That is not bad going for someone who was strongly dissuaded from penmanship from a tender age.

Having migrated from Seoul to California when Lee was a toddler, her struggling parents did not value their offspring’s nascent literary talent. “I wrote poetry when I was young, but being good Korean-Americans, my parents quickly dissuaded me,” she said. “They wanted me to be a lawyer or professor.”

Her parents’ influence would not last. Both died before Lee had graduated from UCLA, where she was studying on a scholarship.

“I was there watching the last breath,” she said. “It was not a pretty picture.”

Yet with death came escape. “Death liberates you to make choices, and the early death of my parents liberated me,” she says now. “I grew up quickly. I was a 40-year-old 20-year-old.”

With nothing to tie her down, she spent two years in the United Kingdom, studying literature at York University. “I uprooted to the U.K. and left all influences,” she said. “I started over again in a vacuum; I could question all my assumptions.”

Then, like so many young Korean-Americans, she headed East.

“I came back to Korea to understand what was going on in my own family,” she said. Although she is American, her home is “Little Korea.”

And like so many young Korean-Americans, she found the real Korea lucrative. “I wanted to make money and not live precariously like my parents,” she said.

She taught literature, edited magazines, made investments and saved furiously ― “I was an absolute miser!” she admits. The resultant financial security enabled her to travel in Latin America, South Asia and Southeast Asia, but something gnawed at her.

“There was in impulse in me to write; the first book is the book you need to write,” she said. “I needed to write a book, it mattered to me, and hopefully to someone else.”

The impulse spawned a book grounded in Korea. “I am interested in Korean society, in class, history, emigration, feminism, womanhood, all that,” she said. It is difficult to imagine “Drifting House” being written about any other society, but Lee claims her themes are not Korea-centric. “The best writing is universal,” she says.

So how much of herself is in the work? “It is almost all fiction, but it is almost all about myself,” she mused. “The book is informed by my own experience, but is 97-98 percent fictional.”

She is clearer on the process of writing, a process that apparently released trapped emotional forces.

“Certain stories shocked me,” Lee said. “You are your own first reader. I cried; I was shocked. The characters took on a life of their own. You are more yourself on the page than in real life.”

She was not even sure if she would be published.

“I never thought I’d sell it because it’s a story collection; it does not have Harry Potter in it,” Lee said. “I thought if I did sell it, I could live a few months off it.” But while Lee was attending the Squaw Valley’s Writers’ Convention, the influential literary agent Susan Golomb spotted her manuscript and signed her on immediately.

A bidding war was ignited among eight of America’s top publishers. Penguin won. The book hit the shelves, reviewers swooned and Lee found herself a hot property.

With a decade in Seoul under her belt, she is currently translating best-selling author Kim Yong-ha’s new work, editing a literary magazine and putting the finishing touches on her follow-up to Drifting House. This project has promising, albeit tragic, potential. It is a novel set among North Korean refugees in China. Their world is one Lee knows well. She helped establish a safe house on the China border, and assisted one refugee escape to South Korea.

“I am obsessed by the idea of power and freedom, which is why I am so interested in defectors in China. That is the complete absence of power, while poverty is taking away their choices,” she says. “Freedom is choice, but for the majority of the world, it is a luxury.”

She hopes her book will differ from much of the current North Korean oeuvre.

“Many books have been written about North Korea that have been sensationalized,” she said. “I become furious as it is clear the writers do not see North Koreans as individuals, but if you know them as I have, they are.”

And while she makes no claim that her own escape from Korean-American suburbia to literary stardom is comparable to the nightmare passage of North Koreans suffer in China, the book’s themes chime eerily with her own experiences.

“It is a book about people trying to escape a country and start lives over again,” she says. “It is about obstacles, and about people who are supposed to help them standing in their way.”

(Yonhap News)