Angela Hui

Chang-rae Lee is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of five novels: 

(2014). Born in South Korea, Lee moved with his family to the United States at the age of three. He previously taught at Princeton University, where he was a creative writing professor and the director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing. Since 2016, he has been the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. This winter, fiction editor Angela F. Hui was able to speak with Lee over the phone. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.

AFH: The theme for our winter issue is Feast, so I want to start off by asking about your numerous essays on food. You’ve written in the New Yorker about the Phillips Exeter dining halls, Thanksgiving dinner as an immigrant family, eating sea urchin in Korea, and your wife’s family’s Italian food, among other food-related topics. Why are you drawn to writing about food?

Well, it’s kind of hard to say, exactly. A lot of those times, the New Yorker has a certain theme for an issue. They write me and say, “Would you like to write about food?” and I say, “Hm, sure.” But I think it comes naturally to me, too, probably because of my upbringing, the way that our family life proceeded when I was a kid. We were an immigrant family without much of a social network, certainly no relatives, and we spent a lot of time in the private little world of our house. Back then you really didn’t have much to do, especially when the weather wasn’t very good. Of course, not all Asian people are into food, but my parents—particularly my mother, she enjoyed cooking, and I enjoyed hanging out with her. Little by little, I ended up starting to cook with her and thinking about food.

One of the things that kind of predicated my day was that generally after breakfast my mother would ask me what we should have for dinner. My father would have already left for work and she was wary of trying to decide all the time. So it would be up to me, essentially, to decide what our family would have to eat that day. It’s just part of my constitution, even to this day, waking up and deciding what I’d like to eat and what other people would like to eat. Not that that happens every time I sit down to my writing desk, but when I do any kind of writing about my own life, that always comes up.

I’ve also written straightforward food pieces, because I’m fascinated by the living chemistry of it, the exciting things that can happen by accident—often the delicious things that can happen. I like the combination of food being intentional and engineered but also improvised. It just feels right to me. And writing is a lot like that, too, obviously.

AFH: And do you feel like food-related memories stick with you in a different way, in terms of sensory experience?

Yes, and I’m sure others, particularly academics, have written about this. For me, it is, as you say, a sensual, sensory happening. I don’t think of myself as an intellectual person. I don’t. I know that’s what I do all day, think about questions of what people are like and politics and things like that, but essentially I feel as if I am just this mass of flesh, and I enjoy that, I hope, in the best way, whether that means doing a little exercise or some yoga or eating. That, to me, is how I anchor myself to this life. It’s a way that I can shape the day—my human day. My artistic day is a little different. That’s shaped by all the other things that happen and have happened to me intellectually and culturally throughout my life.

AFH: You mentioned that food can be central to the immigrant experience. I’m wondering if you have thoughts on how often food or descriptions of food are associated with immigrant or ethnic literature, particularly Asian American literature.

I think it’s true that for immigrants, food is what they know, aside from a lot of hard work, obviously, and projecting oneself out in the world with some trepidation and uncertainty. Food is a refuge. It’s a way to preserve where they’ve come from, or where they think they’ve come from, or where they would like to believe they’ve come from. It’s a bulwark against all the noise, chaos, and unpredictability of what’s going on in the real world. Most immigrants have essentially no control or very little control over their lives because of their circumstances, because they don’t have enough money. They have no political voice or power. Often language is a huge issue. And so, where can we go to have a place where we feel like we’re the people we want to believe we are and hope we are? It’s around the table. It’s making things together. It’s not about flavor. Those flavors are important to us, they do something to us physically, but really it’s about having something we create and cling to at the same time.

AFH: It’s interesting what you say about food as a way of imagining where you come from or where you think you come from. How do you think food can be a way of constructing a particular background or identity?

Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it, about background and identity. People have memories, of course, but the nature of memory is such that it often morphs; it is reformed and sometimes deformed by our experiences now, to become what we need it to be or want it to be more than maybe it really was. There’s this difficult process of idealization or sometimes rationalization about things. It’s a way to capture a way of living that maybe better suits us in the moment. That’s what all memory does.

It’s interesting for me to think about the way I remember my mother, say, or my father, or our family when we were all younger and how important food was to us. There’s a scene in my first novel, 

, about a bunch of Korean immigrant families getting together and having a group picnic and doing sports. I was writing from personal experience. I remember those gatherings so well. I certainly idealize them. I think at the time I maybe wasn’t as happy to be there as I am thinking about it now. So why is that the case? We all like to think that there are things in our lives that were halcyon moments. I recognize that and yet I still don’t do anything to think about those times differently.

AFH: I’m thinking about the character of Ahjuhma in 

, who is always doing a lot of cooking and who is also notable for her refusal to speak most of the time. The main character’s wife tries to get her to talk, but she just wants to cook and do her job. In writing about Ahjuhma, were you thinking about how food can be a form of speech or an alternate form of expression that isn’t talking?

Certainly, it certainly is. It’s the way that my mother and I communicated. I think there was a fairly small window of time in which we shared a language equally, before I started mostly speaking English. Her English got better, but there was only a short window of time when we were on the same page as speakers. But as people we were always on the same page, especially with the things we would do for each other. Much of that was her cooking for me and our family, her showing me how to make things and just allowing me to share that time with her. She didn’t really approve of it because she thought maybe I should be out playing football with the guys, which I also loved to do. She would say, “In Korea, men don’t cook, and you shouldn’t do this.” I would say, “Yeah, but I enjoy being with you,” and she did like that.

We shared and communicated in a way that didn’t need to be verbal. So much of our relationship, particularly as an immigrant mom and son, was not verbal. It couldn’t be. The verbal part always got us into trouble, misunderstandings, and easy ways to intentionally misunderstand each other.

AFH: Since we’ve talked about how food is central to a lot of Asian American writing, I’m wondering if, when you write fiction, you’re conscious of your work being categorized as Asian American literature. Do you see your work as being in conversation with that category, or are you just writing what you’re writing?

I don’t try to contextualize stuff while I’m writing. I think that just naturally happens. I’m looking at certain people in a certain place and moment, and if I’m describing that world and that person then all the cultural, social, economic, political things just come along with it. I think genre is more for critics to see afterwards, to say one piece of writing is in conversation with another piece of writing. But I don’t explicitly do that. That’s not my interest and not why I write. This is not to say that the conversation isn’t happening. It’s just not happening with my intention.

AFH: What would you say are your biggest literary influences?

It’s hard to say. I can tell you the books I’ve enjoyed reading over the years, the writers I enjoyed reading when I was fifteen, when I was in college, and later on, but I don’t know if that means that they’re influences. People always ask that question, but I don’t know what it really means.

I think I’ve always been drawn to writers who seem to have a very conscious, present engagement with the language they use to tell the story rather than people who are interested in spinning yarns. But I don’t know why that is. Is it just because I’ve always had an interest in the possibilities of language and lyric? I don’t know.

AFH: So you would say you’re more drawn to prose-driven writing than plot-driven writing?

Yeah, I think so, and not for any other reason than it just delights me more. I guess I’m more delighted by a well-told story where a great part of the action is the drama of the sentence rather than just seeing what’s going to happen next. I don’t want to boil it down to that, but for me that’s where the action is. The drama doesn’t always have to be so lyrical or quote-unquote “poetic.” It can be spare, it can be stripped down, it can be surprisingly plain sometimes. But that’s where I feel that my energy as a reader wants to go.

AFH: As a writer, would you say that’s also your focus? More on the sentence than the overall plot?

Well, I’m interested in the overall plot for sure. It’s just that it’s my obsession or my tendency to focus on the sentence. I think writers are assumed to have certain ideas about their work, and I’m sure that they really do. I think we all have tendencies that we can’t help. And mine is to think about and listen to the sentences beyond what they’re just denoting. That’s my tendency. I don’t know if it’s my interest. It’s just what I have to do. Some people wash their hands all the time, and they don’t want to do it.

Almost, yeah. Maybe pathology in some cases. That’s how I see it, or how I think it is.

AFH: Your writing reads as being very closely attuned to the aesthetic quality of each sentence. But at the same time, your novels often play with genres that aren’t known for their focus on prose. 

is about a dystopian future. We often think of those genres as being about plot, with prose taking more of a backseat. Was that a tension you wanted to highlight intentionally? Or did it just happen that way?

I think it just happens. I’m just like anyone else. Genre pushes certain buttons in everybody, even if we’re not fans of it. It’s the way that certain genres work in terms of their narrative schemes and structures and certain tropes of action and character. I’m as subject to them as anyone else. I get delighted by them and excited and stimulated in certain ways. When it comes to certain genre tropes, I’m not worried about not inviting them into my writing. At the same time, I can’t stay there. It’s just not what I’m interested in, ultimately, as I write sentences and think about the psyches of my characters. They’re not quite going to fit into those structures and into those traditional tropes. That’s good, and that’s fine. When I step back and think about whether I meant for these things to happen—not at all. But as a writer, I’m not shy about inviting certain kinds of storytelling and certain kinds of stories. I don’t mind holding them pretty close and seeing where they take my personal, distinctive voice.

AFH: Would you say you were trying to engage certain genre elements in order to subvert them?

I think any time you encounter and dance with genre, I don’t think anything can happen but subversion, if you’re doing that dance right. We all want to do the dance, but we don’t want to do the exact steps. Because then it’s death. Then there’s nothing going on. That’s the artistic impulse. I think that’s been a part of me since I was a kid. I never liked to follow directions. I never liked to follow the assignments. Not fully. It always bugged me. It wasn’t because I was such a rebel or a radical. I wasn’t, and I’m not. There’s something about me that’s just resistant. As I said before, I’m inviting genre but then resistant to it. As an artist, that enables me to continue to do my work. Otherwise I’d be bored to death and not want to do it.

AFH: I think I can guess the answer to this. But when you’re writing, do you see yourself as writing for a particular audience? Or are you just writing what you want?

Yeah, I’m just writing for the audience that I am. I’m the test of it. Not to say that I’m the ideal reader; I’m not. But I can only know what I enjoy and find fascinating. I can’t know what someone else wants. What’s real enough, or bright enough, or funny enough, or sad enough—I’m the only one, really. Not that I’m right, it’s just that I’m the only one there. That’s who I am. The who I am is all these other things: I’m Asian American, Korean American, a man who is sixty-four years old, and I’m a father. All these things are there and, I hope, reflected in the work, to make the melange of it all as distinctive as possible.

AFH: With regard to your writing about food, do you see yourself similarly engaging with and subverting expectations about that kind of writing, whether in Asian American literature or just in general?

I hope I do. I don’t think any writer would like the idea that he or she could write something and someone could say, “Yeah, any decent writer could have written that.” I’m sure that happens, but that’s not where we want to go. We love to be able to write something and say, in the end, “Only I could have written that.” Maybe that’s as much as we can hope for.

AFH: Given our Feast theme, I’m wondering if there are dishes or meals that are especially important to you and that you haven’t written about elsewhere, or any foods or eateries that you associate strongly with different places.

I could write about a thousand different dishes, because all those dishes come from a particular cohort of people, a situation, a certain mood that I was in. They contain so much for me. To other people, it’s just food—you either like it or you don’t. But for me, there are these little worlds that come with food. The other day, I made tteokguk, which is a Korean rice cake soup. You make a little broth of kelp and dried anchovies, and there’s just this particular flavor that my mother would get out of her broth that I was trying to capture again. I was trying to get the feeling of that to my adult daughter. I was asking her while we were eating, “Do you taste that particular combination of fishiness and the sea?” That, for me, is why life is worth living.

Winter 2020 - Feast

Features

An Interview with Chang-rae Lee

There is a photograph my mother is fond of showing people whenever she explains how far I have fallen. I am insolent now, uncharacteristically so, and she is unused to seeing my anger so unhidden. “See how happy we were?” she laments, phone in hand, zooming in on the expertly cropped image. In it, we are standing soldier-like behind a table overflowing with food. The corners of our mouths are upturned in the same way. “10th grade, Thanksgiving break,” she explains. “She had just gotten back from boarding school.” And then, invariably, she turns to me and asks, “Do you remember that? What a nice girl you were? Do you remember?”

As my parents stared me down for refusing my aunt’s casserole, my sister quietly finished her second helping of Thanksgiving turkey. She was fearless where I faltered.

Hard-boiled eggs, hollowed and rinsed of any remaining yolk, were not dangerous. Neither were watercress leaves in sealed plastic bags. I carried these things in tin lunch boxes, like a child. My mother often scolded me for wasting food. She had watched girls thinner than I was wrestle over cups of flour, knobbed fingers caught in the spaces between ribs. My sister always took the rejected gray yolks into her mouth without complaint. Later, she would remark on their smoothness.

I pushed a plate of sautéed collard greens across the table. I didn’t like the way the oil glinted at me.

Of my own volition I had been hungry for almost three months. There were certain dietary staples I did not stray from, romaine lettuce and steamed broccoli chief among them. I had a fear of growth and a fear of death simultaneously. Faced with fats and starches I felt lust and disgust in equal measure. Sometimes it was hard to differentiate learned from innate revulsion. I never liked bacon before and when I began to comprehend the meaning of the grease it left on the griddle, I grew to hate it. The same went for cream cheese and bagels, whose rich blandness was best complemented by the brininess of stomach acid and the hot relief of mistakes forgiven. My tongue forgot flavor—my mind invented it in plates of naked green things.

Being home scared me but not for the reasons it should have. I had succeeded, and hating decline as much as I did made success a paranoid place. The tomatoes were too sweet to be trusted. The measuring spoons were warped from the heat of the dishwasher. I imagined my body growing withered. I imagined my body growing swollen. No salad bar safety. No dorm room hiding place. There would be lunches —matinées—and dinners and dinners and dinners.

“Audrey,” I found myself whispering, “Aren’t you afraid?” I imagined biting into the turkey’s thick roasted flesh, the gravy coating my lips with a slimy layer of fat.

“Afraid of what? Them?” She glanced toward my mother and father. “No, not right now.”

I opened my lunch box in my lap and extracted one half of an egg white. I couldn’t bear to chew it. My tongue ran involuntarily along the concave surface, picking up forgotten flakes of yolk, whose quasi-creaminess I held in my mouth for several minutes.

“Mommy, can I have some more?” Audrey gestured to the mashed potatoes. My mother gazed past her, unhearing as usual.

I stood, faced the wall, and emptied my cholesterol-contaminated mouthful into a napkin. When I turned back, I felt my mother’s arm curl around my body, watched her face contort into a red carpet smile. Before I could brace myself, I saw the flash of my uncle’s camera from across the table.

I tell Audrey a story on the way home, the usual one, about when we were little. Back then, she’d cry over the silliest things: smushed flies, roadkill, belly-up carnival goldfish. One day, I recount, she found a mangled feather boa on the sidewalk and mourned it too. My mother thought it was awfully white of her, inventing tragedy where none existed. Her dumb little gweilo daughter, pampered and hungry for problems.

“Funny how I’m the one who ended up vegetarian,” I say, but Audrey doesn’t laugh, just unlocks the front door and then closes it behind us, her expression inscrutable. I wonder if it’s because I’m leaving tomorrow, for the first time since the last time. If I had a sister like me, I wouldn’t miss her much. But Audrey is kinder than I am, more forgiving.

“Did you pack your concealer?” she asks. We’ve reached my room now, and she is searching through my makeup bag. “You should have one for blemishes and one for under-eye circles.” She is 14 but already beautiful, a double-edged quality in a girl so young. She colors herself in perfectly every morning. It was she who taught me to draw shadows on my face to distract from its increasing sphericity. My mother never comments on Audrey’s handiwork except when the powders smudge. You look dirty, she says. Like a cheap whore.

I nod. “Yep, the Almay and the Neutrogena.”

“And primer, too,” Audrey adds. “Don’t forget that.”

At the peak of my success, I was cruel to her. I was desperate, then, for reassurance. I sought safety in myself, in the protrusion of vertebrae, in the growth of fine pigmentless fur that spread over my skin—any palpable proof of purity. But I needed more, I needed a frame of reference, and there she was, silent and pliant as always.

“Close your eyes,” she says, and takes to curling my lashes, which resist beauty, which even now are sparse and fragile. A few casualties land atop my cheeks. She brushes them off and murmurs an apology.

It was so easy, even at that stage, to push her into the bathroom, force her onto the scale, measure the inches of her pre-adolescent body. It was my favorite game: Are You Smaller Than a Sixth Grader?

And somehow, when I met my ineluctable fate a few months later, she had found it in herself to dust my resentful intubated face with blush. How clownish I’d looked, thick paint on sallow canvas. She hadn’t been so skilled back then, it was guesswork, reverse engineering. Now she is like a doctor with those brushes, those palettes, her expert hands exacting and incapable of failure. The girl she presents to me in a hand mirror betrays no trace of her nasogastric past.

She holds the mirror at arm’s length so that we both can fit inside it. “We look like we have different parents,” she says, and she presses her tanned, dimpled cheek to my pale one. “We look like different races.” I turn and blink against her face, tickling her forehead with my matted lashes. True to form, our laughs look nothing alike.

As a final touch, she takes a tweezer to my brows, pulling the skin taut to minimize pain.

Many years earlier, when still I was indifferent to my roundness, I had made a game of dropping my possessions from our bedroom window and listening for the sound of small objects hitting concrete—the light affirmative clatter that marked the turn from cause to effect.

My mother learned English from her grandfather. He gave her a very tattered Oxford English Dictionary, a relic of his time spent studying biology in Britain, and designed an ambitious plan of study: every morning, she had to copy a page of definitions letter by letter, and every evening, he would check her transcriptions by reading them aloud. The day he killed himself, she didn’t finish her writing practice, and she dreaded his return from work until she found out it was never coming. A few weeks later, his dictionary was confiscated and burned by Red Guards.

She would repeat this story to us every time we were disobedient. You’re going to kill me, she’d say. Just do the dishes. Come out of your room. Finish your food. Finish your food. Finish your food.

Now she is telling this story again, but for a different reason. “Can’t you see what a good project this is?” Her voice crackles in my earbuds. “A young girl teaching herself English. A small act of insurgency against insurgency. It’s just like what I tried to do as a girl. And imagine how it’ll look on her résumé!”

“But think of how much school she’ll miss.”

My mother scoffs. “One good role can launch a career.”

“I just don’t think it’s right,” I say, and I hang up so abruptly that she’ll believe me later, when I tell her it was inclement weather that interrupted our connection.

Once I get back, the first thing Audrey and I do is walk to the grocery store. Though it’s hardly the most exciting activity to kick off the winter breaks of our respective freshman years, we’ll take any opportunity to get out of the house.

I’m craving macaroni today, and Audrey suggests that we make some together. “I need your help,” she tells me, holding up two boxes of pasta. “Which is healthier?”

She moves down the aisle, scrutinizing the rows of tomato sauce. “This one has more sodium but not as many calories.” She analyzes the nutrition labels with such intense concentration that she nearly collides with a shopper in a Barry’s Bootcamp t-shirt. I tell myself I shouldn’t be surprised. There is something about this age that seems to infect everyone with these preoccupations, albeit to varying degrees.

But I want to tell her what it felt like.

“Since when do you care about this stuff, Audrey?” I want to tell her about the hunger beyond hunger, when it is no longer the stomach begging but the entire body. I want to tell her about the wanting, and the punishment for wanting, and the endlessness of each day.

“I have to. For the part.” She lowers her voice. “For the movie.”

Audrey places a can of fat-free low-sodium tomato sauce in our shopping cart.

“Are you sure you want to do it? If you don’t eat enough you’ll be short for the rest of your life.” It’s too hard to tell her about the other reasons, the other consequences.

“I’m not gonna do anything crazy. Just eat better and run longer distances, that’s all.” She takes a jar of peanut butter from its shelf, then puts it back down. I think of the night before my fourteenth birthday: me and my dorm-mate in the common room swishing peanut butter in our mouths and spitting the brown globs into a plastic bag. We can’t tell anyone about this, I’d said. People are gonna think we’re pre-bulimic or some shit.

“Can you at least think about taking a different role instead?” I ask.

“I’ve already thought about it. I don’t want a minor part. I don’t want to be an extra.” She walks to the next aisle and I watch her sprinter’s legs flex in ways mine can’t. I imagine her leggings growing loose; I imagine her rifling through the sick clothes I should have donated; I imagine her trying on the jeans I wore when the infirmary nurses asked me why my heart rate was so low.

“Whatever then. If you’re so sure.”

I know that there is no way to stop this, that my mother would laugh if I told her my fears, laugh and do worse than laugh. No pain my sister and I have faced or will face could ever compare to hers. Losing twenty-five pounds to play a starving communist child is one thing; growing up a starving communist child is another.

I began, in my sophomore year of high school, to devise a repertoire of meticulous tricks in preparation for every one of my trips home. I fancied myself an illusionist, pouring soy sauce on a white plate, tracing the outlines of my imaginary meal with a chopstick—it was a private comedy, a thrilling act of forgery, and I was both excited and offended that no one ever discovered my acts of deception. Perhaps, I thought, they were too distracted by my mother, who ate with a ferocity unmatched even by feral animals. She possessed an intimate understanding of hunger, told stories of catching and skinning frogs to feed her brothers. It used to embarrass me, how she would swallow her food as if someone were trying to steal it. Now I was glad her habits would cover mine.

At school it was easy to stay unnoticed. I did as I pleased, lived in a room no one else entered, and recorded my progress in dry-erase marker on the surface of a full-length mirror. Occasionally, a dorm-mate would remark on my continued absence from the dining hall. For the most part I was left in peace.

In my mind it was purely logical, the natural consequence of knowing how to count. I grew to love it, in time, the beauty of the balanced equation, the quantity subtracted, the triglyceride transformed into carbon and water. But first the simplicity of it seduced me. How easily the body could be revised, how quickly the flesh surrendered to the whims of its inhabitant. A bloodless coup, quiet as a child drowning.

I observed it sometimes in other girls, small details, the litany of mental measurements audible only to fellow zealots. No, not you too, I’d think, a sharp pang of jealousy rising in my chest as though we hadn’t all learned it together, as though the root of this special power hadn’t been offered to every one of us. Recall the sixth grade outings to Moscone Playground; recall the way we repurposed the seesaw into a scale, clever girls, always inventing. In these moments perhaps our destinies were manifest.

And still I thought my sister would be immune.

When I think I see the signs, the first real signs, I tell no one. I wonder about the cause of the sick feeling inside of me: Am I protective of my sister or possessive of my disease?

“Audrey,” I ask her finally, “what are you doing?”

She is tightening the laces of her running shoes. The window is open. It is mid-January. There are no seasons here. “I’ll be back before dark,” she says.

When she’s gone, I find the script on the dining room table. The writing is ugly. The dialogue is the kind that must be delivered with a strained third-world accent.

Mother! Mother! Why doesn’t she see me? Where does she go?

I wonder what the process is for a film like this. The famine begins in the second act. Will they shoot the scenes in sequence, my sister’s body shrinking alongside her character’s? Or will she be healthy one day and half-starved the next?

Please, Uncle. One egg. I won’t ask you tomorrow.

Some rice? Uncle, I beg you, my sister is hungry.

She returns in an hour, sweating and flushed. I offer her bread, string cheese, a granola bar. And in her face I see that awful turning, the fluctuating resolve. I almost hear the calculations, before finally she shakes her head and walks away—a fast learner, like me.

Angela Hui

Angela Hui

Features

Winter 2020 - Feast

An Interview with Chang-rae Lee

Fiction

Fall 2018

Variations on a Theme