The stories in Chloe Chun Seim’s debut novel-in-stories, Churn, follow siblings Jordan and Chung on a twenty-year journey from childhood trauma to living as adults through the Covid-19 pandemic. As her characters come of age in a family troubled by addiction, mental illness, violence, and the racial prejudices of rural Kansas, Seim turns to magical realism to portray the surreality of adverse childhood experiences and their lingering effects.
When the novel opens, Jordan, aged twelve, and Chung, aged nine, live with their parents on the family farm in rural Kansas. Their father is an alcoholic; their mother is ineffectively medicated for anxiety and paranoia. They are violent with each other while drunk and fighting, which is made worse by their respective martial arts training—both are black belts in Tae Kwon Do. Mired in their own struggles, they neglect, harm, and endanger their children.
Even so, Churn never comes across as moralizing or judgmental. See how this passage contextualizes the mother’s verbal abuse before touching on its emotional impact and then swinging back to the context of the mother’s behavior:
Our mother used to tell lots of stories, about her mother, about her dreams of Korea, about old boyfriends and growing up in Junction City. Grain by grain, her joy was exchanged with violence, her openness with feeling that every person and every question was a challenge to her validity. Just like her joy, anger collects in her veins, builds, builds, builds, until she can’t hold it anymore.
Her words have always been her best weapon. The vivacity with which she can dismantle your self-worth in two sentences, flake away at the wallpaper of your resolve until she turns you in her favor. The way she talks about skinning your arms you’re being so bad, that she’s done it before, in middle school to some bitch who called her a g**k. (p. 5)
Without excusing this approach to parenting, Seim reminds the reader that, effectively, “hurt people hurt people.” That passage is from a story told in Jordan’s perspective, which makes the description of the children’s mother all the more effective. With the precocious wisdom of the eldest daughter in a traumatic family, Jordan holds her mother’s defects and wounds in tension rather than vilifying or beatifying her mother. Throughout the novel, Jordan seeks to understand her family, her experiences, and how they shaped her, with this same refusal to oversimplify.
Likewise, Seim’s compassion and deep understanding of this family (she wrote the stories over the course of ten years) keep the narrative from ogling their pain. The stories never feel punishing, whether to the parents or the reader. The parents love their children and each other. And they abuse each other and their children. That both these things are true makes Churn feel like a more authentic and valuable addition to the field of novels about traumatic childhoods and recovering from them.
While there are moments as harrowing as all the above suggest, Seim’s stories, like the siblings traversing them, flow towards empathy, connection, and healing. Organized into three sections—“Sink,” “Drift,” and “Surface”—the plot of Churn as a whole follows that same trajectory. In the first section, Jordan and Chung are dragged by their parents to a late-March lake trip, in a desperate attempt by their father to initiate a fresh start after a recent fight between the parents resulted in Chung being accidently shoved down a flight of stairs and the neighbors calling the cops.
Jordan wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of her parents fighting around the fire outside the camper. While she’s trying to get them to stop, Chung, a poor swimmer, goes missing. Fearing the worst, Jordan finally spots him floating on the lake on an inflated alligator. She swims out to save him, but once she reaches him, she sees in his eyes the same desperation to be free of their parent’s violence that she herself feels. Confusing oblivion for freedom, she jumps onto the inflatable knowing it will not hold them both. They sink to the bottom of the lake.
In the title story, narrated simply by “another,” we see Jordan, referred to as “the sister” throughout this story, decide to save herself and her brother. She kicks off the bottom of the lake and they surface, returning to the world in which their parents’ wounds are being treated by medics.
While too much of this scenario—their parent’s arrest, waiting at the police station for their grandparents to pick them up—is familiar for the siblings, they have been forever changed by their encounter with the lake. Jordan now has a fire in her belly that billows smoke out of her mouth and nose when she is upset. Even the slightest hint of danger has her smelling of asphalt.
One second, she was an ordinary, not-even-pretty preteen girl. The next, a geyser. A disturbance. She didn’t put it together until it happened. All that day, ever since the night before when she had given all she had to pull herself and her little brother from the lake’s grip, to do what her parents could not, something new and toxic and formidable had been cooking inside her. (p. 21)
Seim turns a metaphor for Jordan’s dysregulated nervous system and hair-trigger fight response into a reality, one which Jordan will spend the next two decades learning to live with. While this story ends with Jordan feeling the monster’s pride of power—“eventually she would be someone worth running from. Someone worth fearing” (p. 24)—I’m happy to report, without spoiling too much, that Jordan is never consumed by the fire or her own hidden monsters.
Chung’s lake-gift is a literalized metaphor for the freeze response to trauma: when Chung is upset, he flops like a dying fish, writhing helplessly until the danger passes … or he passes out. “The smallest trouble floored him, stripped his vision, and contorted him. Where his sister had gained in strength, he floundered. Often, he wondered if deep inside him some yet unseen power waited—would make him more than his current useless self” (p. 44).
Chung is sweet and tender, the kind of kid who doesn’t like catch-and-release fishing because of the trauma it must be causing the fish. Like those hook-scarred fish, Chung bears the physical reminders of the events that could have killed him, but didn’t:
... my arms are weak—my left, from the time Dad drunkenly backed the tractor into the shed I was playing in and broke my forearm bones in three places each, and my right is perpetually locking up, probably traumatized from the time the riding mower Dad and I rode tipped over and pinned us until Jordan and Mom finally heard us and set us free. (p. 100)
Three years younger than Jordan, Chung is less able to care for himself or avoid the dangers of parents who are farther down the roads of their declining mental and physical health. He is also the victim of more racist treatment from teachers, classmates, and the general public than Jordan, who looks more like their white father’s side of the family. “His sister had the white name and the white skin and had never been sent to the principal like he had (over untied shoes or someone’s misplaced lunch box or an inability to stop crying)” (p. 19). Given all he was up against, what else could young Chung do but freeze?
By the end of the first section, the siblings’ mother has taken advantage of their father being in a treatment facility to move Jordan and Chung out of the farm and into an apartment in town. Unmoored from the landscape that had offered her safety and solace in her youth, in the stories of the second section we see glimpses of Jordan’s high school life and the painful limbo of unspoken first queer love.
Like the rest of the book, the second section gives more pages to Jordan’s narrative, but it’s a Chung story that has stuck with me the most. In “Warm Lines, Cold Shadows,” the mother’s sisters and brother fly in for Christmas at the home of the children’s paternal grandparents. No one has told Chung and Jordan’s dad about the gathering, because they don’t want him to ruin it, and no one has told fifteen-year-old Chung because he would have told his dad. Seim renders decades of tension, disappointment, and still-breathing hope in Chung’s characteristic attempts to understand and do the right thing by all of the people he loves. The story is sad and beautiful and, like the rest of the book, eschews trauma-spectacle in favor of seeing the humanity and the pain in each of the characters.
“Warm Lines, Cold Shadows” is one of my favorite stories in the book, along with its counterpart from the third section, “Rend, Sew.” In the latter story, Jordan and Chung, now in their twenties, visit their mother’s family for Thanksgiving. Both are ensemble stories offering family history that contextualizes some of Jordan and Chung’s experiences. That’s at least part of why they stand out for me: these stories widen the lens and scope of the narrative, making it feel more like a novel than a collection of stories featuring the same cast of characters—which, I confess, Churn did feel like at times. But I don’t think the question of what makes this a novel (or not) is all that interesting in the face of Seim’s artistic experiments.
The stories are mostly told in first- and third-person perspective, though the second-person makes an appearance, and are mostly identified as being from the head of “the brother” or “the sister,” but a few are from “another.” There are stories told in lists and one, “Grandma Kim at Forty-five: a Serigraph in Four Layers,” told in paragraphs numbered like a limited-edition print: 1/10, 2/10, 3/10, etc. (“serigraph” being another word for “screenprint”). These experiments in form are one of the pleasures of reading Churn, though they undoubtedly make it harder to market (thank goodness for small and university presses), and mark Seim as not only a talented writer but an interesting one. (For example: each story is paired with an illustration made by Seim, which I doubt my spiral-bound ARC did justice, so I won’t speak to their qualities.)
The book’s final section, “Surface,” finds Jordan and Chung as adults, struggling with the legacy of their childhood and their complicated emotions. Repeated early childhood trauma often results in a feeling of alienation—from yourself and from those around you--as you contort yourself to survive at the most helpless time in your life. Healing, then, necessarily involves a process of returning to yourself, constructing a new sense of your identity, making meaningful connections, and building the capacity to trust others. Surfacing.
In the final story, which takes place during the lockdown in the early months of the pandemic, Chung comes close to a fatal freeze episode when time pauses, the moment dilates, and he must decide whether to give in to the pull of nothingness or return to the painful, traumatic, yet glorious world. This was the same decision faced by Jordan at the bottom of the lake twenty years prior.
With Chung’s answer, Seim gives us a clear-eyed and open-hearted thesis on the aftermath of trauma: “The brother and sister survived and kept on surviving, time a finger poking their wounds, and they learned to bear the pain and clutch tight to the living they had left” (p. 178). Jordan and Chung find their way to the surface.