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Chang-rae Lee:
An Artist of the Floating World

    Has Chang-rae Lee preserved enough of the raw hurt from his life as an ambitious young immigrant to restore to his novels the blood that courses through even those working to keep the literary tradition on life support? The question must be left to future novels. But if the progression of his first three novels is an indication, Lee's narrative seems to be evolving toward the surreal sinuosity of an Ishiguro.

    Regardless, one is proud of an Asian American who has pulled off a literary reputation so bright that he dazzles everyone, possibly even himself.

    Chang-Rae Lee was born in Seoul, Corea on July 29, 1965. At the age of two he, his sister and late mother emigrated to join his father who was studying medicine in New York. The elder Lee became a psychiatrist and provided a comfortable life for his family in Westchester. Chang-rae was shielded from the hardships suffered by most young immigrants. This is evident in the childhood memories of Henry Park, narrator of Lee's first novel.

    "There's a point in the book when Henry Park complains that his mother doesn't want to borrow a cup of sugar because she thinks it might be shameful," Lee says. Not exactly gut-wrenching stuff. Yet it is Exhibit 1 in Lee's case for authenticity. "That kind of tiptoeing around the majority is a feeling that I did have. Not because I thought anything horrible would happen, but that it would just make things easier."

    The sense of tiptoeing around the majority could only have intensified during his years at New Hampshire's elite Phillips Exeter Academy. He graduated Yale with an English B.A., then went to the University of Oregon for a masters in creative writing. A year as a Wall Street analyst convinced Lee that a writing career was inevitable.

    From the start Lee knew that his stuff wasn't destined for drugstore checkout racks. For one thing, he had to start by unburdening himself of his Corean American experience. The narrator of his first novel is a Corean American who has built a career with a shadowy private multinational intelligence firm by spying on notable Asians. This creepy professional life jeopardizes Henry Park's marriage to a WASP princess, alienates him from society at large and, on some metaphysical plane, brings about the death of his young son. Park's no stereotypical Asian male in the conventional sense, but he does evoke not so subtley the stereotypical suspicion that Asian men are given to sneakiness, double-allegiance and profound social alienation. The effort earned Lee the PEN/Hemingway Award and the American Book Award, not to mention the prestigious job of director of the MFA program at CUNY's Hunter College. In late 2001, Native Speaker beat out James McBride, E L Doctorow and a 9/11 memoir to become the New York City's pick for its municipal multicultural read-in over the objection of a women's group who found it slow and possibly offensive to some Asian Americans.

    Lee's second novel A Gesture Life upped the angst ante. Elderly narrator Franklin Hata had been, in the dim past, an officer in the Japanese Imperial Army who participated in the deaths of two young Corean comfort women. The man's not exactly a monster but the skeletons in his closet aren't of the socially acceptable variety either. The moral burden of Hata's past keeps him from cementing a promising relationship with an eligible widow -- not to mention developing a normal relationship with his adoptive daughter. Some Asian American readers no justification for saddling the protagonist of an Asian American novel with the guilt of WWII sex slaves. The novel elicited high praise from Michiko Kakutani and won Lee a secure place as America's most prominent young Asian writer.

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    The protagonists of both novels find redemption -- or at least the hope thereof. But their deep alienation from their own feelings and identities -- not to mention repression of any honest assessment of their place in American society -- hardly advance the Asian American male quest for recognition as feeling, aware human beings. Lee's novels seemed to confirm that, yes, there are mysterious reasons why Asian men can never fit comfortably into American life. But the literary establishment saw in Lee an American Ishiguro, a writer who seemed to transcend the concerns of his own ethnic group to add a cosmopolitan hue to American letters.

    "Chang-rae Lee is notable for his fusion of large political and social issues with precisely observed domestic details and for his sympathetic portrayal of the complexity of human relations," said Joyce Carol Oates on the occasion of Lee's appointment to a Princeton creative writing professorship in April of 2002.

    That advancement completed Lee's ascension to the high towers of American letters and inspired the removed perspective of his third novel.

    In addition to his three novels, Lee has published stories and articles in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Gourmet, and Granta magazines. Chang-rae Lee has received more honors from the American literary establishment than any other Asian American male novelist. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter.