Don Lee’s Revealing Visit to Rosarita Bay

Because we are the people of an idea and not of blood or soil, American nationality often is a deeply felt ambiguity. Because we are a nation of immigrants, ethnicity and individual identity co-mingle here in uniquely American ways.

The hyphen we choose to embed in our self-description--Irish American, Mexican American, African American--does not simply designate a familial origin. For many of us, it is the pivot on which we balance delicate questions of acceptance and rejection, pain and pride, assimilation and self-assertion.

The literary calibration of this process by now constitutes a virtual genre of American letters. But few writers have mined the form’s possibilities as shrewdly or transcended its limits quite so stunningly as Don Lee, a third-generation Korean American, whose elegant and engrossing collection of short fiction, “Yellow,” recently was published by Norton.

An interwoven cycle of six stories and a novella--all of whose protagonists are Asian American--Lee’s 255-page book is a triumph of the artful over the didactic. His characters’ ethnic backgrounds are so varied (Korean American, Chinese American, Japanese American and Filipino American) and their vocations so diverse (artist, entrepreneur-turned-surfer, poet, lawyer, fisherman, student, teacher and engineer) that they constitute a rich and unusually complete portrait of contemporary Asian America.

Ethnicity is part of the background noise of their American lives, but so too are love, work, desire, sex, anxiety, success, failure, loneliness and perplexity--often more influentially. Lee calls this fertile territory “post-immigration Asian identity,” and his exploration of its intricacies is admired by, among others, the Chinese American writer, Gish Jen.

Lee, she said, “eschews the politically correct, not so much for the politically incorrect, as for a third ground of real human complexity.”

Lee has situated that ground in the fictive Rosarita Bay, a slightly seedy, slightly bohemian Northern California coastal town loosely modeled on Half Moon Bay. “I was interested in creating a California every-town, and I wanted it to be one of those small California places where Asians have been a part of the community for generations, pursuing normal American lives in normal American ways,” Lee explained in a conversation following a recent reading at Barnes & Noble in Westwood.

Ann Beattie, one of the American short story’s contemporary masters, calls Lee’s collection “a masterpiece” and attributes its success, in part, to the author’s successful realization of Rosarita Bay and its inhabitants. “It was no different than reading ‘Dubliners,’ and figuring, ‘Yep, that’s how the Irish really must be,’ ” she said. “You simply take its authenticity as a given, because he writes so well and with such authority.”

The Westwood reading was something of a homecoming for the 41-year-old Lee, who graduated from UCLA in 1982 after a boyhood spent mostly in Tokyo and Seoul, where his father, a career foreign service officer, was posted.

Lee chuckled when he recalls how closely his initial aspirations conformed to those of the stereotypically ambitious son of upper-middle-class Asian American parents. “I was an engineering major for my first two years at UCLA,” he said. “My projected path was all worked out: an undergraduate degree, a couple of years working for Lockheed, earn an MBA and then a career as a project manager.

“What happened to me was that I was taking English and creative-writing courses on the side, and I found that they filled the increasing need I felt for a verbal outlet. So, I frightened my parents by switching to an English major in my junior year but made them feel a little better by telling them I would go to law school.”

Two years after graduating from UCLA, however, Lee moved to Boston to pursue an MFA at Emerson College. He stayed on to edit one of the country’s leading literary magazines, Ploughshares, a labor of love he has pursued for the last 12 years.

“I went to Emerson on a whim,” said Lee, who is a relaxed, self-deprecating conversationalist. “I really didn’t know much about it, but I knew that I wanted to get to the East Coast, but didn’t want to live in New York. Every year since, I’ve told myself: ‘I’m going to go back to California,’ and that is still my dream. I think I’ve stayed because of Ploughshares, which I love.”

Striving for

Perfection in Writing

Given the unforced quality of the touch he displays in “Yellow,” it comes as a bit of a surprise, when Lee describes the collection’s long gestation. “Some of these stories go back over 13 years,” he said. “I resisted the idea of a book because, for me, there was always a lot of fear of failure. I’m a real perfectionist about my writing.

“I saw early on that I couldn’t be what I regard as a great writer, and for a long time, I felt that I couldn’t be happy if I wasn’t great. The worst thing in the world to be is an embittered writer, so I really was quite happy publishing a single story every year and a half or so. Then 40 loomed larger for me than I ever could have imagined, and that instilled a need that overcame my inhibition.”

So, too, did a thematic preoccupation that grew, in part, from Lee’s unexpected encounters with racial and, particularly, anti-Asian prejudice in Boston.

“I found myself interested in two contradictory agendas,” he said. “One was post-immigration Asian identity where being Asian is not in the forefront of the person’s mind. I don’t go around every minute thinking I am Asian, and neither do these characters. I wanted them to be just as sexy, artsy and screwed up as everyone else in America is. But I also wanted to educate people about the kind of prejudice Asian Americans face every day.

“The necessity of doing that was brought home to me when one of my close friends in Boston--who happens to be white--said: ‘I never thought of Asians as being discriminated against.’ When I heard that, I knew I wanted to present the kinds of prejudice Asian Americans continue to face and feel in parts of this country.

“Now, admittedly, most of it comes in the form of pretty benevolent stereotypes: All Asians are smart and hard-working. All Asian men are geeky with calculators on their belts. All Asian women are passive, either submissive chrysanthemums or seductive geishas. These aren’t hugely destructive stereotypes, but they are stereotypes, nonetheless--and they can have hurtful consequences.”

In “Yellow,” the novella that gives the collection its title, Lee comes to grips with these issues in what he admits is the most frankly autobiographical of his stories. The protagonist, Danny Kim, who, like Lee, is handsome and passionately athletic, traverses an arc from his native Rosarita Bay through UCLA, on to professional success in Boston and back to a kind of peace and mature accommodation with his family and birthplace.

The story is, Lee said, “a kind of odyssey through the conventional prejudices that an Asian American of my generation might have encountered. It’s so long because I broke my foot while running, and every day after I had dragged myself back up to my fourth floor walk-up, I found myself with the time to indulge in the kind of direct, soapbox writing I’d never permitted myself before. Even at the risk of appearing melodramatic or even didactic, I wanted to show how I had come full circle myself.

“After life as the son of a diplomat, I went to UCLA and then lived in Los Angeles for several years afterward. To tell the truth, I didn’t know I was Asian until I went to Boston and, because of my race, encountered verbal attacks I’d never encountered before. All of the epithets in that story are real; they are epithets actually thrown at me.”

None of Lee’s characters, however, are conventional victims of bigotry--or anything else:

In “Voir Dire,” a Korean American public defender, deeply conflicted over his defense of a Chinese immigrant drug dealer accused of killing his addict girlfriend’s child, privately disparages his own ex-wife, a conservative Korean American civil lawyer, as a “kuppie,” or Korean yuppie. She is equally contemptuous of the public defender’s conventionally liberal politics and derides him as “a pagoda of virtue.”

In “The Price of Eggs in China” a gifted Japanese American furniture-maker finds himself caught between two warring Korean American women artists--”Oriental Hair Poet No. 1 and No. 2”--and the story of how he extricates himself becomes an extended meditation on artistic success and failure.

The brotherly protagonists of “Casual Water” find themselves deserted in turn by their Filipina mother and their Caucasian father, a feckless golf pro, but discover their affection for each other in the unexpected solidarity extended by other inhabitants of Rosarita Bay.

Identifying With

His Characters

The book is peopled by so many memorable and utterly authentic Asian American characters that one of the revisions Lee says he undertook is particularly surprising.

“A couple of these stories,” he said, “actually had white characters as their protagonists when they were originally published in magazines. I’m really not sure why that was, other than I think that perhaps I simply was trying to demonstrate my empathy as a writer. In any event, when I revised them and made the characters Asian, they not only opened up for me, but I also understood more of why they had behaved as they did in the stories.”

In fact, Lee’s preoccupation with the exigencies of storytelling is one of “Yellow’s” great pleasures. An admirer of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the heroic era of short American fiction, 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. Danny Kim, for example, dives into a river to rescue a colleague suicidal over his failure to win a promotion.

“As I get older, I am more interested in plot,” he said. “One of the things I’ve learned over the years is not to have a story static in time or place. I am walking a dangerous line, but I think it is worth the risk.”

So, too, does Beattie. “Speaking personally, as a reader, one of the things I appreciate about it is that they are very energetic stories, and yet they make me feel strangely hopeful. Very serious things go on in these stories. But, throughout, there is this feeling that good writers can give you: Their characters may be in very bad state when their stories end, but you’ve been subjected to an energized world that makes you believe in their significance.

“The other good thing about this book--speaking as somebody who has read too much--is that the dialogue is something to be admired in its own right. His characters speak so directly and with such authority that it is all utterly believable.”

It is appraisal that might comfort Lee, who has anxiously embarked on his first novel, the story of “an interracial love triangle involving American diplomats in Tokyo. One of my favorite books is ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ” he said. “But instead of fame and money, this is about race and patriotism. A couple of months ago, I realized I had characters but no plot, and I went into second-book panic.

“I was certain everyone would realize that I’m an impostor and a fraud who never will write again. Then I thought about the story and came up with a missing person. She will be a Korean American woman, and right now I’m doing a lot of research because I get to know my characters by getting to know their jobs.”

Meanwhile, he continues to muse over the reception “Yellow” has received. “I always have the sense with serious literary fiction that you are preaching to the converted,” he said. “The conversation I had with that friend in Boston lead me to give this book a didactic point. But I hope that point is not the entire book.”