An Interview with MFA '21 Gina Chung and an Excerpt from her Debut Novel "Sea Change"
Interview by Jonathan Kesh
Gina Chung’s debut novel, Sea Change, applies a touch of the speculative to a deeply interior story.
The protagonist, Ro, is an isolated, directionless woman in her early thirties who spends her days handling sea life at an aquarium. Her mother is estranged, her father disappeared during an expedition to the climate change-induced “Bering Vortex,” and her boyfriend has just dumped her to join an experimental Mars colonization program. All that’s keeping Ro afloat is her bond with an old octopus at the aquarium named Dolores, and the possible sale of Dolores to a private buyer pushes Ro to reevaluate everything about who she’s become and what she must be going forward.
Despite the complex inner world of Ro, she seems to feel as though she exists quietly on the precipice of her loved ones’ much grander tales. The novel always keeps a tender focus on that introspection — beneath a backdrop of climate catastrophe and scientific derring-do, Sea Change is about the struggle to make peace with yourself before you destroy yourself.
On the heels of her novel release in March from Vintage Books, I got a chance to speak with Gina Chung, a graduate of The New School’s MFA program, to talk about self-destructive characters, the genre of “climate fiction,” and a handful of octopus facts.
LIT: Much like the opening of the book itself, I thought I would start with the octopus. Right at the beginning we get this image of the octopus changing colors and moving around its tank. Throughout the novel, the protagonist Ro attaches a lot of significance to this octopus named Dolores, so I’m curious what drew you to the imagery of the octopus?
GINA CHUNG: I’ve always loved octopuses, I think that they’re just fascinating creatures. And they’re so alien from us, from human beings. I think I read somewhere in all my research for the book that they’re anatomically the most opposite that you can be to a bipedal mammal human. Yet at the same time, they’re so intelligent and playful and curious, which are things that we normally don’t tend to associate with sea creatures. So I found that sort of interplay between the familiar and the very strange really interesting when I was thinking about octopuses.
I started with the very first line before I even thought of the idea to write [the novel]. I actually didn’t come into the program at The New School with an idea for a novel, I was mostly writing short stories and was happy to keep doing that while I figured out my voice. I started out with the first line and thought to myself, “Who is Dolores, who or what is this person?” I decided that it was an octopus because I find octopuses really cool, and the fact that they change color is this interesting and exciting thing to me. They do it as both a biological response and also a way to express themselves, essentially. From there, I started wondering, who is this person who’s telling us about Dolores and why does this octopus matter so much to her? And so that was how the voice of Ro came to life for me, as did the world of the aquarium itself.
I don’t necessarily have a personal connection to [octopuses] other than thinking that they’re really cool, but I find them so fascinating because again, they’re very intelligent, they’re also very solitary creatures. They don’t really meet up ever except to mate, and that’s something I explore in the book too, which is that they can’t really mate without it being very destructive for both parties involved. And I think Ro is in her own way quite similar to an octopus in that she’s very secretive, very solitary, doesn’t like to come out of her shell. But of course she’s a human being and I wanted, through the course of the book, to chart the course of her development in learning how to come out of her shell and learn how to need other people and to ask for help.
LIT: That actually ties into my next question. A lot of the story is about loneliness, we learn at the beginning that Ro has lost a lot of people who are close to her. She’s about to lose this octopus because the aquarium is selling it to this private buyer. In some ways, she also seems like she’s a little self-destructive and pushing people away. So what is Ro chasing throughout this book? What does she want?
GC: That’s a great question, I don’t think I’ve been asked that yet. I think she’s chasing a sense of home and belonging really. She is someone who, as you said, has lost a lot in her life or feels like she’s in the process of losing a lot of close relationships. Not just her father who disappeared 15 years ago, or her ex-boyfriend who’s essentially dumped her to go live in outer space. But also, she’s grappling with the changes and potential losses of her best friend Yoonhee, as well as her relationship with her mother, which has never really been on stable ground.
I think when you’re someone like that, when you’ve lost a lot and you’re used to the idea of people leaving you, you start to find all these smaller ways to leave yourself. That’s where a lot of the self-destructive and self-sabotaging behaviors come into play, such as her drinking to excess, her avoidance of important topics and her own role in shaping the mess of her life. And I think she’s really looking for a reason to stop doing those things because at the start of the novel, she doesn’t think that she herself, as is, is enough. And therefore, she’s looking for all these reasons to stay in her body, to stay present. But she’s looking for them in all of these people rather than looking to herself. And it’s kind of a twofold thing that I explore in the book, which is seeking connections with other people, but also, in doing so, learning how to come home to yourself.
LIT: When you were coming up with Ro as this solitary character, was that after you had learned that octopuses themselves are also really solitary?
GC: I learned that while I was researching actually. In a lot of the research that I ended up doing on octopuses, I had this running master Google document where I would dump in a lot of the facts and interesting statistics that I learned. I used those to shape my ideas for the narrative. Then I learned how octopuses are solitary, and female octopuses in particular, when they lay eggs they brood over them until they die. I just thought that was so fascinating, especially thinking about a lot of ideas and parallels we tend to have about motherhood, and this idea that being good mother means you must sacrifice everything of yourself.
I think that’s something that Ro and her mother both grapple with, because they have a contentious relationship and Ro sees her mother sort of struggling with her identity as being a mom. I think a lot of those facts ended up shaping parts of the story for me.
LIT: So the setting is near future. You have a Mars mission going on, climate change is escalating, specifically the Bering Vortex is a big plot point — this fictional cross between the Bermuda Triangle and Chernobyl. But what’s really interesting is that a lot of these speculative elements are looming in the background, while in the forefront you have this much more interior, personal story. What was the thought process behind putting all this speculative elements in the background?
GC: I really love speculative fiction. I think that the range of it is such a rich and storied area in which to build a narrative and build craft. With this novel, one of the first things that came to the forefront for me in thinking about this world, in addition to Ro and Dolores, was also this idea of Ro’s boyfriend leaving her to go on a mission to colonize Mars. I don’t think we’re actually that far off from something like that happening. There’s already efforts toward that in the world.
So I kept telling people it was “five minutes in the future” where day to day, things look a lot like life does for us, but the stakes are just that much higher in terms of what would it looks like for humans to be actually leave Earth and live someplace else. And what would it look like to know that climate change is at such an urgent level that it’s literally changing the zones of environments around us? And again, all of this stuff is actually happening, but with fiction and with speculative fiction, it allows you to crank it up ever so slightly.
Doing that leads to a lot of interesting thought experiments in terms of how your characters would react to it. For example, with the boyfriend leaving for Mars, I remember asking various friends when I was working on the novel, “If this was a thing you had the opportunity to do, would you actually go?” I was surprised by the number of people in my life who said yes, pack up and leave the planet just to have the opportunity of a lifetime to go where no one else has gone before. And I totally don’t relate to that. I find it so fascinating that there are people out there who are genuinely curious and adventurous in those ways. I always think about people like that who are on the forefront of new frontiers, right? But then what happens to the people they leave behind? What does it cost to go to that level?
LIT: Lately I’ve been hearing the term “climate fiction” a lot, this subgenre of fiction that deals with the anxieties of the climate escalating. I’ve heard it about Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman, Appleseed by Matt Bell, I think it goes as far back as Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Would you describe Sea Change as climate fiction? Or what genres would you use to describe this book?
GC: I think it’s definitely a part of the ever-growing — but as you say older than you think it might be — genre of climate fiction, in that it does hinge around this idea of, “this is a very real and urgent crisis, what would it look like for humans to be in an even more dire place with it?” I didn’t necessarily feel like I had to explore all the implications of those things. I mostly wanted it to be a backdrop as a way to explore what would happen to the personal relationships and to this particular character’s understanding of herself and her world. So I would also describe it as a coming-of-age story that is set in this sort-of disaster-informed climate change-informed type of environment.
LIT: Due to the range of different things at play here, what were some of the influences on this book?
GC: I was reading a lot of coming-of-age stories, revisiting a lot of my favorites while I was thinking about and working on Sea Change. One of my all-time favorites is Chemistry by Weike Wang, which deals with similar themes of being Asian-American, growing up in an immigrant family, being a woman in a male-dominated field. And also dealing with a complicated legacy when it comes to your parents. That character, that protagonist in Chemistry is also similarly very interested in — of course — chemistry because she’s a PhD student. And I love the way that book used that character’s knowledge base a way to inform story beats in the narrative itself. You really get a sense of how she sees the world. So that was definitely a major influence on my work.
Another book I really love and think about and was holding close to my heart while writing was Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett, and I love that book so much. I think I would also classify that as a later-in-life coming-of-age in the way Sea Change is, in that the main character of that story is incredibly messy and self-destructive in a lot of ways, but is also so endearing. The way that book was structured was also inspirational for me, because Kristen used this brilliant past-present alternating structure in that book, and that was something I decided to do for Sea Change as well. Just because I think when you come across someone who is as internal and yet self-loathing as Ro, or the way Kristen Arnett’s character Jessa can be, I think the main question for a reader like me is to wonder, “How did they get to be this way? What happened to make you this way?” I loved the way that she incorporated that character’s upbringing and childhood into the present day, so it just became very clear how all of those elements became woven into one another to form that person. And that was something I was very interested in doing as well with Sea Change.
And another book that I was definitely inspired by was Severance by Ling Ma, which is similarly lightly speculative. It’s dealing with a very different type of disaster in that it’s famously a zombie novel, but I like the portrayal of millennial loneliness and alienation in the midst of late-stage capitalism. This character in Severance, she works in publishing, and she just keeps going to her job day after day despite the fact that the world around her is completely crumbling. I thought that was such a realistic and accurate depiction for how most of us would react in extreme situations.
LIT: I don’t know if this will be a very open question or a very quick question, but between the climate change aspects and Ro’s more personal story, would you say this is an optimistic novel?
GC: That’s a great question. You know what? I think it is. And I say that because I don’t think I’m necessarily an optimistic person, and yet I would say I’m a hopeful person. I think the book is about the necessity of hope. Hope is such an important thing for us to cling onto, and certainly as writers too, because it can be very tempting to think that the work that we do as writers, as artists, as creatives, is not important in the light of everything else that’s happening in the world. I often feel that way, where I’m kind of just like, “Why does this matter in the face of everything else happening?” But then I remember all the times in which I have been saved by the work of someone else. And by someone’s writing, or the way that they captured emotion or a given circumstance, or teach me how to think about something. Then I remember and feel heartened again. I read and I write for those reasons, to find connection and to find reasons to hope.
Which isn’t to say that everything I read or write has to be hopeful, but I think that the act of creation in itself is in an inherently hopeful one, as is the act of connection with other people. Because with Sea Change, I really wanted to show how it’s only through reaching out and connecting with other people, and learning how to ask for help, that you can even begin to understand your own place in the world.LIT: You also have a short story collection coming out next year, Green Frog. Are you exploring any of the same themes, or will it be completely different?
GC: Yeah, there are differently similar themes, especially when it comes to Korean-American, Asian-American girlhood and womanhood. There’s definitely some animals in there, because I love writing about animals and I feel very inspired by the natural world. In both Sea Change and in Green Frog, as a writer I’m obsessed with bodies. And how writing can embody and mimic physical sensation, in addition to how emotions feel in our physical bodies. So that’s a thing that continues to be explored in the collection.
Overall I would say, because it’s skipping around different characters, different time periods, I often feel that short stories let me be a little more experimental. So yeah, I think I’ll always be interested in those questions of self and how the self is shaped by different circumstances in one’s life, especially as a woman or as a marginalized person. Or in my case specifically, an Asian-American woman who’s the daughter of immigrants, I think those are things that’ll always interest me. But I think short stories allow me to explore from a lot of different angles, as opposed to working on a novel which is one story for the most part.
LIT: Since this is a New School magazine, I figured I’d bring up the MFA. Did the MFA shape or influence this novel in any ways while you were working on it?
GC: It definitely did! I started working on it while I was in the MFA program. The first lines in the book were written during an in-class writing assignment, and I workshopped the opening chapter, which I thought was just going to be a short story, with a writing group of friends that I made in the program in the summer between my first and second year. At that point, I was just about to go into my thesis semester at The New School and I was working with Mira Jacob, and I thought, “Okay, well this is my chance to write a novel and see how it goes.” And I’d never written a novel before, except for an eight-chapter one that I’d written as a child back in the day. Having that community and structure that being in the program provided me with was totally crucial to the writing of the novel.
I’m always very open about the fact that I don’t think everyone has to go to an MFA to be a writer, you can just be a writer. There’s no need to do an MFA. But for me, I made that decision because I wanted the dedicated time to work on my writing, as well as the community and the structure that a program can provide. I feel really lucky that I was able to find all those things at The New School during my time in the program. I think the biggest thing for me was finding mentors that understood what I was doing, and finding fellow writers and readers with whom I hope to get to write with for the rest of my life.
The following excerpt is from the opening chapter of Sea Change (Vintage, March 28, 2023).
This morning, Dolores is blue again. She’s signaling her readiness to mate, her eagerness to mount the rocks and corals of her tank and push herself against a male octopus, who will insert his hectocotylus into her mantle cavity and deposit sperm packets inside her until she is ready to lay the eggs. Unfortunately for Dolores, there is no bachelor octopus around ready to father her orphan eggs, and so when she turns that milky, almost pearlescent blue that I know means she is in the mood for love, there is no one but me to see.
Dolores can turn herself as flat as a pancake or puff up like a mushroom, and when she propels herself through all one thousand gallons of her tank, air bubbles dance around her like they’re laughing with her. When she undulates her arms through the clean, dark water, she looks like a storm of ribbons. She can be cranky, like any old lady, but she loves seeing me come in with a bucket full of shrimp and fish for her. I could swear that sometimes she waves at me.
So this morning, when I wished her good morning and told her how the weather was outside and she responded by turning blue, I didn’t bat an eyelash. “You and me both, Lo,” I said before turning the radio on and mopping up the floor. It was eight a.m., and I wasn’t about to empathize with a thirsty octopus over her sexual needs when I hadn’t gotten laid in months.
This is my own fault, I know. After Tae left, I basically coped with it by not coping at all. I’ve been broken up with before, but never because the guy in question was actually planning on leaving the planet.
Tae never liked my working at the aquarium. He couldn’t understand why I had “tethered myself to a sinking ship,” as he said. No pun intended probably, knowing Tae. And it’s true that we don’t get too many visitors these days, especially with more and more of the animals being bought up by wealthy investors who want to be able to gawk at a giant endangered sea turtle in their at-home aquarium. The exhibit hall feels ghostly sometimes during the off-season, like an abandoned carnival ground.
But Dolores is still here. She has been one of the aquarium’s crown jewels since I was a kid pressing my nose against the glass to marvel at her shimmering colors. She’s probably one of the oldest giant Pacific octopuses in the world.
“Look at the size of her,” Apa would say. “Isn’t she a beauty?” He was a marine biologist and a consultant for the aquarium, tasked with making sure that the tanks replicated the animals’ natural environments as much as possible. Umma always said, not really joking, that she wouldn’t be surprised if he left her for Dolores someday.
My manager, Carl, walks in, all hair cream and business. Dolores immediately turns inky dark and makes herself scarce. I don’t blame her. Carl is the kind of guy who thinks everyone is happy to see him and always talks like he’s wearing a headset. He’s both fairly harmless and extremely irritating.
“Morning, ladies!” he says, radiating caffeinated goodwill.
“Morning, Carl,” I say, not looking up from my mopping.
Carl pats the glass like it’s a flank, and somewhere in the water I see one of Dolores’s huge eyes open, a horizontal pupil flashing as she watches the movement of his fleshy pink hand, but Carl doesn’t see her. “Cheryl’s out today and Francine’s got a field trip. Mind overseeing cleanup in Tide Pools, Ro?”
I open my mouth to tell him no, and he hastens to add, “There might be a day off in it for you. I’d do it myself, but I can’t stay late tonight.”
“Hot date?” I say, and then wish I hadn’t, because the smile that spreads across Carl’s face is the kind of smile that announces it’s got something to say and it won’t let you go till it’s been said.
“Her name’s Christina. Since it’s our first date, I thought we’d—”
“Fine.” Just stop talking to me, please, I don’t say.
Days off used to mean something to me, back when Tae was still around and I had a life in which I did things outside of work. We used to plan weekend trips to towns we picked at random, either in Upstate New York or down in South Jersey. Tae always took care of all the logistical details, but I was the one who planned out what hokey roadside attraction or niche museums we’d go see, like the wooden clog collection we found once in a town we breezed through on the way up to Hudson. Tae liked our jaunts, my propensity for seeking out the strange. “I get to see more of the world with you,” he told me once after I’d forced him to go to a jug band concert played by animatronic squirrels somewhere outside Albany.
But who says I can’t take trips on my own, now that Tae’s gone, somewhere in the Arizona desert? It’s been months since I’ve had a break of any kind.
Carl is surprised by my acquiescence. “Super!” he trills. “See if you can get Dolores to come out and say hi later this afternoon when the field trip comes by. The kids always love her.” As if in response, Dolores waves one pale arm through the water in his direction, which startles a yelp out of him. I suppress my laughter at the idea that anyone could get Dolores to do anything she doesn’t want to do.
***
Dolores is somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five years old, so technically, she’s younger than me. But by sea creature standards, she’s practically nonagenarian. In addition to being one of the last known giant Pacific octopuses in the world, she has the prestige of having been spawned in one of the most polluted zones of our warmed-over oceans, the Bering Vortex, where my father disappeared fifteen years ago on what was supposed to be a routine research trip.
I’ve saved and studied just about every known photo of the Vortex. I’ve made notes on the sheen of its waters, which are red and green and violet with toxins and spills from the refineries in Alaska. I’ve imagined going there myself, to look for my father.
Officially he’s listed as “missing, presumed dead.” I don’t know if that last part is true, though. Sometimes I get calls from unknown numbers or numbers with area codes I don’t recognize, and when I pick up, I swear I can hear waves of sound, spray and roar, or breathing, a voice that sounds like it’s trying to break through. When I first told Umma about the calls, she said it was just perverts or spam, but I can’t shake the thought that it might be Apa. That somewhere out there he might still be trying to find his way back, and that the calls are his way of checking in. Of letting me know that he’s thinking about me, wherever he is.
The Bering Vortex isn’t on any of the Alaskan cruise stops. The only people who go there are pollution tourists or researchers. The creatures that have managed to survive, mutate, and breed there, passing on their irrevocably altered genetic material over the last few decades, are biblical in size and shape and hard to see or catch. Climate scientists and marine biologists alike haunt the Vortex, hoping for a sight of them, for a chance to discover what’s allowed them to continue living under such harsh conditions.
When Dolores was first caught, she was about fifteen feet long and still growing, and powerful and smart enough that they had to lid her tank with iron. Now there’s more than twenty feet of her, and her round, wicked eyes are the size of classroom globes, the kind I used to spin and place my finger on when I was a kid, trying to guess where I would land when the spinning stopped.
***
“The women of our family have never had luck with men,” Umma said when I told her Tae had broken up with me. She cites my grandfather’s untimely death, which widowed my grandmother at the age of thirty-two, as well as the fact that her younger sister was never able to find a husband as further examples of this bad luck. She’s not the type of mother to whine about my never calling home or visiting, or to say things like “between us girls.” But every once in a while, she comes out with pronouncements like these that make me realize there is a person with feelings somewhere underneath her usual veneer of chilly poise and disapproval.
Umma actually liked Tae, couldn’t believe that her daughter had finally gotten herself a boyfriend who was not only Korean but also smart, handsome, and had a real job. In a way, he legitimized me, made me into a girl she could finally start to understand the shape of. I’ve never brought anyone else home to her before, so it’s highly possible she thinks he was the first person I’ve ever dated or slept with. Umma never told me about sex, and when I was a kid, I imagined that I must have been born from sea-foam, a tiny pearl that bobbed to shore that she and Apa had scooped up one day.
Tae wasn’t supposed to leave on the Arc 4 mission. He was just one of thousands of volunteers on the waiting list, waiting to hear the results of a lottery that would determine who’d get to join the crew for years of spinning around in the dark toward Mars, to build the first human colony out on the red planet. I hadn’t taken his interest in the mission seriously, dismissing it as one of those fantasies that scientifically minded boys always have, about saving the world by leaving it.
“So what, if you get picked, then it’s off to Mars?” I said skeptically when he first told me he’d signed up for the lottery. He shook his head.
“It doesn’t work that way,” he’d said. “I have to get picked, then pass the fitness and aptitude tests, and then there’s a training program out in Arizona. A simulation, to see if we can take it.” By the time he started going into the different initiatives and goals of the program and the types of people they were looking for (apparently there were diversity and inclusion quotas that Arc 4 was supposed to be fulfilling), I had already stopped listening. The vast darkness of outer space—which is totally unlike the darkness of the ocean, where even the most unfathomable, seemingly inhospitable depths still glimmer with signs of life, the kind of life you can see and touch—has never interested me much.
When Tae finally got into the program, he waited until two weeks before he was supposed to leave for the desert to break the news. “Ro, I have to tell you something,” he said one night over bowls of green curry at his place. My stomach dropped, because nothing good has ever happened after someone says that they have to tell me something. It was how Umma had told me that Apa’s ship had gone missing and that there was no sign of him or the rest of the crew.
So I steeled myself and watched my curry grow cold as he showed me the confirmation and plane tickets they’d sent him, and the glossy welcome packet he’d received in the mail with the gold Arc 4 logo embossed on it.
“I’m sorry,” he said after I’d failed to say anything in response. He took his glasses off and polished them, the way he always did when he got nervous. “But I can’t turn this down.”
“Can’t you?” I said, my throat as dry as sand. “What’s out there that you can’t find here? Why is this so important?”
“Ro,” he said gently, as though I were a child. “The planet is dying. Arc 4 is about finding solutions to an untenable problem. I’ve wanted to be part of something like this since forever.”
“What about me?” I asked, my voice becoming high and strangled the way it always did when we fought. Tae hated that. “What am I supposed to do? Just wait until you come back?”
He was quiet, and then I knew that he wasn’t going to come back for a very long time, if at all. Tae had told me, back when he’d first signed up, about all the mission preparations, beyond the usual necessities: seeds, water purification kits, even condoms, in case the crew got lonely—but also ovulation kits. Europa, the company funding the mission, wasn’t being subtle about the fact that if the crew of Arc 4 should want to start populating Mars with a new generation of humans, they should feel free.
I told Dolores about it the next day at work. I shook her breakfast into the water and watched her unfurl herself like the world’s scariest beach umbrella and devour the silvery fish with her sharp beak while I told her about Tae and cried. Once she’d finished eating, she slowly turned maroon, which I decided to take as a sign that she was trying to be supportive.
This morning, Dolores is blue again. She’s signaling her readiness to mate, her eagerness to mount the rocks and corals of her tank and push herself against a male octopus, who will insert his hectocotylus into her mantle cavity and deposit sperm packets inside her until she is ready to lay the eggs. Unfortunately for Dolores, there is no bachelor octopus around ready to father her orphan eggs, and so when she turns that milky, almost pearlescent blue that I know means she is in the mood for love, there is no one but me to see.
Dolores can turn herself as flat as a pancake or puff up like a mushroom, and when she propels herself through all one thousand gallons of her tank, air bubbles dance around her like they’re laughing with her. When she undulates her arms through the clean, dark water, she looks like a storm of rib- bons. She can be cranky, like any old lady, but she loves seeing me come in with a bucket full of shrimp and fish for her. I could swear that sometimes she waves at me.
So this morning, when I wished her good morning and told her how the weather was outside and she responded by turning blue, I didn’t bat an eyelash. “You and me both, Lo,” I said before turning the radio on and mopping up the floor. It was eight a.m., and I wasn’t about to empathize with a thirsty octo- pus over her sexual needs when I hadn’t gotten laid in months.
This is my own fault, I know. After Tae left, I basically coped with it by not coping at all. I’ve been broken up with before, but never because the guy in question was actually planning on leaving the planet.
Tae never liked my working at the aquarium. He couldn’t understand why I had “tethered myself to a sinking ship,” as he said. No pun intended probably, knowing Tae. And it’s true that we don’t get too many visitors these days, especially with more and more of the animals being bought up by wealthy investors who want to be able to gawk at a giant endangered sea turtle in their at-home aquarium. The exhibit hall feels ghostly sometimes during the off-season, like an abandoned carnival ground.
But Dolores is still here. She has been one of the aquarium’s crown jewels since I was a kid pressing my nose against the glass to marvel at her shimmering colors. She’s probably one of the oldest giant Pacific octopuses in the world.
“Look at the size of her,” Apa would say. “Isn’t she a beauty?” He was a marine biologist and a consultant for the aquarium, tasked with making sure that the tanks replicated the animals’ natural environments as much as possible. Umma always said, not really joking, that she wouldn’t be surprised if he left her for Dolores someday.
My manager, Carl, walks in, all hair cream and business. Dolores immediately turns inky dark and makes herself scarce. I don’t blame her. Carl is the kind of guy who thinks everyone is happy to see him and always talks like he’s wearing a headset. He’s both fairly harmless and extremely irritating.
“Morning, ladies!” he says, radiating caffeinated goodwill.
“Morning, Carl,” I say, not looking up from my mopping.
Carl pats the glass like it’s a flank, and somewhere in the water I see one of Dolores’s huge eyes open, a horizontal pupil flashing as she watches the movement of his fleshy pink hand, but Carl doesn’t see her. “Cheryl’s out today and Francine’s got a field trip. Mind overseeing cleanup in Tide Pools, Ro?”
I open my mouth to tell him no, and he hastens to add, “There might be a day off in it for you. I’d do it myself, but I can’t stay late tonight.”
“Hot date?” I say, and then wish I hadn’t, because the smile that spreads across Carl’s face is the kind of smile that announces it’s got something to say and it won’t let you go till it’s been said.
“Her name’s Christina. Since it’s our first date, I thought we’d—”
“Fine.” Just stop talking to me, please, I don’t say.
Days off used to mean something to me, back when Tae was still around and I had a life in which I did things outside of work. We used to plan weekend trips to towns we picked at random, either in Upstate New York or down in South Jer- sey. Tae always took care of all the logistical details, but I was the one who planned out what hokey roadside attraction or niche museums we’d go see, like the wooden clog collection we found once in a town we breezed through on the way up to Hudson. Tae liked our jaunts, my propensity for seeking out the strange. “I get to see more of the world with you,” he told me once after I’d forced him to go to a jug band concert played by animatronic squirrels somewhere outside Albany.
But who says I can’t take trips on my own, now that Tae’s gone, somewhere in the Arizona desert? It’s been months since I’ve had a break of any kind.
Carl is surprised by my acquiescence. “Super!” he trills. “See if you can get Dolores to come out and say hi later this afternoon when the field trip comes by. The kids always love her.” As if in response, Dolores waves one pale arm through the water in his direction, which startles a yelp out of him. I suppress my laughter at the idea that anyone could get Dolores to do anything she doesn’t want to do.
***
Dolores is somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five years old, so technically, she’s younger than me. But by sea creature standards, she’s practically nonagenarian. In addition to being one of the last known giant Pacific octopuses in the world, she has the prestige of having been spawned in one of the most polluted zones of our warmed-over oceans, the Bering Vortex, where my father disappeared fifteen years ago on what was supposed to be a routine research trip.
I’ve saved and studied just about every known photo of the Vortex. I’ve made notes on the sheen of its waters, which are red and green and violet with toxins and spills from the refineries in Alaska. I’ve imagined going there myself, to look for my father.
Officially he’s listed as “missing, presumed dead.” I don’t know if that last part is true, though. Sometimes I get calls from unknown numbers or numbers with area codes I don’t recognize, and when I pick up, I swear I can hear waves of sound, spray and roar, or breathing, a voice that sounds like it’s trying to break through. When I first told Umma about the calls, she said it was just perverts or spam, but I can’t shake the thought that it might be Apa. That somewhere out there he might still be trying to find his way back, and that the calls are his way of checking in. Of letting me know that he’s thinking about me, wherever he is.
The Bering Vortex isn’t on any of the Alaskan cruise stops. The only people who go there are pollution tourists or researchers. The creatures that have managed to survive, mutate, and breed there, passing on their irrevocably altered genetic mate- rial over the last few decades, are biblical in size and shape and hard to see or catch. Climate scientists and marine biologists alike haunt the Vortex, hoping for a sight of them, for a chance to discover what’s allowed them to continue living under such harsh conditions.
When Dolores was first caught, she was about fifteen feet long and still growing, and powerful and smart enough that they had to lid her tank with iron. Now there’s more than twenty feet of her, and her round, wicked eyes are the size of classroom globes, the kind I used to spin and place my finger on when I was a kid, trying to guess where I would land when the spinning stopped.
***
“The women of our family have never had luck with men,” Umma said when I told her Tae had broken up with me. She cites my grandfather’s untimely death, which widowed my grandmother at the age of thirty-two, as well as the fact that her younger sister was never able to find a husband as further examples of this bad luck. She’s not the type of mother to whine about my never calling home or visiting, or to say things like “between us girls.” But every once in a while, she comes out with pronouncements like these that make me realize there is a person with feelings somewhere underneath her usual veneer of chilly poise and disapproval.
Umma actually liked Tae, couldn’t believe that her daughter had finally gotten herself a boyfriend who was not only Korean but also smart, handsome, and had a real job. In a way, he legitimized me, made me into a girl she could finally start to understand the shape of. I’ve never brought anyone else home to her before, so it’s highly possible she thinks he was the first person I’ve ever dated or slept with. Umma never told me about sex, and when I was a kid, I imagined that I must have been born from sea-foam, a tiny pearl that bobbed to shore that she and Apa had scooped up one day.
Tae wasn’t supposed to leave on the Arc 4 mission. He was just one of thousands of volunteers on the waiting list, waiting to hear the results of a lottery that would determine who’d get to join the crew for years of spinning around in the dark toward Mars, to build the first human colony out on the red planet. I hadn’t taken his interest in the mission seriously, dis- missing it as one of those fantasies that scientifically minded boys always have, about saving the world by leaving it.
“So what, if you get picked, then it’s off to Mars?” I said skeptically when he first told me he’d signed up for the lottery. He shook his head.
“It doesn’t work that way,” he’d said. “I have to get picked, then pass the fitness and aptitude tests, and then there’s a training program out in Arizona. A simulation, to see if we can take it.” By the time he started going into the different initiatives and goals of the program and the types of people they were looking for (apparently there were diversity and inclusion quotas that Arc 4 was supposed to be fulfilling), I had already stopped listening. The vast darkness of outer space—which is totally unlike the darkness of the ocean, where even the most unfathomable, seemingly inhospitable depths still glimmer with signs of life, the kind of life you can see and touch—has never interested me much.
When Tae finally got into the program, he waited until two weeks before he was supposed to leave for the desert to break the news. “Ro, I have to tell you something,” he said one night over bowls of green curry at his place. My stomach dropped, because nothing good has ever happened after someone says that they have to tell me something. It was how Umma had told me that Apa’s ship had gone missing and that there was no sign of him or the rest of the crew.
So I steeled myself and watched my curry grow cold as he showed me the confirmation and plane tickets they’d sent him, and the glossy welcome packet he’d received in the mail with the gold Arc 4 logo embossed on it.
“I’m sorry,” he said after I’d failed to say anything in response. He took his glasses off and polished them, the way he always did when he got nervous. “But I can’t turn this down.”
“Can’t you?” I said, my throat as dry as sand. “What’s out there that you can’t find here? Why is this so important?”
“Ro,” he said gently, as though I were a child. “The planet is dying. Arc 4 is about finding solutions to an untenable problem. I’ve wanted to be part of something like this since forever.”
“What about me?” I asked, my voice becoming high and strangled the way it always did when we fought. Tae hated that. “What am I supposed to do? Just wait until you come back?”
He was quiet, and then I knew that he wasn’t going to come back for a very long time, if at all. Tae had told me, back when he’d first signed up, about all the mission preparations, beyond the usual necessities: seeds, water purification kits, even condoms, in case the crew got lonely—but also ovulation kits. Europa, the company funding the mission, wasn’t being subtle about the fact that if the crew of Arc 4 should want to start populating Mars with a new generation of humans, they should feel free.
I told Dolores about it the next day at work. I shook her breakfast into the water and watched her unfurl herself like the world’s scariest beach umbrella and devour the silvery fish with her sharp beak while I told her about Tae and cried. Once she’d finished eating, she slowly turned maroon, which I decided to take as a sign that she was trying to be supportive.
From SEA CHANGE: A Novel by Gina Chung. Reprinted by permission of Vintage Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2023 by Gina Chung
Gina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. She is the author of the novel Sea Change (Vintage, March 28, 2023), which was a 2023 B&N Discover Pick and a New York Times Most Anticipated Book, and the short story collection Green Frog (Vintage, 2024). A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021-2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from the New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Idaho Review, among others.
