SOURCE: Review of The Foreign Student, in New York Times, October 18, 1998.

[In the following review, Marlowe focuses on the "intricate portrait" of Choi's characters.]

Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, is a richly detailed exploration of a young man's escape from the nightmare of a country torn by war. During a stint as a translator for the American information services in Seoul, a young Korean named Chang Ahn is caught up in the political turmoil and forced into a life on the run. By August 1955, two years after the cease-fire has ended the war, Chang has managed to emigrate to the United States, where he attempts to settle into the life of a scholarship student in the university town of Sewanee, Tennessee. Yet he is unprepared for the smallest shocks of a vastly different world: even the realization that people in Sewanee go to sleep at night...