An Interview with Min Jin Lee

WEST 10TH: First of all, congratulations on all the accolades your book, Pachinko, has received, just in the last few weeks—making the lists of New York Times, USA Today—it’s really great. Really encouraging.

LEE: It’s kind of crazy and I feel really grateful. Totally unexpected, in such a positive way. You can’t take it too seriously, you have to be grateful and can’t take it too seriously because otherwise you become a jerk.

WEST 10TH: So then—how have you found ways to stay grounded?

LEE: Well, it’s funny because I just got rejected from several things. (Laughs). Like I just got rejected from four different things. I’m not going to name names, but I just got rejected from two different—no four different things, two different fellowships, I had a job interview that went totally south, and then I applied to something else and they didn’t reply to me, and I thought, well ok . . . and my big problem and it’s kind of a curious situation, is—you’re writing for a creative writing audience, and I don’t have an MFA. So, I’ve had to take all these really inexpensive classes with wonderful, wonderful, famous, famous writers in New York City for like a hundred bucks, a hundred fifty dollars, and I ended up studying, and having, maybe having twenty classes easily, but I don’t have a formal degree because I didn’t have the money for it. I couldn’t really travel because I’m married and I have a son, and my husband has health insurance. But now that I’m trying to think about teaching, I can’t get jobs because I don’t have what you call a terminal degree. A lot of the times it’s institutional, not personal, so despite my accomplishments or whatever they are—it’s very easy to stay humble because I’m still not good enough.

WEST 10TH: I highly doubt that!

LEE: Well, it’s funny, because they ask for requirements, and I don’t have an MFA degree, I don’t have a Ph.D. and I went to law school, so it’s not that I’m an uneducated person, it’s just I don’t have an MFA. And I think people who have studied it, I think, they have every reason to get those jobs, but to answer your question—how do you stay grounded, it’s just sort of the reality of the choices I made. So, I’m curious to see how the next generation of writers are going to fare. They are all going to be MFAs, or not. If you don’t get one and you want to teach, it does affect your employment prospects.

WEST 10TH: A lot of research went into writing Pachinko, and I was wondering, since this is a work of historical fiction, and you’ve written both fiction and nonfiction, where would you figure historical fiction within nonfiction? You could’ve easily written a nonfiction book with the same material. Would you consider historical fiction as a type of nonfiction?

LEE: No, no, absolutely not. I think historical fiction is a category of fiction. It is rooted in history, but it cannot replace historical nonfiction. It cannot. It does not have the same purpose. I think it definitely adds a kind of empathy and it should be accurate in terms of historical fact and my book is very accurate. However, however—it didn’t happen in the way nonfiction should work. So I do take the task of nonfiction writers, who are fictional, as not fair. In the same way, I am not in any way encroaching upon fact-sealed, and I wouldn’t presume that people should take this book as a book of nonfiction. That said, this book is taught in nonfiction contexts by history classes, because very often now, history teachers are using literature in addition to academic literature. And they can agree or disagree with what I’ve done in terms of interpretation because in many ways, I am much more balanced about the Japanese point of view as well as the Korean point of view. Like, something you see in academic work is a focus primarily on one group.

WEST 10TH: In other interviews, you’ve talked about how this is the first novel about Korean-Japanese in English, and I was wondering if you could speak to the importance of this being a novel rather than a historical, documentary-type work.

LEE: There are many wonderful academic books about the Korean-Japanese people right now. And if you look at the back of my book, you’ll see that I have listed the important scholars who have worked for their entire lives, in this field. And they need to get a lot of attention. However, they have written academic scholarship, which is a different kind of writing from what I do, which is traditional, 19th-century social realist kind of narration. So, we’re taking this material and presenting it in different ways, but this is the first novel written in English about the Korean-Japanese in the world, so that was something I was very mindful of. I didn’t think it would have a big audience, because I was writing about this very micro community, and I think the scholarship, the excellent scholarship of academics, that’s listed in the back of the book, should get attention if people are more interested in the subject.

WEST 10TH: It becomes a different story when it’s written as a novel. 

LEE: It’s very, very different. They don’t have the same liberties that I can take in the same way. I don’t have their level of experience and training to be an anthropologist or a historian or a sociologist. I think it’s a very different kind of labor, different rules and protocol. And for me, I had different rules and different protocol, and I think very often, sometimes what happens with fiction, is that people kind of think there’s no craft. Actually, there’s a lot of rules with fiction that you do have to learn, and if you learn really well, if you get a good sense of the tools, it can make you do things that you can’t do without knowing, understanding tone, or point of view, or style, or scene. And within the subjects I’ve just mentioned, which are parts of fiction, there are different subsets of rules, and all those need to be learned, so I do think that sometimes people think that making art is something you are bound to do, but it took me decades of training to try to figure out how it’s done, especially because I don’t have a formal MFA. But these rules do exist.

WEST 10TH: So you’ve written two very expansive novels, both of which are richly peopled, richly plotted. And I was wondering—the New York Times described Pachinko as “resisting summary,” saying its shifting locus makes the story more than it was. So I was wondering, for a story with so many plots, did you have a summary in mind? How much did you plan ahead?

LEE: I had lots and lots and lots of outlines. I’m actually very organized. So, I have lots of outlines, I have lots of charts. I have lots of index cards. My first book, I did not use this software—my second book, I used this software called Scrivener. And I used about 2% of it. Like, I don’t think I used all the different things. It’s kind of an organizational software that a lot of academics and a lot of journalists use. It was very helpful, because I was writing about almost a hundred years, I mean, I know that dramatically it’s only about eighty years, but I was really studying a hundred plus years. So in order for me to keep track of what happened, I would sometimes use Scrivener. I also have piles and piles of notes. The only thing that I will say that is really important that may help a young writer, is that I don’t get that attached to my outline. The maps that I generate? They’re not polished. They’re not perfect. So I’ll generate many sketches, many maps, many doodles, and I don’t put that much attachment to it so I let things go, and I’ll go, “oh, that’s wrong—let’s start again.” And I think there has to be a kind of amusement and a sense of—just kind of joy in making the stuff because it takes such a long time. I know people who’ve written books very quickly and they had some success, but I also know people who regretted having taken such a short time with books and I have to say that I wish I had written my books faster. However, I do not regret anything I’ve ever written and published. That’s really important to me. Every book review, every article and every essay I’ve ever written, I have no regrets about what ended up going to the reader. And that does take time. So in order for you to find pleasure in that revision process, and the drafting, it’s very important that you have joy in what you do. Because I think decent and good writing that’s worthy of your time and attention requires an enormous amount of effort. More effort than will ever be compensated. (Laughs).

WEST 10TH: That’s really encouraging to hear—because it’s so easy to be so self-critical of your work, to wish that the editing process never stops. There needs to be an endpoint, somewhere. 

LEE: There’s absolutely an endpoint. And I think the bridge between your idea and the vision is quite long. It’s a very long bridge. And you’re building that bridge with craft and tools and with effort and with love, but there has to be joy in the process of the daily-ness of what you do, of building that bridge, of building that vision. I think it’s really important that you have to be your best friend in that process. And you can’t be too discouraging, because life is going to be discouraging—like, I began the conversation with you talking about the fact I was rejected from things, in the context of receiving a great deal of praise and kindness in the world. And those things are coexisting. It’s never binary. And that’s something I really try to encourage young writers when I meet them, is that it’s not just acceptances and rejec- tions, there’s a whole world in between. And that’s the stuff I think artists need to focus on.

WEST 10TH: Going back to your outlines—so you aren’t very attached to these outlines, so I was wondering if, while writing Free Food for Millionaires or Pachinko, were there any plot lines that surprised you or dramatically changed the course of the book?

LEE: Yeah, the plot didn’t even exist until 2008. WEST 10TH: Oh really?

LEE: Yup. (Laughs). I started the book in 1996, I got the idea in 1989. Like, I didn’t know Noa and Moses were brothers until, like, 2010.

WEST 10TH: Interesting!

LEE: I know! The entire book was supposed to be about Solomon. WEST 10TH: Really?

LEE: Yup! (Laughs).

WEST 10TH: May I ask what changed? Or, rather, what caused this whole new plot, this book, rather, to emerge?

LEE: I interviewed people. I interview a great deal. I do a lot of journalistic research in order to write my book. And that’s why I feel like— when you read something in my work and you look at a paragraph and you think, “oh, that sounds really true,” very often it is true because I have talked to somebody or I have researched something and it comes from reality. I write from reality. You’re not going to see ghosts in my book. It’s all realistic fiction. I’m trying to be a socially—I’m doing a 19th century social realist kind of narration which means I need to know things that happened. So in that sense, even when I’m writing contemporary novels, like Free Food for Millionaires, they are rooted in fact. That said, it is done with the dramatic license of being a fiction writer and they are written in an American-English style of sentence. So that’s my task. My next book will exactly be in that vein, because I am interested in writing a narration with modern sentences. My subjects will change, my characters will change, but in terms of the kind of writer I want to be, that’s the kind of writer I really want to be.

WEST 10TH: Could you explain that a bit more—the kind of writer you want to be?

LEE: I want to be a social realist novelist. If you look at the 19th century works of British and American writers, you are going to see that kind of book. I want to write like Houellebecq and Tolstoy and some Dickens and Edith Wharton and George Eliot. George Eliot, is like to me, a totem of aspiration. So those are the kinds of writers I really want to be—in terms of their vision and scope. Do I want their sentences? No way. I do not want to write a sentence like Zola. However, I think Zola’s expansive view of the world is really interesting.

WEST 10TH: What books did you read while writing Pachinko?

LEE: I mean, a lot of contemporary fiction as well as old stuff. I don’t read a lot when I’m writing. I can’t read them all the time. There are a lot of modern writers who I admire enormously, like I love Junot Diaz. I also read the old stuff over and over again, so I read George Eliot, I read Flaubert. Let’s see. I think Kate Christensen is great. I think Meg Wolitzer is great. I think. Who else is great? I also do a lot of book reviews, so I’ve been asked to do a lot of book reviews, so I often read books that I ordinarily would not have chosen, because they’re brand new, but very often reviewers will ask me to do things that are academic as well as very serious fiction and I’m very glad to do it because I learn a lot from it. So sometimes I think what you like is important, but as a writer, you have to read very promiscuously. (Laughs). I think you need to read literally, promiscuously, and generously. And I think you have to try really hard to see the good in work, rather than where it doesn’t work and if it doesn’t work, you have to ask yourself “How do I not do that?” Does that make sense?

WEST 10TH: Is it like how some writers have to read while they write and some writers can’t read at all while they write?

LEE: Yeah, everyone is different. I try to train myself to think of it—I try to take the people out of the equation. And I just try to read.

WEST 10TH: The people?

LEE: Like the personalities of it. That’s not easy. That’s definitely not easy. It’s taken me a lot of training. But I’m forty-nine years old. I’ve seen a lot more than when I was nineteen. I remember when I was nineteen, I was different. When I was nineteen, I wasn’t thinking I was going to be a writer. Like, that wasn’t part of the equation. Also, I read a lot of nonfiction, like a ton of nonfiction.

WEST 10TH: What kind of nonfiction did you read?

LEE: History, sociology, I loved biography. I just read a really knock-out biography by Eric Wagner. It’s called A Chief Engineer. And that was the biography of the man who built the Brooklyn Bridge. I liked the way she told the story. I just finished Bill Goldstein’s book, The World Broke in Two. And that was really great. Also Will Schwalbe’s book, The End of Your Life Book Club which is a memoir, so I read that. So these are some of the writers that I know personally, and it’s such a relief when their books are excellent. Like, (laughs) “I loved that, what a relief.”

WEST 10TH: Speaking to your research experience, you also lived in Tokyo for four years, to do research for Pachinko.

LEE: I also lived there because my husband got a job there and I was going with my family. I lived there from 2007 to 2011, and when I was there, I decided to return to Pachinko, which was a—I didn’t call it Pachinko back then. I had an entire manuscript between 1996 to 2003, and that book was called Motherland, and excerpt of it was published in 2002 in the Missouri Review. And I had thought that I would write a book about the Korean Japanese, and I thought the focus would primarily be on my character Solomon, who appears at the very end of Pachinko and he’s sort of a minor character. But when I went to Japan and I met all these Korean-Japanese people, I realized it had to be a historical novel, which is very, very daunting, because I wanted it to be accurate, and that required another level of research that I didn’t anticipate. And I ended up throwing out the entire manuscript for that first book, and I started all over again. 

WEST 10TH: That’s incredible.

LEE: The only chapter that I kept was the one that was published in The Missouri Review. And that was changed, it was changed, but it appears in Pachinko. But like—I kept that. (Laughs). One story I kept and the rest of it I threw away and I started all over again because Sunja didn’t exist. Noa didn’t exist. All these characters that primarily infuse the book and carry the book in terms of the spine did not exist until I moved to Japan.

WEST 10TH: Given that you yourself lived in Tokyo for four years—a country with a lot of fraught history—I was wondering whether you found it difficult to feel objective or separated from your own identity as a Korean woman living in Japan. How did you find that experience? Was it difficult to remain, to an extent, objective?

LEE: Oh, I don’t believe in objectivity. I think it’s nonsense. I think the amount of pressure there is to be objective is stupid because we might as well accept the fact that we try to be objective, we try to be fair, but we can’t help but be subjective and interested in our own personal interests. Should we submit to our biological commands to be self-interested? Absolutely not, because then you would have a society based on chaos. However, I think it’s there, I think it’s there and I think it’s something we should be mindful of. Even as a journalist you can see bias. All the time. Like, I do journalism, and I am constantly thinking—“Oh, wow—I want to be fair.” And I really believe in it and I want to be accurate, but I could tell when I like somebody and I don’t like somebody. I can. I mean, I’m not going to lie to you. You know what I mean? So it’s something I am aware of and try really hard to override any impulses that would be unfair. It’s hard not to be prejudiced against people. Like when I hear about someone doing something really horrible to someone else, my heart immediately goes out to the victim, but it’s interesting. I’ve met enough victims where I go, “Oh, that person who did do that thing is terrible.” But sometimes, sometimes, the victims aren’t very likeable. And wow—that’s complicated. (Laughs). And that’s part of my job, I think, as a social realist novelist. To understand that.

WEST 10TH: A lot of this is about empathy and humanity, and in Pachinko, you write, “Living every day in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.” This quote is deeply relevant to our current and historical political landscape, what with policies and bans, historical segregation. What do you think the social realist novel can do to move us towards a better, more empathetical society?

LEE: I think that my job is to try to generate radical empathy. Not a little empathy. Radical empathy. So my tiny bit of a contribution in the political landscape is to make people realize that those who mainstream culture and majority believe are inhuman, are in fact, human. And I believe the only way we are going to do that, for me, in terms of what I can do, is create art that creates all these Aristotelian ideas of recognition, reversals, catharsis. I can give you the Greek terms (laughs). But if I can do that, I think the reader can feel something in a way that they couldn’t feel before, so one of my primary confusions as an American citizen, is to look at the history of Asian Americans and the history of Asians around the world and how they are seen by the West. And the West really believes, persistently, that Asians are invisible, that they are mechanic, that they are, in many ways intolerable and threatening. So all those things are constantly in operation when you think about the Asian or the Asian American. My resistance is to create art about Asians and Asian Americans who are human. And that may seem like a small thing, but in order to make a person that I make up human—there is a conceit, a friction. I am doing this with a very strong intention. I’m not just writing down stories. I do have a purpose. I want you to realize that an ethnic Korean person is really a person. And that may seem like a really crazy thing, but there are so many countervailing and opposing messages in our media today that says that Asians are not human. 

WEST 10TH: It’s true. In the media, minorities in America are always shown in contrast to, not existing as. Which is why, when I read Free Food for Millionaires, your depiction of Asians in America existing as Asians and not Asians in comparison to a white majority—was super encouraging.

LEE: I hope so. I hope so, because Audrey, what really amazes me, I haven’t met you, I’m talking to you on the phone, you are a disembodied voice, but I know, without having met you, because I’ve met so many other Asian American women and because I am an Asian American woman—that we’re complicated. We are complicated, we are complex, and we have many different wishes and emotions and feelings. All those things are in operation, in our bodies. What really amazes me is that that truth is not represented sufficiently in the world. So I am a political writer. I am a very, very political person. And yet, in my work, my politics does not come out in terms of “I am right, you are wrong.” I just want the reader to consider, including, by the way, that I am not just writing necessarily just for white people or black people or Latino people who don’t know Asian Americans. What really kills me is when Asian Americans believe this about themselves, that they are not human. And I’ve seen that a lot. I’ve seen a lot of Asians and Asian Americans who believe that they are garbage, that they are somehow, that their lives aren’t more complete, more total or comprehensive in terms of the complexity of humanity. To me, that’s really the crime, too.

WEST 10TH: Your next book, the third in a trilogy, will also be about Koreans. Could you speak about this trilogy, when you decided to make it into a trilogy, and why?

LEE: It will be about Koreans around the world. It will mostly be set in America. So it’s about the role of education for Koreans around the world. So it is a trilogy because I’m writing a diaspora trilogy called “The Koreans.” So for Free Food for Millionaires it was Koreans in America. Pachinko is about the Koreans in Japan, and it’s very important that we know about the Koreans in Japan because you can’t really understand the history of the peninsula of Korea without understanding its connection with Japan and its colonial history. You couldn’t really understand Irish history without understanding British history. And then my third book will be called American Hagwon, and hagwon is a study center or a cram school that is usually set in South Korea. And it’s for students for many ages, who go after school for specialization and training for certain subjects or for all subjects, primarily for tests to gain entry to schools or colleges. So these hagwons are also cropping up all over the world, wherever Koreans are. So I’m writing a book about these hagwons. I’m writing a book, and it’s fiction, about the parents and the tutors and the students who go to these hagwons, about what does education mean for Koreans. 

WEST 10TH: So I have a question about the first lines in your books. The first line in Pachinko is, “History has failed us, but no matter.” This was a really beautiful first line. I was wondering when did you come up with this line? Or how?

LEE: It’s my thesis statement.

WEST 10TH: Ah!

LEE: So my first book, the thesis statement, for Free Food, was, “Competence can be a curse.” Competence can be a curse. And what I was trying to say in Free Food, was individual choices are very difficult to make when you are a competent person. And it’s pretty much a statement about most people, which is you can be competent, but is that enough? Like how do you choose what to do with your life? So that’s what gives the critique on class, on aspiration, on money, all the things that are going to feature in there. That book is really about how do you get money and how do you spend your money? Like I wanted to write about money as well as how immigrants decide their futures.

The book is taught in universities and when I talk to college kids, often they make their decisions based on practicality, and I understand that, but I wanted to have them think beyond practical concerns, but also what you want to do with your time and how you want to live your life. The second book, Pachinko, in terms of the trilogy, the thesis is, “History has failed us, but no matter,” I wanted to talk about what it is to be a person who is not recorded in history, but who history has failed. And pretty much 99.9% of the world, history has failed us. We don’t make the decisions, for the most part, around the world. Of all the things that impact us. And I’m arguing not that it’s irrelevant that history is affecting us, but we have to be defiant. That even when history has failed us, we have to persist, we have to adapt, we have to be resilient. And that is really the lesson I wanted to share, because that was the lesson I was taught before I interviewed the Koreans in Japan.

WEST 10TH: If you hadn’t included this opening line, the books would’ve just started right into the story. The mood would be different. So the function of this opening line, this thesis statement—I read it almost like a battle cry. 

LEE: Sure! (Laughs). But it’s not a shrug. It can be shrug, it can be a battle cry, it can be anything. But I sort of would like for people to realize that you’re connected to history. Very often, people don’t feel connected to history because it sounds like it’s much bigger than we are. Like, I’m not a member of Congress, what does that have to do with me? Right? And that’s really the way most people operate in the world, like how does a tax form relate to me? How does the healthcare law affect me? How does banning abortion affect me? Maybe I’m not pregnant, so it doesn’t matter. So all these things are constantly in operation and it does affect us, and we need to know unconsciously how much it affects us. And it does affect our decisions. So all I’m trying to say is what is going on. I’m not saying anything terribly radical. I’m actually just encapsulating the experience of most people in the world, which is history does fail us. But what are you going to do? 

WEST 10TH: Following the publication of Free Food, did you experience getting labelled as a Korean-American writer, or did you feel any responsibility placed upon you by the public to write about Koreans? Do you think this is a fair responsibility?

LEE: I don’t know what people call me. (Laughs). You know? I think, when you’re writing, people are going to say a lot of things that’s nonsense. Whatever they want to say, and you can’t really control it. I think it’s almost like when you’re a kid and you’re on the playground, some kids are going to like you, other kids aren’t going to like you? If you focus on that, you’re never really going to be who you are. And I think some people who are people of color are going to write about, let’s say, white people. And that’s fine. That’s fine. Of course. Do what you have to do. Do what you want to do. Because being a writer is so hard, and you know what? I’m going to tell you something really harsh: most of us are not going to get attention for the work we create. Like, whatever accolades that I’m getting right now, as well as the rejections I’m getting, it’s from a tiny, tiny population. There are YouTubes of artists right now who can get a billion views, and I’ve never heard of them. (Laughs). You know what I mean? We’re out there, we’re generating and making things. To get so focused on the market, it’s very unhelpful, and as a matter of fact, it’s very discouraging, because the market in many ways, is a little stupid. So it’s very important to focus on what is it that I want to make, and to manage my expectations, because some people are going to want what I make, and some people are going to mischaracterize it and mislabel it, and some people are going to say, “This thing changed my life.” But no matter what, it’s still you, at that desk, who has to make the thing. Like after our interview is over, you’re going to sit with all this transcription and look at it and say, “Ok, well what is it that I want to make? What is it that I want to share?” And who’s going to look at it? I have no idea. It could be two people. It could be twenty, it could be a hundred, I’m not exactly sure. Does that make sense? But it doesn’t matter because you and I are having this conversation and that really happened. 

WEST 10TH: It reminds me of the reasons Dave Chappelle gave when he quit “Chappelle’s Show.” Like, if you get it, that’s great—and if you don’t, so what? It’s not for you. And he quit because so many people started to think they got it, when they didn’t. So you don’t worry if some things are lost to readers. 

LEE: Right. What I really try to do more than anything is I want to encourage people to make things. And I hope to God what they want to make is a good thing, not a bad thing. When I see people making bad things or things that are harmful to others, I really question that, because there are many forces at work right now making bad things. There are. There are guns, there are technologies that harm people. And I kind of think, “Wow, you have all this genius, and that’s what you’re going to make?” So I think it’s very important that people who have a higher purpose that wish to make good things for the world go out there and fight and make things, even if it has the tiniest bit of effect, versus a massive effect. Let’s say the thing you make doesn’t go viral. That’s ok. (Laughs). Maybe that’s not what we’re supposed to do. Maybe we’re supposed to affect a couple people. And that’s better than making something destructive.

WEST 10TH: Have you tried writing fiction in the first person?

LEE: Sure. Actually, “Axis of Happiness” is a first-person story and you can find it on the Narrative Magazine website. I know how to do it. (Laughs). I know how to do it well, it’s not something I’m interested in as a novel-length right now, I think that’s what I want to do, but I know how to do it. I think if you are a fiction writer you should learn how to do all those things. You should learn how to—you should have a big toolkit. Go get a big toolkit.

WEST 10TH: And point-of-view is—

LEE: Point-of-view is one of the most important decisions a writer makes.

WEST 10TH: What do you gain by writing Pachinko and Free Food in the third person that you cannot necessarily access in the first person?

LEE: I write not only third person, I write third person omniscient, which means I gain the perspective of every one of my characters. And that means I get a very big canvas, I have lots and lots of stability that I can use. However, in order to learn how to write the third-person omniscient, that took an incredible amount of time. The third-person limited is really the first person in disguise. You’re still limited. If you did third-person limited and told a story, that person always has to be in the room. I’m not that interested in that, in terms of a novel-like work. When it’s done very, very well, that’s great, but it’s still a first-person story.

WEST 10TH: I was wondering if you write in Korean, at all?

LEE: No. I can understand a little bit, I can speak a tiny bit, but it’s not my strength. And it’s not what I do. 

WEST 10TH: I was curious, because there are some stories that bilingual writers are more able to write in one language over the other. Or some stories that exist in certain languages that don’t exist in another. 

LEE: I think it’s an advantage. I think many people think of it as a limitation in terms of having multiple languages in a home, and I think it can be an advantage. That said, a lot of writers—whenever you learn a foreign language, anything—you have an ability to see in that culture’s point of view and that is a real gift. That said, it can also feel like a limitation. Maybe you think you don’t have a nimbleness with the majority language or the language I want to write. I thought Jhumpa Lahiri’s interest in Italian was fascinating to me because I thought, “Oh, she’s chosen a language to master, and write a book”—that’s incredible. Do I want to do that? I don’t think so. My Korean is pretty weak and I don’t think it’s a language I want to take on to write fiction or nonfiction. However, I think it’s a beautiful language, I love it.

WEST 10TH: What I found striking about your writing career was how you began. What was it like to make the decision from being a lawyer to pursuing writing, full time?

LEE: I had a liver disease for decades. And I don’t have it anymore, but that liver disease gave me a kind of clarity about what I want to do with my time, if I were to get very ill, very young in my life. And I thought that when I was an attorney—I’m actually a very good attorney because I’m very neurotic—and you have to be in order to be a good lawyer, you have to be very attentive, you have to be very focused on details. So I decided to quit being an attorney when I was twenty-five, and part of it was really I thought I could die in my twenties, in my thirties. I’m very well right now, I had a very serious treatment and I’m cured, but I think the clarity of life and death made me realize I wanted to do this. I didn’t realize it would be this difficult. I had no idea how difficult it was. In fact, everyone who told me that being a writer would be difficult. They were correct.

WEST 10TH: In between writing both books, did you ever find yourself—and this is a rather atrocious term—in a writer’s block?

LEE: No. I don’t have that.

WEST 10TH: No writer’s block? Ever?

LEE: No. Well, that’s just not who I am. That’s not who I am. I don’t have those kinds of issues. I have other issues. I have lots of issues, but not that. I think part of that is because—I think writer’s block is when you can’t write, or when you think what you’re writing isn’t good enough. Now, remember what I said earlier in the conversation, to try to be your best friend. I’m very encouraging in my voice to myself. I am. I don’t tell myself “oh, you’re amazing” or “that’s perfect.” But I do know the topics that I write about, the people that I write about, are important to me. So in the service of those works, I feel very encouraged to persist. That’s all. Feel that the things you write about are important, or that it has value. Maybe that’s the courage to keep people going. I think that if I think about my personal grandiosity, that would immediately think “I don’t want to do this, that’s stupid.” But I like my topics. I like the things I want to make. I think I have to keep going. I want to keep going, I like, and I feel encouraged, sufficiently, by the response to Pachinko as well as other things, to keep going. And I have no idea, I can’t predict the outcome of the work, but I would like to finish them. I’m very good at finishing things. Starting, finishing, and working. As for the outcome, that’s probably the bane of the artist’s existence, to focus on that.

WEST 10TH: It boils down to caring about what you write about.

LEE: Yes! If you care a lot about your theme, you care a lot about the questions you have in your mind, it’s like, why did you decide you would want to interview me? Whatever it is, it’s going to help you finish the interview. You don’t have to answer the question. Let’s say you have an assignment for school. Why did you take that class? Why did you choose that subject and why did you choose that thesis in the paper in the assignment you have to write? That’s what is going to connect you. You have to be connected to your purpose and to your question. Even though the outcome cannot be guaranteed. Like, I’ve written amazing things on condition for major magazines that have folded. (Laughs). And you’re like, “Oh, I gave my heart and soul to that thing,” and later on, you realize it wasn’t meant to be there and finds a home somewhere else. If you do it for the right reason, it isn’t because you’re going to get published or something. I remember a beautiful essay for Gourmet Magazine and Gourmet Magazine literally folded right after I submitted the article. And all my life, I was like, I would love to write for Gourmet Magazine, and that would be incredible because I love their essays about culture and food. And then they folded. It wasn’t my fault, but it happened. And the essay found a home elsewhere. But if you focus on the fact, “Oh I have to get published by Gourmet Magazine for this essay,” I would have been devastated. Woe is me, I’m going to despair because life didn’t work out the way it was promised to me. Even contractually, I had a contract with Gourmet, and yet it didn’t work out that way. You know, I think we’re living in an era of great creativity, but we’re also living in a time of great disruption.

WEST 10TH: I didn’t catch that, sorry—distraction?

LEE: Distraction and disruption. Your generation, more than any other, has more distraction and disruption. And I am holding your generation in my heart. And I hope and pray that you guys will make it, but it’s really difficult. It’s almost like you have to tie yourself to a mast. Like Odysseus. Because the sirens are calling.

WEST 10TH: That’s a beautiful and terrible image.

LEE: And the sirens want to have you. And they want to destroy you. WEST 10TH: (Laughs.)

LEE: But, remember this, before you get discouraged: Odysseus goes home. He goes home, and he defeats the suitors. You can tie yourself to the mast sometimes, you have to know that the sirens want to destroy you, but you will go home.

WEST 10TH: You will go home.

LEE: You will go home.

Min Jin Lee is the author of Free Food for Millionaires (2007) and the New York Times Bestseller Pachinko (2017). Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017, a USA Today Top 10 Books of 2017, an American Library Association Notable Book, and an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Great Reads. Min Jin went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time. From 2007 to 2011, Min Jin lived in Tokyo where she researched and wrote Pachinko. She lives in New York with her family.