In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Lisa Lee’s Book Notes novel American Han is one of the year’s most moving and smartest debuts.
Kirkus wrote of the book:
“Lee’s heartrending debut . . . captures the culture of the Korean diaspora both with small details—a jar of kimchi buried in the yard for more than 10 years, dug up only when the house is sold—and with broader brush strokes . . . Lee’s self-aware, relentlessly honest narrator feels absolutely real, and her story cuts deep.”
In her own words, here is Lisa Lee’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel American Han:
In my debut novel, I wanted to capture the feeling of han, a Korean concept and emotion. Borrowing from Elaine H. Kim, scholar of Asian American and Ethnic Studies, han is “the sorrow and anger that grow from repeated experiences of oppression.” While Koreans in Korea might argue that han is a thing of the past, no longer a defining feature of Korean identity, I wanted to explore how immigrants of my parents’ generation brought han with them to America and passed it down to their children, and here it became something new, a distinctly Korean American han, inflected by American racism and the pressures of assimilation.
The music that inspired me while writing my book almost all hails from the 1980s through the early 2000s, the time period in which my book takes place. Many of these tracks capture the feeling of my youth—melancholy, anger, defiance—which is partly the feeling of han and is the mood that dwells in my book. Of course, there’s also plenty of humor and playful energy in the lives of the Kim family. Some of these songs connect to their desire for freedom and change and their particular tendency toward absurdity. It is my great pleasure to share with you the music that soothed me and influenced me, that gave me the confidence to listen to my inner voice.
“Roads” by Portishead (1994)
Dummy is the album I listened to on repeat in college. I’d never heard a sound like it before, never heard of trip-hop, never heard such a beautiful, anguished voice. “Roads” is like a mirror of the melancholy and isolation and disillusionment that many of the characters in my book feel. Like the speaker in the song, there’s “a war to fight” within my narrator, Jane Kim, especially, as she tries to satisfy her family’s expectations and be true to herself, which makes her feel paralyzed by sorrow.
“Sexy Boy” by Air (1998)
This was my daughter’s favorite song a few years ago, when she was in kindergarten. In the car, she’d ask me to play it, and strapped in her car seat in the back, she’d sing in an eerie voice, “Sexy baaaaaaagel.” Her love for the song made me love it again too—the dreamy electronics, the androgynous vocals, and since I don’t understand French, the lyrics added mystery to the already seductive sound. Nicolas Godin has said that when he and Jean-Benoît Dunckel wrote the song, they were thinking about who they wanted to be. They weren’t handsome when they were younger, he explained. Kevin Kim, my narrator’s brother, has been made to feel by American culture that he’s not a man and will never fit the ideals of what a man should look like. So this longing to be beautiful and masculine and admired aligns with Kevin’s desire and his mood on a mellow day.
“Raspberry Beret” by Prince (1985)
The secondhand beret represents rebellion, anti-materialism, and a rejection of societal norms, all things boiling under Jane’s good girl veneer. This playful and psychedelic song—complete with string arrangements, finger cymbals, upbeat claps, and of course Prince’s signature high-pitched, ecstatic shrieks—captures the lightness of Jane’s youth. The sound is whimsical and carefree, evoking a nostalgia that isn’t super obvious in my book, but appears in the moments she spends with her best friend, Samir, who offers a counterpoint to all that han.
“Maps” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2003)
I have to include Yeah Yeah Yeahs because the band appeared in an early draft but was sadly cut (by me, not my editor). In the scene, Jane and Samir and some other friends attend a show at the Fillmore to see a new band that was starting to blow up and there was a long description of the Korean band member shrieking wildly, completely mesmerizing Jane. “Maps” is said to be about Karen O’s tumultuous relationship with her then-boyfriend, and while the romantic pining aspect doesn’t quite fit my book, the feeling of longing matches that of Jane and her parents each wanting to get back the lives they feel they never had a chance to live.
“Tramp” by Otis Redding and Carla Thomas (1967)
The playful exchange between Carla Thomas playing the part of a sophisticated city girl teasing Otis Redding as a country boy in overalls who has no money and needs a haircut makes me think of what Jane’s parents’ relationship might have been like when they started dating. Jane’s dad’s first job in America was as a gas station attendant, and her mom was being set up to marry a doctor, a man who would fit in line with her family of male doctors. I like to think about Jane’s mother as a young woman falling in love with Jane’s dad, who doesn’t meet her family’s class standards, but she’s drawn to his creative ambitions and his charisma and good looks.
“Cut Your Hair” by Pavement (1994)I enjoy the message of this song that mocks the pressure to conform to succeed. I always admired Pavement for their anti-industry sarcasm. Ironically, this song that criticizes the music industry’s obsession with image over talent became Pavement’s biggest hit. With its dark humor, “Cut Your Hair” echoes the pressure on my characters to assimilate. I’ve always loved the running joke surrounding it. The song ends: “Attention and fame’s a career / Career, career, career, career, career.” Fans were confused and thought Stephen Malkmus was shouting KOREA over and over. So he went with it and shouts KOREA when playing live.
“Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears (1985)
This song is conveying something about the corrupting influence of ambition and competition. This is very much the atmosphere in which the Kim family lives. It’s something that Jane feels from her peers at school, in her community, and within her own family. In communities like Napa in the 1980s, many people viewed their lives as a ceaseless contest for dominance and became isolated as a result. This song captures that feeling of isolation. The characters in my book try so hard to win and be on top, and even to just fit in, that they don’t notice how their ambition harms each other and themselves.
“6’1”” by Liz Phair (1993)
Exile in Guyville is my favorite album from high school. The nineties were a uniquely misogynistic time when Saturday Night Live aired supposedly hilarious parodies of figures including: Janet Reno, first woman to serve as U.S. attorney general (the joke was she looked like a man), Chelsea Clinton, teenaged daughter of President Bill Clinton (the joke was that she was ugly), and Pat, androgynous fictional character played by Julia Sweeney (funny because: man or woman?). It’s no wonder that I was drawn to Liz Phair’s message of self-empowerment and female agency. I admired her bold defiance, her gritty, tough girl sound. The bravado of this first track sets the tone for the whole record and is a call to young women to stand up for themselves, to stand tall even if they’re physically small. I imagine this energetic song as the soundtrack for Jane Kim as she builds the confidence to stand up to everyone trying to keep her down.
“Corporeal” by Broadcast (2005)
Such a perfect, dreamy song. I love the staticky electronic textures and the hypnotic bass line that weaves through like a pulse against Trish Keenan’s ethereal melody. For me, the song represents the anxiety of the 2000s, when our lives were increasingly mediated through digital technologies designed to manipulate us, categorize us, and offer us the illusion of choice. We were being presented with more options than ever before, but our choices were being made for us. The song is about getting back to the physicality of the body because pain, fear, pleasure, and desire are real. A retreat to the body is the last bastion of real experience in the face of digitally mediated personality. My novel is set in the early 2000s, the time when technology was beginning to take over our lives. This song expresses the fear of what’s to come.
“She’s Got Her Ticket” by Tracy Chapman (1988)
This is the song I imagine blasting on the radio at the end of the book as Jane drives away to move across the country. Her escape from an oppressive family and impossible societal expectations is bittersweet because while they’ve all survived their lives, she feels that her brother has been left behind. Still, I see her driving off into the sunset, feeling hopeful. I love the lines “her mind is made up” and “she knows where her ticket takes her,” as if Jane knows that she’s finally breaking free and on her way to finding her place in the world.
Lisa Lee is the recipient of the Marianne Russo Emerging Writer Award from the Key West Literary Seminar, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from the Center for Fiction, and a Pushcart Prize. She has received other fellowships and awards from Kundiman, Millay Arts, Hedgebrook, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Tin House, Jentel Artist Residency, and the Korea Foundation. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, VIDA, North American Review, Sycamore Review, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. Lee holds an MFA from the University of Houston and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles.