The RAS Korean Literature Club discussion

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The following four posts will include an interview with Pachinko author Min Jin Lee conducted in late 2016 and released in connection with her then-forthcoming novel (released, March 2017); and a few-hundred words from her novel's Acknowledgements section. The interview was published in some of the English editions of the 2017 novel, but not the Korean translations.

In these two places, Min Jin Lee talks about her writing process for her novel Pachinko, in a way I find useful and illuminating.

One thing you see through this Author's Note-like material (on which more shortly), Pachinko may be a historical-fiction novel but author Min Jin Lee herself is a historical actor. The big success and 'reach' of her novel reinforces that view, but this pre-publication material likewise show that.

If you give yourself the fifteen minutes or so it requires to read this material, you'll see her sketch out her years-long process leading to the writing: where she was, who she was talking to, something of her psychological drive. (Well, you judge for yourself all what it is.) The writing and revising process, the contacts along the way, the three-or-four-year residence in Japan, and so forth -- and Min Jin Lee herself, as a person with her own experience, family-tradition(s), and world-experience -- all these things exist within dynamic history that overlaps with the novel's period, places, and characters.

Yes, it's fair to say Min Jin Lee's own (real-world) historical-arc overlaps modestly with the eras, places, and (similar types of) people of the novel. The novel is fiction. We sense Min Jin Lee feels it's plausible enough to be a kind of artist's recreation of real events. (There is meta-commentary here on what fiction itself is. Min J'n Lee's "characters are very real to [her]," she says in the interview.) This makes for a blurring of the lines between reality and fiction, to a degree that I think motivated her whole project. (My view is there are some anachronistic characterizations; the inevitable influence of ca.2010s thinking on events of many decades earlier -- which is inevitable, and itself "part of the text," as I'd see it.)

I find this material interesting, for similar reasons as I did the Author's Note material for Red Sword (see: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...).

As mentioned earlier, the two sources together -- the first half or so of Min JIn Lee's Acknowledgements section, and then the "Conversation with Min Jin Lee" interview from 2016 and released as back-material in some editions of the novel -- I would argue effectively constitute an "Author's Note" for Pachinko.

East-Asian writing has a strong tradition of the Author's Note, both historically and today. The Author's Note in this tradition is a kind of extended commentary on one's own work, published immediately at the end of the work, with the original work. These Author's Notes give first-person (real author's real voice), real-world commentary on the story just told. In the pre-modern period, it wasn't rare, it seems, for Author's Notes to approach (sometimes even exceed!) the length of the fiction story itself. (You can see examples in English of this in Pak Jiwon 18th-century stories; see The Novels of Park Jiwon .)

In the West, as far as I'm aware, there is not much of a tradition of this style of Author's Note in fiction, and people would tend to view it a little askance. (The tradition is accepted and normal, however, in non-fiction.)

In the West, sometimes you'll see such material in republications in, say, 25th-anniversary editions, but more usually it's other people commentating on the text as historical document. With original works, we generally expect no sort of in-text insertion of this kind. The text stands alone!

Shakespeare didn't pop in at the end of the play and say, "Hi, folks, let me tell you about how I was feeling and doing when the idea for Hamlet came to me. A few years back, it was a dark and stormy night down in old Statford-town, when..." (Not that the above necessarily captures what traditional or contemporary Author's Notes are or have been.)

It's interesting, however, that Min Jin Lee follows, without apology, the East Asian tradition of the "substantial, in-text Author's Note" (as I would interpret this material) via her approach to her Acknowledgements section, and then this longer "Conversation with Min Jin Lee" interview.

I believe that my quoting from a portion of the Pachinko Acknowledgements section, and my reproducing this interview (which can also be found elsewhere online), are in line with "fair use" standards. I cannot imagine this affecting those seeking to buy the book. In the following posts I quote zero from the novel itself, just this ancillary material. And it is for purely educational purpose, in the moment related to this Korean Literature Club's forthcoming (July 10, 2025) discussion of Pachinko, but also for purposes of a wider study of Min Jin Lee and her historical-fiction novel Pachinko and its place in the world.

To follow: four posts; first, one quoting from Min Jin Lee's "Acknowledgements" section. Then, reproducing the "Conversation with Min Jin Lee" interview (here in three parts).
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(Quote from Min Jin Lee, my paper-copy of Pachinko)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I got the idea for the story in 1989.

I was a junior in college, and I didn’t know what I’d do after graduation. Rather than ponder my future, I sought distractions. One afternoon, I attended what was then called a Master’s Tea, a guest lecture series at Yale. I’d never been to one before. An American missionary based in Japan was giving a talk about the “Zainichi,” a term used often to describe Korean Japanese people who were either migrants from the colonial era or their descendants. Some Koreans in Japan do not wish to be called Zainichi Korean because the term means literally “foreign resident staying in Japan,” which makes no sense since there are often third, fourth, and fifth surviving generations of Koreans in Japan. There are many ethnic Koreans who are now Japanese citizens, although this option to naturalize is not an easy one. There are also many who have intermarried with the Japanese or who have partial Korean heritage. Sadly, there is a long and troubled history of legal and social discrimination against the Koreans in Japan and those who have partial ethnic Korean backgrounds. There are some who never disclose their Korean heritage, although their ethnic identity may be traced to their identification papers and government records.

The missionary talked about this history and relayed a story of a middle school boy who was bullied in his yearbook because of his Korean background. The boy jumped off a building and died. I would not forget this.

I graduated college in 1990 with a degree in history. I went to law school and practiced law for two years. After quitting the law, I decided to write as early as 1996 about the Koreans in Japan. I wrote many stories and novel drafts, which were never published. I was despondent. Then in 2002, The Missouri Review published the story “Motherland,” which is about a Korean Japanese boy who gets fingerprinted and receives a foreigner’s identity card on his birthday, and later it won the Peden Prize. Also, I’d submitted a fictionalized account of the story I’d heard in college and received a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. With that grant money, I took classes and paid for a babysitter so I could write. This early recognition was critical, because it took me so long to publish anything at all. Moreover, the NYFA fellowship confirmed my stubborn belief that the stories of Koreans in Japan should be told somehow when so much of their lives had been despised, denied, and erased.

I wanted very much to get this story right; however, I felt that I didn’t have all the knowledge or skills to do this properly. In my anxiety, I did an enormous amount of research and wrote a draft of a novel about the Korean Japanese community. Still, it did not feel right. Then in 2007, my husband got a job offer in Tokyo, and we moved there in August. On the ground, I had the chance to interview dozens of Koreans in Japan and learned that I’d gotten the story wrong. The Korean Japanese may have been historical victims, but when I met them in person, none of them were as simple as that. I was so humbled by the breadth and complexity of the people I met in Japan that I put aside my old draft and started to write the book again in 2008, and I continued to write it and revise it until its publication.

I have had this story with me for almost thirty years. Consequently, there are many people to thank.

Speer Morgan and Evelyn Somers of The Missouri Review believed in this story first. The NYFA gave me a fiction fellowship when I wanted to give up. Thank you.

When I lived in Tokyo, a great number of individuals agreed to sit with me and answer my many questions about the Koreans in Japan as well as about expatriate life, international finance, the yakuza, the history of colonial Christianity, police work, immigration, Kabukicho, poker, Osaka, Tokyo real estate deals, leadership in Wall Street, mizu shobai, and of course, the pachinko industry. When we could not meet in person, many spoke to me on the phone or answered my questions via e-mail. I am in debt to the following generous individuals [....]

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(End quote from Min Jin Lee, "Acknowledgements" section, Pachinko [2017].)

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To follow: the "Conversation with Min Jin Lee" late-2016 interview, in three parts.
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(Quote from published interview with Min Jin Lee, conducted around late 2016, on her novel Pachinko [released, March 2017]; reproduced here in three parts.)

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A CONVERSATION WITH MIN JIN LEE

(part 1 of 3)

Q.: What initially inspired you to write this novel? Why did you choose to focus on Korea and Japan during a time of war?

MIN JIN LEE: I learned about the Korean-Japanese people nearly thirty years ago when I was in college. I didn't know anything about this community, which had its origins during the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. As a history major and as an immigrant, I was curious about the Korean diaspora, resulting from the invasions and destabilization of the once-unified nation. However, what really moved me to write this novel and to rewrite it so many times were the compelling stories of individuals who struggled to face historical catastrophes. Although the history of kings and rulers is unequivocally fascinating, I think that we are also hungry for the narrative history of ordinary people, who lack connections and material resources. The modern Korean is informed by the legacy of the Japanese occupation, World War II, the Cold War, and the Korean War as well as Confucianism, Buddhism, Communism, and Christianity. All these topics are reflected in this book, because they interest me, but I wanted to explore and better understand how common people live through these events and issues. These wars and ideas loom large in our imagination, but on a daily basis, such events and beliefs are illustrated concretely from moment to moment.

Q.: What was the process of writing such a long family saga like? Did you begin with that intention and a map of how the characters' lives would play out, or did you work it out as you wrote?

MIN JIN LEE: I wrote a draft of this novel between the years 1996 and 2004, and it was called Motherland; an eponymous excerpt of it was published in The Missouri Review in 2002. But after I wrote the whole manuscript, I knew there was something wrong with it as a novel draft. Consequently, Motherland became the second novel manuscript I put aside, because it didn't match the vision I had of the work in my mind. I was also working on Free Food for Millionaires, and although it was my third novel manuscript, Free Food for Millionaires became my first published novel in 2007. That same year, I moved to Japan with my family. In Tokyo and Osaka, I interviewed many Korean-Japanese. Through that process of gathering oral histories, I felt compelled to discard my earlier draft. In terms of plot, in my initial draft, I had started the book in the late 1970s; after my interviews, I realized that the story had to begin in 1910, and my character Sunja moves from Korea to Japan in 1933. To put it mildly, this was a traumatic realization, because I had to change everything and start again. I wrote a new outline with new characters, and Motherland became Pachinko. After I got over my initial shock of having to throw away a whole manuscript, I returned to my desk and wrote new chapter outlines. In short, I do work with outlines and maps, but I am in the habit of throwing away my outlines and maps when necessary. I don't work very efficiently.

Q.: Why did you choose for the narrator's perspective to switch from character to character, rather than focusing on one person's experience?

MIN JIN LEE: Both Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko are written in an omniscient point of view. In both works, there is a narrator who knows the viewpoints of each character at all times. In Western literature, omniscient narration was the popular style in the nineteenth century, and it is my favorite point of view for community narratives. In both novels, I wasn't interested in only one or two main characters. This bias may arise from my personality. I am normally interested in the minor characters as well as the major ones. In realistic fiction and especially in a book-length work, characters cannot exist alone, and certainly they are never in a vacuum. Naturally, the interplay of characters in setting and time affects both plot and characterization. There are major plot lines, but minor plot lines should offer critical support to the story. If history so often fails to represent all of us, it is not because historians are not interested, but because historians often lack the primary documents of so-called minor characters in history. Interestingly, women have become at best the minor characters in history—although we represent half the human race—because we have left so few primary documents in nearly all cultures and civilizations. Also, poor and middle-class men of all races and cultures—although their lives were so often tragically sacrificed in war and labor—are often minor characters in history, because they too did not leave sufficient written evidence of their lives. I am drawn to novel writing using the omniscient point of view because this allows me to imagine and reveal the minds as well as the behaviors of all characters when necessary. For the kinds of books I want to write, I need an omniscient narrator. That said, I love to read first-person (singular and plural), second-person (singular and plural), and third-person limited (fixed or shifting) points of view. The twenty-first-century author has a lot of choices.

Q.: Did you consciously shift the narrative tone as you switched perspectives?

MIN JIN LEE: I think my narrator's tone (by "tone," I mean the attitude the narrator has toward the subject) does not shift much. More than anything, I wanted very much for the tone to be fair. There are remarkable narrators in great works of fiction that are wry (Pride and Prejudice), sarcastic and unreliable (Lolita), opinionated and high-minded (Jane Eyre), humble and curious (David Copperfield), and intellectual and world-weary (Middlemarch). "Fair" seems like such a simple word, but I think because my subject matter is so troubling and controversial, I wanted my narrator to be as objective as possible. Above all, I wanted the narrator to be sympathetic to every character's plight. I will be forty-eight years old in November 2016 [b.1968], and as I get older, it is easier for me to imagine and appreciate many more perspectives—perspectives I may have disliked when I was much younger. Especially for this book, I wanted my narrator to be fair to each perspective because the Korean-Japanese are so seldom written about in English. I find that in life, even the most unsympathetic person has a clear delineation of his motives, however complex and unappealing, but to him, there is a moral clarity to his actions. I think part of my job as a storyteller is to recognize the congruity or incongruity of his motives and behavior and somehow still be fair to the character and to the reader. I think, especially here, if the narrator is fair, then the reader can decide what happened and what she feels about the story.

[continued... 1/3]
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[continuing "A Conversation with Min Jin Lee," part 2/3]

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Q.: Which authors do you admire?

MIN JIN LEE: I adore nineteenth-century writers Bronte, Eliot, Trollope, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Balzac. I also love Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Tanizaki, Henry James, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. As for modern living writers, I very much admire Lynn Ahrens, Lan Samantha Chang, Alexander Chee, Junot Díaz, Robin Marantz Henig, Kazuo Ishiguru, Colson Whitehead, Haruki Murakami, David Henry Hwang, Meg Wolitzer, Maxine Hong Kingston, Hilton Als, Simon Winchester, Chang-rae Lee, David Mitchell, Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Gary Shteyngart, William Trevor, and Erica Wagner. The writings of Cynthia Ozick, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Audre Lorde, Vivian Gornick, bell hooks, James Baldwin, and Virginia Woolf continue to encourage me to write more honestly and to dwell on subjects that matter to me.

In many ways, Sunja's plight is the catalyst for much of the book's plot. What is your relationship with her character? What inspired her creation?
From 2007 to 2011, I interviewed many Korean-Japanese men and women, and a great many of them mentioned a first-generation matriarch who sacrificed much of her life for the next generation, which ultimately led me to Sunja and her world. To earn money, first-generation Korean women in Japan worked in open markets, raised pigs in their homes, picked and traded rags and scrap metal, manufactured bootleg alcohol, farmed, and sold homemade goods from carts, among other things. Back then as well as today, the poorest women sold homemade goods in the open market, because they did not have much capital to invest. By selling boiled corn, tteokbokki, confections, sweet rice cakes, or gimbap in stalls or from carts, market women supported their families. Later, I met women peddlers in the open markets in Osaka and Tokyo. It is not easy to sell things in an open market, exposed to the elements as well as to be vulnerable to any person who wants to approach you. Also, then as well as today, market women often work in societies where women have less legal protections, rights, and significantly less socio-economic power.

I was born in Seoul and lived there until I was seven, and in my childhood I was keenly aware of the old women who sold snacks in the open markets and on street corners when I went food shopping with my mother. They were also vivid because they wore traditional clothing, in stark contrast to the modern Koreans of Seoul. When I visited South Korea as a college student in the late 1980s and many times later as an adult, I saw these women again in the markets and in the streets, almost unchanged in their expressions except for their clothes and hair.

Finally, my parents became small business owners when they immigrated to the United States. The daughter of a well-known minister and the headmaster of an orphanage school in Busan, my mother grew up very sheltered in a privileged home. A former music major at Yonsei University, she taught piano in our home when we lived in Seoul. When we moved to New York, she worked alongside my father in their cramped, under-heated wholesale jewelry shop in Manhattan, which was robbed and burgled on numerous occasions. She was on her feet most of the day dealing with customers. On weekends and school holidays, my sisters and I took turns working with our parents at the store. In college, I worked part-time selling clothes and shoes in retail shops. I continue to feel a strong connection with anyone who has worked in sales or in the service industry.

Q.: Is it easy for you to write your characters' deaths, or do you have a strong sentimental attachment to them?

MIN JIN LEE: My characters are very real to me, and I speculate that this must be true for most writers. Also, as a reader, I am very attached to characters in books. When Lily Bart dies in The House of Mirth, I wept and wept. Years later, I read Elaine Showalter's brilliant essay "The Death of the Lady (Novelist)" where she posits that Lily's death represents the death of the "perfect lady" who no longer belongs in an era of "vulgarity, boorishness, and malice." Showalter argues cogently that Lily has to die, because her aspiration for the ideals of a perfect lady no longer made sense and that the author Wharton was also shedding an outdated role as a "lady novelist": "In deciding that a Lily cannot survive, that the lady must die to make way for the modern woman who will work, love and give birth, Wharton was also signaling her own rebirth as the artist." I mention Showalter's insightful analysis of a formative work in my reading and writing life because she taught me a larger idea beyond death as a plot element or death as the expiration of a life. It is possible that characters need to die for the author to make her moral point, for the author himself to regenerate by letting go of an ideal identity, or for the world to recognize the necessity of certain ideas and ideals to die. Certain characters die in Pachinko, and to me, their deaths were both natural to the plot and necessary symbolically. To me, the deaths were painfully inevitable; and to be clear, dear reader, each death broke me.

Q.: Much of this novel deals with the pressures of being a first-generation immigrant, or having dual cultural identities. How much of this was informed by your own experiences? What effects do you think war has on individuals and society?

MIN JIN LEE: Consciously or unconsciously, being a first-generation immigrant informs my point of view and interests. Regardless of one's identity, all of us live in an information era where we are continually made to feel physically vulnerable to the political instability and violence around the globe in real time. Consequently, most of the developed world has growing factions in each nation, which want to raise the drawbridge and batten down the hatches. Out of fear, many of us want to retreat, and this makes some sense. Fair or no, immigration is considered in the context of economic scarcity, fear of terrorism, wars and geopolitical conflicts, which may be incipient stages of informal proxy wars. Whatever their cause, all such anxieties and conflicts affect individuals and societies and their movement patterns. Naturally, the movement of people changes the culture of the people around them, and the culture of the people around them affects the migrant people.

As for me, I lived just a few blocks away from the World Trade Center during the September 11, 2001, attacks, and my family and I had to be evacuated for a time. My family and I were residing in Tokyo during the Tohoku Earthquake on March 11, 2011. I have been changed by these events, and these events inform my work and the way I approach crises.

Unfortunately, every one of us is vulnerable to manmade and natural disasters, small and great. According to the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR), there are over 65 million refugees in the world, which is about 1 out of every 113 people on earth. When my father was sixteen years old, he lost his family in the Korean War. The war and the memory of being a war refugee was not spoken of often, but these events lingered in the air of my childhood home. I think this kind of trauma is an unspoken legacy for many first- and second-generation immigrants in the United States and elsewhere. My father, a teenage war refugee from Wonsan, became a South Korean migrant worker in Busan, then a college-educated businessman in Seoul. He immigrated to the United States and became a small business owner. He is now a naturalized American citizen, a retiree, and a member of the AARP who also enjoys recreational deep-sea fishing. He has lived many lives away from his birthplace. Most immigrants are like this. Many of my friends and their families have been directly affected by the Holocaust, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the suffering inflicted by military dictatorships in the Americas and in African nations. Today, all of us live in an era of vast income, educational and information inequality. However, what we also witness each day is how many ordinary people resist the indignities of life and history with grace and conviction by taking care of their families, friends, neighbors, and communities while striving for their individual goals. We cannot help but be interested in the stories of people that history pushes aside so thoughtlessly.

[continued... 2/3]
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[continuing "A Conversation with Min Jin Lee," part 3/3]

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Q.: Why did you choose to title your novel Pachinko?

MIN JIN LEE: Pachinko is a kind of vertical pinball game played by adults in Japan. Although gambling is formally illegal there, Pachinko bypasses this prohibition by allowing the player to win prizes, called keihin, which are exchanged outside the premises of the Pachinko parlor for cash. What is little known outside of Japan is that as of 2015, Pachinko generates revenues of about 19 trillion yen, which is about $190 billion U.S. at the current exchange rate, or about twice the export revenues of the Japanese car industry. Yes, this includes Nissan, Toyota, and Honda. The game started out in the early part of the twentieth century in tiny stalls with itinerant operators at local festivals. After World War II, Pachinko was played in parlors for prizes like soap or cigarettes, which were exchanged elsewhere for cash. Today, many parlors issue tokens or cards embedded with valuable metals, which are exchanged for cash only a few steps away from the parlor. There are about 12,000 parlors officially registered in Japan, and 11 million Japanese play Pachinko regularly, or about one out of every seven Japanese adults. Although ethnic Japanese may have started the Pachinko business, over its near century presence in Japan, a great number of ethnic Koreans have operated Pachinko parlors and have been involved in the keihin business and the manufacture of the machines. Despite the strict regulatory involvement of the police and government authorities in the past twenty-five-plus years, the Japanese continue to view the Pachinko industry and the people involved with suspicion and hostility. I mention all this here because nearly every Korean-Japanese person I met in Japan had some historical connection or social connection with the Pachinko business—one of the very few businesses in which Koreans could find employment and have a stake. For example, if I interviewed an American-educated Korean-Japanese person who worked in the finance industry as an executive for a Western investment bank, he may have a relative who worked briefly in a parlor, or an uncle who lost everything in a failed Pachinko business. Also, nearly every Korean-Japanese I interviewed had some close or distant connection to the yakiniku (Korean barbecue, or galbi) business. In short, Korean-Japanese had to participate in small businesses, which were often given outsider or inferior status, because it was not possible to find work elsewhere. For me, the Pachinko business and the game itself serve as metaphors for the history of Koreans in Japan—a people caught in seemingly random global conflicts—as they win, lose, and struggle for their place and for their lives.

Q.: Female beauty, and how it can persist or fade with age, is such a recurring observation in your novel. Why?

MIN JIN LEE: One form of power, however fleeting, for anyone, is physical beauty. Unfortunately, for women, beauty is often expected in addition to whatever other attributes that may be needed or that may already exist. In many societies, females are often privileged or punished proportionately for their beauty or lack thereof. Without entering into a larger discussion of the intersection of beauty and age, as well as the impossible external requirements of physical beauty for women of all ages, I guess, I would like to discuss something more obvious in this work. In Pachinko, I wanted to reflect how a poor young woman's unconventional beauty, unknown even to herself, can be magnetic and resilient. In the West, there is a disjuncture between the reification and the excessive valuation of certain aspects of so-called Asian female beauty (Asian skincare products being perceived as superior; the commodification of Asian hair, which is sold expensively for extensions; or the hypersexualization of Asian women in pornography, which I have discussed in Free Food for Millionaires) and the utter lack of ratification or acknowledgment of realistic Asian female beauty in mainstream media (the sheer absence of Asian female fashion models of varying appearances, mainstream actresses, or any major roles in film and television). There is even a grosser lack of recognition of Asian male beauty or sexual attractiveness. Scholars like David Eng have argued effectively that there is an established practice of a kind of racial castration of Asian men in Western media and literature. Orientalism, the objectification or erasure of Asian beauty and distortion of Asian sexuality deny Asian humanity. I treat all of these issues in my writings. That said, another cultural travesty is the sheer absence of realistic beauty of working-class women of all races in mainstream media, including novels and stories. In Pachinko, I am acknowledging the physicality and beauty of working-class immigrant women.

I grew up in Elmhurst, Queens, and now live in Harlem. All my life, I have been surrounded by all kinds of women who work in menial and middle-class jobs, who lack the resources to join gyms, color their hair, buy cosmetics and skincare, go to dermatologists and plastic surgeons, polish their nails, eliminate unwanted hair, buy expensive clothing, eat less cheap carbohydrates and eat more lean proteins to be slim…the list goes on. Conventional physical beauty takes time, money, and effort, and it is expensive for all women, but it is cruelly so for women without resources. Every study points to the fact that attractive people also earn more money and have higher social status. Needless to say, it is a perpetual loop of economic gender cruelty to require women to pay for their physical upkeep and then to punish them financially for not keeping up when they don't have the funds. However, the reality is that despite what the media says, there are many women in history and in life who are not conventionally attractive yet who are very appealing. So I wanted to write about the woman that I see on the subway or waiting for the bus in the winter wearing a threadbare coat, or the woman who works as a cashier at an H-Mart—women who are too heavy or wrinkled or gray-haired or improperly dressed by the standards of television, movies, or fashion magazines and now social media sharing apps which commend filters to alter our already insecure images. I am interested in the physicality of women who live their daily struggles with integrity; their beauty captivates those who know them.

Q.: Do you think you have certain themes that you gravitate toward as a writer?

MIN JIN LEE: My subjects are history, war, economics, class, sex, gender, and religion. I think my themes are forgiveness, loss, desire, aspiration, failure, duty, and faith.

Q. How did your experience writing Pachinko differ from your first novel, Free Food for Millionaires?

MIN JIN LEE: I wrote Free Food for Millionaires exclusively in New York City. I grew up in Queens, went to high school in the Bronx, and my parents had a small wholesale jewelry business on 30th Street and Broadway in Manhattan's Koreatown. Both my sisters live in Brooklyn, and my parents now live in New Jersey. I went to college in Connecticut. Needless to say, I know the tri-state area fairly well. Although I had written a draft of this novel in New York, I wrote the new rough draft almost entirely in Tokyo during the years 2007–2011, and I rewrote the drafts between 2011 and 2015 in New York. In Tokyo, I was researching, interviewing, and writing all the time; I was also profoundly homesick and melancholy in a way I had never been before. I missed my family and my friends deeply, and I felt cut off from everyone back home. I enjoyed living in Tokyo very much, but it was difficult, too. Living in Tokyo, I missed America very much; I yearned for the openness, hospitality, and optimism of Americans. I missed the ease of conversation that Americans can have with strangers. In New York, I am more guarded and private, but in Tokyo, I felt a kind of intense and immediate kinship with my fellow Americans. The epigram for Book III comes from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, where he writes of a "horizontal comradeship" which must be necessarily imagined in a nation. I felt this horizontal comradeship strongly with Americans when I lived abroad. I had lost my birthplace once when I moved from Seoul to New York as a child, and living as an adult expatriate in Japan reminded me again of what my characters who lost their birthplace experienced in Pachinko. On a funny note, one of the things I did to overcome my intense homesickness for America, which allowed me to write the new rough draft of Pachinko, was to bake all the time. It was curious, because I have always cooked and baked, but never as much as I did in Tokyo. In my four years in Japan, I was baking the Cook's Illustrated Chocolate Sour Cream Bundt Cake on a dangerously regular basis. I don't know why, but to me, that amazing cake tastes like home.

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[End of the 2016 interview with Min Jin Lee, 3/3.]

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Here is one of the more valuable interviews with Min Jin Lee:

https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmast...

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A 2024 INTERVIEW WITH MIN JIN LEE

TITLE: "Min Jin Lee Revisits the Decades It Took To Write Pachinko"

TYPE: Audio interview, New York

PEOPLE: Pachinko author Min Jin Lee and documentarian Joe Skinner (PBS).

TIME: November 2024

LENGTH: 36 minutes

TRANSCRIPT: available at https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmast...

Excerpt:

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MIN JIN LEE: I don’t think I know any serious writer who doesn’t think that one can write outside of his or her or their experience. I think what one must do is to be profoundly sympathetic, profoundly empathetic, profoundly accurate. So you need to do the homework. You need to really do the work before you write it.

But I think we would limit art tremendously if we only wrote specifically about our little lane. You can argue that I had no right to write about the Korean Japanese people. But I’ve had many Korean, actually Korean-Japanese people around the world have told me that they’re so grateful that I wrote this book.

Two years ago I had a lot of nice, laudatory things happen in Korea. This really important literary critic came up to me and said, "You know, I nominated you for this prize." And I said, "Well, thank you so much." Like, I just didn’t know what to say because, you know, it’s such a nice thing someone did for you. And then she goes, "I nominated you because I realized that you must be, like, kind of dumb about this." I should just leave now and just like, you know, like hand her my flowers. (Laughs) And she said, "Well, I realized that you couldn’t have really understood what you were starting. You had to be an American to take this topic on."

I knew what she meant, because a Korean person would understand better how complex and what a minefield this topic would be. It would have been so easy for me to get into trouble with, I don’t know, fifty groups. But because I did the work, I feel like I could live with myself.

If someone doesn’t like it, or if someone did have criticism, they have every right to say that. I believe so much in the freedom of expression. And I think that art can’t exist without the sort of vital discussion and respectfulness in discussion. However, there are things I want to say, there are things I have questions about, and I think that our curiosity is what is going to, in the end allow us to have a higher quality of, dare I say, love.

(end quote from Min Jin Lee, Nov 2024; see interview link).

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COMMENT: I am not sure how much I agree with this (attributed) characterization that Min Jin Lee "had to be an American to take on this topic" of Korean emigrants in Japan. I'd like to have asked her what exactly she meant by that, or thought the person had meant, in more-concrete terms.

That Min Jin Lee included this commentary that "only someone like her" could have written Pachinko -- i.e., someone who is not fully culturally Korean (or not quite a Korean; a diaspora member) -- means that either Min Jin Lee believes it (i.e., that a Korean-in-Korea somehow "couldn't" have written the book or wouldn't have been allowed to, for some reason?); or that she wants us to believe it; or, at the least, that she thinks this Korean-in-Korea literary-critic wanted her, a diaspora-Korean or Korean-American, to believe it. (Or some combination of all three things.)

In this line of commentary I see a lot of subtext, including on the diving Korean Literature proper from Korean-Diaspora Literature, which is effectively the topic of another thread active here as I write this: What is Korean Literature? (https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...).
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Anyone reading this, feel free to add here any other useful links, or paste excerpts, to interviews or commentary related to what Min Jin Lee has said of her path to writing Pachinko. Not 100% necessary but it's best if a link is with at least some commentary or indication of what you find valuable.

I continue to be interested in the ideological layers, and self-representations, behind the drive to write the Pachinko novel and her writing- and thinking-process(es), and self-identity.

Min Jin Lee is a Korean-identified person but one whose personal experience is only semi-Korean at best (given her presence in the U.S. since around the time she turned 8), at least as many "native, full-, born-and-raised-in-Korea Koreans" would see it.

This is not my own idea purely; Min Jin Lee herself directly comments on it and it seems important to her self-conception of who she is and her role as writer in her three Korea-focused novels in the mid-2000s to mid-2020s period (one forthcoming, said to be called American Hagwon). On her identity and her self-view as Korean-but-also-outsider and therefore supposedly empowered, see the excerpt I give from the November 2024 interview one post above this one.)
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From a revealing interview with Min Jin Lee:

"Doing It Wrong: An Interview with Min Jin Lee" [conducted February 2018], by Abigail Meinen, June 2018, in Sampsonia Way ("an online magazine for literature, free speech, and social justice").

http://archive.sampsoniaway.org/liter...

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INTERVIEWER: This book spans so many places and times and people. What was the process like, to build the layers and layers of generations, and bring all these different people into the story?

MIN JIN LEE: [...] [W]hen I lived in Japan between 2007 to 2011, I interviewed all these Solomon-type people, these Wall Street guys who are Korean-Japanese or fourth generation. And when I met them, I found they’re just not that interesting. So I figured I can’t write a novel about them.

When I talked to them, they were very clear about who was interesting in their family, and it was often the first generation who did extraordinary things just to survive. For example, raising pigs. Their grandfathers would collect garbage to feed the pigs that lived in their houses. Or their great grandmothers who would make moonshine, or the equivalent, and would get arrested every week. This kind of world was very interesting and I couldn’t believe that they did that, and I decided that I would have to create those characters. [...]

INTERVIEWER: I am curious about what made you stick to the form of the novel and to fiction as a genre, as opposed to just publishing a collection of interviews with these folks?

MIN JIN LEE: Oh because I am not an ethnographer. I like anthropology a lot, I love the way anthropologists work, so in some ways I’m like a fake anthropologist. I get to do fake ethnographies and no one’s going to say I did it wrong because I am not an anthropologist! It gives you a lot of freedom.

Let’s say I was going to write about a young woman who does interviews for literary journals. So I decide I am going to interview you. I would hang out with you for like two days as you do your work, and then I would talk to you, but I would also watch you work. That’s sort of what I do for all of my characters. That takes an enormous amount of time. Then I’ll probably end up using about 2% of what we do together, but that’s the way I work.

What makes me stick with it is that I want to recreate something that’s different than what I see. I think that’s what fiction writers are doing. They’re telling the truth, and at the same time they’re asserting a thesis about the world. And I guess in many ways I don’t like the way the world is. I’m constantly figuring out how to create this alternate world that has a verisimilitude, that has an emotional truth to it, and then I see how that plays out. So I’m answering a lot of questions that I have about life. There are so many things that I don’t understand, and I get to work through in fiction. I couldn’t do that in nonfiction. In nonfiction you have a mandate of telling the truth. I am telling the emotional truth, I’m not telling the literal truth.

INTERVIEWER: [...] I am curious about the sort of emotional truth that you grew up with about Korea, and how it found its way into the book.

MIN JIN LEE: [...] My point of view of Korea is a child’s point of view. Because I left when I was seven and a half, there was an enormous amount of innocence. While I was growing up, a lot of horrible things happened politically in South Korea, and yet, I had a mother who was teaching piano at home. I remember things like getting ice cream as treats if we had some extra money, or how my father always wore a suit to the office; that’s sort of what I remember as a child. And that innocence is really nice because, now that I learned the historical aspect of what was really going on, I think, gosh, they must have been terrified in some ways. They must have been terrified sufficiently to say, “We would like to immigrate to another country and start all over again being essentially working class.”

My parents were middle class in Korea and they became working class in the United States, so it must have been that kind of fear, of political disruption, that would motivate somebody to uproot their lives and start all over again. My father came when he was forty, and I think, gosh, what would it take for me, at age forty, to go to another country where my language isn’t spoken and I don’t have hardly any money, very few connections, and start all over again? It’s really hard for me to imagine a reason why I would do that. It would have to be something cataclysmic, ‘cause I’m forty-nine now. And where could I go? The equivalent would be me going to, let’s say, Chile, and starting again.

INTERVIEWER: Thinking about transnationality, I think Solomon is a really interesting character because he goes to American university but then he has these experiences in Tokyo which are very connected with his Korean-ness. How do you see economic globalization changing the way we think about a certain nationalism, or a certain national identity?

MIN JIN LEE: Well what makes me really sad is that the positive part of globalization and transnationalism is felt by those who are very elite. There is an ever-greater polarity between those who can call themselves global citizens, and those who are just citizens, who have no idea that the world is being changed dramatically by the disintermediation of technology. Unless you are part of the world in which you can act in an advanced way and anticipate all the things that are happening to your career, you are going to be in trouble. And that’s what’s happening right now because every single industry around the world, not just the United States, is being disintermediated by technology. We are not talking about that change, or about how people aren’t being paid for their work anymore, or how certain people have to do four jobs in order to make the same amount of money or even less, or how the cost of housing is rising, or how we’re becoming more urbanized. All those thing are going on, and rather than talking about that and having legal and systemic changes happen, we’re scapegoating newcomers.

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INTERVIEWER: Right, far more than I even have on my list here! But I think that the consciousness that so many Americans have is that Asian American literature all just goes on one shelf, so many people aren’t aware of all the intricacies within it. What are your thoughts on that, on the reactions that you have gotten to the book, and on this Korean-Japanese history that so many people don’t know about?

MIN JIN LEE: It’s not taught anywhere. If you were interested in the history of the Korean and Japanese, which is a micro micro history, you’d have to work pretty hard to find it. There are academics who have written beautiful books on it, so on the back of my book, you’ll see a paragraph dedicated to the most important scholars in the field, and I hope people go to it. [...]

(end quote from 2018 interview, Sampsonia)

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My comment: My copy of this book has no list of sources. Whatever she was referring to, it certainly didn't carry over to other editions. Nor does the 2018 Korean-translation or the 2022 Korean-translation have any such thing. Nor does her Acknowledgements section (a defacto Author's Note) say anything about where her sources came from. Except, that is, for the references to interviews with Zainichi Koreans in Japan, 2007-2011. These interviews are unpublished anywhere, that I know of. (She sort of laughs at the idea in this interview.)

The implication is, really, that all the stories in Pachinko are basically true. That they are based on stories told by real people, or re-told from stories heard from earlier generations of these Koreans in Japan.

This unravels a bit, though, when you learn how similar much of Min Jin Lee's own family-history is with the characters in the first half of the book. She doesn't often stress this in interviews, but it's striking. The Korean-immigrant-in-a-richer-society element is probably often drawn from her own life, or direct parallels that she found in Japan.

As for her sources for the general history. I know enough about Korean historical-political narratives to know where, more or less, that she's getting a lot of her information that she framed many plot-points around. That I have seen no word from her on varying accounts of the eras she is writing about (does she think there is only one side to the story?) is a little troubling to me. But she would say: Hey, lighten up! It's just fiction. We can do whatever we want.

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