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Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee gives us a peek into his creative writing classes at Princeton and how his early struggles with English and his own experience as a student shaped him to become the teacher he is now.

It didn’t start out rosy, this love affair that Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee has with the English language.

Throughout kindergarten and all the way to the first few months of first grade, he did not speak—not one word—having found solace in silence against a language that was as much alien to him as the people who spoke it.

But he kept at it and never gave up, his young brain clutched at syllables and words as one would a life raft. He listened and read books—read what he could find—until English wasn’t a stranger anymore. And so by the time he was 10 years old, he was translating for his mother. In middle school and high school, he wrote poetry and stories. At 30, he published his celebrated first novel Native

Speaker, winning literary awards left and right, and, now at 49, finished his fifth novel On Such a Full Sea.

Yet all the while, he never forgot—his struggles, his frustration, and saving grace—books. And so, for his creative writing class at Princeton University, he would de- mand from his students to read, and read, and read. He would give them reading lists that include the novels of

Junot Diaz, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich. “I don’t teach writing,” he insists. “I teach reading… to help writers read their own work.” In fact, his advice to wannabe authors is this: Read many novels. Read the books that you love or you think you would like. Chang-rae recently came to Manila for the Philippine Literary Festival.

He, however, laments that people are less readers now, which, for him, is ironic considering that there are more people now who want to write. “It’s too bad because to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader. Any quality story can teach you a lot, instruct you well on how a story is built. So I try to train my students to become readers first.”

PROCESS VS. THEORY

For Chang-rae, creative writing courses are not there to teach you how to write but to teach you about writing, especially your own writing. “For instance, when you

have a feeling that you are not doing this kind of thing very well but can’t really see it, can’t really recognize it, you sometimes need other people’s eyes to look at it and point out, corroborate what you, yourself, may intuitively know but cannot consciously articulate.”

This, perhaps, came from his own experience in Garrett Hongo’s class. Garrett, later on, became Chang-rae’s mentor. “I was able to see how other people looked at my work, not that I want to change it to please them, but I saw their reasons. It gave me a way to look at my work more objectively. I got some good advice—that maybe I was trying too hard, and I didn’t have to. I didn’t need to push so hard because people were already seeing it, without me having to hit them over the head with it. I just had to let it flow.”

As a teacher, he is more into the process than theory. He would look closely at the text and what can be done to improve it. And he’s good at that— spotting the missing link. One of his students, Fil-American novelist Lysley

Tenorio, pointed out how good Changrae is at zeroing in on what’s lacking. “He’s smart, rigorous, and succinct in pointing out what’s working in a piece of fiction and what isn’t. I am a better writer because of him.”

What Chang-rae sees as pretty common among young students now is the tendency to rush and summarize, which is perhaps another byproduct of the truncated, insta-world that the Internet offers. “They are not patient enough. They’ll rush through quickly over a scene or a thought and they won’t elaborate to the extent that they need to. They think that it’s going to be too boring to go into too much detail of the work.”

Still, he never gets tired of reading his students’ works and, in fact, enjoys the “crazy stuff.” He even encourages his students to experiment and take risks, to try out new styles. The zanier, the better. “I never try to put them in a box or restrict them. I give them as much freedom as I can, and just guide them.”

And in this way, he learns from them, too. “When we discuss literature, they always give me an angle that I have never thought of. And that’s a new perspective, a new way to look at things, at life. And as an author, you need that to make you grow.

NOT JUST TEACHING BUT INSPIRING

For him, being a teacher isn’t about providing students the answers but in inspiring them to want to know the answers, enough to let go of their pride and ask the questions. In writing and in life, there is nothing more powerful than want, than desire, than full- on commitment and sometimes, that is what separates those who do from those who just can.

“I don’t think you need a good mentor for technical things. I think you need a good mentor, a wiser person, to teach you about living as a writer and as an artist. I had a great mentor in Garrett. He was the director of the program I went to. We were able to talk about a lot of things, not just about writing but about life. He taught me to take my own writing seriously, to care about it, and take ownership of it. I did not, then, maybe because I was afraid of being rejected or to say ‘this is me, this is mine.’ I learned to respect my own talent, my own vision, to not be careless, or not take things lightly. I was 25 then and, overnight, I grew up. I started to take my work seriously. I didn’t just do it because I was decent at it. I did it because it’s what I wanted and loved.”