Poured Over: Ed Park on Same Bed Different Dreams

By Jenna Seery / November 30, 2023 at 6:00 am

Ed Park’s Same Bed, Different Dreams blends history, technology and pop culture in a novel that spans time and reality in an unforgettable way. Park joins us to talk about the long gap between his books, writing and identity, media connections in his work and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.            

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.        

Featured Books (Episode):
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
Personal Days by Ed Park
Big Bang by David Bowman
The Notebook by Ágota Kristóf

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’m very, very, very happy to be with Ed Park at our store on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which we are doing our first live taping. So if you hear background noise if you hear other stuff, it’s because we’re live in the middle of a bookstore. So thank you, Ed for being here. 15 years after Personal Days, which was one of my favorite novels 15 years, Same Bed, Different Dreams. It’s a gorgeous title, but it’s long.

Ed Park
15 years, though, talk about long. It’s maybe no coincidence that my oldest son is 15 years old. Okay, I’m just throwing that out there.

So is this where I get to ask you how you manage to load the dishwasher and write and raise your kids at the same time?

I don’t want to sound like a single dad, my wife is in the audience.

I’m just being sarcastic. I’m sorry. That is the question that women writers get asked all the time. And I’m just kind of like, men do it too.

Although, you know, just as a side note, the place that I where I write in the apartment is like, like 10 feet from the dishwasher. So I actually do a lot of putting the putting this plates and taking them out. I find a meditative it helps me when I’m…

I hate the dishwasher. I really do. But so be it. Alright, so 15 years after personal days, you have written a dystopian epic, that pulls from movie history and science fiction and tech. And of course, the literary world, which you hit a little close to the bone, there are a couple of times. This is a very Ed Park book to me. I feel like this is all of the stuff I’ve seen you do in the New York Review of Books, all of the stuff I’ve seen you do in the New Yorker and book forum all of these places. And now we get it in a novel.

You know, I wrote for all these places, and fiction, but also a lot of articles and reviews. And I’ve also worked as an editor. And so when I started writing those pieces, it was sort of a sideline, but you know, I take those assignments pretty seriously. And, you know, I say, far too often. So if somebody’s like, Could you write about, you know, Thomas Pynchon or something, and I’m like, Sure. And then, you know, three months later, I come out with this thing. But I think doing that kind of research and sort of honing my thoughts on these different writers, all of whom I find fascinating, you know, over the years, and we’re talking 15 years, right, that’s got to like kind of leak into my brain a bit. And in fact, some of those writers, especially a couple of Korean writers, from the past that I’ve written about for the New York Review, they appear as you know, fictionalized versions of themselves in Same Bed, Different Dreams, it all kind of feeds into each other.

We’ve got three storylines, all of this novel, all 500-some, 518 pages, give or take.

Something like that.

I could not believe how and I read pretty quickly, but there was going to be no interruption of the reading, there was going to be absolutely no interruption. And the world felt really familiar to me. And that’s with all of the gizmos that Ed has invented. Some of them are, you know, vaguely familiar, but I knew where I was at every single point. Like you didn’t lose me once and you’re doing some structural stuff in this book. That ok, how many of you have read Personal Days? I’m assuming most of you have. Right. Okay. So you know, that thing he does with the voice and you switch between the three sections? Right. Okay. This is one of the reasons we love it, what you’re doing structurally Same Bed, Different Dreams is even beyond that. And I’m not chalking that up to you had 15 years to play with it. Because sometimes 15 years playing with a manuscript is not actually a good thing. Right. So I want to talk about how you wrangle this into what we get to experience.

Sure. Well, you know, it’s been 15 years since Personal Days, it’s been about nine years of working on this book. So there was, I guess, what’s the math here, six years of I don’t know, I was actually working on other stuff that you know, didn’t kind of come to fruition but for this book, it started with what’s now like the second chapter and it’s a storyline that follows a character named Soon. He’s kind of like an Ed Park stand in in some ways. My age, from Buffalo, parents are from Korea, played hockey growing up, etc. But then it kind of goes it deviates from like my biography and he’s working upstate at a tech company called Gloat, which is sort of a combination of the big…

The obvious. And the more obvious.

Exactly, you know, at first, it was like more of a social media thing. But then it’s like, let’s just bundle that, bundle it all together. And that storyline takes place around 2016 over the course of just a couple of months. And those chapters are staggered throughout the book. And that’s kind of a through line in terms of the “I” voice. And so that’s where you see the sort of the kind of the literary satire, the publishing industry satire.

There was a little too much…

It’s all completely made up.

I understand that. But, you hit some buttons, the buttons I thought had been left in the 90s.

It was, you know, the first scene in the book, you know, with this character, it’s like a big dinner party with a lot of sort of literary types. And I was just having fun, it was like a party in my mind where these people could talk. And I kind of went with that for a while just like those, there are a lot of characters introduced early on, and I just kind of follow them. And to make a long story short, it kind of it just kept going. And, you know, some of it was really good and others other parts. I got a little lost. And at a certain point, I realized this, this cannot be the book, like right, there’s a strong voice, but it peters out around, you know, page 400 or something. I’m joking. But, you know, there’s that feeling like, also, as the years go on, you’re like, I’m working, you know, something’s gotta give, like something’s not working. If you don’t feel like you’re arriving at a better version of it, you know, every day. And I had a literary revelation, I read a book called Big Bangby a writer named David Bowman, a posthumous novel that was kind of like…

Let the Dog Drive the Car

So he wrote a book called Let the Dog Drive the Car in the 90s that NYU Press published. And I love that book. It’s like a kind of a cult classic. Right? Right, right. And he’s sort of faded. He wrote a couple other books, and he’s sort of faded from the scene, and he died quite young. But anyway, this, Jonathan Lethem actually edited this posthumous manuscript. It’s a great book, if you’re at all interested in you know, 20s, mid-century American history, pop culture, it’s, it’s all there. But it kind of gave me permission to like, think about Korean history that way. Like, what if I were to write a book where I could talk about all the things that I found fascinating about Korean history, early Korean American history, and American history, to be honest, and how these two, how these things kind of interweave? So I started writing that, just these almost like notes to myself, just to be like, let’s talk about East song, this modernist poet from the 20s, who’s like, writes these poems that are all numbers. Let’s talk about, you know, Sigmund Rhee, who becomes the first president of South Korea. And I realized that this was actually not a separate project, but it belonged in the bigger in the bigger novel. So that’s the second thread. The second kind of section of the book, I mean, they’re, they’re called dreams. a dream, 1,2,3,4,5 and those are kind of in between the other narrative. You should probably be diagramming this.

You don’t have to diagram it. You just have to turn the pages and let yourself go. Because I’m telling you, you will recognize this world. And yes, I’m talking about a dystopian novel like, you know, well, it’s Thursday in a bookstore. I’m talking about just a dystopian novel. But the familiarity and I don’t know, we don’t teach Korean history. We know this, right. I don’t know Korean history probably the way I should. I’m also going to take a moment say we have to come back to the Japanese; we’re going to talk about your Japan. And that’s really their relationship to Korea as well, and imperialism and colonialism, because you can’t talk about the history of Korea without talking about these pieces. And then you can’t talk about what happened to Korea without talking about American imperialism, right. And then I get to add a layer to it because I’m part Japanese and part Taiwanese, and if you know, you know, hello, imperialism, we have a very complicated history there to show all of these pieces, right, that we don’t teach in the US, like we really, in some cases don’t even now know how to have that conversation about what it means to be Asian American or where we’re going as Asian Americans or whether or not we are a unified community, right? All of this plays in to what you’re doing.

Well, I think what you’re saying like we don’t we don’t know how to teach this. We don’t know what I mean, one way, you know, I mean, I’m an old man now. And one reason I didn’t write this book in my 20s, I think is because that it is a question like What is what is Asian American? What is Korean American like? You’re not really taught that in school and so that have been kind of a lifetime of thinking about it and trying to like, work it into fiction.

And also Asian American identity to really belong to the West Coast. When you and I were young, it belonged to LA, it belonged to San Francisco, like people will fight over who invented the nomenclature itself, right? Like it was in San Francisco, it was at Berkeley, it was at UCLA. I’m not going to get in the middle of that fight, because I will lose. I was born in Boston. I was first and only in too many rooms. I was integrating my nursery school. But there’s a much stronger Asian American identity on the West Coast than there is on the east coast. You grew up in Buffalo, first and only in a lot of rooms.

Yeah. I mean, there was, you know, kind of a small but tight knit Korean community there. But it was also like, consciously or not, you’re assimilating.

does buffalo have a K Town? Boston still doesn’t have a K town. But Chinatown in Boston, when I was a kid, it was like three blocks. And that was kind of a stretch, and then you hit the combat zone. So you know, I get to New York. And there’s a Chinatown here. But that, you know, LA still has a little Tokyo and yes, it’s shrinking, but it still exists, like Seattle still has a Japan like these tiny, tiny pockets. Still are there. But we haven’t figured out as Americans how to talk about that peace of our experience. You’re doing that here that yeah, in this book, in a way that yeah, we couldn’t have done in our 20s There’s no way right.

I think it’s, you know, having distance from that, that time in my life. And, and also, you know, having the privilege of being alive and just kind of seeing how, how history, you know, extends and where we are now, it’s kind of crazy. Like there’s there are so many Korean American novels and works of fiction this year. And, you know, for growing up, there certainly weren’t any there were like two books and 50 years or something.

It was a wasteland.

Things have changed. And I think, one, you know, 99 years ago, when I started writing it, I think there was this idea. We mentioned Personal Days, my first book, which is kind of this, it’s an office comedy, but race is not really a part of it, right? In fact, sometimes we don’t even know the character’s last names. It’s sort of it comes in a little bit, but it was almost like I was saving all my thinking around that for this book.

I don’t think the world was ready for Personal Days to have been a different book. If you think about the conversations we have about race now that still makes some people profoundly uncomfortable. When I look back at sort of what the landscape looked like, in the 90, certainly late 90s, early aughts, publishing was having this moment where a lot of energy was going in to sort of what we were calling diverse voices, right? And then it stopped for a while, because then suddenly, everyone’s like, well, no one’s really buying these books. And it’s like, well, no, actually, they are when they can find them. That’s a whole different conversation. But then we had a moment where it’s kind of like, oh, okay, we hit our quota. Yeah, right. And now we’re seeing that energy come back, and we’re seeing people who are looking for more and some of that energy is going into YA publishing, some of that energy is going into genres like romance and sci fi, like sci fi used to be sort of this extremely white landscape for a very, very long time. And all of the people winning the prizes, and you know, all of the best sellers, and when even I mean, I’m sorry, elves, right. We’re writing about elves. We’re writing about pointy ears and lasers, and we can’t talk about race. Okay, cool. And I do want to bring in sci fi, because you’re teaching the Sci Fi in a way at Princeton, there is a sci fi piece running through this, you have a great character. And like I liked the idea that we can play with the genre, and we can use genre to talk about the stuff that makes it profoundly uncomfortable.

Yeah, I think that was my intention. I mean, I’ve always, I’ve always read science fiction, I’m teaching a speculative fiction workshop, which has been really fun. I’ve taught workshops, you know, standard writing workshops before but now this time, like every story is about the multiverse like it like time travel, like all these crazy things happen. So it’s just very entertaining to kind of get these stories, the way it functions in the Same Bed, Different Dreams is so I mentioned that these two threads that going through these two narrative threads. There’s a third one, which is a little bit hard to explain, but each of those chapters is titled 2333. And so it’s kind of a futuristic date. Right there is a science fiction writer who is a former Korean war fighter pilot. He’s African American. He lives in Buffalo, and he runs The electronics store like an appliance store, this is kind of the typical occupation of the Philip K Dick character, like if you if you read Philip K Dick, that’s what a lot of his characters do. But what I wanted to do is have him have this character, Parker jotter. He’s writing these science fiction novels on the side and getting them published. They have kind of a small following. And some of his readers think that there are things about Korea in his book based on his experience, because when he was fighting in Korea, he saw, you know, for lack of a better term, a UFO, he was captured, jailed by the by the North by the communists, and he doesn’t really talk about that stuff. And so one of the conceits is that in his science fiction, which supposedly has nothing to do with our world, these kind of pieces of Korean history and folklore and stuff are creeping into his book, and he flatly denies it. So that’s where the science fiction kind of comes into this into this novel.

But now I’m going to be slightly difficult for a second because alien is a word that gets thrown around, and people who look like you and I, dude, you’re from Buffalo, right? I mean, you can take Amtrak to Buffalo. Yeah. Boston, you know, I have a choice. I can take, you know, Amtrak or I can fly. Actually, you can fly to Buffalo. Right. Okay. Shows you how much I know about buffalo.

Buffalo is farther than Boston from New York. New York is a very long state, to say,

I’m a city person. I’m a city. I’m just better in cities. That’s really all I got. And I realize Buffalo is a city. But y’all understand what I’m saying. But this idea, though, that you can take science fiction and turn it on its ear. Like, let’s sit with that for a second. Because honestly, right, there’s this expectation sometimes that we’re going to write a certain kind of narrative. It’s going to be an immigrant story, it’s going to be this, it’s going to be that we have to fall within we have to color within the lines, right? Like icky metaphor, but there you have it. And you blow up all of that, with this book, all of it, all of it, the tech bros even I mean, please make more fun of tech bros, please. Everyone should be excuse me, if anyone here is a tech person, I’m sorry. But that culture, right, like that culture. And when you look at kids of color, who are part of that whole tech world, they sort of become a different kind of person in a way, right? Like they become the bro-est of the bros. Yeah. And I’m looking at them going, you’re still you what’s happened?

Right? Right. You’re right. One of the things I wanted to do, or maybe this is just part, you know, Personal Days, it was an office novel, but I didn’t want it to be a typical office, not like, it would be funny. But you know, I’m going to do stuff for the structure. Like, it’s just part of who I am, especially as a as a fiction writer. And with this book, you know, the canvas is bigger, and I and I knew that these three parts all had to kind of work differently, even within like the 2333 thread, I do something where each chapter of it jumps forward a decade and is done in a different stuff. So I’m constantly trying to, you know, keep it fresh for me, because I feel like if I’m fascinated by what’s on the page, like the reader will be as well. And I think that maybe, you know, we’ve been talking about sort of Asian American literature and as, as a concept, obviously, I want it to stand out in some ways, like no other book will be like this, but also maybe to hopefully show people what I’m talking about writers, you know, what can what is possible. If that doesn’t sound too, too immodest?

No, because one of the things I’ve been noticing in the reviews of the new book, too, is, you know, people are throwing around names like Pynchon and DeLillo. And I’m like, it’s about time. Right? Like, why shouldn’t you just sit? I mean, you clearly they are big influences. But I mean, you pull from so many different places, and so many different ways. And to me, that’s American literature. Right? Like, we shouldn’t just be saying, it’s going to be here on the shelf, like, write the thing you’re going to write. But of course, we’re going to bring all of the influences. Yeah, you’re always going to have hockey and a book, dude, I know this. Like, I’m not going to read an Ed Park novel and not have a little hockey, a little hockey. I’m good with it. I’m okay. The New England everyone gets skates when they’re little like you show up and they’re like, here’s a pair of skates don’t try not to kill yourself. But go but this idea right that you are some sort of hyphen or an alien or anything else. It’s like no, your dude from Buffalo, right?

This book? Yeah, I think I mean, the hockey thing is is interesting, because, you know, when I started reading it, I was thinking I hockey was not on my mind, let’s say but I just Oh, well, just I didn’t set out to write a book with hockey.

I know. But all I’m saying is hockey has just been a thing for you since you were tiny. So how is it not going to somehow?

I think over the years As I’m, as I’m working on this, you know, you kind of like, go deeper into your memory, right and the things that you’re interested in. And then I realized that this is dating myself, but like, in the early, I guess, early 2000s, but let’s say 20 years ago, or even more than that, I had written a line just for a little couple page thing that I was trying out. Somebody basically says, you know, I believe the Korean War never ended. And I believe that the 1999 Stanley Cup Finals were never resolved. So that’s when that’s when that’s when the Sabres lost to the to the Dallas Stars. And there are still people who say that because the winning goal was scored by Brad Hall when his foot was in the crease, like that shouldn’t count and every anyway, but it’s sort of like a ridiculous concede right to compare these things. You know, the magnitude is completely different. But writing this book, I got to this part where I was like, well, what if somebody thought that?

So if you do have a question, and it’s on an index card, please would you give it to Jason I just also like to work in questions as we go, because there’s nothing more boring than sitting around waiting for your question to be asked. Here we go. I mean, as you can tell, I do my homework, but I’m also curious to see what you guys are thinking. Oh, interesting. Did Fred Armisen’s discovery of his grandfather’s heritage, which he had thought was Japanese, inspire the character his father tells him he’s Korean and not Japanese. Is this a common phenomenon?

It might be more common than you think. And that’s not really a spoiler it happens early in the book. And that was definitely written pre-Fred Armisen, but that episode was fascinating. The Finding Your Roots share where he had all his life thought he was his, I guess his grandfather was this very famous Japanese modern dancer and had turned out to be a spy. But then, you know, on that show, they discovered he’s that family, his dad was part of the family actually came from Korea and changed their name. So somebody, there is a character, not the main character. But there’s another character in the book where that is the case.

Yeah, Koreans in Japan, have a really rough go of it. And, you know, there’s a lot to love about some aspects of Japanese culture, but there’s just some really weird stuff. There’s just some really, really weird stuff. And this idea that you can be that insular. And just, I don’t know, I still I think there’s a better way to handle it. But again, no one in Japan has asked me for my opinion on the subject. So maybe I should just stop it. I do. I come back to this idea of a pan Asian American identity, right? Like, we’re a little complicated. We’re a little messy, like, we really would like to do better. And sometimes I look around and I’m like, wow, wow. Okay. Like there are there are moments where I look at the community, and I’m just like, Yeah, we could do better. We could do better. Wow, we could do better. It’s interesting to me the way you play with identity and the one that Ed and I agreed when we were talking about this, this morning that we were not going to do any spoilers. The book is two days old. I am not going to take the pleasure of reading this book away from you, or anyone listening to the show. So we’re staying far, far away from spoilers, but I will tell you that when I got to the end of the book, I yelled, because it is so satisfying. And he does a thing. He does a thing that I’m not going to steal from you guys. But it was amazing, but it’s also playing off of identity. Sure. Yeah. In a way that isn’t necessarily about race but it’s also not not about race.

Yeah, that’s a good way to tiptoe around it Yeah, I was so happy when Miwa sent me a message this morning that was full of expletives in a really good way. I guess I want to say, You know what, the book has sections that you know, there is a lot of history in it. But it’s like only the good parts like I just want it to be entertaining on the one hand and so I’ve put in all these kind of revelations and like twists and stuff. So that’s exactly the effect I wanted to have when you when you got to that point. Yeah. But if maybe stepping back from the end for a moment, maybe I should just mention the what the Korean Provisional Government is okay, as a way of getting…

That is not a spoiler, it is actually maybe a thing you should know. But you have to tread gently.

Yes. Well, just the narrator Soon Sheen, who I mentioned at the beginning, he comes across this manuscript by by a Korean novelist, and it’s called Same Bed Different Dreams. And the manuscript is a novel that proposes that something called the Korean Provisional Government which was founded in 1919 when Korea was a colony. And the idea was like, this was a government in exile, it didn’t really have any power, but it was like to tell the world, we should be free, we were a country for 1000s of years, blah, blah, blah. And nobody, nobody was really listening. But the conceit is that in this novel within the novel, that the KPG, in fact, still exists, it did not dissolve after World War Two, it kept going. So some real people who are in it, like Sigmund Rhee, are, are named, and I kind of get into their lives. But then I also or my author in the book ropes in all sorts of people. So that’s it, but it’s sort of a way, I guess, to maybe make both, you know, kind of American readers as a whole. But also, you know, also obviously, Korean Americans, like, think of what is the relationship between Korean history and American history?

But what is history? Right? You What is you asked this multiple times throughout the book, what is history? Why can’t you just tell the good bits, because that’s really what a history book is, it’s just telling the good bits.

I’m a little nervous, because my college roommate is here. He was a history major, and I wasn’t. I do bring that up, that’s the very first sentence of the whole book. And I look, you know, I kind of subject history to various fictional treatments. But I kind of think that the answer to that question, and that question is repeated, right. It’s threaded through the book, and in the various different sections that I’ve mentioned. And I think the answer to that question is the book. Like, I think, you know, you kind of throw out this abstract question, but to get to something approaching an answer. It’s like, I had to use everything I knew and everything I knew about writing, to like, kind of make this thing that’s also about, like you said, earlier identity and a way of, kind of squaring that with, with what I know or what I what I’ve felt and thought about the history.

I mean, we’re sitting here, making history, not the kind that’s I mean, obviously, we’re releasing the show into the world. But we are sitting here in a moment where we are making history. You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth, it’s about to become history. I mean, I think we need to change our definition of what history is right. It’s not just 1000 page book that has been researched and footnoted and everything else. I mean, we’re it, history doesn’t exist without us. The question is, how do we tell it and who do we let tell it and how do we claim it back when someone may have… Mash comes up, obviously, a lot in this book, and I realized Mash was like the most watched television show ever in the history of the bla bla bla bla bla. And I had a math teacher in elementary school who had actually served in the Army, and he used to wig out when kids would talk about Mash. And I don’t blame him. He clearly had had a very bad experience. And he was like, it was not like that. Yeah, it wasn’t a comedy. Oh, no, no. And I mean, seriously, I get I totally get it. But I’m just watching this math teacher kind of, I felt very bad for him, even as a tiny person, because I was like, this is not good. Like, whatever is happening here is not good. But I also really hated math and just kind of not wanting to not be in the room. You know, we have these ideas. Right? There are people who genuinely believe whatever they were told, I warned you I was going to bring this up. But we got to talk about Inchon for a second. That movie. Was it really produced by the Moonies?

Yeah. Okay. Well, so you mentioned you know, everybody knows what Mash is, right? It was the series finale in 1983. I put that in the book. It was it’s still like, I think the most watched non-sports thing in history. 1983 is like an important date in the book. And when I saw that, that when I remember, I don’t know if people here are old enough to watch it in 83. Yeah. I remember watching it. I actually watched a lot of Mash because it was on constantly and it was on after school. But it was a weird way for me to think about Korean history. I don’t think that’s what I was consciously thinking. But it’s like, my parents lived through the Korean War. My dad was a teenager during the war. But you know, later he was he was in a mash. You know, he served in mash in the Korean Army, but it’s this comedy. All the Asian characters are kind of like off to the side. It’s, you know, filmed in Malibu or wherever. One of the things I wanted to do in some sections of the book is kind of look at popular representations of Korean history and the Korean War. And so you bring up Inchon, which is a movie that it was in theaters for like a millisecond. In, I believe in 81. It finally came out and it was produced by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon. And I don’t know exactly how much it cost but it was it was very expensive. They paid to have like, if you can imagine the early 80s Like Laurence Olivier plays MacArthur, Toshiro Mifume plays I don’t even know what his character was supposed to be, but he’s in it. Omar Sharif is in it.

Sounds like the Winds of War. You know, remember when there were many series on ABC and like your mom’s friends would watch them and you would just quietly slink out of the room.

Critically reviled. And it’s, it often comes up on the list of like, biggest turkeys, you know, ever, but you actually watch it and it’s kind of like parts of it don’t make sense. I still don’t maybe get all of it. But it’s sort of fascinating, just as this the cinematic artifact where why did he want to make this movie? You know, why did he spend so much getting the you know, I think he also hired like the South Korean army to like actually be in the movie. And anyway, it was too and it’s sort of like that part of the book is talking about, about the 80s. So it was really something I couldn’t let go of one of the things I’ll say if we’re talking about history, I was also thinking about like, what you remember, right? So I remember Mash I remember this. I actually never saw it in the theaters because it was it was there just like I think just one weekend, it was gone before the next weekend. But in the book, you know, my characters obviously go see it odd job from do we know, gold finger played by a Japanese actor in the movie, but you read Gold Finger and the way Koreans are described, it’s just like, so. It’s like beyond racist. It’s like its own thing. So I like couldn’t resist, you know, putting these things in like pop culture, but

Also why shouldn’t we claim that back? Yes. Right. Exactly. Honestly, Douglas MacArthur really like dude has, wow, there were some words that came out of his mouth. And I was like, you know, you know that. Okay. Why shouldn’t we?

Exactly, like, I feel like if they’re in my book, then it’s it is sort of an act of reclamation, and maybe, you know, reframing.

I mean, if we don’t do it, someone else is gonna keep doing it around us. So we may as well.

I don’t know that people think about Mash or Inchon these days. So I feel like within living memory.

Maybe not waking up and saying, oh, let’s think about Mash today. But I do think some of the ideas that they pick, Oh, you’re right, they carry that around. And you may not know, nostalgia can be weaponized. Right? Nostalgia can be absolutely weaponized. And I think there are times where people do it. unconsciously. Yeah. And it’s really annoying. And I would like it to stop. I would really like it to stop. But I don’t think it’s necessarily I think there’s a lot that happens that isn’t always intentional, right? And if we don’t have these conversations, if we don’t ask these questions about where that attitude came from, then we’re stuck in a Groundhog Day loop. Yeah. You know, that movie is cute, but I would like to not. But yeah, no, thank you move on to the next day. Really, I’m good with that. And granted, I’m talking to the guy who can connect The Notebook with Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams to get Agota Kristof.

Who wrote another book called The Notebook.

Yeah, I know. But you did it on the pages of the New York Review.

I had fun with that. That’s what they paid me for.

I know, do more of it, please. I mean, I was trying to figure out if I could work in a joke about the Fast and the Furious. And I was like, No, can’t do it. But I’m gonna try anyway. Alright, so most fun thing about writing this book.

The most fun thing?

I keep hitting on the hard stuff.

I believe Jonathan Franzen said this at a panel or something. He said, If you’re writing it, and you’re having fun, it’s probably good. If you’re writing and you’re not enjoying it, it’s probably not that good. So when you get to that point, where for example, in these historical sections called the dreams when I was sort of it was kind of like this Firehose effect, like, just like, all these ideas kept, you know, parts of episodes or history, from TV from movies, like, they just kept coming. And it was like, they all belong in the book. And it was this almost, you know, somewhat manic idea that, that these all belong together. And, you know, I did cut some things that as the book got longer, longer, but there’s a way like, the most fun thing I guess, is when you see those elements that you put in without kind of knowing how they connect, finding a connection, and I think I you know, no spoilers, but there are a couple places that there was yelling. It wasn’t it wasn’t yelling.

There was a lot. Yeah. The connecting of the dots. Yeah, it’s there. Yeah, it’s absolutely, absolutely there. You have also worked as a book editor. You have a terrific editor who I’m very fond of. Andy Ward. Are you when you’re writing though, are you editing as you go? Are you just handing it over to him?

I am editing as I go for you know, it, it comes and goes like sometimes I’m, you know, revising, revising. But other times, it’s like, just keep going just keep going. You’ll revise later, this book was kind of unusual because I got to the end of a very long and actually quite different draft before the historical elements really kicked in.

He warned me about that. And I just want you I think we did talk about this and you’re like, well talking about this book for a while, for years, I’ve known this was coming.

And anyway, but that that was kind of the occasion for like a major reboot. That was actually more my agent, PJ, very gently saying, you know, but it was good. It was good that he said that. And I think one thing, kind of, if that was phase one, like phase two of the writing of the book, I was pretty ruthless, with myself, like, so almost like, as my own editor. And obviously, Andy did, like an amazing job, when would that kind of second version came in and kind of, you know, I wrote a whole new section to try to address my, our thoughts that he had, and he wasn’t asking for that. But in my mind, I was like, alright, this new chapter set in the 70s, because that’ll kind of, you know, piece things together. You know, as a book editor, what I want to edited books, you know, there’s some books that come in, and you just, you just, they’re ready to go, there has to be the hard covers and others where you’re like, Let’s mess this up a little bit. Let’s find out what’s working, what’s not. And I think I was able to do that with this in the second phase.

I also don’t think you turn off that muscle, right? Like, I don’t think writers turn off the editorial muscle, I don’t think editors turn off the writing muscle. Like I’ve met people who as they’re learning to write, they have that really stiff, like, I must use the words and the punctuation and everything must be orator, you know, and you’re just like, sweetie writing book copy. It’s got to swing. It’s gotta, it’s got to swing like we can’t, you’re not delivering a dissertation. I need you to make someone want to pick up this book.

Yeah, I mean, I will say, you know, part of this book is just a comic novel. It’s like Personal Days. And that’s maybe my natural mode, right? I like to write jokes. And so yeah, I’m a little bit sometimes. But one of the things is for book that takes us long like that, that early chapter that I mentioned, this big dinner scene, like, it was like a joke fest, right? But then, you know, year seven, I’m looking at that same chapter for like, you know, it could have been like, the 80th time and it’s like, if the jokes aren’t still working, I’m going to cut them like they could have worked in 2014. But they got to work in 2023.

Jokes always work though. If you’re Asian, I’m sorry. Like, everyone doesn’t present jokes. There’s always those are kind of the classic ones who need to write and hold tight. But I also say my grandfather was one of 12 children. So I have so so many cousins. Ed, you really did give us so many questions. Is Sprout coming back, the dog?

Oh my god, you’re the only one who’s picked up on this. Julie, the great Juliet Otsuka my, my idol. Yes, there’s two of us. My friend Kevin joked, but this was the long awaited sequel to Personal Days. But the only connection is that the dog in this book is named Sprout. And that was the name of the boss in personal days. I mean, he’s the reincarnation.

I was kind of hoping and I was kind of assuming, but you know, Sprout shows up in a couple of ways in this book, where dogs digging holes isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I mean, it was good. It was secure. Yeah, it was clever.

He actually wound up playing a pretty big role, the dog.

And that’s all we’re gonna say, it’s all we’re gonna say, this book actually feels more personal than Personal Days, in a lot of ways. It feels like there is so much of you in this book. And I’m not talking about you know, since three lines of biography, I’m talking about you as Ed Park critic and writer and dad and just thinker and I mean, for want of a better word, right? philosopher king? It’s like you left it all on the field. Pardon the bad sports metaphor.

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely true. Even the Personal Days was called Personal Days. Like, I mean, a lot of my thoughts about working in an office were definitely in that book. But not my thoughts about you know, I wasn’t a dad yet. But also, my, the thing about being Korean and growing up, you know, growing up in Buffalo, there wasn’t any hockey that I know of. Yeah, in a way. I mean, this, this goes back to your question about like, when did I have fun? It’s sort of maybe that realization that as someone who doesn’t think of himself as an autobiographical writer, yeah. In terms of fiction, like there was a way to use life material in a way that felt true to my instincts as a fiction writer to write and make it kind of work as a novel. And you know, this character’s life starts out like mine and then ends up nowhere near mine. So at the very least, it’s nice to have a character board and 1970 so I can you know, at every age I’m like, oh, yeah, he was watching you. He was watching mash then or whatever. And listening to Rush I mean…

The reference where just things have happened. It could have been Boston, who I’ve seen live at the Leicester Centrum, but we won’t go there. You know, we did a lot of videos a long time. And very American. Yeah. Right. Like what gets more American than like Russia and Boston and like all of those big like crazy.

I mentioned the band Asia in the book. And when that band came out, I just, I mean, nobody was Asian in that group, right? That was all like people from like, ELP and Yes, and stuff. But I was like, I gotta, I gotta buy this tape.

We did a lot with very little back in the day, like we really really did a lot with very, very little.

Well, it’s, it’s interesting, though, because like any glimpse of like, possible representation, anything Asian, you know, you kind of gravitate toward and there was one Korean stand up named Johnny Yun, back in those days, and he would come on The Tonight Show sometimes and like, tell some jokes and sing. And he was actually in a movie called They Call Me Bruce, which, you know, is kind of a flop, but it was sort of interesting. Like, there was nobody else like, who would know other Korean actor that I could think of who started his movie?

We settled for a lot of stuff. Yeah, we settled we settled, possibly too often. But I’m going to ask two of Ed’s questions because they’re making me laugh. Okay. Are your awesome words on criterions Rosemary baby, the collector’s edition.

So I wrote the liner notes to the movie Rosemary’s Baby, I don’t think that’s the reason why, but interesting, you know, we’re on we’re on the Upper West Side, you know, watching that movie a lot and learning about the filming and the mystique of it. The upper west side does come up in the book. So I feel like there I was, I was kind of like vibrating on that uncanny UWS wavelength.

All right, and then which Korean kingdom was the best?

I don’t know. You mean, which of the Three Kingdoms of Yore? I guess the Silla Dynasty…

I mean, wasn’t part of the fun of reading and you guys know this and I’m preaching to the people who are listening from wherever the future. You’ve written about d&d for The New Yorker, you’ve written about Dune, which is a movie that I still go back. And I’ve seen the new version, and I’m still man, I don’t know how I feel about it. But when you explain is like the ultimate adolescent boy fantasy, I’m like, oh, yeah, that really makes sense. That makes so much sense. And here, you are pulling from all of these different places. Right. And then you turn around and you’re writing about Kristof? Yeah.

I like to go I like to go High, low. I think those are my interests, I guess. But I think there’s something like powerful about so we’re talking about this book, The Notebook by a Hungarian writer named Agota, Kristof, told in the voice of identical twins in a time of war in an unnamed country and it’s like the most brutal, hilarious perfect novel that I’ve that I’ve read maybe like from, its from the 80s. But also, you know, Dune or Dungeons and Dragons, like these things are also very important to me. And I think, you know, it’s partly like the books you read when you’re a certain age like Vonnegut or Philip K. Dick, the games you play in this case, d&d, like they stay with you like I don’t I don’t play d&d now. But I think about it a lot.

But it’s also story, right? Like, all of this is foundational story work. And again, I come back to this idea that, you know, you don’t have to stick to, like, find the thing where voices right, like, if I think about the writers that I love, love, love. There’s some weird stuff in there. And then there’s the stuff that does not age well, that we shall not speak of ever again. Henry Miller, you do not age, right. Wow, that. But all of these pieces, right? Like as a reader, you bring your own experience to whatever you’re reading. And as a writer, obviously, that’s the place you start, but you’re also a reader. Yeah, right. Like you don’t separate the two there isn’t that part of Ed’s brain that is the writer part. And the writer part. There’s Ed, the guy who sits down and creates this world.

And I think I was, you know, this is my second published novel, but I think it was comfortable enough with my own voice. Like, I know what my voice is. I know what my sensibility is that it’s like I could invite all these influences in into this book. There’s a little bit of that in Personal Days, but this is much more. You know, I mentioned Yi Sang, this Korean modernist poet, it’s like, he wrote these really like, I mean, this word, probably should not be used with Asian people, inscrutable poems. They’re like real, but they’re, they’re inscrutable even to Korea. There’s right there. But he is like one of the most famous poets, writers of all Korean literature, there’s a big prize called the Yi Sang prize that Han Kang won for The Vegetarian, what if these poems which are formatted so strangely, sometimes it’s a grid of numbers that are like reversed as if in a mirror? What if these were all because he was is like a spy for the Korean Provisional Government like what if like, that’s where the fiction kicks in. It’s like, what do I do with this thing that I’ve been thinking about for 25 years? How do I put it in my book?

And maybe it’s nonfiction? Maybe? I mean, it could have been.

We don’t know what he was doing in Japan in 1937.

Alright, so what’s next? Do we wait another 15 years,

We do not wait another 15 years. I have a book of stories that will hopefully come out before too long. I mean, they’re all written. And actually, a lot of them were kind of written around the same time I started. I mean, they weren’t they were gathered back in 2014. Some are even older, talking about stuff that doesn’t age. Well, like I really went through and took out the ones I didn’t like, put in some newer ones that I wrote. And then there’s, you know, I feel pretty excited. I’m writing another novel and kind of, you know, you finish a book and it has to be revised, edited and everything. During that time, I was also just kind of thinking about this other book that I guess I’m calling sort of a, like a K horror novel, but with historical elements, a little bit of the Same Bed, Different Dreams flavor.

I’m good with it, but okay, just keep bringing it.

It’ll be interesting. Yeah. But yeah, hopefully not another nine years.

Okay. But flipping between short stories and something as sort of heftier as a novel like Same Bed, Different Dreams, that is a different set of muscles, right, like writing short stories, versus being able to sit with multiple narratives in a novel. I’m a little surprised to say to hear you say that stories are even on the horizon.

I’m fond of these stories, because there was like, a time when I was, you know, I was working as an editor, you know, like, it was….

When the New York Times called you, John, that was fun. What’s that? There was a little news article about Ed and there’s a correction at the bottom that says, Oh, we misstated his name.

Anyway, they’ve, they’ve learned their lesson. While many of these stories kind of came about because somebody would ask me to do a reading and I didn’t want to read from Personal Days again. So I’d write a story for that reading. And I think three of them, Michael Miller, I put for him like they have this Valentine’s Day reading. And so three of the stories are like I wrote them for Michael, you know, and so you kind of kind of gather these things, but you think they’re all their own thing and disconnected from each other. But right, you once you gather them, you can kind of see the themes come through. But it’s, it’s I’m a very different short story writer, like I think with stories, I, you know, I think it’s a good strategy just for any kind of story, but you kind of you got to hook the reader upfront. Usually, for me, like make them laugh, like, just have the jokes and the wordplay like, you know, go full tilt from the beginning, because you’re going to be out of it in 10 pages, right? You just want to leave that leave that impression. And also the fact that a lot of these were written to be read, I think, I think knowing that that’s actually good editor internally. That’s a really good editor.

Yeah, early on for the show. Before we were doing a video piece of it. I had to edit the audio. I just want to point out I’m a bookseller and I learned how to edit that was wild. It changed the way I interview because it was like yeah, I don’t want to sit here and have to clean up my own rambling.

It helped you shape the questions.

Much, much, much, much, much better. Because I mean, early on, I was kind of like, well, I don’t know what I’m doing and we don’t have the budget for an editor and hello world. We’re just gonna make a show and see what happens. So we’ll have a different conversation than when the story collection comes out.

I would love that.

Ed Park, thank you so much. I’m Miwa Messer. Thank you all for joining us tonight.