MEDITATIONS ON "HOME"
Min
Jin Lee
For
Bob
When
I was five, there was no Pottery Barn for Kids. I was living in Seoul
with a busy
mom who taught piano 6 days a week, a father who worked as a marketing
executive, a popular older sister and a baby sister just out of
diapers. Family
legend states that I was unbearably shy yet had taught myself to read
somehow.
My first desk where I drew princesses and practiced my letters was an
overturned crate covered with some sort of bright, silky cloth. In
1976, when
we moved to the United States, I was 7 and change, and in our
one-bedroom
furnished apartment, I did my homework on the floor. A few years later,
we
moved to a two-bedroom apartment upstairs and changed dining tables.
The old
one that could seat four was propped up against the living room wall,
and it
became my desk. My sisters did not seem to mind that I got this bonanza
while
they used two kid’s desks from Seaman’s furniture store resting side by
side in
the tiny bedroom that we three girls shared.
V.
Woolf says rightly that a woman must have her own income and a room to
write.
As for income, I learned how to earn money as a kid working behind a
counter at
my dad’s wholesale jewelry shop. Maybe I’ll never make millions, but if
push
came to shove, I think I could probably earn enough to subsist on what
dad
called, “tea and bread.” As for a room, I didn’t have my own till my
older sister
went to college. This came later when our family got a three-bedroom
house.
Naturally, I continued to use that dining room table in my first
private room.
Huzzah. The room was not large; it had just enough floor space for two
twin
beds (one formerly used by my younger sister who now also got her own
room) and
my giant desk. The desk surface was covered with neat stacks of work,
schoolbooks, an AM/FM clock radio and a café au lait colored IBM
Selectric
typewriter that Uncle John who worked at IBM got for us with his
employee
discount. I don’t think I loved a desk as much until my younger sister
bought
me a desk from the catalog company Levenger when I quit lawyering to
write
fiction. When its legs fell off during a move, I paid over a hundred
dollars to
have it repaired when the desk itself had cost about two hundred.
Two
years ago, at the age of 39, I moved to Tokyo with my husband and son
from New
York City. The Levenger desk was in no condition to make the long
journey so a
month before the moving trucks showed up, I went to a modern furniture
store
and found an inexpensive, painted metal dining table. Under the
fluorescent
lights, the paint color looked candy apple red, and it seemed like an
auspicious, happy color for a move to Asia. I plonked down my money and
had it
sent to my apartment where it remained boxed up until it was put on a
freight
container and sent by boat to Japan. When it arrived in our new
apartment in
Tokyo, I finally opened the box to set up my new home office. The color
was hot
pink. Not quite Mary Kay, more like Barbie. Hmm. I read the invoice
from the
store and under color, it read: watermelon. Right. Unpacked boxes
towered over
me; I was living in a new country where I didn’t know how to ask for
water or
how to read the subway map. No matter. I pushed the pink dining table
cum desk
against the wall of my office to moor me. I had a desk. I was home.
Min
Jin Lee, the
award-winning author of Free Food for Millionaires, attended
Yale College and then law school at Georgetown University before
working
full-time as a lawyer in New York. At Yale, she was awarded both the
Henry
Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for
Fiction. Ms.
Lee has also been the recipient of the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the
Peden Prize
from The Missouri Review for Best
Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. She
currently lives
in Tokyo with her husband and son where she is working on her second
novel Pachinko.