By Brett Cadigan
This past August, I enjoyed an interview with Elaine U. Cho (elaineucho.com) regarding her sci-fi space opera duology, Ocean’s Godori and the recently released Teo’s Durumi. We discussed a variety of topics, including the series, her experience as a writer, some favorite authors and inspirations, and a never-before-told Goodreads horror story!
Brett: When did you first know you wanted to become a writer?
Elaine: Oh, gosh. I don’t know. I’ve just always liked writing stories. And I think even if Ocean’s hadn’t worked out to be published, I would still just write for fun. A lot of my stories and books I’ve written with my sister in mind—I have a sister who’s nine years younger—and most of the books I hope she enjoys, or I want to create a world that she’d enjoy. I just think of finishing it off and sending it to her to read. So I think that’s been the impetus for most of my writing.
Brett: When you were growing up, what were some of your favorite books?
Elaine: Ooh. So I’ll preface this with a story. When my husband first talked to my mom and said he was planning on proposing to me, she sat him down and told him this outlandish story about how we used to live really close to a library. And when I was a kid, I read every book in the library, which obviously is not true. But I don’t know if she was telling that to him to brag or to say, listen, this is what you’re getting into. Into the Land of the Unicorns by Bruce Coville was my first book that I remember staying up to read. I read a lot of fantasy; that was my gateway into reading in general. The Redwall series! I think everyone loves those. Ella Enchanted still holds up. I reread that five years ago. As a kid, I think that’s what I read the most. And now I just love reading. I’m a very omnivorous reader, so I just enjoy it all.
Brett: Professionally, what led you to writing? What was your career like that got you here?
Elaine: It’s been a very unorthodox, circuitous route. I went to school for music. I got my BFA and MFA in flute performance. And then I moved up to Seattle after that and did the music hustle, which involved doing as much teaching and performing as I could, but also working three side jobs at the same time. I worked for a UX design company, at a movie theater, and I worked in specialty coffee for four years—a lot of service industry and arts adjacent stuff. I worked for some arts nonprofits too. But what probably has the most relevance toward writing is that I got a job as a bookseller at an independent bookstore here, which was a dream job for many, many years. Then I got a side gig writing reviews for movies too. Now, I work as an editor at Shelf Awareness, which is an online publication that writes about the book industry.
Brett: Shelf Awareness, I like that name. Let’s talk a little about the series. For some of our readers who have not read it yet, could you give a brief overview of Ocean’s Godori?
Elaine: Ocean’s Godori is a space opera that takes place in the future, where the solar system is dominated by a Korean space agency. The main character, Ocean Yoon, is a pilot who fell from grace after a mission went awry and she got a reputation for being a little too quick with her gun. The book centers around her relationship with Teo Anand, the second son to a huge solar-spanning tech conglomerate. It’s got space chases, hoverbike races, and a slow burn romance. I wrote the book because I wanted to use sci-fi as a lens through which to explore ideas of identity. How do we honor where we come from as we’re figuring out who we’re going to be in the future?
Brett: It seems like, in a lot of ways, Korean culture plays a really big role and I don’t think the novel would be the same without it. What inspired you to make this choice? What sort of research or elements did you make sure to include in the series?
Elaine: I think it started when I read The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I love that trilogy. A customer had dropped off the first book at the cafe that I worked at, which is how I picked it up. I grew up reading and loving sci-fi, but it was authors like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and all the usual players. Writers always talk about writing what you know, but also writing because they didn’t see themselves in the stories that they were reading. That’s a reason a lot of authors write their books. But when I read these books it didn’t even occur to me to think, oh, I’m not really in these stories. I kind of internalized the status quo that this is just what the future looks like. And Liu’s book just totally blew that out of the water. It was like, oh, this is what the future can look like. And it was also a very, very unique sci-fi in that it was completely entrenched in his culture and his way of thinking. I love that, and I hadn’t read sci-fi in a while but it brought me back to the genre in a big way.
[I started] looking for other books that were from a non-Western perspective, like Hao Jingfang, who had just had a work translated. Ken Liu had some books translated. Ted Chiang, of course, is great. Kim Bo-young had just gotten her first book translated into English, which is great. But as I was looking for books and reading more, it was very much the cliche: Well, why not write what you want to read? So Ocean’s was meant to be a very particular book through a Korean-American lens. I wanted to write that specifically, so that’s why the culture is such a big part of it. What would the future look like if Koreans dominated space?
Brett: This is definitely a book that embraces the importance of food. So I’m curious to ask, what is your favorite food?
Elaine: Oh my God. I think my go-to for this answer is ox bone. Have you had it?
Brett: I haven’t!
Elaine: Ox bone soup: it’s very homey and you can have it with beef and noodles, and usually you put rice in it. I have a Korean cookbook so I made it at home and when I told my aunt, she said, “Dude, not even Koreans make that at home,” because it’s an involved process where you stew these bones for hours, like eight to 12 hours. You usually go to a place that specializes in soups or stews for this particular thing. There’s a place down in LA that I went to that just does this. It was amazing because you go in there and it’s this tiny corridor and two ajumma are working and they’re just yelling at each other. [They] just plop down the soup, a side of kimchi and that’s it! But it’s very homey. I like how warm it is, literally and figuratively.
Brett: In Ocean’s Godori you have three POVs: Ocean, Teo, and Haven. How did you pick these three characters to focus on?
Elaine: When I wrote the first draft and sent it out to agents, it was actually not focused on just these three POVs. They had the most chapters for sure, but it was peppered with different POVs. It was more open in that it went back and forth between a lot of different characters. My agent was the one who asked me to focus it on these three people because she felt they had the most to say. But I liked that, because the specific themes I was trying to explore pertain to these three characters the most. So that really helped me focus and shape the arc a bit better. The more I’ve written, the more I’ve learned that giving yourself constraints can often be so helpful.
Brett: What was your favorite scene to write?
Elaine: Generally, my favorite things to write are the conversations between characters. A lot of times when I’m writing, I’ll just plop two characters in a room and let them have it out. And I don’t always use the scenes, but I have a lot of fun with them. It also informs me about how well the characters are fleshed out if I put them in a random room with a random character and see what kinds of things arise. But I think my favorite scene might have been the one where Ocean’s thinking back to her brother and when she’s driving around with him, which is one of the earlier scenes where you actually see a little bit of vulnerability from her. Funnily enough, I don’t enjoy writing the action scenes as much. It’s more of the quieter, softer conversations between people that I like.
Brett: If this was going to go to Hollywood, do you have any actors in mind to play your characters?
Elaine: Oh, my God. I get this question a lot, so I should have a dream cast. I’d love to have Andrew Ahn as a dream director. I feel like he’s most well-known for Fire Island, which was a Pride and Prejudice retelling taking place on Fire Island. But earlier in his career he did these really beautiful, intimate movies. There’s one called Spa Night, which is about a Korean-American kid in LA who’s coming of age while closeted and working at a Korean spa. It’s beautifully shot and very intimate. Kogonada is also a wonderful director who has done some episodes of Pachinko, the movie Columbus and some light sci-fi work, like After Yang. He’d be great. Lee Isaac Chung would be great because not only did he make a beautiful movie like Minari but he’s also directed episodes of The Mandalorian, so that’s a great intersection. I think all of these directors whom I really admire have dual experiences and abilities.
Acting-wise, the mother from Minari, Han Ye-ri, was who I had in mind when I was forming Ocean. I first saw her in a K-drama years ago called Hello, My Twenties, which is about a group of Korean girls in their 20s who live together. She plays a ‘hard-exterior, soft-interior’ character like Ocean. One fancast I will mention that made a splash at the Olympics last year was a Korean Olympic shooter, Kim Ye-ji. I had so many people send me pictures of her when that happened. They’re like, “She has to be your Ocean!” She would be great. She was so cool in those pictures.
Brett: I noticed a lot of music and video game references in Ocean’s Godori. I’m curious, do you like video games and music? What are some of your favorites?
Elaine: I love games and music. I did a video game podcast a couple of weeks ago. I was like, “This is the coolest thing ever.” I don’t play a lot of modern games, just because I actually have a hard time with motion sickness. But I did grow up playing a lot of JRPGs, like Final Fantasy. One of my favorite games is Suikoden, which is another great series.
Brett: Suikoden‘s a deep cut!
Elaine: It’s so good, though! Suikoden II is probably one of my favorite games of all time. Supergiant is a company that I really admire. They’ve done Hades, of course, as well as Bastion and Transistor. I’ve loved all of their games. That’s actually the reason why and how I got the audiobook narrator that I did. Judy Alice Lee, who narrates both audiobooks, is the voice of the main character in Hades II. That’s how I found out about her.
Brett (A fan of Hades): Wow!!
Elaine: Another dream come true. I love games. There’s lots of little references. Mega Man is another game that I loved a lot on Nintendo. I got to drop a lot of music through Maggie, who has a very eclectic taste. And a lot of that was symphonic stuff, which is my music background. I think she’s listening to monastic chants when we first meet her. I like listening to a lot of music too. I put together a playlist for both books in terms of just vibes. You could probably make another one based on what Maggie references throughout.
Brett: Maybe Hollywood is not the place to go; I could see Ocean’s Godori as a video game RPG where you’re building the party!
Elaine: That would be so fun!
Brett: Do you work like Maggie? Do you have music playing when you write?
Elaine: I do. Usually, I can’t have anything that has English words in it. It’s just too distracting. But writing these two books and almost all of my writing and editing, I do to Yûki Hayashi, who is the composer for anime series such as Haikyu!! and Run with the Wind. It’s great. It’s got pathos and it’s got action. I usually have that playing in the background when I’m writing.
Brett: In these stories, are there any secret references or Easter eggs that the average reader might not pick up on?
Elaine: I am a trench coat full of Easter eggs. So there’s probably a lot of stuff in there that I just dropped in for fun. One has come up kind of recently—the restaurant where we first meet Teo is called Hanok. And that was a nod to an actual restaurant that I went to in Portland, where I really had a great time. I bring this up because, like three weeks ago, I got a message on Instagram from a woman named Ocean who had picked up my book because she had heard someone talking about it and liked that it had her name in it. Even wilder than that, she ended up being the wine director at Hanok. So she read the restaurant name and she’s like, “Whoa, what a crazy coincidence!” Then I responded, “Oh, that’s actually purposeful.” And she invited me and my mom to eat at the restaurant! I met her and she was so nice and sweet.
Brett: That’s amazing!
Elaine: Then another fun deep cut; when Ocean is doing that first race in the beginning of the book against the other pilot, there’s a very quick mention of how she is pushing the limits of her car and it’s going so fast that it chimes at her. That is a reference to something that actually happens with Toyota cars. In Japan, if you go above a certain speed it will chime at you because it’s basically saying, there’s no reason to be going this fast. That’s a reference to Initial D, a street racing anime and manga, which features that very distinctive chime noise when he is racing.
Brett: A few more questions about writing in general. What do you wish someone told you when you first started writing?
Elaine: When I first started writing? “Less is more.”
Brett: Are there any authors or novels that inspired how you write?
Elaine: Marilynne Robinson is a beautiful writer. I always say that her words feel like they’re bathed in light. I’m constantly reading and, thankfully, reading lots of good books and lots of great authors. I find that inspiring generally. When I’m writing, I try to read outside of my genre because I’m very sponge-like in terms of absorbing ideas or things I want to try or maybe things that I don’t like and maybe want to work against. Ursula K. Le Guin is really lovely in terms of writing, but also the wisdom she imparts… how generous she is with her writing, in terms of not enforcing things but also having a generosity toward her characters. There are a few of her books where the whole character arc is going from a terrible person to an okay, average person, which I think is a great arc. And I like that she has sort of given permission for us writers to do the same thing.
Brett: I know authors have very different opinions on this one, but do you read your reviews? Do you read ‘the comments’?
Elaine: I do not. I’ll read the first few that come in, just because… I don’t know! Am I a masochist? Maybe I’m just trying to get the feel that this will turn out okay, you know? But I do tend to stay away. Sometimes people will send them to me and then I’ll be like, okay, I should read it because they sent it to me. My husband will read the reviews and the comments and if someone says something really nice, he’ll screenshot it and send it to me, which is super nice. When Ocean’s came out, he was reading them and he was getting angry on my behalf! I wasn’t reading them, but I was like, oh, people are reading my book. I’m just happy to be here. There was a period several months ago where I went on Goodreads for Ocean’s and I just read all the one-star comments.
Brett: [Look of horror]
Elaine: I told my husband that and he was like, “Why would you do such a thing?” Right? And I was like, listen, everyone’s opinion is valid and at the same time, I was like, those five-star people don’t know what they’re talking about. I want to know what the one-star people are saying.
Brett: [Laughs]
Elaine: Honestly, as an author and a writer, it’s good that you’re not writing a book that appeals to everyone. The other part of it is something that Ursula K. Le Guin, the wise one, said: “Once you write a book and you put it out there, it’s a publication, it’s not necessarily yours anymore. It’s become this thing that’s creating an experience for readers.” And I think that’s a beautiful thing.
Brett: I definitely agree. Was there a specific moment or time when you first felt like a “Capital W” writer?
Elaine: I don’t know that I feel that yet! The first book came out in April of last year, so it’s been over a year since I’ve been a published writer, but it still feels very surreal. There’s a little bit of dissociation because if I go into a bookstore and see the book, I’m like, wow, look at that gorgeous cover of that book that has no connection with me whatsoever! I’m just so very happy to be here. So that encompasses my experience as a writer, lowercase or uppercase—it’s still very unreal!
Brett: Well, it’s real to us and your readers are enjoying it! Teo’s Gurumi came out August 5 and I can’t wait to read it. Thank you so much!
