not because this person is Asian, it’s not because this character is Asian that I’m relating, but the fact that I’m relating to a character who can speak to an experience that I’ve never read about in literature before. It was so tremendously moving and empowering. …
You know, the people who influence us when we’re children or when we’re just becoming adults, it’s just [a] tremendous influence. It just opened me up in a sort of way that was so important. Actually, when I was older, a little bit older, the other Asian-American writer [who] had such an influence on me was Alex Chee [Alexander Chee], and personally for me as well, I met him later. … I remember he wrote an essay about how he was a “unicorn.” When he was writing [it], he might’ve been the only Asian-American gay man writing. And I think about that, how difficult it is to do a thing when you don’t feel like anyone else like you has done that before. And I feel like, I am really lucky because I had examples that I discovered young enough that made it seemed possible.” Read more here.
Interview with Ollie Brock at Granta.
“CC: I think my interest in mathematics was that of a writer: I was always trying to translate it back into a story. The two interests come from the same source though, which is an obsession with language and its capacity to explore things larger than ourselves. I discovered mathematics as an undergraduate, and fell in love with how beautiful it was: it can be so precise and elegant – and asks all sorts of big questions.
I think I started writing, on the other hand, because it allowed me to actively engage with language in a critical way. When I was growing up, we spoke Korean at home, so I didn’t learn English until I started school. It was very bewildering: all of a sudden I had a name I’d never been called before, and couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. Weirdly enough, I learned to read and write at the same level as the rest of my class before I could track even the most basic conversation in real life.” Read more here.