KL: The house is an image of terror and safety for me. I grew up in a very unsafe emotional and physical place; the return home was filled with fear because I never knew what to expect. When I saw my first enormous spider structure by Louise Bourgeois, I instantly recognized as my own that sense of living under an enormous, threatening shadow. The house is also an image of safety, longing and love for me as all my life, I’ve instinctually sought a stable ballast in what seemed to me a world fraught with danger. CZ: A theme of transience appears in many if not all the stories. That theme manifests itself as either an overlapping of the sentient world and ghost world in the title story Drifting House or the quick fluctuations of temperaments and fates in The Salaryman (i.e., the wife kisses the husband one minute, then nags him the next; sibling affection, then pushing and shoving; overarching life changes in the main character, the salaryman), or the back and forth between North Korea, South Korea, and Korean Diasporas. Is the theme of transience a reflection of your lifestyle, your identity politics, or your personal philosophies? What aspect of you, the writer compels this theme of transience? KL: I once told a friend that I felt myself fluid inside, and that if I were to be cut open I imagined a swirling change rather than constancy. It’s how I experience the world moment to moment shifting around me, whether it be feelings moving in a conversation, the surprising turns of a day, or a life, or the abrupt changes that occur when you leave one country for another. Perhaps it began even earlier, as I went to school by day and returned home to a troubled, unpredictable household. Death, and the knowledge of it, also casts transience on our entire lives, but it doesn’t mean I’m pessimistic. That transience is also what makes this fragile life, and our fragile moments of happiness, valuable before the final disruption occurs. CZ: A few of the stories raise the dual identity issue that Asian Americans are familiar with, i.e.., Yuri/Grace in A Temporary Marriage or Myeongseok Lee/Mark Lee in At the Edge of the World. Do you have a personal story to share on your experience of the dual identity?
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