Nancy Pearl interviewing Min Jin Lee

Nancy Pearl: Well, Min, here we are. 

Min Jin Lee: Oh my goodness. 

Pearl: So you and I had a few minutes backstage and I already know that I love you, so what can I say? 

Lee: Well, I love you right back. 

Pearl: We’re moving into the fourth year of the pandemic, and I know from talking to other people, readers and writers, these three and half years really changed their writing habits, their ability to read, and changed what they read. How did those years affect you? 

Lee: I feel like the quality of my attention is broken like everybody else’s. So it’s really something to think about working during the pandemic, but before I do that, I want to thank you for being in conversation with me: This is the great Nancy Pearl. They asked me who I wanted to talk to, and I wanted to talk to Nancy; she has action figures made in her likeness. 

I also want to thank everybody for coming tonight because it would’ve been mortifying and a disgrace to my people if no one was here, so thank you so much for coming. I know that you guys could be hooking up, getting drunk at some bar in Seattle, or actually doing other things, and you might have had better offers. So thank you so much for being here. I also want to thank Erin and Leah for signing. ASL is something that I’m really interested in as somebody who has different languages in her background. I think ASL is very important, so I’m glad that we are having that accessibility. 

But to answer your question, as for my attention, it’s completely fucked. 

Pearl: Were you just unable to sit down and concentrate on your new book, or where was your mind? Was it like most of us, hamster wheeling, as a friend calls it, just unable to settle? 

Lee: I’m actually a really disciplined person, and when it comes to things that matter, I’m very reliable. So if I said to you, I’m going to meet you at 2:00 on Pine Street in front of this building, I would be there, and if I’m not there, I’m probably hit by a truck. You can count on me. That said, what happened to me during the pandemic—and I don’t know what happened to all of you—is that I still kept that identity, but everything else sort of fell by the wayside. So if I didn’t have a promise to another person, it was really hard for me to function. 

What was upsetting to me in the past few years of this pandemic nonsense is just how we pretended like our lives didn’t matter, that it was not affecting everybody in an equal way. The pandemic happened to the entire world, and not everybody had vaccines, not everybody had equal access to information. So I think that my brain that tends to worry too much, was worried about everything, and then of course I would get these requests, and I would always feel like I’m not doing enough because everybody needed help and things got so much worse because just structurally speaking around the world, we have so little protections for those who are poor, those who don’t have equal access to power, and whenever I would get a request, I would make all these promises. 

I had my attention broken and then I would have all these requests, so then I thought, okay, I have to do everything, and then everything that I would do, I would feel like I’m not doing as well as I could be doing it, and then that cycle would repeat. I’m sure all of you are fine though, but that’s how it’s been going for me. But I do meet people who say that the pandemic was great for them because it brought them closer to their families, which is good. 

Pearl: Yeah, I know many people that I talk to say that, for example, all they could read was light fiction, that they had gone from reading really serious, what we call literary fiction, to light fiction, and other people went the other way; they just wanted to read nonfiction because it meant something, it was important somehow. 

Lee: Well, I am routinely told by people with great pride, “I don’t read fiction.” And I always think, don’t tell me; you could not read fiction, but just don’t tell me.

Pearl: I was reminded when I was reading Pachinko, especially that line that I read somewhere years ago that said, “History gives us the facts; fiction gives us the truth.” And I thought that’s what I would say to people who say they don’t read fiction.

Lee: Well, you’re very nice because that’s a valuable piece of wisdom. I can be a little snarky because depending upon my mood, if someone tells me with great glee that they don’t read fiction because it’s not real, I tell them that very important people in the world that I have met, like CEOs and presidents and senators and prime ministers actually do read fiction. And I tell them the reason why they read fiction is because they’re interested in power and human motivation, and fiction is really a study of human motivation. 

And organizational behavior is something that I specialize in, and if you look at my works, it’s a lot of people who are doing lots of different things, and I manage it because I study human psychology, organizational behavior and a hierarchy of motivations, so I usually tell them, if you want to get ahead, you could read fiction, and then I walk away. 

But that’s when I’m in a really bad mood. Usually when I’m in a good mood, I just go, “Thank you.”

Pearl: Let’s talk about all the characters in your books. How do you organize those characters? I imagine that you’re in a room and there’s corkboard all over and you have three by five cards with the different characters’ names and everything about them—is that fair?

Lee: It is fair, and it’s much worse. I use a serious software called Scrivener. My first book, I didn’t use Scrivener, and for my second book I did; in my third book, I’m using it again. It helps me organize things better. A lot of journalists and academics also use Scrivener, so that’s a plus one for the tech team, but I also think it’s a mindset for me. I’m always thinking about the last person in the room. I mean, if you’re standing below the exit sign right now in the back of the room, and you’re standing over there and you’re thinking, maybe I should stay, or maybe I should go, that’s my person.

I’m always thinking about that person as well as everybody else here. And it’s just the way my mind works. My husband’s always saying, “You’re always doing the 360.” I can’t not do it, and it made me, in some ways, a bad lawyer—when I was a lawyer—because sometimes you have to just say, well, that’s the law and those are the issues. But for me, I would be thinking of all the extra things. I’m a good problem solver in that sense of just noticing everything, but then when it comes to taking away what’s extraneous, I often find that what’s extraneous is actually the stuff that people care about.

Pearl: When I finished Free Food for Millionaires years ago, I really wanted your next book to be a sequel to that, because there were so many questions that I had. Actually, I listened to it just recently, but I had read it first, and I remember turning the last page and thinking, what? Wait a minute, I want to know what happens to Casey in the next ten years of her life. 

Do you miss those characters?

Lee: I miss those characters quite a lot, and the reason why it ends the way it does, and it doesn’t spoil anything for me to tell you of what the ending is, is that in the end you have Casey, who is the main character, who makes very big decisions. But she’s in the backyard of a friend’s house and she’s taking a piece of chalk and she’s accompanied by another Korean American person, Unu, who has had great difficulties with his life. He’s given up gambling, or he’s trying to give up gambling, and he’s lost a big career. 

So, she’s with another person who’s fallen, and she’s fallen, and she’s drawing a tree. And for me, it was intended to be a kind of a new Garden of Eden. Can we as fallen people start again? So that idea of renewal is important to me, but to answer your question about a sequel, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.

Pearl: But I mean, that’s a compliment.

Lee: Thank you.

Pearl: Because I cared about those characters, and I just wanted to know so much more about them. I loved it.

Lee: I have people who write to me saying—mind you, I published that book in 2007—that they read Free Food for Millionaires every year. They send me passages, they’ve done artwork for it, and they will pull out whatever wisdom from it, and they’ll tell me that this is how they have made a decision about their lives, and I always feel like I’m so glad that I gave everything that I had to that book because I was trying to tell something about two generations of immigrant Americans who interact with each other all the time.

It was not meant to be a one-generation book; it was really meant to be two. And when you talk about Leah, for me, she is such an important character and such a difficult character. And she falls in love. She’s a poor woman, a seamstress who falls in love with a choir director who is not her husband, and there is a sexual assault which occurs in this book, and it’s not a spoiler to tell you that that happened. But what matters to me is Casey’s response to her mother’s sexual assault because I was thinking about how our mother’s sexual identities and romantic identities do inform our identities as their children, and I wanted to talk about that. 

And whenever I read fiction or nonfiction or anything in which one person does something and we just follow that person, I think it’s great, but it’s not the way most of us conduct our lives. We are not islands. We’re constantly connected to the people that we love, the people to whom we are vulnerable, and I wanted that dialogue and dynamic to be in there between the generations.

Pearl: I know that Free Food for Millionaires is not necessarily autobiographical, but you do share some characteristics that Casey has. For instance, Casey reads a Bible verse a day, and I’ve discovered that you do as well.

Lee: Oh, I read more than a verse.

Pearl: Okay, tell us about that.

Lee: When I quit being an attorney to write fiction, I started reading the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Financial Times every day to prime the pump—Such a stupid idea. It’s essential to read the news, but for me, not before writing fiction. I did this practice for a couple of months, and my work just wasn’t happening; I wasn’t getting better. As a matter of fact, I was getting bogged down by what I was reading. The news was interesting, but it wasn’t really helping me, and then I read that Willa Cather, a great American writer that I love, whose prose is so smart and sturdy and so big—apparently, she read the Bible every day. 

So I thought, I, too, like Willa Cather, will read a chapter every day. And I started to do it, and I found it difficult because I read it in order, and some parts of it are really—I mean, forget all the controversial things you want to say; it’s just boring or confusing. Then I talked to a smart friend of mine and they said, “Well, why don’t you get the ones with the explanations in the bottom?” 

For those of you who are theologically advanced, they’re called commentaries; I call them explanations as a layperson. So then I bought this New International Version of the Bible, and now I have to use large print because I am older, and I read the comments, so I read the entire chapter, I read the commentaries, and I read the chapter again, and then I’ll pull a verse that’s interesting to me, not necessarily inspiring, the verse could just be weird; then I will write it down somewhere, and that’s what I do. Like today was Jeremiah 11.

Pearl: What does that give you?

Lee: I think it reminds me of text origin, a kind of story of the world. I don’t know how many of you have read either the Bible or the Koran or the Pentateuch or anything; people may not. I’m very interested in understanding how we understand ourselves. Writers in general, especially writers in my world, are very anti-religion, or they’re maybe agnostic, very often atheist, and I understand that. And I’ve often been 

teased a lot for my interest in religion and church. I used to teach Sunday school when I was a kid. And one thing that I have learned is that from my traveling around the world, most people have a religion. So whether or not we are religious or we believe in God, the world mostly believes in God. In understanding human characters, understanding that a person has faith, a faith I may or may not agree with, is very helpful for me to understand how she conducts her life.

Pearl: And do you think that that generalizes to your characters as a whole? That how you’re describing what you’re getting from the daily reading, is something that helps you fully flesh out the characters that you’re writing about?

Lee: I think it helps me flesh out the characters that I write about, but it also teaches me to think in a different way. So for example, if I’m reading battle scenes in the Bible, I don’t normally think about when you want to invade somebody that maybe you want to do it in the morning, in the early hours when everybody’s asleep. Well, I learned that in the Bible. 

Or there are other things that I find so troubling about the Bible that I find it to be helpful to be troubled. I confront the troubling issues in a kind of safe way—through text, I mean. 

I wonder how you feel about this because you are saving books and reading one at a time. This is Nancy’s superpower. And when you could work through life through a text, it’s helpful; it’s a safe space to work out your questions. And I want to have that sense of authority when I write in omniscient prose, that I’ve been thinking about the world and the persons in it. I guess exploring the characters and thinking about all of their humanity is important, but also thinking about each person as being an eternal person.

Pearl: Which they are.

Lee: Which I think they are—I mean, it’s a theory, right? It’s a theory that we’re eternal, it’s a theory that we have spirits and souls and that we can go on forever. Some people may not believe that, and I respect everybody’s right to not believe that.

Pearl: There’s a wonderful novel whose name I’m forgetting, which sort of posits the idea that after we physically die, we go to another place where we are living as long as there’s someone on earth who remembers us. And I found that just incredibly comforting.

Lee: Oh my gosh, yeah. Two of my college roommates passed away before turning fifty, and two years ago, a friend of mine killed himself, and so many of my friends have had very serious health issues or have them right now, some of which are terminal—I promise this will get better—and I do feel the sense of mortality all the time, and I had a very serious illness for decades, so I do think, what do we remember of the people that we love? What is my role as someone who remembers? 

And I’m constantly aware of how this minute matters, like this very second, I keep thinking, why are all of us here? And how would everything change if one of us left, or if another person arrives? And is it possible that every meeting during this weekend was meant to happen? I actually believe that—other people may not—and believing it makes me feel like there’s meaning in our lives, and I want to believe that, and I want to be remembered. We all want to be remembered.

Pearl: Right, you think about the people that you do remember, like your dentist. I mean, who wants to remember their dentist?

Lee: I love John.

Pearl: Oh, you do?

Lee: John Kim is my dentist. I think he’s awesome.

Pearl: Well, my dentist in Detroit as a child was Dr. Gants, Drill-Happy George, I used to call him.

Lee: Oh.

Pearl: You outline a lot for your books because they’re so big. Do you follow that outline?

Lee: No, I don’t follow my outlines, but I do outline, and my outlines are very loose. I’ll think about the macro outline, so my character goes from point A to point Z, let’s say, and then when I’m writing chapter forty, then I’ll think, oh, in chapter forty, character A and character M have a fight. So that’s about the extent of the outline. I know that, I know where they are, I know who’s in that scene, I know what’s the conflict that has to happen, and somehow that conflict must tie with the macro. I’m sure every fiction writer here does that probably.

Pearl: So Pachinko is four generations of a family.

Lee: Yeah, what the fuck was I thinking?

Pearl: What a good question—what the fuck were you thinking?

Lee: I wasn’t—I wasn’t thinking. I don’t think I was. 

I recently got this lovely thing in Korea, and I met the judges for this award, and one is a culture critic for a big paper in Korea, and she knows lots about everything in aesthetics in Korea, a real smart critic. And she said, “There’s a reason why I nominated you to get this thing,” and I said, “Well, why is that?” And she said, “Well, I couldn’t believe that you tried to do this.” 

And she said, “Only a person who’s not from Korea would do this because a person from Korea who knew the basics would never even try to do this.” And I thought it was kind of a compliment, but she was also calling me an idiot, and I appreciated it because I did not know that it would take most of my life to write that book. And if someone had said to me, “Oh, by the way, you’re going to spend twenty-seven, twenty-eight years working on a book off and on and trying to financially support yourself doing this, and you don’t have a contract and you don’t have an agent,” I would’ve thought, yeah, that is stupid.

But I am stubborn. I’m a very, very stubborn person. If I think something is right, and if something’s worth doing, it’s very hard to stop me.

Pearl: What was the impetus to do Pachinko? You woke up one day and said, “Twenty-seven years of my life are going to go to writing this book. Now, what book is that that I’m going to write?” Is that how it was?

Lee: Well, I heard a terrible story in college. A friend of mine asked me to go to a lecture given by a white missionary, who had done nice things in Japan and was giving a talk about Koreans there. I knew nothing, so my friend who knew that I was Korean said, “Why don’t you go?” 

So I go to the lecture and he starts telling us about the history of Koreans in Japan, of which I knew nothing, and then he talked about this little boy in his parish, to whom he ministered, and the little boy who was thirteen who had graduated from a Japanese middle school, who was ethnically Korean, but born in Japan, had climbed up to this apartment building and jumped off to his death. Again, he was only thirteen. His parents, also ethnically Korean and also born in Japan, couldn’t understand why their son killed himself. So they looked through his yearbooks and they went through all of his things, and in his yearbook for middle school, they found that his Japanese classmates had written, “Go back to where you belong. I hate you. You smell like kimchi.” And they wrote the words, “Die, die, die.” 

And that story just became part of my brain, and even today it shakes me to think about the idea that thirteen-year-old children could hate themselves and hate each other so much. I say “themselves” because when you are attacking somebody, there’s something very inhumane that you’re doing to who you are as a spirit and as a person. I see so much hatred today; there’s so much hatred today.

Pearl: And anger.

Lee: And anger. There are so many mechanisms and platforms in which we get more attention for raising more anger. And as much as I believe in raising awareness, just creating more anger doesn’t seem to make us more effective. So going back to your question, I thought I would write a novel because I think that sometimes, stories can be a way to persuade people. I wasn’t interested in writing an essay or a treatise. I’m sure one could do that, but that wasn’t something that I was interested in doing.

Pearl: I think in Pachinko, what you did for me was illuminate something that I was totally unaware of, which was the Koreans in Japan and what that relationship was, particularly at that period. And I thought, if this were nonfiction, I don’t think I would be reading it because it wouldn’t have that narrative drive that the novel does.

Lee: Well, thank you for reading it. I think the reason why fiction can sometimes work in that way is that when we have nonfiction, all of us are just surrounded endlessly by terrible news. Like I just told you about my two college roommates and my other friend who committed suicide, and in your mind when you’re hearing it, you don’t know their names, you don’t know their ages, you don’t know the names of their children, because I didn’t tell you. 

It just becomes another data point in which we say, “Oh, it’s another sad story,” and we just keep getting more and more and more sad stories, so at some point we become inured to the pain of it. In story, we could see a historical plight affect this character and her children, and this is what she decides to do, and all of a sudden, that character becomes us. Because that’s how we read. We identify with our characters and then we travel on the journeys with them, and that does distinguish it sometimes from nonfiction. And of course nonfiction today, especially good nonfiction, is narrative nonfiction, which is almost like fiction.

Pearl: Yeah, you did a lot of research for that. I mean, you’re kind of the research...

Lee: That’s me, research girl.

Pearl: Were you working on that when you were in Japan? I know that your family went to Japan for a few years anyway—was that what you were working on there?

Lee: I had already worked on a draft of a manuscript in the U.S., and it’s called “Motherland.” One chapter was published in the Missouri Review and that chapter has survived in the current form, but that’s it. 

However, that manuscript wasn’t focused; there was no such character as Sunja before I went to Japan. And then when I went to Japan in 2007 with my family, right when Free Food came out, I was like, oh, I need to work on something else, I think I’m going to go back to that book. And that book was so bad; it was really terrible. And I’m not being modest. It was just boring. 

Even my husband said it was boring, too. He’s so nice, so I decided I’m going to work on it and then I started doing all this field work, which is what really changed the book and gave it a kind of love and joy and vitality. It wasn’t just a sad story. I mean, who wants to read just sad stories? I don’t.

Pearl: I don’t anymore.

Lee: You could read about genocide, but what makes you keep reading it is the very fact that people resisted, or that people tried, or people were kind to each other. So when you read really sad stories about World War II, very often the moments that you feel like, “Oh, I could breathe again,” is when you see that she has a loaf of bread and I don’t have a loaf of bread, and even though she doesn’t know where she’ll get her next loaf, she shares a slice with me. We have to believe that we’ll sacrifice for each other. That’s when we keep reading even about genocide and war—because we have to believe in some goodness.

Pearl: So one of the things you’ve done recently is write an introduction to The Great Gatsby.

Lee: I know. It’s crazy.

Pearl: How did that come about? Were you a huge fan of The Great Gatsby? 

Lee: Well, it’s very funny. I’ve been writing fiction for almost thirty years, but I’ve only been successful for about five. So for those of you who are starting, I’m the patron saint of delay. The reason why I mentioned that is I’ve been getting invitations from Penguin Classics to introduce books because everybody knows how much I love some of these old books and how I kind of have memorized a lot of them. 

And I always say no because these introductions take a long time. My friend, another writer friend of mine, I’m not going to embarrass her, she’s like, “Min, just cough it up. Just like, just spend the weekend, just cough it up.” As if I could just cough it up. I love this idea that one could cough up an introduction. 

When they asked me for The Great Gatsby, I said, “Oh, I’ve got to do Gatsby. I’ve got to do Gatsby because when are they ever going to ask another Korean person to Gatsby?” You know I’m right. 

So I said, “I’m going to do a good job and maybe they’ll ask another Korean person to do another good book.” I actually think like that; it’s so silly. I think a lot about cultural citizenship. So very often when I am asked to do things that are interesting, and I’m one of the first people who are asked of my community, I always think, I want people in my community to be considered cultural citizens. 

I’m really tired of Asians and Asian Americans being invisible in the culture. So I keep thinking, well, maybe if I show up, maybe if I talk about another person, then maybe something will change in our mindset. I won’t always be perceived as a foreigner, which goes back to Gatsby. Gatsby was like a foreigner, and even though he was White, he was a foreigner in a certain kind of world. So it’s a book that has always connected with me, and it’s also a book that’s so important to high school children. 

And I thought, well, maybe I could talk about how this book should be read today. I’m going to tell you something embarrassing, and I’m sure if somebody from Random House is here, they’ll be mortified, but so what? I got paid $2,500 to do that introduction, and I spent $3,000 buying biographies and letters of Fitzgerald to do it. Not smart. And then this introduction has almost 100 footnotes.

Pearl: Really?

Lee: Yeah, and I did it I think for a couple of reasons. One is, I read his letters—there are so many letters, and I read all these biographies, I read biographies of Zelda—because there’s a whole camp of the Zelda biographers versus the Scott biographers—I read all this stuff and then I studied Gatsby in a different kind of way, and I looked at his manuscript. I did not cough it up. 

But now I feel like I understand what Scott Fitzgerald was doing with his third novel, which for all of you—I don’t know if you know this—but it was a total catastrophe of a publishing event. So when he died, his first printing remainders were still in the warehouse. Did you all know that? It’s in my introduction. 

And he really needed the money because his first book was an outrageous success, and his second book was not so much. He thought he would become a big deal because he had married this girl who was very aspirational and she came from a wealthy family and her family didn’t want him to marry her, et cetera. She wanted to be fancy. Like she wanted to hang out at the Riviera and wear fur coats and stuff. I like Zelda, but she’s high maintenance.

So he writes a play, and it’s a total disaster. So he’s like, “Oh, I’ve got to make some money.” So he pretty much had spent the advance for Gatsby, and then Gatsby was supposed to be this outrageous financial success, and it was not. Anyway, so that’s part of what I wrote about and also I wrote about the fact that Nick Carraway is gay, because he is. It’s in the book.

Pearl: So I have a couple more questions. I just love—I think we’re having fun.

Lee: We’re having a ball. 

Pearl: I feel like we are, anyway. What’s the best writing advice that someone gave to you and what’s the worst writing advice that someone gave to you?

Lee: Oh, well, the best writing advice is the best life advice I’ve ever gotten. The best life advice I’ve ever gotten is “Choose the important over the urgent.” And by that, I mean, when things are pulling at you, very often we keep turning to do the things that require our urgent attention but very often they’re not important at all. Like text messages. Ninety-eight percent of them are not important, right? Maybe ninety-nine percent.

Pearl: Oh, I’m with you.

Lee: If I could, I would throw my phone into the ocean. And whenever I’m working on a manuscript or an essay, I always ask myself, well, what’s really important to me? Why do I have to pay attention to this? Why should my reader have to be bothered to read this? Or would my reader enjoy reading this? Would it be important to her, to him, or to them? And then I remember, oh, all this other stuff is nonsense. 

Should I have spent $3,000 on that introduction? Probably not, but it doesn’t matter because what’s important to me is that I needed to understand what Fitzgerald was going through when he was writing Gatsby, and also I needed to understand what Gatsby means to America, so that’s what was important. It would’ve been better probably if I didn’t spend three months of my year working on that introduction, but it was really important to me that I get it right.

Pearl: And what was the worst advice that someone gave you?

Lee: I think that whole “show but don’t tell” is so stupid.

Pearl: Talk about that because when I was young, that was the advice, show don’t tell. And now it’s all voice, or so much of it is voice, it seems to me, in perhaps my naivete, that voice of the narrator, the voice is what’s so important.

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