Lisa Lee

Lisa Lee is the recipient of the Marianne Russo Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize. She has received other fellowships and awards from Kundiman, Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Korea Foundation. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, VIDA, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Lee holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles.

Lee's debut novel is American Han. Joumana Khatib of the New York Times Book Review called it “one of the best things I’ve read in ages.”

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

The title is doing a lot of work in that American han is what the book is about. But many readers won’t know what han is or what I mean by “American” han, and since I don’t define or use the word anywhere in the book other than in the title and epigraph, for some readers it might take reading the whole book and maybe a little research to understand the meaning.

What's in a name?

I chose the name Jane Kim for my narrator because it’s a common Asian American name—so common that she shares it with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Jane Kims in America. She has no middle name because her parents are Korean immigrants and it wasn’t customary in Korea to assign middle names. In the novel, Jane explains how she ends up with the middle name NMN on her driver’s license. Jane’s brother is named Jun-ho at birth, and changes his name to Kevin when he’s ten. Kevin is another common Asian American name. To be honest, I just liked the way it sounded with the last name Kim.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your novel?

My teenage self wouldn’t believe it if you told her that she’d grow up to write and publish a novel. I read a lot growing up, but I didn’t think about the idea of being a writer until I was in my twenties, and even then, I thought that was for other people, not for someone like me. It took almost a decade after college to really pursue writing as a career. I had to live and learn a lot before I was ready to write this book. My young self didn’t have any of the knowledge that went into it. I think she’d be relieved to learn that she would one day have a novel’s worth of insight into her experience.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I always knew how my novel would begin. I knew that the charged scene where the mother shows up unannounced at Jane’s apartment in San Francisco was the beginning because it was the first thing I ever wrote concerning this novel, but it took me years to figure out where the novel would end up. At some point, I realized that we couldn’t understand the women in the novel without understanding the men, and this is when I decided to bring Jane’s brother and her father into the forefront as central characters. In this world, the men have the authority and their experiences take precedence. The way they process the world gets passed on to Jane and her mother. So I understood that the men’s experience is a shared experience with the women. When I understood that, I knew that it would end with the climactic event involving Kevin, and that the novel would end with Jane and Kevin.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There’s a lot of myself in all my characters. I imagined them all, so they must all come from some part of me. The characters are inspired by people I know or have met, at least my perception of them, but they are entirely fictional.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I’ve learned a lot from my daughter. Being a mother has helped me to think about perspectives different from my own and to have more empathy for my own mother. This has found its way into my writing. Motherhood has also helped me to value time and think about the passing of time. I try to do the things that bring me joy because that joy fuels my work and allows me to be more free in my writing.

An early draft of my novel is based on Harold & Kumar. I love that movie. When it came out in 2004, it was transformative to see two young Asian American men playing stoners on a road trip to White Castle—their characters were so anti-stereotype and I loved it. I knew Asian American men just like them. It made me happy to see them on film. I tried to write a comedy of errors like Harold & Kumar, starring Jane Kim and Margaret Cho’s mother, but it just wasn’t funny.

Visit Lisa Lee's website.

--Marshal Zeringue