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Drifting House

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We Are All Drifting Houses

Drifting House by Krys Lee (Viking Adult; 224 pages; $25.95.)

I typically do not read short story collections. Novels are my book of choice for a variety of reasons. I enjoy rich, memorable characters, ones who stay with me long after I finish a book. I love a great setting, one in which I am transported to a different time and place so unlike my own and one in which I can lose myself. Plot is also important to me, but it has to be plausible and interesting. I detest badly written novels; thus, a book must have good prose to capture and sustain my attention.

Most short stories tend to lack that certain something I'm seeking in a book. Short story collections should have the above elements I have previously described, but many simply do not. In the hands of a mediocre writer, character development, plot, and setting can suffer due to the length of a short story. Since most are about the length of a chapter, it can be difficult to produce a great short story, especially when page numbers are an issue.

It takes a skilled writer to come up with a great short story. I am happy to say I found a short story collection that is nothing short of magical. I found Krys Lee's Drifting House.

The release of Drifting House is timely considering the December death of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il. Lee's stories matter and she cares deeply about her subjects. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Lee was raised in California and Washington. She was awarded special mention in the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2012, was a finalist for Best New American Voices in 2006, and has published in The Kenyon Review, Narrative Magazine, California Quarterly, and Asia Weekly.

Lee's Drifting House is a powerful, intimate, and affecting debut collection. She writes with elegance and grace as she takes us from Korea to the United States. What struck me most in the stories were the Korean immigrants struggling to assimilate into American culture. At times, Drifting House is difficult to read, not because the book is poorly written but because she brings the reader into the action and into the struggles of the characters. The reader becomes a participant in the story and has an intense reaction to what goes on. Never have I experienced such torment and such anguish as a reader. This is deliberate. Lee wants us to feel this way as she takes on themes such as family, love, abandonment, and loss.

In a story entitled "A Temporary Marriage," a mother leaves Korea after being abandoned by her husband. Not only did he leave her but he also kidnapped their daughter. The mother immigrates to the United States and marries a man only so she can be close to her child. The marriage is a sham but it serves her purpose. My favorite story is the title story, "Drifting House," in which a young boy must make a life or death decision as he leads his siblings to freedom. The choice he makes haunts him and made me cry.

I had the opportunity to interview Lee and am very happy with the results. I hope you will, too. Lee and Drifting House deserve your attention.

Interview with Krys Lee,
Author of Drifting House

Jaime Boler: Thank you, Krys, for doing this interview. I am very excited about Drifting House! Drifting House is a short story collection. What made you want to write short stories?

Krys Lee: I started writing poetry long ago but found that the stories that were beginning to well up in me and wanted to be told no longer fit in a poem. That's when I began considering another form. Stories appealed to me at the time because the shapes of what I was trying to write seemed appropriate for the length of a story.

JB: Did you always want to be an author?

KL: Yes. I've had my nose buried in a book since I can remember. All my books were smudged with toothpaste and stained with beef jerky because I read in nearly every waking moment. Books were an escape and respite from a fairly grim reality, and, like many who love to read, this desire traveled to writing itself. But I wrote primarily poetry until I began this collection.

JB: My favorite stories in your collection are the title story, "Drifting House," and "The Goose Father." Do you have a favorite?

KL: My favorite story is probably "A Temporary Marriage." I felt so much sadness for Mrs. Shin and Mr. Rhee while writing it, and the story's evolution surprised and shocked me. It was one of those moments when you realize how powerful the subconscious can be.

JB: What gave you the ideas for your stories?

KL: Each story was inspired by something personal, though they're generally not autobiographical. I love South Korea, and I'm personally invested in its problems, which is evident in stories such as "The Salaryman" that arose after seeing a man I dated devoured by the Hyundai conglomerate. The story "Drifting House" also arose from my friendships with the activist and North Korean defector community in Seoul; the more you know, the more outraged you become at the tyranny of North Korea.

JB: What was the most difficult part about writing Drifting House? And what would you say was the most rewarding?

KL: The most difficult part was facing my own lack of faith, but still returning to the writing. I told myself constantly that I wouldn't be able to sell Drifting House but quitting was like carrying a baby in the womb but not undergoing labor. It was my baby, and I was going to give birth to it. The most rewarding and difficult aspect of writing is seeing more of yourself in the work than you'd ever wished to expose--all my obsessions, fears, and wounds arose in the stories, though I'd persisted in avoiding directly autobiographical stories. But to create from the personal something larger than the self was a process I value, and I'm grateful for the experience.

JB: When did you begin working on Drifting House?

KL: My first story began over five years before Drifting House was bought at auction, but that doesn't mean I was writing for those entire five years. I took several months off at the time from the book, both for personal reasons as well as out of a fear of commitment. I was afraid of failure, a fear that many writers experience when starting out.

JB: What is your favorite book? Which authors do you consider your favorites?

KL: The list is exhaustive, but a few constants are The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky; To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf; Beloved by Toni Morrison; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie; When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka; Catch-22 by Joseph Heller; Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, W.S.Merwin, and John Ashberry; The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekov; the plays of Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams, Samuel Beckett, Martin McDonagh, and Martin Crimp, and the short stories of Charles D'Ambrosio and Lorrie Moore.

JB: Please tell me a little about your writing style. Do you write in long-hand first or do you simply go to your computer or laptop and begin writing? Do you go somewhere in particular to write? Do you listen to music or do you prefer silence?

KL: I write anywhere it happens for me, from a campground, a subway, to a library. I'm a restless person, so as long as I'm writing most days of the week, I accept my irregular patterns rather than fight them. Depending on the scene I'm working on, music or silence will accompany my writing.

JB: If you were not writing, what would you most likely be doing?

KL: I'd be a human rights activist or a park ranger. Activists inspire me for acting on what they believe is right, and for their courage and sacrifice. A park ranger is attractive to me because I like the unpretentious nature and daily beauty and drudgery of their lives. There's a restlessness for meaning that keeps my mind moving, and both professions, in different ways, is a search for meaning.

JB: Time plays a significant role throughout your stories. Can you tell us about that?

KL: I'm obsessed with time. My parents died young, so time has haunted me since I was in my early twenties. I questioned what it meant to live on this earth, and what actually mattered to me in my finite amount of time here. Historical time and geographical time also interest me tremendously, as I'm but a moment on this planet.

JB: Things that really stood out for me while reading your stories were identity, home, and the immigrant experience. What do you want readers to take with them after reading Drifting House?

KL: My characters happen to be of Korean ethnicity because I understand that culture best, but their stories are universal. I think of all of us as a kind of drifting house, especially readers and writers. The force of society and our personal circumstances acts on all of us in different ways, and people are never quite at ease with their surroundings as they seem. Like my characters in "The Goose Father" or "A Small Sorrow", in the end, we all seek a place of belonging.

JB: One thing that captured my attention in your stories was the acts of violence in almost every one. What made you use this in your storytelling?

KL: Violence shaped the person I am, and it has clearly affected my sensibility. I thought this was in my past, but the past becomes a part of you and I carried that violence into my fiction, to my surprise. But as Harriett Gilbert from BBC's The Strand noted, my aesthetic is informed by humor, fantasy, and violence. Darkness is balanced by light, just as in life.

JB: When will your book be released? Will there be a book tour? If so, which cities will you visit?

KL: Drifting House will be released on Feb 2, 2012. The book tour will take me to New York City, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and literary festivals in Tempe, Arizona, and Dallas. There will also be an additional event in Honolulu, which will be fun.

JB: What was it like when you saw the cover of your book for the first time?

KL: I realized how lucky I was to have a publishing team that worked so hard on my behalf. My experience with Viking/Penguin has been collaborative, from the editing to the selection of the front cover, thanks to a group of editors, publicists, and designers who love reading as much as I do. The excitement and the faith of this enormous publishing house for a story collection--reportedly an uncommon phenomenon these days--culminated in the moment I received a finished copy of Drifting House.

JB: What's next for Krys Lee? Is there a novel in your future?

KL: I actually finished a novel draft last year and am in the middle of revisions. The novel as a form gives you a lot of room to explore, which I've enjoyed. Hopefully, you'll be seeing it soon!

JB: Thank you, Krys, for doing this interview. I am very excited about Drifting House, and I know readers will be, too.

Drifting House consists of nine short stories. All of them focus on Koreans or Korean-Americans. The topics of each short story vary greatly, as do the time in which they're set (from the 1970s to roughly the present), but they do have one thing in common. They are all about desperation, of one sort or another. These characters all yearn to be themselves, but are stifled one way or another, broken from the past or tradition or duty.

All of these stories are really, really sad. The writing style is simple, unornamented, which really seems to force the reader to focus more on the content. The pain these people feel is not dressed up in fancy syntax or diction; it's laid out in front of you for you to experience as well.

Having a chance to learn about another culture, the side I don't learn about from kdramas, is certainly eye-opening. For example, the story "The Salaryman" tells about a man who loses his job at a corporation during a serious down time in the economy. The man sends his family away to stay with his wife's relatives until he can find a job. In the meantime, he is a bum, begging for change, sleeping outside, and going to the unemployment office everyday. What kind of world is this? It's terrifying how one a corporation will lay people off for a profit margin and this is how things can end up.

The story I liked best was At the Edge of the World. The main character of that one is an incredibly bright young boy. I like his voice and his clever thoughts. They remind me somewhat of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

Check out my tags for this post: all of those are subjects of one or more of the stories. Do not come to this book for happiness, because you will not find it; this is a book that looks at the darkest parts of life unflinchingly.

Drifting House by Krys Lee is one of the very best collections of short stories I have ever read. They are right up there with Alice Munroe. The stories are all about Korean people, their culture in Korea and the immigrant experience in the United States. The stories share several thematic elements: loss, separation, solitude, a sense of being out of place and situations of violence that are often painful to read. The author examines the limits of what human beings are capable of and how they endure.

In A Temporary Marriage, a woman leaves Korea for the United States in the hopes of finding her daughter who her ex-husband kidnapped. She enters into a marriage of convenience in order to have the correct paperwork to be in the United States. Here, she searches for her daughter in California.

At the Edge of the World is about Mark, "nine years old and he knew everything". He is more like nine years old going on forty. However, he is friendless and the other children his age torment him in endless ways. When a girl his age, Chanhee, moves in next door, they befriend each other. Chanhee's mother is a shaman and Mark's mother is a christian who despises shamanism. When Mark's father visits the shaman, all hell breaks loose in the family.

The Pastor's son is about the cycle of family violence and abuse. After the death of his mother, Jingyu and his father move to Seoul where his father marries his dead wife's best friend, a promise he'd made to his first wife before she died. There ensues a family from hell despite the pastor supposedly being a man of god. The pastor's son says, in a moment of insight, "I saw the violence that my father had grown up with and passed down to us. I felt what my father must have always carried with him: the terrible war, its long ago shadow that cast far beyond and drew you in like a thirsty curse".

In The Goose Father, Gilho is a goose father, a man in Korea who supports his family living overseas in the United States. To assuage his loneliness, he takes in a tenant, Wuseong. Gilho's life becomes transformed and reaffirmed in ways he could never have predicted.

The Salaryman is a very powerful story about the financial crisis in Korea and a worker who is let go. He gives everything he has to his wife and children and takes to living in the streets - desolate, lonely and hopeless.

Drifting House is about two young boys and their crippled sister who trek from N. Korea to China to try to find their mother who deserted them. The life of poverty they live is inconceivable; "an eleven-year-old with a body withering on two years of boiled tree bark, mashed roots, and the occasional grilled rat and fried crickets on a stick". Finding an acorn that can be divided in three portions is a real gift to them. Some of the people in their village have even reverted to cannabalism in order to stave off their hunger.

The Believer is one of the more violent stories in the book. Jenny had always believed in god and was even attending seminary school. However, she loses faith when she comes home to the site of a violent murder committed by her mother. Their family falls apart and despite the excrutiating emotional violence that Jenny endures, her search for god continues.

The stories are all about people who are dislodged from their lives in some way, passing time until something new might possibly occur. Many are waiting for an epiphany that is just beyond reach. They are caught up in the cycle of poverty, the immigrant experience, family violence, and the absoluteness of time. Some are dealing with sexual issues or sexual awakenings. They all live in a drifting house, some carrying their homes on their backs and others going from one land to another. This is a brilliant book and I highly recommend it.

Once in a blue moon readers find in their hands a book by a previously unknown writer that makes more than a fleeting impression. Rarer these days is discovering a new author whose prose is well-crafted, articulate and compelling. It is even more unusual, however, to sense that a new writer has emerged who will take his or her place alongside the greats of Western literature. We'll have to wait for Krys Lee's subsequent books to ascertain whether the initial buzz about her will merit a reputation as a top notch 21st century author and whether she can break out of the inevitable typecasting of "Asian Lit." But Drifting House has led to one of those times when I have bought multiple copies to give away to friends.

I am very curious to see if the collection will find resonance beyond the world of those fascinated with Korea. I do believe that Korea and Koreans are a mere canvas for Krys to write eloquently about wider issues of identity, conflict, love and death. While well crafted, not every story here is an easy read. This is certainly the author's intention. At times I felt claustrophobic and as if the darkness was emerging from the pages to envelope me. While I never found myself quite gasping to catch my breath I did feel that some of the incidents could repulse more delicate readers. In other words, not every story in this collection can be deemed "enjoyable." However I don't get the impression that Krys Lee is writing to shock for the sake of being perverse, as some other well-known trendy writers tend to do. There are deeper messages and meaning in these pages, which perhaps deserve a second or third reading to more clearly discern. And, that is an indication, after all, of great writing.

The Drifting House - the debut collection of Krys Lee - contains many good stories and some truly exceptional ones. And like all short story compilations, readers are bound to gravitate to their own favorites.

For me, a few of them really sang. In the first, A Temporary Marriage, Mrs. Shin has been forced to endure an abusive relationship and enters a sham marriage with another Korean named Mr. Rhee. As a result of her divorce, she loses custody of her daughter, whom she is determined to see again. But has she courted her own abuse? Phrases such as "her wounded body continued its ancient song" sum up, in a few sparse words, what the theme of the story is really about.

Then there's The Goose Father - the traditional name for a father who faithfully sends money to his family overseas. The father - a one-time poet - takes in a young boarder who carries an actual goose with a wounded wing. In powerful prose, the father - Gilho - must come to terms with his true inclinations and his lifetime loneliness and alienation.

The Salaryman is stunning in its understated, naturalistic prose. In this story - told in second person - we watch a solid Korean businessman lose his job, his family, his confidence, and ultimately, his very humanity. It's like watching a train wreck; it's hard to look away.

There are many other good ones as well - the eponymous Drifting House, the most surreal of the lot, where two brothers and their very young sister try to escape North Korea's countryside famine by fleeing to China. Yet they cannot escape their ghosts. And in The Believer, a mentally deranged Korean American woman commits a heinous crime; her daughter tries to comfort her father by performing an unspeakable act.

Ms. Lee is a young writer who is willing to take risks as she focuses her talent on those who are damaged, lonely, yearning. It's not uplifting - marriages fail, men lose their sense of masculinity, women lose their sense of value, and most everyone feels displaced. Yet it offers amazing insights into the hopelessness and frustration that define a Korea that's been through war, financial draught, and instabilities.