[In the following review, Marlowe focuses on the "intricate portrait" of Choi's characters.]

Susan Choi's first novel, The Foreign Student, is a richly detailed exploration of a young man's escape from the nightmare of a country torn by war. During a stint as a translator for the American information services in Seoul, a young Korean named Chang Ahn is caught up in the political turmoil and forced into a life on the run. By August 1955, two years after the cease-fire has ended the war, Chang has managed to emigrate to the United States, where he attempts to settle into the life of a scholarship student in the university town of Sewanee, Tennessee. Yet he is unprepared for the smallest shocks of a vastly different world: even the realization that people in Sewanee go to sleep at night without locking their doors is unnerving. Choi (herself the daughter of a Korean immigrant father) catches such moments under a very clear glass, wisely resisting the urge to embellish. Instead, she allows the story to blossom slowly after Chang (renamed Chuck) makes his first real friend in America: Katherine Monroe, his 28-year-old neighbor. Caught in a poisonous relationship with a popular professor, begun while she was only 14, Katherine is nearly as wounded as Chuck. Together they begin to heal, not with the dreamy pleasure of romantic young lovers but tentatively and painfully, mindful of all that has gone wrong in their lives—and all that might still go wrong. Moving from the present to the past, from America to Korea, Choi brings hundreds of small scenes to life, then uses them to construct an intricate portrait of lovers who must also prove (to themselves and others) that they arc survivors.