Obviously loss of family is huge and critical, but I think really it's more about losing a sense of family. The horror of that kind of incompleteness. Writing this book, I tried not to think about my father, which does no one any good fictionally. I did try to imagine not just the horror of that moment, but the horror of having witnessed it, and the lifelong void. And I think that's what's so frightening.

The truth, finally, is who can tell it.

My family immigrated when I was 3, and our predecessors inhabited the Korean Peninsula for as long as can be recalled.

By definition it uses and plays and delights in time. It delights in the interlacing of chronologies and the consequences of that interlacing. And those have personal and psychological expressions in a character. Aside from other issues of writing, psychological characterization is what narrative can do best.

I think the action is ninety-three percent, and the consideration is peppered throughout but pretty short... Once I start it, I feel as though I don't want to look over my shoulder too much. I want to trust the preparations I've made.

No place is perfect, but I admire Oahu for its offering of the tropical and the urban, and then its Asian-inflected culture and cuisines.

All of my books really do look at that to degrees of difference. Technically, I do enjoy the flashback! But not just for informational material.