>> Peter Vankevich: Okay,
welcome to the afternoon session of the fiction stage here. I'm Peter Vankevich. If you see any ushers
or have any questions, please check with us. You'll all see our
uniforms on right now. I just want to introduce
you to Lynn Neary. She's the arts correspondent
for NPR, and I will add she's
on a lot of shows. I don't think I ever turn on
when I'm driving and get on NPR, which is my number-one
station, without hearing Lynn on one of the shows there. So welcome, Lynn. >> Lynn Neary: Good to be here. So it's so good to
be here again. This is the fourth
time I've come to the National Book Festival
to interview wonderful authors like Min Jin Lee, and I love
this event, as I say every year, because I feel like it
brings all the book lovers in Washington, DC together
in one huge building, and there's this great energy
around books and reading. And one of the questions
that I get a lot as the books and publishing correspondent
for NPR is, you know, how do you choose the books,
and I was thinking about this as I got ready for this
interview, because I feel like I helped discover Pachinko. I interviewed Min Jin Lee pretty
early on, and I was thinking, well, how did I, because you
know, we get a lot of books, and you're not supposed to
judge a book by the cover, but I really like that
cover, and I saw the word, and I saw Pachinko, and I didn't
really know what that was. And then I read something
about it, and I realized it was this
game in Japan, and I remembered when I was in Japan
many years ago, I had seen these brightly
colored parlors all over the place, and
then I realized that the cover was actually a
picture of a pachinko board, and I thought that
was pretty cool. Then I heard it was about -- I read it was about
Japanese Koreans, and I thought I don't
know anything about that, and then I read that they were
somehow involved with pachinko, so put that all together. I was very intrigued,
so I opened the book. It starts with a love story. What's wrong with that? Then it moves on to
historical fiction. Then it becomes a family saga, and it ends as a
coming of age story. It's what every fiction
lover loves. What was not to love
about Pachinko? So that was how I discovered
the book, and I'm happy that I may have helped
some of you hear about it through my interview
with Min Jin Lee, because I had not read
your first book -- I have to be honest with you -- which is Free Food
for Millionaires, and I know that it
took you a long time to write Pachinko, right. How long? >> Min Jin Lee: Thirty years. >> Lynn Neary: And you
didn't know very much about Korean Japanese
when you started, did you? >> Min Jin Lee: Oh, no, I knew
nothing, absolutely nothing, but before we talk, I just want
to embarrass Lynn a little bit because I have the stage. So I just wanted to thank you
so much for your championing of this book because
for a person like me from my background, for
people who take 30 years to write a book, if you
don't have a really smart prize-winning journalist
saying please read this book, it's actually really hard
to break out of the fray. So there are 600,000 to a million published
every year in America. They all go to her office. >> Lynn Neary: That's true, and I have to tell you
we didn't have an intern. >> Min Jin Lee: Thank
God for that cover. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. We didn't have an
intern this summer, so you should see the books
piling up at NPR right now. >> Min Jin Lee: No, I'm judging
the National Book Awards this year, and there's 370
books for fiction. >> Lynn Neary: I know,
and we should ask -- I'm going to ask you -- >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: -- about that
before we start talking about -- >> Min Jin Lee: Right. >> Lynn Neary: -- Pachinko, because that means you
have to read 370 books? >> Min Jin Lee: I can't
talk about it, but yes, everybody has gotten
my attention, and that's all I've been
doing, because I just read and read and read some more. There's a lot of -- >> Lynn Neary: I don't even
understand how you read that many books in a year. >> Min Jin Lee: It's
really hard. It's really hard, and it's
really hard to write -- >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: --
when you're reading. I mean you know. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: We're
reading all the time. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: And eating
a lot of chocolate, for me. >> Lynn Neary: Well, let's
talk about Pachinko, because -- >> Min Jin Lee: I do
want to say thank you. I just wanted to say. >> Lynn Neary: Well, you're
welcome, because I really do. This is a wonderful book, for
those of you who haven't caught up with it yet, and I
think a lot of you have, which is why you're here,
but I just wanted to ask you, you know, you yourself, how
you sort of stumbled upon -- you kind of stumbled upon
this subject, didn't you? >> Min Jin Lee: I did. So when I was in college,
I had all these problems. I'm sure none of you did,
but I was a history major, which means that I knew
my direct path in life. So I was totally lost, and I was
dating this really bad guy -- it's all true -- and the head of my residential college said
would you go to a master's tea, which now it's called like the
head tea or something like that, and nobody wanted to go because
it was an American missionary talking about the Korean
Japanese, a very sexy topic. So I went because the person
who asked me was a minister, and it's really hard to
say no to Harry Adams because he's a really
great person. So I went, and so it was me
and another guy named Wilson, so there was two of us,
there's an American missionary who has dedicated his
entire life to serving to serving the poor Korean
Japanese, so I felt like I had to go, and then Harry Adams. There was four of us, a
humongous plate of cookies, and it was about 15 minutes. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: And he talked
about the history of the Koreans in Japan, and I knew nothing, and I thought it was really
sad and, you know, very moving, but then I didn't
think that I was going to spend my life doing this, because I didn't know what I
was going to do with my life. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: But he mentioned
this one story of a little boy who had climbed up to
his apartment building, and he jumped off to his death
immediately following his middle school graduation, and it turned out that he was ethnically
Korean, his parents were
ethnically Korean, and his parents were
trying to figure out why this would
happen, and they went through his middle
school yearbook, and his Japanese classmates
had written go back to where you belong, I hate
you, and they wrote you smell like kimchi, and they wrote
the words die, die, die. And I think it just moved
me in a different way, because that was not my
experience of living in America, because I was an immigrant. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: And
I grew up in Queens, and I had so many people be
so incredibly kind to me, and I know that's
not the experience of all Asian-Americans in this
country, but because I grew up in Queens and I
went to high school in the Bronx, I was
really normal. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: So I was
really surprised by it, and when I quit being a lawyer,
I started to work on this book. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah, and you
had to do a lot of research. >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: But
you interviewed a lot of people, I mean I think. Tell us a little bit about
that part of the research? >> Min Jin Lee: Well, you
know that what you read versus what people
say are so different, and the way people
present are so different. So I have -- I don't
know if you know this, but I had a very
serious speaking issue until I was almost
in high school. I didn't really talk to
people, and it wasn't because I didn't know English. It's just because I had
all this social anxiety, so I took all these classes
and all these things. Ones of the ways it allows me
to talk to people is if I feel like I have a formal interview, then I feel like I can ask
questions and it's not rude, because I do have a billion
questions in my head, but then I feel like well, that doesn't seem quite
right, to just talk. So I started to interview all
these Korean-Japanese people in Japan, and I learned
that all the books that I had read were
statistically accurate and factually correct,
especially all the history, anthropology, and
sociology and law books, because I read all those
like things, but the thing that was not correct was that
most Korean-Japanese people that I met, not all, but most, they really don't see
themselves as victims. They don't see themselves as
some sort of like pathetic patsy who really couldn't
figure out what to do. As a matter of fact, they
were so defiantly in charge of their lives, and I was like
oh, I have to rethink this. So I had to throw away an entire
manuscript that I had written, and I started all over again, and Sunja was really
born in 2008. >> Lynn Neary: Sunja is
the central character -- >> Min Jin Lee: Right. >> Lynn Neary: -- in this book. >> Min Jin Lee: Because
the first book, the main character was Solomon. So if you know the book, Solomon's like this part
of the book now, so. >> Lynn Neary: And Sunja, of
course, is this young woman who falls in love with the wrong
guy, which a lot of us have done over the years, right. >> Min Jin Lee: I've done it. I've been dumped
by the wrong guy. >> Lynn Neary: But
then a very -- she's kind of rescued by another
man who's a very kind man, a missionary. He's going to Japan. And I was just fascinated
in terms of the history, because I didn't know
anything about it. I had no idea that so many
Koreans had immigrated to Japan at one time. What caused that immigration? I mean what was the -- >> Min Jin Lee: So
the colonial history of Korea is a really sad one. So from 1910 to 1945,
until the war ended, the Koreans were
essentially a colony of Japan, so Japan basically owned
Korea and acted as such, and there's a lot of
revisionist historians who have different
points of view about this, but for the most part, it can be
agreed that most of the Koreans who went to Japan were economic
migrants or forcible labor, but there was definitely both. So in that time, because
the Japanese were coming in as the colonizer, they
took over a lot of the land. Like a million Japanese
went to Korea, and over a million
Koreans went to Japan. But obviously the status
is different, right, and then when they did a major
land tax, a lot of the farmers as well as the peasants were
taken away from their land and their sustenance, so a
lot of Koreans, if they wanted to have any viability,
went to Japan. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah,
and the other thing that I found interesting just
historically was the realization of how people got
caught in Japan, you know, in the Korean War. It really brought to life the
realization of what happened with the partition of
Korea at that point. >> Min Jin Lee: Right, because
in 1945, Korea gets partitioned, and in 1950, you have the war, and as soon as Japan lost the
war, so many things happened in Japan, but the first thing
that happened for the Koreans in Japan is they lost
their citizenship, so they were no longer
colonial members. They became stateless. So they could have
gone back to South -- gone back to South Korea or
to North Korea at that point. However, they had
cholera in the country, they had lost everything
that they had, most of their family
members were dying, and this incredible poverty, and
then you had the US government that was in charge of Japan
saying you couldn't take more than a certain amount
of property back. So imagine if you have a hundred
dollars' worth of something and they tell you that can
only take two dollars back, and then when you go there,
there's nothing there. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: So they stayed. >> Lynn Neary: So we're
talking about the history, but this is a novel,
and it's one of those great sprawling
family sagas. >> Min Jin Lee: Oh, thank you. >> Lynn Neary: And you know,
I love those kinds of books, and so they're the kind of
books you just sort of fall into and get very engrossed. What is it about that kind
of a book, first of all, that you like as a writer and a
reader, and why did you choose to write that kind of novel to tell this great
historical story? >> Min Jin Lee: I had no
intention of writing this book, and I will never do this again. I turned 50 in November,
and I was like if I have to do this again, it would
take another 30 years. So I guess, yeah, at 80 I might
have another book in me, but no, the reason why I would
never do this again is because I think I felt a
sense of responsibility to the Korean-Japanese
because I'm Korean-American, so I did an incredible amount
of research for this book, and then I didn't realize having
to deal with that timeline of 80, 90 years -- there's a
really serious reason why most people don't write this kind of
book, and when I first started, it was going to be like a
five-year book, and this ended up becoming an 80-year book. >> Lynn Neary: Wow. >> Min Jin Lee: And it's a
lot of wars, and there's a lot of contentious history in
there, so I was really afraid of being wrong, because
if I offended somebody, then I would hear about it,
and most of all, I was afraid of offending the Korean-Japanese
because they have been so mistreated, and I would never
exploit this story for my gain, and also, I didn't
expect this today. You guys are a surprise, so. [ Applause ] But I do think that
the reason why I ended up writing this book is
because I don't have an MFA. I majored in history. I went to law school at
Georgetown, and then I thought that the only books for me that
I kept on returning to over and over again were 19th
century omniscient narration, and I wanted to try that, so my first book is also
omniscient narration, and so is this one. Those are my books
that I really prefer to read more than
any other time. I wanted to write a
social, realistic novel about the troubles
but at the same time to have a really strong human
story and a family story, so I ended up writing
it this way, but I did not know
how hard it was. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: I had no idea. >> Lynn Neary: When did
you realize pachinko had to be not just part of the story
but like crucial, a crucial part of the story, that this had to
be about pachinko in some way? >> Min Jin Lee: Well,
I didn't -- I knew that there were some
Koreans involved in pachinko in Japan, but when
I went to Japan, and I lived there
from 2007 to 2011 -- >> Lynn Neary: And
we should say -- people might not know
what pachinko is, so maybe you should explain
what pachinko is first. >> Min Jin Lee: Oh, sure. You're right. Well, my publisher always goes
you talk about what pachinko is, but I just sort of
assume that you guys know. So pachinko is a 203
billion-dollar industry. It's 4% of the Japanese
GDP, so it's a corner of the Japanese economy. So it's not like when you
and I think about going to Las Vegas once
in our lifetime and doing things
that are shameful. Not at all. Once a week, 11 Japanese
people -- I mean one out of 11 people
play pachinko once a week. That's a lot. >> Lynn Neary: It's
a gambling -- >> Min Jin Lee: It's
a gambling game. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: It's
an adult gambling game. It's not for kids. It's incredibly noisy. I've never met a western
person who likes pachinko ever. Like I've looked. I really researched this. >> Lynn Neary: And
they're very bright, these parlors, as I recall. >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah, they're
incredibly bright and garish, and they're open all the time, and yet because gambling
is illegal in Japan still, there are all these different
workarounds that they do in order to make
it a gambling game, but people play it
regularly, not just as a sport, but actually for income,
because you can sort of eke out an existence from
playing pachinko. So those people are called
pachi pro, pachinko pros. >> Lynn Neary: And
this is a way that -- this was an industry that
the Korean-Japanese -- they run it, don't
they, pretty much? >> Min Jin Lee: They're
incredibly involved in it. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: They're dominant
in it because people who -- unfortunately, due to the
colonial history and even until today, even 2018, the Korean-Japanese are not
considered full Japanese citizens, and even if they
have been living there for four generations, they're
not considered regular Japanese. Consequently, there's a lot
of employment discrimination against the Korean-Japanese,
and it has been historically for over a hundred years. Most Korean-Japanese,
even if they converted to Japanese citizenship today,
face employment discrimination. So one of the industries
that really took them in was pachinko, and
the other industry that took women are barbecue
restaurants, Korean restaurants, so that's where the women
would end up working, and the men would
work on pachinko, but because pachinko
is a gambling industry, people in Japan, even
though it's so important, believe that it's
very low-class. They consider it related
to criminal behavior because it used to be,
about 40 years ago, very heavily criminalized. There are parts of it
that were quite dangerous, but it isn't anymore. It really isn't anymore. There's very little wiggle room because it's so heavily
regulated. However, even if you work in
pachinko today for like -- let's say you own an advertising
company, and you advertise for people in the
pachinko industry. You're discriminated against
socially because people think of you as somebody who's
vulgar, low-class and criminal, and those people tend
to be Korean, and again, I was really surprised
that even today that people who are ethnically Korean
can face this discrimination. >> Lynn Neary: What was it
like for you as a Korean going to Japan, having been raised
in this country, researching and asking people
questions about what it was like to be Korean-Japanese? What was it like for you to -- did you experience
any discrimination? >> Min Jin Lee: Oh, yeah. >> Lynn Neary: Were you
uncomfortable in Japan? >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah, I
was uncomfortable in Japan, and I think the primary
reason why I was uncomfortable in Japan is because I've never
been treated like that before, and the model minority myth
is a very dangerous one for Asian-Americans, but
in a way, nobody ever -- it's like if I walk
down the street, and like let's say I stole
something from your purse. Most people will probably
not think it's me. Most people will probably
think I'm good at math. There's a lot of
like these weird -- >> Lynn Neary: Are you? >> Min Jin Lee: I'm not bad, and
I'm proud of it because I had to really work at
it, but anyway, but you have all these
model minority stereotypes which are really quite
harmful to people. However, in Japan, what
was really strange is that people thought that I
was argumentative and criminal and aggressive, and
I was like wow, no one's ever thought I
was aggressive before. That's interesting. But after the initial sort
of surprise wears off, you realize that it intersects
every aspect of your daily life. So for me, I was visiting, and
my husband is half-Japanese, so I have Japanese
family, so I had kind of an inside connection,
but at any point, I could speak the most
important, unfortunately or fortunately, language in
the world, which is English, so the privilege that you
have as an English-speaker is so incredibly powerful in
Asia, because all of a sudden, you can just kind
of skip some things, and also, it's not even money. Education and language is
an incredible form of power, so that was very helpful,
but I don't speak Japanese, so in that sense,
I was disempowered, and that was really hard for
me, but specific instances of discrimination did occur. So for example, we are renting
this really beautiful apartment that my husband's
company rented for us, like a place I could never
afford to live by myself, and one day, the toilet
upstairs was leaking, so I had to call the management
company, and they came and they fixed it, but
they created a huge hole. And after they fixed it,
they said we're going to come the next day and
repair it, and I said well, -- -- I think you have
to wait a few days because if you don't dry the
plaster, you'll get mold, because I am neurotic, and I
said well, I'm happy to take off from work, and in two days, I'll
meet you when it's fully dry, and then you can
put the plaster on. And the management company said to me you Koreans are always
complaining, and I was thinking to myself like it's
not even my building. Like if there's mold,
it's your problem, but I thought I was being nice. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: And neurotic. >> Lynn Neary: Maybe you
were being a New Yorker. >> Min Jin Lee: Right. [ Laughter ] Point taken. >> Lynn Neary: Well, I'm a New
Yorker today, so it's okay, but I think that's
so interesting, that you can be the same person
in two different cultures and be perceived completely -- like to have that
experience of being -- >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: -- perceived
completely differently. You're the same person,
and yet in one culture, people will think of
you as -- I don't know. Maybe they think of you
as shy and retiring. I'm not sure that
would be right. >> Min Jin Lee: Right. >> Lynn Neary: But
certainly not aggressive, but you know, aggressive
in Japan. That's interesting. >> Min Jin Lee: Well,
what's weird is that I didn't really even learn
how to talk to regular people until almost high school. I had to take all these classes, so my natural MO is always
actually to be very quiet, and I always think that
if you're out in public -- and I have this Thomas
the Tank Engine theory. For those of you who don't know, his whole thing --
it's a little train. It's a kid's story. Do you know Thomas
the Tank Engine? >> Lynn Neary: Yes. Yeah, yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: Okay. So what you want to be when
you're Thomas is that you want to be a useful engine,
so whenever I'm invited to do things like
this, I have to go to the bathroom like 18 times. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: You
were there, so. And I tell myself I have to
be useful, so you have to talk and you have to share things
that have use to the audience. Otherwise it's just vainglory. So it was really surprising to
me that if I had the courage to speak in Japan that
people might think that I was being
pushy or talkative, which I think is
different than when you and I think talking is service. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah, it is. So all right. So you're in Japan. You're researching this
book for many years. >> Min Jin Lee: Many years. >> Lynn Neary: And
then you start to -- and then you start to write it,
and right from the beginning, did you know pachinko was, that this industry was
going to be sort of -- >> Min Jin Lee: No. >> Lynn Neary: -- a
through line of this story? Because eventually, Sunja's
sons both get into the business, and I won't go into
details of how that happens because it would give
some things away, I think, but they both get into it, and
it gets them out of poverty, but it doesn't get them out
of their situation or out of the situation of being
discriminated against. >> Min Jin Lee: No,
and you can't escape it if you're Korean in
Japan even today. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: You might
be really careful even today of telling people that
you're ethnically Korean, and if you are in
Japan, any of you, and you meet somebody
who's Asian and they don't seem Japanese,
if you ask them are you Korean, they could be incredibly
offended. So please be careful, because
they have a sense of privacy that is so intense, because
you may be entirely innocent in your intentions of
asking where you're from or who your people are, but
to them, they have faced such extreme discrimination
that they may be more reticent about saying who they are. So I get letters, many,
many letters, every day now from Korean-Japanese people
saying my name is, let's say, Junia Tanaka, but then their
Korean name is something else, and they'll say I've
never told anybody before, and I think to myself
that must be exhausting, to just always walk around
being somebody else and feeling like I can't say what I am,
and the analogue that I think of in the US is really
your religion. So like let's say you
are privately Muslim or privately Jewish
and you have a reason for being private about it. I respect that, and I think
interestingly, in Japan, you really have to be careful. >> Lynn Neary: You know, I
was going to ask you about, you know, what's going on with
the film Crazy Rich Asians right now, where, you know, it's
this number-one film and based on a book, based on a
series of books, actually, and there will be
two more films, because there are two more
books, but I was going to ask you if something similar
is happening among writers, that, you know, there's
a sort of -- Asian, particularly
Asian women writers, seem to be having their moment. We just met Celeste Ng recently. >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah, yeah. >> Lynn Neary: Her
book is doing so well. First of all, is that happening? But then before I want to ask
you that question, I want to -- it's making me rethink saying
Asian as a sort of descriptive of anybody who looks like
you and who is a writer. >> Min Jin Lee: Right. >> Lynn Neary: Is that
the correct thing to say? I mean because you're making
-- now we're hearing about, you know, the Japanese and
the Korean being so different. >> Min Jin Lee: Oh, absolutely. Well, what's funny to me
is that, and my friends who are Latinx explain it
as well, very beautifully, which is that in America, you
have these enormous tents, and Asian America
is a huge tent. It's huge, because you have
East Asian, and Southeast Asian, and South Asians, and we have
such different experiences. So my friends who are South
Asian are always telling me to be brown is different
than to be East Asian, which is absolutely
true, and then, you know, being Sikh versus Muslim versus
Hindu is incredibly different, but somehow we're in this tent. Australia once in a
while says we're Asian, and we're like I
don't know, but okay. I'm full of love. You know, when you leave the US, you're not going
to find this tent. They think that you're silly
if you say you're Latinx, because a person from Honduras
versus a person from Mexico have such different experiences. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: But I will say that because I know
Asian-American history so well, I get really upset when we think about the way the Chinese are
being discriminated against. I'm not Chinese, but
I'm Asian-American, and therefore I feel very
connected to federal legislation which barred the entrance
of the Chinese only because they're ethnically
Chinese. That happened in the US, and they built the
railroads in this country. Or I get really upset about
the internment, right. So I'm Korean and here
I am being defensive about the Japanese, but that's
because I'm Asian-American. I'm in this tent. I kind of think it's like a good
historical event, but going back to your question of descriptor,
it's what we have, and labels and terms are so limited, but
it's what we have right now. When someone else comes up
with something better, -- >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: -- I'll
think about it, too, yeah. >> Lynn Neary: So then
I can ask the question. >> Min Jin Lee: Sure. >> Lynn Neary: Are Asian
writers having a moment now, in the same way that
Asian actors are? >> Min Jin Lee: They're
related, right, because I create IMPORTANT,
intellectual property, which will end up becoming
translated into film or TV, and I remember when my first
book came out in 2007, a very, very famous Tony award-winning
writer went to Hollywood and said could Free Food
for Millionaires be made, and pretty much every
door was shut in his face because they said
Asians need not apply. That was the message, and
then recently, Pachinko, it has been optioned
for an Apple TV show, which I think is
going to happen. I was told. We'll see. So to answer your question,
is it having a moment, it could be having a moment, but
I have to say it's heartbreaking to think about it
being a moment. >> Lynn Neary: I know. >> Min Jin Lee: Right? >> Lynn Neary: Okay. Well, what other word
could we use, then? You're the writer. >> Min Jin Lee: No, no. No, no, but the thing
is no, you're correct. You're correct to think it's a
moment, because it is a moment in history, and actually, as we
study history, history's made up of different moments,
and what does that mean? Will it turn? Like will the door
really be opened? So all these Asian-American
actors are really freaking out, rightfully so, that
this is Asian August. Did you know that? That was Asian August, but
September -- what is it? I don't know. So a lot of Asian-American
actors and writers and directors are thinking if Crazy Rich Asians does not
do well, what does it mean for all the others when the
last one was 25 years ago, and there are many
Asian-Americans who have to feel pretty mum about
speaking about Crazy Rich Asians in any kind of negative
way because they feel like if they did,
they'd be race traitors. Now Crazy Rich Asians is in
many ways a very entertaining romantic story. It shouldn't have
to be the truth. Like it should just be a
wonderful romantic story, and it's limited. Like there are a lot
of people in Singapore who are upset about it. >> Lynn Neary: Right. >> Min Jin Lee: And you can
follow it if you want to, but I think you're kind of
allowed to be one thing. Like I would like it if -- I remember when Spike
Lee came out, people were really
critical of him. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: And I think
he gave the right response, which is we should have lots of African-Americans
making film, and he's right. Like we should have many
different kinds of stories, so I really hope this moment
does become an opening of a huge path of
different kinds of work, because I think that
we're global. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. >> Min Jin Lee: We're
global citizens, which means that we have
to understand each other as fully human beings,
and that comes through different
kinds of stories. >> Lynn Neary: Yeah. What do you want
people to take away -- -- from the story
of Korean-Japanese that you tell in Pachinko? >> Min Jin Lee: I wanted to
write a very specific story about this community, but
above all, I wanted to talk about what it's like to have
to forgive people who hate you, and that's something that
all of us have experienced. People have hated us, all of us,
for whatever arbitrary reason or for a justified reason. How do you forgive and
somehow maintain your humanity? That was important to me. >> Lynn Neary: And it is. No, you're right, because it
is a book about forgiveness, and I'm trying to -- I'm
trying to think about that now. Well, it's hard to talk
about without talking about what happens towards
the end of the book, and there are two sons,
and one of them -- one of them, it seems to be
things are going to be okay, and the other one,
things aren't okay. >> Min Jin Lee: Right. >> Lynn Neary: But they both
have a pretty rough time. >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: But still,
Sunja's story, from this young, innocent girl who had no idea
what she was getting into to where she ends up in Japan,
is just an amazing journey that this one women has
taken, and then we have to see the consequences for
her own family, which are, in some cases, tragic. >> Min Jin Lee: What I
really took away from all of my interviews with
the dozens and dozens of Korean-Japanese
people that I met were that there was always
this one generation, the first generation, of people
who were illiterate, usually. So I'm not writing about
powerful, elite, rich people. They started out as illiterate,
unwanted people who were ashamed of where they came from and where people are
constantly saying that you're not acceptable for
who you are, and I was so struck by so many women who are really
poor, who are illiterate, who were the beasts of burden
for the next generation, and I thought well, how
do I write that story? That's a difficult story, because they didn't leave
any primary documents behind, and because I was trained in
history, I ended up having to do all these interviews, but the interviews were
constantly contradicting everything that I was reading, because human beings
are so contradictory. We don't make any sense. Like I could intend
something, but then I end up doing something else. Like I had no idea I
was going to cry today. I'm sorry. I'm full of feelings. But I think I want to be open
to my intentions of writing about this community and how the
Korean-Japanese should be seen, but I also want all of us to
experience what it's like to be that character, and this
is what fiction does. I think we can identify with
people who look nothing like us, who don't have our experiences. People have often asked me
do I identify with Sunja, and I have to say
not really, right. I mean you and I have
privileges that are so extraordinary compared
to a person like this. >> Lynn Neary: Right. >> Min Jin Lee: And yet you
enter into another experience. Like as a parent, you enter
into it, or as a sister, you enter into it, and I
think that's really important. >> Lynn Neary: Well, and I think
that's why making a historical novel like this a family story as well is what then makes it
possible for us to understand -- >> Min Jin Lee: I hope so. >> Lynn Neary: -- across
generations and across, you know, historical eras
and across class lines and race lines and
everything else, because this is a woman who's
trying to make things work for her family and
the people she loves, and that's something we can
pretty much all identify with. Now I'm going to cry. So no, but I mean -- >> Min Jin Lee: You're
the one who made me cry. >> Lynn Neary: I think that's
the whole idea of a family saga, don't you think, of
this kind of a book that tells a family story? >> Min Jin Lee: I think so. I feel foolish because I
wanted to write a family saga, in terms of craft, technically
well, but in my intention as a writer, that wasn't
what I was going for in terms of the story, but what I ended
up doing, because I do feel like a minor character in
life, that I wanted so much for the minor characters
in this book to have a complete storyline. So every single one of my
characters, if you plotted it, because I have, they will
have a beginning and a middle and an end, and I wanted
them to experience this kind of Aristotelian reversal
and to have a recognition, and then for you to experience
a catharsis, because I needed to be free from this story. Like I'm so glad
this book is done. You have no idea. >> Lynn Neary: So in
about five minutes, we're going to open
the floor to questions, but I want to just ask
you one quick question about the minor characters, because I think that's really
interesting, what you did with the minor characters, and
in particular, as an example, two of the minor characters
you realize are going to become comfort girls,
although they don't know it. The last time you see
them, they're going off, and if you know the history
and you know the history of the Korean comfort girls,
you know these two young women, that's that where they're
headed, and they don't know it, and I thought that was
really fascinating. You bring in Nagasaki that
way, where characters are going into something that
we know happened and they don't know that's
where they're headed. Somebody's heading to Nagasaki. It hasn't happened
yet, and I thought that was pretty fascinating,
what you did with those minor characters. >> Min Jin Lee: I wanted all
these aspects of history to be in this book, and my
ambitions were obscene. I realize that now,
when I look back and I go why did you
want all of it in there, but I thought it was 80 years. It had to be in there,
because if I left it out, then it would've been really
bad, and yet I have to go back to this idea of telling
fiction -- is that now that I'm
judging this here and I look at modern contemporary
literature, I see why I didn't
understand what I was doing, because I had been looking
at so many old books and rereading them to understand
how they do it, and I realized that oh, I guess I
could have just written about one character. Why didn't I do that? But I'm not going to,
but I do understand that the contemporary
fiction mode isn't what I do, so in that sense, I don't
really belong in this canon. >> Lynn Neary: Well, I know
that you can't read right now because you're reading
one of the 377 books or whatever it was you
said, but are you -- and I know that you've
been so busy. This book is so successful. Did it change your
life completely? >> Min Jin Lee: It's
changed my life completely. It has. >> Lynn Neary: How so? >> Min Jin Lee: I
haven't seen the money for it yet, to be honest. People keep thinking like
wow, your husband can retire. I'm like no. No, as a matter of
fact, last year -- this is kind of a
funny/sad story, but my husband lost
his job on my pub day. >> Lynn Neary: Oh, wow. >> Min Jin Lee: Can you imagine? So in the morning of my pub day
on February 7th, he calls me, and he'd never lost
his job before, and he said I lost my job,
and I was like what the fuck. Pardon me. >> Lynn Neary: We
can bleep that. >> Min Jin Lee: Can
than be edited? I was so upset, and then he
was such a prince, though, because even at the book
party that our friends threw, he was really gracious and
kind, but then we thought that he'd get a job right away, but then he got a job
nine months later. So in that time, whenever
someone asked me to do anything, I was like okay, where do I go? So I think I worked a lot
harder because I was terrified, and we didn't have health
insurance, and that was just so scary to me, and in
a way, I did feel -- and I was really embarrassed. I was really embarrassed
about the thing of being in a situation again where
I couldn't afford things. I was like oh, I thought that,
you know, I'm going to be 50. I should be okay, and my
son's tuition bill came, and it was so high, so
that was just like -- >> Lynn Neary: The
money's going to come. Don't worry. >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah. Well, yeah, for sure, but -- >> Lynn Neary: I have one last
question for you before we open up the floor, which is even
though it's changed so much and you've been so busy,
are you going to write? Do you have an idea
for another book, maybe not quite as big as this? >> Min Jin Lee: Oh, the next
book's going to be really big. So it's a trilogy. [ Laughter ] I know. >> Lynn Neary: I thought you
weren't going to do that again. >> Min Jin Lee: No. It's not going to be a
historical novel, I don't think. So the first book is Free
Food for Millionaires, which is Koreans in America; the
second book is Koreans in Japan, Pachinko; and the third one
is about the role of education for Koreans all over the world. So it's called American Hagwon, and a hagwon is a tutoring
center, and you have billions of tutoring centers
in Washington, DC, Virginia, and Maryland. So if you ever a Korean
sign and it says something like IV Excellence SAT
tutoring, that's a hagwon, and there are more and
more non-Koreans going to Korean hagwons now, and I
wanted to write about that. >> Lynn Neary: Oh, that's
great, and now I'm going to open up the floor if anybody's
interested in asking a question. Right here. >> Hi. Sorry I had to jump
to the front of the line. My name is Sue Young, and I took
notes because I'm so nervous, so please bear with me. Your book was incredible. >> Min Jin Lee: Thank you. >> It's the fourth book that
I've read by a Korean author, and so thank you for that. I really appreciate that. As somebody who was born
to a mother who's deaf -- she was born in 1945
in South Korea -- it was interesting to see
the portrayal of the -- -- occupation of
Japan so differently. So as my mother who, you
know, was able to tell me about running, you know,
over dead bodies and hiding, you know, like during the
Korean War and things like that, and talking about the Japanese, and like my grandmother still
speaks Japanese -- she's 96 -- because she was an educator
during the occupation, but then to see like the
actual historical pieces that you introduce. The book was like so
crazy, mind-boggling, so thank you for that. I mean as a Korean-American, I
really appreciated that history, and so actually, one of my
questions is how did you access that history, and you talked
about that a little bit, but I also did want to
know how interviewing the Japanese-Koreans or the
Korean-Japanese changed you as a Korean-American and how
maybe you understood yourself and your own history and
maybe your own identity as it relates to,
you know, Korea, the Korean peninsula
and all the things. Sorry, that was long. >> Min Jin Lee: So thank
you for your generosity. I really appreciate that. So you have two questions. The first question is how
did I do the research. So I really work as a
wannabe academic journalist, so I start with the very serious
academic research always first. I read everything
that's very academic, stuff that's not mainstream, and then I do secondary
mainstream written research, and then in going --
and coterminously, I also interview people
of different backgrounds for whatever I'm doing. So both of my books
involved over a hundred, at least a hundred
people per book, and I even took classes
when I needed to. So I work in a really weird
way, but I really like it, because it gives me a
great sense of authority about what I speak about. The second question
about in terms of how did interviewing the
Korean-Japanese affect me a Korean-American is
that I didn't realize that I was an angry person, and this anger I think
is incredibly healthy. I think we Americans have a
sense of self-righteousness and indignation which
is incredibly healthful to make change in civil
rights, and I think going to law school was
really healthful for me, because I believe that
even though the wheels of justice take a really
long time, as they should in some ways, because you can't
have laws changing all the time -- but we do need to have
those changes, and I believe that it's possible to seek
redress for an injustice, and that's a very American idea. It's a very optimistic idea,
whereas when I was in Asia, whether I was in Japan or
Korea or even in China, there was a greater sense
of just the way it is, -- >> Right, right. >> Min Jin Lee: -- so we
have to work around things. So I understand when people
have to work around a situation, but I also believe that you
can have direct redress, and we should at least try,
and I think that's a good kind of anger that Americans have. >> Speaking of minor characters, thank you for the
disabled father. I appreciate that character,
even though he was very minor. Just as somebody who is
born to somebody who's deaf, it's nice to see
that in literature. Thank you. >> Min Jin Lee: Thank you. >> Lynn Neary: Thank you. Maybe we'll go to this
mic next and then to you. >> Hi. Nice to meet you. Thank you again for speaking. My mom is actually
Korean-Japanese, and this is the first time
I've ever seen any sort of literature like this. I have to admit I'm only like
40 pages in, so I'm sorry, but it meant a lot
as an Asian-American, because my Korean-American
friend actually recognized that as an important story for
me to know, and I would say that my Korean-Japanese family
never really talked about it. I didn't know until
I was like 18 or 19, like really understood, that
we were actually Korean. It was sort of like a
family secret, I think, a societal secret,
and I really would like to know your
experience with talking to Korean-Japanese people
or also Japanese people. Did you ever say I'm
writing this book about Korean-Japanese
people, and what were sort of their reactions, both
from the Korean-Japanese and Japanese themselves? You mentioned your
husband is half Japanese, so how did his family react
when you said I'm going to uncover this part of society, as I know that's not
something a lot of people in Japanese society want
to talk about as an issue? >> Min Jin Lee: Oh, it's
a really great question. I think you really want to understand how I approached
speaking to the Korean-Japanese about my task, and I
think that two things that you should know is
that I write fiction, so most people think that
I'm entirely harmless, and you'll never
be quoted directly, and I would always give
my interviewees the option of being acknowledged or not,
and some people chose not to be acknowledged because
they didn't want people to know that they had spoken to me about their families,
which I respected. So it's true. I am harmless, because you'll
always be cloaked in fiction, and then secondly, I
think that they thought that it was adorable
I was going to try, because no one has actually
ever written a novel about the Korean-Japanese
for adults in English ever. This is the first book. I know because I've done the
research, and if you look for it, it's not there, and
there are books in translation, but there's nothing right
now that I could think of that's an epic,
80-year-old family saga about the Korean-Japanese,
but I don't know if you know, but there's three
different kinds of Korean-Japanese
people in Japan today. You could be a South
Korean passport-carrying Korean-Japanese. You could be a North
Korean card-carrying person. So even today, there are
Korean-Japanese who identify with North Korean government,
and they send their children to school from Kindergarten
all the way up to university being
identified with North Korea, and those people cannot
travel outside the country because North Korea
and Japan don't have a diplomatic relationship. And the third kind of Korean-Japanese
person is someone who becomes a Japanese
citizen in the way that I've become an
American citizen. And all those three
are very different, and I interviewed each
one of those groups, and their personalities
are totally different. It isn't like meeting a Korean
from LA and a Korean in Philly. We're different, but
not that different. >> Thank you. >> Lynn Neary: Okay. Thank you. Sir? >> My supervisor at work is
Korean-American, and he spent about four years at
Tokyo University in Japan and did experience
discrimination there, even at Japan's leading
university, and the stories are very moving
that he told me, but yesterday, we had lunch, and the main topic
of discussion was the lawsuit against Harvard University
on the discrimination -- >> Lynn Neary: Oh, yeah. >> -- against Asian-Americans, and he does feel there is
discrimination even at, you know, America's leading
institutions, and I wanted to get your opinion on
that as an attorney. [ Laughter ] >> Min Jin Lee: Okay. You know, they told
me that I don't have to answer every question,
but this is a tough one, and it's a really good question,
and I'm glad you asked it, because discrimination comes
in many different ways. I'm going to tell you right
now that I do not agree with Edward Blum
and his lawsuit, and the reason why
I don't believe in what he is doing
personally is because I don't think
he has good intentions. I think there's truth
and there's intentions, and they both have to be aligned
for me, so I do not believe that Asian-Americans
are supposed to be fighting other people who are beneficiaries
-- affirmative action. I believe in affirmative action. That said, I believe absolutely that these admissions offices
throughout this country are giving Asian-American
children lower scores. That is truly happening. So if I had to fight,
I would say we need to have more transparency
in the admissions offices, because what's happening right
now to Asian-American children in this country is
truly diabolical. So yes, I believe they've
been discriminated against. However, I do not agree with
Edward Blum and his purposes. I believe that we should be
going after legacy admissions. [ Applause ] And I went to a fancy-pants
school, too, so. And I also believe that we
need to be really thinking about how our kid gets
in, not because we're against that child getting in,
but because for that child, he or she needs to
understand how this all works, because children are
talking about it anyway. These are young adults. They know what's going on. However, I do believe that affirmative action
is incredibly important, and there's many different ways
we could understand this topic without having Asian-Americans
being pitted against African-Americans. I think that's reprehensible. >> Lynn Neary: All right. We literally have
one minute left. Do you have a short question
that requires a short answer? >> I have a short question, but
he has the book in his hand, -- >> Okay. >> -- so if he wants to -- >> I hope mine is short. I wanted to ask like what
subtleties of Korean language -- or rather, in work that
I've done in translation, I've found that there are some
things that are hard to render in English in their
full capacity. What were some of the
challenges you faced when translating their
Korean voices into English? >> Can I add a follow-up, just because my question
was very similar to that? I liked how you chose to use certain Korean
words throughout the book without actually defining them, but I felt that I knew what
they were when I reading them, and I thought that was an
incredible literary tool that you used. I just -- >> Lynn Neary: Okay, she's
got to answer it now. >> -- wanted to know why
you chose those words and how you chose them. >> Lynn Neary: You've
got 30 seconds. >> Min Jin Lee: So those
questions are definitely paired. Thank you. >> I have one on
a -- pachinko -- -- as a game is a metaphor for how the Japanese
people have been treated. >> Lynn Neary: All right. Okay. >> Koreans have been treated. >> Lynn Neary: You have
really given her a challenge, I have to say, because
we're actually out of time. >> Min Jin Lee: Yeah. >> Lynn Neary: But go ahead. >> Min Jin Lee: Just bring it. Okay. So I found that
in my interviews, I often try to replicate
the voices that I heard, but because I work like
a wannabe journalist, I'm constantly trying to
understand the meter and rhyme of the way people talk, so
that's one, and then secondly, to answer your question, I
chose the words which I believe that we global citizens
should know about Korean, in the same way when
I went to law school, I learned Latin phrases
like "res ipsa loquitor," or when I read 19th-century
novels, there are French phrases that I needed to learn
if I wanted to know that in the Russian court, the
diplomatic language was French. So in order to be an educated
person of a certain view, we had to know certain
phrases and European languages. I am positing, and in
almost an obnoxious way, with great audacity, that
you should know some Korean. >> Lynn Neary: That's great. >> Min Jin Lee: And the last
question, about the metaphor, is that pachinko is a
gambling game, and as you know, in Las Vegas or elsewhere,
the house always wins. Pachinko is rigged, because
the house will always win. Most of us, I would argue almost
all of us, are on the outsides of the world and in
terms of connections, and yet we still have to play
a rigged game all the time, and so I'm arguing that
pachinko is like life. Thank you. >> Lynn Neary: Okay. Thanks so much.
