By Steve Seepersaud
Corrie Wachob Wang ’00 (at right in photo above) satisfies your taste buds in more ways than one. When we first introduced her to you in 2017 in the pages of Ƶ Magazine, she was feeding people’s love for Asian cuisine and a good read. Two years later, she’s reaching new levels in both areas.
Wang wrote the young adult novel City of Beasts, to be released this fall by the Disney imprint Freeform. In a mix of seriousness and fantasy, she explores how roles are developed in teenagers amid a gender-segregated post-nuclear background. At the center of the story is Glori Rhodes, who seems to be the average teenage girl, except that she can bench 250 pounds and is adept at fighting beasts around her.
City of Beasts is an example of how some story concepts don’t die when they sit on the shelf; they only get stronger. Wang completed the first draft in 2009, and the work was informed by the writing and publication of her debut novel The Takedown (Disney Freeform, 2017).
“After reading a handful of articles about how we raise boys and girls differently and how that adversely affects us all later in life, I wondered what girls could and would be like if we were raised separately,” Wang said. “What if we weren’t predisposed to being the ‘weaker sex?’ What if we could grow up being the only sex? How much more independent, rugged, inventive would we be if we weren’t yoked with the preoccupations of our physical appearance or finding a mate?"
“On the flip side, I also wanted to write a story with realistic boys in it. What would boys be free to become if they didn’t have so many masculinity tropes placed on them all the time?”
When she isn’t writing, her creative juices find their way onto the plates of diners in Charleston, S.C., where she and her husband, Shuai, give people food you wouldn’t customarily expect in the South. They own Short Grain, a food truck that has received acclaim from Bon Appetit and other publications for its fresh take on traditional rice bowls.
Soon, they’ll open Jackrabbit Filly, a brick-and-mortar restaurant in North Charleston. They describe the new venture as a friendly neighborhood restaurant, driven by Chinese heritage and heavily focused on local farms and sustainability.
“There are 12 animal symbols in the Chinese zodiac,” Wang said. “Horses are social creatures who get bored easily and like to gallop off to new pastures. Rabbits are lucky, quick-thinking and friendly. Shuai is a rabbit, while I’m a horse. After years of doing a food truck and pop-up restaurants, we finally have a home 100 percent us. Because Rabbit Horse is a terrible name for a restaurant, we chose Jackrabbit Filly. It will have our food, our music, our vibe and all our regulars. We couldn't be more pumped.”
Photo credit: David Strauss Photography