To what extent does a fear of betraying and of being betrayed hinder each of them in their relationships? What borders and boundaries--for example: geographical, emotional, cultural--are crossed or transgressed? What are the consequences of each crossing or transgression? To what extent is the "total, irresolvable uncertainty" that Chang carries with him after his release from torture characteristic of life itself?
How do Chang, Katherine, Addison and others deal with the "total, irresolvable uncertainty" of life?
What are the implications of Choi's setting her story of an interracial love in the American South of the mids? Why do you think she makes only muted and indirect references to racial prejudice and condescension? When young French student Philippe Leclerc Marco Hofschneider gets awarded a fellowship to study abroad in the United States, he is thrilled to experience A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, The Foreign Student!
Felicia Leon on The Foreign Student! Felicia Leon attached chancrosab. She seemed particularly American to him, not in spite of her isolation but because of it. Obligation or dependence would never have entered her realm.
Eventually his idea of her grew so elaborate and sufficient and remote from the actual woman that it was a shock, one morning in early November, to find her standing in the lobby of Strake with her gloves in her hand. Does this seem like the time? Would you like to go for a drive with me? He said Yes. The semester was no longer beginning, and the restless way in which everyone watched what the others were doing, and the exuberance with which they threw themselves into the novelty of hard work with one foot still stuck in the summertime, were all over.
The air was pristine now, monastic and preoccupied. There was the subterranean hum of activity folding in on itself.
It was a pattern she was accustomed to, one she even felt she thrived within, as her orbit grew increasingly far flung from Sewanee and she was more and more often alone. This time of year reduced life to the pith. The summer was a place apart from the normal course of things. If they saw each other now they would smile 19 Susan Choi and nod, and keep moving. In the autumn Katherine stayed in her car more than ever, and when she left it she carried her keys in her hand, like a talisman.
Even her friendships with the hired women, the housemothers and housekeepers, were now brisk and pragmatic. Sometimes she still did stand at Mrs. But mostly she moved between them, each domicile a solitary island, ferrying their occasional news back and forth, once in a long while driving them to the good stores in town, and on holidays to the bus stop, when they set out on their pilgrimages, to a sister somewhere, or a nephew.
She tried to take their example, and stiffen her spine. Although she felt they must be lonely, they never betrayed it. Nor did they voice discontentment or speak harshly of people, although Katherine often felt there was something they all shared and all took for granted, a placid assertion they made, that they were glad to have staked out their lives on the unobserved edges of things, and that they had their attention half elsewhere.
At other times she thought this might be an illusion. She took care to do things that could only be done at that time of the year.
She ventured into her attic, too stifling in the summer to set foot in, and chased away the squirrels with a broom. She picked up turned leaves and stuck them in her heavy books, with leaves from other years, now brittle and forgotten.
She attended evening lectures sometimes, feeling that if only she approached 20 The Foreign Student the lecturer—on Gothic architecture, on the poetry of Ireland, always an elderly, sage visitor who came a great distance to stay just one night—and posed a question like the questions she saw them ruminate with care, they would be able to speak easily to each other.
More than anything she drove, watching the leaves turn, and the changes the season made. She was always shocked by the way in which autumn, after dropping constant hints of its nearness, still managed an ambush.
She would come out from her house one cold morning and stop dead in her tracks. It was like striking a match to a kerosene lamp and then turning the key: the hills were suffused, with a light from within blasting forth. Looking along the ridge, after every trace of green was gone, she would realize how many shades there had been, each one now a slightly different red, the hill a single thing on the very point of falling to pieces, the trees flinging their dead branches to the ground where they broke explosively underfoot, and the air turning chill and carrying those noises, of tree death and the chattering of creatures, over miles and miles, unaltered.
She would sense the shearing away of yet another year from beneath her feet. The passing of time somehow made itself felt the most powerfully during the autumn, in the way the season precisely repeated itself, and the years in between disappeared, each night the clouds lying black against an orange sky, and every autumn linked to the next to make one endless autumn through which her life shot, like an arrow. Driving, she watched the low sun flashing through the trees.
Or coming out into cleared land, one hill swung away while behind it another revolved, the crown of trees on its crest turning 21 Susan Choi a new side to her, and in the gap of sky that widened in their midst a shred of cloud scooting across like a toy on a string.
She would drive as far as Alabama, and turn around. She would wend her way north, and duck under the Kentucky border, but she never simply went up to Chicago, or St. Louis, or down to Birmingham. She was always driving back, in the evening, with the western light blinding her out of her rearview. The road that found Sewanee from the west passed down the center of a vast agricultural plain, so level it looked machine-made, lacking even slight dimples or humps where a tree might survive.
The red dirt always seemed freshly turned. From here the mountains spanned the horizon ahead like a modest green hedge. The mountains were full of grand yet squat, low-eaved, stone-floored summer houses, as cool as iceboxes. The houses were mostly full of well-heeled old women, faculty widows or society dames who went to the mountains in June because the weather was cool and the company good.
Sewanee had always been a summertime retreat. No one remembered which had come first: the well-heeled old women or 22 The Foreign Student the striped picnic tents on the quad; a dance orchestra in the evenings sometimes, all the way down from Nashville; and good meals every day, barbecue at least every week, and cocktails all afternoon on the broad patio of the faculty club overlooking the gorge, with the boys from the kitchen tricked out in white jackets and gloves.
It had been this way forever. Many of the houses now belonged to successful alumni whose affection for Sewanee, or sense of indebtedness to it, made them want to return every year. It was also true that Sewanee men lived in the South, where they had been born, and so Sewanee was a summer refuge from Birmingham, or Atlanta, or Jackson, that was not someplace like Provincetown, or Maine.
Joe Monroe was one of this group, but he also had other incentives. It gave him great pleasure each year to affect casual ostentation at what always, even in the absence of classmates, felt like a reunion. He wanted to demonstrate the extent of his worldly accomplishment in the setting most likely to emphasize it. At Sewanee he had been a charming but talentless student. This arrangement had made Monroe secretly miserable.
The roommate was famously brilliant, academically careless, slight, unathletic, pseudo-aristocratic, and strangely devastating to the girls. After graduation he went to Princeton for his doctorate but returned to accept a position from his alma mater, which felt lucky to get him. They never changed their minds about this, and so Addison continued to be lionized at Sewanee long after the larger world of his profession had come to see him as a man who failed to live up to his potential, out of laziness, or arrogance, or both.
Everyone assumed that he had driven her crazy with neglect and justifiable contempt. Joe Monroe dated his own emergence as a possibility, as someone who might amount to something, from the moment at which he found himself accepted by Addison as a good enough companion and foil.
In many ways the return to Sewanee was for the sake of seeing Addison, because Joe could continually assert the depth and longevity of the friendship, as well as his triumph. The way he saw it, he had gone forth into the world and made a lot of money, while Addison had lingered in the past. It seemed to her that Glee was saying she was 24 The Foreign Student too old not to be serious.
The truth was that Katherine spent most of her time with the boy doing nothing. Their options for physical transgression were never quite clear. While Katherine dwelt morbidly on the possibilities, the boy seemed content to go swimming. Sewanee had a river that cut a deep cleft through the grade of the mountainside, sometimes pausing to spread at the base of a steep waterfall.
They both had the same favorite swimming place, a coincidence that might have been the sole cause of their courtship. They would walk there together, on a narrow path that was lumpy with tree roots, holding hands.
They both wore sneakers and shorts with their suits underneath, and limp towels tossed over their shoulders. Sometimes the path grew so narrow they rotated sideways, still yoked, and then rotated back. But when they reached there she left him, and went off by herself. The riverbed at the head of the falls was a jutting stone shelf, and the water slid over its edge in an unbroken sheet.
The falls were so constant they seemed motionless as they disappeared under the surface. When Katherine stretched out and let her ears fill with water the roaring of the falls turned into a noiseless vibration. She liked to pretend she was lying in bed, and tried to untrain her body from floating. She would feel her legs sinking and towing her hips along with them, until she was just an archipelago of new breasts and shoulders and face. She kept her eyes closed.
Somewhere near the base of the waterfall the boy was scaling the rocks, or squinting at the prospects for fishing. In the afternoon, when the high cliffs cut off the sun and threw the pool into shadow, he would come to the bank nearest her, holding open a towel. There was an odd, delicate formality to their companionship. They had little to say to each other and little real desire to sneak off alone. The only thing she had to conceal from her mother was the very lack of something to conceal.
One day she came downstairs to the living room and found Charles Addison sitting there alone. He looked her very frankly up and down. She was wearing a fitted gingham sundress, with spaghetti straps and darts. It was the sort of thing her mother insisted on putting her in for evening dates with the boy, and not the sort of thing she wore much otherwise, but she was wearing it now, and the womanly cut of its little-girl fabric suddenly struck her as lewd.
She lowered herself onto the wicker ottoman across the room from Addison and looked around vaguely. Self-conscious, she raised an arm and scratched at her back between her shoulder blades. She knew it looked gawky and crude. The ground is still marshy in spots. Pleasant breeding holes for bugs. The only girl in a bevy of boys. Have you had terrors from all of your brothers? She liked her brothers, but they were a different breed. She liked the idea of being terrorized by them; it made her wish they had.
But no, they had never done that. I would make her regret every breath that she took. Suddenly uncertain, she reached again for the elusive itch, but it was not there. She deeply preoccupied herself with an imaginary discomfort, one arm hooked awkwardly over her head, and realized suddenly, with horror, the nervous prickling beneath her arms that was soft hair there, gathering sweat.
The arm dropped. Crossing the room, she had known; he had only taken her by the shoulders and turned her, and seated her on the edge of the sofa before him, and scratched her carefully between the thin gingham straps. Her hair hung thick and loose, an upper boundary, and below was the snug upper seam of her dress. It was a small compass. Her skin beneath her hair teemed unbearably, but his hand would not move there. Then his fingers paused.
It was not a bite; it might have been no more than a slight interruption in the color of her skin, a mark that she would never see, or his attention gathering and disabled by its own weight. He suddenly pushed his hand up, raking over the teeming skin, into her hair. They heard the motor of a car and a door blithely slam, and she had risen and moved, like a sleepwalker, out of the room. There was nothing to do in Sewanee. For several years it had just been herself and her parents. The remaining presence of her daughter did not seem to offer much solace.
For ten years Glee had had nothing but boys, and her supposed incompetence with rambunctious boy babies was a topic she discussed enthusiastically and constantly. It never did, but it threatened to all afternoon. It seemed risky to venture much further.
Everyone in the party was, for the most part, old, and for the most part female. Many of them were clustered around Charles Addison, laughing with what they seemed to feel was dangerous abandon.
They were gasping and fanning themselves. Katherine watched her mother move across the flagstones, one hand regally proffered, and Addison seize it and pull her toward him through the crowd. He kissed her briskly on the mouth and then, making a mock show of recalling himself, on the hand. They laughed hard and exchanged witticisms. Her father was back in New Orleans for a few days on business.
Katherine went to watch the kitchen boys husking sweet corn, ripping away at the tight layered leaves, and then fastidiously going to work on the squeaky silk threads.
Eventually she found herself at the head of the flight of stone stairs that swept from the deck to the lawn. She began climbing down. The sky glowered and grumbled, noisily shifting its great weight like heavenly furniture. The rain was all around them. It only needed a catalyst, some first effort to give a stir to the air and send everything tumbling. She came off the steps onto the lawn and strode into its center. She imagined herself to be the unacknowledged focus of a collective, multifaceted attention: matronly disapproval, or mater- 29 Susan Choi nal annoyance, or some other keen, distant disinterest.
The weather was attending on her, too. Looking back she saw heads up there, bobbing eagerly, but from this distance she could not make out their eyes. For a while she trailed conspicuously to and fro on the otherwise empty lawn, like a lightning rod. Her dress was a yellow silk sheath. Her mother claimed that even water would stain it. She was still on the grass, hoping for telltale droplets, when shrieks and leaping flames from the deck drew her reluctantly back there.
The kitchen boys were dousing them with straight gasoline and throwing lit matches. A wall of fire would spring up with a whump, burn a minute or two, and then seem to evaporate.
An acrid combat stench had filled the air. He was ripping up the Chattanooga Tribune and stuffing crumpled balls of it between the coals. Several women cried out that he might burn himself. Louis, the head cook, tried batting Addison away with a pair of tongs. He often made an irritating display of shaking hands with the table-servers at university functions. We need kindling. It might keep her from getting more spoiled. Hard labor? In spite of what your mother says.
Even when she was alone she felt as if she was measuring up. He was on the ground, looking for twigs. As they drew near the house her mother came down to meet them, laughing again, her glittering gaze fixed on Addison.
He tried to make conversation, telling Katherine about walking up that first night, and about the lamp Mrs.
Reston had put in the living-room window. Reston there smiling for all she was worth. He had been extremely grateful, he carefully explained, for the confidence of the promptly opened door, and the lack of locks. The windows were open to the night air, his bedroom door was open to the hallway, and although this had made sleep impossible for a long time it had also reached back to encompass his terrified toil up the hill, and now this trial seemed like a transforming and deliberate arrival.
It was wonderful, he concluded, that it had 33 Susan Choi never occurred to Americans to keep their doors locked. She found this mistake evocative. Just like that, he had remembered his dream. He could never understand what it was in the full light of day that lay across his path like a trip wire, waiting for the slightest touch to recall the night to him.
All that had been needed was for that life to withdraw itself slightly, to give his mind space to restage things. Sometimes he woke with the disturbing sense that his own voice had just finished a long ricochet through the room.
The dream flickered past his sights and was gone. She was a little pleased at his brushing her off. Sewanee is an island. Nothing new ever washes up here, and that makes people dull. They stop noticing things. Or an island of the soul. The stumps descended down the trunks like thorns, and between the pines nothing else grew. The dim air seemed full of fine, plum-colored dust.
He would feel as if he were homing in, the thick mat of needles crackling beneath his feet, toward a place where stillness was accumulating, and then suddenly the trees would give way and he was standing at the edge of a cliff, facing a bright void, looking down over farmland that stretched away into haze. People spoke of living on the mountain, but he saw they lived in it. There were many places like that, where the view was unutterably lovely, and at the best of these the university had erected a huge white crucifix.
It was the first thing that anyone saw, coming up the long gradual road through the lesser mountains, that indicated the nearness of the mountain itself, in the same way that Mrs. Katherine always noticed the cross making its first appearance like a pale stitch in the green mountainside, even when she tried not to. It would vanish behind turns and then reappear, growing steadily larger. And when she was leaving she watched it in spite of herself, nearly running off the road, as it slowly diminished backwards in the frame of her rearview.
He spoke very little after they came down out of the mountains into open farmland. She watched him watching the road. She always grew frustrated and impatient with the people who ran the place. As soon as she had turned off the engine she would suspect that the boy who pumped the gas was sullen, or even sadistic, in the way he slowly loped out to her car.
The woman soda jerk in the cafe seemed reluctant to lift her arm, and the arm itself seemed to be made of lead. By the end of three minutes Katherine would be mad with impatience, and she would hop back into her car and gun the engine, and swear to herself, and scream her wheels in the dust.
But she always inserted this hiatus into her drive. Going in the other direction, away from Sewanee, she never thought to stop there. She would rarely perceive it had passed, and if she did, she would hardly think of it. Looking for it now, she nearly missed it. They must have known her as well as they knew the distant streamer of smoke from the train or the mud puddle that formed in the dust every time that it rained—she was an unremarkable, semiregular feature of the landscape, something which excited little speculation and which vanished from memory the moment it vanished from sight.
But now they noticed her. She was afraid for a moment, and sensed that he was also. They slurped their drinks, staring ahead. The boy looked back at her uncertainly, and she nodded, and so he looked down at the nozzle again until a spurt of gas leaked down the side of the car and then he snatched the nozzle out. As the boy wiped down the side of the car and washed the windscreen, lifting each wiper blade with an excess of care and restrained admiration—it was a very nice car—there was a waiting that they all shared in, and the mass of it gathered around them.
But it did not tip or tremble; it kept steady. They might have been watching a ship come in, Katherine thought. For a moment she could feel it. The arrival in a strange land, and stepping onto the gangplank as the whole harbor paused in its work and turned a single gaze toward you.
She stood there with him in a half circle of constant, unshy observation until she had paid the boy and they had emptied their glasses and slowly walked back to her car. Speaking, it takes slower. Does he make conversation with you? A good conversationalist? It really is. She had hoped she was taking him on his first exploration of America. I go to churches belonging in this, and talk on Korea. But I like to give a talk. I have a projector, and I show some slide.
He generally explained that Koreans were farmers, that they enjoyed celebrating their holidays clad in bright costumes, that they were fond of flowers and children—that they were unremarkable, hardly worth the trouble of a lecture. The slides were never quite appropriate. Like his remarks, he kept them as generic as he could, and changed them often. He understood that people liked something to look at, and that even the least seasoned audience eventually lost interest in looking at him.
He also gave a potted history of the war, and answered questions. Nothing you say would be stupid. He blushed. What did you say? The kind of a house up on legs, like this. You were too polite. They give Sewanee, for my tuition. She was silent a moment. How far in advance do you get your marching orders? Sometimes a lot of time, sometimes just a few, one or two days. I like this bus, though. Like going to the movies. Very much. He watched her eyes calmly scanning the road, until she glanced at him.
It was late. He wondered if Mrs. Crane must have heard him come in. He came and hung off the door frame, the frame groaning in protest. Crane seemed morose 40 The Foreign Student and self-absorbed, as usual. Where the hell are you going to go, right? I think so. He hung there like a pendulum. Crane was his only real friend, his only possible confidant. Now he ignored it completely. The outer limit of his vision sprang up right before his face and he refocused.
He 41 Susan Choi would walk the paths of the campus with his head bowed, his algebra equations radiating in every direction, his latest dictionary words floating past like bits of floss on a fine summer day, lost in the landscape of his thoughts, but with the problem of her looming throughout, like a hill in the distance. It became clear that her offer of a ride had been no more than kind conversation.
He blushed slightly to think it. He was embarrassed not only by his mistake, but by his sudden disappointment. Dean Bower sent him a note saying that he had been invited to speak to the congregation of St. The first move was made, and nothing intervened to correct him, and so he went on, each elapsed day eroding the likelihood of his conversation with Katherine a little more, until he might have actually forgotten, because there no longer seemed to be anything to remember.
Then she called him, on the telephone that sat on a glossy round vase-table out in the hall of Strake House.
My last name is Monroe. Reston knows how to find me. Almost anyone does. But I should have made that simpler. Is he asked to speak anywhere lately? I have an aunt almost everywhere. Have you met Mr. Reston when he had just gotten here. He had managed to locate his voice. I just found out myself. I like to drive. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
Download the Reading Group Guide. A Gen-X bildungsroman that speaks to young generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery MeToo puzzle-box about the fallibility of memory.
It flexes its own meta-existence—as a novel about the manipulation inherent in any kind of narrative—brilliantly. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind.
Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest. Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon. Read it once for pleasure, and then again to turn up all the brilliant Easter eggs. Hormones practically drip off the page. This mind-bending book is worth the wait as Choi challenges readers to consider the boundaries between fiction and reality. With consummate wit, punchiness and feeling, [Choi] shows how much we need our female novelists within the sea change of our current moment.
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