Chang-rae Lee lecture postponed

By Milena Insam

The lecture by Asian-American writer Chang-rae Lee, author of Native Speaker, A Gesture Life and Aloft, which was supposed to take place tonight in the Bart Luedeke Center Theater (BLC), will be postponed until Friday, Feb. 3, because of the expected snow.

“We’re unfortunately forced to cancel [the event],” said Dr. John Hulsman of the English Department. “There were three acts involved in this, so we cancelled because we thought it would be a big mess.”

However, the lecture is rescheduled to take place in either the BLC theater or the Fireside Lounge.

Lee is the seventh guest in the Rider Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) Distinguished Writers Series.

Hulsman said Lee is an important writer who offers the reader a “useful kind of novel.”

“He is achieving a great reputation,” Hulsman said. “He is interested in the intricacies of Asian culture and the adjustment to the complexities of American society.”

Lee was born in South Korea and immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of three.

“We arrived the way most emigrant families did,” Lee said in a recent telephone interview. “My father came first, and the rest of us — my mother, my sister and me ­— followed a year later.”

After his graduation from Philips Exeter Academy and Yale University, Lee worked as a Wall Street analyst for one year. But he decided to quit and devote all his energies to
writing.

“I didn’t leave Wall Street because the work was not my nature,” he said. “I left because I had this love for writing.”

Lee currently lives with his wife and daughter in Bergen County, N.J., and teaches writing at Princeton University.

In his writings, Lee explores the themes of identity, belonging and assimilation. His novels are focused on the meshing of cultures, portraying Asian characters that more or less successfully immerse into American society.

His first novel, Native Speaker (1995), tells the story of a Korean-American spy who is caught between two cultures. The elaborate mask he wears as a result of his job gradually unravels in the course of events, revealing his true identity.

His second book, A Gesture Life (1999), is a narrative about a Japanese immigrant who leads a proper life in a New York suburb. As his life slowly unravels, he is transported back to his days as a medic in the Japanese army during World War II and his obsessive love for a young “comfort woman.”

His novels have won him several honors such as the American Book Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for Fiction, and he was recently selected by The New Yorker magazine as one of the 20 best American writers under the age of 40.

Before the lecture, a seminar and reception for EOP students will take place. The reading will be followed by a discussion with a question-and-answer session and a book-signing in the lobby.