An immigrant's lot

Krys Lee may have been raised in the US and speak with a strong American accent but the Korean-American writer of short stories feels far more Korean than American. That’s probably because she’s been living outside the US for almost half her life and has spent the last several years in Seoul.
  Born in Seoul, Lee moved to the United States at the age of four with her parents who, like many other South Koreans in the 1960s and 1970s, found it hard to live at home. Raised in California and Washington, Lee studied in both the US and England.
“I’ve spent so much time outside the States that I don’t think of myself as a Korean-American anymore,” says Lee during a break at the Singapore Writers Festival, “I feel partially Korean, partially American. It’s every different when I’m back in America, as I have to relearn that world. A part of me is very much a product of that world. The longer I stay in Korea, the more the way I look at the world changes.”
Her return to South Korean is a type of reverse immigration, a phenomenon that has lately seen a large number of Chinese, Korean and Japanese-Americans going back to their respective motherlands. After a period of living in England, Lee is proud to call Seoul home and is content to be dating a Korean who doesn’t, she laughs, speak a word of English.
She’s received recognition for her writing: a finalist in the Best New American Voices competition, she received special mention in the 2012 Pushcart Prize and has seen her work published in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian and the New Statesman.
She’s just published her first book, “Drifting House”, a collection of short stories, which focus on the failures of dislocated Korean families in the US. The stories are set mostly in America, but some take place in Korea, both South and North. It was this book that drew her back to her motherland. “The book is 85 per cent fiction and 15 per cent biographical,” she says.
“These are the stories that I understand the most. When I returned, I couldn’t leave. It was a coming to terms with everything that had haunted our family and our history. It was like I’d been missing an arm but had been unaware of it my entire life.”
“Drifting House” portrays a range of characters caught up in violence, sadness and loneliness. Among them are Mrs Shin, a South Korean divorcee who moves to the US to find her daughter who’s been kidnapped by her ex-husband; the friendless children of Korean families in the US; and a “goose” father in Korea who lives a lonely life as he works hard to support his family now living in the US. There are also heart-wrenching tales of North Korean children trekking to China to find their mother and an incestuous relationship between a daughter and her father. Lee also writes about a South Korean salaryman hit hard by the 1997 IMF crisis who ended up on the streets.
Lee came across some of these characters while living in the US and describes them as a microcosm of a much larger culture.
“For me this book is very much about trying to understand what happened to our family, our generation, what they had to go through. My parent’s generation is a wounded, scarred generation. In the US and UK, you hear success stories about the Chinese and Koreans, but there’s a large majority of immigrants who fail – and fail spectacularly. The suicide rate among Koreans is high both in the US and Europe.”
In the apartment where Lee grew up, the walls couldn’t mask the sound of arguments and beatings, part and parcel, she says, of the economic pressures and the lack of dignity inherent to immigrant life.
Lee says her parents earned a minimal salary and their family grew up without health insurance. Her mother died of cancer. The family sunk into debt and lost their home. Her father was a pastor and was expected to give back to the church.
“Even though we looked to America, we lived as if we were in Korea. My mother never spoke English well. We lived in a conservative Korean way,” she says.
Writing has helped Lee find solace and an understanding of the world surrounding immigrant families including her own.
“Through the process of writing a book you change as a human being. You’re not just creating a product. The thing you create changes who you are, and so if you really work on a book, put everything you know about the world into the book, you become a different person because of that book. I’ve felt very much that way with ‘Drifting House’,” she says.
Lee also believes she can do more to help her characters by being a writer. In South Korea, she devotes much of her spare time to helping North Korean refugees. “When you’re close to refugees who survive, you want to do what you can help. You feel some responsibility as a human being,” she says.
It’s an activity that has landed her in hot water on more than one occasion and has also led to death threats. Lee laments the level of corruption in NGOs that often has dire effects on North Korean refugees. Speaking out about it has put her life in peril.
“Last year, things happened and I had to get out. Some people were coming after me,” she says, adding that some North Korean refugees end up in Thailand on their way to a third country.
Inspired by the plight of these refugees, Lee plans to writes a novel about the border area between China and North Korea.
“It’s inspired by my own experiences there,” she says with a grin.

The author attended the Singapore Writers Festival courtesy of the island-state’s National Arts Council.

THE FLAMES OF SUFFERING

Krys Lee’s “Drifting House” is published in the US by Viking Penguin and in the UK by Faber and Faber. Visit www.KrysLee.com.