When I was in Hong Kong for the Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival, I was interviewed by the journalist Saul Sugarman who is also on the staff of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
Link » Wall Street Journal Asia
An essay on my complicated travel issues appears in the April 2009 TRAVEL + LEISURE (Southeast Asia). It was surprisingly funny to brood on my curious anxieties about leaving the house. In the process of writing this essay, I figured out that I love the learning and seeing bits of travel even more than my consuming fear of the unknown.
My T+L editors were Chris Kucway, Paul Ehrlich & Matt Leppard.
A profile of my work appeared in the Post – the English-language paper of Hong Kong. It was written by Melinda Harper. I recently visited Hong Kong for its Man Hong Kong Literary Festival, and it was a beautiful place.
A profile of my work appeared on March 8, 2009 in the Yonhap News—South Korea’s official news agency. I was interviewed by the journalist Shin Hae-in of Yonhap.
The interview begins…
“She was once cast in with that sea of would-be authors, struggling to find a publisher for her debut novel: a lengthy, dense work full of complex characters that might intimidate even the most voracious reader.Now, people call her the “21st century Jane Austen,” and Lee Min-jin has become one of the few Korean-American writers to have their book translated into the language of their parents.”
M.J.L.
Click here to read the article.
This version of the Yonhap story ran in the Joongang Ilbo—the Korean partner paper of the International Herald Tribune: Joongang Ilbo.
I recently spoke to the enthusiastic Classes of 2009 and 2010 at ASIJ about being a writer and visited Ms. Karen Noll’s AP English seminars. The seminar students were reading Mrs. Dalloway (I read this in my early 30s), and they were an impressive group. Later, I spoke with two lower school students about how writers make a living. I hope I wasn’t too sobering an influence. The best part was spending the day with my favorite librarian Lin Hayakawa and cataloguer extraordinaire Kirby Yoshii who have been friends since they were girls in Connecticut and now work together in a library in Tokyo.
M.J.L.
This new book by Susie Orbach is a must-read-please. It will be out in the States in March. I think her work is unequivocally brilliant and important.
My review in The Times of London
FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES is titled AMORI E PREGIUDIZIO in Italian and has been released by the publisher EINAUDI.
How do you say “Hooray!” in Italian?
M.J.L.
“This big, realistic novel centers on a set of young Korean-Americans working in New York’s financial industry in the 1990s, and their parents. Protagonist Casey is a recent Princeton grad who is aimless, alienated from her family, and deeply in credit card debt. Though Casey and the other well-developed characters seek fulfillment in work, status, attainment, and sex—there’s a lot of it, and bad language—those things don’t satisfy. Because she’s writing about Korean-American culture in which the church has a central role, most of Min Jin Lee’s characters are wrestling with God in some way. That makes this book different: How many novels grounded in New York City reality even acknowledge that God is worth thinking about?” —Susan Olasky
I am serving as one of the columnists for “The Morning Forum” of The Chosun Ilbo Daily. The first of the six essays appeared today. It was translated by Sunny Park, senior writer of The Chosun Ilbo Daily.
The English version of the essay appears here:
A Good Question: How Could I Quit Being a Lawyer?
The Korean version of the essay appears here:
왜 변호사를 그만두셨어요?
You can also download the Korean version in pdf format:
[min081120.pdf]
I was recently interviewed by the writer Julie Wilson for the magazine Tokyo Families. An essay appears in the forthcoming anthology ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY (Riverhead, February 2009), edited by the brilliant Rebecca Walker. The anthology was recently praised in Publishers Weekly. ONE BIG HAPPY FAMILY includes contributors Jenny Block, Antonio Caya, Dawn Friedman, Suzanne Kamata, Susan McKinney Ortega, Liza Monroy, ZZ Packer, and Dan Savage.
This essay appears in the anthology Why I’m a Democrat (PoliPoint Press) which was edited by Susan Mulcahy. The proceeds of this book benefit survivors of the Katrina Hurricane. Contributors include: Frank McCourt, Jonathan Franzen, Isaac Mizrahi, Tama Janowitz, Maira Kalmon, Tony Bennett and Melissa Etheridge. Incidentally, I am a huge fan of David Gutkowski of Largeheartedboy.com, because indeed, his heart is enormous.
Profiles about my work appeared in The Japan Times and J-Select this month. The article in The Japan Times (“Tackling the ‘Zainichi’ experience”, September 9, 2008) was written by Tim Hornyak, author of Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots, and the feature in J-Select (“The Reluctant Expatriate,” Sept/Oct 2008) was written by Suzanne Kamata, author of the novel Losing Kei. It’s been great to meet such wonderful writers in Japan.”
M.J.L.
I was fortunate enough to eat at the sublime Ryugin restaurant in Tokyo, and my essay of the delicious experience appears in the September issue of FOOD & WINE.
“Six days a week, my parents sold Mexican silver earrings to street peddlers for $1.50 at their cramped wholesale jewelry store in Manhattan. Every night, my mother rushed home to Queens to fix delicious Korean suppers from the meat and produce on sale at the Elmhurst Key Food supermarket. Then, in 1981, about five years after we immigrated, my father decided that knowing how to butter bread properly should be as much a part of his children’s education as algebra and spelling. He allowed me, a precocious 12-year-old, to select one fancy restaurant to study each year. On the appointed day, the Lee family would waltz into the likes of Lutèce or Le Cirque.”
For more, the link follows: Food & Wine Magazine
I wasn’t able to post this earlier. Here’s an excerpt:
Newsweek: But there was so much adultery in the book! Everyone was sleeping around and breaking up with each other. It’s sort of a dim view of love.
Min Jin Lee: Love is an absolutely tantalizing, beautiful thing. And yet, it is profoundly disappointing, too. I think adultery is a wonderful metaphor of betrayal. Sex is this intimate act between two people. In its highest form, we believe that it’s to be held sacred between two people who love each other. And that’s the reason why adultery always wounds us so much. But, if you take that as a metaphor, you can have adultery in friendship, you can have adultery in any intimate relationship.
Read “Forget the Comparisons, She’s Unique” at Newsweek
“Discussing the tenuous relationship between first generation immigrant parents and their hip young offspring, this debut novel is sympathetic without being saccharine and constitutes a fantastic portrait of intergenerational cultural friction” – TATLER (Ireland) 2008
(Review of FFFM for the UK paperback -Hutchinson-Random House)
Min Jin Lee is the author of Free Food for Millionaires, published by Warner Books May, 2007
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