For sometimes you can't help but crave some ruin in what you love.

There is secrecy and betrayal but that's more part and parcel of the kind of anguish that the people go through. And maybe that's modes of survival, rather than modes of consciousness.

I wanted to write about the Korean War, but I had no entry into it that made the kind of sense it needs to make for a novelist.

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

I'd always wanted to write something about the Korean War because of my heritage. My father lost his brother during the war, and I fictionalized that episode, which was told to me very briefly without much detail.

I'm more interested in the psychic intricacies that they build up and try to run away from, and how they self-construct. A lot of my work is about self-construction. Here, it's those folks who are deeply wounded and bewildered. They're not just victims of trauma; they've been shaken so forcefully that they don't quite know how or where to stand.

To be honest, Im not that much of a reader of Korean fiction, since so little is translated.