This week’s story, “Standings,” is about a ten-year-old boy, Jeon-Gi, or J.-G., and his relationships with the boys around his age in the apartment complex, Cove Gardens, where he lives. It’s set in 1976. How important is the era to the narrative that unfolds?

Quite important, given who J.-G. is: an immigrant kid who, for better or worse, is pretty much left to his own devices in an unfamiliar world, experiencing a state of being that almost doesn’t seem possible these days. Back then, for the most part, we children kept our own company and counsel, which, either by necessity or custom, our parents—and society at large—let happen. We sported, we played, at times we fought. We ruled with and over one another. We chattered away about everything and nothing, in the process steadily coming into focus as people. For me, in terms of narrative material, that time of childhood felt like a seam of endless ore, offering action quite different from what typically “happens” these days in the virtual lives of kids.

The story is excerpted from your forthcoming novel “A Tender Age,” which will be published in August. How long have you been thinking about J.-G.? When did you know he’d be the main character of one of your novels?

I’ve been circling the idea of writing about young J.-G. for many years, keeping to the periphery, I will admit, because a lot of his story is also mine; I was never terribly interested in writing such a book. Yet here it is. It’s still thoroughly a fiction, but one that satisfied my need to engage certain characters and events that have always stuck with me. In many ways, it was the most “sensational” time of my life, one in which every moment and event seemed supercharged with emotion, every tableau saturated with color and smell and texture, like you were being pushed to the edge of the highs and the lows. You could really taste those days.

The story, like the novel, brings the reader right into the mind of Jeon-Gi the ten-year-old boy, but the events are being recalled by J.-G. many years later. Was it challenging to achieve the right balance between a child’s point of view and that of an adult’s?

Before starting any writing, I mulled quite a bit about the mixed perspective I was hoping to employ. While I wanted to have as much of J.-G.’s boyish perspective as possible, this to capture the wonder and exuberance and confusion and hope of his young mind and spirit, I didn’t want to be limited to his voice alone as you might find in a Y.A. novel. Along with J.-G.’s experiences, the novel is also interested in the unseen and unaccounted gap between then and the present time, these accruals of feeling and knowing that bubble up at certain points. As we get deeper into the story, the reader, I think, naturally begins to wonder what this narrator is telling us, and why. What is he trying to figure out? What is he reckoning with? I quite enjoyed letting him periodically take full helm of the story to point us to where, it seems, he can’t help but go.

J.-G. describes “tourniquet tight” bonds of friendship, but he also observes that “our tribe was fuelled by constant disagreements.” There’s a clear leader, Cleon, who rises above the fray, but the rest often seem to be jockeying for position. In the middle of a heated game of basketball, one boy, Joshua, throws an ethnic slur at Jeon-Gi, calling him “chinky chow.” A little later, Jeon-Gi retaliates with “Sure thing, kike.” Are Joshua and Jeon-Gi more shocked by what they’ve each said or what they’ve each heard? How similar are they in their competitiveness?

Indeed, they’re very similar, and in more ways than they know! It’s surely why they are “good friends” but also so perfectly and vehemently in opposition. Given this, I think what they say or hear isn’t shocking so much as it is a confirmation of how twinned they are in certain respects. We note that each of them is sneakily manipulative in the arena of Cove Gardens in trying to gain favor and status, that each of them is “handling” another boy, Osvaldo, for his own advantage. It’s not only Joshua in whom J.-G. feels mirrored, as he senses bits of himself in several kids he’ll encounter, particularly at summer camp. And perhaps this is what’s operative about J.-G., that he’s drawn to certain attributes of others that kindle an unsettling, if still unconscious, self-recognition.

A second boy, Tommy Reilly, is going to disturb Jeon-Gi’s little world much more aggressively than Joshua. He’s a relative newcomer to Cove Gardens and a loner, and he seems intent on inflicting pain. How scary a figure is he for J.-G.? Can anyone protect him from Tommy—his parents, his friends, his teachers—or does he feel completely alone?

I think the great sorrow I feel for J.-G. is his isolation. Despite his loving family and his tight gang of friends and the cohort of well-intentioned adults in his life, he still can’t bring himself to report Tommy or the other tormenters he endures. In part, that’s the fate of the bullied, who are excruciatingly alone in their shame and feelings of guilt, but, with J.-G., it’s also that he’s doubtful that his immigrant parents will ever comprehend what can and does go on in the playfields or at school. As such, he feels essentially responsible for himself, whether he’s ready to be or not.

In the story, Jeon-Gi is almost always the only “Oriental” (“the only polite term by which I knew myself,” he observes) and is often assumed to be Chinese, or, if not Chinese, Japanese. But a large part of the novel takes place at a summer camp organized by a Korean church which he attends a few weeks after the events described here. How meaningful is it for him to make friends with other Korean kids? Do you want the reader to feel that there’s a chance that the camp will save J.-G., or will any group bring with it the possibility of being bullied or being a bully?

The Korean church camp is surely a last hope for J.-G.’s parents, who at this point have no clue what to do with him. Their idea, of course, is that there won’t be the kind of racialized strife that seems to afflict J.-G. at home, and that he’ll somehow find himself and straighten out by being with others more like him. And while he does connect with the Korean kids immediately, what neither his parents nor J.-G. can anticipate is that through them he begins to discover aspects of himself that he knows are troubling and wrong but that he can’t seem to help.

Something shocking happens on Jeon-Gi’s last day at the camp. Do all the adults around him, including his parents, view it in the light of what happened in the schoolyard? When J.-G. acts—on the basketball court, in the schoolyard, at the summer camp—is it with intention or pure, unthinking forward momentum? Or is it impossible for him to tell?

I think these states in J.-G. are simultaneously at play. It’s as if there are multiple forceful winds in him, each naturally occurring and vying to prevail. He desperately wants to be righteous and honest. He wants to be a good boy. And yet. As the reader, you begin to wonder whether his visceral reactions and desires have, over time, formed—or maybe deformed—his intentionality, or if it’s simply the way he is. It’s this sort of figure that has always fascinated me as a reader and as a writer, a personage whom you can’t exactly trace, either backward or forward.

The story appears in a special issue of the magazine devoted to the U.S.A.’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary. And the story itself takes place during the year of its two-hundredth anniversary. How much do you think the country has changed over the last fifty years? Are you looking forward to the next fifty?

With all the woe and struggle marking this present hour, I’m often glad I won’t be around for another fifty. But then I think of how things used to be, say, in 1976, when I marched in our town’s July 4th parade with my Little League team and felt love and pride for the country, even if I didn’t feel much embraced by it; I realize how much certain things have progressed, despite everything. And will. ♦