Min Jin Lee On Writing 'Pachinko' - Service95 Book Club

I got the idea for the book when I was a junior in college I went to a lecture of a white missionary a nice guy who was doing good things for poor people in Japan and the people that he served were the Korean Japanese he told a story about a little Korean boy who was born in Japan who was bullied by his classmates and he killed himself he went up on a building and he jumped off and later on his parents went through his things and found his Middle School yearbook because a boy was only

13 and in the Middle School yearbook his Japanese classmates had written go back to where you belong I hate you you smell like kimchi and they wrote the words die die die I didn't know that I was going to write a book about the Korean Japanese people but I did start to really think about this issue because I was entirely ignorant about the history of the colonial era of Korea and Japan I think the concept was so much more broad than I realized so I knew there was something wrong I knew about the colonial era

I didn't understand what that would mean for the people of both the people on the peninsula as well as the people who went to Japan so I did a lot of research which meant that I learned a lot about the sociology the history and the law and the economics of about a hundred years and then I think the book became too unwieldy for me and it was just really intimidating well I wrote an entire draft and I called it motherland and it was about a father and a son Moses and Solomon and their girlfriend edsko

I worked on it for a really long time and it was really boring like so by the time I finished it it was this kind of self-righteous angry book one selection of it survives and it's a section about fingerprinting a kind of law that I found really interesting and then it was published in the Missouri view a little literary quarterly that's very wonderful and this was published in 2002 so when I say that I've been working on this book forever I really was working on it forever I've been using a word processor since I was

in college although I did go to college with a typewriter because that's how old I am but I work on a word processor I print it out and then I do a lot of hand editing and then I go right back to the computer and I start to read write usually very often from scratch very often from scratch unless it's in my 15th 20th draft but my first draft my second draft were utterly unrelated I ended up reading a great deal of academic research because the academics were the only people who had spent that kind

of considerable attention on the subject of the Koreans in Japan that said I don't think I really understood my own novel until I lived in Japan and I met the Korean Japanese people and they were not in any way victims in fact they were so hearty and and strong and smart and funny and they really didn't like the interpretation that they were victims and many of them loved Japan many of them had profound wonderful relationships with the Japanese so and they weren't saying oh I hate Japan I want to live in Korea in fact many

of them who had gone to Korea had had terrible experiences so all of that really changed my understanding of what I wanted to say what I needed to say I think what I share with other writers who take writing very seriously is that all of us draft and revise and throw out multiple manuscripts I don't know any serious writers who don't throw out manuscripts so in that sense I'm similar I think where I am different is that I do a lot of field work so I will pound the pavement and talk to people and listen

to them I will go to a lot of places so when I think about research I probably do a lot more than I need to do it so I do academic research I do secondary research I do first-person interviews I go to the actual sites and and then I write drafts and then I throw them away and I start again so in that sense I probably take far too long and I'm not sure if that's necessarily a good thing