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Interview: Min Jin Lee

cover of Free Food for Millionaires by Min Jin Lee.     Cover of Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

 

After being born in Seoul, South Korea, Min Jin Lee came with her family to the US at the age of seven and was raised in Elmhurst, Queens. She studied history at Yale University, graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, and worked as a corporate attorney in New York City. Her short writing has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and numerous other magazines, and she served as a Morning Forum columnist for the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea for three seasons. She is also a well-known and well-traveled speaker on writing, politics, film, and literature, serves as a trustee of PEN America and as a director of the Authors Guild, and currently is Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College.

 

The recipient of best story prizes from Narrative Magazine and The Missouri Review, Lee has also been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as an honorary doctorate from Monmouth College.

 

Lee’s first novel, Free Food for Millionaires (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2007) was selected a Top 10 Novel of the Year by The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. It was selected for various special recognitions and awards by the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Book Sense.

 

Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2017), her second novel, published after she lived in Japan for several years, was winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times bestseller. It was recognized on more than seventy-five “best books of the year” lists and is translated into twenty-nine languages.

 

Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:

One of the things that struck me, and that I really admired as I read Pachinko, is that it’s an epic. And that you chose—or, might we say, dared—to write on this grand scale, which I think a lot of women, especially, hesitate to do. And especially as just your second novel, how challenging to do that. Could you comment about your decision to do that? Did you set out to do that as a kind of statement—”I can do this too”—or did it evolve out of your original inspiration?

 

Min Jin Lee:

That’s such a good question. First of all, thank you for reading the book. Because it’s a huge surprise. When I meet people who’ve actually read it, I kind of think, “Wow, that’s amazing.” [laughter] Thank you so much. My ancestors thank you, my parents thank you.

 

TFR:

Oh, that’s sweet. Thank you.

 

Lee:

No, really. It’s really quite a gift for someone to give you twenty hours of their lives. It is. It is, especially nowadays. But going back to your question about epic and the decision to do it—I initially had written this book from 1996 to 2003 and it was not an epic. It was based on about ten to twenty years, and it was meant to be a book about Solomon, who appears at the very end of the book now and is a minor character. And then after I moved to Japan in 2007 and I interviewed all these Korean-Japanese people, I realized that I got it all wrong and the only way this book and the story would work is by making it an epic. And I was terrified, because I didn’t have that kind of ambition.

 

TFR:

That’s so interesting that you felt compelled to do it.

 

Lee:

I had the ambition to always write an omniscient-narrated, social novel—that was absolutely clear. But to write from cradle to grave, that was not my intention. It really upset me that I had to start all over again [chuckle].

 

TFR:

That’s a tough process. How did you stay on track?

 

Lee:

I outline all the time. I’m not attached to my outlines, but I outline constantly. My outlines, my character cards. I have little cards with people’s birthdays and where they went to school. And then, also, I interview prolifically. I constantly interview. I work like a journalist a lot.

 

TFR:

That makes sense. It was fascinating to me that the setting just seems so vivid and so real, even from the historical past. I was really interested in that research process and what you think research offers the fiction writer.

 

Lee:

I can’t imagine writing fiction without research for the kinds of books I want to write, because I am writing social novels. So, both of my novels have required an enormous amount of research. I’ve interviewed well over a hundred people.

 

And I’ve also taken classes that I didn’t want to take. For my first book, I took a class at FIT on millinery [laughter]. I’m not a fashion person. And I met all these people who can make things out of felt and put these things on their heads, and I thought, “Oh, you’re really different than a shoemaker.”

 

I was interested in the process of making. And I feel like I haven’t met enough people from all these different corners. And I want to write stories about people who aren’t represented. I also want to write about poor people, and poor people often don’t leave any documents… So I have to interview.

 

TFR:

Free Food for Millionaires, your first novel, is notable because you don’t make it only the story of Casey and Ella and their generation, but also of Sabine and Casey’s parents. So many coming of age stories are written as though young people know only other young people [laughter]. It’s great that you managed to include the parental generation there. In Pachinko, you extend even further across generations. And you started to speak to that a minute ago, saying that, “To tell the social story, I realized I had to do a bigger picture.” But what makes you want to extend that reach to the whole social novel? Is it a cultural matter of respect for our elders or other political or other social factors that influence you in that regard? How do you feel that came to be something that’s your goal?

 

Lee:

This really goes to who I am. I’m a historian, so I really care about the long view. People have often asked me, “How did you work on these things?” And I kinda think, “Well, if you look at different examples of people who make things, you should really expect failure. You should really expect suffering. You should expect obscurity.” Guaranteed obscurity.

 

[laughter]

 

And then you should try to pick a topic that you really care about. But in terms of picking generations, I don’t think any of us really makes sense without understanding all the people who inform who we are, whether they’re biologically related to you or culturally related to you or your community. For example, if you are a Mormon, you don’t really make sense without understanding Mormonism. It’s such a specific American religion. So I wanted to very much talk about every corner and every level, which is nuts, which takes a long time.

 

TFR:

It’s interesting too, because it’s against the flow right now, which is all … shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. Snip it, snip it, snip it, snip it. One reason why I enjoyed Pachinko so much because it was a novel I could sink into the way I’ve sunk into novels so many times in the past (and not so much these flash-by novels so common now) and just really get that larger picture.

 

Lee:

I do know that what I’m writing is very against the grain of my contemporaries. I am writing a social novel of the nineteenth century kind with modern sentences. At the same time, I wanted readers to stay with me.

 

TFR:

It’s well worth doing. I have one more comparative question. It seems likely that Free Food for Millionaires was rooted in your own personal experience…

 

Lee:

Some of it, yes.

 

TFR:

… as a Korean-American who attended an Ivy League university, and experienced conflicts maybe similar to Casey’s. But you’ve noted that Pachinko stemmed from this history lecture that you heard. How did you make that transition from writing about something that was closer to your own experience—and this is obviously still something close to your heart—to something larger than your own experience or slightly different from your own background? How did you make the transition?

 

Lee:

Actually, I had no intentions of writing Free Food for Millionaires because it was way too close to home [chuckles]. I had written Pachinko in another iteration well before I published Free Food for Millionaires, because I’m a very political person, I’m a very theoretical person. I’m actually much more comfortable talking about global feminism, poverty, the refugee crisis. I actually like that. Until I read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, I would not have written Free Food for Millionaires.

 

TFR:

So the transition was actually the other way round for you.

 

Lee:

When I noticed that Naipaul had the courage to write about his hometown, I said, “Well I’m going to write about my hometown of Elmhurst, Queens. And I’m going to write about the Koreans that I know,” because there are so many different kinds of Koreans and they were interesting to me. And I figured, well, I’m not gonna be successful, I’m not gonna make any money. I’ve made this incredibly stupid decision to quit being a lawyer [laughter]. I might as well write the book I want to write. I think honoring that was really helpful for me. That’s the reason why I wrote it, but it’s really uncomfortable to write about yourself. Really uncomfortable for me.

 

TFR:

So while some people feel more comfortable with starting close to home, your background in history perhaps meant you were a person more comfortable with the large-scale. In some ways, it was a relief to come back to Pachinko and be able to turn a little further out? Could you tell me a little bit about your reasons for going to Tokyo? Did you do that primarily to work on the novel? Or was that for other reasons and then it was just suddenly all this material presented itself? You began to meet people? Or how did you develop your routine of interviewing other people and doing research there in Japan?

 

Lee:

I always interview people for my fiction. Even Free Food for Millionaires, I was interested in writing about money and class.

 

TFR:

And the millinery class [chuckle].

 

Lee:

Right. And so because I did all those things, I’m very comfortable with the interview form. I also grew up incredibly shy, but in interviews, I feel like it’s okay to talk to people.

 

TFR:

You have a role.

 

Lee:

Yes, I have a role. And also, in the service of a story, it’s okay to ask all these questions. I went to Japan because my husband got a job and we needed the money and the upgrade. So we went and I got to interview so many Korean-Japanese people. And the initial interviews are very hard. It was really hard to get those interviews. But once people realize that I’m a harmless fiction writer, they’re like, “Oh, okay. All right, fine. Let me introduce you to my friends” [laughter].

 

TFR:

These interviews, I’m sure, influenced the rich array of characters in Pachinko. I’ve a hard time figuring out which particular character or characters to ask about so many are well-developed. But Sunja, of course, is the cradle-to-grave presence in the novel, and I loved her so much. She was a fabulous character. But I also want to ask about Yoseb and Isak. They were the two who struck me as the tragic figures in the book. And I wanted to ask a little bit about whether you felt… Sunja went through many, many, many difficulties, but she seemed to have this stronger spirit. And is there a little bit of a feminist commentary in this book? Do you feel that the women survive better than the men? And is that something that you feel is sort of more generally true in the world? That women can face this kind of conflict and travail better and intact?

 

Lee:

I think it’s not so much a matter of inborn resilience of women. It’s a matter of all the cultural messages that men and women receive. I think that men from oppressed minority groups still have the burdens of the masculinity of the outer world, and consequently, the choices that they make in order to become men in that world are very often unfavorable to their lives. And they become tragic characters. So for the two characters that you mentioned, Isak and Yoseb, Isak really cares about being a really excellent person, so he decides that he’s going to become a man by being a martyr, and that’s a tough road.

 

[laughter]

 

Whereas Yoseb, his attitude is, “I’m going to try to become a man by having conventional ideas of providing for my family.”

 

If you’re an oppressed minority male, it’s difficult to provide for your family.

 

But going back to your initial question about how women in these groups survive. I really admire many women that I’ve met, who are illiterate, who are really poor, and the way they survive… And a lot of it has to do with the fact that I think women who—across culture, across race, across class, around the world—have this in common, which is that our biologies force us to make decisions that are not only about our individual lives. And one of the things I heard over and over and over again is that women are supposed to suffer. And in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America, in older countries, that message is, I think, relayed over and over again, because women don’t have the same rights as in advanced Western nations, and, also, they are older countries.

 

Even in Europe—I’ve met women from Germany who have to leave their work to make lunch for their families at 2:00 every day. It’s an advanced nation, and yet it’s an older country, and the expectations of femininity are different.

 

This is the other flip side of suffering—if you can bear humiliation, it’s easier to survive. You may not like the kind of life you have, but you can survive. I think it’s harder for men to bear the same humiliation that women bear.

 

TFR:

That’s beautifully put. Do you resist the labels? Or do you consider yourself a political writer, or a feminist writer, or a Korean-American writer?

 

Lee:

Presbyterian writer.

 

[laughter]

 

TFR:

What do you think about all those labels that I’m sure that get used for you quite a lot?

 

Lee:

It’s fine. The fact that people think that I’m any kind of writer, I’m like, “Thank you.”

 

[laughter]

 

Just to be obscure and to not be read for such a long time, I’m so grateful to have readers.

 

TFR:

Would you read us a favorite passage from Pachinko?

 

Lee: Yes. [Reads from xxx].

 

TFR:

I love that passage because it’s just that moment of change.

 

Lee:

And wonder.

 

TFR:

And wonder, and there’s so much that’s coming together there in terms of the relationships that are going to be built and explored in the novel.

 

Do you have any words of advice for anyone wishing to write a historical epic kind of novel? Or any other good tidbits about you or your writing process?

 

Lee:

When I teach my writing classes, I often meet really talented writers who feel discouraged. And I always say that, “If you could choose the topic that means the most to you, then the external discouragements will feel a little more bearable, because you are staying closer to the things that you love.” So I think the pages need to be something that you love and that you want to turn to as opposed to something that the world is judging, and that will help you stay with the project longer.

 

TFR:

As opposed to what is “selling” or what will be popular?

 

Lee:

Yes! Or what they think will be… admired. I always try to discourage that. And what’s the expression that I’ve heard? “Forget being the best, be the only.” You can do that if you really honor the thing that you care about.

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Lisa Roney

Lisa Roney is editor-in-chief of The Florida Review and Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. She is associate professor of English at the University of Central Florida and the author of Sweet Invisible Body: Reflections on a Life with Diabetes (Henry Holt), The Best Possible Bad Luck (Finishing Line Press), Serious Daring: Creative Writing in Four Genres (Oxford University Press), as well as short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in numerous journals and literary magazines. Her latest work is "Friend with an Illness" in Panhandler.

 

Homepage photo of Min Jin Lee by Elena Seibert.