This interview is from SDPB's daily public-affairs show, In the Moment, hosted by Lori Walsh.
Author Jung Yun's second novel takes readers to the Bakken oil boom in North Dakota. The protagonist is journalist Elinor Hanson, a former model. Elinor is Korean-American, North Dakotan, Midwestern. She returns to her home in search of a story and in search of her own story in a swiftly changing landscape. The book is called "O Beautiful."
The following transcript was auto-generated.
Jung Yun:
I think that Eleanor being a journalist does definitely invite some distrust and maybe some discomfort, but she's also pretty uncomfortable going back to this place where she has never quite fit in and never quite felt accepted in all the various communities that she belongs. She's also kind of a green journalist sort of getting her footing and not particularly good at her job or comfortable with people. So she fumbles quite a bit in the beginning of the book, trying to get her footing, trying to feel like she is a legitimate writer who has a job to do and is trying to do it well.
Jung Yun:
So, it's a strange homecoming for her going back to a place where she spent most of her childhood and her adolescence. And again, coming back to a community that doesn't accept her and where the newcomers, all these oil workers who are descending upon this region from other parts of the world, they also don't accept her and don't think that she's from there. So it kind of exacerbates these very complicated feelings that she has about home and homecoming to begin with. In addition to the fact that she just has a very important job do that she is not fully equipped to do well, particularly at first.
Lori Walsh:
I feel like you, as an author must, at some point have said, "and then let's send her into this exhausted before she even arrives." I mean, this woman is already burned out, fried, exhausted on the plane before she lands. Oh, so mean of you, as an author!
Jung Yun:
Very true. But it's so perfect for the Bakken because I just remember the times when I went back and forth there, people were so tired. Everybody was tired. The people working behind the counter at the Mini Mart were tired. Everyone was working on a level of exhaustion that was like bone deep. And I figure, she should be too because people make very interesting decisions when they're tired. Right?
Lori Walsh:
Right, right. Okay. So she has a responsibility as a journalist that's different from your responsibility as an author of a novel. How did you make that distinction? Did you feel a responsibility to say, oh, I can't make people look too bad, or because people are going to read this as fiction but still know that you are writing about your home, they assume there's going to be some crossover between you and the protagonist. Even if there isn't, they're going to think there is.
Jung Yun:
Sure.
Lori:
How do you handle that as an author of fiction?
Jung Yun:
I don't think too much about an audience and I don't think too much about readers as I'm writing a book. I think very, very deeply about the characters and I think about the story and what is right for them and what is real for them. I think often about how Eleanor is a person who has a pretty complicated family history, a lack of self-esteem as an adult female who has been in her previous life as a model. Her job was to sort of 'shut up and be pretty.'
Jung Yun:
So she's a person who kind of gets herself into situations that are ill advised and sometimes not very smart. And she's also not entirely sensitive to others, but my goal was to not make a character that readers would like, but to make a character that felt real. Real to me, real on the page, real ultimately to the people who follow this woman around. That's my job as a novelist, I think. And it's tough at times, especially when you're writing about deeply personal subjects, and I'm writing about my home state. But I really had to separate and disengage from that kind of worry about what the final product would be and how people would interpret it. because I think that's a really good recipe for not writing at all or talking yourself out of a book.
Lori Walsh:
It's good advice for all aspiring writers. So for people who haven't read the book yet, Eleanor's father is white. He's a former military man. Her mother is Korean. He met her in Korea, and this causes quite a bit of social anxiety and discontent and alienation when he brings her to this community in North Dakota. And yet there's one point where Eleanor thinks back on her parents, and I won't give away too much about the plot points of the novel, but she's watching a fire at one of the oil rigs, and she notices how people just aren't banding together and helping. They've lost their empathy. They've lost a sense of community. She remembers one low point in her family's life and she wonders how to measure the impact. And I thought it was so poignant to unpack her biggest loss and say, we've lost something here because in my time of greatest need, there at least was a community that brought casseroles.
Jung Yun:
Yep, absolutely. And as this community in the Bakken, this fictional community in the Bakken, grows and grows because of so many people coming for work, which of course is a reflection of real life and what really happened during the boom. That sense of knowing who your neighbors are, caring for your neighbor. It becomes kind of untenable just because of the numbers of people and the sort of migratory nature of the people who do come. And they're there one month, but they're gone five months after that. So Eleanor who again, had these complicated feelings about growing up in North Dakota, she realizes over time that there are certain things that she misses that she is nostalgic for. That she was grateful for. But wasn't in the moment, it only took decades and distance to be able to see things like that so clearly in the midst of a boom, which has changed everything.
Lori:
Yeah. That scene kind of reminded me of the pandemic, wait, stick with me here, in the sense that there was a grief that could not be measured because so many things were happening at once. And I felt like that's what it felt like in some of the early days of the pandemic where so many lives were being lost. But yet you were so desperately trying to hold on to just functioning on a daily basis that you realized, I can't even measure what's already been lost. And I don't know when I will be able to. There are some parallels, don't you think?
Jung Yun:
Yeah. It's not a coincidence, Lori, that I wrote part of this during the beginning of the pandemic, which I honestly thought was going to last for a couple of weeks. I was so confident that I left food in my office at work, not realizing that I wouldn't return for a year and change. But yeah, I think that the time that I was writing this definitely filtered into the fictional timeline and the fictional sort of emotional space of the book.
Lori:
Yeah. All right. So let's talk about the women. There are women who live, who stay, who leave, who come to this place. There's a small percentage of them and they are surrounded by this, human powder keg, masculinity. Why focus on the women because that's where this book just really kicks ass. I mean, that's where it shines.
Jung Yun:
Thank you. I think that Eleanor's mother was very distant and detached and I don't think I'm giving away too much by saying that Eleanor's mother decided to leave the entire family and left her daughters behind. And so Eleanor never really recovers from that first wound and it colors and affects her relationships with women all throughout her adolescence and her adult life. Even to the point where her own relationship with her sister is really fractured and frayed. So, because of her past life, because of her first career, this is a woman who has taken a very sort of elbows out approach to the world. She just wants to get by. She doesn't want to be bothered, but she has spent most of her life kind of in that male gaze and is very conditioned to look at other women in judgment.
Jung Yun:
And I think by virtue of being thrown into this community where she is so overwhelmed and outnumbered by men, it forces her to seek comfort and allyship with the only people who she can, which is other women. And some women are game for that. There are characters who are very supportive of her eventually once they get to actually know her and what she allows herself to be known. And there are others who are doing the same thing that Eleanor is, which is just sort of scrapping for their lives and their dollar and their jobs and aren't particularly kind or supportive of other people and other women. So, she sort of focuses in on a story that is different from the original story that she went out to the block and to pursue. And it really does focus on women because she realizes that there's so much there that's waiting and needs to be told. It just takes her a while to get to it.
Lori:
Right. And she's beautiful. She's a former model. And this book is called O Beautiful, which has layers of meaning to it, with who we consider America to be in the landscape of this place. And then the beauty of women and the responsibility of it, or the burden of it. And then the purpose of it and that male gaze. There is just a whole lot happening there. She's beautiful, but she's aged out of her profession too. She's getting a little bit too old for the early stages of modeling. There's a moment on the dance at a club where she looks around and she sees women just happy to be seen. And this is a shock to her system because of course it's very dangerous at the same time to be outnumbered. There's a lot of tension in the air. And yet there are women who are reveling in it. And she has a lot to process there And she processes it as a model and as a journalist. Tell me about writing that scene.
Jung Yun:
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear the tail end of that question, Who was writing the scene?
Lori:
Tell me about writing that scene. When you were writing that, what was that moment like for you? Because that's a complicated thing to try to put on to paper.
Jung Yun:
It really was. I think I was spending a lot of time kind of remembering my 12 and 13 year old self, to be honest. My best friend and I on a Friday or a Saturday night, we would walk up and down the sidewalk on the main drag in her neighborhood. And it would be such an extraordinary thrill if a guy rolled down his window and honked at us or told us to smile or, basically cat called us. And you know what, we were kids and we looked like kids. But even at such a young, young, young age, 12-13, I was already very much conditioned as was my friend as were most of our girlfriends, to seek and want that kind of attention and to feel validated by it. So I think I was sort of expanding that out by a factor of X for a woman who made her living at one point being looked at, and wanting to be looked at, and needing to be looked at in order to get paid for her job.
Jung Yun:
There's a line in the book about how attention was a valuable form of currency and the more that she earned, the more that she was worth. So I think that is a moment in the club where she's realizing that she has lived her life in a particular way. She has made choices. Some of them her own, some of them a bit more conditioned. And she wonders in that moment, who did that hurt? Did she hurt just herself? Was she hurting other women? Did men assume that because she liked to be looked at, that other women wanted the same thing? So it's really kind of a maelstrom of different thoughts and emotions kind of coming back at her as she's watching other women do the very same thing that she did. And she's worried for them.
Lori:
Yeah. I can't think of another book that does that as well as this one does. And I'm fairly well read.
Jung Yun:
Thank you.
Lori:
It is a masterful turn from the choices that you made as an author to how your character develops. Then you mentioned writing part of this at the beginning stage of the pandemic. There is also this simmering lava of white supremacy going through this book, which is crackling and dangerous. And so that tells me you're also writing this during the increase of violence against Asian Americans. And does all that unfold into your work as this is happening and as you're writing it too?
Jung Yun:
Yeah. I mean violence against Asian Americans, against people of color more broadly and also fed against the historic backdrop of colonialism and conquest upon which our country was founded. I mean, you can't get away from it. So yes, all those things sort of factor into this book. But they factor into my work in general simply because I tend to gravitate toward writing and imagining stories that think about the ways in which race and gender and class in particular as well, sort of affect the way that people experience and move through America. So not a coincidence that both of my books sort of center around these particular themes and also not a coincidence, like you said, that there is this sort of spike of violence and white supremacy and white separatism that does sort of peak into this particular novel.
Lori:
What are you working on next?
Jung Yun:
[inaudible 00:15:52] , which is set in New York in the early [inaudible 00:16:00] . And it's just in that very early phase where anything could happen. Which is kind of the nicest phase. But it can't last too long.
Lori:
Right. I cannot wait to read your first book because this is the first one of yours that I've read since we were just introduced. And I will be following your work forever now, because it's just wonderfully written. So Jung Yun, thank you so much for being here with us today.
Jung Yun:
Such a pleasure. And thank you so much for such a close and careful read that, I can't even tell you how good that makes me feel as a writer.
Lori:
Thank you.
