How to Write From Diversity, with Marie Myung-Ok Lee

The writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee is the author of several young adult novels, including Finding My Voice, thought to be the first contemporary set Asian American Young Adult (YA) book. The first Fulbright scholar to creative writing, she is the founder of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia University. Her stories and essays have been published in the Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica and The Guardian, among others. She graduated from Brown University and was a writer in residence there before she began teaching at Columbia University. Her new book is The Evening Hero, just out from Simon & Schuster. She’s the perfect person with whom to discuss how to write from diversity. Listen in and read along as we do just that. 

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Marion: Welcome, Marie.

Marie: Hi, Marion. I’m so excited to be here.

Marion: Well, it’s wonderful to have you here. And as I’ve mentioned, you’ve written YA novels, essays, and this new novel, The Evening Hero, which is for adults. And your work includes some tremendously transparent pieces of memoir that take on your parents, immigration, your own Thanksgiving, as well as your son’s substantial disabilities and subsequent medical issues.

And we’ll talk in a moment about your new book and its themes. But if you had to define your territory as a writer, what is it? What do you take on and what do you leave alone and how do you make those decisions?

Marie: I think my territory is curiosity and meaning in life. Very early on when I started writing, I was given really bad advice about, I should expertise myself in something. And in general… Right?

This novel has taken me 18 years because I just followed a lot of my curiosity, seeing where it led me and then just getting way too much material and then having to thrash around and find the actual story within the mess. But that’s just kind of how I work through mess. I’m not super organized. I don’t know what I’m doing. A Yale doctor had a really great quote about how, for some writers, writing is like driving at night, you only see what’s in front of you in the headlights a couple feet. That’s me. I’m lost in my own book. I’ve been lost in my book for years, but I finally wrote my way out.

Marion: Oh, that’s such a great answer. It’s so honest. It’s so helpful. I think so many people are under the impression that writing is this mystical thing that drops from the gods into our heads and comes out our fingers and I’m like, “Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

And so you touched on the lousy advice we can get. So I’ve heard it all. And it’s apparently you didn’t get the memo that writers are supposed to stick to the one lane or you got it and you tore it up or you did whatever you did. And I love to ask writers about this, about how to learn to travel more widely than that one lane, because usually this bad advice is given by agents, that you just are supposed to write in one genre.

And I find it completely repellent. But I also understand that publishing is a business in which you’ve got to develop a track record, blah, blah, blah. But how did you just bust out and say, “Okay, a little YA here, some personal essays over here.” And you say you’re messy, but it’s a pretty repressive piece of advice that we get that you stick in one lane.

Marie: Right, because I think a lot of the way capitalism works is about branding. You want a simple, clean brand and the logo and so forth and writing is really as you know, the opposite of that. And so much of it is subconscious. And I think a lot of what really good writers do, like Jennifer Egan is one of my favorites. She is so good at picking up these weird signals from the future, that she almost writes us into the future. Do you know what I’m saying? It’s not even just witness. It’s almost like pressions, because she’s so sensitive to what’s going on. And so for me too, I grew up in a rural area. And so I wanted to be a writer when I was nine. And I love that your podcast is called QWERTY, because the typewriter was my foundational thing.

When I was a little kid, I was writing stories and blah-la-la. But then it wasn’t until my brothers gave me their typewriter they no longer wanted, and when I typed something for the first time, it came out so professional that I sold it to my parents for a nickel. And I just thought, “I just want to do this forever.” I was set, you know what I’m saying? “I’m professional now. I’m publishing and getting money for it.”

But back to your point about, you don’t know what you’re doing and most people don’t realize that is, I kept thinking I’m not a real writer because I really love Flannery O’Connor and I’m just writing this stuff and I don’t know what’s going on and I don’t know what’s happening. And I too had that idea that if I was a real writer, I would actually write real stuff, versus the messy way that I work. And really it wasn’t until, seriously, 10 years later, I just thought, “Oh wait. Actually other people write this way too. And it’s okay.” Or it’s okay to start out badly. And that’s the thing I have to really have my students learn to marinate themselves in because they don’t believe me when I say my first drafts are still awful. And I would be embarrassed if anybody saw… They’re sentimental, you know what I mean? They’re cringy, but you have to sit with it to get to the next part. And my students are so well trained to do everything well right away. And that is something that’s a real obstacle if you want to be an artist.

Marion: Perfect. And that’s just it. I call my first draft the “vomit draft,” and I do that because it is.

Marie: Yeah, but it’s getting it out. You’ll feel better.

Marion: Right. You’ll feel so much better and try to get it all up the first time. Kind of hard, but. But you don’t want to fall in love with it and you’re not going to develop a great deal of sentimental attachment to a big pile of vomit. And good, because now you’ve got to go in there and find the stuff that works.

Marion: And this just leads beautifully to something I just am dying to ask you. In 2020, you wrote a piece for Salon in which you take on the xenophobic naming of epidemics. And you do this undeniably wondrous thing in this essay where you slap down the history of invasive and alien species, defining them according to their official language that went into the 1999 law that seeks to quote “control and minimize the economic ecological and human health aspects, that invasive species cause.”

And you talk about alien species, and you talk about how horses were imported and how essential they became to our identity. But how quote, “Asians, are also foundational to our country’s story, remain perpetual outsiders, foreigners, ready to be feared and reviled with any Asian-inflected spark.”

And you go on to talk about the conscious and unconscious ways we categorize invasive species as good: Horses, palm trees, house sparrows, and bad: the Asian Flu. And you go on to write about how ridiculous racism and xenophobia is. So let’s talk about constructing a piece like this.

I marveled at this. I actually let out a big loud whoop when rereading this for this interview. And my audience is writers and writers get ideas every minute, like you just said, messy, sloppy, crazy, whatever. All the time, we get these ideas, whirling around. We see metaphor and analogies that no one else sees. And yet we talk ourself out of them all the time because they’re so wild. So give some advice on how, when you see this crazy, racist, xenophobic, horror that is naming the pandemic “the Asian flu, the Chinese flu,” whatever we wanted to call it, how you gave that idea the juice it needed to make it on to the pages of Salon.

Marie: Well, one thing is I keep a notebook with me, actually, I keep several notebooks. I am literally messy. I have a bunch of notebooks. I always carry one with me. I don’t know why. I’m not sure if you’re like this, but I like to write by hand. I can’t write notes into my phone. So I have been keeping this list. And it’s funny. I just saw some other thing that I was adding because there’s some kind of other Asian term that just come up recently. Someone’s complaining in Florida, which I’ve added. But so I’ve had this list for years and it’s been marinating there forever. And I’ve been joking with my friends about, “Ah, not the Japanese beetle again.” And so sometimes these things are free floating and then there’s enough pressure that they coalesce into something. So I’ve also been interested in borders and we talk a little bit about border security.

So it really is going back to being curious. So a lot of times I can’t read an article without clipping things out and just writing weird little things in all my weird little notebooks and they end up having no organization. But then occasionally when something like this comes up, I have so much weird stuff that I can draw on. And then it makes it seem like, “Oh, this is a genius article,” but actually I had all these weird little scraps of everything that I wanted to write about. Because I have wanted to write about borders as well, and border security. And so how weird is it that… All my weird, this is not an advice that you should spend all day on the internet, but a lot of times when I’m looking at stuff, I’m just like, “Oh, this leads to this. This is so weird. Or I didn’t realize the border wall didn’t start with Trump,” and so forth. And I will add also that Tucker Carlson has some weird campus group that really came after me for this article. And because, as you see, I have the receipts. Everything is very carefully documented.

So I think that’s the other difficult thing about being a writer is a lot of times, like I would say what my brand is. I try to make sure everything I say in nonfiction and in fiction actually is backed up. But even still in this day and age, that’s not enough for people. That’s not enough to make me not want to write, but it is something that you do have to face in terms of… You want to speak your truth. And sometimes people are saying, “Well, you’re not speaking your truth.” And you just have to, as you probably know, have to get used to that.

Marion: You do. I mean, ever since Kellyanne Conway introduced the idea of “alternative facts,” we’ve just all been a little bit addled by the idea that how many people hold to things that are simply not true. So it’s a responsibility of the writer to be accurate. You want to be accurate all the time and that’s the bare hack minimum is to be accurate. But when we get to these combinations of ideas, I just love what you did in that piece. It’s so wonderful. And it would be easy to say that you’re angry in that piece and justifiable anger is terrific fuel for writers. It’s righteous indignation is like high-test caffeine, but it can really get in the way of voice when you get preachy or demanding. And you don’t do that in this piece. The goodness knows we all need to be constantly reminded of the bias that is endangered Asian Americans for generations. So let’s talk for a minute about voice and how you bring the language of anger under control to make your point.

Marie: Yes, I did. It seemed like there was a little blip, but it went fine. Yes, I did get the question. Thank you. And anger is a really good question because I think, in this book, there’s a lot of sort of… In The Evening Hero, there’s a lot of sort of sub-rosa anger, sort of these underground fires that we’re talking about. But it’s not an angry book per se. And similarly to how I had these lists of the Asian termite and so forth. I think also this has to branch off to my anger at… I feel like as a culture, we’re less interested now in how and where does knowledge come from? And because we kind of offload that to other people like Kellyanne Conway, then we don’t do the hard work that we need to do.

Marie: But it’s not just a Maga thing. That is also too easy to just offload. But part of the research that I did for this book is I went on the third year clerkship with the OB-GYN fellows at Brown University’s Medical School. And in doing that, one of the things that they did is they gave us this book that was sponsored by one of the drug companies. And it’s sort of like, so if someone has a vaginal infection, you give them this much of this company’s antibiotics to which I couldn’t help saying, “Doesn’t that seem a little weird that the company that’s supplying us with these books, that we’re just supposed to use their drugs?” And everyone’s kind of like, “Shut up, lady. We’re trying to memorize everything so we can get on with it.”

And the fact that no one wanted to stop and think about this, that made me angry. And so that kind of became this thing that I wanted to express in the book. But without me going like, “Why does no one think about where knowledge comes from?” So it’s kind of like, it’s something I want to express in the book, but in a way that’s more organic versus… So something like that is less of a Salon piece and more of a “Let’s do this in literature where Yungman kind of sees, oh, a lot of things that he thinks is true, he realizes aren’t true, but he’s just kind of accepted it because that’s what people do.”

Marion: Yeah. So you’re referring to your main character in your new book. And I love the fact that you’re, in The Evening Hero is the title of the new book. And we’ll put lots of links in the transcript to this, but before we jump into all of the plot there, and the construction of that book, you mentioned the reporting you did. And I think memoir writers need to constantly be reminded that they need to do that if only to check their facts. But I think a lot of people who want to write fiction fear placing a character in a world… Or at least beginning writers, they fear placing a character in a world they don’t know. Because they don’t know that you can call up someone in a chosen profession and ask about it. You can tag along. You can watch.

I have literally never had anyone say no to me when I’ve asked them, can I come see what you do? And that includes a forensic pathologist who let me come and watch crime scene autopsy. So we tag along, we learn, we report on it. So you embedded yourself in this OB-GYN third year rotation. And along with finding out that the drug company whose booklet you were given was also recommending their own drugs, is there anything else you could pass along to the young writers out there about making that call, embedding yourself, finding a place to get your story,

Marie: Right. That’s such a great point. First, people do love talking about what they do. So that’s the first part. The second part is if you can talk to someone and just follow them, that’s so much better than reading about it because you’ll find you just get so much weird stuff. And the third thing is the story will kind of, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, I believe the story will demand what it demands and ask of you. And again, so a bunch of the book is set in North Korea. Obviously it’s hard to find out information. You can’t even look at North Korean Google Maps. But still, the story demanded that parts of it be set in North Korea.

And then the weirdest thing that happened too, was I just felt like, “Oh, I really need to get there. I need to see what it smells like.” I just had this weird obsession. And then the most bizarre thing happened at Brown. A bunch of kids… Kids. I shouldn’t call them kids. A bunch of students who were studying Chinese, they found a Chinese fixer to take them into North Korea. And they needed a faculty member to come with them. And guess who that was? It was me. And then this other weird thing happened. And they ended up actually taking us to the place where the book takes place, which was not something I could have possibly planned. But so to your point, just do it. And then you never know what’ll happen because how there’s no way I could have planned, “I’m going to go to North Korea next and to the exact place where this particular scene,” but it happened. So do it first and then do your research, just do it, see where it takes you. And then the rest will follow. I guarantee it. I can really, yes.

Marion: Yeah. I do too. Yeah. Make the call, ask somebody. Literally, no one has ever said no. And it’s led to, as you just said, I’ve seen some of the wildest things. I’ve heard some of the most remarkable things. People say the most astonishing things, even when I have a notebook in my hand, and I love that about this world.

So let’s talk about this beautiful book of yours, The Evening Hero, and the old adage tells us to write what we know. Your parents are immigrants who exited North Korea after the partition that was made that divided Korea along the 38th parallel as a spoils of war act after World War II. And to say that what they witnessed was harrowing just doesn’t cover it as the Soviet troops raped and pillaged in the north and your family had no idea if things were going to be any different in the south, under the American troops.

Your father would become a doctor in rural Minnesota. Your son has significant medical issues that result in you interacting with the American medical system regularly. So what I’m trying to get at is, can you take us back to when you, in your own life, began to develop the idea for this book. If we write what we know, when you were developing the idea for The Evening Hero, you’ve got a lot of this in your family, a lot of this in your life, and you bring us that life of a rural doctor in Minnesota. You take on, you take on American medicine and the dilemma of what’s gained and lost in the lives of contemporary immigrants. So where along the experiences of your own family did you begin to note some storyline, some pulse you wanted to feel?

Marie: Well, the ironic thing actually is that if… Most Koreans that I know of my generation, our parents will not talk about the war at all, because it was so traumatic, the things that they saw. And people of my age, our parents also lived through the Japanese colonization, which was also very brutal and then add migration and immigration on top of that. And then just trying to stay alive and survive and thrive in a new country. So ironically, I used to try to get all these oral histories from my mother and she will never talk about it. And I even signed her up for this thing called Korean-American Story where they will put you on camera and you do an oral history. So I thought, “Well, if she wouldn’t tell me, when she’s on camera, she’ll tell the camera all this stuff.” Now she didn’t say anything that was new.

So in a weird way, I think having my parents, and they’re a little bit older than the protagonist in this story, it kind of gave me a structure and environment just sort of seeing how my father worked at a rural hospital and they were all men. And you never talked about money and here I’m bringing my son. And first thing we have to do is go to the finance place. This gave me like a lot of world building. I just know these worlds so well. But then actually the storyline was something that I wrote myself into. And a lot of it is I was trying to get to know my parents.

So my father passed away more than 20 years ago. And my mother now has dementia. And this whole time, they never really told us very much at all about their lives at all. I did write about my mother’s traversing, the 38th Parallel right after World War II. She has told us some, but that is the barest outlines of anything we know, and they’ve never embellished it at all. So to some degree, the bulk of this has been from me taking oral histories of other Korean war survivors. And then just trying to… It’s almost been a therapy thing where I’ve understood a lot more about how the trauma that my parents had was passed down to us, but that we didn’t really understand it. So kind of how there’s an American-born son in the book, right. He’s just kind of clueless and he doesn’t understand why the dad gets so mad about so many things or just sort of some erotic behavior.

And now I’m understanding my parents so much more, or really about… Just for instance, my mother used to do this kind of crazy thing in the grocery store where she couldn’t tell which apple she wanted and she’d kind of have a fit over it. And as kids, we be kind of like, “Mom, can we just choose an apple?” But I never realized in her story, which I do know, is that she went over first, over the 38th Parallel with an aunt, because she had to help the aunt with a baby and her whole family was supposed to come the next day. But the next day the border was closed. So she never saw her family again. So that one decision that she made meant she never said bye to her mother. She never saw her family again. So for us kids, we’re just kind of like, “Oh, she can’t decide from this apple. And she has these mood swings.” But we didn’t know that one decision when you’re 14 changes your entire life or just… You survived the war, so yay. That means your life is great.” No, when you’re 14, we talk so much about resilience with children. But no, I think that scar has just completely extended to her life.

For instance, I always felt it’s harder for her to love because I really feel like she lost so much when she was young, that it was harder for her to show affection to us because I really do feel like I understand now that everything could be taken away in a day. And so I can kind of see why she wasn’t like my friend’s mom like, “Oh, I love you” and hugging us and so forth. And that kind of trauma was something that I was hoping to express in the book because the idea too that, even with the shootings at Uvalde, we’re like, Well, we’ll get over it.” But no. The trauma radiates outward. Similarly with the war, the war has affected so many people, and the trauma continues.

Marion: Yeah, it does. Absolutely. And what’s fascinating to me, and you mentioned Jennifer Egan before, about how she’s prescient. And publication is tricky business. Publishers buy books they think are, well, that are going to sell. And some of that decision on both the writer and the publisher requires that the books speak to what’s going on in the future. In this book, among other themes, you consider rural hospital closures, anti-Asian racism, and how war trauma seeps into everyday life for an immigrant. Huh? Yeah. I can’t imagine more timely topics because we’re all experiencing the lack of nurses, doctors, and subsequent care. And you would pretty much have to be living under a rock not to know about all the anti-Asian racism that is yet again risen to a very obvious, ugly place on our American landscape. So let’s talk about prescient.

You said you’re messy and you don’t really think about it, but is that… In planning a book, are you just keeping your head down and writing what interests you? Or at some point, did you look up and say, “Well, I really should bring in this rural healthcare issue because it’s going to be crazier even than it is now when this book comes out.” So is it keeping your head down and just doing what you want or is there some degree of listening for the coming earthquake that writers have to engage in, do you think, to be successful?

Marie: It is my actual personal opinion that… And I can only speak for myself, but I think I just wrote what I was really interested in. And I think it is… Again, my opinion, I think it is a mistake to try to chase after what is currently interesting or what you think might be like that in the future. And I can also speak to that because I did that myself when I was first trying to get my YA published, I was all, “Oh, well, Sweet Valley High is really cool. So I’m going to try to do this Sweet Valley High-ish book,” which my first novel was actually Sweet Valley High-ish, didn’t have any Asian characters because I really felt like I was doing this kind of mimicry and, yeah, the beautiful thing is that I even auditioned for one of the series. I don’t think it was Sweet Valley High, but it was one of the… Maybe it was The Babysitter’s Club? And the editor eventually rejected it. I still remember… I saw the rejection letter. It says something like, “You didn’t follow the formula.” It was the Francine Pascal series with the twins. They said, “You didn’t follow the formula.”

But one of the editors who rejected it ended up becoming one of my editors for my YA’s today, when I’m actually trusting my own voice, my own interests, versus “I’m going to chase after Sweet Valley High,” and that has become my abundance. I’ve gotten into the groove. And I do remember feeling kind of, ugh, just when I was chasing after, “Oh, I want to be the next Judy Bloom. I want to do this. I want to do this,” versus, “Can I be the best Marie Lee I could be,” when I kind of settled into that sort of. And it was just more a, “Well, I got to just be me because I’m not good at being Judy Bloom or Flannery O’Connor.”

Interestingly, I’m not a white lady from the south, even as much as I like her stories. So I think at some point, the mimicry finally gave way to me being more confident in just writing my own stuff. Although I will mention that finding my voice, my first YA novel was rejected everywhere. Everywhere, except one last place. So I was one place away from being an unpublished author. But I will say again, but you can also look at it, that was all I needed was that one. And I was off to the races.

Marion: Yeah. I love the idea. I love the advice about not being mimicy because it isn’t going to feel good if you win at that. And you’re not probably not going to win at it. And I don’t want to write formulaically and you don’t write formulaically. And that’s evidenced by reading a bulk of your work. I think the first piece of yours I read was in 2014, when you publish an Opinionator piece in The New York Times called “Eat Turkey, Become American.” And so you’re the perfect person to ask about for my writing audience about building our way to a book. In the tagline to that piece, read that you were writing a book on the history of medicine and that’s the book you’ve just published. And so, as you said it, this book took you 18 years to write.

But I went back and looked at the taglines of the other pieces in which you’re identified the same way. And along the way to publishing this book, you were advertising what you were up to. And I tell writers all the time to do this. Break off pieces of things, build an audience, test your argument on the public, see what interests them. So let’s talk about building up toward the publication of the book. Were those pieces in the Paris Review and The New York Times and Salon that preceded this novel, were they strategically placed in your messaging or merely just being a writer, trying to make a living, and this is what interests me right now?

Marie: Ironically, it also goes to show that the book was sold in 2012. So anything after 2012 was just kind of a tagline because the book was sold. It was still very much in progress. But at the same time, I also felt that I used to be very superstitious about my writing, or not wanting to call myself a writer. This occurred to me for a really long time, but now I felt more just being, “Look, I’m a writer. This is what I’m writing. This is what I’m doing,” made me feel that it would eventually get done. And I feel like that’s a mental shift that I’ve done that also, I feel respects myself in my chosen profession.

One of my best friends from the Asian American Writers Workshop… We co-founded this. It just had its 30th birthday. And we are funnily in another writing workshop together. It’s very informal, but I was writing some article… Oh, for poets and writers about our pandemic workshop and Curtis, my friend said, “Oh, but I don’t really feel like a writer.” And I was like, “Curtis, we’ve been friends for 30 years. We’ve been writing together for 30 years.” He said, “Yeah, but I’m not published like the rest of you guys”. And I just said, “Curtis, no. You have to stop that.” And then the funny thing is he just got this huge book deal. And I just kind of feel that, do you know what I’m saying? Yeah, you should be calling your… If you write and you’re serious about it, you’re a writer. It doesn’t matter if you’re published. I think that is not the line that makes you a writer or not. The line is, do you write? Okay, you’re a writer.

Marion: Yeah. I try to teach and treat the people that I work with as professionals. And I find that it surprises a lot of them when I give them a deadline. And I say, “I want to see the rewrite on this in two weeks. I want to see this next week. I want to see this in six months.” And I think it helps to just get that professional point of view around your work, because otherwise you can talk yourself out of it. After all, the world is filled with questions. If your in-laws say, “Are you ever going to get a real job?” Or they say all kinds of really diminishing things if you’re not careful. So I do have a real job. I write all the time and it works for me.

So you talked a little bit, and as we wrap this up and I hate to wrap it up, but we’ll have to wrap it up. But as we start to wrap it up, you talked before about not being all that organized, and I loved that. I loved the candor of that. But you have had residencies as a fellow at both Yaddo and McDowell. So if you are out there in the world at home, not being all that organized and just reacting to things the way you want to, how hard is it to drop out of being wife, mother, teacher, person, daughter, and then step into the solitude provided by a writing colony where you’re expected to just write?

Marie: Well, that’s a perfect segue because that is one of the first places where I felt, “Wow, they’re treating me like a professional. I’m expected to work. And no one’s telling me to work. I’m not getting paid to work.” And for me, particularly with Yaddo and McDowell, they also had a fund that gave me extra money. So I could get extra care for my son while I was gone. So physically, this has become a huge part of my writing practice, where I’m physically away. I cannot do anything. I do not have to be a functioning adult. So generally I would do nutty things like basically right to my heart’s content, which could include, “Oh, it’s 2:00 AM. I’m going to make myself a cup of coffee. I’m not sleepy. I’m going to write because I don’t have to get up, you know what I mean, and be a functioning adult tomorrow.”

But at the same time I did… The longest time I ever spent away was a month at Yaddo, and I was so grateful and I thought, “Oh, I’m super going to get my book done.” And this was in 2008. I was very wrong. But no being able to be called a professional. It’s beautiful. And if you can’t go to a Yaddo or McDowell, make it so there’s a weekend, no one talks to you, or go to a hotel, just marinate yourself in your own work. Just detach everything. It’s kind of delicious. You can write. You can take a nap. Just try it. It’s amazing

Marion: Coffee at 2:00 AM. It’s a lifestyle. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Marie. I am deeply grateful for you taking the time and I wish you all the best with the new book.

Marie: Thank you so much. This is a really fun conversation. I really appreciate it.

Marion: You’re absolutely welcome. The writer is Marie Myung-Ok Lee. See more on her at marie lee dot net. Her new book is The Evening Hero, just out from Simon and Schuster. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at over it dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lauren Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, where I offer online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.