When I’m watching the street fill up with leaves when dusk morphs
to a waxy flickering to a phone pinging dad I’m inside this bar
I’m line dancing I’m filled with holes for the man with the Glock
releasing the safety must be orgasmic and a background check
equals emasculate one day is like another and then it’s another
school café yoga studio church another concert hall another
outdoor space for cold bodies quiet like a pile of unlucky armadillos
when a friend arrived two days before the one at the synagogue
when he said I have a right to carry to sleep with it to fuck it
the pasta went from hearty to heart riot though I wanted to handshake
a civil understanding on the footprints leading to a glowworm cave
of mourners to the police officers’ eyes the line dance toward
the hearse that my pain string was taut that our country’s pain string
is taut that our country is electric like a frying pan with a frayed cord
always a fray away from fire
Category: Aquifer
Two Poems with Parents
Sleeping in My Childhood Bedroom as an Adult
Glow in the dark stars tumble
into black, their light hanging
like the feet
of a man tied to death. I trace
the outlines of memories and pull them
to my nose, they smell like
patchouli and my father’s
velvet coat. Gray shapes
dance to the window. Are they
the ghosts of my dead dogs
or the angels I overheard
my mother asking for help? Or maybe just
teenage headlights, sneaking back into their parents’
driveway. The laundry
room moans and shakes
behind a poster
of New York City’s face. The dryer thumps
against my wall. Round
round round. Clothes rise
and fall
like the air lifting up my chest. My mother’s
Elvis T-shirt. My father’s white
briefs. The noise goes
in circles. Up
and down. Taped on the fridge
is a photo dated two
days after my birth. My mother is holding
my head to her chest, my feet swing above
Elvis’s bleached teeth. And I still remember
my father
getting nervous and shouting
and shutting
the door when my brother and I found
him in his white briefs. Rise
and fall. I focus on the dark
and the noise and the clothes
that make the
dark warm. Up
and down.
Rise
and fall. Round
round round.
Sitting in a Classroom Where Everyone Is Smarter Than Me (Except Maybe That Guy with the Taco Tattoo)
I want to pull my knees to my chest
and make myself small and see
through like the balled-up sheets
of cling wrap I find in the drawers of my mother’s
kitchen. But I don’t do that
because I wouldn’t be small
or see through to the people
sitting across the table. They would still see
a girl with uncombed hair
wearing a baggy t-shirt she got free from a bank
because she never learned
how to not be ashamed
of her breasts. And they might find it strange
if this girl slipped her feet from
the mud-painted rainboots
that keep her weighted
to the government-bought linoleum,
and then if she pulled
her feet and the hand-knit socks
that held them up to the seat of her chair,
and what if her neck let go
so that her forehead sat balanced between
the tops of her knees.
Yes, that would look strange.
Instead I move my left thigh
over my right and tie my calves
into a knot. I can’t see
my legs beneath the table
but I imagine them as the twisted strings
of green and pink
taffy my father pulled from his suitcase
whenever he was afraid
that he’d been gone
for too long. Throw away
your wrappers, he told me. My mother yelled
when she found them
rolled into worlds
and tucked inside
the corners of kitchen drawers.
Two Poems
Once when I was eight
and my sister seven, tensions boiled over
in a game of hide & seek
& I slapped her. Thwack.
Her head shook while streams on her cheek
loamed into deepening red.
She didn’t talk to me for a week.
No chocolates, no sorry, no nothing.
I even did her homework for a day. Still nothing.
She finally spoke when she found me
crying in a corner after India had lost a cricket match.
Today, years later she isn’t picking up my calls
& I’m here wondering if she’s busy
or simply pissed with me.
I haven’t seen her in long & in this hour of prolonged dusk,
I’m trying to summon facts on her.
But as I pace on my balcony, phone in hand,
watched by a sun rasping blood across a browning sky
all I gather is the colour of her slapped cheek.
And how on reconciliation after a week, she had said
I just wanted to see you cry.
Sambar on my shoes
I spot you in the cafeteria sitting with a faceless stranger
while I await my dosa at the desolate counter
you sip what seems like watermelon juice although
I’m sure my blood is just as gruesome and thick
that must be how your cheeks are so red and faint
like blushes of sky at dawn attracting birds of fury
and strangeness unknown I see some wrens beak you playfully
the crimson spreads through your neck like a field of clover
the stranger inundated with anticipation he crosses his legs
underneath the table when you let out a laugh
I head back to work my appetite punctured my spirit flensed
my dosa tray trembles in the tremors of discovery
buried fears don’t nibble they swallow
I try to tell myself it was probably someone else
but I find incriminating evidence when my colleague points out
continents of sambar on my white converse shoes
By the Creek
Among Schoolchildren
Like a cormorant turning on the wind before tucking its wings and descending into the ocean, my mother, five days a week for forty years of her life, submerged herself in the primary schools of small-town Texas, each brick or stucco campus at which she worked named for a hero of the Alamo: Travis, Crocket, Bowie, and Bonham, garrisons of the alphabet and basic arithmetic—crumbling and underfunded missions all.
As the school’s lone counselor, my mother traveled from classroom to classroom, her materials piled on a Rubbermaid cart as if she were a vaudevillian or ventriloquist, boxes and suitcases filled with dolphin puppets, marionettes of creatures from the sea, and stuffed-animal pirates, each one with an accompanying picture book to teach children about difference and compassion.
Abandonment was the fear that trumped all others, and the children carried it always, the fear dissipating only at the sight of a father’s arrival, or spreading like a fever at the close of the school day when a mother was not readily seen.
How deeply the children sank into worry, withdrawing into hooded sweatshirts like miniature monks, or carving row upon row into their desktops with the tip of an inkless pen.
To be sure, the children had cause to worry.
Parents deployed to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and though most returned to the Air Force base on the city limit line, some did not: the brother ambushed in a sandstorm at night, a father’s helicopter losing sight of the ground, a mother’s Jeep triggering an IED.
There were the domestic and financial worries as well, and my mother scrounged shoes for the shoeless and glasses for the sightless, arranged pro bono visits from doctors, marriage counselors, custody advocates, and lawyers.
Each Friday, she filled backpacks with nonperishables for the poorest children to take home for the weekend, without which they would have nothing to eat, the great isolation of hunger, each child, not adrift for days, but helpless, inert, a boulder in a river around which all water flows.
For loneliness, consider the third grader born without cheekbones, a shrunken jaw, Treacher Collins syndrome, who met with my mother when a surgeon was found to perform a procedure in Dallas for free.
The recovery required that a helmet be worn for weeks to secure her features like clay dredged from a riverbed to dry in the sun. The young girl’s concern was not the surgery but the wearing of the helmet, conspicuous to all.
A deal was struck, and when the girl arrived back at the school, my mother was wearing a helmet as well. Other teachers and students joined in, and for two months all manner of headgear—whether bicycle, beanie, lacrosse, or hockey—bobbed through the halls.
Like Janus, the Roman god with counter-gazing faces, the god of new beginnings and transitions, the children relied at all times (naively, stubbornly, irrespective of evidence) on hope. Each six-week block, each promotion in grade, was a chance to start again, and if hope flickered and dimmed like a struck match, their final refuge was laughter.
When the vice-principal, svelte as an offensive tackle for the Houston Oilers, the muscles of her right forearm hard as an ox’s neck from swinging a hole-bored hickory paddle (in a time before spanking was banned from public schools), tucked her mohair skirt by accident into the rear of her floral-print underpants and inadvertently promenaded through the hall, the laughter, shrill and instantaneous as the city’s lone tornado siren, overwhelmed the vice-principal’s calls for order so that, red-faced, defeated, she was left with no choice but to skulk to her office and brood.
The pièce de résistance (French, spoken with a Texas accent, could peel paint from the Eiffel Tower itself, and for two semesters in high school an English teacher referenced the “Bore-gē-OH-ēs,” the word seared in my mind until, in a Marx Brothers movie, I heard Groucho correctly pronounce “bourgeois”) was the story my mother told about puberty education, how, on one day every school year, the fourth-grade boys were sent en masse to the cafetorium as the girls retired together to the gym.
Television stands with VCRs were wheeled down from the A/V closet, and for forty-five horrifying yet fascinating minutes, as the teachers popped in the tapes and slipped out for a smoke, the children suffered a barrage of gender-specific information from menstruation to dropping testicles, body hair to voice cracks.
On one such appointed day, my mother heard shrieking from the cafetorium and gym at once, and as she rose from her desk, a teacher ran through the hall, her just-lit cigarette trailing smoke from her undulating hand like a priest swinging incense.
“The tapes are switched!” the woman yelled. “The students are watching the wrong tapes!” as the vice-principal, gopher-like, peered out from behind her office door.
In the end, parents had to be called, and though no explanation would fully suffice, the secretary (who got stuck making the calls) offered only a shrug and a halfhearted, “They would have learned about it all sooner or later.”
The one indisputable truth about children is that they grow into adults where personality, instead of evolving, calcifies.
“Joey! We taught you better than that!” my mother, sitting at the kitchen table, would exclaim and slap her hand down on the newspaper article she was reading when a now-adult student was apprehended for robbing a convenience store or absconding with a neighbor’s car.
For my mother, the adult was never severable from the child, which became the measure of her work. Student replaced student each year until, at last in retirement, the progression, like the volley of soldiers against the walls of the Alamo, subsided.
I shall never retreat, Lieutenant Colonel Travis wrote in his final hours. Victory or Death—the scene reenacted each year in the spring while the teachers mouthed lines to the costumed martyrs, and their parents, knowledgeable of history and fleeting time, raised cameras and tripods like bugles and swords.
Future Holdings
Future Holdings documents the abandoned construction site for what would have been the tallest building in the world (Sky City) in Changsha, China. After a few short weeks of building activity in 2015, government authorities halted all construction and local residents eventually allowed the foundation to fill with water and become a fishing pond. Located on the northern edge of Changsha, Sky City would have been the first structure visitors would come across as they traveled along the Xiangjiang River. Today, though, the only elements that tower over this habitat are the construction cranes that fill the horizon. I first photographed this site in 2016 and have returned each year since. Each time, I was struck by the calm and quietness that enveloped this landscape despite the fact that with more than 7 million residents, Changsha would rank as the second largest city in the United States. My goal with Future Holdings is to investigate political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of our contemporary lives through issues of hubris, the relationship between humans and nature, and the evolution of cities like Changsha.
No Problem, Mon: The Batty Boy Adolescent’s Quick Survival Guide
Become a Christian
There is no exception. When Grandma’s getting ready for church tomorrow, tug at her skirt hem and say Grandma, I want to come to church too. She’ll scowl. She’ll remind you that Big Reds said the same thing five years ago, but now he sleeps in every Sunday and had that seizure the other day from smoking weed. Stand your ground. Point out that you’re nothing like your brother, and that it’s her Christian duty to set you on the path of righteousness. She’ll smile. She’ll call you a mouthy little bitch.
Stick with it. Go to church every Sunday. Every Sunday. Starch your white shirt. Press neat creases into your wool slacks. Save any little money you have for the collection plate and cherish the pocket-sized New Testament she’d originally given to Big Reds. On the bus ride to town, ignore the other kids. Sit by your grandma and assume the stoicism of a proud martyr. This means no complaining about: the holes in the bus floor, the rents in the bus seats, the heat pressing in from all sides. Sweat will run into your eyes and pool beneath your butt. But Jesus endured much worse on the cross, so keep quiet.
Don’t Make Friends
Okay, this is a two-parter. So first off, don’t make friends with the kids at church. I know this is tempting; church is so damn boring (can you believe it? Jamaica in 1998, and part of Holy Trinity’s church service is still in Latin), and these kids, they’ll want you to catch butterflies with them at first, out back, in the churchyard, ’round where the tombstones are. It’s a trap. They’ll grow eventually (well, the girls you’ll witness — the boys will start to disappear around 13). They’ll grow somber, like those heavyset women in church with the lining of their slip always dipping below their skirt. They’ll start to wear blouses that button at the neck, and fasten their hair in no-nonsense plaits. They’ll start to invite you to summer retreats and choir practices and, when you politely decline, exhale gasps of frightened outrage that seem way too heavy for their flat chest. You’re not here for all that work. So just keep to yourself from the outset. Sit by your grandma and shake hands with the ladies and the old men as they walk by.
When your grandma dies (terrible loss, really), you can ditch that fancy church in Kingston and go to one in your own area. Don’t go to one in your direct neighborhood, though — go to one on the other side of the gully where the roads are less formal (snaking through bushes) and the houses have a delicious ad hoc quality to them — zinced and planked and set atop cinder blocks. Notice how the roof of this church is flat. Notice how the windows aren’t stained. Notice how the floor is dirty, how the walls are bare and how the pews aren’t pews but fold-up chairs. Notice how the women here jump and wail and mash their faces into foregone ecstasy. Notice how, no matter what church you go to, the preacher’s son is always tall and square-jawed and smiling at you in a way that makes you wonder if there’s anywhere Satan doesn’t have a house.
Speaking of your hometown, this brings us to part two of this section: don’t make friends with the other boys in your neighborhood. That’s asking for trouble. Eventually, they grow into teenagers and confront the futility of trying to make it anywhere. They never know their fathers, and they never make it past the tenth grade. They spend time under the lampposts, by the gully bank, against the old trailer, slapping dominoes, shooting dice, slipping their hands under their girlfriends’ skirts. They’ll want to pull you in on it too. Seal the bands of brotherhood. The Christian defense won’t work here. They’re too basic, too disaffected. My yute, you doh see di girl a check fi yuh? Why yaa act like a pussy?
Trust me. Way too risky. Best to stay inside at all times. Except when you have to go to school, of course. Your mother will send you to good schools in Kingston, far away from the locals. That’s good. After school, when you get off the town bus, head straight home. People will call to you. They’ll say Brown Boy or Scholar or Preacher. It will be out of deference. They’ll admire your discipline. Still, don’t call back to them. Nod politely or smile. Sometimes you can hold up a hand in acknowledgement. Carry around your bible for good measure too. They know you go to church, but it’s good to reinforce this every once in a while.
Keep up at your studies. Otherwise, you won’t have an excuse to stay indoors. Your mother will begin to think it unnatural that a boy is spending all his time in front of a television, atrophying his muscles, neutering his presence. Studying is an excellent pretext. It assures her you’re determined to make the best of her sacrifices. It buys you some good bonding time with her too. She’ll bring you milk sometimes, a whole glass. She’ll put her arms around you. She’ll say you’re nothing like your brother (Big Reds’ been disappearing for days at a time now) and squeeze a little harder. You’ll feel her lips on the top of your head. You’ll remember how soft they feel pressing against your skull. You’ll wonder when will be the last time she holds you like this.
Avoid All Types of Playing Fields
This might seem random, but it’s worth noting. Whether cricket or football or basketball, they’re all the same — trouble. This won’t be a problem where your schools are in Kingston; all the playing areas are walled off and/or privatized. In your hometown, though, they’re plentiful, cropping up in dubious makeshift forms in the most inconvenient places. Be vigilant. Keep abreast of the changes in landscape and avoid the main thoroughfares. Playing fields line them. I know it’s tempting to watch the boys at play, but you’ll thank me. What do you think will happen when a ball comes your way? Don’t think it won’t happen, ’cause it will. And those men, the ones you like to watch, will lean on their haunches and heave at the air, expecting you to throw it back. And, bless your heart, you’ll try, but your throw will go awry (your wrist — always a bit too theatrical). Or you’ll try to kick it back, concentrating with all your might on lining up the ball with the plate of your foot, but the ball sails wild. It goes clear over the light wires onto a rooftop or across the gully into the bushes — it will go everywhere but straight (Tee hee). The men will laugh. They’ll call you skettel, Shelly-Ann or Big Reds’ likkle sister. They’ll ask you what color panty you prefer. Even though it’s in good fun, it’ll hurt. You’ll develop an ironic fear of balls.
On your walks home, best to take the long way through the back roads. Through the flimsy dirt lanes webbing through the groves and wild grass that cordon the town. Buck up, though; you’ll make a friend. His name is Mr. Turner and he’s a sweet old man. Grey sideburns dip from his bald head and line his weirdly smooth face. But he has such nice brown eyes, bright balls of coppery brown eyes. He lives in one of those wobbly wood shacks that crop up by the back lanes like monstrous weeds.
He’ll call you over one day and offer you butterscotch. You’ll notice his house is not as ugly as the others; it’s a confident little wood square set atop slabs of concrete. And, look, he has a little garden to one side — bright bunches of cherry bougainvilleas dripping from a trellis of a fence. He’ll be sitting in a small wicker chair behind his front grill, the inside of his house dark behind him. He’ll tell you how you look like his grandson, who’s also about seven, and offer you butterscotch candy in a yellow-gold wrapper. You’ll start taking that lane regularly; you’ll tell him about your day at school in exchange for candy. When you get a little older, he’ll start giving you plantain tarts and little patties he baked himself; he’ll tell you about the daughter he hasn’t seen since his divorce thirty-odd years ago. She’s about forty now and has a son whom he’s only seen in a few pictures she’s sent. You look so much like his grandson, he’ll say; he’s probably growing a beard too. You’re curious; you didn’t even realize you were growing a beard. Come here, he’ll say, you’re growing some fine little hairs. He’ll reach his hand through the grill and you’ll move close. He’ll sweep the line of your jaw with a shaking finger. Are those really baby hairs? you wonder. Or is his hand that coarse?
When you go back the next day, he won’t have any patties for you. His spatula fell behind the stove and his hands are too big to reach back there. Do you think you could reach back there and get it for him? He’ll ask to see your hand. He won’t be smiling. Still you consent, and he’ll grab your wrist with a strength you didn’t know he had. Will you come and help me? he’ll say. His grip is hard, but his face is as still as dead water. You nod, holding his eyes with yours. He tightens his grip; his eyes are balls of thunder in the dark. Yes, you say again, and tick your mouth into smile. When he lets go to open the grill, run! Dart straight through the fever grass — tall, sticky fever grass slapping your wrists and scratching your neck. Cut into the burned-out clearing, then dash through the field of wild bush they call Deadman’s Fall. Jump the gully. Keep running. Keep running. Run until you reach the guinep tree at the top of the hill that overlooks the Fall. Take a breath. Drop your book bag and take a breath. Laugh, boy, laugh. Throw your teeth to the sky and laugh.
You’re such a tease, you’ll think to yourself. You’re such a motherfuckin’ tease.
Make Up a Girlfriend
Yes, that’s right. When you’re in high school, you’ll want to make up a girlfriend. Your classmates are from a different type of environment from yours. Their houses have carports, and they use summer as a verb. Thankfully, they’ll have some amount of decorum. They’ll not expect you to share sex stories, as they know you can quote Ephesians. Still, being Christian doesn’t exempt you from having a girlfriend. It’s convenient to make one up. So here goes: Her name is Rachel. She goes to your church in your hometown, and her favorite show is Step by Step. If they ask why you never bring her to one of the formals, just say that Kingston frightens her. They’ll believe you.
Be sure to have more interesting tidbits about Rachel so that she sounds like a human being. Keep cryptic notes on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights at home. Things like: R was born on May 6, 1988. R likes pink hibiscuses. R does not get the appeal of video games but has a brother who plays constantly so doesn’t mind it so much. In the unlikely event that your older brother (he’ll be back from jail around now) finds these notes on the inside cover of your book, tell him they are notes you’ve made on the novel’s protagonist, Romeo. He’ll believe you.
Near Final Note
All this work is wearying I know, but think, an American college is right around the corner. And I swear to you, there, you will have reached the promise land. There are, of course, practical matters of concern — Where do you do SATs in Jamaica? — Where are the American college applications? — What is your story? And how do you craft that into a compelling narrative? — Do foreigners qualify for need-based aid? What’s your mother’s salary like in US currency?
Daunting? No doubt. But now that the exit is so close you get to indulge in a bit of fantasy as a reward. Actually, it will be a good form of motivation. That’s right! You can finally start to imagine what type of boyfriend you’re going to have. Can you believe it!? B.O.Y.F.R.I.E.N.D.
Okay, so let’s see, he’s going to be your roommate — tall, broad shouldered, athletic build but not too hard. Blond hair, parted bangs and a baby face with a smile so earnest you’ll be convinced he still drinks milk with dinner. Hey! He’ll look just like James Van Der Beek. Yes! And he’ll wear flannel, and be from some outside-sounding place like Montana. He’d have played football in high school and, like you, had to work very hard to bury his difference. You’ll realize he likes it when you mistake American football terms. He doesn’t get to correct you often, so you give him this opportunity. “Oh my god, it’s end zone not field zone!” He’ll find this ignorance charming, and sometimes chuck you on the shoulder. He likes your accent too. You’ll sometimes catch him mouthing a word you’d just said, slightly in awe. And that is how it will happen, in the dark of your dorm room one night. You’ll both be sitting up in his bed against the wall, your head rested on his shoulder, his arms scooped around your back. It doesn’t matter how you got there, just know you’ll both be slightly drunk. He wants to know how you say ‘hello’ in Jamaican. Hello. And now he wants to know how to say ‘what’s up.’ Whaa gwaan. Whaa gwaan…he’ll contemplate it in a heavy whisper, gently rubbing the curve of your side. Your hand is now across the barrel of his chest, and you’ll marvel at the contained force of his heat. And even more, you’ll marvel at the exquisite realization that you’ve finally found your first friend.
The Return Home
So this is where I take my leave (for further tips on navigating the complex identity issues related to race and alienation within the American queer scene, please see Yes I Lacan: Dislodging the Pane of the White Gays”). But before I go, just a word about your return trip to Jamaica: don’t bother with the coming out thing. This trip won’t be about you. Plus, your mom will be in a weird space with Big Reds’ death and all. She’ll look different when you see her, inching instead of walking, and her eyes will have sunken in. There’s something unmoored about her — this wild hair and rumpled skin. Was your mother always this ugly?
There’ll be no words between you. She’ll squeeze your wrist and turn to the cab then stay silent on her side of the back seat. Her hair used to be sleek and jet black, and her nails were always polished in a ripened pink like the insides of a guava. But her hands look cracked and dead now. You’ll think to take one of hers into yours, but what kind of a gesture is that after 15 years? No, better to think about the flurry of e-mails Big Reds had been sending you, the ones that would be irritants before his disappearance and a torment after: Hey bro, how are you?; hey bro, do you think you could help me with something?; I promise I’ll pay you back; How’s teaching going?; Please, I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t serious; Hope you’re well, bro; Let me know when we can talk. Consider that he probably begged your mom for help too. Ponder the possibility that she ignored them as well.
As the cab turns out of the airport and onto the Palisadoes, it will hit you like a brick of cold that it happened here, somewhere in the crevices of this wiry road snaking through the ocean. Or maybe they didn’t do it here. Maybe they chopped your brother up elsewhere, loaded the parts in the trunk of his car and left it at the lip of the airport in a whip of theatrical irony. Well, that’s assuming Big Reds was trying to get away from something. And that’s assuming “they” knew what irony is anyway. Oh dear, look at you, trying to construct a narrative.
Look out at the city, across the maw of dark water to the clump of small buildings huddled by the waterfront. This is Kingston. There’re more buildings, you’ll remark.
Yeah, the Chinese, she’ll say.
When you move to hold her hand, she’ll stare back at you from the plane of another world.
Mum, how did this happen?
How you expect me to answer that, son?
Simple. Just tell me what you know.
Her mouth too looks old, limp in a mesh of wrinkles.
I don’t know what. Maybe it’s the IMF.
The IMF killed Big Reds?
She’ll shake her head, raking the air with the teeth of her tin-gray hair, and you’ll remember, you’ll remember, she had grown ugly right in front of you. She’ll be saying something about the murder rate and the state of emergency, but you’re trying to remember your mother as a pretty woman, when she used to kiss you on the head and her hair would fan about you like a sheet. Why did she stop doing that? Maybe it’s because you stiffened when she started growing ugly. When was that? Maybe when grandma died. All her powders and creams had disappeared around then. Or maybe it was around high school; there was talk about her hairdresser money going to your monthly lab fees.
She’ll be talking about some riots. Do you remember the riots after the Free Zone got shut down? You won’t remember any riots. You’re trying to remember your mother’s hands, the way you witnessed them putrefy because of the clothes washing she started doing on the weekends. Whose clothes were they? It hadn’t concerned you to ask. But the money you remember going to Big Reds’ first bail because of…the riots?
Was Big Reds in the riots?
She’ll look at you, concerned.
No baby, Big Reds wasn’t in the riots. He’d already moved to MoBay, trying to find another job. Remember?
Why can’t I remember any of this? You’ll ask.
Maybe you were focused on the wrong things, she’ll say.
Interview: Min Jin Lee
After being born in Seoul, South Korea, Min Jin Lee came with her family to the US at the age of seven and was raised in Elmhurst, Queens. She studied history at Yale University, graduated from Georgetown University Law Center, and worked as a corporate attorney in New York City. Her short writing has been published in The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, and numerous other magazines, and she served as a Morning Forum columnist for the Chosun Ilbo of South Korea for three seasons. She is also a well-known and well-traveled speaker on writing, politics, film, and literature, serves as a trustee of PEN America and as a director of the Authors Guild, and currently is Writer-in-Residence at Amherst College.
The recipient of best story prizes from Narrative Magazine and The Missouri Review, Lee has also been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as an honorary doctorate from Monmouth College.
Lee’s first novel, Free Food for Millionaires (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2007) was selected a Top 10 Novel of the Year by The Times of London, NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. It was selected for various special recognitions and awards by the San Francisco Chronicle, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Book Sense.
Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, 2017), her second novel, published after she lived in Japan for several years, was winner of the Medici Book Club Prize, a finalist for the National Book Award, a runner-up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and a New York Times bestseller. It was recognized on more than seventy-five “best books of the year” lists and is translated into twenty-nine languages.
Lisa Roney for The Florida Review:
One of the things that struck me, and that I really admired as I read Pachinko, is that it’s an epic. And that you chose—or, might we say, dared—to write on this grand scale, which I think a lot of women, especially, hesitate to do. And especially as just your second novel, how challenging to do that. Could you comment about your decision to do that? Did you set out to do that as a kind of statement—”I can do this too”—or did it evolve out of your original inspiration?
Min Jin Lee:
That’s such a good question. First of all, thank you for reading the book. Because it’s a huge surprise. When I meet people who’ve actually read it, I kind of think, “Wow, that’s amazing.” [laughter] Thank you so much. My ancestors thank you, my parents thank you.
TFR:
Oh, that’s sweet. Thank you.
Lee:
No, really. It’s really quite a gift for someone to give you twenty hours of their lives. It is. It is, especially nowadays. But going back to your question about epic and the decision to do it—I initially had written this book from 1996 to 2003 and it was not an epic. It was based on about ten to twenty years, and it was meant to be a book about Solomon, who appears at the very end of the book now and is a minor character. And then after I moved to Japan in 2007 and I interviewed all these Korean-Japanese people, I realized that I got it all wrong and the only way this book and the story would work is by making it an epic. And I was terrified, because I didn’t have that kind of ambition.
TFR:
That’s so interesting that you felt compelled to do it.
Lee:
I had the ambition to always write an omniscient-narrated, social novel—that was absolutely clear. But to write from cradle to grave, that was not my intention. It really upset me that I had to start all over again [chuckle].
TFR:
That’s a tough process. How did you stay on track?
Lee:
I outline all the time. I’m not attached to my outlines, but I outline constantly. My outlines, my character cards. I have little cards with people’s birthdays and where they went to school. And then, also, I interview prolifically. I constantly interview. I work like a journalist a lot.
TFR:
That makes sense. It was fascinating to me that the setting just seems so vivid and so real, even from the historical past. I was really interested in that research process and what you think research offers the fiction writer.
Lee:
I can’t imagine writing fiction without research for the kinds of books I want to write, because I am writing social novels. So, both of my novels have required an enormous amount of research. I’ve interviewed well over a hundred people.
And I’ve also taken classes that I didn’t want to take. For my first book, I took a class at FIT on millinery [laughter]. I’m not a fashion person. And I met all these people who can make things out of felt and put these things on their heads, and I thought, “Oh, you’re really different than a shoemaker.”
I was interested in the process of making. And I feel like I haven’t met enough people from all these different corners. And I want to write stories about people who aren’t represented. I also want to write about poor people, and poor people often don’t leave any documents… So I have to interview.
TFR:
Free Food for Millionaires, your first novel, is notable because you don’t make it only the story of Casey and Ella and their generation, but also of Sabine and Casey’s parents. So many coming of age stories are written as though young people know only other young people [laughter]. It’s great that you managed to include the parental generation there. In Pachinko, you extend even further across generations. And you started to speak to that a minute ago, saying that, “To tell the social story, I realized I had to do a bigger picture.” But what makes you want to extend that reach to the whole social novel? Is it a cultural matter of respect for our elders or other political or other social factors that influence you in that regard? How do you feel that came to be something that’s your goal?
Lee:
This really goes to who I am. I’m a historian, so I really care about the long view. People have often asked me, “How did you work on these things?” And I kinda think, “Well, if you look at different examples of people who make things, you should really expect failure. You should really expect suffering. You should expect obscurity.” Guaranteed obscurity.
[laughter]
And then you should try to pick a topic that you really care about. But in terms of picking generations, I don’t think any of us really makes sense without understanding all the people who inform who we are, whether they’re biologically related to you or culturally related to you or your community. For example, if you are a Mormon, you don’t really make sense without understanding Mormonism. It’s such a specific American religion. So I wanted to very much talk about every corner and every level, which is nuts, which takes a long time.
TFR:
It’s interesting too, because it’s against the flow right now, which is all … shorter, shorter, shorter, shorter. Snip it, snip it, snip it, snip it. One reason why I enjoyed Pachinko so much because it was a novel I could sink into the way I’ve sunk into novels so many times in the past (and not so much these flash-by novels so common now) and just really get that larger picture.
Lee:
I do know that what I’m writing is very against the grain of my contemporaries. I am writing a social novel of the nineteenth century kind with modern sentences. At the same time, I wanted readers to stay with me.
TFR:
It’s well worth doing. I have one more comparative question. It seems likely that Free Food for Millionaires was rooted in your own personal experience…
Lee:
Some of it, yes.
TFR:
… as a Korean-American who attended an Ivy League university, and experienced conflicts maybe similar to Casey’s. But you’ve noted that Pachinko stemmed from this history lecture that you heard. How did you make that transition from writing about something that was closer to your own experience—and this is obviously still something close to your heart—to something larger than your own experience or slightly different from your own background? How did you make the transition?
Lee:
Actually, I had no intentions of writing Free Food for Millionaires because it was way too close to home [chuckles]. I had written Pachinko in another iteration well before I published Free Food for Millionaires, because I’m a very political person, I’m a very theoretical person. I’m actually much more comfortable talking about global feminism, poverty, the refugee crisis. I actually like that. Until I read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas, I would not have written Free Food for Millionaires.
TFR:
So the transition was actually the other way round for you.
Lee:
When I noticed that Naipaul had the courage to write about his hometown, I said, “Well I’m going to write about my hometown of Elmhurst, Queens. And I’m going to write about the Koreans that I know,” because there are so many different kinds of Koreans and they were interesting to me. And I figured, well, I’m not gonna be successful, I’m not gonna make any money. I’ve made this incredibly stupid decision to quit being a lawyer [laughter]. I might as well write the book I want to write. I think honoring that was really helpful for me. That’s the reason why I wrote it, but it’s really uncomfortable to write about yourself. Really uncomfortable for me.
TFR:
So while some people feel more comfortable with starting close to home, your background in history perhaps meant you were a person more comfortable with the large-scale. In some ways, it was a relief to come back to Pachinko and be able to turn a little further out? Could you tell me a little bit about your reasons for going to Tokyo? Did you do that primarily to work on the novel? Or was that for other reasons and then it was just suddenly all this material presented itself? You began to meet people? Or how did you develop your routine of interviewing other people and doing research there in Japan?
Lee:
I always interview people for my fiction. Even Free Food for Millionaires, I was interested in writing about money and class.
TFR:
And the millinery class [chuckle].
Lee:
Right. And so because I did all those things, I’m very comfortable with the interview form. I also grew up incredibly shy, but in interviews, I feel like it’s okay to talk to people.
TFR:
You have a role.
Lee:
Yes, I have a role. And also, in the service of a story, it’s okay to ask all these questions. I went to Japan because my husband got a job and we needed the money and the upgrade. So we went and I got to interview so many Korean-Japanese people. And the initial interviews are very hard. It was really hard to get those interviews. But once people realize that I’m a harmless fiction writer, they’re like, “Oh, okay. All right, fine. Let me introduce you to my friends” [laughter].
TFR:
These interviews, I’m sure, influenced the rich array of characters in Pachinko. I’ve a hard time figuring out which particular character or characters to ask about so many are well-developed. But Sunja, of course, is the cradle-to-grave presence in the novel, and I loved her so much. She was a fabulous character. But I also want to ask about Yoseb and Isak. They were the two who struck me as the tragic figures in the book. And I wanted to ask a little bit about whether you felt… Sunja went through many, many, many difficulties, but she seemed to have this stronger spirit. And is there a little bit of a feminist commentary in this book? Do you feel that the women survive better than the men? And is that something that you feel is sort of more generally true in the world? That women can face this kind of conflict and travail better and intact?
Lee:
I think it’s not so much a matter of inborn resilience of women. It’s a matter of all the cultural messages that men and women receive. I think that men from oppressed minority groups still have the burdens of the masculinity of the outer world, and consequently, the choices that they make in order to become men in that world are very often unfavorable to their lives. And they become tragic characters. So for the two characters that you mentioned, Isak and Yoseb, Isak really cares about being a really excellent person, so he decides that he’s going to become a man by being a martyr, and that’s a tough road.
[laughter]
Whereas Yoseb, his attitude is, “I’m going to try to become a man by having conventional ideas of providing for my family.”
If you’re an oppressed minority male, it’s difficult to provide for your family.
But going back to your initial question about how women in these groups survive. I really admire many women that I’ve met, who are illiterate, who are really poor, and the way they survive… And a lot of it has to do with the fact that I think women who—across culture, across race, across class, around the world—have this in common, which is that our biologies force us to make decisions that are not only about our individual lives. And one of the things I heard over and over and over again is that women are supposed to suffer. And in Asia, in Europe, in Africa, in Latin America, in older countries, that message is, I think, relayed over and over again, because women don’t have the same rights as in advanced Western nations, and, also, they are older countries.
Even in Europe—I’ve met women from Germany who have to leave their work to make lunch for their families at 2:00 every day. It’s an advanced nation, and yet it’s an older country, and the expectations of femininity are different.
This is the other flip side of suffering—if you can bear humiliation, it’s easier to survive. You may not like the kind of life you have, but you can survive. I think it’s harder for men to bear the same humiliation that women bear.
TFR:
That’s beautifully put. Do you resist the labels? Or do you consider yourself a political writer, or a feminist writer, or a Korean-American writer?
Lee:
Presbyterian writer.
[laughter]
TFR:
What do you think about all those labels that I’m sure that get used for you quite a lot?
Lee:
It’s fine. The fact that people think that I’m any kind of writer, I’m like, “Thank you.”
[laughter]
Just to be obscure and to not be read for such a long time, I’m so grateful to have readers.
TFR:
Would you read us a favorite passage from Pachinko?
Lee: Yes. [Reads from xxx].
TFR:
I love that passage because it’s just that moment of change.
Lee:
And wonder.
TFR:
And wonder, and there’s so much that’s coming together there in terms of the relationships that are going to be built and explored in the novel.
Do you have any words of advice for anyone wishing to write a historical epic kind of novel? Or any other good tidbits about you or your writing process?
Lee:
When I teach my writing classes, I often meet really talented writers who feel discouraged. And I always say that, “If you could choose the topic that means the most to you, then the external discouragements will feel a little more bearable, because you are staying closer to the things that you love.” So I think the pages need to be something that you love and that you want to turn to as opposed to something that the world is judging, and that will help you stay with the project longer.
TFR:
As opposed to what is “selling” or what will be popular?
Lee:
Yes! Or what they think will be… admired. I always try to discourage that. And what’s the expression that I’ve heard? “Forget being the best, be the only.” You can do that if you really honor the thing that you care about.
Wedding Season
Free again, my panther
life takes off fast—palmettos
and snakes in the path.
The beautiful sea grape
is aging like it’s winter;
leaves of talkative platters,
some big as my hand, still
grow heart-red veins
but have gone soft
and pale at the edges.
My very last husband
sheds his brave persona
and slithers into the bamboo
for good. Leaving
him there, I remember
that on nights like this,
thousands of baby
sea turtles hatch
and make their determined
way to the water. Life
goes on, the planet sings,
unaware of all our betrayals.
The waves swell
and collapse. I hear
the corks and lantern-lit
shouts of new wedding
feasts all over this ringing
world. If champagne comes
in midnight blue, I’ll toast
their tight bouquets of joy
as clouds bubble
against the sky in
their incessant kissing
with the moon.
Glowing sand pushes
up from every step
like sifted white
hills of cake flour,
the only light for miles.
Please also see Russ Kesler’s review of Susan Lilley’s book Venus in Retrograde, in which this poem later appeared.
Stories Inspired by Midnight at the Havana Zoo
A Kind of Solitude by Dariel Suarez
Winner of the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction
Willow Springs Book, 170 pages, paperback, $19.95
Elena, the keeper of the address registry in her neighborhood in Havana, is an outstanding citizen and an exemplary neighbor. But all that comes undone when the police come knocking at her door, find out about the contraband cheese in her fridge, and demand the name of the supplier, her old friend Emilio.
Isidro hauls his eighty-year-old father, a Santería practitioner who is writhing in pain, in a wheelbarrow through the storm-lashed, flooded streets of Havana to the hospital. As Isidro struggles getting the proper treatment for his father in a hospital with limited resources, he finds himself reconciling his family’s beliefs and his own lack of faith.
In both these stories, “The Inquest” and “Possessed,” Elena and Isidro find their solitary lives disrupted; there’s palpable angst and longing, and that sensibility forms the heart of Dariel Suarez’s debut story collection, A Kind of Solitude. The mélange of eleven stories, set in Cuba and largely after the fall of the Soviet Union, offers an intimate, penetrating, and nuanced sociopolitical commentary of living in a communist country facing severe economic crisis. There’s critique, criticism, flavors of patriarchy, but also a portrayal of the infallible beauty of hope, yearning, and ambition. Suarez’s characters are neither heroes nor victims. They are, in turn, bold, shrewd, cruel, corrupt, melancholic, contemplative, kind, dignified, and—as portrayed in the story “Primal Voice”—actual rock stars.
The opening story, “The Man from the Zoo,” is at once magnificent and heartbreaking, and appropriately sets the tone for the rest of the collection. Two men, Arquímedes and Orlando, steal a giraffe from the Havana Zoo in the middle of the night for an American trophy-hunter family. The story is fast-paced, yet periodically slows down to let you catch your breath and to reveal the history of the men and their motivations.
Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Suarez moved to the United States as a young teenager in 1997 during the island’s economic crisis known as The Special Period. His writing is reflective and critical of his country of birth; his prose is lyrical yet incisive, but not pedagogical. His Cuba is not a private or enigmatic Cuba, where revolutionaries or counter-revolutionaries are smoking cigars and plotting government takeover (though some of his characters have fought alongside Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, and marched in service and in protest of the country), but a Cuba that is deconstructed via the power of fiction and rendered approachable and open.
The title story, “A Kind of Solitude” [originally published in The Florida Review 40.1, Spring 2016] takes us deep into Cuban countryside, where sixty-year-old Eladio, a man who prefers the company of his farm animals over humans, prepares to leave for the city after he realizes that at his age he needs the protection of companionship. Haunted by the suicide of his wife, he nonetheless looks forward to uniting with his long-term mistress, Griselda. He ruminates about his love and devotion to both women, but as the evening progresses the focus changes—there’s an intruder on his property, and Eladio must act, for better or worse. The story showcases powerfully the way that fleeting choices can change our paths.
In “Mudface” we come to terms with the games and cruelty of young boys. In “The Comforter,” corruption and a young man’s integrity come head to head. And here we see Suarez’s brilliance in how he portrays the ugly interiority of complex, flawed characters, shaped by the sociopolitical landscape but shown without unnecessary judgments or justifications. The Special Period in Cuba was a time of great economic crisis with overwhelming shortages in food, medicine, energy, healthcare, and opportunities. Through the eleven stories in this collection, Suarez offers a multitude of perspectives and plot lines that wade through these difficulties and showcase human desire and ambition. In the story “Hope” we follow the motions of Vladimir who is yearning for a better life, a life his mother doesn’t want. We find a similar yearning in the story “Daredevils” where Suarez explores the friendship and love between two young men, Yaisandar and Miguel.
It was the story “Marching Men,” however, that affected me the most. There’s a moment toward the end of the story when the protagonist, Eloy Manduley, participates in the parade at La Plaza and brings to fore the triumph and tragedy of the Common Man:
. . . and the steady chant of “Fidel, Fidel, Fidel!” resounded within different pockets of the crowd. Eloy held his umbrella against his chest—the handle down at his right hip, the metal tip at his left shoulder—and raised his chin like a proud soldier. He was in sync with the throng. He knew the majority of people had been forced to participate, yet the men marched on with determined steps, stout voices, and celebratory gestures … for the first time in his life, Eloy was physically part of el pueblo, a nation brought together despite all odds. If only Gladys could see him. Maybe he could surprise her at the airport. Maybe he could take her dancing at the carnival at El Malecón.
At a recent reading from A Kind of Solitude at Boston’s Brookline Booksmith, Suarez also spoke about the process of writing his book. He spoke of the research involved, the craft and linguistic choices he made, and the challenges of choosing to write about a Spanish-speaking world in English—a language not his first but preferred because, he said, even though he loves speaking Spanish he didn’t think he could do justice to the Spanish language by writing in or translating his stories to it. He further talked about how writing about Cuba through his stories helped recalibrate his world view. For me, both the talk and the book reinforce the importance of reading international (and multilingual) authors. Dariel Suarez’s story collection contributes further to the American publishing landscape what Jhumpa Lahiri, Ha Jin, Yiyun Li, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and others like them have helped evolve and enrich—the scope and possibilities of what constitutes the universal experience in literary fiction.