Min Jin Lee

But I was trained in history in university and one of the first things that you learn is this existence of primary documents, which means that we can't study that which wasn't recorded or written or in which we have primary documents or artifacts

That means that almost everybody who's ordinary, who wasn't written about, or who hasn't kept journals or diaries, which still exist, cannot be counted or surveyed or compared with.

And that means that if you think about, let's say, the Great War, like World War I,

ordinary boys who died in the trenches, their lives mattered, but only usually as a statistic rather than as a story.

So it isn't just about oppressed minorities.

It's really about anybody who is not important.

So yes, it's written about the victors or about the losers who actually have enough power to write about it, of history.

But what really troubles me is that

the mass of people who are having history affected upon them don't get to be remembered or have their say.

And I guess I'm upset about that.

Yeah.

Talk about the part of the phrase, history has failed us, but no matter.

Talk about the, but no matter.

I think this is the coda of ordinary people, of the average person who wasn't counted, is that it doesn't matter if people don't know who we are.

we're still going to show up and do what we have to do, what we want to do anyway.

And I think that for me, it's always given me so much hope and courage to think about the way we circumvent the powers that don't want us to matter.

We're going to survive.

We're going to have a subculture if we can't have culture.

And eventually our subculture will become even more important.

So I see this happening throughout time, throughout history of how the sense of defiance.