Min Jin Lee

And that gives me enormous hope.

I love this idea of the defiant person who's not supposed to count, who counts an awful lot.

How much autobiography is embedded in your work?

I was struck by the father that dies of tuberculosis in Pachinko, and I know that your dad had tuberculosis.

How much have you embedded of yourself in your work?

Well, I think that the literal...

biography probably wouldn't track.

But I think that in terms of emotional biography, I have put it in every one of my characters, especially after I decided somewhere before I published Free Food that I would be judged, I would be exposed, I would be vulnerable, which meant that

Every one of my characters has all of my embarrassing emotions.

So all of my desires that I was ashamed to have, all of the sad feelings, all of my discouraged moments, my wishes for greatness, my wishes for death, all of it, it's in there.

My wishes for revolution, my wishes for assimilation, all of the things that I'm not supposed to have, I put into my character.

So in that sense, I could identify it.

And then because I have so much research, it's really nice because I can do a thorough line between the feeling and the event and the interviews.

So it's all there.

And it gives a kind of roundedness, I think, to what I was trying to do.

I mean, I have two last questions for you today.

Just two more.

You've said that when people ask your advice, you often state, choose the important over the urgent.

Why that particular piece of advice?

I think this advice is so important.