SOURCE: "Crossing Borders." in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 30, 1998, p. 2.

[In the following review of The Foreign Student, Eder examines Choi's handling of details of character, setting, and theme.]

Fiction as metaphor: as travel, that is. To be transported suddenly—the way a moving van lets the furniture fall asleep in one town and wake up in another, seemingly without transition. "Metaphora" is the word painted on the sides of Greek moving vans.

Chang, a Korean student at college in the Tennessee hills in the late 1950s, is such a van. We could travel to Korea half a dozen times and never possess the intimate sense of being there that he provides us.

Wrestling with the strangeness of the American South after living through the horrors of the Korean War, this seemingly awkward and diffident young man does more than give the American reader a view of...