VIDA Review, and LIT Magazine, and her stories have been recognized by the Black Warrior Review Contest, the Los Angeles Review Literary Awards, the CRAFT Elements Contest, and the Ploughshares Emerging Writer’s Contest, as well as being named Longform Fiction Pick of the Week. Find her at gina-chung.com. An excerpt from her story “Human Hearts” can be found here. It appears in the May/June 2021 issue of the What was your original impetus for writing “Human Hearts”? I’ve always been drawn to the myth of the kumiho, or Korean fox spirit. Unlike other East Asian fox spirit archetypes, such as the kitsune, the kumiho is almost always seen as malignant and monstrous. Like many female monsters, she is seen as a threat to the patriarchal order because of her agency, power, and ability to take what she needs from men and destroy them. With this story, I wanted to explore what it would be like to be an atypical kumiho—to be a powerful, immortal being who is, at the same time, incredibly vulnerable because of her fears and how little she knows or trusts herself. My protagonist Okja is everything that a kumiho isn’t supposed to be: she’s awkward, fearful, not considered beautiful, and doesn’t enjoy killing in the way that her mother and sister do. Like most children of abusive parents, she internalizes her mother’s cruelty and tells herself that she deserves it because, as a half-human kumiho, she embodies everything that her mother despises about humans. And yet, when she does encounter humans later on in the story, she actually finds herself becoming more kumiho-like. It’s only in reconciling these two parts of herself that she is able to realize that she is more than just her sister’s foil, or her mother’s scapegoat, and choose another path for herself.