March 23, 2015
Starting with his first novel, “Native Speaker,” the Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee has written of immigrant experiences in the United States. His latest novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” centers on a Chinese woman named Fan who is a laborer in a city called B-Mor, a future version of Baltimore. The novel is a dystopian tale, set in an era when nations around the world are suffering from overwhelming environmental degradation. Fan is one of tens of thousands of Chinese from smog-choked Shanxi Province who have taken jobs as food production workers in B-Mor to escape their toxic homeland.
Mr. Lee, who also teaches creative writing at Princeton University, was in Beijing for the annual Bookworm Literary Festival, which runs to March 29. Last Sunday, I hosted a conversation with him that included questions from an audience at the Bookworm. Following are lightly edited excerpts, transcribed by Becky Davis:
A pesticide factory in Shanxi Province where a chemical spill severely polluted nearby waterways in 2013. Mr. Lee’s protagonists have fled environmental degradation in pesticide factory in Shanxi Province where a chemical spill severely polluted nearby waterways in 2013. Mr. Lee’s protagonists have fled environmental degradation in Shanxi.
Q. Earlier today, I was at the Chinese prime minister’s press conference. He said China hadn’t done enough on pollution and that he really needs to push forward in the war against pollution. In your latest novel, “On Such a Full Sea,” the future that you envision is one in which China loses the war on pollution. Can you tell us why you see this being the future of the world?
A. It’s not just China — it’s really everyone, in the book.
The book is set some vague number of years ahead, 150 to 200 years, I’m not that specific about it. But I am very specific about the kinds of implications for the people of the society, which is that they all suffer from a certain kind of inevitable disease, which they call “sea,” which is something that’s sort of lurking out there mysteriously. They can’t really address it. And obviously that comes from the violation of the environment.
They’re always talking about being careful about the things that you eat, the water that you drink. One of the conceits of the book is that there is a production facility called B-Mor in the former Baltimore, and this production facility is a facility that provides pristine fishes and vegetables for an elite class of people. And the very fact of its existence is that everything outside is too poisoned and too ruined to trust.
I don’t get into the environmental issues very much. There’s some guy who kept writing me every week after the book came out and said, can you just come out and say that this is a “Cli-Fi” novel? I don’t know, he must have had a trademark [on the term] or something. There’s climate anxiety [in the novel], but it’s not that geeky about it. It’s almost a psychic condition, of feeling beleaguered.
Today, we were just walking around. I bought my first mask here, which I kind of liked. But then I noticed that the mask itself smelled sort of chemically. So I was thinking, maybe the mask is actually worse for you than the air.
Q. You were originally going to write a novel about China but then you took the train past Baltimore, and decided to set it there. In your original conception of the novel, why did you want to set a book in China? You came to China on one or two trips to do some research — could you tell us about that?
A. My original idea was to write a kind of social fabric novel about Chinese factory workers. So in about 2011 or so, I went to Shenzhen. My sister lives in Hong Kong, so it was an easy trip. I sort of finagled my way into a factory. It was a really fascinating visit for me. I hadn’t been to a factory and had all these preconceptions about what I would see. It actually wasn’t so horrible. I don’t know if people have gone to that area — that’s where you know all the factories are, you know. They’re not really factories so much as they are settlements. And this particular settlement, this factory that I went to was a facility that produced tiny electrical motors, the kind that drive a DVD tray or a side-view mirror. So it wasn’t a big, huge industrial complex. It was really more like a campus, but a really grubby one — kind of rundown. There was nothing aesthetically pleasing about it.
