Assistant Managing Editor Abi Nelson talks to Ji Hyun Joo about her story “Chef Clem” featured in the Spring 2025 issue of Colorado Review.
Ji Hyun Joo is a writer raised in San Diego, California and Gyeongi-Do, South Korea. She completed her M.F.A in Fiction at Columbia University, where she is a recipient of the 2020 Felipe P. De Alba Fellowship and a nominee for the Henfield Prize. Her fiction has been published in The Drift, VQR, New England Review, West Branch, and elsewhere.
AN: What originally inspired you to write this story?
JHJ: I really enjoy writing about food. I think, through the way that you choose to describe a dish, you’re able to direct a reader’s attention to the many details that go into the care of cooking it, which then allows you to go into the deeper layers of (potential) suffering and thought that went into making it. That being said, the first part of the story that I wrote was the pubic hair falling out. It’s a jarring image—to have a clump of hair fall out from anywhere on your body—and I think it helped set the foundation of what the story was going to be about, as well as its tone.
AN: What drew you to have this story take place in the kitchen of a high-end restaurant? What research did you do for this story/do you have any experience in restaurant kitchens that impacted how you wrote about this setting? What surprised you?
JHJ: I’m fortunate to have worked in restaurants and to have family that work both front-of-house and back-of-house in restaurants across the city. I am also an avid diner, of course, and love to observe how service is run when I go out to eat. There is a meticulousness in restaurants, especially the high-end ones, a very high level of attention to detail, all within a fast-paced environment. The atmosphere within a restaurant during service is constantly contradicting itself; there’s this push and pull of calm and chaos. I think that back and forth is very interesting to depict on the page, and I guess having that as part of the basis of this story, and seeing all that came out of capturing this dynamic surprised me most. I wanted the moments of Clem placed in the restaurant to be fueled with emotion and drive, while the ones where she is at home, sitting with her body, to be slower. I thought that slowness was necessary in processing what she might be losing internally along with the external loss of her pubic hair.
AN: What part of the story was the most difficult to “get right?” What about it do you think made it difficult?
JHJ: Getting the tone right was very difficult. There’s a lot going on in this story—some parts of it are funny, a lot of it is horrific. When this story was being workshopped, I got a lot of helpful feedback about not knowing what to feel while reading the piece because what is wrong feels right in a crazy way, and people find themselves rooting for a narrator who has done something terrible. I wrote this story five years ago, during the pandemic, and it took a very long time for me to realize that that is the reading experience that I wanted—it’s an opportunity to reexamine our own moral structure. Or, at least, while writing it, it was a chance for me to reexamine my own.
AN: The meticulous care for pubic hair, the Tupperware in the freezer, and the urge to preserve it were some of the most intriguing sections to me. How did you decide that this was the way in which Clem was going to preserve herself?
JHJ: As I wrote the parts of Clem by herself at home, it became a progression of her attachment to her pubic hair, especially as she continued to feel that she was losing control of her body in the workplace. This is where my mind already being in the place of writing about food came handy. I wanted her to equate freezing her pubic hair with freezing meat, saving it for later until you know what to do with it, trying to keep it “fresh” for as long as possible.
AN: I was really struck by this cycle we’re presented with at the end and this idea that someone is too talented to let it go to waste and how “invincibility” is not just “reserved for truly heinous people.” How did you see this tying into Clem’s story and the idea of preservation?
JHJ: I wanted to have a moment where Clem is punishing herself. She is offered an opportunity to have this awful thing she did slid under the rug, despite getting fired, and knows that she shouldn’t take it. I wanted her to have done what she did, but have the opportunity to be different from B somehow. B will do whatever he can to preserve himself, to make sure he is unscathed, and I wanted Clem to realize for herself that she is not that type of person.
AN: What is your favorite part of this story? Was it your favorite part to write, or is there a different part of the story that was your favorite to write?
JHJ: My favorite part of the story is also the one I most enjoyed writing: the beginning paragraph where Clem loses her pubic hair for the first time. I remember the feeling of writing it, thinking this is going to be weird, but feeling an energy coming off the page that I was really happy with. It’s also the one part that hasn’t changed much after the many drafts this story has undergone, which probably speaks to my attachment to it.
Abi Nelson is a first-year MFA candidate in fiction at Colorado State University. In her work, she likes to explore bizarre possibilities, blurry boundary lines, and balancing despair with humor. She is the Assistant Managing Editor of Colorado Review.