Discovering Linda Sue Park

Linda Sue Park wasted little time becoming a published writer. When she was just nine years old, a haiku she wrote appeared in Trailblazer magazine. Since then, the once-precocious author has written four historical novels for children, all set in Korea and all recipients of much critical praise. Her 2002 Newbery Medal winner, A Single Shard (Clarion, 2001), tells the story of Tree-ear, a homeless orphan who yearns to be a potter, an aspiration far beyond his lowly status in 12th-century Korean society. Park's most recent novel, When My Name Was Keoko (Clarion, 2002), fast-forwards to World War II, during the Japanese occupation of Korea, as seen through the sensibilities of two young narrators, 10-year-old Sun-hee and her older brother, Tae-yul. (See SLJ's starred review, April 2002, p. 154.) Although her stories seem to have sprouted from Korea's soil, Park herself is a daughter of the Midwest, born in Urbana, IL, and brought up in Park Forest, a suburb of Chicago. She now lives in upstate New York with her husband, Ben Dobbin, and their two children, Sean and Anna. Park recently spoke to us about her writing life.

Congratulations on winning the Newbery Medal. What has the experience been like for you?

It's been really exciting. The thing that most surprised me was the response I got from Korea and from Korean Americans. I hadn't anticipated that at all. It was apparently very big news in the media in Korea. In fact, my parents heard from a cousin who lives there, who called the day after and said: "Linda Sue is on the front page of the papers here!" I've been interviewed many times since then, and I'd say easily a third of the interviews have been from the Korean media. I've had many, many messages in the guest book on my Web site (www.lindasuepark.com) from Koreans saying how excited and how proud they were that a book about Korea by a Korean American had won a big U.S. prize. I had a really lovely congratulations letter from [South] Korea's First Lady. That sort of thing just flabbergasted me!

In the dedication to your first book, The Seesaw Girl (Clarion, 1999), you thanked your father for taking you to the library. Were those visits a big part of your childhood?

I grew up in libraries. In fact, I have one vivid memory of being about 12 years old and going to baby-sit for a little girl who lived in the neighborhood, and being absolutely amazed at her bookshelf. She owned hundreds of books, what looked to me like every book I'd ever had from the library. Of course, I knew on one level that people could own books, but it never really sank in until I saw this little girl's room. Growing up, I owned almost no books, and I can really remember the ones I owned because I had so few. I read everything, but it was always from the library.

As a youngster, were you interested in history?

I remember loving a wide range of things. I wouldn't have said that history was my favorite, but certainly many of my favorite titles were historical fiction. Any good story interested me.

How did you come to write historical fiction?

That was part of the ethnic-roots search. When I had my own children, at that time we were living in London. My husband is an Irishman. He's from Dublin, and we would travel frequently to see the Irish side of the family, because it was so close. I felt that at that stage, my children were getting a pretty good feel for the Irish part of themselves. I knew also that we would eventually end up living back in the States, so the American part wouldn't be a problem either. But I knew relatively little about Korea. I couldn't tell them much about Korea because I knew very little myself. That's why I started to read whatever I could find about Korea, to pass it on to them. I didn't have a plan that I would write four historical novels on Korea. It's just that with learning these things and the research I was doing, I kept thinking, "Oh, that would make a neat book." So it ended up that way.

Your novels span eight centuries. Is there a particular period in Korean history that you're especially attracted to?

The Seesaw Girl and The Kite Fighters (Clarion, 2000) are set in an era that's called the Chosôn era—also sometimes known as the Yi Dynasty—that lasted roughly from 1300 to the late 1800s or early 1900s. Really, it is the era that shaped Korea, as we know it today. The Chosôn era interested me because it has determined a lot of the culture and attitudes that remain in Korea now; it only ended a hundred years ago. There's a lot more information about that era than there is about Tree-ear's era, the preceding one, known as the Koryô Dynasty, which eventually, of course, gave its name to Korea. I did keep coming across information as I was reading these books about Korea's celadon pottery in the 11th and 12th century, so that's how A Single Shard got started.

The story literally began as a single shard, with the pottery, rather than with the main character, Tree-ear?

Absolutely. I was curious to know how for that brief period of time, Korean celadon had been considered the best [pottery] in the world. When I do school visits, I tell the kids that we call China China because of China's china. They basically invented the art of porcelain pottery. So how did Korea, this little tiny country, get better at pottery than its huge powerful neighbor, basically beating them at their own game? I was interested in knowing how that could have happened.

In your author's note, you mention that homeless people were a rarity in ancient Korea. Why did you decide to have a homeless orphan as the hero?

First of all, family is very, very important in Korean society, as it is in many, many cultures. But in Asian cultures, the disintegration of [the] family has been much less pronounced [than we have experienced here]. There isn't any bigger way to be an outsider in Korean society than to not have family. Also, there is, I guess, what you'd call a cliché in Korean [culture]: when siblings want to tease younger siblings, they'll say, "Oh, you're not really our family, we found you under the bridge. You're really an orphan from under the bridge." This is how Korean children are teased. I suppose it's one of their primeval fears that they don't really have a family. I wanted to see if this orphan-under-the-bridge thing, which is so negative in the Korean psyche, could be given a twist.

Your latest book, When My Name Was Keoko, is quite a departure from your earlier books. Not only is it set in the 20th century, but it has a more complex narrative structure, with two distinct points of view.

It was definitely the most difficult book to write. It went through, by far, the most drafts and the most revisions. At first it began more similarly to the other three [novels]. It was the girl's story alone, and it was [written] in [the] third person, like the other three books. But it didn't work for me this time. I kept having a lot of trouble. So the first change I made was to switch her to first person. I just think the character's voice was somehow a lot clearer to me in first person. When my editor, Dinah Stevenson, read a full version, she said that she liked it a lot, but Sun-hee was spending far too much time telling her brother's story, and she did not seem to have a compelling enough story herself. It all seemed to be all her observing and telling Tae-yul's story. So I tried a couple of drafts with Tae-yul telling the story.

Lots of times, I hear authors say that their characters talk to them. My characters don't do that. They're definitely characters; they don't become people who live with me. This was the only time in my life that a character has talked to me. I woke up one morning, and Sun-hee was yelling in my head. She was saying that it wasn't fair that I had taken the story away from her and given it to Tae-yul—and she wanted back in. So I think it was at that point, three or four attempts along now, [that] the story became a dual narrative. I realized that I had exhausted the possibilities of third-person past tense and that very traditional type of story structure. I must have been ready to try something different, and the way this story presented itself [to me] was the opportunity to do that.

You've spent part of your adult life in Ireland. Will you ever write a historical novel that takes place there?

Yes, that's one of the things in my idea file. There's actually this bizarre connection between Korea and Ireland, which I hope to explore one day. But at this point, with so much going on, it feels like I'll never have time to write another book again. I know that it's not true. I'm trying to do my best to enjoy [the Newbery Medal], and I really am. It has just been so wonderful. I tell kids on my school visits that it's like, you know how you feel special on your birthday? You just know when you wake up that it's going to be an exciting day? Well, that's what it feels like every morning since I've won the Newbery.