Chang-Rae Lee

Template:Short description Template:Family name hatnote Template:Infobox writer Chang-rae Lee (born July 29, 1965) is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University.<ref name=USAToday2010>Template:Cite news</ref> He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.

Early life

Lee was born in South Korea in 1965 to Young Yong and Inja Hong Lee. He immigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old <ref name=NYTInterview>Template:Cite news</ref> to join his father, who was then a psychiatric resident and later established a successful practice in Westchester County, New York.<ref name="Yung-Hsing 2005">Wu, Yung-Hsing. "Chang-rae Lee." Asian- American Writers. Ed. Deborah L. Madsen. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 312. Literature Resource Center. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.</ref> In a 1999 interview with Ferdinand M. De Leon, Lee described his childhood as "a standard suburban American upbringing," in which he attended Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, before earning a B.A. in English at Yale University in 1987.<ref name="Yung-Hsing 2005"/> After working as an equities analyst on Wall Street for a year, he enrolled at the University of Oregon. With the manuscript for Native Speaker as his thesis, he received a master of fine arts degree in writing in 1993 and became an assistant professor of creative writing at the university. On 19 June 1993 Lee married architect Michelle Branca, with whom he has two daughters.<ref name="Yung-Hsing 2005"/> The success of his debut novel, Native Speaker, led Lee to move to Hunter College of the City University of New York, where he was hired to direct and teach in the prestigious creative-writing program.<ref name="Yung-Hsing 2005"/>

Career

Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won numerous awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel.<ref name=USAToday2010 /> Centered on a Korean-American industrial spy, the novel explores themes of alienation and betrayal as experienced by immigrants and first-generation citizens, in their struggle to assimilate in American life.<ref name=NYTInterview /> In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life. This elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the narrative of an elderly Japanese immigrant in the US who was born in Korea but later adopted to a Japanese family and remembers treating Korean comfort women during World War II.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> For this book, Lee received the Asian American Literary Award.<ref>The Asian American Writers' Workshop - Awards Template:Webarchive</ref> His 2004 novel Aloft received mixed notices from the critics and featured Lee's first protagonist who is not Asian American, but a disengaged and isolated Italian-American suburbanite forced to deal with his world.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> It received the 2006 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Adult Fiction category.<ref>APALA Past Award Winners Template:Webarchive</ref> His 2010 novel The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Lee's next novel, On Such a Full Sea (2014) is set in a dystopian future version of the American city of Baltimore, Maryland called B-Mor where the main character, Fan, is a Chinese-American laborer working as a diver in a fish farm.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> It was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award.<ref name=nbcc2014>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

In 2016, Lee joined the faculty of Stanford University, where he is the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He previously taught creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.<ref name=":0">{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> He was also a Shinhan Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.<ref name=":0" />

Lee has compared his writing process to spelunking. "You kind of create the right path for yourself. But, boy, are there so many points at which you think, absolutely, I'm going down the wrong hole here. And I can't get back to the right hole."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Major themes

Lee explores issues central to the Asian-American experience: the legacy of the past; the encounter of diverse cultures; the challenges of racism and discrimination, and exclusion; dreams achieved and dreams deferred. In the process of developing and defining itself, then, Asian-American literature speaks to the very heart of what it means to be American. The authors of this literature above all concern themselves with identity, with the question of becoming and being American, of being accepted, not "foreign."<ref>Matibag, E.(2010). Asian american art and literature. In Encyclopedia of American Studies. Retrieved from http://0-search.credoreference.com.library.simmons.edu/content/entry/jhueas/asian_american_art_and_literature/0</ref> Lee's writings have addressed these questions of identity, exile and diaspora, assimilation, and alienation.<ref name="Yung-Hsing 2005"/>

Awards and honors

In 2015, the American Library Association included On Such a Full Sea on their list of the year's Notable Books.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>

Awards for Lee's writing

Year	Title	Award	Category	Result	Template:Abbreviation
1995	Native Speaker	Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award	—	Template:Won	<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
1996		PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel	—	Template:Won	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
2000	Template:Sort	Anisfield-Wolf Book Award	Fiction	Template:Won	<ref>Template:Cite news</ref>
		NAIBA Book of the Year Award	—	Template:Won	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
2006	Aloft	Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature	Fiction	Template:Won	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
2011	Template:Sort	Dayton Literary Peace Prize	—	Template:Won	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
		Pulitzer Prize	Fiction	Template:Sho	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>
2017	—	John Dos Passos Prize for Literature	—	Template:Won	citation	CitationClass=web }}</ref>

Bibliography

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Books

• Native Speaker (Riverhead, 1994)
• A Gesture Life (Riverhead, 1999)
• Aloft (Riverhead, 2004)
• The Surrendered (Riverhead, 2010)<ref group=lower-alpha>Template:Cite magazine</ref>
• On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead, 2014)
• My Year Abroad (2021)

Articles

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• Template:Cite journal<ref group=lower-alpha>Online version is titled "How Sea Urchin Tastes". First published in the August 19&26, 2002 issue.</ref>

Screenplays

• Coming Home Again (co-written and directed by Wayne Wang, 2019)

Critical studies and reviews of Lee's work

My year abroad

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• Template:Cite journal<ref group=lower-alpha>Online version is titled "Chang-rae Lee lets loose in 'My Year Abroad'".</ref>

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Bibliography notes

External links

• "Mute in an English-Only World", an essay by Lee in the anthology Dream Me Home Safely: Writers on Growing Up in America, at Google Books
• Interview with Lee at Words on a Wire
• [1] KGNU Claudia Cragg radio interview with Chang-Rae Lee, March 2011, on 'The Surrendered'.