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June 6, 2022
Marie Myung-Ok Lee's Playlist for Her Novel "The Evening Hero"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee's novel The Evening Hero is a smart and unforgettable exploration of trauma, immigration, and the failings of the United States healthcare system.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"This precise, watchful novel reveals the loneliness of the immigrant experience, even when cloaked in outward success… a novel about healers and healing, about unflashy, quiet heroism…[with] lyrical, lush, deeply felt prose… a soulful, melodic, rhapsodic novel."
In her own words, here is Marie Myung-Ok Lee's Book Notes music playlist for her book The Evening Hero:
The Sun: Shin Joong Hyun from Beautiful Rivers and Mountains:The Psychedelic Rock Sound of South Korea's Shin Joong Hyun 1958-1974
Shin Joong Hyun's music is extremely trippy and I'd often listen the whole album to it to get into a mood, but his deceptively song "The Sun," sung by Kim Jung Mi has these beautiful childlike lyrics and invokes a lot of classic Korean nature scenes, "high mountain," "warm sun," and something about "clasping one another's hand to go meet the sun" just brings tears to my eyes.
Love Love Love — Mountain Goats
Something about this song resonated (and reverberated) with Shin's "The Sun" so I'd often play them together to get into a mood, like escaping myself into the world of the book.
With God on Our Side — Bob Dylan
I grew up in Dylan's home town and found it propitious that my book's supply-chain-delayed date was moved to May 24, his birthday. I love the cynicism and anger in this song, and it reminds me of Yungman, my protagonist's hobby of rooting out hypocrisy in his fellow pious Christians.
The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald — Gordon Lightfoot
This song came out in 1976 when I was a little kid it was played all the time in my rural Minnesota mining town because it was ABOUT us, about a carrier carrying ore to the East Coast smelters and the tragedy that occurred. I even went to the Bethlehem steel mills (long defunct but preserved as a kind of weird outdoor museum) to see where the ore one had its endpoint. This as an adult, the song it has fused the "vibe" of being young and in this dying mining town and Bob Dylan absconded from, and then also thinking of how the song has such a beautiful narrative structure.
Cat’s in the Cradle — Harry Chapin
Kind of a joke song about the protagonist's trying to hard to raise his son and being estranged.
Ain’t No Woman Like the One I’ve Got — The Four Tops, The Main Ingredient — The Temptations
You will have to read the book to figure this one out--no spoilers!
This was a funny song someone composed for the internet after a racist college student imitated Asian students talking on the phone.
Holding Out for a Hero — Bonnie Tyler
Another sort of joke song that would get me in the proper humorous/ironic mode even when what I was writing wasn't humorous.
Marie Myung-Ok Lee is an acclaimed Korean American writer and author of the young adult novel Finding my Voice, thought to be one of the first contemporary-set Asian American YA novels. She is one of a handful of American journalists who have been granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War. She was the first Fulbright Scholar to Korea in creative writing and has received many honors for her work, including an O. Henry honorable mention, the Best Book Award from the Friends of American Writers, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fiction fellowship. Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Guernica, The Paris Review, The Nation, and The Guardian, among others. Marie is a founder of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and teaches creative writing at Columbia. She lives in New York City with her family.
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