Immigrant Stories: Min Jin Lee in Conversation with Simon Winchester

Novelist Min Jin Lee, author of the critically acclaimed Free Food for Millionaires, speaks with New York Times best-selling author Simon Winchester about her latest novel, Pachinko.

Immigration may preoccupy American politics, but immigrants’ stories are everywhere. And the themes which unite them—escape and adaptation, assimilation and discrimination, alienation and inclusion, advancement and stagnation—exceed many of the differences that distinguish them.

Pachinko traces multiple generations of a Korean family living in exile in Japan between the 1930s and 1980s, encountering the spectum of struggle and opportunity. “History has failed us,” Lee writes in the novel’s opening line. “But no matter.” For those unacquainted with the story of Koreans in Japan—a story that is still unfolding today—Pachinko will open your eyes to a difficult history that will at once seem completely new and deeply familiar.

Simon Winchester, the author of The Professor and the Madman, Pacific, and The Men Who United the States, called Lee’s novel “A revelation of joy and heartbreak. I could not stop turning the pages, and wished this most poignant of sagas would never end. Min Jin Lee displays a tenderness and wisdom ideally matched to an unforgettable tale that she relates just perfectly.” Join the two for a conversation about a book the New York Times has called “stunning” and which will find purchase with anyone moved more by the human story of immigration than the political one.

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