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Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Richard Lloyd-Parry, the Asia

editor of the Times and a contributor to the LRB, and today I'm talking to you from Seoul in South

Korea, where my guest is the novelist Chris Lee. Chris is a professor at Yonsei University in

Seoul and also the prize-winning Korean-American author of two remarkable books,

Drifting House, a collection of short stories, and published more recently her first novel, How I Became a North Korean.

She writes about North Korea, South Korea and the United States,

and the characters who live in the marginal, liminal spaces between those three. And today we're

going to certainly talk about her work, but also more generally about the remarkable current situation in the Korean Peninsula. Chris,

it's a pleasure to talk to you. Welcome. Thank you. I'm glad to be here. Well, there's a lot to talk about,

but let's start by talking about this crisis and how it's being felt here. I mean, you were born in South Korea before becoming an American.

I've been reporting on Korea for 22 years. And in that time, in the manner of a rather jaded

hack, I suppose I've become a bit blasé about North Korea security crises over the years.

I mean, I've lived through a lot of them, and there have been a number.

And I'm very used to this pattern where, you know, as a news reporter for a daily paper,

I get a call from an editor in London who's in a terrible panic because something

alarming has happened in Korea. There's some incident on the border or blood-curdling threats

from the North Korean state media. And they want to know, you know, what's happening. Is it going

to be a war? It seems terribly dangerous. And over the years, I've found

it's been my job to tell people, look, don't worry, calm down. The situation is always rather

...