- Used Book in Good Condition.
Amazon Exclusive: Chang-Rae Lee on The Surrendered
Chang-Rae LeeThe inspiration for The Surrendered has its roots
in a project I worked on more than twenty years ago, while I was
still in college. I was taking a seminar on modern Korean
history, and I decided that I would conduct an interview with my
her to fulfill the writing assignment, conceiving a
reporter-at-large-type piece that would offer personal testimony
and narrative set against a historical backdrop. I wasn't sure if
he would agree. My her was twelve years old on the eve of the
Korean War, and although over the years I had asked him a number
of times about his experiences, his responses were typically
vague and hurried; he never seemed to want to talk about that
time, only briefly mentioning that his sister had died during the
war from an untreated bout of pneumonia. But since I was taking a
course with a special focus on Korea, he agreed to speak in more
detail about that period.
My her's family was originally from Pyongyang, now the
capital of North Korea, and they had joined the throngs of
refugees who were heading south in an attempt to get behind the
line of American forces. He first recounted a story about his
favorite older cousin, who was pregnant and just about to give
birth as the rest of the extended family was frantically packing
up and leaving. My her was dispatched to tell his cousin that
everyone was departing—explosions could be heard in the
distance—yet even though she and her husband desperately wanted
to go, she had already started her labors. She couldn’t be moved.
Everybody soon left, and that was last time the cousin and her
husband were seen alive; to this day no one knows what happened
to them, whether they perished or survived the war and ended up
living in North Korea.
Telling that story of his cousin seemed to break the grip of
something on my her. He recounted again that his sister had
died of pneumonia during the refugee march, then added, casually,
that in fact his younger brother had died during their travels,
too. This disclosure surprised me. I knew that he had lost a
brother, this from asking him, as children often will, about how
many siblings he had, matching the number against my uncles and
aunts, but I remembered his saying that his brother had died in a
"subway accident." I didn't think there was a subway in either
Pyongyang or Seoul during his childhood, so I asked him when his
brother had died, and how.
My her told me that in fact his brother had been killed not
by a subway car but by a boxcar of a train full of refugees. They
were among the hundreds who filled the cars. The car holding the
rest of their family was packed tight, so he and his brother had
to on top of the boxcar. In the middle of the night the
train halted violently, and his brother, who was eight years old,
fell off, the train then lurching forward for a short distance.
My her jumped down and went back and found his brother, whose
leg had been amputated by the wheels of the train. My her
carried him back to the car, to the rest of their family, as the
blood—and his life—ran out of him.
I've been haunted by that story since I heard it, not only by
the horror of the accident but also by the picture of my her
as a boy, a boy who had to experience his brother's death so
directly and egregiously. I was struck, too, by how unperturbed
my her had always seemed to me, this cheerful, optimistic man
who certainly didn't appear to be haunted by anything. But of
course this was not quite true. The events of the war had stayed
with him, and always would.
In recent years I began to consider writing a novel about that
time, and what happened to my her and his brother kept coming
back to me. I finally decided to try to write that scene,
wondering whether a larger story might be instituted. Naturally
the details changed quite drastically as I began to write, the
story expanding in every direction, developing its own world and
s, and soon enough it was not my her's story at all. But
the kernel of what had happened grew to become the first chapter
of The Surrendered, which for me is not so much a war novel as it
is a story concerned with the effects of mass conflict on the
human psyche and spirit, the private odysseys that those who have
experienced conflict must endure.
(Photo of Chang-Rae Lee © David Burnett)
