Chang-rae Lee is the author of four novels: “Native Speaker” (1995), “A Gesture Life” (1999), “Aloft” (2004) and “The Surrendered” (2010). His novels have won several awards and citations, such as the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the American Book Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, ALA Notable Book of the Year Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Literary Award, the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award, and the NAIBA Book Award for Fiction. He has also been awarded numerous fellowships, including those from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and The American Academy in Rome. Chang-rae Lee was born in Seoul, Korea, and educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, Yale, and the University of Oregon. He is currently a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, where he teaches creative writing.
Since publishing my first novel in 1995, I’ve been periodically asked certain pointed questions about the origins of a story or character, in particular about the Asian-American figures in my books, the underlying assumption being that I’ve taken someone personally known to me, or even a blood relation, and then proceeded with the writing. While I’m sure all writers have been asked this on publishing a book, I can’t help but feel that because my characters share my “ethnic” heritage that this seems to some readers more clearly true in my case. By extension, there’s an implication that I’m more recounting a story than writing one, that I report on what I’ve experienced, rather than employing my full experience and imagination to create a piece of truthful art. This is something that I’ve heard other writers of color express as well, and it’s a particularly frustrating feeling for me. As a novelist, I’ve always been a bit leery of writing anything too directly sourced in or inspired by my life or that of my family.
The hesitation is not so much about privacy or a sense of decorum or even to bristle against the aforementioned assumption as it is one of process and craft. Fiction writing, it seems to me, is about the joyous, hard task of creation and the nearly infinite range of exertions that act entails, which is to fashion out of the nothingness a world of language and characters and plots that will seem to the reader to possess an unimpeachable and inevitable reality (whether realistic or speculative, whether physical or wholly in the mind). This “reality” is of course completely constructed: a particular character, say, is shaped into a convincing existence not simply by the bestowal of a “personality” and “history” (regardless from whom it’s drawn) but also because he or she is set forth within a series of actions and settings and other figures, all of which will (one hopes) somehow more deeply illustrate the character and develop the larger story and its concerns. Those entrancing, arresting characters of great literature—whether Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby or Sethe of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”—are surely recognizable to us as “people” and reveal through their tribulations enduring truths about humanity, but in fact, they don’t really exist very well outside of their fictive realms. They only feel “real.” They’re not meant to be actual people, their being and function tightly circumscribed by a complete lingual universe that in turn begins to re-engender itself, character-in-a-plot creating more plot, and further characterization, and then further plot, and so on and so forth. Poor Anna Karenina is trapped in her life/world, but so wonderfully trapped that she becomes her world; there is no excising or separating her from it, and there’s such an exquisitely binding reciprocity of character and language that the story (ultimately, in retrospect) has no easy beginning or end. Anna simply is, and always was and will be.
