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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Thorpeblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, my guest is Don Lee.

He's the author, most recently, of Country of Origin, as well as a collection of short stories,

also from Norton, called Yellow.

Now, this is part of our ongoing series about identity.

And one of the things I noticed, as I was reading Country of Origin,

is that of all the forms, the thriller has seemed to be the most congenial, one of those places where through the cracks,

subjects of prejudice, identity, presumption about nationality, because the books are frequently

written in what purports to be a street language, they carry with them a kind of ongoing freight of the unniced-up version about what people are thinking about the people down the block.

Did you find in writing country of origin that the format of the thriller loosened you

to explore things that are usually left unsaid by literary writers? Well, when I started out

writing the book, I really had no idea that it was going to be a mystery, that I thought

it was going to be just mystery, that I thought it was going to be just your

straightforward literary fiction. My father was in the State Department, and I was born in Tokyo,

and I lived there for four years, and then Japanese was my first language. And so we were transferred

over to Seoul, Korea when I was four. And suddenly I learned

Korean and then it was getting a time for me to go to school. And I didn't learn English yet. And so

...