August 18, 2000

With Our Academic Pilgrims, Let Us Give Thanks

By CARLIN ROMANO

In Susan Choi's lustrous first novel, The Foreign Student (1998), Korean student Chang Ahn arrives at the University of the South in 1955, the multiple miseries of the Korean War still festering within him.

At home, the elite family life built by his privileged father, a professor during the Japanese occupation, disintegrated quickly during the war. His best friend fled to the Communist dictatorship of the North formed by Kim Il Sung.

With English learned from American

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