Don Lee's Country of Origin

Writer Don Lee talks candidly about his hard-core construction skills, the inspirations behind his book, and the many many nights he spent frolicking around Tokyo researching their sex industry. Just kidding--one of those isn't true.

By Ada Tseng

Don Lee's first novel Country of Origin has been praised as "mercilessly absorbing" (Jennifer Egan, author of Look at Me), "at turns trenchantly funny and heartbreakingly sad" (Publisher's Weekly), and "as satisfying as it is unsettling" (Booklist). Lee tells the story of Lisa Countryman's mysterious disappearance in Tokyo, inspired by the real-life incident of a young British woman Lucy Blackman, in Japan.  Lisa is a half-black, half-Japanese, Berkeley grad student who has been entangled in some shady hostess clubs in Japan; Tom Hurley is a cocky, half-Korean, half-white, foreign-service officer assigned to the case, but too busy having an affair with a CIA officer's wife; and Kenzo Ota is an endearingly neurotic Japanese cop who is trying to prove his worth by taking on the investigation of Countryman's murder. Lee boldly tackles the intricacies of identity, race, justice, morality, and cultural dislocation in a story that dives into the gritty, murky waters of Tokyo's sex industry, the darkness and danger of crime, and the thrilling world of CIA operatives.

Now living in Massachusetts, author Don Lee is a third-generation Korean born in Japan. His father was a career State Department officer, and young Lee was moved around often enough to confuse his poor-childhood-sense-of-identity. Was he Japanese? Was he Korean? Was he American? Craziness! But Don Lee only came out stronger, because this inner "who am I?" chaos helped to create a fixation deep enough to last till these glory days of authorship, where years of profound analysis subconsciously surfaced, helping to create an intelligent literary backdrop that propels his deep murder-mystery-thriller.     

Lee graduated with a BA in English literature at UCLA and has an MFA in creative writing and literature from Emerson College. He has been the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares (www.pshares.org) at Emerson College for 16 years. His first book Yellow was a collection of short stories which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was a pleasure to speak to the man behind the novel and find someone who was equally personable and articulate, whether he was discussing serious issues revolving around his novel or excitedly ranting about his hobbies (windsurfing!) and other parts of his life.

APA: So you're a UCLA alumni who graduated with an English degree before you moved on to get your MFA at Emerson. What did you do during the two years in between?

Don Lee: I did odd jobs. I graduated in 1983, which was supposedly the worst recession, the worst economic situation since the Depression. So what I ended up doing with some of my UCLA friends was, I ended up painting houses and doing construction. It was really good money, and we worked our asses off. But I knew that it wasn't quite cutting it, cause I went to this party once and was talking to this one woman that I was trying to put the moves on, and she said, "Well, what do you do?" And I said, "paint," and she said, "Oh, I've always wanted to get into oils, but I've always stuck with pencil and ink," and I said, "No... paint houses."

APA: Was she not impressed?

DL: [laughs] No, she wasn't very impressed.

APA: That's funny. So you decided to go into writing. As an editor for Ploughshares, you're flooded with creativity and fiction entries all the time. How has that influenced your writing style?

DL: I think that at first, it was a real negative influence. Definitely, just because I was full of it in my ears all day long, so it was very hard to go home and write. Very early on, I decided OK, I'm an editor. I might write these short stories once in a while, but my main thing was an editor. But I think a lot of it behind that was probably just my basic insecurity about my own talent. I think I was afraid to go for it, cause I didn't want to find out that I just didn't have the goods. It was only as I was approaching 40 that it really became apparent to me that I'm either going to do it, or else I'm not. Now I define myself as equally a writer and an editor.

APA: I know you had to do a lot of research for this novel--on the US State Department and on Tokyo's sex industry. Do you enjoy the research process?

DL: Yeah, I guess. It was a little tedious to do that kind of research. I certainly didn't do any personal research of the sex industry [laughs]. I didn't go to Japan and visit all these sex clubs or hostess clubs or things like that, but what I ended up doing was just reading a lot of articles and books.  I think I tend to over-research, and I just start to get lost in this minutia, and really I should just be getting a grasp of some of the aspects of it and letting my imagination go, because after all, it's fiction.

APA: You talk about needing to let the story find you, and one of your characters Kenzo Ota was actually an unexpected surprise. Can you describe that writing process?

DL: Yea, originally, I was just going to have one main focus--the Tom Hurley character, who's working in the embassy. I quickly found out that I really didn't have a story. I had a nice situation --you're in the embassy--but I didn't have anything to drive the thing forward. I read that article about Lucy Blackman, and a couple books about hostess clubs, and it occurred to me that there was going to have to be a Japanese policeman. In the beginning he's having to deal with a landlady, and their relationship becomes the major part of this story. It just kind of occurred naturally. What was fun for me was that he actually became the comic relief of the book, and that was unexpected and probably the best part of writing the book.

APA: How did you come up with the title?

DL: The original title was very poetic, and probably too abstract. The original title was There Once was a Country, so after I handed in the book and they were doing sales and marketing meetings, they said, "Look, this is kind of an edgy book. We should come up with something that's a little catchier." So I just said, "how about Country of Origin, because that's a phrase that's oftentimes on passports and documentation and everything," so it seemed to work well with the book.

APA: Do you guys agonize about the titles of your books?

DL: Often times it comes out on a whim and you're not really thinking about the ramifications of it. Like, with my collection Yellow, I didn't really think that it might strike people as a political statement. I do think of myself as a fairly common-sensical person and I think I'm somewhat savvy about the marketing and the publishing business, but when it's your own stuff, there seems to be this absence of rationality. I thought, well it's the longest piece and it has a lot to do with the motif of people just being scared to move on with their lives with some fashion, so yeah, I'll call it Yellow. And there was an interesting reaction with some Asian Americans, in that they were put off by that, because they thought it was too in-your-face.

APA: How come you set your story in 1980?

DL: I remember I was at UCLA at the time, during the Iran hostage crisis. And, people forget about what a huge event that was, the taking of those hostages. That's when Nightline began. They had updates every single night. And then this went on for over a year--444 days--and then after that, they kept the show on. It was just pervasive and on everyone's mind about what was happening in Iran and what a horrendous thing it was, how those people felt about it. So those kinds of things have always been very clear and distinctive in my memory. I felt like things changed after that. In the 1980s, people got into money and into superficiality. When you think about the '60s and '70s and all the strides that had been made of power and fashion and everything else, all those hippie ideals, they just got washed away after that. It really started getting to a sort of solipsism.

APA: Why do you think people had that sort of reaction?

DL: I think people got angry at the rest of the world, that really it was a matter of seeing the US get the shit kicked out of them over the period of decades. When you think about the '70s, you have Vietnam, the first war the US lost, and then you have Nixon and Watergate, and he was sort of a low point of the corruption of government, and then suddenly you have this Third World country taking over, and keeping supposedly the greatest power of the world hostage and we're helpless about this. People were mad. And it seemed to be a sort of isolationism, where they didn't really care about what happened with the rest of the world, so I think that was sort of the key change that still remains today.

APA: So in your book, you talk about people struggling with different types of identity beyond just race-related definitions. There are struggles with being adopted, being in a foreign country, the idea of sexuality etc.

DL: I think oftentimes the things that you try to base your identity on are elusive and are maybe just figments, and the only way you can really find a place for yourself is with the people that you're close to, not so much these kinds of artificial groups or ethnicities or communities. Just going back and forth between overseas and base and living in these various cultures of the army and the US embassy, I never could really find a place for myself, and I started to see that in a way, it could be a shape-shifter. You could say that you were one thing one minute and change the next, and in a way, it was very artificial.

The funniest, best thing that happened to me, as I went around and went on tour for my first book, was this 21-year-old come up to me at a bookstore and say, "Listen you know, I'm Korean-American, and I want to be a writer too, but do I have to write about being Korean-American? And I said, "No, because I've done that for you." And I think that the writers of my generation and the generation before--starting with Maxine Hong Kingston, David Wong Louie and Chang-Rae Lee, and Gish Jen--these writers have had to deal with that burden of expectation that we're going to write about being Asian American, and I think very quickly that that burden will lessen.

APA: Yeah, hopefully that will be the case. OK, ready for my brilliant last question?

DL: OK, I'm ready for your brilliant last question.

APA: In your opinion, is windsurfing the sport of the future? [Don Lee has these fun pictures of himself windsurfing on his website: www.don-lee.com/bio.html]

DL: No [laughs] Windsurfing: the fastest shrinking sport in the world!! Unfortunately no, although the Israelis won the gold medal today for windsurfing, and I thought, Wow, I'm sure there's gonna be 10 million new Israeli windsurfers, people learning the sport. No, I love to windsurf, but I'm afraid what I'm seeing is dwindling.

APA: How long have you been windsurfing for?

DL: 8 years. It's really fun. But I understand it though, because it's very hard to learn, it's very expensive, there are few places you can do it, but it's just that you wait for wind on weekends and a lot of times it just doesn't arrive. It sort of doesn't have that much allure anymore. But I'll keep doing it!

APA: You'll keep the sport alive, right?

DL: That's right.

 

Go to Don Lee's website, which he maintains himself, thanks to 2 years of engineering at UCLA (before he saw the light and ran the other direction) for more reviews, information, and a sneak peek at the first chapter and other excerpts from Country of Origin. www.don-lee.com

 

Asia Pacific Arts

Date Posted: 9/1/2004