originally appeared at nwasianweekly.com
August 12, 2004
BACK TO ANN-MARIE STILLION: WRITING

Photo by Ann-Marie Stillion for Northwest Asian Weekly

Don Lee is the editor of one of the top literary journals in the United States, Ploughshares. He is seen here speaking at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.

Don Lee--letting the story find you

By Ann-Marie Stillion
Northwest Asian Weekly

Strolling to the podium at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Don Lee doesn’t look very much like the editor of a prestigious literary journal. Tall and athletic, his khaki shorts, plaid shirt and Teva sandals make the writer look more like the guy in his Web site photos who drives to Cape Cod to windsurf “whenever the forecast is good.”

Now it’s a hot, windless day in July, and the bookstore basement is stuffy and not exactly filling up with an audience eager to meet the man who has given much of his adult life to crafting and promoting American literary fiction. Seattle is the beginning of the book tour for his debut novel, Country of Origin, a story that takes place in the 1980s in the hallways of embassies and the back rooms of sex clubs, drawn from real stories of women in Japan who entertain men for a living.

Lee seems unperturbed by either the heat or the small crowd. He’s long been soldiering in obscure realms, literary and otherwise, as a sort of modern Don Quixote — an errant world citizen jousting against narrow perspectives with the well-ordered sentence or the casual phrase.

Born in Japan to Korean American parents, his father was a career officer in the U.S. State Department. His childhood was divided between Seoul and Tokyo. He attended the American School in Japan and learned French instead of Japanese because, at the time, he thought the family would move to Paris. As a teenage gaijin (or “foreigner”) in Japan, he grew up fast. By the time he got to college, “going out binge drinking was old hat.”

“In my freshman year (in college) as an engineering major at UCLA, I came in with a very specific idea. I watched a lot of Jacques Cousteau when I was a kid. What I wanted to do was get a mechanical engineering degree and go to the Scripps Institute and get a Ph.D. and build submersibles. Then I went to visit, and they told me that only six people in the world did this.” If that wasn’t enough to discourage him, there was something else: He was, as he said, “bored to tears.”

“Switching over to English was a complete whim. I was not really aware of the pragmatic future. I was not really thinking about what I was going to do to make a living. I was a dreamer. I think I was kind of an idiot in many ways.”

A composition teacher in a required course said his “writing had a flair.” Lee began to study literature, appeasing his parents by telling them that he was planning to go into law. He wasn’t. Two years later he was accepted to a MFA program in writing in Boston.

There, the graduate student was drafted to read submissions for the influential lit journal Ploughshares. Lee progressed up the ladder to assistant fiction editor, and then to editor in the late ’80s.

Work published in Ploughshares often finds its way into the big prize anthologies like The Best American Poetry, The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses. Many of the country’s most important contemporary writers, including Russell Banks and John Irving, first appeared in print in the Massachusetts journal.

“I used to work a lot more at Ploughshares. There was a period of a couple of years there, when I was building up the magazine, that I was putting in 70 to 100 hours a week,” he said.

Before his 40th birthday, Lee decided to return to his first love — writing — because he wanted “to have something to show for his life.” A collection of his stories, Yellow, published in 2001, chronicled lives in an imaginary coastal town in California called Rosarita Bay. Written over a 10-year period, the writer sums up Yellow by saying that it is about “characters who are afraid to live in one way or another.”

His incisive, passionate portraits of Asian Americans drew thanks from younger Asian American readers who applaud him for paving the way. They told him they were tired of the “immigrant stories” and were glad to see the complexity of their lives being explored. He was nonplussed when some critics quietly derided him for using his ethnicity to sell books. It was something that had never occurred to him. The stories won awards and praise from critics, however, including Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Lee continued at his writing table, carving out three days a week from his “day job” as Ploughshares editor to reach his next goal, which became the novel he’s now promoting.

The hard-working writer-editor carefully plotted Country of Origin, researching like mad, delving deeply into conveying an imaginary but very real Japan. “It was the first time I tried a novel. I was terrified,” he admitted. One character, though, surprised him. It was Kenzo Ota, a luckless detective who finds love and the meaning of luck within the dark world of Lee’s sometimes hapless victims.

“I was going to have the entire book center on the character of Tom Hurley and the diplomatic community. And then the (half-black, half-white) character of Lisa Countryman emerged, and Kenzo Ota. The cop, Ota, was a complete surprise, and I really had fun finding the connections to his character in the structure of the story.”

“No matter how much control you think you have over your material,” Lee said, “it’s really the story that finds you, and not the other way.”