7. A Case For Reading More True Fiction

On Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Hi all,

Welcome (back) to Ideas Over Drinks!

I hope this message finds you rested and ready for the new year. I was fortunate enough to spend Christmas with my mother-in-law, who not only has deep reserves of patience for our superhero children (superheroes can be intense), but also gave both of them piano lessons almost every single day she was here. They dropped some jams. Someday, maybe after we get the tyrant out of the White House who likes to incite white supremacist mobs, I’ll try to give you an audio sample.

Anyway, for this newsletter, I want to share some thoughts with you about a book I just finished reading, one that absolutely rocked my world: Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.  

Pachinko is a multigenerational epic. It tells the story of a Korean family that moves to Japan, beginning in 1910 in Busan and going all the way through to Tokyo in 1989. The narrative begins with young Hoonie and his unnamed parents, who run a boarding house in the fishing village of Yeongdo. Below is an excerpt from page 2: 

Like his parents, Hoonie was not a nimble talker, and some made the mistake of thinking that because he could not speak quickly there was something wrong with his mind, but that was not true. 

In 1910, when Hoonie was twenty-seven years old, Japan annexed Korea. The fisherman and his wife, thrifty and hardy peasants, refused to be distracted by country’s incompetent aristocrats and corrupt rulers, who had lost their nation to thieves. When the rent for their house was raised again, the couple moved out of their bedroom and slept in the anteroom near the kitchen to increase the number of lodgers. 

- Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

Notice the point of view. The narrator is omniscient, floating above the lives of her characters, zooming in and out as she sees fit. In the span of a few sentences, she brings us from a description of Hoonie and his parents, to the minds of people who judged them because of how they spoke, then outward to the historical fact of Japan’s annexation of Korea, before swooping back down into what the parents had to do as a result of their rent being raised. 

Also notice the tone. The fisherman and his wife “refused to be distracted by the country’s incompetent aristocrats and corrupt rulers, who had lost their nation to thieves” (emphasis mine). With this straightforward verbiage, and in describing the country’s leaders as “incompetent aristocrats” and the Japanese colonizers as “thieves,” Lee paints a picture of a couple with unfettered determination, two people doing what they had to do in the face of a harsh and unfair world. There is so much power in this craft, and it’s an example of why I think a well-written work of fiction often contains more truth than any other form of writing.  

And now, if you will, please permit me to step even deeper into my former life as a composition instructor. I’m pretty sure it won’t hurt either of us too much.

Just pretend I’m Grover.

Everything you might read—from social media posts to the Bible—has a point of view. Unless it is co-authored, a piece of writing is the act of a single mind taking words and organizing them into a meaningful structure. That structure is then interpreted differently by everyone who reads it. The writer tells a story, but the reader brings the truth to it. The reader decides how much they want to believe the writer’s words.

While I see power in the craft of writers (said the guy who has identified as a writer nearly his entire life :), I also think a lot about this tremendous truth-making power of readers. To a degree, this truth-making depends on how well the writer renders the story: how effectively they utilize style, research, and the numerous other tools in their rhetorical toolkit. But it’s also influenced by genre. And there’s a potential problem with this. 

Genre—what a piece of writing gets called, what category it gets put into, and what traditional rules it’s supposed to adhere to as a result—is a construction. It’s part of how something is sold to you. Writing can be labeled as nonfiction, but like I said before, it’s still an invention of an author. 

Some of my friends and family members tell me they prefer to read nonfiction over fiction. If you too, Dear Reader, fall into this camp, well, part of me wants to say, hey, that’s cool, do your thing. But another part of me desperately wants you to read more fiction. (And poetry!) I want to press Pachinko into your busy hands and tell you that you have to read this book, because it’s beautiful and sad and jarring, and because it taught me more about the complicated history between Korea and Japan than any history textbook or Wikipedia post ever could.

In the postscript to Pachinko, Lee, when asked about why she chose to use an omniscient point of view in composing the book, says that she is interested in the minor characters of history as well as the major ones: 

If history so often fails to represent us, it is not because historians are not interested, but because historians often lack the primary documents of so-called minor characters in history. Interestingly, women have become at best the minor characters in history—although we represent half the human race—because we have left so few primary documents in nearly all cultures and civilizations.  

- Min Jin Lee

Lee goes on to state that many poor and middle-class men of all races and cultures have also been rendered as minor characters throughout history because they didn’t—and often couldn’t—leave significant written evidence of their lives. Her ideas about how she researches the stories of people who have been marginalized, which she expands upon in this talk at the Literary Arts conference in Portland, make a compelling case for why the work of novelists is so important in our distraction-filled world.   

I could go on. (I could always go on!) For now, I’ll just say this: I hope you’ll read Lee’s book, if you haven’t already done so. And I hope you’ll share about other fantastic books you’ve been reading. Please consider leaving a comment below, even if it’s just to drop a recommendation of a book you think is worth reading. (Again, I’ve changed the settings on the website so that everyone who’s signed up can comment.) Big bonus points—sorry, the teacher in me is coming out a lot in this post!—if you can share about how to move from ideas and reading into action, to ensure that people aren’t just reading about the minor characters and untold stories from history, they’re also engaging with them and making positive changes in the world. 

Along related lines, a quick reminder that in January, Ideas Over Drinks will be contributing to Radical Xchange, which is working with Another Round Another Rally to provide mental health relief to Black hospitality workers in need. How it works: if you spend $5 for a monthly subscription to Ideas Over Drinks, you get 4 newsletters a month instead of 2. Then, after Substack takes a 10% cut and the payment service takes their 10%, we donate 20% of the remainder to a monthly organization that aligns with our family’s values of education, racial & gender equity, and hospitality. If this is something you want to try out, and/or if we’re featuring a particular organization whose mission resonates with you, you can always subscribe for a month and then decide after that if you want to keep the extra content coming. 

As always, thanks so much for reading. I know your time is valuable, and that you have a lot of information coming at you, so it means a lot to me that you’ve spent these past 5 minutes or so with me. Later this month, as we get into the more drinks-focused newsletters, I’ll be breaking down some spirit-based beverages and some NA ones as well. For a lot of people, January represents a time to detox and reset. I sometimes prefer to go “sober in October,” which my wife came up with years ago, and which I like mainly because I really like rhymes. 

Lola, EJ, and some words to live by. If only Donald Trump had played with a piano instead of a toy gun as a kid.

Wherever you’re at, I hope you’re well and safe. I’ll catch you next time.

Cheers,

J.