How have the different audiences in Korea and in the States responded to Fox Girl?
Since I write about a time and place that I am not personally familiar with, I sometimes worry about authenticity; there is only so much research you can do. So when Fox Girl first came out and I started to meet the first readers of the book, I half expected to be denounced. Actually, I think that’s the fear of most writers, no matter how established. At the start of the book tour, I was scheduled to do a radio interview with an African-American man who had been stationed in Korea at the time Fox Girl was written, and I thought “uh-oh,” here it comes: he’s going to tell me I got it all wrong. But when I walked into the studio, the first thing he said was, “I’ve been waiting thirty years for someone to tell this story. I feel like it’s a part of my history.” And he shared with me two photo albums full of his time in Korea, full of America Town. He even pointed to one picture of a group of biracial children and said, “Look, there’s Lobetto! Any one of those kids could be him!” That exper
