Marie Myung-Ok Lee

 

Catherine Hong:

Today, we are thrilled to be interviewing author Marie Myung-Ok Lee, who has written the acclaimed new novel The Evening Hero. It’s a sweeping, darkly comic story centered on an aging Korean American physician living in Northern Minnesota named Yungman Kwak. In the twilight of his life, Kwak finds himself force to question his past, his conception of himself and his pursuit of the American dream.

Lee, whose apartment on the Upper West Side we’re recording from today, was born in Minnesota in a small town like the one in her novel. Her father was an anesthesiologist who was a pioneer of open heart surgery. They were the only Asians in the entire community and Lee was expected to go to Harvard and become a doctor. Instead, Lee attended Brown and went on to become a prolific fiction writer and essayist. She has written six previous books, including Finding My Voice, which was published in 1992 and was the first contemporary YA novel to feature an Asian American protagonist. Over her career, Lee has championed the work of dozens of other Asian American writers through the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, which she co-founded 31 years ago. When she’s not writing, she’s teaching at Columbia and caring for her son, Jason, who has autism and who has recently become famous in his own right, as we’ll hear later. We have much to talk about, Marie. Thank you so much for having us!

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I’m so excited to be here. Thank you.

Juliana Sohn:

We thought we’d kick this off by asking you to read from The Evening Hero.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Great. I’d love to. I am just going to give you a little teaser from the prologue.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

His name was Yungman. The components of his name were, as custom dictated, selected by his paternal grandfather, just as his father’s had been selected by his grandfather, and so forth back to the origin of the clan. The grounding character “Yung” —”hero” —cemented him to all his cousins (Yung-jo, Yung-ho, Yung-chun, Yungbok) in this twelfth generation of Kwaks, whether he knew them or not; “Man” meant “evening.” Evening Hero would thus be carved into all the family trees on Kwak male headstones henceforth, chipped into his jade name-stick–his legal signature. Yungman’s place as First Son was evident by contrast to his younger brother Yung-sik, “Vegetable Hero.” To his patients, he was no Evening Hero but Dr. Kwak. A little Asian man (certainly short of stature, at 5’4″), the hospital’s obstetrician. He was distinctive to the white townspeople not just by being Asian, but being the first doctor from somewhere, anywhere, else. First, North Korea, then South Korea. In America, a year first in Birmingham, Alabama repeating his internship, as all Foreign Trained Physicians had to do. And yet: a graduate of the “Harvard of Korea,” no hospital even bothered to reply to his American job search, of a man from Asia, a region of the world America had decided it didn’t want and made laws to ban and expel. Yungman would end up so desperate for employment as to drive straight north with his wife and infant child to this Arctic Circle of the U.S.—the Iron Rangeof Minnesota—where winters were almost lightless, where schools close for blizzards only when temperatures fell below minus fifty degrees.

Catherine Hong:

Thank you.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

It’s been 18 years in the writing and the publishing so, I’m almost in shock that it’s actually finally a book that I can touch.

Catherine Hong:

Juliana and I both read Finding My Voice as well as The Evening Hero. We read them back to back. One thing we were so struck by, it’s pretty obvious to anyone, is the setting, which is a small town not unlike where you grew up, which is Hibbing, correct?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Yes.

Catherine Hong:

Can you tell us a little bit about growing up in Hibbing and also sort of why you keep coming back to this setting, which is like your Dublin if you’re Joyce or

Juliana Sohn:

like Faulkner—

Catherine Hong:

Or Anne Tyler’s Baltimore.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Exactly. It’s a terrain that I know super well. Obviously, when I was growing up, growing up, you just know what you know is normal. But then, now I’ve spent the bulk of my life in New York. Looking back on it, it’s always really interesting because the two books seem superficially almost they’re both autobiographical because in both of them, there’s the small town, there’s the young rage, there’s the doctor father. There’s sort of the tiger parenting and so forth.

But what’s really interesting with the two of them is Finding My Voice was my first novel. And as James Baldwin said, “Almost all first novels are autobiographical.” The author has so much to get off their chest. So for me, growing up in an all white area, I felt like I want to write something that’s universal. So, I’m going to write this all white character book. I started when I was in college. I was like, “What period of my life do I know a lot about? Oh, my teenage years. So I’m going to write a book about high school and how fun it was.” Then it was actually my boyfriend, who’s now my husband said, “How come there are no Korean characters in this?” And just thought, “Well, I want it to be universal, like Flannery O’Connor and stuff,” but then sort of with his encouragement, I made Ellen, the protagonist, Korean.

Catherine Hong:

Ah, I would assume that you started with Ellen as a protagonist.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

No. Then when Ellen, that Korean protagonist, then there’s all this racism and all this other stuff that really surprised me. No. I wrote a whole draft of “fun in high school.” It was called “Greetings from Arkin, Minnesota.” It was completely different.

Catherine Hong:

Fascinating,

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Completely different.

Catherine Hong:

Because I think I heard another interview where you talked about high school days and you mentioned that you had a good time in high school. You were a head cheerleader, is that right? But so then I’m trying to square it with what you’re recollecting now, that maybe, more than you realize, then you were experiencing all kinds of racism, maybe?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Yes.

Catherine Hong:

It wasn’t as overt.

Juliana Sohn:

Ellen, in Finding My Voice, experiences racism, but it’s in these flashes where sometimes you can’t even… like did I hear that correctly? Did that just happen? So, there are almost these very, almost subtleties. This must have peppered your existence as well while you were head cheerleader.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Oh, definitely. I still feel like it comes into relief now with the model minority because a lot of times when we as Asian Americans experience crime, we are always like, did that really happen? So, that is a theme with all my books because I feel like just sort of being a contemporary fiction writer, I almost feel like we have to almost acknowledge 2016. Then one of the things that some librarians have brought up is “How come all your books have some really violent pivot in them?” In fact, my newest book that’s coming out is a retelling of Of Mice and Men. You kind of have to really lean into the violence because Of Mice and Men is really violent. But I’m also realizing this isn’t an inadvertent thing that I’m doing, but it also is reflecting, I experienced a lot of physical violence when I was growing up. But to look at me, no one would think it. “Oh, you were a cheerleader, da, da, da.” Nobody really thinks of my first memory of growing up is being punched in the face when I’m like three or four. I have this memory of someone calling me chink and punching me in the face.

Juliana Sohn:

Do you mean an adult?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Yeah. Well, like a teenager. You know what I mean? Someone who’s bigger. I remember him punching me in the face. That’s one of my early memories, and it was also, when you live in a town that’s all white, it’s kind of like all of people’s racist inclinations don’t have anywhere else to focus except on our family. So that book was super autobiographical. It’s also about a teenager having experience, but it was so informed by what happened to me and what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about racism. I wanted to talk about what it felt like to be a victim of violence.

But this book is so different in that I wanted to write a book about someone who’s like my father, who’s a very small person that everyone has assumptions about what they’re like. I remember my father being very patriotic and always going, “There’s no racism. I’ve never experienced racism.” But then seeing him, like how he was treated at the Northwest counter, exactly what you’re talking about, this sort of untraceable racism. I could tell he felt that and he would get really angry, but he wouldn’t call it that. So in some ways, this book is more my imagining what someone like my father, and I’m almost trying… My father passed away more than 20 years ago. So in a weird way, too, this is my way of writing my way back. Yungman is actually 10 years younger. He was a child during the Korean War. The first one’s more autobiographical. This is more like I’m trying through fiction to try to do justice to that generation.

I also feel almost scared because it’s sort of here in America we call the Korean War the forgotten war. But in Korea, it’s kind of becoming forgotten, too, where I feel like whenever there’s something with North Korea, the young people are, “Let’s reunite.” But then the older people are like, “No, it was like this in the war.” And it’s kind of like, “Well, shut up. That war was a long time ago.” But that doesn’t matter. It still happened. It still reverberates. The traumas reverberate through Korea to our generation. I feel like unless we remember it, it’s just going to go away. The new generation will just be replaced not even remembering it.

Catherine Hong:

Speaking of your father, from what I heard, he spoke fluent English, which he learned when he was in Korea, right?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Yes.

Catherine Hong:

I mean, he was quite unusual, kind of a pioneer in many ways because he came so early on. Will you just tell us a little bit about your dad?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Well, when my father passed away… Again, I don’t know much about him, but he did leave me his diaries. From 1946 on, he only wrote his diaries in English because he just wanted to practice English, which is great for me because my Korean’s not very good. He wrote it all in English, and he just had some very interesting idea that someday he was going to go to the US, which at the time would’ve been like, “I’m going to go to the moon someday,” because of the laws. There was no immigration. He’s in Korea.

Juliana Sohn:

Do you know how he learned English at the time?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Some of it was self-taught. He does mention when he was in school, they did have a woman who came in and taught them English. Then during the Korean War, he joined this American bible study. He was a liaison officer for the Army, and so they gave these free lessons. What happened, too, that made it extra lucky is he practiced a lot of spoken English, so when the Eighth Army came to Seoul National University and they needed liaison officers, they took the top five people from his class, just like, whoop! But my dad was the only one who could speak pretty well.

Catherine Hong:

Right. In your novel, that’s sort of the key to Yungman’s success or rise, is his-

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Exactly.

Catherine Hong:

… English.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

You never know what the—

Catherine Hong:

It’s a ticket—

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

… opportunity is going to be. Exactly. It’s just because Yungman is singing these hymns and stuff. He hates being a Christian, but somehow the hymns get him to the US.

Catherine Hong:

How did your dad end up in Minnesota, of all places?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Well, like Yungman, because he’s foreign trained, he had to go get his internship done again. That was indeed, it was in Birmingham, Alabama. It was also during Jim Crow. So, you can imagine my parents are coming from the world’s most homogenous country to Jim Crow Alabama, and they’re seeing, “Wow, this is what race relationships are like in America? This is horrible.” That’s one of the reasons they never taught us Korean. They really felt like to give us the best opportunity, we had to become as American as possible, as white as possible. The Army helped him get his visa. But because of the Immigration and Naturalization act of 1924, all immigration was banned from East Asia. So, they could not do anything after his visa ran out. Then in Northern Minnesota, they were so desperate. They had been looking for an anesthesiologist for years because what native-born American wants to live where it’s 50 below and you’re the only person in this whole region who does anesthesia? So you’re on call 24/7. For instance, for the most important thing in my father’s life, my brother’s Harvard graduation, he had to hire some guy to come in from this other city to take over and he had to pay him. But you can imagine. You’re getting paid less. You’re on call all the time. But it was this mutual… They would take someone who had immigration problems, they were that desperate. Then for my father, when he went there, he goes from Birmingham where it’s all hot and Jim Crow to Northern Minnesota, where everyone is blonde and blue-eyed, which is exactly what he thought America would look like. So in a weird way, he just thought this was going to be a really wonderful place. I guess he felt like if we just worked hard enough, we would be super accepted. And that wasn’t quite what happened.

Catherine Hong:

My guess is it was very working class where you grew up?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

It was—

Catherine Hong:

You were probably wealthier than the average person. Your father had this very important position in town. At the same time, you were maybe an outcast. It’s an interesting dynamic.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

There was definitely a class issue. Exactly, having gone to an Ivy League school was interesting because in a town like that, it’s not like … money does not make you better, sort of the way we do it here. It’s all who’s the big hockey player? Or who’s this?  It was a very different thing where, and in fact, probably only 40% of people went to college, almost no one went to a four-year college. In fact, one of the other doctors’ kids went to Yale and when he came back to work in the mines over the summer, they said, “Where’d you go to school?” And he goes, “Yale.” And he goes, “Oh, that sounds like it’s an out of state school. Is it an out of state school?” Like that. You know what I’m saying? For my parents, they’re just like, “It’s Harvard, Yale or Princeton.” They were so not impressed by Brown, but none of my friends… I was just in Minneapolis for my launch tour. My friends drove four hours to come see me, and none of them went to college because none of my friends went to college!

Catherine Hong:

And what are your siblings… Where did they end up? And what are they doing?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

My eldest brother went to Harvard and then my next brother went to Carleton, and I went to Brown and then my sister went to Harvard.

Catherine Hong:

Four kids.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Yeah. It’s various. Everyone’s kind of self-employed. My sister used to teach at Biola, which is the Bible Institute of LA, and she’s kind of retired. One of my brother does PR. My other brother’s kind of retired.

Catherine Hong:

Nobody lives in Minnesota? All the siblings left the state?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Actually, my Carleton brother, for whom my parents were the roughest on because he did not get into Harvard. He took a lot of the brunt for me before I also didn’t get into Harvard. He’s still there and is the dutiful son. My mother has dementia, but because of his devotion, we are still able to keep her at home.

Juliana Sohn:

You mentioned that your parents were super assimilated, and they made sure that their kids were super assimilated as sort of a survival mechanism here in the States. So, you grew up without learning Korean. Did you also grow up without a lot of Korean traditions and culture?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Oh, definitely. My parents didn’t talk about it at all, but when I was a little kid, I wanted to learn Korean so bad, so I would eavesdrop on them. But I would only hear weird fragments of stuff. So I’d say, “What does ‘mal-i ya [speaking about]’ mean?” You know when you say “mal-i ya’ refers to something? They would just be like, “Ugh, don’t even… whatever,” because, you know what I mean? I’d only hear little fragments. The only things I ever learned was ‘byung won (hospital)’ because my dad would talk about going to the hospital. ‘Ddong (poop), o-joom (pee)’. Then a bunch of weird Japanese words because my parents grew up during colonization.I went to Korea as a Fulbright scholar to learn Korean and also to research my novel. But also then I’m, like, saying for underwear, salimada, all these weird Japanese words. It’s like of the 10 words that I know, 5 don’t even count! Of all my siblings, nobody eats Korean food or anything. It’s sort of like, that’s how we were raised. I feel like if I would’ve continued on that path, I would also feel that way. Do you know what I’m saying?

Juliana Sohn:

Yeah.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

The first time I had Mexican food, I was like, “Oh, my God, this is so spicy. I hate it,” because in the Midwest, it was like, “Oh, no. Too much cinnamon. It’s too spicy.” Everything’s super bland. But then it wasn’t. Actually, I was talking about this with Cathy Park Hong, and I said, “I just feel like this stuff goes right into my veins.” And she said the same thing. I just feel like I’ve finally reached this equilibrium where normally I’d be like, “Oh, it smells bad. Or it’s really salty.” Part of it is we didn’t have a Korean grocery. When we finally did, we would drive four hours to Minneapolis where we’d see the one other Korean family, and then one time the kimchi jar broke on the way. My parents

 

Juliana Sohn:

Oh, my gosh.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

… and it broke. We were in the car for four hours with kimchi smell, and they also did not allow us to eat it. My mom didn’t like my dad eating it because there’s this fear of the smell.

Catherine Hong:

The smell!

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

And then they had to put it way in the back. Also there’s so much emotional, because I just feel like, is that a bomb? What’s wrong with it that we’re not even supposed to touch it? So, I just grew up with this real fear of it. My sister today I can see she just kind of like, “Ugh, I don’t want to eat that.” But I’m like, no, actually if you start eating it, you won’t be able to stop. But she won’t. She won’t. You know what I mean? She won’t. She won’t take that plunge.

Juliana Sohn:

I heard that you didn’t even know what your Korean name was.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

No, I did not. For Finding My Voice, I’m like, “this girl needs a Korean name.” I don’t know anything about anything. So I’m asking my parents, “What’s my Korean name?” And they’re like, “It’s Myung-Ok.” So I’m like, put that. Ellen’s last name is Sung, and a bunch of my friends are like, “Why’d you name her Sung? That’s such a weird Korean name.” And I was like, that was the one Korean family that we drove the four hours. So, this was the very small universe in which I understood anything Korean. Basically, taking your shoes off in the house was the only Korean thing we did. I didn’t think of it as being Korean. I thought it was being smart. But I’ve also realized after spending so much time in Korea… Because in Korea, my relatives would call me Muhri. I don’t like that homonym, Muhri. My husband’s name is Carl, so it’d be like Muhri Carl. They would just laugh about haircut. Do you know what I’m saying? I got kind of sick of that. So I just like being called Myung-Ok better. So I’m just happy-

Catherine Hong:

It’s now become part of your identity.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Oh, definitely. The weird thing, too, is that it’s not on my passport. Then finally when my mom’s trying to arrange things and I finally got my birth certificate, it’s literally my second name. It’s on my birth certificate. I just find it so funny, my parents never told me what my name is. My sister’s nickname is Gi, and I’m realizing it’s because her name is Chung-Ok, and when we were little, before we were in consciousness, they must have called her Chung-Ok-Gi. Because everyone was like, “Why are you calling her Gi? That’s such a weird nickname.” But that must have been when I was listening in. It’s just these really bizarre fragments.

Juliana Sohn:

I find that so fascinating because my parents only spoke Korean at home, and we only ate Korean food at home. I think my dad has almost never, ever called me anything other than my Korean name. So it just fascinates me that people grew up in such polar opposite ways.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Right. Right. But did your parents grow up in a situation… Because they were undocumented, they had no expectations of ever going back to Korea, and then my dad was such a tiger dad because he didn’t have any other examples. He was convinced if we became bilingual, we’d get confused and get accent and that would hurt our chances to go to Harvard. Where now, for my Fulbright, I had to take Korean class at Yale and half the kids were just getting out of their language requirement. They could speak it at home. I was realizing, “Wow, wouldn’t that be interesting to grow up where it’s totally okay to speak it at home?”

Juliana Sohn:

So, you must have been incredibly curious about your Korean heritage and identity because you work so hard to cultivate this community for yourself. You said finding your cohorts with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, being the first Korean American Fulbright scholar to Korea. I mean, it feels like you were denied that at home, and as an adult, you really made an effort to find the food, find the community, and all your books are centered around this Korean American experience.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I think it actually might be the books are coming first. There’s a quote from Wittgenstein, “In order to be an artist, you have to really know yourself or all the art you will produce will be a form of deceit.” So, I think part of that was knowing when… I took one creative writing course when I was at Brown and then writing that teen novel, there had always been something that felt wrong about it. Not wrong necessarily. It was technically really good, but there was something missing.

So, I think once I got over that idea of what I needed or just the reason this book took so long, is it told me I need to go to North Korea to see what’s this is all about. Similarly, to write whatever I have written these last years, I have needed to know all of this. It has been this weird drive, and a lot of it was super embarrassing because my mom, once I started taking Korean, would actually make fun of me. Yeah. She’d say, “You sound exactly like those missionaries.” I’d try to be like-

Juliana Sohn:

You didn’t teach me.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

… “Thanks a lot, mom.” Because that could have been just such a gift. So, yeah.

Catherine Hong:

So how is your Korean now?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

It’s terrible. It’s terrible, but-

Catherine Hong:

But you can get around? When you go to Korea, you can…

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

My hearing is really bad. Even someone saying you versus me, I can’t hear. But I’ve written things about, I don’t know, Squid Game and things that have to do with language. I’m realizing, and my cousin’s family has noticed this, because I work with language, I really understand a lot of the nuances, but then I can’t speak to save my life. I can’t speak well. I can’t hear well. I just watch a lot of K dramas.

Catherine Hong:

I love the parts in your book where you analyze or even just drop in these subtle explanations of Korean language or English and how different it is—

 

Juliana Sohn:

Like the pronouns.

Catherine Hong:

Yeah. I love this part. Just things like this because I’m always talking to my mom about what we’re missing when we’re talking to her, and how she feels like she often can’t express things or I misinterpret things. But I love this part. “English was so strange the way the subject, not the action of the verb, came first. How he, she, I, and they were so necessary, while in Korean, you knew who was speaking or being spoken of just from the verb. Americans also habitually said “I” a lot, which seemed very conceited.” Observations like this, were these things that you’ve thought about for years or was it research and talking to linguists or other Korean speakers?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Honestly, really, I think it has been more that I’ve spent 18 years with Yungman, and it’s just more knowing what he knows. So, no. It hasn’t really been as much about analyzing language. It’s just more understanding him. It’s more like when I was writing it, I actually would laugh at stuff because I thought he was being really funny. It sounds weird, like being schizophrenic, but it is like when the character really takes off, they just do their own thing. The good thing is that I have had the structure of the language and I understand it. It’s more I understand what he’s talking about. But it’s not like I’m any kind of linguist or anything.

Juliana Sohn:

I find it surprising that you’re not as fluent as maybe I expected from reading the conversation of the fancy doctor friends at that party. When the way they speak, I could hear, even though it was written in English, I could hear how they would have said it in Korean because-

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I really appreciate that. I had so many fights with my editors over that. They would just be like, “Well, do it more like this.” And enough to say, “Well, they’re kind of speaking nonstandard English.” It wasn’t even that. It was just like, “No, it sounds wrong.” And I’m like, “No, it’s perfect.” Just from the audiobook, the guy, I heard him read and he read Yungman’s voice in a slightly off accent when he said Korean words, I was like… perfect. Because Yungman’s also been away from Korea for 40 years. So it’s those kind of subtleties. I really appreciate that.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

As a person of color, a writer of color, I feel like fighting for that is so important versus, “No, it should be written like this because we’re all white and this is how we’re used to reading.” Readability becomes such a big issue. Well, why people want to read this? And I’m kind of like, I don’t care. This is how they probably would talk or this is how I hear them talking in my head.

Juliana Sohn:

On a side note that is totally tangential, when people read audiobooks, writers of color and specifically Koreans, they really need a language coach, or if not, the actor reading it should be familiar with the language because I’ve listened to so many Korean books that the Korean pronunciation is so off that it catches my ear and it’s almost like, “Ooh,” it makes me cringe every time I hear it. I think one of the worst offenders was for “ajusshi”, it was “ajiyoshi”.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Right. It probably just takes you right out of the narrative, going… But no, it’s important because also I asked for a Korean American narrator, and that person, Raymond Lee, was the first person they auditioned. I just said, “Nope, that’s it. No need to go any further.” For the cover, I asked for a Korean, either someone who’s Korean or a diasporic Korean, even though it’s not necessarily there’s going to be a temple on it or something, but you can see that even in the subtler aspects, it’s deeply Korean, like the colorways and so forth. I noticed at first, actually, because my editor at the New York Times when I was writing a lot of op-eds is Chinese American, and he did that for me first. He only had either Korean or diasporic Korean illustrators. These things all matter.

Catherine Hong:

I’m glad you mentioned your op-ed writing because one thing I really enjoy about your writing and all your social media is that you do not hold back and you express outrage in a great way that’s very cathartic for, I guess, people who share your opinions. Whether it’s Trump or racism or the Supreme Court, or whatever’s going on in the news or in your life with unleashed dogs you express your outrage and you’re funny about it, and you clearly aren’t afraid to say what maybe some people don’t want to hear. But then I was thinking about your protagonist in Finding My Voice, how when she was a younger girl, she was a people pleaser. She didn’t want to create waves, and she had to learn to express herself and to fight back. Did you go through that evolution yourself?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I was probably the most opinionated kid in the family of the four and definitely the most trouble to my parents. But in terms of the people pleasing, I was much more of a people pleaser than Ellen, my protagonist. She was almost more like my ideal what if. What if I stood up for myself more? Or have this big breakthrough with my parents and racism at the same time. No, that was much more of a fantasy thing.

I think as I’ve gotten older, though, I feel more imperative, particularly this book is a lot of imperatives from the 2016 election, particularly Trump calling for genocide of North Koreans, all the bombing, and similarly my social media and this book are similar because with all the research I’ve done, it really seems that the Korean War has been one of the most brutal wars of the 20th century. We’ve had a lot of wars. The research I’ve done almost makes me feel like I should be using the word genocide in terms of what happened, the amount of people who were killed and the property damage that was done. North Korea was bombed. 99% of its infrastructure was bombed. Why would we do that to any other… It was done by a third country.

So to some degree, what I wanted to do was not write some trauma epic, but I wanted to write a really funny book about genocide. So I think similarly, I use social media as a brain dump for myself. But at the same time, John Waters has talked a lot about humor being a weapon. I feel like I’m not just being, “I’m so mad about Roe.” I’ll just point out more about how the justices are such jerks or something in a funny way, and then I feel hopefully that would help people sort of reframe things and maybe see things in a different way, in a way that may foment action because while I do go to marches and I’m involved in a lot of social justice things, I do feel like I have more impact as a writer. I consider my social media presence to be writing, too. It’s 140 characters. It’s writing.

Juliana Sohn:

I try to educate myself on a lot of Korean history. It’s really dull reading history books and textbooks. I think some of the information goes in and just leaves. I find myself reading fiction by authors like you that write about Korean history. You’ve done a ton of research, and because the stories are attached to these compelling characters, I’m actually learning a lot and being educated about history that I had no idea about. I know that you believe that fiction can educate, so you clearly do it with intention.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Oh, definitely. For this book in particular, I also felt like I wanted to de-center the history of Korea and the Korean War away from actually the textbooks because we already have textbooks, and a lot of them are written by white people. Actually, for almost every detail has been verified, but they’ve been verified via talking to survivors. In some ways, too, because my parents won’t talk about it, I think it’s just my own therapeutic thing. It was great for me to talk to other people and probably they didn’t want to talk to their kids about it either. But they would talk to me. I think that it’s kind of like this love letter to this history that’s been lost to my parents. Really, just an anger thing about all this time… When I was growing up, it was always like I was either a chink or a jap. No one even knew about Korea.

Catherine Hong:

There wasn’t even a good slur.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Right. There wasn’t even a slur. People didn’t even really think of Korea as… They still don’t. I think the fear that I have as a Korean is I feel like, well, we’ve just gone from forgetting. It’s like chink, jap, and then we’ve gone to Squid Game. Then just the idea that how people watching people consume Squid Game and being like, “Oh, it’s so brutal, blah, blah, blah.” I’m like, “You don’t understand. This is an allegory of US occupation.” I feel like this is some kind of reparations and revision that we need to do, our generation.

One of the craziest things that I found among my father’s diaries is that he had these little snippets of what he called short stories, and they were really cute. They were just like, “Dr. Halper.” “Hello, Dr. Lee.” “Hello. How are you?” “I am fine.” End of story. He clearly had wanted to be a writer at some point, but he never, ever, ever mentioned that. This entire time, when my parents are both yelling at me, “You cannot become a writer. You cannot become a writer.”

Catherine Hong:

Yeah. What did they think about you becoming a writer?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Cannot become a writer.

Catherine Hong:

They were against it.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Cannot become a writer … No, no, no! I had my first piece published in Seventeen Magazine when I was in high school. My parents were like, “Oh, this is nice.”

Catherine Hong:

What was it about?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

It was about being a volunteer worker. It was called… Well, the original title is called “Volunteer Workers Are Not Schmucks”. Because I was reading Mad Magazine, I didn’t realize schmuck was a bad word. I was just reading Mad Magazine that had all this Yiddishism. So the editor changed the title. But it was just about how I was forced to do volunteer work, and I ended up liking it. This essay had got a hundred bucks. I thought I’m going to be a writer. I’m going to be rich. But no. My parents were very much, “You have to be a doctor.”

Then when I got to Brown, I flunked out… I didn’t flunk out. I could not handle inorganic chemistry, which is one of the first classes you have to take. My roommate was pre-med, and I just saw her. She just took off, and I just thought, “I can’t do this.” So my parents said I have to do something in STEM. At Brown, econ was the one discipline for which I’d had the fewest course requirements. So, I could take that and I could do an honors thesis. Then I ended up you, as you can see, really interested in late stage capitalism. Then I could work on Wall Street so I could live alone and try to establish…

Catherine Hong:

Did you work at Goldman?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I did, in fact.

Catherine Hong:

I found that fascinating. Just tell us what you did.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I did this purposely so I could live by myself in a situation where it’s expensive in New York and also to fool my parents because they thought that I worked in equity research, for which most of the people would go to Harvard business school afterwards. And I did not.

Catherine Hong:

But you did the whole thing. You wore the suit  and you worked the long hours and worked with all those guys.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Six years. Yes. I did all of that.

Catherine Hong:

It was intense.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

The super expensive clothes, the super expensive calculators. People would get fired if you got a decimal point wrong. I had to be at work at 6:30 if there was call. The hours were crazy.

Catherine Hong:

But you were writing at the same time?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I was just telling  Juliana.

Catherine Hong:

How did you do that?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

But that’s why I got up at 4:30. I would get up at 4:30 in the morning. I would write for like an hour, half an hour. I’d go running around the reservoir. I’d go to work.

Catherine Hong:

Incredible.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

That’s what I had to do. That’s how I wrote Finding My Voice, basically, is doing that. But I’m actually finding… I love Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires because I thought she did such a good job explaining what it’s like to work at an investment bank, and I’m realizing now a lot of my Columbia students, if they’re not Asian American, they’re very much like, “Ugh, I can’t believe you worked for The Man.” They will actually say that to me. Where I’m kind of like, “Oh, it’s interesting how so many Asian Americans were lawyers, are lawyers.” Chang-rae Lee also worked at, I think, he worked at Chase. This is how, if you don’t have parents who will buy things for you, how else are you going to live in New York by yourself and make a lot of money? I could not be a waitress, like the people on the Girls tv show. That’s not how you can live in New York by yourself.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

So, it’s kind of funny that that was my way of doing it. But I’m seeing there’s so many Asian Americans who were lawyers. When they came to the workshop, when Monique Truong came to the workshop the first time, she was just this lawyer going, “I think I might want to write.”

Catherine Hong:

Okay, wait. Go back because this is our next question. Tell us about the Asian American Writers Workshop, which you co-founded in the early ’90s while you were still working at, where were you?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I had just quit. I just quit. I thought, “You know what?” I’d made a decision not to get an MFA. I was going to use the opportunity cost of making a lot of money and hopefully having a sustainable career. Then I get out. I ended up quitting, I got a very small grant from the Society of Children’s Book Writers to finish Finding My Voice. Also, I had a side business where I did editing for business school. So I had a income stream. But I’m quitting my job and I’m all by myself. I have no cohort. I have no idea how to access the literary community. Then luckily, my friend Christina said, “Oh, come meet my friends.” And that was it.

Catherine Hong:

So who was in the original group? And tell us a little bit about how you got it started, what your goals were.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

First, we were just meeting in this Greek diner. It was me, Christina Chiu, Curtis Chen and Bino Realuyo. I think at the time we were all ex-premeds, and we were all just … “Oh, look at my stories.” And we all had these problems because I had joined some writer’s workshops before. We all had the same experience, either one, being accused of plagiarism because we’re overachievers. Or two, being, “Why don’t you write more like Amy Tan?” or “Why isn’t there more rice in your story?”  Or “Why does that person call that person aunt where they’re not related?” We’re just like, ugh… Suddenly, we’re at this diner and then just sharing our stuff and it’s really cool. Then at one point, a couple more people joined us and then Curtis said, “Oh, we should do a reading.” I don’t know if you guys remember back in New York before digital, when they had the poetry calendar. It was just a piece of paper in tiny, pharmaceutical font. That would have all the readings and you would have to go to a bookstore to get it. It was just one page.

So we had this tiny, tiny thing that said Asian American Writers’ Workshop reading at the Chinatown History Museum. 200 people showed up.

Catherine Hong:

Wow.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

We almost had to close it because of the fire codes. Then we just realized, “Wow, there is something here.” Then we also decided for other people like us who weren’t going to get degrees, well, let’s have low cost writers’ workshops. One of the first ones was Cathy Park Hong, Ed Lin, Min Jin Lee, Lisa Ko. Then we got this unknown person. We got Jhumpa Lahiri to teach it. Right.

Catherine Hong:

That’s the craziest group.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

And we’re just these bumbling people.

Catherine Hong:

Do you have photos from this?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I know, I wish. But it was just the best way to spend my 20s and early 30s.

Catherine Hong:

Another thing I love about your story is that, and it’s not that you haven’t had a career all these years, but that you did so much writing quietly, relatively quietly. And this book is huge. This book has taken off. It’s going to be on Good Morning America and all these lists, “best books of the year” type of thing. How does it feel at this point in your life after you’ve mentored so many young writing students, undergraduates and graduate students, to be getting this kind of attention now?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I think a lot of it is when you’re writing it, you never know if it’s any good. Everyone gets worried, and I’m just really happy to see the reception it’s gotten.

Catherine Hong:

Did you have periods where you thought, like, “I’m never going to publish another novel?” Did you have those kinds of anxieties?

Juliana Sohn:

I mean, 18 years is a long time.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I have friends sending me emails with me going, “I’m lost in my novel. I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I’m going to finish it.” There were many times like that because it’s not just the mechanics of publishing and getting a publisher and then writing it in the way the publisher wants. I think that was one of the… Problems is not the right word because I do feel supported. It’s hard to get a book published. So, I feel very grateful that I’m able to do this. But at the same time, a book is a consumer item, and there are certain ways that people want to sell consumer items, particularly how people want to sell the Asian experience to white people because they know that white women tend to be the biggest demographic. So there were certain issues with the book, like, oh, its readability. There was a long time where everyone wanted me to write it chronologically and we would have these huge fights about it. It was a lot of me finally just being stubborn enough that they just gave up.

Even with Finding My Voice, that one, this very big editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, and in fact, I saw her at a writer’s conference very recently, and it was very funny. She was just really, “You have to write it in third person past tense. First person present tense, is just amateur hour.” She actually said it was amateur hour! People don’t write like that! I started rewriting it because I was so desperate. Nobody wanted this book and then again, it felt wrong. I had a writing mentor who she didn’t tell me what to do. She just said, “You have to figure this out for yourself.”

I literally figured out I want people to know what it feels to be called a name. So it has to be in first person. It has to be present tense. I don’t care if this is the wrong voice. So, we stuck with it and it ended up coming out. With this book, too, it came very close to never coming out. But at the same time, all I can do is make something that I am happy with. Readability, voice — I’ve just learned for myself it’s not going to be worth it for me to make this the Asian Where the Crawdads Sing or whatever. I can’t do it. Yeah. I constitutionally cannot do it. No matter how much I realize I would want to get published, I cannot do it.

Juliana Sohn:

Do you feel are you able to enjoy the success and feel validation at all after all these years?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Oh, definitely. In fact, one white writer who I esteem very much said the scene of Yungman eating kimchi was one of the best scenes I’ve ever read in fiction this whole year. Then I feel really happy because I fought so hard to keep that the way it was.

Catherine Hong:

You got lots of,  sounds like, not such good advice or advice that you didn’t need to take. You had to be stubborn and believe in what you were doing.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Oh, definitely.

Catherine Hong:

I’m sure that’s tough.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

It was similar to during when we were founding the writers’ workshop. Amy Tan was so hegemonic. So that was like, everything was in relation. Is your book like Amy Tan’s? Is it not like Amy Tan’s? It was not Amy Tan’s fault, but it became this lyrical, exotified, your grandma’s story. That became this template for how Asian American literature is written.

Juliana Sohn:

You’ve written a lot of editorial articles about your political views, but also you’ve really pioneered the use of cannabis to treat autism due to the experimentations that you went through with your son. It was a real medical breakthrough. You went against convention to find your own way. Can you share what that experience was like? And I think your son is the first, is it minor? To have a-

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Yes. We were the first-

Juliana Sohn:

… medical license-

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

… people to use it. Yes. We were the first to use it in pediatric use and for autism.

Catherine Hong:

We should explain that. Marie, you wrote a piece in the Washington Post that went totally viral. The headline is “I Made My Son Cannabis Cookies. They Changed His Life.” Right? What year was that? 2018?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

That was 2018. Actually, before that, when he was nine and we first started, I wrote a whole series for Slate on, they called it, like, “My Kid has Autism. I Gave Him Pot” or some click-baity thing like that. Yeah. So that was the first one.

Catherine Hong:

This is what I was referring to in our intro about how you’re known for this work that you’ve done and being very outspoken about the outdated laws and the regulations and how people in the medical community aren’t supportive of this use of cannabis.

Juliana Sohn:

I mean, you really spearheaded that. You were testing, you were working with growers, you were testing on yourself before you would give anything to your son because there wasn’t this kind of… I mean, I guess it’s very controversial with pediatrics. So you pushed for this to happen, really, much sooner than it ever would have.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I think there’s a certain amount of desperation and feeling like there were no good options. What’s interesting is that the one antipsychotic drug that they wanted to put him on, the company has been sued and paid $2 billion in fines for the side effects that have been deadly. Then just the weird coming to cannabis, mainly because it was the only thing that wouldn’t kill him if I messed it up. That was the main thing. But after a year’s worth of experimentation, it ended up really helping him where we understand that it’s neurodegenerative. Then now, in conjunction with some other therapies, how strange that after 20 years of people think he’s completely unreachable, he’s mentally retarded, that he speaks.

Catherine Hong:

This is huge. So explain this more clearly, that only in the past few months, it’s been… what exactly did you see or what was the change?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

I actually got this idea from a friend of mine who’s a palliative care physician. He said, “When people have strokes, they often will continue to have aphasia, where they cannot speak because speaking is actually very complicated. But they can still point.” So we have these boards that are just the alphabet and it’s nothing special. People think we have some electronic device. No. We just have a board of an alphabet. We’ve been trying to teach him how to point to this board. There are people who do similar therapies. We just take him all over the place to try to do these therapies. But nothing’s happened.

This one time we took him to Texas, to this woman who is kind of a founder. She was able to get her son to be able to point. Then at one point, when she asked Jason, they were doing a lesson on geography, “Is there a place he’d to visit?” He managed to point out the Grand Canyon, which surprised us because we didn’t know he knew how to use articles. But after that one little blip, the rest of the week was just crap. He also put his head through her wall and we just thought, “Oh, this is just not working.”

But we’ve kept on with it. But we’ve also broken with her protocol. You’re not supposed to touch them. Then so one day I was trying to… I feel like my son doesn’t… His arm, when you just let him go, it just goes all over the place. So, I started holding his hand and then letting him do it, but by giving him pressure. So he has feedback. I asked him because he had a better day when he had this therapy. I said, “Why are you being less violent today?” And he did manage to hold it together enough to go H-O-P-E. I told my husband. That was kind of our Aunt Sullivan, Helen Keller moment. I said, “This can’t be some coincidence. He managed to do this.”

So there’s just been weeks of it’s just been all weird. But then my husband is much stronger and it also turned out… So my son can be very violent and in order to do this, we have to show him the board, and he can get very violent. A lot of it, he was saying it was hard for him because he was really afraid of hurting me. But when my husband did it, he didn’t feel as bad, I guess, about hitting him and stuff. So my husband did it also. My husband’s much stronger if he’s going to try to poke you or something. Then he just one day, when we’re just asking him a question, he actually spelled out, “Hold the board up better so I can see.” So that’s the first time we noticed that’s his voice coming out.

The other thing that’s really cute is that the other day he typed out… He was having a tantrum when we were trying to have a conversation with my family, and he just said, “I don’t like being made to do tricks.” And oddly he’s almost neurotypical inside and this is what’s been strange. But he just said he just listened. He’s just been listening to us.

Catherine Hong:

And he has opinions about politics. He knows the news.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

He knows that-

Catherine Hong:

He knows everything that’s going on.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

… critical race theory is going on. Yeah.

Catherine Hong:

That’s amazing. Did I hear you mention that you are helping him tell his story or write some kind of book?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Because he’s also finding that he types better with me. He tends to get less… When he starts getting agitated, he will get violent. But he’s finding he can stay calmer with me and be less worried about hurting me if we type. What’s really interesting is he has already typed a lot of his book because he said he’s just been sitting with himself and writing it this whole time. So, it’s coming out fairly quickly. I said, “Okay, do you know who Solzhenitsyn is?” He goes, “Yes, Russian dissident writer. He was on the Gulag for a very long time.” So I was able to tell him the story that when Solzhenitsyn was on the Gulag, in order for him to write his book, he would take little pieces of bread and chew it up and make these little rosaries as mnemonics. So then when he got out, his books are so long, that he could just write his book. Jason is similar where he’s just written it, and he has an amazing memory, which must be helping him organize his world the whole time and we didn’t know what was going on. So I think this book is going to do a lot also to show that, no, he’s wanted to be with people all this time. He had to teach himself how to read and even it turned out, one of the things he said is he wanted to go on my book tour. Instead of going to camp, we went to Boston. The night before, we just took out the board and said, “Is there anything else you want to say?” He just said, “What time are we leaving?” For the last 20 years, they’ve told us because he has autism, he does not understand “wh” questions: who, what, where, why? So these whole paradigms, it’s more like, no, it’s an output thing. It’s not an input. But there’s never been a moment where I really truly felt the people who work with him, and probably me to some degree, think he’s in there to that degree.

Catherine Hong:

Can you just tell us a little bit about your next book? It sounds like you’re already writing it, in the middle of it?

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Yeah. So that one is this other project, a memoir that I’m doing about my father. I have put aside because we’re going to do this with Jason. But then I do have the young adult novel that’s a retelling of Of Mice and Men. It is from a non-neurotypical perspective, but I’m also realizing, oh, I didn’t realize it’s also about gun culture and about the fact that people who have disabilities, especially if they’re mental disabilities, people are afraid of them, but they actually have a much more chance of being shot, particularly by police. I’m done writing that. So, I think creatively I’m going to be more working on stuff with Jason right now. I thought I was done with young adult stuff. I thought I was so out of that culture. But I’m realizing that maybe not.

Juliana Sohn:

Thank you so much for this fantastic conversation and having us in your home.

Catherine Hong:

Thanks Marie.

Marie Myung-Ok Lee:

Thank you so much. This was such a great conversation.

 

Juliana Sohn:

Thank you for listening to K-Pod, a production of Korean American Story. Our audio and visual engineer is AJ Valente. Our executive producer is HJ Lee. Our videographer is Kimberly Young Sun. Our production assistant is Deborah Baik. You can follow K-Pod on Instagram @KoreanAmericanStory. You can follow Marie @MarieMyungOkLee. You can follow Juliana @Juliana_Sohn, and you can follow Catherine @CatherineHong100.