REBROADCAST: Min Jin Lee

Author Min Jin Lee’s latest novel, “Pachinko,” was a finalist for the National Book Award. It’s an epic story about four generations of one family through migration, heartbreak, oppression, financial success, and trauma. We spoke to Lee in front of an audience at Portland’s Franklin High School in January, 2020.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re bringing you a conversation today with the novelist Min Jin Lee. Lee is the author of two novels. Her first, Free Food for Millionaires, follows a Korean-American Ivy League grad as she navigates family, friendship, love in the world of rich New Yorkers. Her second book, Pachinko, follows four generations in a Korean Japanese family who live, suffer and thrive as second class non-citizens in Japan. Her books are specifically and proudly about the Korean Diaspora, but they also speak to some universals of the immigrant experience, striving and struggle, resilience and success as it happens. That’s a pretty fair description of some aspects of Lee’s life as well. Her family came to the U.S. when she was seven. She worked for two years as a lawyer before quitting to pursue a life as a writer. About a dozen years later, her first novel was published, 10 years after that she was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has called herself a late bloomer. I talked to Min Jin Lee pre-pandemic in front of an audience at Portland’s Franklin High School. We started with the very first sentence of her novel, Pachinko. ‘History has failed us, but no matter.’ I asked who that ‘us’ is.

Lee: Oh, I think it’s you and me. I think it’s all the young people in this room. I think history continues to fail us today. And I think that history is failing us around the world and I think I’m really upset about it, but it’s very important for me to think about the subordinate clause: ‘But no matter’. Because even though our world leaders are disappointing us, I think that we still have to feel and remember in this one sense of true history, is that we have been resilient before, and we will be resilient today.

Miller: At what point in your writing of the novel did you have that specific beginning?

Lee: Oh, I think that probably 15 years into the book, because I’ve been working on this book off and on for three decades. I know. Which is probably the age of some people here. So I didn’t really understand the thesis of the book, which is the first sentence of all my books, the thesis. So, I have the thesis for my next novel already, and it’s always the first sentence. So, anybody in AP English or AP History, that’s the answer. I really didn’t understand it until I wrote several other manuscripts in which I was kind of going around this idea, but then I don’t think I had the courage to say it. And I think that one of the great things about getting older is, and now I say what I believe.

Miller: There’s so many ways to think about the nearly three decades that you worked on Pachinko. But in the end, it seems like it’s a question of toil and editing and changing, but it’s also really hopeful that you can keep plugging away at something and you can make it better.

Lee: Well, it’s great to think about when it’s done, but when you’re doing it, it’s really depressing because you’re thinking ‘I’m a moron, like why can’t I do this faster’? Everybody I know does this faster than me. And one of the things that’s been sort of helpful for me is that as a kid in my family, I’m the middle of three girls, and my nickname at home is Turtle. You might have heard that story as a child. You know, the tortoise and the hare? I’ve always been the tortoise because I’m very, very slow and I’m really slow about things that you kind of wonder why I’m so slow. But I’m always kind of marching ahead and I am a finisher. So that’s something I know about my identity in a psychological way, in a temperamental way, that I know people will outpace me all the time. However, I know that I’m very steady and I finish things.

Miller: Are you literally a slow writer, or is it that the process is slow?

Lee: The process is slow. I’m a really fast writer when it comes to creating a draft. Once I know what I’m doing, it’s like boom, and Robert Caro talks about this too. And I was so happy when I read his book Working, because he talks about how everybody always thinks he’s a slow writer. I’m actually a really fast writer. So I could knock out 1000 words in a day, but I might toss them at the end of the day.

Miller: I once read something, that the metaphor you’d used was that writing is like making cheese. You need what, 10 gallons of milk to make a pound of cheese or something. That’s the way you think about your writing.

Lee: That’s exactly right. You have to have so many ingredients and so much quantity in order to parse it down to this teeny little essence. And I think a lot about when I was in college and I don’t know, you guys will be going to college pretty soon. I want you to know that when you get the syllabus for a class, even if you don’t take the class, keep the syllabus. Because what you have is a distillation of someone’s life-long learning about that field, written in about two pages. Because they’re going to tell you, you have to know these things about the subject, and if you don’t know them then you will not know the subject. But in order for them to get down to those eight pieces of text, they had to really think about it and spend maybe 20 years and I think that’s quite an incredible thing. And I took a lot of classes beyond my number of requirements in college. and I didn’t do that well in college. People are always really surprised by this, but I didn’t do very well. I did fine. I remember, I looked at my report card recently for college, because I have to write this essay.

Miller: Why did you keep it?

Lee: Because I’m a historian. [Laughs]. I mean I really have a lot of primary documents, and I got a B-minus in a fiction class. I didn’t take that many classes in fiction, but I got a B-minus in fiction. I teach college right now at Amherst College and I’ve never given a B-minus. I’m really a high grader. So if you take my classes it’s really likely you’ll get an A-minus. But I remember getting the B-minus and I didn’t complain about it. I just thought, okay, there are way better writers in my class than me.

Miller: What role does research play for your novel writing?

Lee: It’s everything, it’s absolutely everything. I did more research on Free Food For Millionaires than Pachinko, and people are always surprised by this.

Miller: But this was a country you grew up in, a world in some ways you knew well. You weren’t working in finance, for example, but you were adjacent to it in a lot of ways. So why is it that you needed more research to write about New York in the 90s?

Lee: I think because I didn’t have the confidence. So in order for me: I’m somebody who suffers from anxiety, depression, and security in very large, deeply meaningful ways. And in order for me to sit here and talk to the world, anybody who’s listening, I feel like I have to really know what I’m talking about. And in order for me to put it in black and white and have it published and shared – if I’m lucky enough to do that – I have to feel really strong about it. And research is really the foundation upon which I write fiction. And that’s not normal, as you probably know.

Miller: What’s the connection for you between that research, that sort of fact-finding accumulation of details, and imagination? Because in the end, we are talking about you creating lives.

Lee: I create lives and I create worlds. And especially I want to reflect communities. So when I do that, it really helps me to talk to 100 people in a group. So if I was writing about, let’s say high school students in Portland, Oregon, I would meet at least 100 high school students in Portland, Oregon. And different high schools too.

Miller: What kinds of questions do you imagine you might ask?

Lee: I would ask, what TV shows you watch? I would ask, what do you do at one in the morning when your parents think that you’re sleeping? I would ask, who is the cutest boy in the class? I would ask the questions that I think that you care about, what you really spend time on. I wouldn’t ask what’s your favorite subject? I wouldn’t ask who your favorite teacher is, and if I did, it would get to be like my number 18th question, I might say who do you sit next to in class, and why did you choose to sit there? I’m very interested in positionality in space.

Miller: Were you ever interested in journalism?

Lee: Well, I work as a freelance journalist, so there are two things that I’m really interested in: I’m really interested in academics, and in journalism. So I always feel like I’m a pretend academic, I’m a pretend journalist when I write fiction.

Miller: What did you gain from interviewing ,if not dozens I think hundreds of Korean-Japanese people, especially in Japan. What did you gain from those conversations?

Lee: Well, I learned that there are so many different kinds of Korean-Japanese people. Literally as you can have Korean-Japanese who identified and have identification like literally citizenship differences. So you’ll have Korean-Japanese who are North Korean, Korean, Japanese who are South Korean as well as Korean-Japanese who have Japanese citizenship. So today there are people who are born in Japan, who are ethnically Korean, and their identification cards as North Korean, there are, and most people don’t know that and I wouldn’t have …

Miller: And their parents and grandparents may have been born in Japan?

Lee: Oh yeah. So that kind of stuff that you wouldn’t know, that’s a legal distinction, and I learned that from interviewing. But then what really was so strange is if you spend time with anybody, you realize like, oh, why are the people who have North Korean identification more confident than the people who are the most assimilated who have Japanese citizenship? And they were. Like, they would sit up straighter and they would kind of laugh at me, they just thought that I was sort of a silly writer. And whereas I was incredibly different than somebody who was more assimilated, who was much more deferential and polite, much more like the mainstream community. And I think having that distinction of experience of this interpersonal spending time with a human being, was so important in terms of the way I wrote about them. It’s very humbling to meet people, because you realize you’re wrong all the time.

Miller: That’s also how you get a little bit closer to the truth.

Lee: Oh yeah, because we really don’t know people, we really don’t. We can try, and people are full of surprises and secrets.

Miller: Let’s take some questions from our audience. Somebody could come up to the microphone, tell us your name please, and your question for Min Jin Lee.

Audience member: Hi. My name is Lynn, I’m a senior at Franklin, and my first question for you is: So as Dave stated, Pachenko spans four really broad generations. Was there any reason that you didn’t choose to expand the storyline into modern times? And how would you have approached that?

Miller: Just for our listeners who haven’t read the book, and want to know what a high schooler thinks of as modern times: the book does go up to 1989, but not past there.

Lee: It’s an excellent question, Lynn and it’s a pleasure to meet you. I was laughing because I was born in 1968. So I feel fairly modern, but not all the time. I stopped at 1989, and it’s actually a very personal reason. The reason why I stopped in 1989 is because [in] 1989 I was a junior in college and that’s when I learned about the Korean-Japanese. So it’s kind of a humorous thing for me just to end exactly where I began.

Miller: Let’s get another question from another student here. What is your name?

Audience member: Hi, my name’s Flora. I’m also a senior here at Franklin. And my question is, many of the women in this novel lack their own agency [inaudible] to societal expectations and norms. However, events like [inaudible] reclaim some of her power. Although almost a century later, do you think these women’s lives parallel the struggles of today? And how so?

Lee: Oh, what a great question Flora. I’m a feminist, and I’m a feminist who is a 21st century feminist because that’s where we live today. That said, I’m really aware that patriarchy is the present condition for people around the globe everywhere, including men. Men suffer under patriarchy too. The reason why I wrote so much about those women who had suffered extremely as a condition of patriarchal culture as well as legal patriarchy because you can have dejure instances where you have laws that don’t allow women to, let’s say vote, or drive, or those things which exist today. I wanted to write about it because it’s true and it’s historically accurate to reflect those conditions. As for women today, I want to tell you that even though we live in I think the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, and I am an American citizen and I really love this country in a different way,I think because I’m an immigrant, I’m very grateful to live in America. That said, I think American women suffer enormously. If you look at the global studies of where Americans fit in the world in terms of their actual rights, it’s actually quite low of the way women are treated. We don’t have universal healthcare and this is incredibly important.

We don’t have universal daycare. Women have very little protections in this country for leaving their work. Maternity care. And so those things are legal decisions that our democracy has elected, and it’s something that I think that feminists today really have to change. So yes, I think that today unfortunately we still have to suffer under that. And actually all families are affected by it because so many children in America are growing up in single parent led households and those parents are usually women.

Miller: If you are just tuning in, we’re talking right now with the novelist Min Jin Lee, in front of a group of students at Portland’s Franklin High School. You’ve written about Pachinko, but I think about some of your other work as well, that you want to show the ways in which goodness can arise out of suffering. Is that for you, is that an aesthetic idea or a literary idea, or is that the way you view the world?

Lee: I think for me it’s the way I view the world, it’s also based on my religion, I’m a christian, and I come from a Judeo-Christian ethic, and that’s incredibly important to me in my practice, and all of my work will be infused with it. That said, all of the Western literature which I trained under, the stuff that I really love is 19th century literature, and 19th century literature is deeply governed by moral principles. So I’m not a postmodern writer, I’m not even interested in writing like that, I like reading it, but I don’t want to write like that because I do believe that the world has meaning. I believe that my interpersonal actions have great meaning. So if you see a door in my dramatic scene, there’s a reason why the door is there, and I want to earn that through my literature.

Miller: In a lot of ways this is a Christian novel, not just thematically, and in terms of the characters who, you know, ministers and and who talk a lot about their faith, and the way it informs their lives, and the way it’s made their lives in some ways more difficult. And also in a more broad way, we see sort of Christ-like figures who die for, in this case, their families or for what they believe. And in a lot of ways the books that are most successful in terms of critical reception and audience acclaim they’re not ones that are so likely to have such Christian themes. Were you surprised that this book has been so acclaimed by a very secular literary world?

Lee: It’s shocking. It’s so shocking. I didn’t intend so much to have a Christian readership because I espouse a lot of values that a lot of conservative Christians don’t agree with. So I believe in single sex marriage, I’m very pro-choice, I’m a feminist, a very progressive political person, but I believe all those things do come out of my faith and I feel more empowered to speak about these things based on my faith. That said, the people that are my friends in the elite media literary world, are often atheists and they think it’s adorable that I go to church. And it’s fine.

Miller: Do you think that the sense you’ve gotten from them, is it that down-putting as they think it’s adorable?

Lee: You know, because I live in America and because I believe in religious pluralism, I think that atheism is a religion no different than being a Christian. And I think that that’s your religion and this is mine and I respect it right? I don’t think I don’t believe in a theocracy, because if you believe in a theocracy, you would say they would have to go to jail or something, and I don’t believe that. And also I’m really willing to debate and to discuss and to think through what people believe. But the thing that I really think, and I get in trouble for this, and I might as well get in trouble now, is that I think that we fail readers when we forget that they believe in things. Very often ... I mean actually, statistically if you want the data sets, most people in the world believe in religion. They have a religion …

Miller: You say believe [in religion], you mean believe in God?

Lee: … believe in God. Most people in the world. There will soon be more people who are Muslim than there are Christians in the world, very soon. So if you say people don’t believe in something in a way, you don’t even understand who they are. And as a matter of fact, when we have all these crises right now in the Middle East, we’re fighting people who believe that they are theocratically correct, and we’re making policy decisions that we think are based on science or politics. And I think fighting somebody who believes in something in a theocratic way is a different kind of fight.

Miller: It’s interesting. This gets to a kind of geopolitical version of what you were saying earlier, that we misread people and don’t understand them, in this case, at our peril. Let’s take another question from our group of students in the audience. What’s your name?

Audience member: I’m Julian. I’m a senior here at Franklin High School. And my question is, what did you learn about the human condition in the process of writing Pachinko? This could be related to the research behind the novel, the content of the novel and/or the hard work involved in drafting the novel.

Lee: Wow, that’s a really good question. It’s a question worthy of a senior. And congratulations to you. You did it. So, the thing that really surprises me, the longer I work on writing novels and on writing personally, is just how careless we are with each other. We are so deeply profoundly careless with each other’s feelings. And that really troubles me. And I can say that in a very personal way between you and me, but if you take that, and if you expand it on a local basis, on a state basis, on a nation basis, on a global basis, this carelessness is truly to our peril. So I think that a greater sense of sobriety and self control and the way we speak and think and behave around one another would really benefit us, especially thinking about the other person’s feelings.

Miller: How does that work itself out? When you say that we’re careless with one another and one of those feelings, what does that mean in practice? What do we do?

Lee: So, for example, if someone hurts my feelings, says something that’s unkind to me, I could assert my ego and say you’re wrong or you’re dead to me. That’s really dangerous, because I really don’t know what motivated that person to do that. Very often, even if I ask that person,

that person might not know what motivated that person to do this to me. So, for example, I could be at a line, like waiting for something, like to get a drink, and someone could literally push me aside because they have to go somewhere. Now if I knew that person pushed me aside because they had to go solve a crime, or because their child was sick or because they were fired that day, I would be okay with being pushed aside. But I could also say, oh that person pushed me aside because I’m an Asian woman and Asian women are invisible, which is kind of true. It’s a political truth that Asian women are often seen as invisible. So then does it make it ok for me to say ‘listen, jerk face’, I would have used a stronger language normally, I’m on the radio [laughs]. So jerk face is about as strong as it’s gonna get.

Miller: It has its own kind of poetic power, if you’re four.

Lee: Why did you do this? Is it because you’re a racist? Now I don’t know. Then we start to escalate to another level of unkindness and cruelty. And now believe me, I am filled with rage about so many things around the world. So I could immediately just go to rage. So as I get older, what I want to think about is a greater sense of self-control and a carefulness with other people, because I don’t know what they’re going through. And that’s really hard. It’s really hard and I fail 9 out of 10 times. But I just wanted you to know that.

Miller: We have time for one more question from the students here in our audience before we take a break. What is your name and what’s your question for Min Jin Lee?

Audience member: Hello, my name is Lana, I’m a junior at Franklin High School and my question is: how did you decide on your name for the novel Pachinko? I read in a separate interview that you were originally going to call your novel Motherland, so I was just wondering on that.

Lee: Lana, it’s a great question. Junior year, that is not a fun year, but I’m with you, I’m with you. So it’s called Pachinko and Pachinko, as you know, is a vertical pinball game. It is almost a $200 billion industry in Japan. Now $200 billion is a lot of zeros. So I want you to think about, let’s say, I think Starbucks is a $16 billion company. That’s a global company. Pachinko is a local business, it’s that big. It’s not like Vegas. Vegas is a rounding error compared to Pachinko. It’s called Pachinko because this industry has been dominated by so many Korean-Japanese people. It’s also an industry that’s considered really low class, criminal, and unseemly. So if you’re affiliated with Pachinko, like if your dad works for an advertising company that services Pachinko, he’d be considered something shameful. I wanted to write about this culture in which so many Korean-Japanese participate. And I also wanted to argue about the fact that Pachinko is absolutely like all gambling, a rigged system. I’m arguing that life is unfair, because it is. And it’s rigged, in many instances. But that said, we still play. We still play, we have to make the game less rigged. It used to be called Motherland because I thought the book was going to be about Solomon. I was wrong, so I had to toss that.

Miller: We have a lot more coming up with Min Jin Lee, and our fantastic audience here, after a short break, stay tuned.

Miller: We’re bringing you a conversation that we recorded in front of an audience at Franklin High School in Portland in January of 2020 with the writer Min Jin Lee. She’s at work on a third novel now in her trilogy of the Korean Diaspora. It’s called “American Hagwon.” Given that we were in a high school, I asked Lee what she most remembered from her own high school years.

Lee: I loved it. I loved high school so much. And then I went to college -- and I worked really hard to get into college -- and it was such a disappointment. I remember thinking, “oh.” Not that college was a disappointment, my friends were really fun. But I really thought that college would be so different compared to high school because, in high school, I felt that the world was really open to me. And I went to a very multicultural, very poor high school in terms of, the kids were really poor. So I thought that I was fine. I didn’t think that I was a poor person, economically. But when I went to college, I was really surprised by the amount of wealth and splendor of my peers. It wasn’t their fault. Now I can see that. Now I realize that my peers, they weren’t being jerks, jerk faces, my favorite term now. [Laughs.] They were just saying what their parents had been saying. They were just saying what their cultures had been saying. So, now I see it in a different way, but I remember having a really hard time in college.

Miller: What did reading mean to you in high school?

Lee: Oh it was everything. It was absolutely everything. And I really think it’s sort of sad because today I think younger people aren’t given this opportunity to read as much as they had before. Back then, when I wanted to tune out my parents, I couldn’t go to my phone. I would just go to my book. And, even though I didn’t have any money, I was able to go to the library and just borrow whatever I wanted to. And so in many ways I had guided reading -- guided by myself but also by smart people around me saying, “What do you mean, you haven’t read Stendhal?” And I’d just be like shamed and I would go read Stendhal. But I don’t think anyone says that anymore. And I think that’s kind of sad because there’s a lot of disaffected angry people in books [that] you guys should know about.

Miller: It’s true that in the ‘70s and ‘80s kids didn’t have phones to turn to but there was TV, there were other things..

Lee: A lot less channels..

Miller: Absolutely, but more people watching fewer channels.

Lee: Right.

Miller: Or people watching the same stuff. But what was it about books in particular that made them such an outlet for you?

Lee: I got to see things I never saw before. Before I went to college, I felt like I had visited Europe 100 years before. I just knew so much about Europe and Africa and Latin America. I just knew all these things and I felt like this kind of time traveler. It’s what everybody says about books and it’s really true, it’s never overrated. You’re always going to come out ahead. If you read for 30 minutes, I promise, if you read for 30 minutes, a good book for one chapter.. And, for 30 minutes, if you’re scrolling on Instagram, I promise you will come out ahead if you’re reading a chapter. As a matter of fact, you might have your life changed. If you find the right book. I’ve had my life changed several times because of the correct book. As well as the personal encounters that I’ve made. And I think that, even though I have a cell phone and I think the internet is in many ways groovy, I often find that there are a lot of missed opportunities because I’m not reading enough. And I read a ton compared to what I used to read.

Miller: I imagine you have a lot of possible answers to this question. But what’s one book that’s changed the course of your life?

Lee: I think Middlemarch by George Eliot, without question. I think that, for those of you who are interested in romantic love -- maybe one or two of you -- you might want to read Cousin Bette by Balzac. I bet you no one’s going to tell you to do that, but I’m going to tell you because, if you want to understand seduction, it’s in there. [Laughs.]

Miller: I wonder if you could read us a part of an essay that you wrote, last year I think it was, for the New York Times. It is called Breaking My Own Silence. This is from the middle of the essay. And feel free to share any information that you think we might need to hear before you read this excerpt.

Lee: Well, what’s sort of interesting is the New York Times asked.. They have one question every year in their philosophy section and that’s their annual question and they ask people around the world, “what do you think about this question?” And the question is “What is power?” So I thought about that question for a long time. And I thought, you know, I know what power is, power is expression. And all my life I had wanted to learn how to talk well. So this was partly my answer about talking. “As a child immigrant I had read straight through Lois Lenski, Maud Hart Lovelace, Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume and then through Dickens, Hemingway, Austin, Sinclair, Lewis and Dostoevsky. Books recommended by goodhearted librarians and teachers. In Western books, heroes spoke well and could handle any social situation, not just through action but also through argument. In Korea, a girl was virtuous if she sacrificed for her family or nation. But in the West, a girl was worthy if she had pluck and if she could speak up even when afraid. As a kid, I had watched Koreans criticizing a man for being all talk and no work. In America, a man was considered stupid or weak if he couldn’t stand up for himself. Both things were true. I didn’t want to talk and I didn’t want anyone to think I was stupid.”

Miller: How did you navigate that, very different ideas and ideals given to you by two different cultures?

Lee: Well, I think this is again the whole turtle thing. I knew that it was good in America to talk. If I didn’t talk, people were going to think I was an idiot. So I tried, and I took a lot of classes. I asked my parents for money so I could take classes on talking. In these classes I didn’t do very well. Because I couldn’t do it. I would cry, I would stammer and I would sit in my seat. I didn’t get good grades in these classes. But I felt like I had to keep going and I think that that’s the difference between me and the other average person. Is that, even if you keep telling me I’m not that good at something, I’ll just keep trying. And, in that sense, I think I must have a really strong ego.

Miller: That says, “It’s okay, even if I haven’t gotten validation yet, I know deep down I’m going to do this.” What is the ego saying?

Lee: I think the ego says that you have the right idea. It’s not that I’m going to get recognition or a good outcome. It’s that, “No, I think this value is true.” It is a good value to learn how to articulate yourself and to argue what you need to, especially for the right reason. So I’m asked to do lots of things now, especially because things have gotten better in my career. And, because I would much rather stay home and be quiet, I only agree that it’s okay to go out there if there is a value for which I’m very committed. It makes everything really easy because I know what my values are.

Miller: You talked earlier and you’ve written in this essay about how difficult it had been for you to speak, how you didn’t always feel confident, in some ways, it was just the opposite. What about now? When you’re up in front of a group of high schoolers or you go to your various fancy panels? What’s in your head?

Lee: I want to die. It’s so hard to sit here.

Miller: It doesn’t seem that way at all. Three feet away from you and I imagine.. Who in this audience seems like you’re dealing with somebody who feels a lack of confidence? So, are you faking it or.. that’s not what I... I think you know what I mean?

Lee: Sometimes I fake it, yeah. Like I’m not breathing right now. That’s not helpful.

Miller: Is that because I’m asking about confidence?

[Laughter]

Lee: You know what I really hate? I hate when people talk a lot and they don’t say anything. Or I really hate it when people brag about themselves. I really also hate it when people who talk really well, use the power for wrong things. Because it’s a gift to talk well.

Miller: And are you saying you’re afraid that you’re going to do that..

Lee: Yeah.

Miller: ..or you hate that in others?

Lee: I don’t want to be that jerk face.

[Laughter]

Miller: Yeah.

Lee: Yeah. Which is the theme of the show today. [Laughs.]

Miller: Yeah.

Lee: So, I kind of think, one, I know, and you can ask my family how I didn’t talk for years. I literally couldn’t talk to my peers, so I had almost no friends until I was 13. My parents were really worried about me because I was a freak show. And in high school, because I went to this nerdy science high school, there were one or two people who took kindly upon the supplicant and bestowed friendship on me. But I’m really old-fashioned; even the way I talk is really odd. It’s okay when you’re 51 but when you’re 15, I talk like this. So it was really odd and I think..

Miller: Well, it seems like, because you’d learned friendship..

Lee: Yeah.

Miller: ..from 19th century novels.

Lee: And I have those values. Like, if people say “let’s have lunch”, I literally think that means, let’s have lunch. So, in that sense, I’m very [literal], I think, okay then I have to find something in my schedule and I have to meet that need.

Miller: But what does it mean? [Laughs.]

Lee: I think it means, let’s keep in touch if you need me for something.

Miller: Okay, I have a lot to learn as well.

Lee: Right. [Laughs.] But I don’t think I realize more and more there’s a transactional nature of being an adult that I did not understand until much later on in life. And now that I’m learning it, I go “okay” and then very often I’ll actually say that. So, I know I’m somewhere on the spectrum. Where I shouldn’t say that, but I’ll just go, “Well you need this, right? So okay, if you need it, I’ll do it”. But if people are kind of circuitous about it, then I might miss it altogether.

Miller: Let’s take some more questions from some of the students in our audience. What’s your name?

Audience member: My name is Bryce Doherty. I’m a junior at Franklin High School. And my question is, why did you end “Stonehenge” so abruptly the way you did, saying, “I went to law school”?

Miller: Thanks for that question. Just a quick explainer for our audience, maybe you can explain what “Stonehenge’' is before you answer the question about the last line.

Lee: I like Bryce’s question. I also like the way you talk, you have this really masculine cadence. If I was a dude, I’d want to talk like him. [Laughs.] So, his question is not a spoiler for anybody. “Stonehenge” is an essay that I wrote in the New Yorker this past year. It’s called “Stonehenge” because, when I went to Yale, I took a really fancy writing class that I got into and I was the only person of color in this class. Also, I grew up working class and I had not been to Stonehenge. Stonehenge, those of you who are in the audience probably know, is a stone structure that was created prehistoric and it’s considered a spiritual sight, sort of, and it’s in the UK. Anyway, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know this fact. And this was before Google, so you couldn’t look up words and find the image. So, in this class, I was trying to learn how to talk in this class. In which class, I was very intimidated by my peers because they were such good writers. And, when I mentioned that the person should define Stonehenge, the entire circle/table turned to me and looked like I had just climbed out of a rock. That’s when I knew that I wasn’t fit to be a writer, that I should go to law school. Because I figured, “You know what, I’m a pretty good student. Maybe I can figure out the law school thing and employ myself and not depend on anybody.” So that’s the answer. The answer is, I said law school because the entire essay is an illustration about how I really didn’t belong to my peer group. And I still don’t.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience here. What’s your name?

Audience member: My name is Clementine. I’m a Junior here at Franklin and, before I ask my question, do you mind if I thank you for something?

Lee: Sure.

Clementine: Earlier in your interview, you were talking about your Christian beliefs and then also how those affect and, sort of like, play into your beliefs and things like you said pro life, I’m sorry, pro choice.. pro choice, feminism, things like that. Sorry, I’m kind of nervous. I just wanted to thank you for that because I’ve never really heard anybody talk about their Christian beliefs like that. So, thank you.

Lee: Oh, thank you. Thank you, Clementine.

Clementine: Yeah. And then my question for you is, what kind of influence has your family had on your education and career?

Lee: This is the funniest part, Clementine, because everybody thinks because of that horrible book by Amy Chua -- see I’m being careless right now but I don’t care. I hate that book. It’s called the “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” That is a racist piece of literature and history will bear me out correctly on this. I speak out against that book because very often people make assumptions about Asian American families. And I’ve heard Asian American people call themselves tiger parents. I did not have that family. My mother is really interesting. She was a piano teacher in Korea so she’s had students all of her life. And, of the three of us, I was considered the slow person, as I’ve said earlier. So, she really didn’t expect very much from me. She really didn’t. And she left me alone. I never had tutoring, I never got pushed. If in fact anything, they felt really worried about me because I was trying to keep up with these weird ideas. I have very romantic ideas about education that I somehow found in these old books. So they would always tell me to go to sleep and not study too much. So my family, if anything, they left me alone. So my mother was really ahead of her time in being a parent who was not a helicopter parent, at all. Because she was also really busy working all the time. She worked six days a week alongside my father in a very dismal little hovel of a store. So, I think she was mostly concerned about, “How do we get dinner on the table?” But there was no concern about my education because they just thought that I would figure it out. My mother still believes this about young people. She thinks that kids have way too much pressure today.

Miller: You did end up going to law school. As I mentioned briefly in my introduction, you spent two years as a corporate lawyer. And then you left that. It was a grueling time as you’ve written. You also were dealing with illness. It was just, it seemed terrible. But you then made a leap that was, if not terrible then just scary in a very different way. You were going to try to be a writer. And for what, a dozen years, you in a sense gave yourself your own education in writing. And got rejection after rejection after rejection, as you would send stories in, or a first novel manuscript. What sustained you in that time? What kept you going?

Lee: I think I had privacy. And this is a kind of a strange thing to say, but right now, if I fail at something, people will know. Because at this point I’ve become a sort of known quantity to a certain number of people. Back then, when I got my failures, it was very between that person, who said no to me, and me. And of course, my poor family who had to listen to me sob on the sofa. But, you know, it’s kind of like, you go on the sofa, you eat some ice cream and you’re like, get to the next thing. You know, enough of the self pity.

Miller: But that’s the moment I’m curious about. What was it inside you, or perhaps outside of you, that made you say, “All right. Now, I’m going to do it again”?

Lee: I have a kind of dogged attachment to my wishes. If I think I want something and if I think it’s not a thing that hurts other people, then I think it’s okay to keep going. And I wasn’t hurting anybody, except me. [Laughs.] I wasn’t, and even then I knew that I was getting incrementally better. So the way -- for those of you who want to be creative fiction writers, God bless you, and I mean that -- the way it works is you get these rejections. Maybe things have changed now, but I would send out a story and I would get a form rejection, like a piece of mimeograph paper or xerox paper that would say, “No thanks.” And then I would send out another story, let’s say a year after, and then it would be that same piece of paper. But someone would have written, “Try again next time.” .. “Send us your next thing.” I had that kind of thing happen to me and then gradually, over the years, I would think maybe I’m getting closer, maybe I’m approaching something. And also, I don’t think I realized until recently, because I’ve been judging so much all these different awards, that I realized I was trying to write a 19th century novel with a modern sensibility. And I don’t know that many people today who are trying to do that. So, what I was trying to do was a difficult thing, but I didn’t know because I didn’t know modern literature that well. So now I realize, “Oh, you were trying to climb a different kind of mountain.” So now I feel like, okay, “It took you that long, because that’s how long it takes.”

Miller: I wonder if you could tell us the story of what happened when, if I’m not mistaken, when you were in law school and you met the man who you eventually married, who is half Japanese, and if you can tell us what happened when you told your parents that you and he wanted to get married.

Lee: I was disowned.

Miller: What does that mean?

Lee: Disowned. My parents, my father, stopped speaking to me. And he wouldn’t pay for law school. So I went to the financial aid office and I got my own private loan package because it’s very easy to do that for law school. I was heartbroken because I love my dad. He’s a really great guy. But he had this belief that I should marry somebody Korean. So it was really difficult. And then I wrote him a letter, because you know, I’m kind of clever this way, I was like, “I’m going to write him a letter because that’s where I’m strong.” So I wrote him a really long letter, kind of detailing that I really respect him. And I really thought, I was 22 and too young to make these decisions. So [I wrote], “If you meet him and you don’t like him, I’ll take it very seriously. But if you don’t meet him, it’s not because I didn’t ask you to meet him.” And I think, when I look back, that was a really smart thing to do. Because it’s true; when you’re a young person, your feelings may be correct or incorrect, but you have to test those feelings. And I wanted to ask somebody that I love who loves me very much, “Well, what do you think?” If my father said, “He’s a jerk face,” then I would be like, “Okay, we’ll have to think about it.”

Miller: But if he’d said he’s a [laughs] he’s a jerk face [Lee laughs] because he is not Korean, that wouldn’t have passed the test for you..

Lee: That would have been racist.

Miller: Right.

Lee: And I would have said that. I would have said, “That’s racist and we know that racism is an ignorant form of hatred. And that’s exactly what you’ve taught me not to be.”

Miller: What did happen when they met?

Lee: My father thought he was great. And I was like, “Ha!” That’s a delicious feeling, by the way, when you’re right with your father.

Miller: In one of your essays -- I think it was the same essay where you talked about that genius idea of writing a letter to your father -- you wrote that, having lived in America since you were seven years old, you were an American legally and spiritually. That word really caught me. What does it mean to be American spiritually?

Lee: See, I love the whole ethos of America. For those of you who don’t know that I majored in history, but I majored in 18th century intellectual American history. It’s a really specific kind of thing. Which means I essentially studied the origins of how America was founded. So you know when you hear all these campaign speeches about “city upon a hill,” I read the document where that phrase comes from. So I believe in this idea that America is a beacon of freedom. Obviously in the 18th century in America, we were not a beacon of freedom. We were hurting a lot of people, but the idea was there. And as an immigrant, I really hold on to those kinds of values. And I love this idea of inquiry and questioning and generosity and democracy. Those are the things that I really held onto. I will say this, when I lived in Japan between 2007 and 2011, I did some volunteer work at a church where we fed homeless people. And Americans should be really proud because all these countries outside the United States, when they have charitable organizations, very often expatriates are doing the heavy labor. I remember thinking I’m so proud of America for them helping the Japanese poor. Because these are the people that the Japanese government had failed. The despised poor of Japan were being fed by Americans. And I remember thinking that’s a really good thing. So, in that sense, I totally think the genocide of the Indigenous people in this country is reprehensible. I think slavery is absolutely reprehensible. I mean we are on lands that were taken from the Chinook people. I’m fully aware of that. But, that said, the principles of founding this government are so beautiful and we have to hold on to that. And if we don’t remember those values, we’re going to have a really stupid fight.

Miller: We have just about a minute and a half left. But since we are in a high school and you’ve talked a little about your high school years, what do you wish? If you could go back in time, what would you tell, I guess is a way to put it, your high school self?

Lee: I think I would tell her that it’s going to get better. You know, I teach college right now and I teach young people very much like the beautiful people in this audience. You guys, Generation Z has every rational reason to be worried about mass shootings, about college loans, about the inequity that you see around you, housing inequality. All those things are absolutely true. However, I want you to know that you have the power to enact change. In the way you live and the way you work, in the way you study.

Miller: Min Jin Lee, thanks very much. That’s the author Min Jin Lee in front of an audience at Portland’s Franklin High School in January of 2020. Thanks very much to Sandra Childs at Franklin and the folks at Literary Arts for making that show possible.

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