LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS / January 25, 2018

The Union / February 14, 2018

The Guardian / September 02, 2016

Book Reveiw of Krys Lee's Book   Lee has worked with North Korean refugees, and her hotly anticipated debut novel vividly captures the challenges faced by defectors

ASIAN AMERICAN WRITERS' WORKSHOP / February 27, 2017

Krys Lee’s collection of short stories, Drifting House, was published in 2012 to great acclaim. In How I Became a North Korean, her celebrated debut novel set just outside the North Korean border, Lee traces the treacherous journeys of three very different North Korean defectors whose lives briefly intersect. In the conversation below, Hannah Michell speaks with Lee about playing with reader expectations, the delicate balance of writing North Korean voices, and the power of fiction to give clarity to the world. source: aaww.org

SF Gate / June 01, 2017

The Guardian / August 12, 2016

Krys Lee’s debut novel, How I Became a North Korean, opens with a description of a lavish banquet hosted in Pyongyang by the dictatorial “Dear Leader”. The guests wear fur coats and Rolex watches, and sit at a mahogany table, eating delicacies flown in from the Tokyo Tsukiji fish market by private jet. Following the meal, the host raises his hand: “a glittering disco globe came down from the ceiling and the Joy Brigade began strutting in pink hot pants to a banned American pop song”. One couple, a senior party official and his wife, whose story we are following, are among those obliged to dance. Suddenly the mood changes, and the evening ends with the official shot dead, and his wife and son, Yongju, forced to flee the totalitarian state across the heavily patrolled border into China.

Poblanerías en línea / August 31, 2016

The writer Krys Lee published his second book in this August and debuted as a novelist. The title of his work is "How I Became a North Korean", the story of three young people who face with crime and the border between North Korea and China. Lee, in an interview with Los Angeles Times , talked about the reasons that led her to delve into the novel. She is a woman who has sought to define their identity: as a baby she moved with her ​​parents to California, while after studying college, returned to Seoul to reconcile with his past. South Korean narrator had very conservative parents. His father was the pastor of a church in Koreatown -Barrio Los Angeles- and exerted violent control over his family; It was the kind of man who preferred to keep everything secret. His mother, on the other hand, died of cancer when she was a university. The traumatic events of his childhood and adolescence carried Krys Lee to seek a new life in Seoul. This writer said about that time in his biography: [My return to Korea] helped me to see Korean men as people with their own sufferings, insecurities and complex problems. [...] I showed that this culture is very rich, interesting and confusing. Also, how can you love a crazy culture. I recognized the madness in me. " It was in Korea where Lee found the subjects for literature. There, newcomer, participated in a conference on human rights in North Korea. This has led, over the years, to work closely with North Korean refugees. All these personal experiences were important to form "How I Became a North Korean", although it is not a memoir. The book is published by Viking-Penguin Random House and still has no translation into Spanish. Can be purchased at Amazon at a price of $ 14 for the electronic version -260 pesos.  Source: http://www.poblanerias.com/2016/08/krys-lee-publica-novela-sobre-migrantes-norcoreanos/

koreaherald / September 07, 2016

NBC news / August 31, 2016

Krys Lee is a writer who has traveled between borders her whole life, immigrating to the U.S. from South Korea as a young child, later becoming a foreign student in the U.K., then settling in South Korea, where she now sharpens her craft as a Korean-American author.  Krys Lee's novel "How I Became a North Korean" was released on August 2nd. Viking Books"As a writer, when I debuted, it was so funny when I would get invited to literary festivals," she said earlier this month at a New York event launching her first novel, "How I Became a North Korean." "I'm very grateful and happy and thankful to every one of them - but I would go and … they'd say, 'Oh, you're the American writer,' or 'You're the Korean-American writer,' or 'You are Korean.'" Identity has been key to Lee's work. Both her new novel and her 2012 debut collection of short stories, "Drifting House," focus on characters occupying new worlds, such as recent immigrants to the U.S. or North Korean refugees who have just crossed into China. Lee spoke with NBC Asian America about "How I Became a North Korean," her "accidental activism" to support North Korean refugees and her life in Seoul. What has it been like to work as a Korean-American writer in South Korea? Do you experience "reverse culture shock" when you travel back and forth between the U.S. and Korea? "I WASN'T PREPARED FOR HOW KOREA CHANGED ME EVERY DAY AND MADE ME FACE MY FAMILY'S PAST."Being a writer working in the English language and living in Korea is an odd situation. I'm far away from the writing and reading community that I'm theoretically a part of, and spend most of my time with mostly non-readers as well as a few Korean fiction writers who can't read English. Sometimes it's difficult to believe that I am a fiction writer at all. In either direction, reverse culture shock is always present. It takes me about two weeks in America to not feel like a stranger in a country that I grew up in, and when I return to Seoul after a spell, I am overwhelmed by the city's intensity and competitiveness that makes New York City look slow. But the shock isn't always negative — shock is also a state of alertness. RELATED: Grassroots Organization Aims to 'Change the Narrative' About North Korea How did your new book "How I Became a North Korean" come about? When did you first start working on it and connecting with North Korean refugees? "How I Became a North Korean" has a few origins. I started a novel about the Los Angeles Koreatown and couldn't make progress because my present, most vivid concerns were about the friends around me in Seoul who were North Korean.  Krys Lee wrote "How I Became a North Korean," as well as the short stories collection "Drifting House." Matt Douma / Krys LeeI first met activists and North Koreans through volunteering at Liberty in North Korea more than 10 years ago. A few North Korean friends urged me to write about their country. One even gave me five years' worth of diaries and asked me to write his story, which I didn't feel capable of doing. But I could write fiction. After writing about North Korea's 1990s famine in "Drifting House," I wanted to write a more up-to-date, thorough depiction of what happens to the people I care about, and about North Korea and China's terrible role in the human rights crisis. This required a novel. Aside from refugees, other characters in the book include missionaries and activists. Do you count yourself among either group? What's your opinion on the sometimes controversial work that they do? I consider myself an accidental activist, as I've been involved on and off in the community whenever there was something I could do, from mentoring North Koreans to setting up a safe house in the Chinese border area. But the true activists are those who have devoted their life to their cause, though my friend Joanna Hosaniak, deputy director general of the NGO Citizens' Alliance for North Korean Human Rights, once said to me, "Your writing is your activism." I have great respect for secular and religious leaders alike who improve people's lives, but I'm no fan of anyone who furthers their agenda at the harm to others, including opportunistic, corrupt missionaries. RELATED: War Torn Families Separated for Decades Reunite for 72 Hours What surprised you most about meeting North Koreans? I was most surprised by their loyalty to their friends. Because they are cut off from their homelands forever, and [because they are] immigrants in South Korea, once they trust you, they are the most loving and loyal of friends. Barbara Demick, who wrote "Nothing to Envy," an incredible nonfiction account of North Korea's famine, said the same during an event that we recently did together. Relationships with my North Korean friends have been one of the most moving experiences of my life. What made you move to Korea? I went to Korea directly after finishing an M.A. in literature at the University of York in England, thinking of it as a year out before I went back to the life I was to start again in London. I wasn't prepared for how Korea changed me every day and made me face my family's past. It felt like an important journey and I wasn't ready to leave. By staying, I surprised myself by falling in love with a culture and history, a language, and a Korean man who didn't speak English. That year turned Seoul into my home, and my life.  Follow Krys Lee @krysleewriterStringent economic sanctions. The elite fleeing. #NorthKorea hasn't looked so unstable in a long time. #humanrights https://twitter.com/nknewsorg/status/769988031449268225 …6:04 AM - 29 Aug 2016  3 3 Retweets   1 1 likeIn your work as a creative writing professor in Seoul, have you seen any major themes or topics emerge from your students' writing? Does teaching give you a sense of what's yet to come in literature? I joined the full-time faculty at Yonsei University's Underwood International College three years ago... The number of my students writing about social class in their fiction increases every semester. In a country as competitive as South Korea, fate often seems determined by a family's social and economic standing. When I heard about the Korean Air Lines "nut scandal," I was astonished and simultaneously not surprised. I live in and love South Korea, but it is a stratified, divided country. There's been a lot of talk about the need for more diverse books and authors in the literary world in recent years. What has it been like to work in this space during this time? I'm happy to be a part of the movement toward more diverse books and authors, but actual readership and change happens slowly. When readers across the spectrum can read books by a Cambodian-American, Burmese, South African, or Inuit writer as if their work and worlds are as valuable as the writing of someone from New York City, then it will truly be a time to celebrate. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.   Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/accidental-activist-krys-lee-writing-korea-how-i-became-north-n640076

newsday / September 02, 2016

Forgetting the complexities of other lives is so easy these days, immersed as we are in our daily grinds, our political battles, our iPhones and our Netflix. With her devastating yet ultimately hopeful first novel, Krys Lee provides the reminder that sometimes we need a wake-up call. “How I Became a North Korean” demands that we look outside ourselves, pay attention and bear witness to the world and how it can break so many of us. In the stories of her first book, “Drifting House,” Lee — an assistant professor of literature and creative writing in Seoul, South Korea — explored questions of country and identity, past and future, in North and South Korea, as well as in the United States. In “How I Became a North Korean,” which is on the shortlist for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, she narrows her focus to a single place: China, along its border with North Korea, where three young people cross paths after escaping their homelands. Most popular Dunham apologizes to Giants' Beckham Jr. for comments Are Khloé Kardashian, Tristan Thompson dating? Amy Schumer kicks heckler out for sexist comment Who was the 'Sons of Anarchy' Homeless Woman? Cosby could get trial date at evidence hearing this week Like many such places, this border is dangerous and desperate, especially for North Koreans, who are regarded at best with suspicion and at worst with outright antagonism. Lee’s narrators have arrived there in 2009 with different baggage, divergent pasts. Unlike most of his countrymen, Yongju, once the pampered son of loyalist parents in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang, has not known hunger or deprivation. He and his sister have grown up on bootleg DVDs and foreign novels. But his father’s betrayal of the Dear Leader — in the powerful and startling opening chapter of the book — forces Yongju, his mother and young sister to flee the city and cross the river into China, where a gruesome fate all too often awaits women. Jangmi, on the other hand, was weaned on the deprivations of North Korea’s great famine. She has relied on trading sex for survival, and now, pregnant and determined to get out of North Korea to save her baby, she agrees to an arranged marriage in China. She hopes her new husband won’t realize the bad timing of the infant’s arrival, but her plans are threatened by his spoiled, jealous daughter. Jangmi, though, understands how to survive: “I closed my eyes as one person, opened them as another. Somewhere inside of me there was another self that was hidden from sight. She was watching this other woman.” Religious Danny and his parents emigrated from the Autonomous Korean Prefecture in China when he was 9, but now, a miserable and bullied gay teenager in California, he wants to return to China, where his mother is doing missionary work. After a couple of ugly incidents, his father agrees to send him, but after discovering a secret that his mother has kept from him, Danny flees from her apartment there. ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISE ON NEWSDAY The three meet, and as they try to evade authorities who will send them home, Lee shines a harsh light on the treatment of North Korean immigrants in this foreign world. The result is eye-opening and heartbreaking, even if Danny’s story seems a bit far-fetched. Would a relatively timid son of America, even one born in China, risk his life and run away like that? But Lee uses Danny’s higher position in the cultural hierarchy to underscore the vast injustice and hopeless predicaments of the some 50,000 North Korean immigrants hiding along China’s border. Readers of Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Orphan Master’s Son,” should relish this revelation of yet another facet of North Korean life. “How I Became A North Korean” doesn’t quite reach that novel’s mighty scope, but it’s an intense, unforgettable, compassionate study of human resilience.  Source: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/how-i-became-a-north-korean-review-krys-lee-s-novel-is-a-study-in-human-resilience-1.12258999