How did you choose Casey Han's name?

I began this novel shortly after September 11, 2001. And until August, 2007, I lived in downtown New York, not ten blocks from the World Trade Center.

After the attack, The New York Times published a series of brief obituaries with photographs of all those who had died. I could hardly read them, but now and then I tried. One day, I opened the section and saw a young Asian woman's face. Her first name was Casey. She was pretty with a beguiling expression—like someone you'd look forward to seeing at work. She had a Korean surname, and I'd never met a Korean with the given name Casey before. I don't know anything about her except for what was on that brief obituary, but I named my character after this woman who died so close to where I live.

As for Casey's surname, I have been told that there is only one Han family line in Korea whereas there may be many branches of Kim, Lee or Cho. The word han can be loosely translated as a uniquely Korean sentiment of lament—an inexpressible anguish or suffering of a people from a divided nation whose national history is one of humiliation and loss. The meaning of han is considered by some to be a national cultural trait, reflecting historical oppression and isolation. That a young woman growing up in America with such enormous freedom and advantages could somehow carry with her this unconscious sense of historical suffering was something I considered throughout the writing of this book.

Casey Han and her traditional Korean father have a pretty violent opening scene. It might be helpful for readers to get his perspective on the events taking place. Is there anything you'd like to add about this scene and why it's happening?

This scene was difficult to write, because domestic violence is prevalent yet hidden in patriarchal cultures, and to write about it seemed like a betrayal. It was essential to write this scene in an omniscient voice because I wanted to dramatize and personalize the experience of violence for each character in the room. In this scene, the father is the perpetrator of the violence, while Casey is the victim; the mother who is present but helpless and the sister keeps to herself. Each character acts out all that he or she cannot express. I think about children who do not have language and who have to hit, bite or cry. I love the phrase you say to preschoolers: “Use your words.” But grown-ups don't always have the words either, yet they, too, have all this feeling. I wanted to show that kind of emotional illiteracy and frustration sympathetically in this scene. The fight between the father and daughter was unfair, but it was Casey, to me, the one who was hit, who was in some measure stronger because she had greater power of expression and awareness.

Where did you find the inspiration for the book?

A friend told me a story about the free lunches given at investment banks after a deal ends, e.g., if an investment bank closed a bond offering for a Chinese telecom company, there might be a free dim sum lunch for some of the employees of that investment bank. My friend told me that where he worked, sometimes the wealthiest employees were the first in line to grab a lot of food. I thought this was ironic and funny: Free food for millionaires. I had intended to write a short story, but my best friend Dionne Bennett, a professor at Loyola, said it would make a great novel because I am familiar with this world of Wall Street and New York's complicated class structure. I started this book in 2001 and finished it in 2006.

How did you decide to write about Casey and Ella?

I quit being a lawyer in 1995 to write fiction. For about five years, there was no relief to the number of rejections I received. It was then I began a short story called “Bread and Butter.” It became my first published story, and I was thirty two years old. The story was about two young women who become friends by accident and about how failure affects each one and their feelings for each other and themselves. They were both Korean-American and newly married—one was wealthy, beautiful and depressed and the central character was poor, unattractive but possessed enormous confidence and even larger dreams which she could not fulfill. It was really that story and how it was received that gave me the courage to write about friendship—permitting me to render Casey and Ella's dynamic. I have also met the Ellas of this world who romanticize poverty and those who escape it. It felt true to me that Ella was drawn to Casey for her energy and desires in the same way she is drawn to Ted and his exuberant ambition. Everyone always talks about how the poor want to be rich, and there is that, of course, but I've also seen the opposite to be true.

Do you have any favorite male characters?

There are the obvious good guys like Isaac Gottesman or Dr. Shim. I love them for their kindness and wisdom. I adore the rake Hugh Underhill because there is something sexy about his carelessness regarding his beauty and privilege. Nevertheless, I think my favorite male character might be Ted, because his desires were so strong. He may be repellent to some but I think we all know a variation of Ted in our lives and whatever they are doing, we want to watch them compulsively. I wanted to see how the son of uneducated cannery workers goes to Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard College then Harvard Business School, marries a beautiful doctor's daughter—an heiress’s. What would it be like to give him what he wanted and worked for? What would he want next? I found his behavior on the page interesting, because what I learned was that he craved to feel at ease—though it looked as if he was winning every battle smoothly. The person who made him feel this way was Delia—the office “slut”. How bizarre, but to me, very true. I believe that Ted could not and would not have chosen Delia unless he had actually lived and experienced the fulfillment of his primary wishes and goals.

You've chosen to write this book showing many points of view. Is there a reason why?

More than anything, I wanted to try to write novels in the style of the ones I loved. I have always loved 19th century literature from England and Europe, and early 20th century literature from America. The books I reread for pleasure almost always employ an omniscient narrator—either a fictive person who knows everyone's thoughts and how the story will be told or the author himself who knows how the story ends and why. There is a godlike quality to omniscience, and it is that I am vainly approaching in story telling.

Also, I think I loved Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Thackeray, Flaubert, George Eliot, Balzac, Edith Wharton, Maugham, Dickens, the Bröntes...because they reveal marginal characters as well as the central characters. Perhaps this is important to me, because of my own background in which I have felt both marginal and central at different times. Obviously, none of those books featured anyone biographically like me. It's very difficult to share what you learn and speculate only through one point of view. The omniscient point of view lends itself to far greater flexibility and spaciousness.

Though omniscient narration is an unpopular way of storytelling for modern writers, it can reveal how everyone in the room is thinking about the issues and each other and themselves rather than what they are actually doing and saying. Even the people of the finest character don't speak truthfully or act honestly all the time. It is only in fiction that all the dimensions of personality and behavior may be witnessed. I wanted to have a go at taking it all down.

Who are your favorite authors, and which are your favorite books?

George Eliot: Middlemarch

Charlotte Brönte: Jane Eyre

William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair

Sinclair Lewis: Main Street

Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure

Honore de Balzac: Cousin Bette, Lost Illusions

Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina

Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye

Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie

Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God

Edith Wharton: The House of Mirth

Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary

Junichiro Tanizaki: The Makioka Sisters

What's the best piece of advice you ever received? How have you applied it to your writing career?

I heard in a sermon once that the definition of self control was to choose the important over the urgent. I think as a writer, it is difficult but necessary to defer gratification and to do the work and to keep doing the work regardless of its prospects. I think John Gardner's advice to writers was very good—basically, not to expect that writing would provide for your needs, but to write anyway if you must. Often, I've wished that I could've had quicker success, greater financial security, more respect, etc. as a writer. For nearly twelve years now since leaving the law, I have often felt ashamed for wanting to be a writer and doubtful of my talents. What helped in these moments was to consider what was important rather than the urgent feelings of embarrassment and helplessness. What was important is still important now: To learn to write better in order to better complete the vision one holds in one’s head and to enjoy the writing, because the work has to be the best part.

What will be your next novel?

I am working on a novel called Pachinko. It is set in Tokyo and its central characters are ethnic Koreans, Japanese and expatriate Americans. I started this book in pieces long before Free Food for Millionaires, and a story excerpted from the manuscript was published in The Missouri Review a few years ago. The story “Motherland” features Etsuko Nagatomi, an important character from the book, but the novel's main character is the boy Solomon in the story who appears mostly as a young man in the novel. Solomon Choi is an ethnic Korean whose father owns lucrative pachinko parlors in Tokyo and Kyoto. Solomon is sent to international schools in Tokyo, educated at universities abroad then finds work as a trader in an investment bank. Solomon is a romantic character and a highly seductive person.

I have been curious about the ethnic Korean population in Japan and their history since college. For me, fiction usually starts with a personal question or actual event then I try to see the people and how they behave under their circumstances. I am most interested in what people want and what they do in relationship to their desires. I have recently moved to Tokyo with my family, so it should be a rich environment for my next work.

On writing Free Food for Millionaires

My parents, sisters and I immigrated to Queens, New York in March of 1976. My family was sponsored by my Uncle John, a computer programmer at IBM. I was seven years old—two years older than my main character, Casey. Also, like her, I grew up in Elmhurst in a blue-collar neighborhood. We lived in a series of shabby rented apartments for the first five years, and then my parents bought a small three family house in Maspeth and rented out the other two floors while we lived on the second floor. I learned how to speak English and to read and write in the public schools of Elmhurst and Maspeth, Queens. My sisters and I were latchkey kids. Our summers were spent working in our parents’ wholesale jewelry store and hanging out at the Elmhurst Public Library.

I could not have articulated it in this way then, but my childhood was continually informed by immigration, class, race and gender. This book features first and second generation immigrant characters, and therefore, I believe that it satisfies the definition of an American story because unlike any other country in this world, America has this generative quality due to its immigration policies and early colonial history. With the exception of Native Americans and descendants of slaves, in the United States everyone’s biography is ultimately connected to an immigrant’s journey.

I was a history major in college, and my senior essay was about the colonization of the 18th-century American mind. Quite a mouthful. My argument then was that original American colonists from England and the generations that followed felt profoundly inferior intellectually and culturally to Europeans and those back home in their motherland. That idea has affected how I see my own challenges in America as an immigrant. I am not legally colonized—far from it—but an immigrant is like a early colonist (a word currently out of favor), that is, a person who has come from somewhere else, learns to adapt to her new land with all its attendant complexities with an overall wish to acquire new “territory”. It is an interesting position to consider since I am venturing to make culture—my crayon drawings of what I see and notice in the form of fiction. I can be critical of how this country works, but I also respect its ideals of rugged individualism, the Protestant work-ethic, and the American entrepreneurial spirit. It is easy to criticize America, but from a global perspective, this is an amazing country with tremendous openness. This comment has been made before elsewhere by many pundits, and I think it is worth considering: Many who criticize America would still prefer to live here than anywhere else. Carlos Buloson, the Filipino-American author titled his rich novel America Is in the Heart. To me—another immigrant from a later time—I, too, possess a complex America in my heart.

Having said that, if you honestly love any object or subject, you will ultimately need to admit to its flaws in the hopes of some idealized love. We recall America’s Checkered Back story: The pillaging of Native Americans, slavery of African Americans, Jim Crow legislation, gender inequality, immigration quotas for people from Southern Europe, Exclusion Acts of the Chinese, the internment of Japanese Americans, its reluctance toward entering World War II, Hiroshima, McCarthyism, Vietnam and the list continues. And thus, we recognize with both shock and compassion how with every generation, America has transferred its set of insecurities and anxieties to the newcomer.

With all this in mind, I wanted to chronicle the personalities and issues which abound in my village of New York in the form of a novel, because I wanted to reveal these images and thoughts to myself and hopefully, to my reader. I was profoundly affected by 19th century European novels when I was growing up, and in college, I had the opportunity to read American novelists like Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Edith Wharton, among others, who made me realize that what you saw and wondered about should be reflected in a literary work with an eye toward integrating emotion, history, insight and narrative shape.

There are many kinds of immigrants, and when I was growing up in Queens, the immigrants were German, Polish, Irish, Greek, Italian, Hungarian as well as Chinese, Korean, and Indian. One of the interesting and perhaps obvious aspects of being a non-White immigrant is that an Asian-American cannot “pass” as a member of the majority group as long as his or her phenotypical features remain racialized. Simply put, if your eye shape, nose, hair texture or your physical body type reflect a distinctiveness compared to the ones belonging to the majority group—for good or for bad—full assimilation may not be possible. This can cause all sorts of interesting problems to crop up even in an open place like America. Some have argued persuasively that racial minorities may always be immiscible with the majority. Naturally, this theory may cause consternation to many who wish to be a member of the majority culture with all its privileges and responsibilities. In this book, I handed my characters all sorts of gifts: education, good appearances, talents, strong family structures...and I wanted to see what they would do with their ambitions. They also received trials and caused some troubles of their own. Would race, class, immigration and gender politics affect them? Or you might ask, how could they not? I wanted to know very much what would happen, too.

I believe that the dearth of accurate representations of Asian-Americans in the media and in the arts has led to a misrepresentation of Asian-Americans. Very often Asian Americans are perceived as highly competent, hardworking and non-belligerent—that being the “positive” image, or they are represented as devious, inscrutable and megalomaniacal. Whichever way it is done, these images do not fully represent the Asian Americans I know. If an Asian American or anyone for that matter is not given a voice and language with clear expression and evidence of feeling, his humanity is denied. What separates us as humans from machines or animals is our ability to feel, to express, to wonder, to yearn, to regret... I believe that the absence of accurate reflections is effectively a kind of social erasure with grave psychological consequences. The difficulty, however, is in discussing that which is not seen. In my attempt at the community novel, I wanted very much to reveal the complicated individuals who make up the Korean-Americans I know. As a writer, I wanted to place the same demands on my non-Korean-American characters as well.

Forgive me for stating what may be to many of you the obvious: A Korean-American man can be romantic, passionate, loving, funny, and he can be troubled, sad and frustrated. He can be all those things and so much more. A Korean-American woman can have existential questions about her world. He can be afraid. She can be heartbroken. It was extremely important to me that the Korean-American men and women I know and love in my life were given a fair shake in terms of their complexity. I have known Korean men who listen to opera, write poems, worry about losing their hair and would give every cent in their pockets to their friends. I have seen Korean women ruin their lives through too much sacrifice or self-sabotage. I wanted men and women like that in my story. It is an ever-present concern for me that in our collective wish to succeed and assimilate, we, as Korean Americans, will not make trouble or not say what we think or feel. That silence or deferral until the time is safe permits others to interpret our characters and lives for us. I cannot speak accurately for all Korean-Americans. This book is clearly one person's limited point of view. Nevertheless, I love being Korean-American, and I love my family, my communities and my history. This love was a kind of filter and a kind of bias. I wanted to honor what I know by telling it as truthfully as possible—with all its flaws and with all its beauty. My goals for this novel were embarrassingly lofty, but at the minimum, I wanted the characters to be imperfect and to be gifted, too, because I believe that is how we are all made.

Lastly, but I think, for me as a fiction writer, most importantly: I want to share with you that for all of my life, for as long as I can remember, I have loved to read. A writer is always a reader first. Throughout my life, what has consistently given me great consolation was being able to read. When I studied how to write fiction better, my models were always the books I wanted to read again and again.

I hope this book pleases you. Thank you for reading this. It means a great deal to me to have your attention and time.

M.J.L.

Tokyo, Japan 2007