Gina Chung’s "Sea Change" Is a Departure from Typical Asian American Narratives
By Olivia Cheng
Gina Chung’s novel Sea Change is a departure from modern Asian American novels that often focus on sad, high-functioning women in prestigious institutions. Instead, Ro, the protagonist of Sea Change, is a Korean-American aquarium employee who isn’t sure who she’s meant to be or how she’s supposed to be happy. Her lack of direction, mediocrity at work, and general inertia marks her decisions to stay at a dead-end job in the same town she grew up in.
The novel borders on speculative, with mysterious phone calls of rushing water, theories about disappearances in the Bering Vortex, and conversations questioning whether octopuses are aliens, although it never fully dips into that territory. The book uses a time splice between Ro’s childhood and her present job feeding animals in an aquarium. Sea Change questions the extent to which we are the arbiters of our own future.
Ro has strained relationships with her ex-boyfriend, Tae, who leaves for a Mars expedition, her father who disappeared in the Bering Strait, and her mother who, partway through the novel, introduces Ro to her new boyfriend. Ro recounts her mother and father fighting all throughout her childhood and internalizes their lack of affection: “My own family was never particularly playful. Love was portioned out, something to be both carefully guarded and left alone in the hopes that it would grow on its own overnight, like cultures in a petri dish.”
But Ro’s most compelling relationship is with her childhood friend, Yoonhee, who works at the aquarium with her. Yoonhee and Ro grow up in Bergen County. Ro is an only child and Yoonhee is one of three daughters, and they experience high school friends, drinking, and romance together.
“[Yoonhee] always had a way of making me feel like I was beautiful by association, and that beauty wasn’t something magical the way I’d always thought it was, but something that could be attained with just a little bit of polish and elbow grease.” After college, they live in the same apartment—“...it was Yoonhee’s plants, framed art pieces, and rugs throughout the apartment that had made it feel like a home,”—until Yoonhee moves in with her future husband, James. Since people tend to dip in and out of Ro’s life, Yoonhee is her only consistency.
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I met Moo in Ms. Crowley’s third grade class. We were the only two Asian American students. The school had a handful of Asians at that time, although the community in Northern New Jersey has since expanded from Fort Lee and Palisades Park to Woodcliff Lake and Montvale. Moo’s parents were recent immigrants from Korea, and mine recent immigrants from Taiwan.
In the winter, we had to present dioramas of book reports. While Nicki King's shoebox was adorned with perfect glitter hearts, miniature clay furniture, and colored origami people, it was clear Moo and I were the only students in the class who made our projects ourselves.
My diorama had the Payless logo showing and paper stick figures propped up inside with glue to represent a scene from Tuck Everlasting. I was so embarrassed by my childish diorama of newspaper and old socks that I peed my pants in front of the class, and had to wear a pair of green sweatpants reserved for pant-wetters for the rest of the day. During recess, Moo rubbed my back while I cried and told me that everyone still peed the bed. She clutched her own shoebox with a drawing of a dog running through cotton ball snow, a diorama of The Call of the Wild.
Even though we were constantly pitted against each other by teachers (Olivia isn’t excelling in math as much as Moo, Moo’s essay wasn’t quite as meaningful as Olivia’s) and by friends (Should we invite Olivia or Moo? As if more than one Asian was a party foul), we found solace in our interchangeability throughout middle and high school. The summer before college, we watched When Harry Met Sally four times and the entire Star Wars franchise in my parents’ basement.
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Recent Asian American novels, such as Chemistry by Weike Wang, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, and Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng focus on parent-child relationships and end with tearful hugging and mutual understanding. From the Oscar-sweep movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once, to social media memes in the Facebook group "Subtle Asian Traits,” complicated family relationships have come to mark Asian American culture for better or worse.
While Sea Change depicts the trauma of a largely loveless marriage, it also argues for the importance of friendships within the community. About halfway through Sea Change, Yoonhee and Ro go to one of their first high school parties in Palisades Park, where, in classic high school fashion, they get into a fight; Yoonhee gets too drunk, and Ro ends up taking care of her. Both girls forgive each other over and over again throughout the course of the night (and the novel), and Ro takes Yoonhee back home to sleep off her hangover. Their friendship is ultimately the final motivation for Ro to begin changing her life.
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I called Moo shortly after my twenty-seventh birthday, a few months after moving to Ann Arbor, to let her know I was attending an MFA program. We had not really spoken since high school besides a few Merry Christmas texts in college. As we fell into relationships and new friendships in college, weekly calls were canceled, sometimes missed and eventually forgotten. She congratulated me and told me she was going into psychiatry after medical school.
“Do you remember how I peed my pants in third grade?” I asked.
Moo was silent.
“I had to wear those terrible green sweatpants,” I said, walking back from the library. The air was fresh and clear, still warm from the summer, although the wind had the slight chill of coming fall.
“That didn’t happen to you,” Moo said, laughing a little.
“It definitely did.”
“No. I was the one who peed my pants. You comforted me on the playground. That memory is so clear to me.”
“It’s so clear to me!”
We laughed. It didn’t matter whether she peed in front of the class or I did; the feel of her breath on my cheek and her hand on mine overpowered the itchiness of those green sweatpants, which I am still certain I wore.
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While Moo and I haven’t been as consistent in each other’s lives as Yoonhee and Ro, we remain bonded through blue nail polish, episodes of That ‘70s Show, and tie-dye T-shirts. After our first call in years, we began to talk on a more regular schedule with monthly video chats, random texts, and quick phone calls about our boyfriends.
We updated each other on the mundanities of our lives and sometimes, to marvel at our differences: she enjoys pop culture—Marvel movies and Twilight books and Game of Thrones—while I like to read pretentious art books about Japanese calligraphy. But we both still love Nora Ephron and Star Wars. As the years pass, and Moo and I live our separate lives—and I metaphorically pee my pants in many other ways—but her friendship remains an anchor.
In Sea Change, readers follow relationships where women can finally free themselves from men and find happiness such as when Ro’s cousin, Rachel, leaves her abusive husband, Simon, and when Ro’s mother moves on from her husband's emotional absence and disappearance in the Bering Vortex. Ro’s decisions to change her life, as the women around her change theirs, are rooted in the forgiveness and support of her community.
During an argument with Ro about whether they she should salvage the friendship or not, Yoonhee tells Ro, "I want you to be the fucking weird aunt to my adorable children and be a bad influence on them and look out for them when I'm too tired to be a real person. I want us to get old together and knock back shots like we're twenty-two again and talk about all the stupid things we used to do and have really bad hangovers together. I want to go on a dumb cruise when we're, like, seventy-five and wear matching bathing suits."
Sea Change turns the Asian American family drama on its head. The novel does not end with tearful hugging between Ro and her mother, but Ro’s acknowledgement to take responsibility for her own life. “I’ve often wished that human bodies were as clever as those of octopuses. If we could divvy up the work of one heart among three, if we could have a semiautonomous brain in each of our appendages, perhaps we’d be more efficient with our time, less likely to waste it on grudge and hurts and all the things we feel we can’t say to one another.”
It posits that the heart of healing often lies in the friendships we choose to cultivate and the relationships we choose to preserve. Ro’s complicated relationship with Yoonhee, from anger to forgiveness to reconciliation, asks its readers to find redemption in the friends who laugh at bad jokes, bring boxed wine in the evening, and always find a way to stick around.