Min Jin Lee

I also remember feeling really worried when I first came to this country because I didn't know what was going on with my parents.

My mother worked at home in Korea, but once she came to America, she worked with my father at their store.

So our domestic life really changed.

I read some really harrowing details about how your parents had to manage working in the shop that they did.

But before we get to that, I just wanted to ask you a little bit more about what it was like to come here at seven.

I read that when you first got to the United States, you thought that you would exit the airplane as Cinderella.

And somehow the airport would be a 17th century fairy tale.

The women would all have big Marie Antoinette hair and they'd be wearing ball gowns and they'd be stagecoaches.

How did it feel when you realized the airport was just like the airport at Seoul, except with non-Korean people?

Well, I thought it was so dismally boring and sad because I was expecting some sort of Disney spectacular, beautiful,

ball, like literally a ball.

I don't know why I thought this.

It's because I so lived in books and in children's books of that time.

And when I got here and everybody just looked exactly like people from another city that I was born and lived in, I was kind of disappointed.

And it's kind of funny now, but I really don't know why I felt this way.

In my imagination, I always think things are going to be infinitely better.

There's that optimistic part of you.

Yeah.

You moved from a nice middle class home in Korea where your mother was a piano teacher.

Your dad was a white collar executive.