Asia Literary Review - Chinese writing

Each of Chang-Rae Lee’s four novels is a rewarding experiment in genre and voice. Lee (born 1965) recently published The Surrendered, arguably his most ambitious novel, tackling difficult subject matter. This protean, impossible-to-stereotype writer, who emigrated from South Korea to the United States at three, has so far defied any simplistic categorisation of himself as Korean-American.

His first book, Native Speaker (1995), winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, introduced us to Henry Park, a first-generation immigrant who ends up spying on and working for the aspiring mayor of New York, John Kwang. Lee’s debut simultaneously confirmed and deconstructed the conventions of the immigrant novel.

A Gesture Life (1999) welcomed Doc Hata, an immigrant with a traumatic secret living in a New Jersey suburb: he played a passive role in the abuse of Korean ‘comfort women’ by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Although the novel provoked comparisons with Kazuo Ishiguro and his self-denying characters, the truth is that Lee offers a much more redemptive view of humanity than given in, say, The Remains of the Day. Lee’s third novel, Aloft (2004), instead of having Korean leading characters, put Italian-American Jerry Battle and his family at the centre. Aloft is perhaps Lee’s most aesthetically polished novel, often questioning the conventions of the fiction of suburbia familiar from the works of John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Yates and Richard Ford.

Now comes The Surrendered, in which Lee confronts the Korean War for the first time, giving us three fascinating characters – June Han, Sylvie Tanner and Hector Brennan – whose lives intersect during and in the aftermath of the war and who ‘surrender’ to their fate with varying degrees of resilience. The Surrendered is one of the most difficult war novels published recently in the sense that it completely deprives the reader of comforting toeholds and is relentless in its interrogation of war as the antithesis of humanity.

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Lee’s writing is that he never ceases to experiment with language: Native Speaker is written in a high-energy voice that betrays the false confidence of the successful immigrant; A Gesture Life is narrated in a passive voice perfectly synchronised with the moral character of Doc Hata; Aloft is narrated in Jerry Battle’s sinuous, free-flowing, labyrinthine prose, in harmony with the deceit and hypocrisy of the major character; and The Surrendered, in keeping with its far-reaching theme, is Lee’s first novel related in the third-person objective voice, easily switching from character to character with the omniscience necessary for such a multi-spatial, disorientating narrative.

In person Lee is softly spoken, receptive to no-holds-barred intellectual conversation and has an appealing, wry sense of humour. I recently had the pleasure of meeting him during his visit to Houston’s Rice University for a reading and a discussion sponsored by the university in conjunction with the Asia Society of Houston. Later I had the opportunity to speak to him at length by telephone in his office at Princeton University, where he is a professor of creative writing.

Anis Shivani

Shivani: I want to start with a question about your first novel, Native Speaker.

The voice immediately strikes someone reading that novel as borrowing something from, say, Maxine Hong Kingston, perhaps even the urban alienation novels of Don DeLillo and Philip K. Dick. Why is there an immensely energetic voice eager to push language to its limits? Why do you think that’s so characteristic of immigrant novels?

Lee: One of my desires for that book was to try to forge a different kind of language for this immigrant hero. Part of my frustration at the time as a reader of immigrant novels or ethnic American novels was that I felt so many of them were quietly domestic and familial in their themes and tenor. I was looking for a way to give a different voice to my hero. So I didn’t want the voice of this character to sound like anything one would expect from an immigrant hero.

Obviously the book is interested in immigration and the state of being a newcomer, of alienation, but I wanted to explore the subject and predicate it through a notion of language. And that’s what the book for me is really about. It’s about the centrality of language, its force and power – not just as an instrument, political or personal, but also as a way of describing and creating self.

So this is a character who is not just voicing his opinions and beliefs but calling himself forth. It’s a book in some ways about this kind of self-creation through language.

At the time I was reading a lot of DeLillo and connecting with what you speak about, the sense of alienation, of distance from the culture. DeLillo’s distance is quite differently cast to mine but I liked the language I was reading, particularly in books like Mao II. That language seemed to capture a certain moment of consciousness I was imagining.

Shivani: With that language, were you trying to deconstruct the notion of the model minority in Native Speaker? And when you say you were frustrated with a lot of immigrant novels, was it because the heroes were too tame or domesticated – which wasn’t what you wanted for Henry Park?

Lee: Yes, they were tame in the sense that the stories seemed to be so circumscribed by familial bond and legacy … which is fine, but I felt limited. I wanted my hero to act and speak on a larger stage and that’s why I cast the story as political intrigue also … to get this hero out into the world so he could conduct himself outside the private ethnic world.

Shivani: On the other hand, feelings of guilt and shame are typical of immigrant novels. You would have to say that Native Speaker is saturated with both guilt and shame, because of the immigrant’s sense of having betrayed his own culture. The shame comes from not having assimilated successfully enough, and the guilt from having assimilated too successfully. In that sense it is like immigrant novels, isn’t it?

Lee: Oh, yes, absolutely. I’m not trying to suggest I wasn’t writing a novel that wanted to look at the immigrant condition and immigrant consciousness, but again, I wanted to do it in a different form and modality. There’s plenty of family tension and drama in that book, and as you suggest it’s funnelled through the idea of what the costs of assimilation are. Of leaving behind the old world embodied in, say, Henry Park’s father and old ways of thinking and expression.

Many of the family tensions, say with his father, are predicated on differences in language. He talks about how his father uses language rather than its being only a generational conflict or a conflict of old world versus new.

Shivani: Did you work on the language for a long time, a number of years, or did you have the voice pretty early on?

Lee: I had the voice quite early on. I didn’t start thinking about this novel until, I would say, a few months before I started writing it, in the fall of 1991. You mentioned Philip K. Dick, but I was also thinking of noir novels, the noir voice. I was quite focused on the voice – in fact, that’s all I was focused on. And everything – characterisation, plot, structure – proceeded from that voice.

So in some ways it’s the most obsessive book I’ve ever written … obsessed with language, obsessed with its beauty, its glories, but also its brutalities.

Shivani: Native Speaker takes us back in time to the early 1990s, with the early national unease with multiculturalism …

Lee: Yes, there are a lot of references to the racial issue, between blacks and Koreans in particular. That period is so expressive of newcomers’ groups having difficulties with the native population.

Shivani: The Los Angeles riots occurred during the writing of the novel, now that you mention it. How did they affect the book?

Lee: There were some protests in New York, boycotts of Korean stores, greengrocers, so those were the kinds of things that more pointedly influenced what I was writing. The profound eruption of racial tension was definitely on my mind. And there was also a lot of stuff in terms of immigrants. There was the Golden Venture, where the Chinese were smuggled over on a big boat and washed ashore. Many of them died. So there was a lot of tumultuous activity.

Shivani: Do you now think of Native Speaker as a young man’s novel? Do you assess it differently, in ways you wouldn’t have when you wrote it?

Lee: I would. When I wrote it I was impassioned and probably semi-conscious of all the things I was doing. But it certainly had a fury, a young man’s fury that I will probably never have again.

Shivani: The anger, the frustration, the hate Henry Park feels – it would be hard to create a character like that again.

Lee: Yes.

Shivani: And you certainly haven’t in The Surrendered, with June Han.

Lee: No, not at all.

Someone with that kind of rage, but also the exuberance and wonder at this thing called language. So yes, it is a young man’s book in that way. I think that’s why it appeals to people still, it has a freshness, a sense of possibility and a youthful wonder.

Shivani: Yet the concern with language never leaves you in all four of your books.

Lee: No.

Shivani: And that’s why you keep experimenting with different voices for your different novels. So in the second one, A Gesture Life, you have this emotional reticence, and then in Aloft, you have this exuberance of voice with Jerry Battle and I think you’re also parodying and playing with the suburban-novel genre.

Lee: Yes.

Shivani: Then in the fourth, The Surrendered, your first third-person book, you are being very precise. But again, it’s a great experiment in language. So that concern has never left you?

Lee: No, absolutely not. The only way I can even begin to conceive of a novel is through its modality of language. All the other things are suggested by it and come after it, and I can’t really start it without understanding my relationship to the particular sense of that prose.

And in different ways the books are responses to each other; A Gesture Life was in some ways a response to Native Speaker for me.

I was curious about a character at the end of life – who lives such a circumscribed, cloistered existence, at least in his mind. I was wondering how that would express itself. Of course it becomes its own motif – a motif of hiding, obfuscation, making things opaque.

Shivani: We talked about some literary models for Henry Park. What about Franklin Hata in A Gesture Life, did you have any literary models for his emotional reticence?

Lee: Not really. People have said that the book reminds them of The Remains of the Day, but to tell you the truth I hadn’t read it then. I only read it afterwards. I can see the similarities. One of the challenges of the book was to try to write from the point of view of someone who didn’t want to speak; Native Speaker was so much about this urge and instinct and passion to try to speak. A Gesture Life was to do the opposite, that’s what I started with.

Shivani: The idea of the Korean comfort women is a central part of A Gesture Life.

Lee: That was the germ of the original novel. Then I got on to the idea that I was going to write this book about the comfort women, but probably more discreetly. After about a year’s work I decided that I was interested in that approach and decided on following this character, Doc Hata, whose story uses the comfort-women episodes. They wholly determine who he is.

Shivani: The thing that really interests me about your books is the violence, the scale, the quantity of it. You see some of it in Native Speaker, but compared to what happens in subsequent books it seems relatively light.

A Gesture Life is where I think it really picks up, with accidents, trauma, injury, serious illness – I’m classifying all of these as violence because often illnesses and accidents happen abruptly.

Lee: That’s right.

Shivani: So what explains this change in your second novel and why does it remain a predominant preoccupation until today, with The Surrendered? Or perhaps it wasn’t with the second novel, perhaps it started from the first one but it’s been constantly escalating, if you would agree with that.

Lee: I would agree that all the books have a serious accident as a factor in the stories. Maybe what attracts me to it is that I lead a fairly quiet life and my characters for the most part lead quiet lives as well. I’m attracted to the idea that things and events and possibilities hang over them, that they’re constantly subject to the winds of fate. So I like the contrast of the placid life and this immediate, wrecking injury that can happen. It’s something I’ve always found dramatically compelling.

It provides me with infinite possibilities as to how characters are going to deal with this kind of injury. I’ve always enjoyed disruptive narratives, so on an undiscovered narrative level it’s pleasing to me. But most importantly it’s a way to open up character. I want moments of extreme discomfort.

In The Surrendered you could say I wanted moments where you would see the unseeable; in the other books maybe hear the unhearable.

Shivani: To go on to your third novel, in Aloft you have a narrator who can’t stop talking. He creates a breathless rhythm. This is the most noticeable thing to me about the book and the thing that I most like, with these long sentences, these endless sentences that seem to float above reality. This prose style was new for you, whereas in The Surrendered your prose is objective, detached, precise and even impersonal.

With the extreme length of sentences in Aloft, can you relate the prose style to its theme?

Lee: Absolutely. One of the themes of Aloft is this dream of infinite suspension. There’s a dream that Jerry Battle can float above the realities of his life and that’s one of the levels the book wants to work on. It wants to string you along in this endless language. That’s how he finds buoyancy. He enjoys it but ultimately finds it’s all a charade. And again, in those first three books I really wanted to marry the language to the characterisation and for me, Aloft is a coming-of-age story of a man who is sixty years old.

More broadly, it’s about a certain kind of American consciousness, a suburban consciousness. A dream of control and safety. A certain kind of master plan in which everything should go right. And the suburban master plan of course is safe homes, good schools, clean streets, clean air, no violence – and ultimately no heartache.

Shivani: No racial tension.

Lee: No nothing. When of course we know that’s absolutely the furthest thing from the truth. It is a suburban book, but I hope it works on that other level, the lingual level, the rhetorical level, rather than just unearthing the domestic difficulties and realities of these people.

Shivani: When you started that book were you a great fan of the suburban literature of Updike, Ford, Yates, etc.?

Lee: Oh yes, Cheever, Updike, Ford. I think what a lot of people missed about Jerry Battle is that I really wanted him to comment on that literature through the character of his language.

Shivani: In A Gesture Life, whenever suburban life starts becoming too predictable or comfortable, you switch to scenes of World War II. You’re generally abrupt, so as soon as you start getting comfortable with Doc Hata and think that he’s going to be able to work things out, along comes some really horrible flashback from World War II. In Aloft you don’t have that contrast of physical locations, you’re not going from American suburbia to some other essentially violent location. Yet there is this tension, this rhythm up and down – but you do it with the voice alone.

Lee: Yes. And for me it’s the most literary novel I’ve ever written. It’s purely about the modality.

Shivani: Updike, Ford, all these suburban novelists, they’re incredibly precise and, I would say, even excessively or unnecessarily precise, in descriptions of suburban materiality.

Lee: Yes.

Shivani: They take all the details of houses, gardens, streets, buildings, squares and churches very seriously. Were you parodying the Updike style, or at least rendering its artificiality? In Aloft, there are examples throughout the book where at some emotional peak you start talking about, for instance, ‘The truck was washed once a week on Saturday mornings for $22.94 …’ It’s as if you are disrupting the emotional peak and consciously commenting on the genre of the suburban novel, isn’t it?

Lee: Yes, I think so. Is it really important that we know the price of those special washes? It’s making fun of the people too, but one of the little fanciful notions I had was what would the suburban novel read like if Wordsworth were to write it? Slightly pretentious, over-romantic.

Shivani: So with the immigrant novel you were dissatisfied in certain ways. With the suburban novel too, you had certain dissatisfactions?

Lee: If you think of A Gesture Life as the most insane kind of suburban novel, yes, absolutely. The book does spend a lot of time describing the beauty of Doc Hata’s house and the pool, and his neighbourhood and how manicured everything is. But of course it burns down and he loses it all.

Shivani: It’s a particularly American thing and yet there’s great pleasure to be derived from the well-done suburban novel, isn’t there?

Lee: Oh yes, because of that hyper-perceptivity. It’s such a rich and detailed picture of what life is like right now. I think we’ll look back on it and see these novels as very important to our sense of this time.

Shivani: In Aloft Jerry marries an Asian woman, so he is at an angle to Asian culture just as I think you, the writer, seem to be at an angle to Asian culture in this novel. But only in this one, not in the other three, correct?

Lee: Yes. He has an angle on a different racial element and cultural element. I could have made a lot more of the racial themes in the book but I didn’t, because I didn’t feel as if he was really capable of addressing certain issues. He has this sense that race is more important than he thinks or knows, but he can’t appreciate that importance. In many ways it was just my realisation that that’s how most white people are: fairly well intentioned but in some ways completely lost.

Shivani: The emotional deadbeat who recurs in Native Speaker and A Gesture Life. In Aloft, you transpose this to an Italian-American to make it less of an Asian thing?

Lee: Yes, absolutely. Readers and critics were always saying, ‘Oh, look at these Korean characters who are just so deficient emotionally.’

Shivani: Unable to express themselves, to communicate.

Lee: Yes.

Shivani: And that’s a big cultural stereotype, isn’t it?

Lee: Yes – and that’s not what I was looking to do.

Shivani: Let’s go to The Surrendered. One of the most interesting things about that book is your decision not to describe June’s intervening thirty years, between Korean refugee and successful New York antiques dealer. Why did you do that?

Lee: I felt as if all that business would explain things that were not important to her character. It would explain certain questions about how she made herself fit into this world. And that was not important to the book. It was more important to see the ramifications of her strong will to get by, her resilience. My original instinct was just to open up in the present and show that she had leaped all these years to a fairly successful and secure state of affairs. And I wanted to trace her efforts and her character in arriving at that place through the dissolution of her relationship with her son. So what I show about her background is really about her son and not about her. She is almost brutal in her composure and her self-possession.

Shivani: Is she capable of feeling emotion after her experiences in the Korean War?

Lee: I’m not sure. I think she would like to, because you like to be a real person, but I’m not sure she can feel emotion in the same way. I think it’s too dangerous for her because emotion includes the possibility of loss and I’m not sure she’s willing to risk that anymore.

Shivani: When did you first know that you wanted to deal with the Korean War directly?

Lee: It had been a while, even before I finished A Gesture Life. But I was thinking of it vaguely, not in any specific way. The Korean War is important to my family and me. The fact that I’m here in America is some ways a consequence of the Korean War.

Shivani: We were talking about violence and brutality earlier and I think they reach their highest pitch in The Surrendered, especially when you think of the Japanese atrocities in Manchuria, the torture and so on. As you were writing the book, were you concerned that violence and brutality can de-sensitise?

Lee: Yes, but I didn’t think that would happen because we’re de-sensitised already to violence – we see it on television, in the newspapers. But we don’t have a connection to these real-life people who have to endure these things. So I felt that if I did my job as a writer and created useful, full-blown characters you cared about and understood, or felt you understood, then the violence would only deepen your understanding and empathy.

One of the things I wanted to do with the violence was to write those scenes quite patiently and methodically. I didn’t want them to be rushed, or just explosive things that happened. All the scenes are entered quite quietly. They’re engaged at a very different kind of pitch as we get into them. I wanted to invite the reader in to hope that nothing would happen. Those ‘scenes of violence’ are really scenes of life until certain moments, they’re scenes about human possibility until certain moments.

Shivani: The choice of missionaries is something that interests me in The Surrendered. You could say that missionaries are flawed, but at least they’re well-intentioned people. The novel would have been very different, of course, if you had featured, let’s say, capitalists, or spies, or generals, figures more associated with empire.

Lee: It had to be missionaries given the modern history of Korea. Missionaries have been part of Korean life for a hundred years or more and were certainly instrumental in a lot of things that happened during the Korean War. So much of contemporary and religious Korean life is the direct result of missionary presence. So that was not really a choice; once I researched the orphanages in Korea after the war I found out that almost all were run by religious groups.

And that’s where the whole complicated notion of mercy comes up. These people had the best intentions, but of course were as human and flawed as anyone else. So that was interesting to me.

Shivani: Were you really determined to expunge humour in The Surrendered from the beginning? This is another really distinctive element in the new book, this lack of humour.

Lee: I did attempt sometimes to write pieces that were more humorous, but the humour wasn’t the right tone. Obviously there aren’t many humorous war novels.

Shivani: Was it harder to write the book because you relied so much on humour in the other three?

Lee: I think it was more emotionally hard than anything else. I don’t think it was hard in terms of the writing or the process, but just to sit with this material, the kinds of things that happened and the anguish of the characters. Yes, it definitely took a toll on me. It wore me down.

Shivani: I’m sure you didn’t feel like an older man after finishing Native Speaker.

Lee: No, no. A Gesture Life was hard because in some ways Doc Hata is such a monstrous character. It was hard to sit with him.

Shivani: Was Aloft the most fun for you to write, would you say?

Lee: Yes, it was. I had a lot of fun with it. I really felt that I was playing, whereas I didn’t feel that at all with the other books.

Shivani: The scope of The Surrendered is very wide. Was it hard for you to keep the links loose enough and yet at the same tight enough? Did you struggle with that?

Lee: I was very conscious of the different scales of the book, that there would be sections that were very closely observed, even very internal, psychological. But then I had to try to fit all that in with relevance and with the sweep of events. Yes, it took a lot to feel confident doing it.

Shivani: Duty versus love. This is, I think, a running theme in your novels. It starts with Native Speaker, it’s very manifest in A Gesture Life. Henry Park has to kill symbolically the hyper-successful, big-shot immigrant John Kwang to free himself. Henry Park has to get rid of, in effect, all the father figures in his life. But could you say that this theme has retreated in your last two books?

Lee: So much of Henry Park is his struggle with the patriarch. A lot of the book is about that.

Shivani: You’ve killed off all your father figures now; there are none to worry about. I think you did that very well in the first book.

Lee: Yes, I don’t feel I need to do that anymore.

Shivani: How about the theme of unreality? John Kwang, for example, in Native Speaker, as a New York City councilman, memorises his whole list of contributors, which is an impossible feat. Your novels all seem to me a comment on the arbitrary confinements of realism. Would you say that that’s the aesthetic breakthrough you’ve been pursuing all along?

Lee: I mentioned before the notion of discomfort. When you read my books, at first blush they might seem to be traditionally realistic fictions, but I really don’t see them that way. I see them as maybe predominantly realistic, but very self-consciously they have significant alterations to all of them. They actually defy the reader to question what he is doing here and what I’m doing here.

Shivani: Discomfort – the reader’s discomfort with notions of narrative realism or notions of what a story should be. What do you think critics have missed or are likely to miss about The Surrendered? How have they most misread it? What’s that element, do you think?

Lee: Sometimes I feel as if critics, if they’re deeply engaged with the book, they mistrust that engagement. And this book can be read by certain critics that way.

I wanted to write a book like some of the books I read when I was younger. You would read the book and you could not put it down. The kind of book, whether you loved it or despised it, you were not confused by your desire to want to read it. You may have been confused by things within it that you were not quite getting, but there was this passion inside the book that was very honest. And that’s the kind of book I wanted to write. I think that sometimes readers, critics, particularly sophisticated ones, they mistrust that feeling.

Shivani: The critic is more likely to mistrust.

Lee: Their job is to mistrust and to be sceptical and vigilant.

Shivani: Can we talk about your four books as four varieties of immigrant ambition? It’s interesting that in the fourth one you don’t talk about it at all.

Lee: I would say the first three books are about immigrant ambition. The fourth isn’t.

Shivani: Do you think you have successfully avoided the label of ‘Korean-American writer’ or some other such classification? Were you interested in avoiding such a designation from the beginning, and was that part of the motivation to write Aloft – as an experiment in testing your own boundaries?

Lee: In some ways with Aloft it wasn’t testing my boundaries, but it was testing the culture’s boundaries. Aloft is perhaps the easiest and most pleasurable thing I’ve ever written and in some ways the most autobiographical. But it tests the readership’s boundaries and I think it’s exposed them. I think some readers don’t read Aloft because they assume it’s not about the same concerns …

Shivani: They’ve taken it outside your other books and put it in a different place?

Lee: Yes. Whereas really, the book that is quite separate in terms of those kinds of things is The Surrendered.

Shivani: Why would Aloft be the most autobiographical of your books?

Lee: It’s the most squarely suburban and also it makes fun of this writer character, the great American writer character. It’s a landscape I know well.

Shivani: How about the label of the Korean-American writer, is that something that bothers you?

Lee: That’s not something that I wanted to avoid. It’s something that I sometimes find frustrating and irritating, but I think it’s just a function of the culture and a function of my career inside the culture. If my books are to continue to be taken seriously then at some point that label won’t be so useful. But it’ll always be there. And that’s probably what I hope for.

Shivani: I’m wondering about your relationship with modernism. Do you think writers today betray the legacy of modernism by speaking to broad audiences – writers who could enter into deeper levels of consciousness, the way modernism used to do? Do you think really good writers today ought to speak to narrower audiences again as opposed to broadening the audience?

Lee: I don’t think we have to do one or the other. I trust that even within a single writer’s work there will be books that have different scales of inquiry and exposure. I don’t write for other writers exclusively, but by the same token I don’t write for readers, I write for myself, the reader I am. Maybe that reader is not a pure modernist reader anymore and never could be.

Shivani: You published Native Speaker in 1995; there’s been a closing going on, slowly but steadily. As you wrote, a narrowing of who can rightfully live here [in the United States] and be counted. This seems to have come true very much in the last decade, but it began twenty years ago, which doesn’t seem coincidental to me because the early 1990s saw the onset of globalisation. The rhetoric of globalisation is openness and tolerance, yet there has been a domestic backlash as globalisation has picked up pace. Did you really have this kind of intuition in the early 1990s that this might happen?

Lee: In Native Speaker there was a very faint sense of our American world being encroached on and changed forever by the larger forces of globalism. There was a very small reference to China in that book. China: that’s going to be the place. But it’s not so much about China as the sense that this will be the last of American ascendancy and power.

For me, that has always been there and it’s part of the tension of being an immigrant in this land, when this land is not the land of the early twentieth-century immigrant. This is a land on the wane – and maybe I’m in the wrong place. The next book I’m writing is squarely about that, about a Chinese immigrant to America who has global ties and interests and businesses. So it’s an American immigrant story but it takes a different view of the centrality and power of this place.