I was born in Seoul and lived there until I was seven, and in my childhood I was keenly aware of the old women who sold snacks in the open markets and on street corners when I went food shopping with my mother. They were also vivid because they wore traditional clothing, in stark contrast to the modern Koreans of Seoul. When I visited South Korea as a college student in the late 1980s and many times later as an adult, I saw these women again in the markets and in the streets, almost unchanged in their expressions except for their clothes and hair.
Finally, my parents became small business owners when they immigrated to the United States. The daughter of a well-known minister and the headmaster of an orphanage school in Busan, my mother grew up very sheltered in a privileged home. A former music major at Yonsei University, she taught piano in our home when we lived in Seoul. When we moved to New York, she worked alongside my father in their cramped, under-heated wholesale jewelry shop in Manhattan, which was robbed and burgled on numerous occasions. She was on her feet most of the day dealing with customers. On weekends and school holidays, my sisters and I took turns working with our parents at the store. In college, I worked part-time selling clothes and shoes in retail shops. I continue to feel a strong connection with anyone who has worked in sales or in the service industry.
Is it easy for you to write your characters’ deaths, or do you have a strong sentimental attachment to them?
My characters are very real to me, and I speculate that this must be true for most writers. Also, as a reader, I am very attached to characters in books. When Lily Bart dies in The House of Mirth, I wept and wept. Years later, I read Elaine Showalter’s brilliant essay “The Death of the Lady (Novelist)” where she posits that Lily’s death represents the death of the “perfect lady” who no longer belongs in an era of “vulgarity, boorishness, and malice.” Showalter argues cogently that Lily has to die, because her aspiration for the ideals of a perfect lady no longer made sense and that the author Wharton was also shedding an outdated role as a “lady novelist”: “In deciding that a Lily cannot survive, that the lady must die to make way for the modern woman who will work, love and give birth, Wharton was also signaling her own rebirth as the artist.” I mention Showalter’s insightful analysis of a formative work in my reading and writing life because she taught me a larger idea beyond death as a plot element or death as the expiration of a life. It is possible that characters need to die for the author to make her moral point, for the author himself to regenerate by letting go of an ideal identity, or for the world to recognize the necessity of certain ideas and ideals to die. Certain characters die in Pachinko, and to me, their deaths were both natural to the plot and necessary symbolically. To me, the deaths were painfully inevitable; and to be clear, dear reader, each death broke me.
Much of this novel deals with the pressures of being a first-generation immigrant, or having dual cultural identities. How much of this was informed by your own experiences? What effects do you think war has on individuals and society?
Consciously or unconsciously, being a first-generation immigrant informs my point of view and interests. Regardless of one’s identity, all of us live in an information era where we are continually made to feel physically vulnerable to the political instability and violence around the globe in real time. Consequently, most of the developed world has growing factions in each nation, which want to raise the drawbridge and batten down the hatches. Out of fear, many of us want to retreat, and this makes some sense. Fair or no, immigration is considered in the context of economic scarcity, fear of terrorism, wars and geopolitical conflicts, which may be incipient stages of informal proxy wars. Whatever their cause, all such anxieties and conflicts affect individuals and societies and their movement patterns. Naturally, the movement of people changes the culture of the people around them, and the culture of the people around them affects the migrant people.