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

Don’t sanctuaries become prisons, and vice versa, foremost in the mind?

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

I wanted to present a sweep and scope of larger events, and a grander backdrop, but most important was to set against that a very singular, real and modest people struggling with every day and human struggles.

For at some point, each of us will be asked to embody what we feel and know.

The past, as you suggest, is absolutely present at all times and the present is born from the past. I wouldn't want to suggest that the past determines the present.

I want the flashbacks to feel that once you're there they have their own unity, their own kind of atmospheric sensibility; I want the reader to be transported. The novel is a big, complicated, unknowable thing before it's written.