In a surprising follow up to his intricately arranged time traveling debut novel, Flux, Jinwoo Chong flexes a different set of muscles in I Leave it Up to You. When Jack Jr. suffers an accident that renders him comatose at the end of 2019, he wakes up in early 2021 completely unprepared for the ways the world and his life have changed. His unexpected return to the land of the living isn’t just a surprise for him, but also for his fiancé and his family, none of whom are present for his awakening. In their stead, Cuddy, the nurse who’s gotten to know Jack Jr’s family while they visited, is the first grounding figure he encounters in the hospital. With this meet-cute in place, Chong manages to push this rom-com premise into rich territory with a prickly family dynamic and sharp dialogue delivered by a cast of characters that fight as hard as they love, all while Jack Jr. tries to get his bearings helping at the family restaurant, Joja. With its fun cast of characters, I Leave it Up to You feels something like a big queer hug, a perfect novel to remind us of the power of family and community in challenging times. 

When I caught up with him, while he was dog sitting for his brother in New Jersey, Jinwoo’s warm, comforting energy matched that of his book, even though publication jitters had him a little nervy. We discussed the changes to his process he adopted between his first and second novels, the differences between writing about an audience and writing towards them, and the dream gig that might convince him to quit writing.  

Stephen Partick Bell: It was funny when I finished this book and put it down – I felt overcome with this warm, cozy feeling. That’s especially weird because it was set in 2021 – a very odd period of time when we were maybe just barely vaccinated, starting to unpack the traumas of the pandemic. Restaurants were just starting to figure out how to do things in person again, while still dealing with new online models. Donald Trump was contesting the election results from 2020, and still, it feels like a return to a cozier, simpler time. I want to call this a rom com. Are you comfortable with calling this book a romantic comedy?

Jinwoo Chong: Oh, totally yes. It's what I set out to do – I was hoping that it would have the same effect on me writing it and reading it that it's had on you. I was hoping that it would make me happy, and that it would sort of be a hug to me. And it has been. I wrote it during a really kind of difficult period of life – of course in the outside world – but all of this was happening in my own world as well. My first novel just wasn't selling to a publisher, it had been so long. I was thinking maybe this is the end, my agent's going to drop me, and then I have to go all the way back to square one. My stress with it got tied up in in the thing that I most enjoy and the thing that gives me the most purpose. I started to really dislike writing and reading, and that was scary. In writing this book, I poured all my hope into it to try and remind myself that I did really like writing. It's the only thing I can imagine myself doing forever. I think it worked. I feel removed from the funk that 2021-2022 instilled in me.

SPB: It comes across, the warmth. You made me laugh. That’s not the sort of thing that I normally reach for. I remember you describing how long it took you to write Flux, and I was worried that I would never see another novel from you again. Could you talk a little bit about how writing this book was different from your first one, and what in what ways that Flux might have informed ILIUTY.

JC: Yes, I learned a lot of lessons working on Flux, because of all the time I spent not actually writing it. I spent years outlining and obsessing over the arrangement of things. I had mapped out basically every scene, every kind of thing that was going to happen, and I had written out tags of dialog that I wanted to include. It was a really, really involved, very detailed outline. I love the outlining of it because it removes the stress of having to deal with a blank page and having to, in the moment, decide what to put on it. I had removed that for myself when writing Flux and had also convinced myself that was the only way I could write. It was a great opportunity when I started working on ILIUTY, because I didn't have that much time. I just wanted to finish something by the time Flux was published, and that gave me a hard deadline that that I couldn't do my old process with. I had maybe a year to figure it out. I tried outlining. If you look at the Google Docs for it, the first chapter is exactly the set up I did for Flux. As the chapters go on, [you can see] I realized I was running out of time, and I needed to start writing it. I started leaving more blanks for myself to fill in and it was scary to do. I'd never really approached anything that I've worked on like that. I enjoyed it so much more when I was sitting down and I had questions that needed to be answered. The structure of ILIUTY is more conducive for that kind of thing, because it a pretty linear narrative. There's one point of view. Things don't need to interlock into other things like they did with Flux. It was a great space to kind of try out a more improvisational working style, and I did enjoy it. It got stressful at times, but I'm excited to see what I can do by just continuing to shorten my deadlines.

SPB: So, structure. I want to talk a little bit about your chapter titles. They go in opposite directions. Some of them are super concise, and some of them are very, very detailed stories in and of themselves. There's one dissociative flashback chapter that provides a lot of context for the schisms between the characters and the way that it's written feels like the stage direction of a play. It's very removed from the voice that we spend a lot of time with throughout the rest of the book. When that section came to you in the process and what made you decide to deploy it when you did?

JC: It was completely new. When I gave the book to Danielle, my agent, that chapter didn't exist, really. There was something very early on and a much more limited version of the chapter, written more like Jack's voice. She said, I want you to put that later so that it becomes its own climax and then find a way to differentiate it because it's the only flashback. With those directions, it became something that is so different from the rest of the book. It allowed me to be experimental in a way that the rest of the book didn't totally allow for. I've never thought of them as stage directions, but it is exactly that. I like that chapter a lot because I find myself laughing at it. It's really just a person having a panic attack, but I enjoyed writing it.

SPB: It's fun. I love that moment. I feel like in both of your novels, mechanisms of time and memory seem to be a kind of comfort zone for you. Was that part of your thought process at all, centering this book on a character who's lost time and doesn't have exact memories of how they got to where they are now?

JC: I think that's fascinating, and I do seem to just always think about that. Maybe where I'm coming from is the sensation of the pandemic having felt a little bit like a coma, like time travel. The statement of emergency in the [United States] was almost five years ago, and in one way, it feels approximately that long and, in another way, it feels like it was four days. I felt, first of all like it would be really funny if someone came out of that to just see how much the world had changed around him. I also thought it made for a really interesting metaphor, to have it be an actual coma, and for it to play out in a way that's literal, but also in a way that everyone alive who has been through the pandemic can understand what that might feel like.

SPB: Are you in Fort Lee right now?

JC: No. My parents live in Alpine. It's very close to Fort Lee and my parents live here so that they can go eat every meal in Fort Lee.

SPB: Your connection to Fort Lee really comes through in the text.

JC: I grew up coming here for basically every other weekend. It felt like from when I was five years old to when I went off to college on Saturday or usually or Sunday, my parents woke my brother and me up at eight in the morning and said, Okay, we're going to Fort Lee, and it would be a ninety minute drive which, if you're eight years old, is like forever. Then you go there and have to do all of these annoying errands, like pick up groceries and get our hair cut. For the longest time I despised Fort Lee. I wanted to stay home and play Nintendo and watch TV and instead, I had to spend four plus hours in this car driving for things I just I didn't have an appreciation for. Part of it was my youth. Part of it was some internalized kind of self-hatred of Koreanness and things that made me different from other people. I just didn't I didn't appreciate it. I was so used to being surrounded by white people that when I was in this community where everybody's Korean, all the signs are Korean, it was so unnatural to me that I felt uncomfortable, which is a very strange way to feel. Over time, I came to appreciate it so much more. Now, I every time I come here to visit my parents, it's my favorite thing to go there to eat something or to just hang around. It's crazy how much time has changed my perception of it and made me realize how much the city that I spent so much time resenting is a part of me and what makes me who I am.

SPB: Is there a specific place that inspired Joja and the Korean-inflected sushi they serve?

JC: There isn't a place in Fort Lee that directly inspired it. There’s this Korean explosion in fine dining all over the country and in New York, just recently, the restaurant Jungsik got a third Michelin star. It's the first Korean restaurant to get three in America. This huge Renaissance is happening and a lot of those new chefs are incorporating hybridized Japanese, Korean, and a lot of different other sorts of Asian influences in their cooking. That's where the inspiration for Joja comes from. There isn't much sushi in Fort Lee, to be honest. That was a fiction I created. I wish there was a Joja there.

SPB: Your characters do have some sex, but I feel like the intimacy is deepest when your characters are feeding each other, especially to think of the first scene Jack Jr. cooks for Cuddy. Could you name one of the first people in your life to cook for you this way?

JC: Okay, so this is the point of contention between my two parents, because the only thing I remember from being little is my dad cooking everything. Because he got home from work earlier than my mom, he would always make us dinner –Korean things like spam and kimchi with rice. Or it would be like spaghetti Bolognese. Everybody in America knows or has grown up eating that kind of stuff. It was all over the place. My mom claims that she invented all those recipes and cooked them, probably for first few times when I was too little to remember, and then my dad picked it all up. I guess it is both of them. We didn't really go out to eat, except for these Fort Lee sojourns on the weekends.

SPB: Do you and your husband cook for each other at home?

JC: I cook for him almost all the time. I can count multiple days where I'm responsible for all of his meals. And I love it. I love it the same way that that Jack Jr. does. Feeding people is something that I find enjoyable and, maybe some people will disagree, when I'm cooking for someone I really, really love, it doesn't feel as difficult. It doesn't feel like work. Maybe when I have children, I'm going to feel differently about that, but right now, it doesn't feel all that much like work. Sometimes he cooks for me, but it's usually something very easy, like an air fryer meal. He's a recipe cooker. I am not a recipe cooker. I one of my favorite things is just kind of like a refrigerator salsa, like a pot of all our produce and everything, just thrown together, maybe with, like, cous, cous, or orzo or something.

SPB: ILIUTY showcases a wide spectrum of traditionally Korean foods, American foods and the “high” and “low” ends of cuisine. Was it something that you really thought about featuring, or is it just something that was a natural byproduct of looking at how this family is eating?

JC: I think it's a natural byproduct. A lot of this family is my family with some key distinctions, like, my older brother is not an alcoholic. My mother, when she read this book, said, I just want to know why you made your older brother such a terrible person. But, yes, so much of this family is my family, and my family does a lot of that mixing stuff, a lot of high low, a lot of store bought versus homemade things. I think maybe it was a matter of necessity, probably because my parents both had so many things on their plate that they were just running around. All our meals felt kind of cobbled together out of whatever was convenient, but they were also trying to feed us healthy things. So, when it came time to write about how this family cooks and what kind of foods they eat, it felt natural to model it after my own experience.

SPB: Grace Lee’s blurb accurately describes ILIUTY as a remarkable portrait of an American family. There’re so many ways that I recognize this Korean family in the same way that I recognize my own Jamaican family in that very hyphenated-American way. On one hand it is inherently other, but on the other hand, it's the most quintessentially American thing to be like two things at once. How much you think about the Americanness or the Korean ness of your characters?

JC: I think that's a great question. My family is really assimilated into America. A lot of things that we do are more Western than they are Eastern. It's always kind of an uncomfortable thing to talk about or even compare myself to other Korean-American people, the measure of their assimilation, or their kind of hyphenness, and where the balance is. Mine is stacked a lot more towards speaking English without an accent – really just feeling a lot more American than I am Korean. It can get uncomfortable because, sometimes, it feels like I've lost a part of my heritage by being so westernized. I feel that recognizing that is an important thing. It's something I can't totally change. I could change it with my own kids, but it is a hand that that every generation has dealt to them when they are born – just the state of where they are and where their parents are in their lives. That question is really important, but something I don't totally know how to answer or really talk about. This is why, in the book, it is a sort of implicit issue. It doesn't get totally talked about. It's kind of talked around in some senses. There's a couple of scenes where some very, very Korean people comment on how terrible Jack Jr.’s Korean is and that's from such a real place. It happens to me all the time. The way that he deals with it with a little bit of shame and but also a sort of kind of it is what it is. But there is also a sense of pride in the way that he's able to operate well in America, in a way that earlier generations weren't able to. I think that's a sense of pride, and it's something I feel as well.

SPB: When I think about books like Queenie or shows like Insecure, I wonder if you felt any pressure, either way, to lean into mess or dispel/challenge any stereotypes about Asian Americans, especially Koreans.

JC: Yes. I think there are two things that I really didn't want to do in this book, and one was to do a 2006 Glee plot-esque, like gay thing happening. It doesn't mean that story isn't poignant, not true. I just think that it's been told before. There are so many other facets to this life that people need to know about too. There is a total spectrum of experience. That was the one thing. The other thing was this whole idea that if you wrote a sort of Dash-American novel – Guatemalan-American, Jamaican-American, Chinese-American – if that was the kind of novel that you're writing, you had to have characters speak in italics if the word was in another language. You had to be over-explanatory about things and you had to bridge the language gap in ways that felt like pandering. What I imagine happens in a lot of the Jack Jr. scenes with his father is that his father is speaking Korean to him, and he's responding in English, which is how so many people like Jack Jr. operate and communicate with their parents. It's not written out because it doesn't have to be. It's just not necessary anymore, because the white audience isn't the only one that we need to write towards. It's not enough to write about. It's also about writing towards a certain audience.

SPB: I hate this phrase, but on the subject of the High/Low tensions in the cuisine here, I do feel like this is very much like a working-class romance. No one has one of those rom com professions. There are no architects or doctors. Actually, I'm not sure if any of the characters have advanced degrees. Medical debt is a huge motivating factor for Jack Junior and his family. Glamour and fame are not central to the characters’ goals or their values. Was it a goal of yours to subvert these tropes of rom coms?

JC: I feel like it may have been. I might have used money and the stress of it to heighten the stakes for everybody involved. There are all sorts of those romantic books and thriller books about very rich families –  they don't know what to do with their money, and they're so miserable. See how miserable they are, even though they're worth billions? I wanted to go the total opposite way, and not in a way that was hokey – not to have one character who couldn't pay his bills and have that be his thing. The fact that everybody here in the book struggles with money and it's always at the back of their minds is a reality. The debt mindset, like existing with debt, pervades and permeates everything in life, and it's what Jack Jr. thinks about at all times of the day. And it made for interesting ground to let the characters kind of be more raw with their emotions, to be realer than you might be if everybody was comfortable.

SPB: I love that explosive scene in the restaurant at the end of Jack Jr.’s very consequential fifteen hours. Also, you gave us a few dramatic “running to intercept my lover” moments. I feel someone like Nora Ephron would really have loved to read this book, and I was wondering if there are any romantic comedies that you felt yourself writing to yourself writing towards.

JC: Okay, my favorite movie of all time is It's Complicated, the movie with Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. It's ridiculous and silly and it's one of those rich families dealing with stuff films. But I really appreciate the humor in it. I don't particularly like movies like that, and I like this one because I think the people are more real to me. I wasn't totally thinking of romantic comedies when I was writing it. I was thinking more about sort of family dramas. I think ILIUTY is first, a family novel, second, a food novel, and third, it's this love story. So, when I'm thinking about what I was writing towards, it was much less romance than it was about families. The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang was really, really amazing. Bryan Washington's Memorial is a beautiful novel that I feel just totally gutted every time I read it. That was in my head.

SPB: Is there anyone that you would think of in terms of writing an adaptation, directing, or people that you might cast in an adaptation of this?

JC: Yes, this is the question I'm ready for. Okay. This all stems from 2021, when Minari was up for Oscars. It was directed by Lee Isaac Chung and Lee Isaac Chung is totally Korean American, in so that he spoke with the Korean actors on set through a translator and directed in English. They tell this really just amazing story about this Korean-American family moving to Arkansas to start a farm, and half of the dialog is in Korean. For that reason only, it was nominated for Best Foreign Film in a lot of different award cycles, and it was probably one of the most American movies I've ever seen. Lulu Wang's movie, The Farewell, is really amazing, one that deals with such an interesting part of kind of Eastern family dynamics, this secret keeping and the guilting and all of that happening. I was thinking about those two movies a lot. Also, the director, Andrew Ahn. His most recent thing is Fire Island with Joel Kim Booster, but he also wrote and directed Spa Night. It's kind of like a dark sort of sexy thing in a Korean spa.

SPB: You gave us a lot of really, really fun lines. Like I said earlier, you made me laugh while I was reading, which is not normally a thing that I do, but the Trader Joe's meet cute line, that’s something I'm going to be thinking a lot about. “You never know what white people might do with guilt.” I love Jack Jr.’s hysterical meltdown about bottoming after eating pizza. There are not a lot of opportunities in literature to give bottoms their flowers – they do go through a lot. Do you have any screenplays rattling around inside of you?

JC: I have never written a screenplay. I've never attempted to. I think where it comes from is my love of plays. My husband is a playwright. Since I met him, I've developed this love of theater beyond the musical that I didn't think was there inside me. I like plays more than musicals now, which I never thought I would admit it, but that's probably where it comes from. I think the way it looks in a script is so different to the experience of watching it happen on stage. It's so impressive the way that certain playwrights who are good at that kind of crisscross banter. Maybe I was internally trying to emulate that style with the dialog.

SPB: I find creative couples interesting. You mentioned that your husband read your work first. What’s that like?

JC: Oh, I can't even be in the room. I hate it. It's two things. It's me saying I can't even be in the room, I can't even look at you while it's happening, this is so embarrassing, blah, blah, blah. But it's also like, why aren't you done yet? He's always so nice. He's nice about everything I've ever done, and I that's what I look to him for. I don't look to him for feedback. I know he values my feelings more than he values the quality of my work, and that's something that I feel is necessary in every writer's life, to have someone to do that for you. So, I know he's always going to be positive about everything I do. The telling factor is how long it takes for him to read things. This book, I sent to him and he read it in about 48 hours. I take that as a good sign.

SPB: Like your husband, Cuddy is a playwright and we learn in the novel who Cuddy's favorite playwrights are – Yasmina Reza, Donald Margulies, and Neil LaBute. What do they say about him as a character?

JC: I think they say that he's a boy. Neil LaBute and Donald Margulies, for sure, I could have put David Mamet in there. He's a big boy playwright.

SPB: Yes, you do mention him.

JC: Yasmina Reza, I just really like her work, so I put that in there. I always love to see which plays my real-life husband enjoys. One of his new favorites, is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, who, oh my god, things just happen in his plays that you just can't even believe whatever even happened on stage. That is incredible to be able to do that, to stil be pulling out things that shock like that in 2025 is incredible. I think that's what Cuddy really likes in plays as well and why he enjoys these “man” playwrights who write about “man things.”

SPB: This book deals a little bit with the ethics of sympathy marketing. Like, the tragic thing happened, let's put it on Tiktok and see how much we can get for it. Ethical implications aside, what would your dream viral marketing campaign for this book be?

JC: If I could leverage this into food Tiktok and become one of those food reviewers, I'd be really happy because the large majority of those food reviewers have no idea what they're talking about, and it's just embarrassing. Now it's this whole kind of genre in itself, people making fun of these food influencers who were like, “go to Tandoori Chicken, like it's so authentic,” and it's like, just shut up. It’s not being done correctly and I feel like I could really do it, because I have the knowledge. I also feel that I'm not impressed by hype. If something's over hyped, it makes me want to go there less. I feel like I could be a really great, sort of down to earth food influencer and maybe this is my way in. If I created some sort of like, sushi tour of New York and visited all the places that inspired Joja, then I could quit writing.