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Software
to Hard Truth The transition between writing software and writing fiction is a big one… Lee’s ideas, developed from life experiences both as a child and as an adult, about resisting hatred, believing in self-determination, and feeling the grind of poverty, all made it into her first novel, Princess June. Download full review in PDF format Click this button
Daniel & Daniel Author Interview
What
influenced you the most in the creation of this work? Were there any particular people in your life, or any
particular events that led you to create this particular story?
Well,
not any one particular person or one particular event, but a number of
people and a series of events over a very long period of time led me to
create this story. But
the most important person by far was the one special nanny that I had in my
childhood. I grew up in South
Korea. And when I was growing
up, almost every middle-class household over there had a live-in maid who
doubled as a nanny. You just
couldn’t manage without one, really, because the housekeeping and cooking
traditions were so fussy. Anyway,
this one nanny came into my life when I was about eight and she made a big
impact on me. She was the kind
of person who makes such a strong impression on you that you cannot forget
even after a brief encounter. Looking
back, I realize that it was the force of her whole person rather than just
her looks that made her unforgettable.
I also remember her being intelligent and multi-talented, even though
she didn’t have much formal education at all.
And she was a free spirit. By
contrast, I was an extremely shy and tentative child.
So I was really impressed with that boldness in her, you know, not
caring about what other people say or think – just living as she believed
in, doing things as she pleased. She
had that sureness of herself. She
seemed to know exactly who she was. The
amazing thing was that she wasn’t even an adult yet, still in her
mid-teens at the time. But even
more incredible than that, she knew how to love.
She was loving, generous, and compassionate - not just toward me but
toward almost everyone. That
was what’s called an unconditional love, I realize that now.
That kind of love is so hard to find.
I feel really blessed and fortunate to have experienced that. She
stayed with us for a few years. But
one day, her older brother and father showed up in our house. It turned out that they were gangsters, criminals, and she
had run away from them. We only
found out about that when our house was robbed while she was alone in the
house. Her father and brother
were the ones who did it. In
retrospect, there were many tell-tale signs of how much she must have
suffered at their hands - you know, marks and bruises which she said were
from falling from a tree. She
used to have bouts of dark moods also.
Anyway, that very night, she slipped out of our house while we were
sleeping. She left her entire
savings behind. We tried to
find her, but couldn’t. The
two extremes in her life have always haunted and intrigued me. How was it that such a loving person could have emerged from
such an ugly and brutal environment? In
this story, I have attempted to answer that question. You could say that my nanny is the inspiration behind my
novel. The heroine of my story,
Junee, is based on her, in terms of her appearance, her personality, her
circumstances and how she conducted herself. But
there were also many other events that led me to write this story.
There was my experience of the red-light district near the American
Army base. I was about thirteen
years old when my family moved into that neighborhood.
That district appears as Keechun-dong in my novel.
My mother was a pediatrician and many of her patients were so-called
“Yankee Prostitutes” raising Amerasian children by themselves. So
through my mother, I got to hear many heart-breaking stories on how they
ended up in that district. Ironically
enough, my beloved nanny may have ended up in that same district, too.
She may have even died there. I
have a good reason to believe it and that possibility served to preserve her
memories in my mind all these years. And
then there was that plane ride when I emigrated to the U.S.A. I was twenty years old at the time. The airplane was overbooked.
So I agreed to care for a baby who was on his way to his adoptive
parents in America. He was tiny
– barely a week old. As I
looked into his sleeping face that day, I couldn’t help wondering about
his birth mother and about his future in America.
What circumstances would force a mother to put up her own baby for
adoption? What a difficult
thing that must have been? How
would this child fare in America as he grows up?
He might possibly be the only Asian face in the entire school. My heart ached for that little guy, perhaps because I, too,
was feeling intense anxieties about my own uncertain future in a foreign
country. For
the first several years in America as an immigrant, I was in a
“survival” mode – you know, trying to learn the new language, going to
school, establishing a career and finding love.
So I had no time to think much about the past, about my nanny. But my
memories of my nanny rekindled at one point because of all the talks of
“nannies” that I suddenly seemed to be hearing.
It seemed that with the advent of yuppies, the live-in nannies were
suddenly popular. I will never
forget overhearing discussions that went something like this: “The Mexicans are getting way too expensive nowadays.” “Try El Salvadorans or Guatemalans. You can save at least $100, even $200 a month.” “The
problem is that they all speak Spanish.
Wouldn’t your baby end up speaking broken English?” As
if human beings can be priced by the color of their skins, by their birth
places. Listening to them, I
couldn’t help but think about my nanny.
And I was glad that I met her when I was still young, before I was
exposed to the society’s way of looking at people – by labels, by
categories. Right
about the same time, I heard another contrasting story.
A Hollywood executive living in Beverly Hills was going through a
bitter divorce. The couple had
a five-year-old boy. This child
was so traumatized by all the fights around the house that he locked himself
in a closet clutching a photo of his nanny.
She was a Guatemalan school teacher who had cared for him for the
first few years of his life. The
nanny eventually left the family to go back to her home country.
This boy refused to come out of the closet for days, crying that he
wanted to go to Guatemala to live with his nanny. Now that story confirmed a child’s perspective on the same
issue in my mind. And
then a few years ago, I watched a TV movie – A Thousand Men and A Baby, I
think it was called. Based on a
true story, the movie was about a thousand American service men falling in
love with an abandoned Amerasian boy that they rescued.
It all happened on a ship as they were coming home from Korea after
the war. I loved the movie.
It was a very touching story, except for one thing that left a sour
taste in my mouth. Scene after
scene, I heard the condemnations of “that Korean woman who abandoned the
baby.” Yet I didn’t hear a
single mention of the American father of the baby. None of those men really knew the story behind the woman, yet
they were all so righteous, so condemning.
As touching as the story was, I couldn’t help thinking about many
other truly heroic Americans – people who adopted not only the Amerasians
but full-blooded Korean orphans, even severely handicapped children.
If anyone deserves to be portrayed as a hero, shouldn’t those
adoptive parents be the ones? Also, it kindled my desire to one day tell the story from the
other side – from the perspective of a birth mother who was forced to give
up her own baby. But
it was a family crisis that happened several years ago that directly
motivated me to write this novel. This
crisis involving a member of my original family was severe enough to flip my
life upside down for quite awhile. The whole trauma made me reevaluate my
life. Until then, I never
thought of myself as unusual. I
never thought of my achievements in life as anything special.
But witnessing what another member of my family was going through, I
realized for the first time in my life that it was indeed special and even
miraculous that I’d turned out a healthy, warm and productive person.
I don’t mean to suggest that my childhood circumstances were that
extreme. But there were enough
to deal with – mental illnesses and violence in the family.
And I was vulnerable because of what runs in my family and because of
my temperament – my excessive sensitivity and intensity.
So how did I manage to avoid the trap, I began to ask myself.
As I back-traced my life, I could pinpoint the exact time when I
decided that I wasn’t going to follow my family’s footsteps - at age
eleven. It was a very
deliberate and conscious decision on my part, and from that point on I began
to chart my own path, according to what my heart seemed to tell me,
according to my own feelings and beliefs.
In other words, I made my nanny a role model in my mind.
I’d decided that I would be like her.
By that, I don’t mean her profession, which is how a lot of
grownups define themselves. I
don’t mean that I’d decided to become a maid.
I’d decided to become the kind of person she was.
Children have that way of seeing.
As a child, I didn’t see a poor and uneducated “maid” in my
nanny, which is how the general society would have judged her to be.
Instead, I was able to see the real core of her being – loving and
compassionate, yet bold and free to act as she believed.
That inspiration by example was her ultimate gift to me, I realized.
And it was my desire to share that gift with others which led me to
finally write this novel.
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