Sea Change

Advance Praise for Gina Chung’sSea Change“Sea Change tugged at my heart and refused to let go…. Between giant Pacific octopuses and humans, this remarkable debut reminds us that we are not so different—all of us hoping to be witnessed, all of us striving to surface through our loneliness to connect, even when we know nothing is permanent.”—Elaine Hsieh Chou, author of Disorientation“A wild blessing of a debut. Gina Chung’s curiosity, precision, and grace have created a world both strange and recognizable, the kind of place you can find a version of yourself you did not know existed and call her home.”—Mira Jacob, author of Good Talk“From the first page, Sea Change stole my big weirdo heart…. With her debut, Chung has proven she is a true original, the rare kind of writer who can be simultaneously witty and deeply sensitive, confident and devastatingly vulnerable.”—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl“Weaving deftly between humor and longing, Chung’s masterful prose interrogates what it means to be alive—and all of the growth, heartache, love, and friendship at the center of it. Marvelously original, tender, and moving, Sea Change will stay with readers long after they’ve surfaced from its pages.”—Qian Julie Wang, New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Country“Soulful, evocative, and wise. Sea Change is a powerful meditation on grief and healing, as well as family, immigration, and intergenerational trauma.”—Daphne Palasi Andreades, author of Brown Girls“Tender, perceptive, and sumptuously original…. Sea Change is a novel of vast empathy, flickering between humor and vulnerability as deftly as our beloved octopus Dolores changes her colors. A glittering debut.”—Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me“Absolutely stunning debut…. Full of longing, mystery, fear, and hope. I loved this book to pieces!”—Frances Cha, author of If I Had Your Face GINA CHUNGSea ChangeGina Chung is a Korean American writer from New Jersey currently living in New York City. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, she is a 2021–2022 Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow and holds an MFA in fiction from the New School. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Catapult, Electric Literature, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Idaho Review, among others. She is also the author of the forthcoming story collection Green Frog (Vintage). Sea Change is her first novel. A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL 2023Copyright © 2023 by Gina ChungAll rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataNames: Chung, Gina, [date] author.Title: Sea change / Gina Chung.Description: New York : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023.Identifiers: LCCN 2022023368 | ISBN 9780593469347 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780593469354 (ebook)Subjects: LCGFT: Bildungsromans. | Novels.Classification: LCC PS3603.H8534 S43 2023 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220523LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022023368Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593469347Ebook ISBN 9780593469354Cover design by Mark AbramsCover illustration by Anabeth Bostrupvintagebooks.comep_prh_6.1_143027766_c0_r1 ContentsCoverAbout the AuthorTitle PageCopyrightDedicationEpigraphChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Acknowledgments_143027766_ For my family All life from the ocean, is a sure thing.Even when time divides us, (please)laugh triumphantly and call them waves.—Haolun Xu, “Reverse Takoyaki(How to Uncook an Octopus)” CHAPTER 1This morning, Dolores is blue again. She’s signaling her readiness to mate, her eagerness to mount the rocks and corals of her tank and push herself against a male octopus, who will insert his hectocotylus into her mantle cavity and deposit sperm packets inside her until she is ready to lay the eggs. Unfortunately for Dolores, there is no bachelor octopus around ready to father her orphan eggs, and so when she turns that milky, almost pearlescent blue that I know means she is in the mood for love, there is no one but me to see.Dolores can turn herself as flat as a pancake or puff up like a mushroom, and when she propels herself through all one thousand gallons of her tank, air bubbles dance around her like they’re laughing with her. When she undulates her arms through the clean, dark water, she looks like a storm of ribbons. She can be cranky, like any old lady, but she loves seeing me come in with a bucket full of shrimp and fish for her. I could swear that sometimes she waves at me.So this morning, when I wished her good morning and told her how the weather was outside and she responded by turning blue, I didn’t bat an eyelash. “You and me both, Lo,” I said before turning the radio on and mopping up the floor. It was eight a.m., and I wasn’t about to empathize with a thirsty octopus over her sexual needs when I hadn’t gotten laid in months.This is my own fault, I know. After Tae left, I basically coped with it by not coping at all. I’ve been broken up with before, but never because the guy in question was actually planning on leaving the planet.Tae never liked my working at the aquarium. He couldn’t understand why I had “tethered myself to a sinking ship,” as he said. No pun intended probably, knowing Tae. And it’s true that we don’t get too many visitors these days, especially with more and more of the animals being bought up by wealthy investors who want to be able to gawk at a giant endangered sea turtle in their at-home aquarium. The exhibit hall feels ghostly sometimes during the off-season, like an abandoned carnival ground.But Dolores is still here. She has been one of the aquarium’s crown jewels since I was a kid pressing my nose against the glass to marvel at her shimmering colors. She’s probably one of the oldest giant Pacific octopuses in