APRIL 25, 2014
LETTER FROM THE ARCHIVE: CHANG-RAE LEE
When the Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee was a child, he was particularly interested in the works of Sigmund Freud. As he told the Times recently, he read Freud’s case studies eagerly, absorbing the tales of his famous patients as if they were descriptions of characters in a story. This may explain Lee’s natural affinity for characters trapped by behaviors and conditions they cannot control. Lee, who first began contributing stories to The New Yorker in 1995, was included in the magazine’s 20 Under 40 fiction list in 1999, for his short story “The Volunteers,” about the experiences of Korean comfort women during the Second World War. The story was excerpted from Lee’s second novel, “A Gesture Life,” which eventually went on to receive the Asian American Literary Award.
In 2004, the magazine published “Daisy,” an excerpt from Lee’s third novel, “Aloft.” The story, which expertly skewers the tales of American suburbia that proliferated during the late sixties and seventies, centers on a hapless Italian-American businessman, Jerry, and his Korean wife, Daisy, who live in the suburbs of Long Island. It’s a portrait of suburban malaise with a twist: while the story is told from Jerry’s limited perspective, his wife quickly emerges as the more compelling and haunted character. Living far away from her family, and increasingly reliant upon her unsympathetic husband, Daisy begins to experience a kind of mania. As the story progresses, her emotional state becomes more and more unstable:
Did the time mark a strange kind of renaissance for her? I really don’t know. What’s clear to me is that Daisy pretty much exploded with life, and our life exploded right along with her. Up to then, my basic conception of crazy was the one I’d held since youth: the picture of a raven-haired Irish girl named Clara who climbed the trees in her pleated Catholic-school skirt not wearing underwear and lobbed Emily Dickinson down to me in a wraithlike voice (“I cannot live with You— It would be Life—and Life is over there—Behind the Shelf”), my trousers clingy with fear and arousal.With Daisy, neither I nor anyone else, not even Dr. Derricone, knew the extent of her troubles, the ornate reach and complication. Those initial shopping sprees would in the end seem like the smallest indiscretions—filched candy from the drugstore, a lingering ass pat at a neighborhood cocktail party—nothing you couldn’t slough off with a laugh, nothing you couldn’t later recall with some wistful fondness.
Daisy’s mind is a mystery to her husband, but that’s precisely the point. The self-involved Jerry has neither the curiosity nor the patience to discover what ails his wife. Lee, who resides in New Jersey with his family, once remarked that the suburbs can be an awful environment for isolated immigrants. In “Daisy,” he shows us a character who is ultimately more isolated by her marriage than by her environment.
The entire story is available in our online archive. If you’d like to read more by Chang-rae Lee, please take a look at “The Volunteers,” and his 1995 Family Life piece, “Coming Home Again,” on cooking Korean dishes for his mother. You can also check out this Fiction Q. & A. with Lee, from earlier this year.
Photograph by Pascal Saez/Writer Pictures/AP.
