Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal. You are a very special breed, for you are the only animal, who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hello and welcome to Bookworm. I'm Michael Silverblatt, and today my guest is Chang

Ray Lee. He's the author of A Gesture Life, published by Riverhead Books, the author as

well of Native Speaker, which won most of the literary prizes for its year for

first novel.

His books are literary books.

They center around the lives of Korean-Hifeng Japanese Americans, and they are very unusual books in that, while poetic and intimate,

they are interested in describing what is sometimes called in native speaker the

Chinese wall between the speaker and other people.

And I wondered, how do you make language that can describe people who are trying to conceal themselves?

I think it's always a language of great restraint.

But it's restraint for me that is born from a strange kind of, I would say, ecstatic energy, too.

Because where there's restraint and silence, there's always, I think, deep emotion.

One of the pieces that has spoken to me as a writer, a piece of literature,

is many parts of leaves of grass.

And in that book, there's this ecstatic, broad, expansive reaching.

Not quiet at all, of course, not silent at all.

But there was something emotionally there that I thought,

that's exactly the feeling that some of these people that I'm writing about. That's exactly

the feeling and maybe the exact tonality that I want to get to, that I think is the undercurrent

of what's happening. That's very interesting. Leaves of Grass, Whitman provides the epigraph

...