A Conversation with Jinwoo Chong

Chong’s debut novel Flux is about “spectacular implosions” and “selective outrage” in the Age of Scams

Jinwoo Chong’s Flux is as soaked in popular culture as a boozy cake — and as delightful, too. But the book also doesn’t waste much time before you know it’s up to some very strange and dark things.

It’s the story of a floundering late-twenties guy who gets hired by a company claiming to have invented a transformative energy source. The book’s publisher bills it as a sci-fi thriller, and I’d say that’s accurate. But Flux’s speculative strangeness is also couched in the familiar consciousness of its narrator, Brandon, whose blasé yet agile mind is filled with old TV episodes and bits of snarky gossip. (Think Oscar Wilde meets Bowen Yang.) Brandon’s the kind of guy you want to like –– or rather, whose aloof vibe makes you want him to like you. 

Because of Brandon, the book feels more literary than its genre-focused paratext would have you believe. I devoured an early proof of the book once I realized that the narrative wasn’t in first person, but second: Brandon is narrating to his favorite TV character, a sort of imaginary friend whose real-life actor has just been––as we so concisely put it these days––“MeToo’d.” The allegations and public condemnations aren’t enough to convince Brandon to renounce the character. For as savvy and smart as Brandon is, he seems entirely free of cognitive dissonance––which of course immediately raises red flags about his reliability as a narrator. 

Thus, Flux’s canny narration works on the reader the way so many post-MeToo novels do: by unveiling the workings of patriarchy in not just the world of the book, but in the reader’s own mind. It’s a literary flourish that relies on readers’ willingness to become complicit with Brandon, only to find themselves as stuck in a vicious cycle as he is. 

All of the novel’s cultural products, brands, and figures are inventions of the author’s imagination, so that they are at once more fun, and easier to examine critically.  “When novels directly reference modern real-world things, it takes me out of it,” Chong told me, “so I usually have to make up my own.” Where the story hews to reality, the friction is not unlike satire. But even when Chong’s imagined dystopia becomes too strange to be recognizable, there is a grounded familiarity to his characters and situations, which keeps the dark parts of this book both gritty and prescient. 

The New York-based writer has won praise from established literary figures like Ling Ma, Alexander Chee, and Gary Shteyngart, as well as newer contemporaries of his like Elaine Hseih Chou and Rob Hart, whose novels, like Chong’s, take us by the hand and guide us into the twenty-first-century heart of darkness that is neoliberal late-capitalism. Where Chou’s Disorientation brings us to the college campus for its savvy satire, and Hart’s The Warehouse to an Amazon-like workplace hellscape, Chong wanted to write a “weird, beautiful office psychothriller” in honor of the Age of the Scam. 

His references run deep and wide, but the 80s are the decade with the most caché in this novel. Flux — which refers to the name of the creepy, cash-flooded clean energy company that hires Brandon without explaining his job description — is a self-conscious allusion to Back to the Future. Flux’s CEO, Io Emsworth, named her company after “that little piece of mechanical fuckery that the films claimed made time travel possible: the flux capacitator.” Her own promised “piece of mechanical fuckery” is called the Lifetime Battery: the ultimate solution to the energy crisis. But the press seems more interested in Emsworth herself, her nerdy love of old sci-fi a signifier of her legitimacy in the field: “She had watched the first [Back to the Future] at least fifty times, though by now she’d lost count. ‘It was on while I slept. It was my night light. I wore out so many VHS tapes that I’d get a new one each Christmas.’” 

Chong’s novel is indeed a consummate tribute to the VHS tapes we once played to death. The book’s nostalgia for a different media age — one where you rewatched and rewatched because you only had so many video cassettes (or had to return yours to Blockbuster by tomorrow) — serves his deeper themes about childhood’s buried wounds, and the salve, or perhaps intoxication, of immersive, fantastical visual stories, both then and now. The fantasy of time travel may be disguised in Back to the Future as a teenage dream, but its desperate impulse — to right wrongs, solve major problems, turn this burning planet’s train around — reveals so much more, and may even live at the heart of all our major scam stories. For who is the scammer but a person who wants to bend the laws of the universe to make things go the way they want them to?

A couple of months before Flux’s release, Chong and I spoke about our cultural obsession with scammers, and his book’s attempt to complicate the trope; MeToo, and the affective states it engenders in fans of tainted works; being a debut author in the midst of publishing’s ongoing reckoning with its racial and economic exclusions; and the pleasures of writing novels, which Chong told me are “home” for him ever since he was ten years old.

***

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Staff Picks: You’ve published a lot of short fiction, and this is your debut novel. How did the novel form compare to short stories for you? Do you prefer one over the other?

Jinwoo Chong: Totally. I have always wanted to write novels. I started very early writing a bunch of horrible fifty-page novels when I was ten years old. It has always been a part of my life, I’ve always loved doing it. 

I’ve not thought until very recently that I could do anything with it career-wise. It was always just a hobby to me. It became serious probably a couple years ago when I was first thinking about getting my MFA. I knew it would give me a lot of time to write and would help me make connections and things like that. As I’m sure you know, workshops are really suited to short fiction, and so I started writing short stories right around then to have something that would work well with the workshop format. 

So I love and appreciate short stories as well, but novels have always been home for me. And speaking of the business angle of it, I knew that it was going to be hard to get an agent if I just had a manuscript and nothing else, so I started submitting to contests and trying to publish short stories so that agents would notice. I found my agent this way: she had read a story of mine that was published and reached out to me. 

SP: I feel like you could write a scathing satire of the publishing industrial complex… but maybe let’s talk about the book first. 

Flux is such a feat of structure with all of these strands that you eventually tie together. I was wondering if there was one seed for the novel — if there was one of those strands or plot details that came before the others?

JC: Well, I’ll start with the way I try to write novels. I kind of cook the idea in an outline for a really long time, and add to it and include little paragraphs about what I think the characters are going to be like, and slowly get around to a chapter-by-chapter outline of what happens. I get very anxious about sitting down and actually putting together a draft, so I like to have done most of the work beforehand. That’s why for this novel, I outlined it for maybe two and a half years, but then I wrote it in about four months. It came together pretty quickly. That’s just the way I’ve found that’s most useful to me. I know a lot of people, especially short story writers, who just sit down and go with whatever they want, but I think it stresses me out too much to do it that way. 

The idea for this novel came about around 2017-2018, because that was the real-time implosion of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes. That story just captivated me. I had read Bad Blood, and then I had read all of the Vanity Fair articles and NYT Magazine articles that came out about it. It was just wild to me. 

I feel like society as a whole has fallen in love with this scam story. And we’ve seen it, all the way back then, to George Santos now: people love it. I felt the same way, and so that was probably the germinating seed. I added the television aspect, the time travel aspect, much later on. I wanted to start out with a scam company and go from there.

SP: I also see it as a MeToo book, thinking about 2017-2018. I wonder if that was also in the ether for you as you were formulating Brandon and Raider.

JC: Absolutely. And the selective outrage. I think a lot of people are unwilling to really recognize it themselves because they might’ve really admired this one person or loved their work or something, and so they refuse to, just, see it for what it is. This is what Brandon [my protagonist] does. He’s very blinded by his nostalgia for the show [Raider] … first for like, writing off the scandal that happens, but also in not recognizing that the show is actually not that progressive. 

There was a funny thing that happened when I presented this in workshop. They only read the first chapter, and then they went into chapter 3, which actually deals with scenes from the [fictional] show. They were like, “I have a huge problem with this, this show is actually very racist, very compartmentalizing toward Asians.” At first I was a little hurt by it, but then I was like, No, I did that intentionally. That was the point! It was a really cool angle to dive into. 

As well as the response from celebrities: like the tweet from Hadrian Haubert [the son of the show’s problematic actor]. Every time somebody gets found out, their wife, or their mother, or their close coworker writes a statement being like, “I’m recovering from my trauma and I’m listening…”. It’s so boilerplate now. That was a lot of fun to play with — to try and portray the culture around that sort of thing and how ridiculous it can be.

SP: I wondered too — maybe this is getting into some of your influences — if you have so-called problematic faves that have tortured you lately. I think about Harry Potter … that’s probably the most painful one for me to navigate. I don’t know if you’ve had those real life analogs, or if you invented Raider because you don’t. Someone like Raider doesn’t exactly really exist…

JC: That’s a good question. I feel the same way with Harry Potter. I used to read those books for comfort, just when I was feeling sad, and plus they were on kindle unlimited so you could get them for free! I would read them just to make myself feel better, and now I feel like it’s been tainted in a way. That was one of them for sure. The movie Call Me By Your Name was a big part of me accepting my own identity, and I feel very sad that … it just feels gross to watch it now. 

You can fixate on something so much that it becomes something different to you than what it really is. And then once the ties are really severed by something horrible like that, then you’re left kind of drowning. I was probably thinking about Armie Hammer the most when I was writing that. Because that was just a spectacular implosion, and it happened so quickly, and it was clear that this was not someone anybody should support ever again. 

I felt anger. I think that’s like at the end of the first chapter, when Brandon allows himself to be angry: Why the eff did you do this, why did you do this to me? And I felt that way about JK Rowling, and about many things, and now that time has passed … I was trying to capture that sort of rage. 

SP: In terms of world-building: the [fictional] Raider episodes and all the detail of that is such a pleasure of the book, and I think it probably is really unusual; I haven’t read a novel in a while that does that. There’s a nesting-doll feeling, almost frame narrative like… I was curious, how much of a mock-up of Raider do we have? Can we film it tomorrow?

JC: I’ll admit, I got carried away. They were not supposed to be that detailed, or even that much of the story — it was supposed to be something you could look at from afar instead of something that I feel like this book immerses itself in for pages and pages. I think it was because I really like shows like that, with that sort of vibe, it’s just cool. It felt like the cool thing to do to emulate Miami Vice and Night Rider — those cool characters with brooding music and light and shadow. It was just fun to write, which is probably why I kept doing it. 

And then I really like creating fictional things within other things. Sometimes when novels directly reference modern real-world things, it kind of takes me out of it. Like if someone mentions, “Lady Gaga was playing in the bar.” It feels incongruent to me sometimes. And so I usually have to make up my own thing. 

SP: I did want to ask if you surprise yourself when you’re writing — you said you do this outline process, and there are so many surprises in this plot. If you look at my notes while reading, it was a lot of like “WHAT!” in the margin. Did you have “what” moments as the story unfolded for you?

JC: There were some late additions that happened during the revision process after I’d sold the book. That was interesting to do because it was so concrete and fully formed in my head when we sent it out that adding to it was a completely new experience. 

One was the addition of the jacket —

SP: Wow!

JC: — yeah, the leather jacket was new. There were fewer surprises than normal just because I outline everything so in depth. But when they happen during the revision process, those were some really lovely surprises.

SP: Wow, that leather jacket feels so important to my experience of the book!  And the other “high quality leather goods” in the novel… 

JC: That part actually happened to me. It was 2018. I used to work for a magazine publisher who just, out of the blue, sold itself to another company and then completely laid off all of its marketing and sales people. And so that part did happen. I got this call from HR, and then I went downstairs … it was the Brookfield Place Mall, way downtown. I went downstairs, and I bought a very expensive wallet that didn’t make me feel better. And I thought, wow, this is very poignant. I think I’ve learned an important lesson about material goods, but also, I’m sad…

SP: …but also, this is the promise of consumerism, that it’s supposed to make us feel better!

JC: That’s right. That was very funny, to incorporate that into the first chapter. I was not sleeping with my boss, I want to be very clear about that. That part was fabricated. 

SP: We’ll make sure that’s on the record. 

I noticed in the publicity materials for Flux that it’s called a time travel novel; I was wondering if you consider that a spoiler.

JC: I think that was mostly a marketing oriented decision. Not to say that Marketing made that decision; I think all of us made that decision to kind of frame it in that genre, which has been really nice — a lot of scifi/fantasy titles have picked up this book and written about it for that reason, which has been really cool. 

But I also think that knowing the genre helps kind of prepare you for what it is. Because all you need to do is insert that word, and it manipulates your expectations… like, I would not want someone to read this thinking that they were getting like just a straightforward Theranos proxy, and be surprised by how strange it gets. I would not want that.

SP: Because once it does start getting strange, it gets very strange! That makes sense. Well on that note — do you have sci-fi inspo that you love, or that you’ve read growing up? There’s a lot of 80s nostalgia and references to Bladerunner, Back to the Future — I sensed that these were touchstones for you.

JC: Back to the Future for sure. Bladerunner for sure. And I think I was also kind of thinking of a lot of the scary, mind-bending office shows that seem to all be on the tech-streamers. I was thinking of Severance … And then Julia Roberts was in one called Homecoming that was this weird, beautiful office psychothriller. I love that because offices are horrible, and they’re the most awful places in the world, and so it makes sense to inhabit that kind of place for a weird story like this. I was thinking as much as I could about offices in that way. Which is why Ling Ma’s Severance played very heavily in my mind.

SP: When it came out I thought the show Severance was an adaptation of Ling Ma, and when I heard it wasn’t, I was like, Well then nevermind!

JC: Oh but it’s still good. But also Ling Ma’s Severance as a show would kill. But I don’t know, I wonder if they were going to do a show and then this other Severance came out and they said, “We can’t have two shows called Severance.”

SP: We’ve never had two shows with the same name at the same time. Maybe that’s the excess that our Golden Age of Television really needs.

JC: They could Lee Daniels-ify it — “Ling Ma’s Severance.” 

Ling Ma was very nice and gave a blurb for this book. And I had no idea it was coming. She did not respond for months and months and then randomly her assistant emailed my agent and said, “Oh, she’s actually reading that, can you give us a deadline?” It had been like 6 months. And so out of nowhere— she was very, very kind to do that. And now we’re best friends. [laughter]

SP: Soon enough… Once Flux hits stores she’ll know you’re in her echelon. 

JC: Hopefully. 

SP: Let’s keep talking about contemporary fiction and other writers you admire. 

JC: Oh yes. There are two that I can really think of, which are Charles Yu and Viet Thanh Nguyen. I read The Sympathizer right when it came out, and it bowled me over in so many ways. I still think it’s my favorite book I’ve ever read. And then Interior Chinatown, it was so experimental with its form, I’ve never seen anything like it. It helps that Charles Yu is a TV writer, and he’s done episodes of West World. Just the mastery of that was incredible. I like those two a lot. 

I read a lot of sort of ‘Silicon Valley books’ to try to acquaint myself with that. One was fictional, it was The Warehouse by Rob Hart. It’s a fictionalized Amazon that is far more powerful and almost treats its employees like indentured servants who live at these warehouses as well — that was an incredible story. 

SP: Do you know Dave Eggers’ The Circle?

JC: I have not read that one. I really want to, I love all his work.

SP: It’s like an exaggerated Google, with the whole campus aspect and the surveillance aspect… but I almost think it would seem quaint now.

JC: I’m sure it must feel dated. And it was a really bad movie.

SP: I didn’t even see the movie!

JC: I don’t think anybody cared about the movie. 

And then I was lucky enough to meet Josh Riedel, whose book Please Report Your Bug Here came out a few weeks ago. It’s about another kind of start-up company that is hiding a dangerous secret…and that one is lovely as well.

SP: Maybe we could dig into your character Io Emsworth, [the CEO of the company Flux]. It makes so much sense to me as a Theranos story, but she also feels post-Elizabeth Holmes, a post-feminist icon. It strangely made her likable, I found her likable. As you said, everybody likes to see these scams, but Elizabeth Holmes wasn’t exactly likable. That’s what felt different about Io. Did writing her character change your understanding of these scammer figures?

JC: I think so. It’s probably because at the end of every scam story, the person behind it is revealed to just be a dummy who didn’t know anything. I feel like this is happening with Elon Musk, too. Everyone is just like, “So you’re an idiot and nothing you did was what you intended…” And that’s always a letdown at the end of these scam stories. The exception being I think Anna Delvey. I think she absolutely knew what she was doing and had this guise of the airheaded heiress that I think is false. 

But I wanted not to have that moment at the end of this one, and to have this scammer be genuinely formidable and just be interesting and intelligent on her own terms. I thought it would kind of be a disservice to make her totally ignorant. That felt like a more powerful character than just someone who’s just a complete idiot. 

It was also very interesting and fun to write her dialogue, and also Lev’s, because they’re both insane — and it’s just like, nobody talks like this. Well, actually, I think a lot of people in LA talk like this.

SP: I was gonna say, they’re very real to me.

JC: Thank you. It was a lot of fun to write her. And maybe because it was so much fun, I had some pity, and I didn’t want her to just implode and be someone that you hated. 

SP: I think of her as post-feminist in the sense that she’s really very knowing. She’s very aware of all that’s being projected on her and playing with it so skillfully and… I don't know, that also felt dystopian. That feels like part of the curse of scam culture, that we all have to always know how we’re being seen and marketed, or how we could be marketed.

JC: Totally. If I had to cast this movie I would think Julia Fox would be perfect.

SP: Do you find yourself picturing Flux as a piece of film or TV?

JC: I think I always held a visual version of it in my head. And I think I made careful steps to make sure that it felt cinematic and sort of adaptable. Not just because I want it to be a movie; it held my attention better when I could think of it as such. So it was always in the back of my mind as I was writing it, and I think that was useful because it reminded me to be economical about scenes and to always have this realism about it. If I wasn’t able to visualize how things would happen in a particular scene, then I tried to work around it to make it visualizable. I think that helped it in the long run. 

SP: Could we talk briefly about Min as a character? She felt like a proxy for the reader in some way, or a really important foil for Brandon…

JC: Totally. She feels the most like a real person. I loved writing her so much because she seems to see everything in more clarity than everybody else, and is consequently the most important person in Brandon’s life at that point. That was an important piece to get right because she’s small but very pivotal. I wanted her to call him out on his crap at all times. I know a lot of young women who are very confident and independent, who push back on everything because of how intelligent they are, and I feel like I channeled a lot of that into her. For that reason I admire her the most. 

I don’t know that much about straight relationships and straight dating and tried to write it on my own terms… I wanted to try and give her more agency than I think I see in a lot of books written by men, where the male character encounters a woman that occupies the same position as Min. That character is often so underwhelming, or so underdeveloped and/or subservient to him in ways that just felt icky, so I think I was trying to push back against that. 

SP: I want to hear more about your sense of publishing right now. We have strikes happening at HarperCollins, we have a lot of really problematic, white-dominant stuff happening across the industry, and not enough money for the right people. I don’t know if you wanted to comment, or even just share personally what it’s been like navigating that.

JC: It is a weird thing to have a book coming out in what appears to be a period of at least potential change. On the one hand, I’m overjoyed that this could result in other editorial staffs unionizing, more hirings of POC in upper editorships, things like that. But I think I’m also wrestling with: “Did this have to threaten to destroy the industry this year?” I can’t deny that I’m a little scared because I used to have an idea about what a typical publishing career path would be, and I feel like that’s all being thrown out the window, and is continuing to be. 

And so in one sense, I’m excited for it, because it’s the right direction, and I think anybody would agree that plurality of voices is supposed to be the end goal of publishing books, so moving toward that is the right thing to do. But I’m also scared for what it's going to do, all the unexpected change it’s going to have on the industry. It might cause a lot of smaller houses to shutter, and then it might cause a lot of these striking employees — maybe some of them can't strike, and maybe some of them are going to leave the industry, which is just awful. So there’s a lot of fear and doubt that I’m wrestling with, along with feeling excited for the people who win these small victories.

SP: Thank you for sharing. Maybe I’ll end by asking what else you’re working on —any fun projects, hopes and dreams for what’s next.

JC: I actually started on Book Two! And it came about I think as a response to all of the rejection of last year when Flux was on submission, with editors who passed on it to say it was too confusing, or the genre hybridity is not sellable, those kinds of things. And a lot of people said it was just sad and depressing — which I agree with. 

But so my hope for Book Two would be to write something more joyous, because the past three years when I was upset or sad or depressed about the state of the world, I turned to books to be happy. And I think I’m in the mood for something more uplifting. And also something a little more autobiographical. 

SP: Congratulations again. We were in need of a novel that helps us think about these cultural phenomena together, all at the same time, so I’m grateful for the book, and I also found it really fun. I hope they make it a TV show. 

Are you going on tour at all?

JC: I don’t think we’re doing a tour because the idea of going to North Carolina and having like nine people show up would be devastating to me. Everyone says you have to have one like that, but I’m still scared of it! 

There’s just going to be a couple of things in New York. The big one is the launch at The Strand, with Alexander Chee, on the 23rd of March. 

***

Flux comes out on March 21 (my birthday!). You can pre-order it now from your local indie bookstore. 

I wrote a longer review of Flux for The Rumpus, called “It’s Not Cancel Culture, It’s Scam Culture.”