Deep Roots (2023), Skin Deep (2020), Love Love (2015), and Everything Asian (2009), which won the 2010 Asian Pacific American Librarians Association Literature Award. In 2022, his Modern Love essay from The New York Times was adapted by Amazon Studios for episodic television. A graduate of Cornell University with an MFA from New York University, he lives in Washington, New Jersey.
Woo applied the Page 69 Test to Lines and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Sung J. Woo's website.TOGETHERPage 69 of my fifth novel, Lines, is the beginning of a “together” chapter of the book, and it is perhaps the most crucial part – where Abby comes to grips with her pregnancy. The previous chapter ends with her revealing her baby news to her soon-to-be husband, Ted, while in this chapter, she has yet to tell Ted, who is not her future husband but an officemate – and is sort of in love with him. In these “together” chapters, Abby is married to Joshua, whom she detests.
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ABBY RESTS HER brush on her palette. Baby Cecilia, one hand covered in soap bubbles and the other clutching a yellow rubber ducky, is done. At last. No more baby.
Except now she’s got a real one brewing in her own belly, an idea which is equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. She’s going to be a mother.
It’s half past noon, but no knock on her door from Ted. She quietly, stealthily walks up to her own door — which makes no sense, so she stomps her feet for the last three steps. Which makes her feel even stupider. She swings it open and sees and hears nothing but the deserted hallway.
She walks over to the bathroom, though she doesn’t have to go. But she can wash the paint off her hands with her squeeze bottle of turpentine, streaks and crusts of deep brown and mango down the drain, the last colors she’d worked with on the canvas. As the paint temporarily coats the sides of the sink, Abby feels a sadness. She might have resented painting Cecilia for the last month or so, but now that she’s finished, the work is no longer hers, and there’s an emptiness in that. Of course she’ll be paid for handing it over, two thousand dollars and 100% hers because no gallery was involved with this commission,
I know this may sound confusing, but it’s actually straightforward once the story gets going. In the “apart” chapters, Abby and Josh, painter and writer, are just beginning to know each other, while in the “together” chapters, they are married and struggling mightily on many fronts (career, relationship, monetary). (Irony alert: when Abby and Josh are physically apart, they are spiritually together; when Abby and Joshua are physically together, they can’t stand each other!) The book spans nine months – yes, the time it takes for a baby to be born – and the two “lines” dovetail from one chapter to the next until the very end.
Abby’s baby figures hugely in this book. The child is a blessing and a curse, a source of wonder and a source of consternation for both Abby and Joshua. This is the fourth Page 69 Test I’ve run, and I remain astonished at its prescience.
Coffee with a Canine: Sung J. Woo & Koda.
The Page 69 Test: Everything Asian.
My Book, The Movie: Skin Deep.
Q&A with Sung J. Woo.
The Page 69 Test: Skin Deep.
My Book, The Movie: Deep Roots.
The Page 69 Test: Deep Roots.
Writers Read: Sung J. Woo (September 2023).
--Marshal Zeringue
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