Chang-rae Lee explains why he drew upon his immigrant father and mother’s history for his latest novel, The Surrendered
Tim Teeman
Hollywood has come calling for Chang-rae Lee. “A big producer is interested in making it into a film,” he reveals shyly of his fourth novel The Surrendered, but only after I say I could imagine it on the big screen, and only after we have finished the interview. The book certainly has an epic cinematic sweep, revealing the tangled history of its lead character, June, who in the present day is dying of cancer. The mysteries of her past are woven into the story of her time as a young refugee caught up in the Korean War, housed with an American missionary and his wife who have secrets of their own. Lee evokes the smell, sound and texture of war and, in the hard and unyielding June, creates a protagonist for whom it is tricky to feel empathy.
“This novel took the better part of five years to write,” says the award-winning Lee, 44, in the tranquility of his home on the Princeton University campus where he lives with his wife Michelle and two young daughters. “I’m a slow writer so I can’t blame my teaching creative writing here. I wouldn’t say I enjoy going upstairs to work, it’s not pleasurable. It’s like mining, stripping and layering all at once.” Does he have down moments? Yes, he says. How does he get through them? “Pinot noir.”
The problem with The Surrendered,Lee says, was that it “kept growing”. In the end he cut 250 pages; whole characters and storylines. It’s his first novel to be written in the third person, and the first — after Aloft, A Gesture of Life and Native Speaker — not to be overtly concerned with immigration. June may live in the United States, but that is a given. It does however swirl with religion, belonging and cultural identity and, as Hollywood has identified, it is a mystery with some very good twists and a tense, bloody war backdrop.
The Lee family moved from Korea to America when Chang-rae was 3. His parents had met in Seoul (his father was from North Korea and at medical school, his mother from the South). The inspiration for The Surrendered came from the stories his father told him. “He was 12 when the war began,” Lee recalls. One cousin was pregnant and going into labour as explosions could be heard. She couldn’t be moved, and that was the last anyone heard of her or her husband. His father’s sister had died of pneumonia in the refugee march from North to South Korea.
His father used to say that his brother had died in an underground train accident. “But I got to an age, around the time I was at college working on a project about family history, where I was like: ‘Dad, there was no subway for him to die on’. Then the truth came out. He and his brother had been travelling on top of one of the boxcars of the refugee trains. The train lurched. His brother fell between the cars and one of his legs was cut off by the wheels. My father jumped down and picked him up and ran with him alongside the train until it stopped again. But it was too late. His brother died in his arms.
“When it came to writing The Surrendered I wanted to find a way of using the story somehow, and the rest of the novel expanded from it. Another refugee recalled seeing a foot alongside the train tracks, so that kind of thing did happen.”
How did the experiences of war affect his father, who went on to become a psychiatrist? “He doesn’t talk about it. He’s a very self-contained, affable, gentle, fellow. He’s not dark, but he has a private life that perhaps one cannot touch.”
The rest of his research came from books and personal testimonies, although Lee says that “surprisingly little” has been written about the Korean War. June is “the other side” of what can happen to a war refugee: where his father is gentle, she is hard. “The endurance, the toughness you see in Koreans today, is down in some way to the generation that survived the war.”
Lee’s own childhood was “Korean at home, American outside and I could inhabit both quite well”. His mother was a free-spirited, warm and eloquent woman in her own language, but quiet and shy in the outside (Western) world. “Her personality was stunted a bit by society,” he says. “I could see her frustration sometimes because she just couldn’t express herself in the way she wanted to.”
Growing up, Lee was studious but not overly academic. “When you have to study something I think it makes you slightly resentful. At Princeton I certainly don’t feel like an academic, more an artist who’s been welcomed in.”
He wanted to be a writer from when he was 13, but after university went into trading financial equities. He resigned to focus on writing. “My parents were not happy. They said: ‘Why do you have to quit when so many people want a job?’ But I felt I could make money if I needed to.”
He wrote a first novel that was never published, and did a series of odd jobs. Around the same time his mother had cancer diagnosed. “I take after her in a lot of ways — my father is always telling me to get it checked out. She died almost 20 years ago, when she was 51. Because of doing temp jobs I could spend a lot of time with her. It worked out as well as it could have worked out.” Is there anything of his mother in June? “Sure, in the scenes when June feels her body under attack from the disease. My mother was in the prime of her life in many ways.”
Lee will return to the immigrant experience in his next novel, about a savvy young Chinese man newly resident in America, “which interests me, because China is so in the ascendant now. The immigrant is a powerful central figure because, as a newcomer, they see things we don’t. They’re open to everything, but wary, sceptical and a bit afraid, which gives them this fascinating energy.”
The Surrendered is published by Little, Brown, at £12.99, offer price £11.69, incl p&p. To order it, call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/bookshop
From Times Online
Published April 30 2010