Chang-Rae Lee

The West of 2026 is exactly that, a region composed of many competing, overlapping voices.

If you look at the margins of the site, you see a review for a book called A Tender Age by Chang-Rae Lee.

The site explicitly notes this is a portrait of Korean American suburbia.

Right.

I'm like, eh, wait a minute.

Chang-Rae Lee says he's never going to write in the collective we, the person plural ever again.

I also said I'm never going to

write the campus novel, and now I'm back to

It's astonishing how these experiences inscribe something permanent on your soul.

Chang-Rae Lee's novel follows the tumultuous months before a boy turns 11 and finds himself at a summer camp where he experiments with different ways to be seen in his suddenly widened world.

As you listen to the conversation.

Think about that first summer camp experience, and you know what? Drop me an email about how it changed you.

And so she was, you know, in Korean and in Korea, she had a completely different stature than she did as an immigrant mother in suburban New York City, in this kind of rundown suburb where no one knew her and she couldn't speak to anyone else.

I'm Carrie Miller.

You're listening to Big Books and Bold Ideas, a podcast and show where readers meet writers, and I'm in conversation with Chang-Rae Lee.

We're talking about his new novel, A Tender Age, and you can hear our conversation developing out of some of his experiences as a child and watching his parents.

Would you have, if somebody was wanting to get into that after they'd read Soju Club, obviously, would you have a recommendation for a good place to start or a particular author or a particular book?

I would say Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker.

That would be a big one.

This book is about a Korean-American man who is tasked with being tasked with spying on a Korean-American politician who is running as a mayoral candidate.

I'm Andrew Limbong.

Before his newest, the last Chang-Rae Lee novel I read was On Such a Full Sea.

It's a dystopian sci-fi novel that I remember feeling huge in its scope and all the things it was trying to say.

So it was a surprise to me when I started reading his new book, At Tender Age, that I found it was quieter, uh, more grounded.

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Author Chang-Rae Lee has written award-winning novels about many things, corporate espionage, World War II, a global pandemic.

But he's drawn some criticism, or at least notice, for not writing about something close to his own life, growing up as an Asian immigrant child.

... like at the movies, sometimes the critics come around and, and, and bestow some things.

So A Tender Age by Chang-Rae Lee.

It sounds like, uh, I, I looked, I picked this up the other day, and it's a coming-of-age story, a prepubescent child, so not...

I guess coming of age is more puberty plus, right? This is a young person-

... 'cause I am pretty averse to child narrators, and I was not-

Yes

... gonna, like, I like Chang-Rae Lee, but I was going to pass on this one just 'cause, like, that does not usually work for me.

But if we're in a, we have an adult narrator reflecting on childhood, I can get in there, so this is on my list now.