Writer Min Jin Lee is having a moment. Culturally speaking, that conclusion is the ultimate two-edged sword for any artist. Is she being embraced purely for her work, or is there something more crass beneath the discussion? Her 2017 novel Pachinko, embraced at the time for carefully balancing the lives of four Korean generations as they struggle and eventually prosper in Japan, is the basis of the currently streaming (since March 25th) Apple TV + series created by Soo Hugh and starring (among others) Young Yuh-jung, Lee Min-ho, and Jin Ha.
The problem with the zeitgeist, a German philosophical term from the 18th and 19th century meant to represent the defining spirit of a mood or time, is that by obsessively considering just the flavor of the moment, we dismiss the importance of the past. In fact, it can be argued that many consumers of culture would rather compulsively move on to the next big thing after their appetite for the latest writer’s work has been satiated. Lee speaks to this with the opening line of Pachinko (“History has failed us”) and explains it in a February 2022 New Yorker interview:
“…I was arguing that the discipline of history…has failed poor people and people who don’t have a voice.”
In other words. Lee most likely knows all too well that it’s not enough just to collect a following of readers, be embraced by Book Clubs, and sell more copies. She’s using her moment to teach, illuminate, and perhaps suggest that while the immigrants must assimilate into their new world, those of us welcoming them are obligated to assimilate the mistakes of our past so that they don’t happen again.
To capture the zeitgeist, become a strand in the fabric of mainstream cultural conversation, great literature speaking specifically to the immigrant experiences of its characters culture and ethnicity needs to be assimilated into something bigger when transferred to the screen (small or big.) The family in Pachinko were immigrants from Korea creating new lives in Japan. Soo Hugh, writer and showrunner of the Apple + TV adaptation, explained during NPR’s March 29 episode of It’s Been a Minute the ways Lee’s novel could be easily adapted for any immigrant experience:
“I feel I had amazing experiences in this country,” Hugh says. “But at the same time the immigrant experience all the world over is a horror story…to leave your homeland [for] a country that is not yours…a country and a language that you have no comprehension of- that’s a horror story.”
The inherent difficulty that comes from choosing to tell the 20th century story of the immigrant life in a foreign land can be seen from that very choice of article. Is this the life of these people, or is it simply a series of lives, a carefully calibrated sample of equal representations, a sanitized and equally balanced example of demographics within a population whose end result is always the perfect mix of entertainment and accurate history? What do we want from our historical literary novels? When the usual immigrant story involves those finding their places within the complicated and evolving fabric of the United States, the narratives are comfortably familiar. When these narratives involve strangers in a strange land, neither of which might be familiar to us, the task of creating and sustaining a compelling epic about the process of assimilation can be even more difficult.
For those who understandably prefer to lose themselves in the novel rather than binge watch another prestige TV series, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko is a remarkably textured, assured, and confident take of Korean immigrants living in Japan from 1910 through modern times. The effects of poverty, institutionalized racism, domestic abuse, suicide, and the sometimes alarming accumulation of wealth are illuminated through the story of twenty-eight year old Hoonie, “born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot.” He enters into an arranged marriage with fifteen year old Yangjin, and they bond over a mutual, undying love for their daughter Sunja. By the time she is thirteen, Sunja’s father dies of tuberculosis and life is all about trying to cope, she and her mother in a rooming house with colorful characters and charm to spare.
Lee manages to balance this richly textured tale of Sunja and the family she creates as a grown woman with the regular scenes of poverty, disrespect, and inhumane conditions in which they Koreans are kept while in Japan during WWII and through to the end. Lee’s clear-headed style and control over this story reflects the mindset of her characters. It is their mission to live, raise their families, and maintain a sense of dignity in spite of the obstacles. Once they are able to see that survival is theirs for the taking, they will work on human rights issues.
It is not lost on the reader that while the pool hall parlor game Pachinko is the family business, it can also be seen as a metaphor for the lives of the characters themselves. Pachinko is a mechanical Japanese game that dates back to the 1920’s and is comparable to a low-risk western slot machine. They will be shot out into the world at birth, and they will bounced against one side of the game and hit another. There are bumpers, hidden corners, angles where it seems they’ll get stuck (but won’t) but there will be no escaping the fate that sends them plunging to a definite conclusion based on race, economics, and a variety of other factors. This was probably the best structure in which to place these characters.
Any novelist whose mission is to sweep through nearly a century in the lives and times of a family understands that the big picture narrative comes with risks. If the story comes without attention to detail and subtle precious moments and instead serves only as repeated picture postcard tours through a large museum where we are directed to look at the artifacts and not touch, the novelist and the mission of the book fails. Pachinko is a beautiful, haunting, at times stunning epic that earns our attention on every page. It’s compulsively readable. Lee respects her characters and she understands we need to feel the same way. By carefully illustrating their lives through a meticulous tapestry of scenes and images that when combined are staggering in their ability to draw on our empathy, Min Jin Lee has created in Pachinko a novel whose importance, beauty, and power to speak on the universal human condition will not soon be forgotten.
The question of fair and equitable representation in the arts will always be a shaky one, dependent on so many factors. Lee eloquently expressed her hunger for “other voices, other rooms” (as Truman Capote named one of his books) about her comprehensive autodidact curriculum of Dreiser, Shakespeare, Frederick Douglass, and countless others. Imagine this young Korean girl, coming to the United States in 1976, at the age of seven. “During Douglass’s lifetime,” she writes, “most girls in Korea were not allowed to read.”
Great readers certainly make great writers. They also make for concerned and conscientious citizens, willing and ready to cede the zeitgeist spotlight once they’ve determined the future is bright for the next generation.
SAMPAN, published by the nonprofit Asian American Civic Association, is the only bilingual Chinese-English newspaper in New England, acting as a bridge between Asian American community organizations and individuals in the Greater Boston area. It is published biweekly and distributed free-of-charge throughout metro Boston; it is also delivered to as far away as Hawaii.
