Poured Over: Chang-rae Lee on My Year Abroad
“And fiction is all about obstacles. It’s all about misapprehension, misunderstanding, lack of information, lack of connection, and the problems that come up, arise out of those things.” Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Chang-rae Lee’s most recent novel, My Year Abroad, is now out in paperback and it’s unlike anything he’s written before. Chang-rae joins us on the show to talk about homecomings and hunger, the limitless imagination of a new generation of immigrants, his 20-year-old narrator and the sense of play at the heart of this new book, what’s on the syllabus for his Asian American autobiography class at Stanford, and much more.
Featured books: My Year Abroad, Native Speaker and Aloft, all by Chang-rae Lee.
Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.
New episodes of Poured Over land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and wherever you listen to podcasts.
From this episode:
B&N: And you’re back to first person narrator for this book, and it’s been a while. It was third person for The Surrendered, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and then you used that wonderful second person, sort of hypnotic, very seductive narrator for On Such a Full Sea, Now, you’re back to the sort of very intimate, yet unreliable narrator,
Chang-rae Lee: I was looking to get back to a first-person voice, even though my plan for Pong was to tell his story in third person. But pretty quickly, when I started to really interrogate why I was telling Pong’s story, and why I was so interested in Pong, it became clear to me that it was not just his figure that was the totality of my of my interest, but really also, maybe most importantly, my own kind of need for a figure like him. My own kind of feeling that, you know, I had lost some of that immigrant fervor and apprehension and constant energy, you know, that my parents and parents’ generation had. Maybe I felt a little too comfortable, like Tiller, although, of course, I’m in middle age. So that’s why I thought, you know I would create this younger character that would not be me, but be me in certain ways, and just explore his life and time…someone who’s really just the cusp of adulthood, who’s trying to figure things out, but who’s in crisis, you know, a kind of a teenage crisis that maybe could expose some things about how the world is, how the world works for people, and especially for this for this young man who is just now starting to see who he might be in certain different ways.