Korean American novelist Jung Yun on what inspired Shelter, her stunning debut
One of the most talked about novels of 2016, Shelter is set in recession-hit America in 2008. Yun talks about the home invasions and home foreclosures that sparked her to write the book, and what she’s working on now
It seems as though every year a novel – and its author – appears out of nowhere and gets readers everywhere talking. This year that book is Shelter, by Korean American writer Jung Yun.
Her debut work, Shelter is set during the American housing crisis and financial crisis of 2008, and explores the American psyche, which has taken a beating from the Great Recession. Shelter opens with a harrowing scene – Kyung Cho, a Korean-American biology professor, sees an older woman, naked and limping through the fields behind his house. That woman turns out to be his estranged mother, who has managed to escape a scene of unbelievable violence at her home a few miles away – two drug addicts had taken over the stately home where she and her husband, Kyung’s father, live.
In Shelter, Yun explores our deep attachment to real estate and strips away the comforting associations of home. Here, she talks to Alison Singh Gee about her fascination with “house invasions”, growing up in one of the few Asian families in Fargo, in the US state of North Dakota, and how she spends her days as a writer.
The start of your novel focuses on a harrowing home invasion. How did you first become interested in this type of crime? How did that spark the idea for your book?
I didn’t really know it at the time, but I started writing the first scene of this book in 2004. I had imagined a man standing at his kitchen window, watching his elderly mother walk toward his house naked. As a writer, one of my greatest joys and challenges is coming up with something random like this and trying to piece together what happened before and after. But like a lot of ideas, I didn’t quite know what to do with this one, so I put it away and moved on to other things.
Three years later – in 2007 – there was a home invasion in Cheshire, Connecticut, about 90 minutes south of my home. Two men took a family of four hostage, and when the police began closing in on them, they set the house on fire and fled. The only person who survived that night was the father.
