to read other books about alienation, such as The
Outsiders and The Catcher in the Rye.
Lee’s novels for younger audiences include F
Is for Fabuloso, Night of the Chupacabras, and If It
Hadn’t Been For Yoon Jun. F is for Fabuloso is the
story of Jin-Ha, a junior high school student whose
poor math scores cause her to tell her parents that
the “F” on her math exams means “fabuloso.” Night
of the Chupacabras is about two Korean-American
siblings, Mi-Sun and Ju-Won, who are invited to
spend a summer in Mexico with a friend, Lupe.
Some mysterious activities on the ranch lead them
to conclude that there is a monster in their midst.
If It Hadn’t Been For Yoon Jun tells the story of Alice
Larsen, a Korean adoptee who considers herself
white. A new Korean immigrant named Yoon Jun
moves to her school, and although Alice is primar-
ily resistant, eventually they form a friendship and
Alice learns more about her Korean heritage. Lee
makes a significant contribution with these nov-
els, making accessible a range of Korean-American
characters and their experiences to elementary-
and middle-school audiences.
FINDING MY VOICE, SAYING GOODBYES and NECES-
SARY ROUGHNESS are written for slightly older read-
ers. These novels present a fresh voice speaking on
behalf of young Korean Americans and their strug-
gles in high school and college. The protagonists
of these three novels are forced to negotiate their
Korean-American identities as events throughout
the novels cause them to learn more about their
Korean roots and family histories. Each protago-
nist is the victim of some kind of racial altercation,
to which Lee does not always bring closure. It is
not always clear if the protagonist has really made
the right decisions.
Besides publishing her first adult fiction, SOME-
BODY’S DAUGHTER (2005), Marie Lee is also an essay-
ist whose work has been published in anthologies
and newspapers such as the New York Times. One
of her well-known pieces is “We Koreans Need an
Al Sharpton,” an editorial essay that calls for Ko-
rean Americans to be more politicized and to strive
for leadership positions so the Korean-American
community can have a public representative. She
founded the Asian American Writer’s Workshop,
an active organization located in New York City.
Bibliography
Davidson, Cathy N., and Linda Wagner-Martin. The
Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the
United States. New York: Oxford University Press,
1995.
Sarah ParkLee, Mary Paik (1900–1995)
Born Paik Kuang Sun in Pyongyang, Korea, the
second of 10 children, Mary Paik Lee became the
only autobiographer of early Korean experience in
America by writing Quiet Odyssey (1990). She and
her family were among the few thousand pioneers
to enter the country between 1902 and 1905, the
small period during which such immigration was
allowed. In Korea, the Lees were an educated, in-
fluential Christian family, and Kuang Sun’s pater-
nal grandmother founded the first girls’ school in
Pyongyang. However, this life was interrupted by
the Japanese occupation of Korea. When Kuang
Sun was five, Japanese soldiers took over the Lees’
house, and the extended family decided that one
branch of the Lee family should leave the country to
ensure that at least some of them would survive.
In 1905 Kuang Sun’s family arrived in Hawaii;
her father was one of more than 7,000 Koreans
recruited to work on the sugar plantations. After
a year, the Lees moved to the mainland, arriv-
ing in San Francisco. From there they migrated
from town to town and from job to job, farming
on Roberts Island and mining quicksilver in Idria.
The children tried to keep up with their schooling,
but that was not always possible. Kuang Sun’s older
brother gave up school to help support the fam-
ily, while she left home to attend high school in a
nearby town for a year. Feeling guilty for leaving
her family, and exhausted by her housekeeping job
and her studies, she dropped out of high school due
to poor health, and married Hung Man Lee on Jan-
uary 1, 1919. Kuang Sun and her husband, known
as H. M., also migrated in order to find work. For
a time they grew rice as tenant farmers and later
owned a fruit stand in Los Angeles; when H. M.’s
health problems required them to give up the fruit
stand, they returned to farming and later managedLee, Mary Paik 167