Zitat des Tages von Min Jin Lee:
I think that social migration to another economic class requires a kind of negotiating with yourself. And also, there's so much ambivalence in your heart about who you are and who you're really not.
I really love Japan, and I liked living there very much, and there are so many terrific things about Japan. However, I do think what's amazing is that Japan really prides itself on being monoracial. It doesn't have the same kind of idea as in the U.K. or Canada or the United States, in which the idea of diversity is a strength.
I think that if you're a writer and a woman, then you have to take humiliation very well.
I think it's not an accident that you don't have that many Asian American women writers who are breaking out. I don't think it's an accident that you don't have that many Asian American writers, either women or men. I don't think that immigrants are encouraged to become artists. That's very gendered and racialized and ethnicized.
Twenty-five million people who live in North Korea are denied freedom in every respect of their lives. In short, they are hostages. Imagine 25 million hostages.
As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.
When my family was living in Tokyo, there was a year when we couldn't go back to the States for Thanksgiving, and we went to Seoul. Mandu is a highly satisfying substitute for turkey and trimmings.
We all want to be affiliated with success. It's the impulse of people who have been excluded, and Koreans have been excluded from lots of parties.
For me, writing a historical novel was really hard. I love history as a subject and majored in it in college. I think, in a way, my training made it worse for me because I knew how important it was to focus on document-based analysis, and I really didn't want to get stuff wrong.
I moved to Queens, New York, when I was seven and a half. I went to middle school in a foreign country, but I had so many different kinds of Americans push me along and encourage me. I was very odd. I didn't talk very well. We were poor, and we didn't have any connections, but people showed up and pushed me along.
As an artist, my wheelhouse is 19th-century literature. I want to write realist novels in a Victorian sense, and the writers I admire in that style tend to do omniscient narration.
My husband is half Japanese and half white European-American, and our son is half Korean, quarter Japanese, and a quarter white European-American.
Education is a beautiful, liberating thing, but I think that tying in education and status, and the need to do well at every cost, is toxic.
I do have love for Japan. At the same time, I have a complex relationship with Japan because I'm Korean. But I think it shows the strength of a country when you can talk about the past transparently.
I love most New England towns.
Pachinko, like all gambling, is rigged. The house always wins. It's a central metaphor of life. It's rigged, but you keep playing.
I have accepted the fact that I don't work very quickly, that I have been rejected a lot as a writer, and that what I do is unusual, so I just have to accept the terms and that it's going to take longer. It is what it is.
I thought, 'Nobody wants this book, and I'm an idiot for having worked on it so hard.' But to succeed in writing, you must be willing to look stupid for a long time. 'Pachinko' took so long because I got it wrong so many times.
For me, whatever you write about should be worthy of your attention, worthy of your gifts. That's very important.
I find being an adult very difficult. Being an adult artist, Asian American, incredibly difficult. Or trying, anyway.
I've often felt like an outsider, not necessarily because I'm Korean, an immigrant, or female. I think writers are odd people.
My father was born on Christmas Day in 1934. He grew up in what is now part of North Korea. When the Korean War began, my father was 16, and he found passage on an American refugee ship,thinking he'd be gone for just a few days, but he never saw his mother or his sister again.
We're so willing to dehumanize entire populations in order for us to conveniently go along with our lives. We know exactly one North Korean, for example. The rest of them, we don't know - but it makes it very easy to bomb North Korea if we pretend they're all one person. Literature makes it harder to dehumanize people in this way.
I have romantic ideas about home and what it should mean.
There's a lot of freedom in failure, and I can see that now.
We're always observing, and we're cautious people. We really want attention, but at the same time, we're ashamed of wanting attention. All those bizarre qualities of being outside are necessary for being a writer.
I suffer from an enormous amount of self-doubt, so the fact that 'Pachinko' has been so kindly received has encouraged me not to give up, as I'm always telling myself that, 'Maybe this isn't a smart idea.'
I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.
The omniscient narrator is a bizarre technique, when you think about it, and no one uses it much anymore. But for the novels I want to write, it's the only approach that makes sense to me.
I believe there is meaning in life. I believe there is good and evil.
