In this lyric memoir, Seo-Young Chu experiments with using literary fugues to explore the literal and figurative “fugue states” — from spells of incantatory writing to oneiric re-namings of the self — in which she has found refuge from abuse, intergenerational distress, and rape trauma. The voices animating the fugues in A Refuge for Jae-in Doe speak in a variety of first-person personas as well as in other-than-first-person pronouns, together comprising a complex authorial voice that is both less and more than completely unified.
Through such experimentats, Chu illuminates topics encompassing the nature of time, the history of the sonnet, code-switching, suicidal ideation, the model minority myth, late-stage capitalism, institutional violence, suicide, rape culture, standardized tests, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, what it means to read a book, and what it means to be a self.
About the Author
Seo-Young Chu (주 서영) teaches in the English Department at Queens College, CUNY. She is the author of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep? (Harvard, 2010), as well as numerous critical essays and creative works exploring science fiction, intergenerational trauma, mental illness, rape culture, and sexual violence.