Janice Y.K. Lee
Three years after publishing “The Piano Teacher,” a wildly successful World War II-era love story set in Hong Kong, Janice Y.K. Lee is hard at work on her second novel. The locally-born Korean writer talks to Hana R. Alberts about returning to her hometown and the challenge of creating fiction.
In the 70s and 80s, I grew up in Pok Fu Lam. Cyberport did not exist. It was magical It’s not what you think about when you think about Hong Kong.
As kids, after school we’d fling off our backpacks, go downstairs, walk through a farm—there were ponds, there were vegetables growing, there was someone who sold eggs—and we’d walk down to this rocky beach.
Hong Kong has such duality. But I’ve always had a very idyllic sense of it. My experience was that it wasn’t a city at all.
It’s a big question these days—who gets an ID card, who gets a passport. But the Indians, the Koreans, everyone who has been born and raised here feels very much like a local although we’re not Chinese.
I went to boarding school when I was 15. I went to New Hampshire, and it was awfully cold. I didn’t even own a winter coat.
Everyone thought I was from California, because I had this accent from the American school. But I had very few cultural touchstones. I didn’t know a lot of TV shows. I stayed in the States for a while—high school, college and then work after.
