![]() ![]() She was the kind of author I preferred because once I finished one book, I could just pick up another. At the library, Lenski’s books populated whole shelves. It creaked all the way home.ĭuring elementary school, as a new reader of English-language books, I discovered Lois Lenski, a prolific American writer and daughter of an immigrant. We loaded up our metal grocery cart with its tilted black wheels and white plastic hubs. We could borrow as many books as we liked, he said. In our first year in America, Uncle John took my two sisters and me to the library in Elmhurst and got us cards. A year later, we came to Elmhurst, Queens, where Uncle John, his wife and their two American-born daughters lived. company man, sponsored his younger sister’s family to immigrate from South Korea. ![]() hired him as a programmer, where he worked for most of his life. Not long after, he got a job at an insurance company, then, later, I.B.M. The former history graduate student read library books on computer science. He noticed that computer programmers had high starting salaries, so he borrowed books on programming. On a day off, Uncle John went to the New York Public Library to check the classifieds. His knife moves across the thick porcelain plate, making a thud sound as food hits a plastic bag. A young man wears a white waiter’s shirt and black worker’s slacks and stands over a bin. ![]() In my mind, I can still see Uncle John’s handsome face with the square jawline, thick eyebrows highlighting his large dark eyes, the same shape as my mother’s. Though hungry, he’d scrape French fries off dinner plates and toss bowls of spaghetti into garbage bins. If he was caught eating any of it, his boss would threaten to fire him. When he cleared the tables, diners left food untouched on their plates. for a master’s in history but ran out of money.įor a time, he worked as a waiter. After getting his degree from the University of Central Missouri, he headed to N.Y.U. In Warrensburg, he managed to study history, get married and have a daughter. Kim arrived in Missouri as a student a few years after the Korean War. He came to the United States when he was 23 - the age my son is now. Uncle John was the second son of a Presbyterian minister, the headmaster of an orphanage school. On Zoom, I tell my college students: “I know it’s lousy right now, but it’ll get better. #Min jin lee how to#I’ve had some troubling news, and had to gather myself and remember how to solve knotty problems. I miss the happy laughter of the children. The elementary school across the street has been closed. Through desperate struggles and hard-won triumphs, its members are bound together by deep roots as they face enduring questions of faith, family, and identity.This past year, I’ve spent most of my time in my drafty office in Harlem, where the water leak from the lintel above the south-facing window has reappeared after some bad weather. ![]() So begins the tale of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. But her decision to abandon her home, and to reject her son’s powerful father, sets off a dramatic saga that will echo down through the generations. Deserted by her married lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. She later worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to becoming an award-winning fiction writer. While attending Yale she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. #Min jin lee free#Lee’s debut novel, Free Food for Millionaires, was one of the “Top 10 Novels of the Year” for The Times (London), NPR’s Fresh Air, and USA Today. Min Jin Lee’s National Book Award finalist, Pachinko, is a gorgeous, page-turning saga where four generations of a poor Korean immigrant family fight to control their destiny in 20th-century Japan, exiled from a home they never knew. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |