Patricia Park

Jane Eyre retold through Korean-American eyes — that’s the premise of Patricia Park’s recent debut novel, Re Jane (Pamela Dorman Books). The heroine here is Jane Re, a half-Korean orphan raised in Queens who becomes an au pair in a Brooklyn household headed by a brooding English professor of a father…

The backstory of Re Jane…
When I was little and misbehaved, my mom would say to me in her broken English, “You act like orphan.” That always struck me as very strange because you’re either an orphan or not, and how do you act like one? I realized that, for her and her generation of war-time Koreans, to act like an orphan meant you behaved in a very disgraceful way that brought shame to your family. When I read Jane Eyre, I noticed that Jane was also thrown similar epithets. I saw the parallels between the Victorian understanding of the orphan and the Korean Post-War one. That was the official genesis of Re Jane.

Jane vs. me…
On a surface level, I was born in Queens whereas Jane was born in Korea. Jane is mixed-race Korean; I am not, and I was not adopted. Jane represents a very marginalized figure within Korean society. Up until recently, Korean society was one that really valued homogeneity and ethnic purity and Jane’s mother, as the story goes, had relations with an American; in many ways, she’s wearing her mother’s shame. She’s an other among the others, a minority within a minority. I found that a really fascinating starting point. I wanted to explore a character who mainstream America automatically lumps into her minority community, but who doesn’t even have acceptance within her community.

Favorite line in the book…
“This was my America — all Korean, all the time.” It speaks to my own experience growing up in Queens, too, and the experience of other hyphenated Americans. You grow up on American soil and yet your version of America is very different from, you know, what we think of as the Heartland.

Most challenging part about writing this book…
Fighting off the urge to just throw it away. Because it seemed like there was never a finishing line in sight. Also, the conventions of a 19th-Century novel are very different from a modern-day one. It’s not very acceptable to have marriage proposals from your cousin, you know. And 19th-Century heroines are a lot more passive than their modern-day counterparts. As forward-thinking as Jane Eyre was, she was still a product of her times. In my early drafts, I was staying more closely to the original text and it made for a rather passive protagonist. I had to cut ties after a certain point.

Aside from Charlotte Brontë, the authors who influenced me the most…
I really love Jane Austen — I love her social commentary, her blatant use of language. I like Laurie Moore a lot — she takes weighty issues and cuts them with humor. The books that influenced me while I was writing Re Jane, that I went to over and over again, was not just Jane Eyre but The Great Gatsby — which tackles these scenes of being a New Yorker and the different class issues within New York — and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.

Best writing advice received…
I studied with Ha Jin in grad school and he used to say, “Put everything, everything in the novel.” Because I was trying to think of different ideas for future novels — the grocery store and Queens angles in Re Jane could be different novels — and he said to put it all in one novel. That, and then he would say, “It’s all about the small moments.” So much of life can be distilled in these small moments, these small gestures.

How I combat writer’s block…
Athletic activity. Sometimes when I would get stuck, I would get up and go for a run. And it’s not even so much that I work out problems in my head but that I shake off a lot of anxious energy, that kind of anxious energy that was keeping me from myself, or writing for myself.

What I’m reading now…
The Dirty Life, “a memoir of farming, food and love” by Kristin Kimball. She’s a thirty-something New York-based writer who goes on assignment to interview a young farmer in Pennsylvania, falls in love and decides to change her life, uproot and become a farmer. She and her husband run a place called Essex Farm upstate, and only eat what they produce. It goes counter to everything you think New York writers are about — New York is urban, you have your black uniform, your heels…

What’s next…
My second book is about the Korean community in Buenos Aires. It’s about a minor character in Re Jane who gets his own novel. Even though he’s born-and-bred Argentine, he’s always considered the other. He and his family emigrate to New York with the financial crisis and is constantly facing these identity issues. I have a lot of family from Argentina and my mother was an Argentine citizen, so I’m drawing off that.

And this theme of identity resonates with me because…
Because I’m a “hyphenated” American, I don’t take identity for granted — I can’t. Because my whole life, even though legally I’m American, I was never treated as one or thought to think of myself that way. I’m fascinated by people who are outsiders among outsiders.