Min Jin Lee's upcoming debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires will be published May 2007. Her sprawling, ambitious, compulsively readable book tells the story of a dozen characters over several years in the 1980s. Lee owes her largest debt to 19th century novels like Middlemarch, Vanity Fair, and Madame Bovary. Her primary character, Casey Han, is a Queens-raised, Korean American woman and a recent Princeton grad. After graduation, with no job prospects, Casey finds herself away from the rarefied world of Princeton and back in Queens with her Korean immigrant parents who run a dry cleaner. Free Food for Millionaires is Casey's story, as well as the story of the rich and the poor, immigrants and Americans, and Manhattan in the 1980s.

Min Jin Lee was born in Korea and emigrated to Elmhurst, Queens when she was seven and a half. She attended Yale College and Georgetown Law before working as a corporate lawyer for less than two years. After realizing that the law wasn't for her, she quit, and started writing.

She has since received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the William Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her work has also been featured on NPR's Selected Shorts and anthologized in To Be Real (Doubleday, 1995) and Breeder (Seal Press, 2001).

In March 2007, she took a few hours out of her busy pre-sell tour in to meet me for coffee at the Koryodong bakery on 32nd St. to discuss her novel, book promotion, Asian American stereotypes, race, class, and the importance of paying yourself first.

Ginny Too: You've just come back from a pre-sell tour trip. What is a pre-sell tour?

Min Jin Lee: A pre-sell tour is when a publisher sends an author out around the country to meet independent booksellers. You don't meet reviewers, you meet booksellers who may not have read your book. Let's say you go to Boston. You have the sales representative from my publisher, Warner, and they'll have a dinner for 20 booksellers from around the region who are very key accounts. You're at a fancy restaurant, and there are menu cards. They'll bring in the author, have a cocktail session. Then, the author sits down and meets the booksellers.

"Maybe my publisher thought it was important for booksellers to meet someone who's different. Because I am different."

That's a very, very rare thing. It almost never happens for debut novelists. But, of course, I didn't know that. This is my first book. When I met with other writers, they talked about how rare that is. They do this for Stephen King. They do this for Pulitzer-prize winners. Maybe my publisher thought it was important for booksellers to meet someone who's different. Because I am different.

GT: How are you different?

MJL: Well, my race. My gender. My story. I'm an immigrant. All of those things in combination make me different. To be honest, when I was in Colorado, I met people I think have never met a Korean before. So there's an exotic aspect; I'm a girl from Queens, and they're going, "we don't know what Queens is, we don't know what Korea is, except for M.A.S.H." They get to overcome whatever images they had before.

The point of a pre-sell tour is to get the booksellers to read your book if they haven't. And then peddle it.

This is the interesting thing they don't tell you when you're in writing class. There are 160K books published every year. Publisher's Weekly only reviews 8K.

GT: So, 5%.

MJL: 5%, right. Very good, and I went to Bronx Sci! But I was a History person. Anyway. You have the store owners getting 1-2K galleys a month. You're a store owner, you're trying to keep the roof over your head, sell to your customers, do your accounts, and you're supposed to read in your private time? How do you read 1-2K galleys a month? You and all the people in your store who make eight dollars an hour?

It can't be done. So once in a while, with a pre-sell dinner, they'll meet an author and if they like me, they'll read my book. If they like it, and a customer comes in and asks for a recommendation, the [bookseller] says, "Oh! I met this tall girl from Queens, who came all the way to Colorado. She told us a story, started crying about the Van Gogh letters, I think her book is great!"

Now, I didn't know that's how it worked. I was told, because I was still stuck in the 19th century.

GT: Was Becky Sharp selling books like this?

MJL: Yes, was Becky Sharp selling books like this? She would know. What would Balzac say? Balzac was a publisher, so I expect he would be very savvy.

So that was one of the things that I learned. And once I was there, I admit I was really scared. I didn't know what [the booksellers] expected of me. There's nobody in my family who's been a writer or artist professionally.

99.9% of the people I met [on the pre-sell tour] were white. Many didn't know any Korean people. It's not as though I can't deal with different people, I'm from New York! All of a sudden, you get flown out somewhere, your publisher spends all this money to give you a dinner, and you're the person they focus on.

As an Asian American and a Korean person, you're not supposed to talk about yourself and brag about your accomplishments. All those things you have to turn over, because you're there to hawk your book. I felt a lot of pressure, I didn't want to let my family down, let my publisher down.

When I was a lawyer, and [my firm] sent me out to do due diligence, I would have all these boxes. I would have to do an amazing job, because they sent me out there. I would go through every box, and be really thorough. When I look back on it, I think it's kind of sweet, how seriously I took it. If I took it that seriously, I took this pre-sell tour ten times more seriously. If I have to fight for my book, I have to fight for my book.

GT: You want to succeed.

MJL: I'd like to do it for the home team. I do want to succeed. I've failed for such a long time: twelve years of not having a book. I've watched a lot of people younger than me publish.

GT: Is writing always about publishing?

MJL: It's not about keeping a diary either. I could do that. As vain as it sounds, I really wanted to write literature. I didn't want any less than that. I could have been a lawyer with a six-figure salary. I better be good at writing. I wanted to write something significant, good. I also wanted it to be heartbreaking. Because I was asking the reader to stay with me for 560 pages, it better be interesting.

I read a lot of books where I think the writer is really clever, but I don't care. To me, this is the reason why literary fiction has snotted themselves out of existence. You can sit on your high horse, and say "I'm a language writer." So your writing is very lyrical and beautiful, but you don't believe in plot, or characterization or emotional truth. I think that's great, but I don't want to read it.

When you're new on the market, you're going to have to outperform just to be accepted. I may sound a bit defensive. I have worked with the AAWW for a long time. I see books which are not being received by the mainstream because there is a lot of explanation. It does take more effort for the regular American book buyer.

GT: How long have you wanted to tell this story?

MJL: This story? 5 years.

GT: How did it come to you? Are these characters you've been nursing for years?

MJL: It's not like that. What happened was, a friend of mine worked at a Wall Street firm, and told me a story about whenever a deal closes, they have these free meals. The wealthiest people at the firm, the managing directors, especially the wealthiest managing directors, would swoop down and grab all this food.

And I said, "free food for millionaires." I thought it would make a really good short story. I told my best friend about this, and that my next story would be called, "Free Food for Millionaires." She said, "oh no, no, no, no, that's a novel." She pointed out that I know a lot about people like this, and I need to write this novel.

"I know a lot of lost people."

So, I thought, ok. I'll spend a year scribbling something down. It ended up taking me 5 years. It was such a fun time to write this book, but it was really so difficult. The more I unspooled this thing, the more I realized that I did know a lot about people like this. I know a lot of lost people. I know about poor people who want to be rich, and rich people who are enamored of the poor.

That's one of the things I wanted to show with Ella and Casey. People always talk about how poor people want to be rich, but that's an easy one. There are a lot of rich people who glamorize poor people and their lives.

Ella's attraction to Casey and Ted is about how she doesn't think she has an authentic experience, being an upper middle class Korean person. It's not money. It's not enough for her. She finds these very ambitious people to glom on to, but she doesn't know what her own dreams are.

GT: She's attracted to their hunger.

MJL: Exactly. And there's a lot of people like that in New York City, too. There's a lot of hungry people, and a lot of people who have no idea what they're doing. And they're drawn to hungry people. I wanted to write about that.

It's also about friendship, what it means to be a friend. What are the emotions just beneath friendship? Is it competition? Envy? Love? Need? Aspiration? The motivations, and how they shape social webs.

GT: Now, your parents didn't want you to be a writer. Your father told you to go learn a trade.

MJL: Yeah. He wanted me to be secure. He wanted me to be a lawyer because it would be a protection. It makes sense. I'm sure part of my father's logic is, why did I leave to come to the U.S. and have my daughter be some destitute artist? I came here to give her an education and a good life.

That said, I have a theory that you should pay yourself first.

GT: What do you mean?

MJL: If you're making sacrifices, like quitting a secure job, you should make room for your art. You need to pay yourself first. An hour a day goes to you first, before you pay anyone else.

Even as I am a mom and wife, I always try to find time to pay myself first. Whatever my dream is, if I can't give an hour of my time to my dream, then all of my sacrifices become meaningless.

GT: How do you find time to write?

MJL: I write at night, in the morning, in little pieces. I don't have the luxury of huge blanket stretches of time. I don't think anybody really does. Maybe John Grisham, but I'm sure he's put upon. John Updike is put upon. Joyce Carol Oates is put upon.

When I was writing this novel, I would tell myself, you can't call yourself a writer if you're not writing. So, if you write even one paragraph today, I will not be mad at you. That's me talking to me.

Sometimes, it would be one paragraph a day, for six days a week. It does add up little by little. If you did, say, two paragraphs a day for six days a week, you are going to have four to five pages at the end of the week, guaranteed.

You look at 19th century writers who worked every single day, and they only wrote 250 words a day. There's no other way to do it. So, if you feel a compulsion, and you're making real career sacrifices to write, I encourage you to pay yourself first.

GT: Do you feel any difficulty writing non-fiction? Like the personal essays you wrote about being a lawyer for the To Be Real anthology? Or being a mother in Breeder? You're more open than I expected for an Asian American woman. Not to over generalize.

MJL: No, you can generalize. You can only achieve theory from generalization, and I love theory.

"I think self-consciousness is the enemy of art."

I think self-consciousness is the enemy of art. It's worth always to get the ugly out, and then decide what you want to keep on the page. Even if it's embarrassing, or humiliating, or really painful.

You shouldn't hurt other people though. That's the goal. One thing I feel self-conscious about writing non-fiction is that there are a lot of people who can't defend themselves the way you can in print. That's what I don't like non-fiction as much. In fiction, you write from everyone's point of view. I want to be fair.

I'm glad my book is coming out in my late 30s. The older I get, the more I see how everybody suffers. Nobody is protected. Everybody is vulnerable. You start to think the world isn't so simple. If you're going to make anything worth reading, it should have that level of complexity and sympathy.

I like Casey a lot, but this book wouldn't have been worth doing for five years if it was just Casey's story. Casey's a crazy Korean girl. And there are a lot of crazy Korean girls who smoke too much, sleep around, shop too much. I wanted to give those girls a voice, because I see those girls all the time, in a bakery like this, wasting their lives. I wanted to give her dimension, give her her story. Was she worth five years of my life? No. But her family, her friendships, her struggle in reaction to her community, that was worth it.

GT: Tell me about your relationship with the AAWW.

MJL: I took a lot of classes at the AAWW. I took a class with Jhumpa Lahiri. These were very inexpensive courses for who they were, and what they gave of their time. I remember being on the AAWW board of trustees, and also being a student. I remember thinking this organization is so important for what it was. After having gone across the country and meeting all these people, I realized that no matter how far you or I think Asian American writing has come, it's still not on the map.

You have people who are really good who aren't read. Lahiri is read, her movie (The Namesake) is coming out. But the average person doesn't know her name. She's not James Patterson. She's an incredible writer. Whenever her stories come out in The New Yorker, I read them several times. Technically, she's off the charts. I encourage out, if you're interested in short fiction, just type out a page of Lahiri and ask: how does she do that? It takes audacity to use those techniques for first-person, third-person. Like Alice Munro, they're at another level of short story.

GT: What are you reading these days?

MJL: I'm reading James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk. I really love Baldwin. People aren't reading him enough, and people should. Especially when I think about how much he had to overcome in order to persist, it takes your breath away. I have nothing to complain about.

GT: Are there any books you read and re-read?

MJL: That is one thing I gave Casey that I very much do. I re-read Middlemarch. I read —

GT: Jane Eyre?

MJL: Jane Eyre? Absolutely. Vanity Fair. Madame Bovary. Balzac. You should read Cousin Bette. That book will change your life. Balzac wrote over 90 books, a lot of them pulp. But some will change the way you think. Every woman should read Cousin Bette, it's really sinister how he sees what women can do. But it's interesting, because you start to understand how.

One thing that's interesting about Balzac is that he isn't an absent narrator like Madame Bovary. Flaubert's style is so clean. Whereas Balzac is always nudging you in the ribs and saying "heh, heh, what do you think dear reader?" Once he tells you something, that knowledge that he tells you is so insightful. You're not just reading for fun, you're reading for insight. The really great books give you insight.

If you can't give insight, you've given the reader entertainment. But has the reader gotten any smarter or wiser for the fact that he spent time with you? No. You're out there, killing yourself, trying to figure out the causes of the human heart, you may as well share your theory, even if it's wrong.

I have a lot of theories about life in this book. That's what makes my book different. I'll tell you what I think about class and race, and rich people and poor people, and why people try. There's a scene in here where people exchange gifts for a wedding. That's cultural anthropology. I really wanted to share what people do in Asian wedding rituals. I wanted to document this. I bet you most people don't know what Korean people do in weddings, and you're going to see it in this book.

GT: An excerpt of this book is coming out in Women's Studies Quarterly in May. It's the scene where Casey goes to Hugh's apartment, and they have sex. Hugh is Casey's friend, a white, male banker she once worked with. After they have sex, Casey finds pornography featuring an Asian woman and a white man. She leaves immediately after finding it.

MJL: I wanted to make a feminist commentary. What is it about Asian women? If you type in "asian women" on Google, you get four million hits, most of it pornography. As a category, that's how majority culture in the West sees us, as objects of pornography. How does that affect relationships between straight people, if it's a white man and an Asian woman? How are relationships affected if the white man sees a lot of pornography with Asian women as stars, or objects, whatever you want to call it.

I wanted to get at that in this scene, where you can have a sympathetic male who looks at pornography. I wasn't criticizing pornography. It will change the nature of your sex if both parties are aware that that's what's going on. Casey can think Hugh is a good guy. And Hugh can think he is a good guy, he just uses this tape to jerk off.

But the pornography would recast everything. I wanted to give sexual subjecthood to Asian women. I can see myself in this way, I can do what I want to do. But I can also change my point of view if I know what you're thinking about me. This aspect of pornography is what I wanted to comment on.

Many people who read this section may just think it's salacious and interesting. But I put that in there to make my feminist commentary, as well as my racial commentary, on the sexual subjecthood of women. I was really happy that WSQ picked it up. It's the premier academic journal in the world on feminist commentary. I want academics to talk about what it means when Asian women understand that they are objects of sexual desire in a very subjugated way.

I thought at a certain point, I'm going to blow it here. It might get rejected, no one might read it. I might as well write the most whole book I could write. I did have many rejections.

GT: You have a pile of rejections as thick as this book, right?

MJL: Right. Thicker than this book. It was hard for me. School wasn't hard for me. I loved school. I achieved academic success very easily. So when I received my first couple of rejections, I was devastated.

I will say the past twelve years, the humility that I have comes from having failed consistently. I realized that writing is nothing short of a compulsion. If you stick with it, if you're really serious, you realize that rejections are a real part of the job.

Even if it hurts to wait or be rejected, and you still feel the compulsion to tell your story, I really encourage you to persist. Even if it's humiliating. I would never tell you it's not humiliating.

GT: Is this what you love about the Van Gogh letters written to his brother about his fear of failure?

MJL: It's about persisting and believing the bigger things. There's a quote I have on my wall, "I would rather learn my art well than sell a painting for pity's sake."

I think it must be a compulsion. There's really so little likelihood of getting published.

GT: And once published, getting read.

MJL: Getting read, right. If you're going to make room for your art, you have to be stubborn about it. That's a good quality. I've never met a writer who's not sensitive. It makes you perceptive. And all their lives, they're being told "you're too sensitive." I think there are too many knuckleheads out there who aren't sensitive enough. So, you need to be sensitive and stubborn, because it is so hard.

Another thing I thought, you always hear things like Asian women can't drive?

GT: Right, all the stereotypes about Asian women.

MJL: I wanted to hear "Asian women can write." We're not just competent workers, these robots. That was my criticism. Like at the end of the book, when Casey gets an offer from the investment bank where she was interning, the bank says she's so good at putting the work away. Why can't they say she has good judgment? Or imagination? Or creativity? Or decisiveness? They make it seem like she's a robot.

I wanted to make a point. Asians aren't these flat, passive, emotionless people who do work well. It's a stereotype we need to fight, because it denies our humanity. Because I do see so many kids out there, dropping out of college, attempting suicide, having eating disorders, being promiscuous, a whole gamut of problems. But, the stereotype of Asians being so competent is still there.

GT: There's so much you have written into your book. What do you hope readers get out of reading Free Food for Millionaires?

MJL: I hope people enjoy the book. On the surface level, I want it to be enjoyable. I have a lot of agendas, and if people get there, that's cool. If they don't, that's fine.

"One thing books did for me is they made me feel like I was part of a community larger than me."

When I was a growing up, I didn't have a lot of friends. I was a very lonely kid. One thing books did for me is they made me feel like I was part of a community larger than me. Reading gave me such happiness. I was reading V.S. Naipaul, and he was writing about how he wanted to be a member of this community, even as a very poor boy in Trinidad. I remember thinking, that makes perfect sense to me. You want to be a member of this community, and the only way you can be a member is to write a book.

The fact that I can be a part of the Library Congress, that's really cool. I'm shelved somewhere. I've fulfilled that goal.

GT: You've got a Dewey decimal number. That's great. What's next on your list?

MJL: I'm working on a manuscript called "Pachinko." It's a novel set in Tokyo about ethnic Koreans in Japan. I worked on that manuscript before I worked on Free Food for Millionaires. A short story excerpted from that manuscript was published in the Missouri Review. It's called "Motherland," and it won the William Peden prize. It's archived on the website. That book, I really have in my head. It's about a trading scandal, but it's also about ethnic Koreans in Japan. I'm moving to Japan in August for a few years, so that will be good for my book.

Ginny Too grew up in the South, went to school in the Midwest, and (recently) moved to Brooklyn. She does not discriminate between thick and thin books; she reads them both. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago.