Mirinae Lee: On Writing Literature in a Foreign Language

Mirinae Lee was born and raised in South Korea, and now lives in Hong Kong. Her first work of fiction appeared in the Antioch Review and was listed as Notable Nonrequired Reading of 2018 in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019.

Her second short story won the 2018 Editors' Prize in Fiction and appeared in Meridian. 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is her debut novel.

In this post, Mirinae shares the inspiration for her debut novel and why she decided to switch languages during the drafting process.

Name: Mirinae Lee
Literary agent: Nicki Richesin from Dunow, Carlson & Lerner
Book title: 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins (US), Virago/Hachette (UK)
Release date: June 13, 2023 (US), and May 4, 2023 (UK)
Genre/category: Literary Fiction, Cross-Genre Fiction, Historical Fiction
Elevator pitch for the book: 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster is a shape-shifting life story of Trickster, a mysterious female protagonist who claims to have been a slave, an escape artist, a murderer, a terrorist, a spy, a lover, and a mother, to survive the turbulent course of the 20th century Korea, from the Japanese colonization to the Pacific War, the Korean War to the Cold War

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The seed of 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster was my great-aunt, one of the oldest women to escape alone from North Korea. She had lived through the most tragic, dramatic period of modern Korean history.

When I decided to write a book about her, however, she wasn’t able to tell me a coherent story of her life due to her Alzheimer’s disease which was rapidly progressing. Thus, in the end, the novel became a mix of my own wild imagination and my research on relevant historical contexts.

And yet, some of the memorable characteristics of Trickster came from those of my late great-aunt. She was so far removed from most Korean women of her generation, and she had both avid fans and disgruntled haters around her. Like Trickster, she was an ingenious and devious storyteller, a polyglot, and she claimed to be a lover of horse riding.

It was more than a decade ago when I first had the idea that I might one day write a book inspired by the unique life journey of my great-aunt. For a long time, however, the idea had remained a vague wish I had dabbled with on and off.

It was around 2017 when I began to write seriously, several hours each day, and the opening chapter of the novel, Virgin Ghost on the North Korean Border, came into being. Initially, I wrote the piece as a short story, but with time I realized that I could build a novel in stories around the mysterious female protagonist “Virgin Ghost,” whom I began to picture as an imaginary version of my great-aunt.

The ideas and the details of other stand-alone chapters had come to me little by little as I continued to write about her for four years. I finished the novel in early 2021 and a few months later in the same year I began to sign with publishers in the US, the UK, Italy, Spain, and so on.

As a foreigner and as a novice writer, I had no idea that the publication of a book was such a long process in the US. Like many people who weren’t literary professionals, I simply assumed that I would see my book in bookstores several months after I signed with a publisher. Well, I was quite ignorant!

Now I’ve learned that publication is a work that involves many different professionals in various stages from acquisition to editing, marketing to promotion. Furthermore, I signed with most of my publishers back in 2021, in the midst of the pandemic that had greatly affected the industry and its supply chains, and this peculiar situation added an extra delay in the publication of my novel.

The overall process has been educational, and it especially taught me a great deal about patience.

The biggest change the novel had gone through was in fact its language: I began writing it in Korean, but I switched to and finished it in English. The change was simply a practical choice. I have been living in Hong Kong and all the literary and creative writing programs I could join were taught in English.

At first, I had a doubt that I could complete a literary novel in English, a foreign language that I began to learn and use as an academic language only after I became an adult. I’m Korean, born and raised in Seoul, and before I moved to the US for my undergrad studies, I had never attended English-speaking schools.

For a long time, I had believed that writing literature in a foreign language, to which you had no extensive exposure as a child, was next to impossible. I had not imagined that I would one day prove my own thought wrong. It was a nice surprise.

Regardless of whether readers will like my novel or not, I hope they can have an experience of engrossment while reading it. We are now living in a society in which concentrating on one thing for an extensive amount of time gets more and more difficult. People are used to the incessant pings from their smartphones, exposed to the bombardment of one fleeting stimulus after another.

So I wish my readers can have an unusual experience with 8 Lives of a Century-Old Trickster: to immerse themselves thoroughly in the character of Trickster and to dwell in her dark and spellbinding world that is culturally, ethically, geographically, and temporally far removed from theirs.

Victor Hugo said a writer is a world trapped in a person. If my readers can feel as though they are being transported to a different world as long as the story lasts, the world that had been trapped inside my little skull for so long, I’ll be a very lucky and happy writer.

I remember seeing Bo Burnham on a talk show when he was asked to give inspirational advice to aspiring comedians. “You gotta just take a deep breath,” he said, “And give up.”

I found myself caught off-guard, laughing a lot. He went on to say that the system is rigged against you, your hard work and talent will not pay off, and luck plays a much bigger role in success than you think. I think this comically ruthless piece of advice can help you face the uncomfortable truth that your efforts to be a successful writer might not become fruitful.

Ironically, however, accepting this harsh reality can make you realize whether you are truly motivated or not. When a journalist asked Stephen King what had made him want to be a writer, he answered: “What makes you think that I have a choice?”

If you, despite the grim probability, still want to keep writing stories, not because you dream of success but because you just can’t help it, because that’s what you really want to do, then you’d better stick to it. Success wouldn’t hurt, of course not, but it shouldn’t be your main goal as a writer.

I think keeping in mind these acerbic words of Bo Burnham can rightfully test your determination, kill all the background noises, and thus can help you focus on your writing better.

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