Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hey, y'all. Happy Sunday. Elise Hugh here. And as we often do on Sundays, today we are sharing an episode of another podcast from the TED Audio Collective, handpicked by us for you. In honor of World Book Day, which was just a few days ago, we reached into our archives for one of our favorite interviews with an author.
So in this Design Matters conversation from 2022, host Debbie Millman speaks with Min Jin Lee, the author of award-winning novels, Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires. They discuss Min Jin's remarkable career and the long and intentional journey behind her Korean diaspora novels. You can find episodes of Design Matters wherever you get your podcasts.
Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com.
I think being admirable and being competent is very different than being an artist. It's almost like the difference between being pretty and being beautiful. It's like a really different level of vulnerability and exposure.
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Min Jin Lee talks about her values as a writer.
I am creating this world in which there's meaning. I am arguing deeply against a postmodern world.
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Chapter 2: What inspired Min Jin Lee to write about the Korean diaspora?
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Min Jin Lee is an author and journalist who was born in Korea, grew up in Queens, and now lives in Harlem. She's published two novels. The first, Free Food for Millionaires, is about the daughter of Korean immigrants from Queens trying to make it among Manhattan's rich and glamorous. The second, Pachinko, chronicles several generations of a poor Korean family living in 20th century Japan.
Pachinko was an international bestseller, a National Book Award finalist, and was named one of the best books of 2017 by the New York Times, the BBC, the New York Public Library, and more, and it has been translated into 35 languages.
Min Jin Lee is also the recipient of South Korea's Grand Prize for Literature, and she has fellowships in fiction from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study at Harvard, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She's a writer in residence at Amherst College, a trustee of PEN America, and she joins me today to talk about her extraordinary life and career.
Min Jin Lee, welcome to Design Matters. Oh, hello, Debbie. What an honor to be on Design Matters. I feel like I've made it. Oh, please. That's so kind of you. So I have a question for you. I understand that when you were 17 years old, working as a cashier at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you sold a book to Tina Turner. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.
That was my next question that I read that. And is it true? It is absolutely true. I was working in one of the cash registers all the way in the back of the shop. And this little person, this really beautiful, tiny person walked over to me. And I realized it was Tina Turner. And in my imagination, I thought she'd be really tall, but she was very petite.
And she bought a very expensive photography book. Like an art book, like about $100. And she gave me her gold credit card and it said, Tiny Dancer, Inc., Tina Turner. Wow. Pretty cool, huh? And you don't remember the book? It was just a photography book? I think I was just so gobsmacked by the fact that Tina Turner was right in front of me. And I was and am a super fan.
So I just felt really special. And I was telling all the other cashiers, she picked me. She picked me. Yeah. And I read that this just happened to be your last day at the job and the evening before you left for college. And then you spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the museum thinking, how cool am I? Tina Turner choose me. I am the shit. I am the shit.
I think what really happened was that she just wanted a more private space to buy a book, but I felt pretty special. I had a kind of an unpopular cash register in the back, but you know, you got to take the wins when you can. Absolutely. There you have it. Min, you were born in Seoul, South Korea, and your family came to the United States in 1976 when you were seven years old.
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Chapter 3: How did Min Jin Lee's childhood experiences shape her writing?
And then I happened to take an English class with Mr. Green. And Mr. Green made us read. I love Mr. Green. Mr. Martin Green. Give him a shout out. He said that you have to read through an author. So you couldn't just read one book by a writer. You had to read all of them. And he had written too many. So I think I chose four or five novels that he had written.
And after I read four or five novels, I became very... critical of the world because I think Sinclair Lewis was so critical of the world. And he was tackling very big social problems. And I remember thinking, oh, I would like to be a big thinker like a person like Sinclair Lewis. I didn't know very much about him. And back then we didn't have search engines.
So whatever I learned, you had to go to the library and look at the index of periodicals and go look at the encyclopedias. And I loved what he was saying about trying to prevent provincialism. We couldn't be narrow thinkers. We had to be bigger thinkers. We had to be against fascism.
So his book, It Can't Happen Here, was something that people really heralded when we had the recent administration of Trump. because we are seeing the rise of fascism around the world today and demagoguery. And he was somebody who really understood that even back then. So I really admired him. I thought, I want to go to a college which gave him that education.
So I applied, and bizarrely, I got in. Back then, it was much easier to get into colleges. Of course, I'd go there, and he wasn't there because he was dead. But... This is not that different from when I wanted to come to America in 1976 and expected a ball. I keep thinking that what I read, it's frozen in time. What did you think you wanted to do professionally at that point?
This was right as you were going to college. I think this goes back to this whole idea of when I was younger, I thought that I wanted to be a carpenter or a cabinetmaker. I don't know if you knew that. I did not. Which is really weird. And I love that. I wanted to make things.
And when I was at Bronx Science, I took a class called Scientific Technical Laboratories, which is essentially woodworking with electricity. And I loved making things. So I kind of thought, oh, maybe I should do something with that. But I knew that I couldn't really make a living as a cabinetmaker in New York City, or it didn't even occur to me. So I thought, maybe I'll become an architect.
I love design, I love art, and I thought, oh, I would like to build homes. I didn't know what architects did. I thought they designed houses. And of course, I met real architects and I realized, oh, that's not what real architects really do unless you are much, much older and much more powerful. So, you design parking lots or the corner of a parking lot or a ramp or something.
And I was like, oh, maybe I don't want to be an architect. And I thought I would maybe major in economics because I thought that I needed a stable job. And I took an economics class and I know nothing about graphs. I just couldn't understand pictures and data being presented in a different way. So I thought I should do something else.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Min Jin Lee face as an immigrant in America?
I'm terrible at saying no. And then I got that letter and I didn't know what that meant. I knew it was something bad, but then it turned out that I had the sort of latent carrier status. And then when I went to college, I was okay. And then I think my sophomore year, I got incredibly sick. So my latent, my carrier status became active. And then I was almost incapacitated. Yeah.
Your doctor told you that you would get cancer in your 20s or 30s. Instead, when you were 30, you had liver cirrhosis and you received interferon and were able to get better. But was there any time while you were sick, whether it be at Yale or after, before you were treated with interferon that you thought you might not survive?
Well, I thought all along that I wouldn't survive because when Dr. Adrian Rubin of Yale New Haven Hospital said to me that you will likely get liver cancer in your 20s or 30s, and he made it seem very, he was very calm when he said this. And I was by myself because my parents couldn't go to the doctor with me because they were working. And I remember telling my dean about it afterwards.
And then she went with me for the next appointment because she was concerned. Wow, that's really kind of her. Dean Joyce Baker, she was incredibly kind. So when I went to the doctor and I heard this news, I remember thinking, oh, okay. And he said that the liver is this really magical organ because in some ways you can get it replaced or it can get it operated on, it grows back.
And he made it seem like it's not so terrifying. At the same time, he said, you know, it's something that you can die from. And that's when I read Sister Outside about Audre Lorde, who also had a very serious liver cancer. And I remember thinking, oh, people die from this and it's a very painful death. And it was very helpful for me in some ways because I never drank. So even now I don't drink.
I never drank then. And I thought I will do whatever I can to somehow not get sick. And that is very, very mingin. If you tell me that this is something that you should not do because it will be harmful, then I will not do it. And I take advice very seriously.
Like if I meet a smart person, smarter than me about anything, like if you happen to be better at lawn care than me, I'm like, I'll take notes. I'm not quite sure if that's the immigrant thing or survival thing or I'm ready to learn because it helps me with my anxiety. What are you most anxious about? I think harm coming to people I love.
I think that a long time ago, I've gotten used to this idea that something might happen to me, that my life might get cut short. So I've always lived with this sense that if this is my last day, I will live it with integrity. I will try not to have regrets. I do have this sort of very pie-in-the-sky idea of life. But the thing that I can control is harm to people I love.
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Chapter 5: How did Min Jin Lee's family background influence her career choices?
And I think that's a superpower, too, because... That is. It absolutely is. You see beauty. I could really find beauty in anything. So if you put me in a museum, a city, a mountain, a store, and tell me, go find the most beautiful things in it, I feel like I could. And I feel really confident. I'd be like, no, that's it.
And I don't know where that confidence comes from, but I've always felt this about myself. It's interesting because that confidence, I think, instills a sense of self-reliance. But I also think that that is the product of good parenting, you know, feeling loved. I do think that's the case. I think my parents, they're very hands-off people. Both my parents, my mother is an artist.
She's a musician. And my father, he's somebody, as you know, is really scrappy and a survivor and a problem solver. And he's very good at building things, building ideas and execution. They're both very good at those things. But in terms of parenting, they've always said out of the three girls of the three of us, my parents, their attitude is, oh, you'll figure it out. You'll figure it out.
The upside is that it's given me a great sense of resilience. But the downside is that I do live with a sort of terror like, oh, I have to figure this out. I have no one to ask. So all along my life, I've always found thousands of people who either feel sorry for me or who have decided to help me and who can like pat me on the head and go like, you, you need help.
Yeah.
You don't know what you're doing here. Do this. And that's one of the great things about New York, right, is that you'll find help in corners like some 80 year old, you know, Lithuanian immigrant will find me and say, oh, you you need help with this. Come, come on, sit down.
will and I'll take notes things like that have happened quite a lot actually oh man I think that's one of the most wonderful things about you So your first published book was Free Food for Millionaires. But the first book you wrote was called Revival of the Senses, which you didn't publish. And you've said this about that book. It was so boring. Really competent prose, but so, so boring.
And you want to state that even your husband said it's really boring. And he's one of the nicest people on the planet. Did you ever try to have it published? Did you ever solicit any other opinions besides yours and your husband's? Oh, yeah. I finally got an agent who I don't have anymore. This very nice young person who decided, I'll take a shot at you.
And she sent it out and it was rejected everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. I have the letters. And... No one said it was for them. I mean, not a single publisher. And she must have sent it out to at least 20 places. And I'm so glad it wasn't published. Now I see what happens if you have a terrible first publication. Like, I really understand what that means.
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