Lee, Don 1959-

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LEE, Don 1959-

PERSONAL: Born 1959, in Tokyo, Japan. Ethnicity: "Korean American." Education: Attended American School in Japan (Tokyo); University of California at Los Angeles, B.A.; Emerson College, M.F.A. Hobbies and other interests: Windsurfing.

ADDRESSES: Home—Cambridge, MA. Offıce—c/o Ploughshares, Emerson College, 120 Boylston Street, Boston, MA 02116. Agent—Winfrida Mbewe, Associate Publicist, W. W. Norton & Co., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110-0017. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Emerson College, Boston, MA, adjunct instructor, then office manager/assistant fiction editor, Ploughshares (literary journal), 1988—.

AWARDS, HONORS: American Academy of Arts and Letters, Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, and Asian American Writers' Workshop Members' Choice Award, all for Yellow; O. Henry Award, 2002, for "The Possible Husband"; Pushcart Prize, for "The Price of Eggs in China"; fellowships from Massachusetts Cultural Council and St. Botolph Club Foundation.

WRITINGS:

Yellow: Stories, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2001.

Country of Origin: A Novel, W. W. Norton (New York, NY), 2004.

Short fiction included in anthologies Charlie Chan Is Dead 2, edited by Jessica Hagedorn, and Screaming Monkeys, edited by M. Evelina Galang. Contributor of short stories to Gentleman's Quarterly, New EnglandReview, North American Review, Gettysburg Review, Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, American Short Fiction, and Glimmer Train.

SIDELIGHTS: Don Lee, a third-generation Korean American, began his education at the University of California Los Angeles as an engineering major during which time, he told Jessica Brilliant Keener of Poets & Writers he was "bored to tears." After encouragement from an English composition instructor to take some creative-writing courses, he was "hooked." Thus began his career in the writing field. His book of short stories, Yellow, won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and individual stories in the book won an O. Henry Award and a Pushcart Prize.

Yellow is a collection of six interwoven stories and a novella all with Asian-American protagonists and all set in a fictional coastal town in California. Janice Bees wrote in Kliatt that the stories are "compact, complicated, energetic, and sharply written." Reviewing the book for the Los Angeles Times, Tim Rutten commented: "Lee is unafraid of flirting with the perils of melodrama and even sentimentality—if it is the service of narrative. His prose is spare and free of literary allusions, and he is unafraid to take narrative chances, including what some might consider Hollywood action set pieces." Rutten called Yellow a "triumph of the artful over the didactic," and stated that the characters filling its pages "constitute a rich and unusually complete portrait of contemporary Asian America."

Lee's book was a long time in the making, with some stories dating back thirteen years before their publication. The author told Keener that, due to the long process, people might assume he was having difficulty selling the manuscript. Not so, he contended: "I just wasn't writing. I wrote one story every year or two and published in literary journals. I was a hobbyist." He noted that his job as editor of Ploughshares is demanding and his days are filled with programming computers, writing grant applications, organizing information for tax returns, and a myriad of other responsibilities. "The editing part is the easiest and most enjoyable part, but it's also the smallest percentage of an editor's time," he commented.

In order to write his novel Country of Origin, Lee declared to Keener, he first had to believe he could; this was his greatest challenge. He then negotiated with Emerson College, his employer, to take Fridays off from his editorial job at Ploughshares and he worked on his book Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, spending four months in research, one year on his draft, and six months in revision. The schedule he set himself was two chapters per month, with each chapter approximately twelve to fifteen pages long. "I followed through, and it was pretty miraculous," he told Keener.

The basis of Country of Origin is identity. Based in Tokyo in 1980, the story centers around a half-Korean, half-white foreign-service officer and a Japanese police officer who unite to search for a missing black American woman who may be half Japanese. Through the characters' interlocking stories, Lee explores issues of race, identity, social conventions, the Japanese sex trade, and the law.

In an interview with Terry Hong for AsianWeek, Lee explained why he is "so hung up on identity." The son of a U.S. state department officer, Lee was born in Tokyo and moved with his family to a U.S. Army base in Seoul, South Korea, when he was four years old. Japanese was the only language he knew; he had always thought of himself as a Japanese kid. Now, was he a Korean kid? And on an American army base? Then it was back to Tokyo where he spent his adolescence. "Given my background, I was fascinated by the milieu of foreign service officers and expatriots," Lee told Hong, and the breakthrough in finding a theme for his book came when a young English woman—a hostess in Tokyo—went missing. "So now I had my story," he said.

Lee wrote on his Web site that all the themes in Country of Origin about identity and race were explored "on a subconscious level," and only after many interviews did he consciously understand those themes. While several reviewers called the book subversive, Lee responded to Hong: "That's because everything in the book deals with artifice. . . . Everyone is trying to deny or preserve or find their origins, but the point, I think, is that identity is elusive. It can't be easily defined, it can't be appropriated or simulated, and maybe the search for it, at least on an external level, is futile."

Entertainment Weekly contributor Rebecca Ascher-Walsh called Country of Origin an "elegant and haunting debut." Frank Sennett, writing in Booklist, deemed it "as satisfying as it is unsettling," and a Kirkus Reviews critic explained that "Thriller conventions draw the reader, like the characters, into a gallery of human enigmas," adding that the novel's author "leaves no fingerprints: his cool, precise prose captures his characters without overexplaining them."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, April 1, 2001, Peggy Barber, review of Yellow: Stories, p. 1447; May 1, 2004, Frank Sennett, review of Country of Origin, p. 1546.

Entertainment Weekly, July 16, 2004, Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, review of Country of Origin, p. 82.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2004, review of Country ofOrigin, p. 351.

Kliatt, September 2002, Janice Bees, review of Yellow, p. 29.

Library Journal, February 1, 2004, Edward Keane, review of Country of Origin, p. 124.

Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2001, Tim Rutten, review of Yellow, p. E1; August 8, 2004, Ben Ehrenreich, review of Country of Origin, p. R5.

Newsweek International, August 9, 2004, Malcolm Jones and Kay Itoi, review of Country of Origin, p. 53.

New York Times Book Review, July 15, 2001, Will Blythe, review of Yellow, p. 6; July 11, 2004, Tessa Hadley, review of Country of Origin, p. 8.

Publishers Weekly, April 2, 2001, review of Yellow, p. 38; April 12, 2004, review of Country of Origin, p. 34.

ONLINE

AsianWeek,http://news.asianweek.com/ (July 23, 2004), Terry Hong, interview with Lee.

Don Lee Web site,http://www.don-lee.com (September 28, 2004).

Poets & Writers Online,http://www.pw.org/ (September 28, 2004), Jessica Brilliant Keener, "Don Lee on Building Confidence as a Writer and the Editor of Ploughshares" (interview).