Ed Park was born in Buffalo, New York. He earned an English degree from Yale and an MFA from Columbia. His novels, Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams, have both been finalists for major awards, including the PEN/Hemingway and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and Same Bed won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Asian Pacific American Award. Since this interview, he has also published the story collection An Oral History of Atlantis.
He is the founding editor of The Believer. He has also worked as an editor for The Village Voice, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, and many others. He lives in Manhattan and teaches at Princeton University.
When Ed Park visited March 18th as part of the Vivian S. Delbrook Visiting Writers Series, we discussed his motivations for his most recent novel and how he wrote it on a craft level.
Jaden Dennis (JD): Same Bed Different Dreams is three separate stories that are slowly interwoven and intersected with one another to create a dream-like state. Did you always plan to structure Same Bed this way?
Ed Park (EP): I did not. I originally thought it would be a straight-ahead, single-voice novel, with maybe some flashbacks or things like that. Given the title, Same Bed Different Dreams, at a certain pointit made sense to introduce a different narrative voice.
The first voice was that of Soon Sheen, who narrates the sections called “The Sins,” which I was comfortable with, a sort of comic-novel voice, though sometimes I felt it straying.
Then I thought, “Okay, so maybe I’ll have most of the book be in his voice, and the ‘different dream’ will be some other character in the second half or part of the book.” I had an idea that Daisy, another important character in the novel, would tell her story in the end, and that would be the different dream, and the bed would be the book. I wrote a long draft this way, most of which I had to scrap.
I eventually decided to take some of the material from the Soon Sheen part to form the first strand and make a second strand that I called the “Dreams,” written by a novelist character named Echo, who I’d already introduced. For a while I had those two strands going, and then I was like, “I need a third strand!” There needed to be something else that didn’t adhere to the other two strands. The construction was quite arduous. I did not plan for it to take a specific form in advance form. The more I wrote, and the more I took out, the more I realized what the shape had to be.
JD: It took on a life of its own.
EP: Yes, absolutely.
JD: You use a lot of coded language and spy-like action in connection to the Korean Provisional Government, one of the novel’s main conceits. What was your process in making and putting these codes into your novel?
EP: The KPG was a real entity. It came about in 1919 after the March 1 demonstration against Japan, which had colonized Korea. The KPG always seemed like such a great vehicle for fiction—a “provisional government” is such an interesting combination of words.
The KPG didn’t have any power. It was a government in exile. I thought it was a good blank canvas on which you could present a variety of exciting stories. The members were often in hiding, avoiding capture while broadcasting their message for a free Korea. I thought it would be fun to use some of those figures genuinely associated with the KPG, like Syngman Rhee, who later became the first president of South Korea, along with other Korean figures of that era who I’m personally interested in, such as this avant-garde writer named Yi Sang. Even today, his poetry looks super bizarre and full of secret codes. I thought it would be cool to have Yi Sang, this poet who wrote in a hermetic language, to be a spy transmitting codes.
Even though much of Same Bed Different Dreams is historical plot and literary ambitions, I also wanted it to move like a spy story or mystery, genres that I enjoy.
JD: When going through the research involving the KPG, the Japanese occupation, as well as the Korean War, how were you able to decide between the events that were most important to your novel, and what would be left behind? Is there anything you regret leaving out?
EP: Good question. The KPG might have been in that very early draft I told you about, but it didn’t really play a major role until I cooked up the “Dreams” sections. When I introduced the Dreams, I knew that I would be representing modern Korean history in an elevated way, as well as fictionalizing characters and events I found fascinating. The KPG was a good way to express all that.
Some of these events I knew already, so I would just read more about them. As I read different books and articles, the ambience and the names soak in. I got a taste of what things were like back then. That left an impression, but also, as a fiction writer, I was looking for things that would work in a book. So, I definitely used far, far less than I read.
No regrets, though.
JD: When I was reading it, I got hyper-focused on specific points that I knew and related to. Specifically, William McKinley getting shot, because I’m from Canton.
EP: Oh, you are? Interesting.
JD: Yeah, I live right where the McKinley Memorial is, so…
EP: How crazy that Trump is now talking about how great William McKinley was, in relation to tariffs.
JD: I don’t even think people from Ohio like William McKinley. At least people from Canton don’t talk about him like that. We walk on the Memorial, we live near the park, but there isn’t much care for him. My own high school was named after him, but the people who populate that high school are people who would be affected by his very disgusting, racist policies.
EP: These powerful figures…time passes, and they just become a name. I just did a double-take when I saw Trump mentioning McKinley so much recently. You know, I’m from Buffalo, and McKinley was assassinated there. This is a big part of Buffalo lore. There’s a marker commemorating where he was shot. It’s not just that he was shot there, but as I discuss in the book, it was part of the Pan-American Exposition, which was like a big world’s fair held in Buffalo in 1901. People came from all over.
Buffalo was at the height of its glory. For a president to be shot there, it has great symbolic power, and it was something I wanted to include even though, at some level, it doesn’t connect with the KPG or things like that. Since it’s fiction, I could sort of orchestrate it so.
JD: I think something similar happened to Canton, but I won’t get into that.
Let’s continue. Many of the characters in the novel, historical and fictional, are approached with a somewhat neutral lens. They are recognized for their bad deeds while also being somewhat praised for the good they did for others, vice versa. Did you ever struggle with recognizing the good and bad in some of the novel’s historical figures?
EP: I think it’s easy to be judgmental in life. I mean, I think we all are, and we have opinions about different figures. Good fiction is more interesting. There are figures in the book whose actions I don’t condone, but I think it would be problematic if the book just said what’s “bad.” Otherwise, you’re sort of preaching to the converted.
For example, Syngman Rhee is both the father of modern South Korea, but also a figure who eventually left office because of popular unrest. He was a very old man when he came to power in 1948—he’d already had a whole colorful globe-trotting life before that. He was born in 1875. By the time he was out of office, he was already 85 or so. I was curious about his earlier life—about what came before. For one thing, he spent decades in America. When he was elected president of the KPG in 1919, he wasn’t in Asia at all. So what was his life like here? It became, to me, a conversation about what it would mean to have been Asian American, specifically a Korean American, in that era. He was in D.C., he was in Boston, he spent time at Princeton, etc., and he was trying to get people informed about what was happening in Korea, and nobody really cared. I found that, for all his deficits and the criticisms he incurs, this period was pretty interesting.
I didn’t want my novel to be a hagiography. One of the sources I used was a biography written later in Rhee’s life by an American writer who was essentially his PR person, so it’s a very glowing tribute. But it has a lot of interesting tidbits, like how he got a letter of recommendation from Woodrow Wilson, who had been the president of Princeton at the time.
Then I also found reminiscences of a contemporary of his who had worked alongside him for a while, and it’s a very bitter chronicle. So I could balance these two perspectives, try to find things that would be fascinating even to people who didn’t know who he is.
JD: Interesting. You have many different characters represented in your novel that don’t necessarily identify as Korean or with the conflicts of the KPG. How important was it to you to represent these characters and their multifaceted problems in connection with politics? How important is representation to your writing as a whole?
EP: It’s something that I both think about a lot and don’t. I go where a short story, a novel, or even a chapter takes me. In my first book, Personal Days, you don’t really know the race of anybody. At the end, there are, I think, two characters who you could kind of pinpoint what race they are. They all work in an office, and some of them are not White, but you’re not actually sure which ones.
With Same Bed, I wanted to be transparent about race, from different angles. Korean Americans are predominant in the book, but I also wanted to see how Korean history has intersected with American history writ large, particularly in terms of pop culture.
When I was growing up, M*A*S*H was on all the time—a sitcom with serious moments, set during the Korean War. It’s centered on these White American doctors and, every so often you’d see a minor Korean character. No one you’d remember. Growing up, I think any kind of representation of Koreanness or Asianness in pop culture was interesting to me, even though it was a complete fiction. I began to think: What if you start to understand certain elements of American pop culture strictly through a Korean lens? What would you see? That wasn’t my initial plan, but as I wrote and included more material from the real world, that’s what happened.
I would like to quickly mention a fictional character named Taro Tsujimoto, who was a nonexistent player chosen by the Buffalo Sabres in the 11th round of the NHL’s 1974 draft. The Sabres run out of players they wanted to pick, so they just made up this Japanese guy. I learned about this long ago and originally tried to write about it as a nonfiction essay. But kind of like with KPG, I thought this was like a ready-made fiction vehicle, a blank canvas. The name “Tsujimoto” pops up a lot in the book, and he kind of melds with one of the fictional characters I created. So, I don’t know. When Taro Tsujimoto was created by the Sabres front office, was it racist? The account that I read in a memoir by the Sabres GM read as more of a weird PR step.
Over the years of writing this novel, it became clear to me that I was trying to put into context what it meant to be an Asian kid who grew up in Buffalo, where few Asians were in the ’70s and ’80s. Could I make compelling fiction out of that situation?
JD: I think that answers one of my other questions: What are you hoping readers take away from the novel regarding Korea and its history? Is there anything you wish for readers to take away regarding the politics and persecution of Korea?
EP: Well, I spent many years on the writing of this book, but some of it, like Taro Tsujimoto, I had for decades. Stuff I was interested in as a younger writer, or even as a kid, kind of came to the surface as I was writing Same Bed. And on a larger scale, I was thinking a lot about the Korean War and how it affected Koreans. It’s called the “Forgotten War” in the U.S., and yet it’s still a huge part of the lives of generations of Koreans. My father was a teenager when it happened, but it affects world politics even today.
So, part of me would love for readers to just know a little bit more about that war and maybe erasing that adjective “Forgotten.” By no means is this a Korean War novel, nor is that its entire focus, but I wanted to plant a flag a little bit. Everybody knows about World War I, World War II, and Vietnam. The Korean War is not really well-known.
I’ve been struggling my whole writing life with how to put these ideas and figures into fiction. I felt like I did that. Now, it’s the reader’s choice. Hopefully, they’ll enjoy the book, and if they want to dive in further, read the poetry of Yi Sang or something, that would be great. But they can also just move on to the next book by somebody else.
JD: Right. So, when incorporating aspects of science fiction, how did you map the world of the fictional future with parts of the historical past?
EP: Like the reality of the book that’s slightly off kilter?
JD: Sort of. Like the company Soon works for called “GLOAT,” as well as the acronyms the company uses and the game they produce…I’m realizing this is pulling into the spy question. It’s all kind of correlated.
EP: Like a lot of people, I started reading science fiction as a teenager. I’m old enough that, when the first Star Wars movie came out, it was the first movie I saw twice in the theater—I’d never seen anything like it. Culturally, it’s a game changer, for better or worse.
I brought that up just so I could say that there’s one chapter where there’s an actual made-up game. The main characters are these game designers, commissioned to create a role-playing game, like D&D, based on these novels by Parker Jotter—the former pilot. The game is called 2333, after the series of science-fiction books he published. I wanted the chapter to unfold and end right before Star Wars the movie came out so that everything they’re discussing about science fiction will be completely overshadowed by it, for those readers in the know.
As a kid, I was very interested in Dungeons & Dragons, as well as Gamma World, which is even more pertinent to the game they’re trying to design. These are fascinating to me because they are alternate realities we hold in our hands and read. We devise them at the gaming table, yet they have such a powerful hold on our imagination and even our identities. That was a great moment, while writing, when I realized I wanted this stuff in the book. Kind of like the spy stuff, it’s just another way to entertain the reader. They also have a long history, and I just had a lot of fun exploring that. Not only would Parker Jotter write these novels, but they would somehow be communicating something about the history of Korea or the KPG, as well as being a game, like an RPG. It would also become this kind of thing that keeps perpetuating over the decades in different forms, then finally, with GLOAT, this huge tech company, it becomes very important as well. It’s almost like a science fiction within itself, but it was also a lot of fun to trace these novels that Parker Jotter wrote and see how they could have huge implications.
JD: Absolutely. That’s funny. Like Parker Jotter, many writers almost subconsciously slip their own personal or private life into their writing. When you catch yourself doing this, how do you respond or work with the material?
EP: Good question. My first novel, Personal Days, was very personal in that it grew out of a real-life workplace situation involving my colleagues and me getting laid off, but it was also very fictional because there was no one-to-one correspondence between a character and somebody I worked with. It was never defined what the workplace was or what kind of work they did. But that’s definitely an example of my own biography informing my fiction.
I wouldn’t have written that book had I never worked in an office, but I’m not really any one of those characters. Rather, I’m like a little bit of each one of the characters. Whereas in this book, from the beginning, I kind of wanted Soon Sheen to be an alternative version of me: about my age, from Buffalo, Korean, interested in hockey and role-playing games, stuff like that. Also, he was a writer in his past. When I wrote it, I had published a novel, but it had been many years since, so this idea of a writer who has stepped away from writing was very personal.
I kept writing in the years after Personal Days, but a new book wasn’t materializing. I didn’t have a manuscript. I think, from the beginning, I was willing to let aspects of my biography form this character. However, as you can see, the book then took on a life of its own and soon becomes…well, he’s still a key player, but there are other characters who are a bit flashier and know more than he does. He sort of goes along, and there’s a kind of big twist in his last section involving his relation to the manuscript. It becomes very complicated, but it all connects.
I would say there’s some of me later in the book when we see a younger version of him in Buffalo. There’s also a version of my parents, especially my father, in there. Some of my dad’s stories about the Korean War and growing up during the Japanese occupation were told to me when I was very young. They’re burned into my memory. It’s almost like I gravitate toward what I write about those eras because it seemed like I had to tell these stories. It’s like he told them to me, and, though they’re fictionalized in many ways, I think the emotional truth is there, and a lot of the details are things that I remember.
I didn’t ask him again. I didn’t actually ask for permission or anything like that. I let my memory of his telling take it in whichever direction it wanted. However, he did read the book eventually, and he was a very big supporter of the book, so I feel good about that.
This is where—we’ve been talking for a while—maybe you’re getting that one of the secret motivations of the book was to tell these stories. As a certain kind of fiction writer, it took me many years, hundreds of pages, and many drafts to actually tell these stories the way I wanted.
JD: Of course. It’s like a secret ode to your father.
EP: That’s a great way of putting it.
JD: Lovely. Stepping away from Same Bed Different Dreams, you were a finalist for the Pulitzer. How does it feel to be a finalist? Did you ever imagine yourself being nominated in your early days as a writer?
EP: It’s interesting. I was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which I didn’t know until they announced it. Publishers can nominate whichever authors that they want, but the day the committee announced the awards was the day I found out I was a finalist.
It was all online, and I was preparing for a class. I thought, there are so many great books published every year, whatever, whatever. I had it on in the background. I believe the last category was fiction, and they listed the three finalists, and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m a finalist.” Then, twenty seconds later, they announced the winner, which was not me.
Still, it was a huge honor. I’m still very happy about it. I guess you always hear about Pulitzer Prize winners or winners of different awards, and maybe it just seemed too remote or close to impossible.
For me, I just wanted to get published. I don’t know if winning prizes was really a goal. I just wanted to be a good writer and to get books published, which I’ve done. What I think was great about it for me was that it felt like all the work was recognized. That people read the book, even with how complicated it is with the three different strands, timelines, many characters, and historical factors. I just love that the ambition was recognized. And if it hadn’t been a finalist, that would be fine too. I am gratified by the people who’ve written to me, people I’ve met, and other awards and reviews the book has received.
While working on Same Bed for nine years, I was often thinking, “What am I doing?”, “Where is this going?”, “How will I ever finish?” All these dark writer fears. However, there came a moment when I was done, and it went into production. As much as I love Personal Days, it felt like this was the book I was meant to write. It came out in the way I wanted, which I think is enough. So, everything else is great and I’m appreciative, but the main thing was to have the novel here in a form that I was proud of.
JD: Absolutely. This is my final question, and it’s about your upcoming collection. You’re releasing a new short story collection this year titled An Oral History of Atlantis. Can you tell me a little bit about what readers can look forward to in this collection?
EP: Of course. This book is a collection of stories. My debut collection at age fifty-four, and it contains about twenty-five years of stories. There are sixteen stories in total. These aren’t all the stories I’ve written, but these are the ones that I feel belong together.
Obviously, style changes over the years, interests change, and the voice can morph, but these pieces felt like they were in conversation with each other. I would not say this is a novel in linked stories, exactly, but there are recurring characters that readers may recognize. There’s even a character from Same Bed Different Dreams, Mercy Pang, who originated from a 2010 story that’s in the collection.
These characters, I just really like them, and I loved creating them. The first story I wrote was in 1997, published in 1998, maybe before you were born?
JD: Definitely before I was born. Sorry.
EP: It’s all good. Anyway, the last story was written in 2001 and published in 2003. The in-between stuff is from the early aughts and the 20-teens. This is the book I was writing when I was not writing novels. What’s great about short stories is you can write them fairly quickly. The title story is “An Oral History of Atlantis,” that partly refers to the fact that I wrote many of these for various events. Also, I like the metaphor of Atlantis—the lost continent as a symbol for the irretrievable past. A couple of the stories are pre-9/11, a dividing line for New Yorkers. Those days seem very far away.
You can get closer to perfection with stories than with novels. I’m really happy about how the collection hangs together. Readers might also notice that every story has comic elements to it. Some are straight-up comedies, but there’s also a blend of the uncanny with contemporary life.
JD: Well, that was amazing. Thank you so much.
EP: It was fun to talk.