Korea Tour: Telling the Grayness with Krys Lee

In Seoul's Seodaemun-gu, Colin talks with Krys Lee, author of the story collection Drifting House. They discuss the impression of Korean life as a living hell; the way she prefers to mix the light and the dark; the "obsession with violence" that led her to write about a woman who longs to be beaten; "Koreanness" as Drifting House's accidental unifier; what brought her to identify with "the outsider"; her suspicions of "socialization in general"; why she thinks about what it would be like if one person simply told another, "I wish I were a raccoon"; whether one can keep a foot in reality and a foot "somewhere else" through solitude; the surprising presence in Korea of "ideas, strangeness," "girls who wear dog collars," and at least one person with a pet squirrel; her problem with genre boundaries; what makes her focus on "individuals both of and not of their culture"; her own pathway from Korea, then around the world and back to Korea again; the importance, in her time in the United Kingdom, of meeting not just other Koreans but artists; how she came to write about Korea's IMF period, one instance of her writing "driven by anger"; education as, at least theoretically, Korea's "grand equalizer"; why some Korean families who go to America pretend they aren't in America, and what Korean disasters observed from afar might make them feel; how she thinks about "getting it right" with North Korean characters; what surprises Koreans who leave and come back; the condition of the stranger in Korean culture; why some readers thought Drifting House must have had a "really good translator"; and whether a writer can use the western fascination with North Korea to pull them deeper into a real story, one that tells the "grayness."