Chang-Rae Lee
Chang-Rae Lee
Chang-rae Leeis a Korean American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University,. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing...
NationalitySouth Korean
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth29 July 1965
writing issues trying
I try to be aware of what I'm concerned about, aware of how I feel about myself in the world, aware of how I feel about the issues of the day, but I guess I don't want to write essays in my head about my craft and maybe it's because I teach and talk about craft of other writers as a reader. I feel the moment I start doing that is when it's going to kill me.
long korean my-family
My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.
psychics discounts hives
Do not discount the psychic warmth of the hive.
feels knows
For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.
brother war father
I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.
offering perfect culture
No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.
roots maps littles
We have hopes and make plans, and if they are dashed or waylaid, we naturally rationalize and redraw the map to locate ourselves anew. Or else we brood and too firmly root. Very few can step forward again and again in what amounts to veritable leaps into the void, where there are no ready holds, where little is familiar, where you get constantly stuck in the thickets of your uncertainties and fears.
sorry practice hopeful
And it occurred to me that in this new millennial life of instant and ubiquitous connection, you don't in fact communicate so much as leave messages for one another, these odd improvisational performances, often sorry bits and samplings of ourselves that can't help but seem out of context. And then when you do finally reach someone, everyone's so out of practice or too hopeful or else embittered that you wonder if it would be better not to attempt contact at all.
war struggle mean
I had a visceral connection to the period [of Korean War]. By visceral I suppose I mean emotional. But every fiction requires so much that is not that so I did a lot of other research and a lot of thinking, a lot of struggling there.
tales ends universe
A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.
yesterday eras commodity
In this difficult era the most valuable commodity is the unfailing turn of the hours and how they retrieve for us the known harbor of yesterday.
ideas flames desire
For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it’s when we’re closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we’ll tread through any flame.
littles fiction honest
To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.
thinking light preparation
What hasty preparations we make for our future. Think of it: it seems almost tragic, the things we're sure we ought to bring along. We pack too heavy with what we hope we'll use, and too light of what we must. We thus go forth misladen, ill equipped for the dawn.