A Refuge for Jae-in Doe and Other Fugues

A Refuge for Jae-in Doe and Other Fugues is the lyric memoir of Korean American survivor Seo-Young (Jennie) Chu. It is also a meta-memoir, one that is aware of its makeshift nature, poses questions about the genre(s) it inhabits, and self-consciously reflects on what it means to write autobiographically. Throughout the book, Chu experiments with the first-person singular “I,” tracing the polyphonies always implicit in the memoirist’s first-person singular voice. Writing polyphonically allows Chu to explore the plurality within her “I,” the uncanny homes she has found in dissociation, the appeal of other-than-first-person pronouns as sites of autobiographical consciousness, as well as the literal and figurative fugue states—from spells of incantatory writing to oneiric re-namings of the self—in which Chu finds refuge from intergenerational distress and rape trauma.

Moving from one fugue state to another, Chu explores a wide range of topics relevant to her meta-autobiography, including the nature of time, the history of the sonnet, code-switching, suicidal ideation, the model minority myth, late-stage capitalism, institutional violence, rape culture, standardized tests, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, what it means to read a book, and what it means to be a self.