MJL: The command of the English language is an extraordinary source of power in the world. What are you currently exploring about the relationship between language and power? American Hagwon will explore the importance of education for Koreans around the world, and involves hagwons-private tutoring centers-some of which teach English to students. I’m curious about the novel you’re working on right now. I think we lose so much by only knowing one language. So I am more thoughtful about time, and life, and what this moment means. You start to realize that we don’t get an infinite amount of time. I’ve had people die on me who are younger than I am. All I have to do is write the books that only I can write. I won’t write that many books and that’s okay. But now I feel like, You know what? This is me and I accept that.

I spent so much time thinking that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t know what I was doing, or that I must be stupid because everybody else was publishing at a faster rate.

There are many smarter and faster writers. I have to go through all this fieldwork, interviewing, translation, research, and thinking about things academically as well as politically and personally to arrive at a realistic social critique. The way I work may not work for somebody else-I respect that. I do a lot of things that are odd for a fiction writer. MJL: I feel more certain that the way I work works for me. How has your writing process changed over the decades? JK: You’ve been writing now for many years. Years after their publication, her books, Pachinko and Free Food for Millionaires, remain timeless and infinitely re-readable. Her narrative voice is authoritative but generous, and teaches us-as writers, readers, and humans-how to pay attention. Much has been written about Min Jin Lee’s capacity to write propulsive, immersive fiction that centers the minor characters history forgets. Pachinko grabbed me with its first sentence and held me until the end, and I staggered back into the world four days later absolutely transformed. “I’ll recommend it to everyone.” I’m a fast reader, yes, but I abandon books frequently, intersperse slow books with fast ones, return to something I’ve abandoned only if it still lingers months later. “Just sobbed through the ending,” I wrote. “I already know I’m going to be devastated,” I wrote. On May 12th, 2021, I texted my friend to tell her I had started Pachinko that morning. And then I graduated, I moved, and I didn’t think about it again until the pandemic hit and I slowly started working through my “Books to Read” backlog. I was in my second year of graduate school, too busy to consider reading a hefty historical novel for fun. That was 2017, just a few months after the book was published. The first time someone recommended that I read Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, I added it to my “Books to Read” list and promptly forgot about it.

Min jin