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Not only "Asian American" An Interview with Don Lee by Lillian Chan Two poets dubbed "The Oriental Hair Poets" duke it out. A father leaves his two sons so that he can fulfill his dream of becoming a professional golfer. A man must overcome racism, or rather his fear of it. These are just a few of the stories written by Don Lee in Yellow, his debut collection of short stories. The Marketing Game Over lunch at Pho Pasteur, a French-Vietnamese restaurant, Lee talked about the break-through moment for his book. "The major thing that happened was it came in out of the blue. It was just a serendipity that the Los Angeles Times ran a really large article," Lee said about being featured on the front page of the living arts section. A reporter, who was the culture writer, for the newspaper happened to run across Yellow. After reading it, the reporter contacted Lee for an interview. "That's something that any publicist would dream of getting," said Lee. If that feature story hadn't been written, he doesn't believe though that his book would have gotten the attention that it has. Lee touched upon one of the possibilities. It might have to do with the fact that his book is being marketed as an Asian American book. He's been asked by some Asian Americans how he feels about it. "It's a loaded question," Lee said, "And when they say that, I know what they're asking me is, 'Don't you think that first of all you're being pigeon-holed as an Asian American writer and sort of ghetto-ized -- not being accepted as a book, but with that label 'Asian American?'" Lee went on to say that he expected that whatever he wrote would be marketed as an Asian American book. The reasoning behind that, he said is that "book reviewers and newspaper editors aren't very imaginative." Lee stressed that it isn't any kind of paranoia that's looming about, but rather because book reviewers and newspaper editors need to find a way to make a book stand out from others and it's just natural for them to use the Asian American aspect. Also, there was a bit more competition this spring season in getting coverage in book review sections of newspapers because two other short story collections from Asian American writers came out as well -- Christina Chiu's Troublemaker and Other Saints and Laura Glen Louis' Talking In the Dark. "It's just human nature that if a newspaper reviews one of us, they're not going to review the other two," Lee said. The Post-Immigrant Experience Yellow has been well-received and it's not surprising why. It's a refreshing book to read. Asian American literature is usually comprised of themes dealing with the immigrant experience. What Yellow deals with is the post-immigrant experience, those first generations of Asian Americans who have been in the United States for a very long time like himself. Lee admits that he made a conscious decision to veer away from the "green grocer route of characters." What he wanted to do was show that Asian Americans "are just as sexual and artistic and articulate and feisty and also as screwed up as anyone else." Lee had always assumed that most Asian Americans were already familiar with matters such as being a minority, discrimination, and stereotypes. But, he's come to find out that there are some Asian Americans out there still who don't believe that they are being discriminated against and feel that there are advantages to being a model minority. It is also these people who Lee hopes to educate as well. "I do feel somewhat of a sense of mission to show my generation of Asian Americans a little more accurately and diversely than they have been shown. These are the Asians that I grew up with -- my friends as opposed to the portrayals you see on TV," Lee said. The characters in the book go through their own individual struggles with Rosarita Bay, a fictional town in California, as the backdrop and the connecting point for each of them. The backdrop for the stories came to Lee by accident. A long time ago, he was traveling by train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. As he was passing through an area, he saw a worn-out seaplane in a backwater canal. He wondered who could have owned it and why. It was that moment that prompted him to write Casual Waters, which is about two boys, Patrick and Brian Fenny, who are abandoned by their parents. That story then inspired him to write another story and then another. By the third story, Lee started thinking about writing a whole collection set in the same place. "I had a plan of, ok, I'm going use the same locales. Then, I'll have the same characters and it became fun trying to fit them in and try to use them in the same places," Lee said. It's in the Job The interesting aspect of the book was the focus and attention given to the various professions that the characters had. There is a chair-maker, golfer, and surfer among many others. Lee explained that the prominence of the professions was because "I get frustrated when I read stories that are about people who are teachers or writers because it sort of shows me the lack of imagination that people have." He refers to the fact that most writers teach and/or write for a living. Lee went on to say, "they [writers] really kind of limit themselves to the role that surrounds them and I know that there's a big world out there and people are always doing different things which can be pretty interesting. And so for me learning about someone's profession makes me learn about who they are as people. I get into the character because of that. I think because also for me a lot of people are defined by their profession that the choice that they make as a career and their intensity of lack of intensity about it tells you a lot about those people." One of his favorite stories in the collection is The Price of Eggs in China, which is about two poets, Marcella Anh and Caroline Yip, who are rivals -- first with their work and then later in trying to gain the attention of Dean Kaneshiro. But, the most important story for Lee, is the title story, Yellow. "It's the one story that gets on the soapbox and confronts racism directly and that's the only time I'll ever do it. But, it was very important for me to do it," Lee said. Return to Writing For a long time, he considered writing as just a hobby. "I wasn't doing it with the kind of drive and passion that I think you actually need to make a go of it as a writer in literary fiction," he said. He thought of himself as an editor first. The drive to do the book actually came a few years ago when he was around 38-years-old. He started thinking about turning 40 and didn't like the idea. It was then that he decided that he'd like to have a book. He didn't want to be bitter and think "should have, would have, could have." So he took old stories -- some went as far back as thirteen years ago -- he'd written and revised them. He ended up having three new stories in less than two years. He did this while he was still working full-time for Ploughshares, a national literary journal whose institutional host and sponsor is now Emerson College. He's been serving as the journal's editor for the past 12 years. Changing Places, Changing Directions Lee, who is a third generation Korean American, was born in Tokyo. His father was a State Department officer and traveled a lot. After having lived in Tokyo for a few years, he and his family then moved to Seoul. At four years old, "I was Korean, an American citizen, who spoke Japanese living in Korea but soon to go to an American school," Lee remarked. Needless to say, it was a confusing time for Lee. "I really felt like I was an outsider all of the time and I didn't really belong anywhere." He and his family spent one year in Virginia. Then, every 2 years, he and his family would go to the states for 2 months on home leave. It wasn't until Lee was 18 that he and his family returned to the United States for good. Lee went to college at the University of California, UCLA. There, he studied engineering for two years before eventually switching over to English, which took some time. "It took me a long time to get rid of the hard sciences and the soft sciences to go to humanities. You know, I might be Americanized, but I'm still Asian," he said referring to the overwhelming pressures that some Asian parents place on their children to find a secure, well-paying job. But, the writing and literature classes he took as electives were enjoyable. He also began to realize that he needed an outlet to express himself because he wasn't getting that need fulfilled in his engineering courses. So, he took a creative writing course and that encouraged him. The change in study was also due in part to his "wanting to repudiate my Asian-ess and sort of separate myself from the stereotypical Asian American." He compares his "identity crisis" with that of Danny Kim, the title character of Yellow. After college, Lee came to Boston to pursue his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Emerson College. After completing his masters, he was planning on returning to California, but then he got the job at Ploughshares. Since 1984, he's been in Boston. "A Little Braver" Lee has commented on what a detriment editing can have on somebody who has aspirations to become a writer "because you're doing this all day long - hanging out at work, thinking about publication and the business - it's kind of hard to do that all day long and then go home and write." He encourages aspiring writers to do something completely different as a way to be more open to new ideas and people. "If you go out and you're working in a genetics lab or civil servant or something you'll meet different types of people who are a lot more interesting as characters," he said. The title of the book Yellow touches more than the Asian American aspect. It's also about the different kinds of meaning of Yellow. "All these characters are afraid to live," Lee went on to explain, "They're paralyzed with some sort of apprehension and I was trying to think god is that me? Does that say something about me and I guess it has to be…and maybe I should go to therapy as everyone tells me," Lee said in jest. "I do realize that a lot of times I'm not as adventuresome and as free wheeling as I should be that often times I'm hanging back just wondering how and what people will think of me. So I'm always trying to let loose and be a little braver." So, is there any adventure he's readying himself for? Well, there is his upcoming novel, which he's a bit nervous about undertaking. He's never written a novel before so it will be his first foray into that medium. "I just hope that I don't fall into this second book syndrome where people are just kind of incapacitated -- unable to get going. So, I'm trying very hard to keep calm," Lee said. printed in the Sampan, New England's Only Chinese-English Newspaper, on July 6, 2001 |