He kept it open at great cost to himself, and he argued for the rest of his life to include other groups like Native Americans, women and immigrants. Above all, he wasn’t someone who escaped, reached his destination, then closed a door. His path to freedom serves as both an amazing metaphor and literal truth. He was primarily self-taught and freed himself literally from nearly every possible cage. Most people think of him as an abolitionist and orator, but I see him as a writer who comes from an “outsider” background. However, as I got older, I read his writings and gained a different sort of respect for him and his work. MJL: I first learned about Frederick Douglass as a child in school. Those of us who may be women of color, immigrants, or working class aren’t often meant to be people who write novels about ideas, but no matter.ĬP: When did you first learn about Frederick Douglass and how has he contributed to your own political consciousness? This idea gives me an enormous amount of strength and hope as a writer because I am an ordinary person. It doesn’t matter that history has failed us because ordinary people have persisted anyway. The phrase “but no matter” is a statement of defiance. It is not that historians aren’t doing their jobs but rather that the memory of history has been reconstructed by the elite, because the overwhelming majority of ordinary people rarely leave sufficient primary documents they do not have others recording their lives in real time. I am also arguing that the discipline of history has failed. I believe history has failed almost everybody who is ordinary in the world, not just the Korean-Japanese, who are the subject of Pachinko. Min Jin Lee (MJL): “History has failed us, but no matter” serves as my thesis statement. Though Frederick Douglass didn’t write fiction, his speeches have great narrative power because he integrates storytelling tools elegantly with his political analysis.Ĭhristopher Petrella (CP): The opening line of Pachinko, your latest novel, reads: “History has failed us, but no matter.” What inspired such a powerful idea? I want my books to be pleasurable and edifying. Political novels can be boring to read unless written effectively with the powerful tools of fiction I was trying to do this. My third novel, American Hagwon, will complete my triology the novels are unrelated in characters, but related by the theme of diaspora. Primarily, they speak to what the diaspora does and means for people who are scattered throughout the world.

Both novels deal with themes of immigration, race and homeland. My second novel is about Koreans in Japan in relation to colonialism and xenophobia. My first book is a critique of class and immigration in America. I explicitly intended to write political novels. MJL: All art is political because it is created by people.

ĬP: In your view, what is the role of the social novel in political resistance? What is the role of art in political movements and political movement making?

Frederick Douglass, for instance, called the United States a “composite nation” when he argued against the Chinese Exclusion Act. Nevertheless, there has also been strong resistance to nativism. On the other, a deep nativist strain keeps resurfacing. On the one hand, we believe that different kinds of races make up an American person. In the United States we have two competing mythologies about immigration. We are having a dark moment in the American political climate regarding undocumented migrants and asylum seekers but, then again, the history of immigration in America has always been checkered. MJL: I’m going to sound like an optimist here. What can this type of arrangement teach us about identity, migration and movement in the US context? You note that, in general, Koreans in Japan fall into three categories: North Koreans living in Japan, South Koreans living in Japan and ethnic Koreans with Japanese citizenship. Lee is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.ĬP: Pachinko is a novel about Koreans in Japan. The New York Times Book Review called her most recent novel, Pachinko, one of the 10 Best Books of 2017. Min Jin Lee is a National Book Award finalist, whose writings wrestle with the themes of race, class, diaspora, religion and love.

Min jin lee