ISSUE 06 || FALL / WINTER 2009
Interview
with
Chang-rae
Lee
Interview by
Christine Lee Zilka
My brother
had just
given me the rare gift of a book; he thrust the hardcover copy at my
torso and
said, “Read this.” In the language of
family, no explanation was given, but from the urgency in his voice, I
understood
this would be a meaningful read, and so I caught the book in my hands
just in
time. I didn’t recognize the name of the
author, nor had I heard of the book before.
That book,
Chang-Rae
Lee’s Native Speaker, was one that I
later defined as a pivotal piece in the scope of Asian American
literature.
Chang-Rae Lee was an Asian American writer whose work I read and
proclaimed,
"Wow. This is for real," realizing then and there, that Asian
American literature had just been taken to a whole, new level.
Correct
that: he had taken literature to a whole, new level.
Thereafter, I
became a
loyal reader of his books, following up Native
Speaker with A Gesture Life and
then Aloft, with all his New Yorker
essays and interviews in
between. I do not think I was alone in this behavior, given
Chang-Rae
Lee’s popularity and implicit entry into the literary canon. Over the years, Chang-Rae Lee has shown to be
an increasingly private person, a writer whose appearances at writing
conferences or social events is rare, so we were giddy when he agreed
to do an
interview with us. On the eve of his
anticipated next book, The Surrendered,
due out in March 2010, Lee shared his thoughts on writing with Kartika Review.
Chang-Rae Lee
was born
in Korea in 1965. He immigrated to the United States with his family
when he
was 3 years old. He was raised in Westchester, New York but attended
Phillips
Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. He graduated from Yale
University with
a degree in English and from the University of Oregon with a MFA in
writing. He
worked as a Wall Street financial analyst for a year before turning to
writing
full time.
His first
novel,
Native Speaker (1995), won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the American
Book
Award and explores the life of a Korean-American outsider who is
involved in
espionage. In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life,
which
elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the
narrative of
an elderly former army medic who remembers treating Korean comfort
women during
World War II. His 2004 novel Aloft features Lee's first
protagonist who
is not Asian-American, but a disengaged and isolated suburbanite forced
to deal
with his world. He teaches writing at Princeton University, and
currently
serves as the director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing. His next book, The Surrendered,
will be available in early March 2010.
ON
WRITING AND IDENTITY
CHRISTINE
ZILKA:
You’ve been in Hawaii for the past year or so!
How has it been? In what ways has
Hawaii informed your writing? Will we be
seeing a sneak peak of Hawaii in your upcoming novel, The
Surrendered?
CHANG-RAE
LEE:
Living in Hawaii hasn’t informed my writing yet; it takes quite a bit
of time,
at least for me, to take in a place deeply enough to consider writing
about it
as a subject or using it as setting. I think living in Hawaii certainly
informed me as a person, as I found it to be a very comfortable place
culturally. Being Asian-American there is perfectly natural, normal,
and
ordinary. It was something of a revelation, to be ordinary, by which I
mean
completely unnoticed. Invisible, but in a good way.
ZILKA:
You didn’t start out as a writer—you were on an entirely different
track in
finance prior to writing. When and what
determined you to be a writer?
LEE:
Well, the stint on Wall Street was simply a way to be employed after
college. I
never studied finance or anything like it, and had always wanted to
write. My
good friend and roommate after college had early success publishing a
book and
I was inspired to try my hand. I quit the Wall Street job after a year
and
threw myself into a novel. That novel was no good, but it wasn’t a
complete
failure, as I learned a lot about the habit of writing, the endurance
and
stamina and will it takes to write a novel, even a bad one.
ZILKA:
A significant number of aspiring Asian American writers, especially
from
Generation X and Y, do not want to be categorized as “Asian American
writers,”
but rather as “a writer” or at least “an American writer.” Have you
ever felt
that frustration and if so, why do you think this is such a prevalent
frustration among Asian American writers today?
LEE:
I have a feeling that things are changing, though I can’t point to
anything as
evidence. I, too, felt sometimes trapped inside that moniker, but there
are so
many new Asian-American writers publishing today and I must think that
the
perception of who “we” are is changing. We’re writing all kinds of
stories and
in various modalities and styles, and it’s getting more and more
difficult to
categorize us. Or at least for intelligent readers and critics to do so…
ZILKA:
In a 2008 Kartika interview with Don
Lee, we asked him for his thoughts on how after Aloft
was published, many activist Asian American groups criticized
the book for presenting a non-Asian protagonist. Don
Lee said the following: “I thought having
that novel narrated by a sixty-year-old white guy was brave, brave,
brave, and
I credit Chang-Rae with starting a mini-revolution. I think he knew
he'd be hit
with a lot of flak for doing that, but he did all Asian American
writers a huge
service.”[1]
We agree. But did you anticipate and
foresee the flak? Why do you think some Asian Americans had such
passionate
negative reactions to an Asian American writer writing about non-Asian
characters?
LEE:
It’s funny, but I don’t feel that I did get as much flak as Don or I
might have
expected. I will say that I do sometimes
come across satisfied Asian-American readers of my first two books who
have not
even bothered to try to read Aloft,
which does surprise me. I think sometimes we ourselves do the very
thing we
accuse others of doing, which is to delimit and define what our
interests
should be. I certainly hope that I’m not read by Asian-Americans or
anyone else
solely because of the subject matter or “ethnicity” of my books.
ZILKA:
In a profile on your oeuvre, the author of the profile wrote, “Readers
who
expect Lee's novels to deal exclusively with Asian Americans will be
pleasantly
surprised to see [Chang-Rae Lee] flex his writing skills with the
creation of
Jerry Battle.”[2]
What is so pervasive in the American literary world today that leads
people to
believe that the creation of Jerry Battle required you to “flex” more
of your
“writing skills” than the creation of, say, Henry Park or Doc Hata? How
do you
deal with this assumption? What recommendations do you have to other
Asian
American writers who face the same assumptions?
LEE:
Indeed the assumption is that before Aloft
I was writing more from “experience” rather than employing whatever
artistic
skill and sensibility I possessed, which is terribly frustrating. All
writers
work from experience to some extent, of course, and yet there’s
something about
the American reader and culture at the moment that obsesses on the
personal,
giving primacy to “reality” narratives and “essential” identities and
ignoring
or diminishing the great wonders of imagination. I guess I would say
the same
thing to Asian-American writers as I would to any other writer, which
is that
there’s little one should intentionally do in the work for the directed
purpose
of shifting or changing opinion. We must write only what we want or
can’t help
but write about – often the only thing we can – and hope that the
individuality
and focus of that vision moves the reader, and at some point, perhaps,
the
wider culture.
ON
WRITING, PROCESS, AND CRAFT
ZILKA:
I personally remember your saying that you don’t
revise, that you only allow your wife and editor to read novel drafts,
and if
the novel doesn’t work, you just start over.
And also that A Gesture Life
was an emotional struggle to write, and Aloft
a pleasure, a great reprieve. What was
writing The Surrendered like for you?
LEE:
Well, my revision process certainly was different
with The Surrendered. Perhaps because
it is a larger-scaled book, with multiple main characters and settings
and
chronologies, or perhaps it’s that my own process has changed, but I
wrote and
rewrote and discarded whole sections and shifted course in the
narrative many,
many times. I worked nearly five years on the book and required every
minute. I
must say that there were many points at which I didn’t quite believe in
the
project or in my own abilities to pull it off and came dangerously
close to
quitting it and starting something else. I’d had that feeling with both
Native Speaker and A Gesture Life (not
so much with Aloft) but I suppose in those instances
it was more the customary
panic that comes periodically while working on a long writing project.
But with
The Surrendered the sense of anxiety
and looming failure was deeper, for some reason, and ever-attendant.
The
experience probably scarred me but in a way I’m thankful for it, too,
as it
feels as though I’ve gone through yet another and different trial in my
writing
life.
ZILKA:
You once said, in a Poets & Writers interview
years ago, that being in Oregon
helped you to write your first published novel, Native
Speaker, because you were “away and in the position of
someone who is looking at New York with a kind of awe and wonder again,
like a
newcomer. But I wasn’t a newcomer; I was
in a kind of exile and I was pining for New York.”
Your statement resonates with me—do you have
to put yourself in a kind of exile to write about another time/place? What do you do to get there—how did you do it
for your subsequent novels? Or (am I
totally reading too much into it) and does it not matter at all? Or perhaps, more simply put…what is it
that
you require to write?
LEE:
I don’t think it was a sense of “exile” discreetly
that helped me write about New York. Indeed the vision of a “newcomer”
is often
fresher, more unexpectedly discerning and honest than some longtime
native’s
and I was certainly viewing New York from that vantage point. But what
I think
really happened – and happens whenever I write – is that as the writer
I needed
to see the New York that the novel
required, which is not necessarily the “factual” or “real” New York,
but rather
the New York that forms and reforms in the imagination, the one (albeit
real
enough) that I could employ for storytelling, the one that I could
fashion
purely out of my own language. Physical distance or separation can
compel
imaginative intimacy and clarity.
ZILKA:
You don’t write short stories. The few
“stories” we have seen in venues like
The New Yorker are actually chapters
from your novels. You also have an MFA
(from University of Oregon)—and MFA programs are well known for
supporting
short stories better than they do novels because of the workshop format. How did you cope with writing a novel in the
MFA workshop format?
LEE:
It’s quite difficult to “workshop” a novel,
especially if you’re not presenting the book chapter by chapter. And
even when
you do (as I did at the start of writing Native
Speaker), and folks are able to follow along, there’s a danger of
heeding
all the “good” suggestions from the group while the characters and
narrative
are still developing. I say “good” because while the offerings and
opinions of
readers might be worthwhile and even excellent, they can never exactly
match
one’s vision for the work. So much of what makes a novel is the
distinctiveness
of its voice and vista on the world, its absolute idiosyncrasy, and I
think
this tends to get lost in workshopped novels. What I ended up doing was
not to
workshop my novel at all, submitting instead some personal essays and
snippets
of a project that I wasn’t really working on anymore.
ZILKA:
What is it about the short story format that deters
you from writing them?
LEE:
I’ve always been frustrated as a writer of stories,
mostly I think because I keep wanting to write more, that most of my
pressing
questions haven’t even been aired, much less answered. While I
appreciate the
form as a reader, my impulses as a writer are to continue the inquiry,
to keep
creating layers upon layers as I peel them back. I suppose I enjoy
fashioning
those layers, the steady accruing of them, and then also find a certain
majestic beauty in the interplay of all those elements.
ZILKA:
What do you think is your greatest writing strength
as a writer? And your weakness?
LEE:
I think my strength is a deep engagement with
language, which is sometimes also my weakness. I sometimes wish I had
more
interest and perhaps ability in a pictorial mode, where I’m painting a
more
detailed vision of some setting or character. Sometimes I think I’m too
impressionistic, or too psychologically-minded, and don’t give enough
effort to
reporting the physical world. But of course even as I know I haven’t
really
done anything about it!
IN
CLOSING
ZILKA: What are
you reading
these days? What books would you
recommend?
LEE: I’m reading
City Boy, Edmund White's new memoir
about his life in NYC during the 60’s and 70’s, Evening’s
Empire, by Zachary Lazar, and The Shadow of the Sun,
by Ryszard Kapuscinski.
ZILKA: What advice
do you
have for Asian American writers? For
emerging writers in general?
LEE: I don’t
have any
advice for Asian-American writers only. My advice for all emerging
writers is
to read and read and read, as much and as widely as one can. And then
if you
truly do want to write, to sit down and do so, without making excuses
for why
you can’t or don’t want to write that day. All the true writers I know
are
extremely focused, and exhibit an almost fierce stubbornness when it
comes to
doing their work.