03.03.08
Racial Issues Smolder in Korean American’s New Book
Susan choi a Korean American writer has been receiving acclaim from the press and literary circles in the U.S; she was born to a Korean father and a Russian-Jewish mother and grew up in the U.S. Susan Choi’s “A Person of Interest” deals with the subtle racism that lurks in everyday American life. Her first book “The Foreign Student” is a love story between a Korean man and an American girl. The immigrant suffers painful memories of the Korean War while the girl suffers for an affair she had with a friend of her father. The LA Times called the book one of the top 10 novels of the year. Her second book, “American Woman,” published in 2003, was inspired by the 1974 kidnapping by a leftist guerrilla group of Patty Hearst, the daughter of a media mogul, who eventually accepted the group’s ideology and became one of them. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A Person of Interest” was based on the case of the Unabomber, an American terrorist who mail-bombed universities and airlines for 17 years from 1978, causing 26 casualties.