About Min Jin Lee
Min Jin Lee is the author of Free Food for Millionaires (Grand Central Publishing 2007).
Min Jin Lee went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She then attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York before leaving to write full time.
She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her work has also been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and anthologized in TO BE REAL (Doubleday, 1995) and BREEDER (Seal Press, 2001). She lives in New York with her husband and son.
Her Website is http://minjinlee.com
Recent Posts
Min Jin Lee has made 1 posts
Previous Entries
- War is Over (if you want to believe it)
- 2666 and “Jupiter and Semele”
- Your Face Tomorrow: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marias
Recent Comments
The link to the project is available here:
http://www.thegoldennotebook.org
– Kirsten
on “The Institute for the Future of the Book announces a Public Conversation on....”
Go Bud! Thanks for this wonderful expression of your vote. I think your assessment of McCain’s foreign policy is too kind - if you read through this article in The New Yorker (current issue) you’ll hear what his old buddy and fellow Republican has to say about it: http://tinyurl.com/6e7k6o
I’m off to PA tomorrow to canvass and then round up voters on 11/4. Our votes have never been so critical to the future of the world…
– Paco
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
The number one thing schools can do to improve student learning is to focus on parent involvement. School leaders must start publishing not only math and reading scores but also percentage of parents attending meetings and participating in the classroom. They should spend money on workshops for those parents who have for generations been excluded from participating in a meaningful way. Schools are run on middle class values. People from poverty have no way of understanding those values unless we clearly communicate them.
–
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Both Republicans and Democrats know that a certain amount of taxation is necessary. The only difference is, they only think it’s fair when it pays for things they want.
People who are really into the Space Program want taxes to fund NASA. Almost everyone wants some taxes to fund the military. A lot of people want taxes to fund interstate highways, whether for vacation travel, to visit loved ones, or to move products from factories to distributors to stores. If you are the governor of a state that needs disaster relief, you want disaster relief, damn it, whether you are Democrat or Republican. Some people want tax money for schools because they believe, however corny it may sound, that children are our future. Some people want taxes to provide health care to more people because, in the long run, this makes a stronger America. That’s why we have polio and small pox vaccinations! Remember? If you are a millionaire living in a gated community, you have to go outside sometime. Do you want to catch polio because you said, “Let the peasants fend for themsleves?” If a kid is failing in school because of poor eyesight or an undetected illness, I would rather pay taxes to help the child become a productive member of society, rather than later when taxes are used to subsidize emergency care for the indigent, welfare, or even the criminal justice system and prison.
What are Republicans so afraid of?
– Bill Ectric
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
This, probably, is the most heartfelt personal account on American Elections in the wake of the financial crisis that I have read so far. I guess, like many others round the world, that you made the right choice.
I guess, there will be few with doubt that Bush not only failed as a President, but committed blunders, intentional or otherwise, which has changed the face of the world for the worse. If not for anything else, a non-republican victory is essential as no-one needs a President who will need to defend the decisions of Bush. McCain will, so let him out.
I am an Indian living in India and have been hoping Obama wins. As an Indian, that’s not an intelligent wish, for Obama and the Democrats in general have been against stuff like outsourcing which today provides jobs to a good number of Indians and brings in good foreign exchange home. However, I doubt if any consideration can make one chose McCain over Obama. It would defy intelligence.
– BookCrazy
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Actually, Michael - there are things that are working. You lost me at “studies show...” My wife is a public school teacher here in New York City who has taught at “inner-city” schools as well as other schools in the city (that we don’t assign politically-correct euphemisms to). She’s taught five year-olds who have suffered gunshot wounds, who couldn’t afford proper medical care or lived in shelters or who were being raised by their grandparents because their parents weren’t around. As a teacher, don’t you think that those schools where teaching only happens amidst security concerns and a disruptive environment could use extra help? Those teachers are overwhelmed! They would certainly benefit from smaller class sizes and basic money for supplies and books or additional para-professionals that I assure you are not generally being seen. After-school programs are critical for these kids to get extra help, books etc when the parents are working. These are simple solutions but powerful - they are not free. Whether or not that creates better performance on standardized tests, I don’t know and truthfully, I don’t care. I do know that we need to bring up the poorer schools somehow and without funding you’re merely shuffling. We don’t need shuffling.
Teachers are a special breed of person who are certainly motivated by something more than money, but wouldn’t you like to see teaching as a viable career option to the brightest students who might be necessarily lured into other fields? There’s a fair amount of tenured mediocrity in our schools, but I think teachers ought to be treated and paid like the professionals they are. I know teachers that can’t even afford to live in the neighborhoods they teach in. My wife, after more than ten years and advanced degrees was paid pretty well, but still no where near what she could have made in other fields (she made less money teaching than some secretaries at Merrill Lynch where I used to work).
I don’t believe that money is a panacea, but I’m tired of the handwringing in this country over how bad our schools are among people who only want to patch this or that problem up when I think we need give it the sort of weight we do war or our perennial financial bailouts. We’re throwing our best asset away. Of course, I’m also not under the illusion that any president would be able to do that, at least not overnight, but I do believe there’s a far greater chance of a renewed emphasis on education with Obama than with McCain and that line about not throwing money at the problem is just not enough because starving the problem of funds is not the answer either.
Now, take the case of the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School here in New York City (I don’t know where you’re writing from). There are horribly failing schools in the South Bronx - these are large, faceless schools with thousands of students and insurmountable security problems. What one group did with the help of grant money from the Annenberg Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was to create smaller, specialized schools within the area with a professional staff who engaged student’s families (as in going to a student’s house if they don’t show up for school) and each teacher is responsible for a core group of students. Each student can only graduate by presenting and defending a body of work accumulated during their time there. 98% of these kids go on to college, something previously unheard of in the South Bronx. So don’t tell me that money won’t help.
– Bud Parr
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Bud - Just wanted to leave a comment about the line “Everyone knows that schools are better in districts where there’s more money.” This is certainly true, but this isn’t because the schools have money - it’s because the people do. A school with lots of money in an inner city neighborhood will not do much (or at all) better than a school with a moderate amount, because its students have to deal with all the problems of that neighborhood (drugs, crime, single-parent households, etc.). As a teacher myself, I wish that just giving money would help. But studies have shown that it doesn’t help. So we need to reevaluate just how to use the money with give to best help those students, and at least right now there don’t seem to be any great answers.
–
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Kevin, I knew I could count on you for a rebuttal. Good luck out there.
– Bud Parr
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
I won’t get into Iraq and America’s reputation abroad as that is a complicated discussion and an emotional one as well.
But I did want to point out that your point about money and education is simply not true. There is no connection between per student spending and educational outcomes. The best schools in this country don’t spend more per pupil.
It is also worth pointing out that Obama’s work in education has been marked by failure. The infamous Annenberg project failed to improve Chicago schools despite millons of dollars spent. On top of that the Federal Government’s roll in education has been ineffective at best - and full of wasteful spending - so I fail to see why more Federal dollars is likely to help.
As to health care, I really think this is one area where McCain has been treated very poorly. Prior to this election cycle many people agreed that we needed to decouple health care from employment so that you were in charge of your care and it was portable, etc.
So when McCain makes just such a proposal, and one a number of unbiased observers agree will save most American’s money, Obama attacks him with deceptive ads. McCain may have done a poor job of selling the plan, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a good one.
Just my two cents.
– Kevin Holtsberry
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
Excellent, Bud. I couldn’t have put it better myself. (that line about what Putin saw when he looked back is hilarious!)
–
on “I Voted for Barack Obama Today and Here's Why”
On Deck +
Contributors +
Notes & Links
“But why in the world would anyone think that writers should be ‘bending over backwards’ to appeal to people who have no interest in reading? What bizarre conception of literature would have it intended primarily for nonreaders? The mangled logic of this view, which perversely seems to be widely shared by many who do read, seems to me so far removed from any plausible assessment of the place of “literature” in our culture as to be pretty close to insane.”
“It was Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast”
- Iain Martin quoting a McCain staffer at the Telegraph
“As you know, the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.
Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.”
- Charles Bernstein at Harper’s
“…it’s a source of some pleasure to come upon one of one’s older books, and to see the work inside, both of its writer and its reader, who, on some pages, such as during a notorious eighty-page party scene told almost entirely in dialogue, plum lost his mind:”
- Wyatt Mason, at the Harper’s blog on marginalia and The Recognitions
“In my opinion, Philip Roth is the Oliver Stone of fiction. We are drawn to him because he creates strong characters and has a knack for plots and situations that catch our interest. But he is hopelessly heavy-handed, single-minded and irritatingly consistent. He’s been writing the same story since the 1960s, showing no growth or maturity and never developing an interest in the world outside East Coast USA.”
What I always find frustrating is that the Indie Bestseller list is of bestselling books in independent bookstores, which seems to me not that far from the bestselling books of the moment in non-indie stores. What I’d like to see is an Indie Bestseller list that is of bestselling books from independent publishers. Does such a thing exist?
“…This is the way that readers/reviewers/booksellers avoid ‘foreign’ books by essentially diminishing their importance. It’s the same sort of logic that dismisses the quality of something — like Cubs fans — by questioning it’s authenticity — even if they really don’t understand baseball — is a slippery slope.”
“Willie’s story is more of a tall tale. Like Daniel Boone, Willie belongs both to American history and American myth. Huckster. Trickster. Philanthropist. Pothead. Road dog. Genius. His nicknames read like godly epithets of a peculiarly American sort–Shotgun Willie, the Red Headed Stranger, Booger Red. Like Boone, in his own lifetime Nelson has become a living symbol of pioneering American virtues–individualism, integrity, survival, self-made commercial success. And the people around him speak of him as if he were the Yoda of Austin.”
- Jason Chervokas reviewing Joe Nick Patoski’s Willie Nelson: An Epic Life
“I think industry mediocrity is more of a threat to the future of reading than television is.”
- Sarah McNally (owner of McNally Jackson books) quoted in the New York Observer
The point is that I need things to look and be a certain way in order to get into the full creative spirit. Wagner had to wear silk robes and work in a room with heavy drapes to keep a lot of the sunlight out, while Shostakovich could, and did, work in the middle of chaos like the German assault on Leningrad. I can crank out words and music in the middle of unpropitious circumstances if need be, but I prefer to have a work space and work environment that are creation-ready, and little totems nearby to help: Hot black coffee in an interesting mug, sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga pencils (HB2), cream-colored lined paper (I like Archives 18-stave orchestral book), my green-marble Waterman fountain pen nearby to ink things I’m going to keep.
“Land [founder of Polaroid] nurtured an idealistic vision of photography. He dreamed of a camera that would release the artist in everyone. ‘‘My basic faith,’ Land wrote, ‘is in the random competence of people in all walks of life, at any level of income, of any derivation. There is a common sense of beauty and of manual aptitudes.’”
- Phil Patton, on Polaroid’s announcement it would close its U.S. factories making instant film
“Let us open up our doors for writers the way that so many, not only in Brooklyn but across the country, have done for musicians (check out www.dodiyusa.org for an idea). The internet and its social networking sites have made the promotion of independent arts events not only extremely easy but extremely cheap (if not altogether free). If we as readers become the curators of our own literary events, we take the power out of the hands of publicists and publishers with bookselling agendas, and create a more organic experience. Furthermore, by hosting readings and performances outside of bars, we open doors to the under-21 crowd, which has a great literary energy but little access to events outside of the undergrad sphere.”
- Bryan Miltenberg at The Millions
“So, apropos of practically nothing (and not with a bang but a whimper) I tossed in a quotation from “The Waste Land.” That, I thought, will show him I’ve read a thing or two besides my press notices from Vaudeville.
Eliot smiled faintly — as though to say he was thoroughly familiar with his poems and didn’t need me to recite them. So I took a whack at “King Lear”…
That too failed to bowl over the poet. He seemed more interested in discussing “Animal Crackers” and “A Night at the Opera.” He quoted a joke – one of mine – that I had long since forgotten. Now it was my turn to smile faintly…
“I jumped at the chance to see him in concert, and managed to squeeze into the fifth row of the packed nightclub to gaze up at his thick hands laying that pulsing tremolo over those Bo Diddley chords on that beautiful box-shaped guitar. Bo Diddley was pretty old in 1987, but he wasn’t too old to snarl his lyrics, or to enjoy himself.”
“Miroslav Holub once said that when things were really bad in Eastern Europe, ‘it is a very poetic situation.’ It is a terrible thing to say, but Joseph [Brodsky] was blessed with ‘a very poetic situation.’ No American poet has had the opportunity to enjoy such terrible historical circumstances.”
- William Wadsworth interviewed by Valentina Polukhina at Words Without Borders
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