Ed Park thinks big and absurd
The author mashes up fact, fiction and humor in his sprawling latest novel
Ed Park's “Same Bed Different Dreams” is a retelling of modern Korean history, seen through the prism of a mysterious group of freedom fighters called the Korean Provisional Government.
But it's also the story of Soon Sheen, a Korean American from Buffalo who quit writing fiction to work for a tech company aspiring for the reach of Amazon, Facebook and Google combined. And it's the story of Parker Jotter, a Black man from Buffalo in an earlier era who flew a fighter jet in the Korean War and spent years as a POW before returning home to find cult success as a science-fiction writer. It's like a work of surreal art, where images overlap and change and bleed into one another: Soon wrote a book called “The Sins” but so did a Korean man named Echo, and this book also has sections called “The Sins,” which also feature a doctor and family, whose last name is Sin.
There's a section about Maj. Frank Hallsworth and his wife, Barbara, during the Battle of Inchon and another about surgeon Benjamin Franklin Pierce huddling with Korean civilians while desperately hiding from Communist soldiers. Only later are both revealed to be fictional: from a movie called “Inchon!” which was a total dud and disappeared, and from the “M.A.S.H.” finale, the mostwatched television episode in history.
Then there are stories that seem less realistic — newspaper clippings from a 1950s article in a Buffalo newspaper about the atom bomb wiping out the city, and a story about a Buffalo Sabres hockey coach who drafted a fictional Japanese player — but are true.
While the sprawling cast of characters and time periods (past, present and future) and mix of fiction and fact may leave you occasionally disoriented, Park leavens it all with a healthy dose of humor — a Rene Magritte reference to Douglas MacArthur's pipe, a line about a mortician “who knows of grave matters,” and a character who wrote a six-hour silent version of “The Taming of the Shrew” starring actual shrews.
Park, a founding editor of The Believer whose previous novel was the tautly written workplace satire “Personal Days,” spoke recently by video about balancing this heady mix to create a pageturner out of it all.
What is history?
I start the book with that sentence, and it gets repeated and reformulated throughout. It's a basic but thorny question. Different characters think of it in different ways, and there are different uses of history. It was a way for me to work out what that question means pertaining to American history and Korean history, but also how those two intersect and also my personal history — what I've experienced and what I remember.
So what is history to me? Well, it's what I make of all these things in the past and how I put them into a story, weaving together events people will recognize and some obscure ones. And since it is a novel, I think there's the freedom of making these connections and, in some cases, inventing connections and scenes and quotes.
Q
OK, so what is fiction?
A
I like how you're starting with these grand overviews. Both fiction and history as terms and concepts change depending on the era and
who is speaking about them. I'm at heart a fiction writer, so all the history is grist for the mill. I took a Korean history course in grad school and each event sparked my imagination. I love how fiction is kind of capacious enough to include however much history you want.
Q
In your book, history is also capacious enough to include fiction as you weave elements like the film “Inchon!” and the “M.A.S.H.” TV series.
A
A lot of material in the “Dreams” sections
is drawn from history, but then there's more from movies and TV. Part of the thrill was to write these things so that they would still have the power to surprise. There are these reveals of things you thought were part of this historical tapestry that are actually fake.
Growing up in Buffalo, there weren't many Asians and so you were definitely trying to assimilate, consciously or unconsciously, but you could never forget that you were Korean. What did my friends and their families even know about Korea?