Award-winning author Chang-rae Lee read from his 2004 novel "Aloft" and spoke about his identity as a Korean-American writer last night as part of the University's observation of Asian/American History Month.
Lee, whose debut novel "Native Speaker" won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Award in 1995, was named by the New Yorker as one of the best 20 writers under the age of 40 in 2002. He is currently the director of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing and was brought to Brown by the Asian American Students Association.
"Aloft," his third novel, is the story of Jerry Battle, a 60-year-old Italian-American retiree who grapples with disengagement and isolation in the archetypal suburbs of Long Island. In the excerpt Lee read as part of his lecture, Battle describes the gated McMansions of his son Jack's luxury housing development, providing a cutting portrait of the excesses of middle-class suburban sprawl.
Battle is Lee's first protagonist who does not share his Korean heritage, a change that reflects his desire to explore cultural discomfort from an "inside point of view," rather than from the perspective of a minority group, he said. "I wanted his conditionality to be one of belonging and comfort," he said, "and to have that break down."
Despite this distinction, however, "Aloft" addresses similar issues of belonging and identity that were present in "Native Speaker" and his second novel "A Gesture Life." In his talk, Lee discussed this question of belonging and its role in shaping his own identity, both culturally and as a writer.
"I've always thought that (belonging) was a good thing," he said, "probably because I was an immigrant and an outsider."
He described his childhood in the suburbs of New York City after he and his parents emigrated from Korea when he was 3 years old. As one of a small number of minority children in his town, Lee was perpetually aware of his difference, enduring near-constant questioning and even bullying in school. He remembered hearing his parents "venting confusion and frustration, consoling each other. We wondered when this would be our home."
The transition was especially difficult for his mother, who had been a teacher and a champion basketball player in Korea but who was now "strangely meek and compliant" in the unfamiliar surroundings of Westchester County. "I was steadily being educated away from her influence and culture," Lee said.
Nowadays he "half-jokes" that his career goal is to be regarded as simply an American writer, rather than an Asian-American writer. "I worry when ethnic Americans are marketed as niche writers," he said. "Although I live and work in the core of the culture, the feeling of being on the periphery has never diminished."
Lee noted, however, that he avoids positioning himself as a spokesperson or an activist for Korean-Americans or for Asian-Americans in general. "To be a fiction writer is not to be a political advocate or a philosopher or a psychoanalyst," he said. "I do wish to support certain social issues, but I have great difficulty practicing literary engineering in my work."
Lee also spoke about the interaction in his writing between his own personal experience and the inventions of his imagination. "When you write for a living," he said, "you often can't tell the difference between life and imagination."
In fact, Lee told the audience that all of his writing is drawn at least in part from personal experience.
In the discussion following his talk, Lee presented the difficulty for second-generation and third-generation Asian-Americans of maintaining a connection to "the mother culture," which, in his experience, became gradually diluted as he learned English and assimilated into mainstream American society. Although his daughters, who are 5 and 9, "are encouraged in school to think about heritage and difference in a way that didn't happen for me," he said, "I feel sad about it because I can't show them that culture - I don't really know it."
"It would be difficult for them to connect to Korea," he added. "Although I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. This is my country."
