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Allison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Allison Stewart. We just heard about Jeremy Lin's real life. Now let's talk about some art inspired by it. Matthew Salesses's new novel, The Sense of Wonder centers on Won Lee, a Korean American NBA player and Carrie Kang, a Korean American producer trying to bring K-drama to a US audience.
Despite being immensely talented, Won Lee had been a bench warmer for the Knicks until a string of injuries forced the coach to put Won into the game. What follows as a meteoric rise. He's referred to as The Wander, but that shine fades just as quickly when structural racism bubbles up and Won's career is thwarted by a country that just wasn't ready for him.
Add to it a love triangle for a little spice and you get what Kirkus Reviews calls, "A smart, very meta take on love, sports, race and media." Matthew Salesses is the author of eight books and was a finalist for the Pen Faulkner Award for fiction. He teaches fiction. He's currently an assistant professor of writing at Columbia University, and he joins us now. Welcome to the show, Matthew.
Matthew Salesses: Thanks so much for having me here.
Allison Stewart: Matthew will be in conversation tonight with author Kirsten Chen at Books Are Magic at 7:00 PM. What did you think that, maybe fiction, you could explore with fiction about this reality that was Jeremy Lin's reality of being the one and only in the NBA and being the first. What could you explore in fiction that maybe non-fiction couldn't get to?
Matthew Salesses: I didn't really know what it was like to be Jeremy Lin, only knew what it was like to be me and to imagine the ways in which being seen that way, being seen one way before insanity and then a totally different way for two weeks, and then another completely different way right after the loss. That's something that I could imagine pretty well because I've walked through various rooms and various ways of people looking at me throughout my life.
Allison Stewart: You said in the past you instruct your students, you're a teacher, you teach writing about writing for three rings of audiences. When you think about that as applied to this novel, what did you have in mind?
Matthew Salesses: At the center of that ring is my friend Kirsten Chen, who I'm doing the launch party tonight with at Books Are Magic. We send each other a thousand words a day of our novels as we write them. She gets pretty much everything that's in my head, all the good stuff, but also all the bad stuff. Then I start to think about a larger audience usually of Asian American adoptees, especially Korean adoptees around my age in a large wave that came then, but also politically similar to me reading a lot of literary fiction.
I actually consider that, sadly, to be a pretty small number. Then in the third ring of audience, I'm thinking about Asian Americans in a larger sense who read a lot of literary fiction, and then how I can talk between the lines of what it's like to be on this side of the community and what it's like to be on the other side of the community.
Allison Stewart: The story opens with Won's success, but as you read more and more into the book, it becomes clear this is so much about relationships as much as the plot device to get us where we're going. We have the TV producer, Carrie. Won has a tense relationship with an Asian journalist, Robert Sung, who's also Korean American. You've got the Knicks captain thrown in there, his wife. The relationship between Won and the reporter is so interesting to me. How would you describe that dynamic and what were you trying to get at with this dynamic between this Asian reporter and this Asian basketball star?
Matthew Salesses: Robert Sung has been in a similar situation to one in that he also played with the Knicks Star, but in high school, when they were both in high school, and he wanted to be the first Asian American basketball star, but had his career cut short by an injury. Actually, steps on Star's foot and twists his knee. He's watching, one, have this meteoric rise, but also having to write about it as the beat writer for the Knicks.
It's a vicarious thing, but also something that he is fairly jealous of. I was thinking a lot about Robert is adopted from Korea like myself, and there's a way in which I feel sometimes both as a part of the Asian American community, but also somewhat outside of it as someone who grew up without the same cultural touchstones, and so Sung has the same dynamic, but times too because he also has the dynamic on the basketball.
Allison Stewart: Won Lee is given the name, the Wander, obviously, a playoff of his name and he shapes against the phrase, why?
Matthew Salesses: I think sometimes when people use your name in that way to pun on it, then it becomes a symbol that replaces you as a person, and Won feels that he has been replaced by this two-week performance and that people aren't really seeing him. It's better because people are seeing him in a good way, whereas before, they were seeing him symbolically in a bad way, but it's still not really him.
Allison Stewart: My guest is author Matthew Salesses, author of the new book, The Sense of Wonder. The second perspective we get is Carrie Kang's, Korean American TV producer, who is really focused on bringing K-drama to American TV networks. The way you bring her in, and when you get to read a little bit of it, is she starts her section talking about those videos of cake that look like something else, but people cut into it and then they're amazed by it. I'm going to ask you to read a paragraph from the chapter, It's a Cake.
Matthew Salesses: On my favorite account, the creator was a tiny Asian mom who each time she lifted out the slice would shout with amazement, "It's a cake," as if she hadn't known. Eventually, the objects became more impressive, a bouquet of flowers, a sneaker, a cup of coffee, until she made this one video in which the screen showed only her two hands and a knife, and then she picked up the knife with one hand and cut open the other. As usual, she shouted, "It's a cake," with glee. I got to watching that video on repeat, especially late at night when I suffered from jet lag. Each time the hand looked so real. "It's a cake," I would say with her. It got to be a mantra, something I could say whenever life turned out to be more than it seemed. I would picture the woman chewing a slice of herself and moaning as if she were the most delicious thing in the world."
Allison Stewart: That's Matthew Salesses's reading from his book The Sense of Wonder. Why does Carrie want to bring K-dramas to the US so badly?
Matthew Salesses: K-dramas are like this cake thing. They're a story, but inside of that story is all of this other possibility, and she sees, in K-drama, a story or storytelling that represents something closer to the life she's living, in which fate and coincidence have a large hand and in which she doesn't have as much agency as she wished things that she could have.
Allison Stewart: Carrie says at one point, "To be a minority in America is to guard what you love against other people's scorn." How does this affect her career? How does this affect her personally?
Matthew Salesses: She has always loved K-drama and watched them at home with her family, but at the beginning of the book, K-drama is just starting to hit the mainstream in America, and her boss decides that they're going to take advantage of this, and who better to put on it than the one Korean producer they have. Carrie would usually hate this idea, but she loves K-drama so much that she agrees to do it. She's now finally able to have the chance to show everyone the thing that she loves and to be proud of it in this public way and even to have a part in making it. It's her dream come true in the way that Won is suddenly having his dream come true.
Allison Stewart: Without giving anything away, how do Won and Carrie intersect?
Matthew Salesses: They start dating pretty early in the book, and it's love and basketball. What more would you want?
Allison Stewart: It's open though. We would say that at least in the beginning.
Matthew Salesses: It's an open relationship, yes.
Allison Stewart: The story you're writing does contain elements of K-drama. You have romantic leads, secondary romantic leads. What about the K-drama form of storytelling is compelling to you?
Matthew Salesses: I just love the whole thing. I'm romantic at heart, and there's a beautiful romance element to many of the K-dramas, and even more so, there's a lasting feeling that I don't usually get from American TV shows where I always feel like the movies too, at the end of that movie, they're probably going to break up.
They've been through this difficult time together and they've come to like each other, but now that things are going back to normal, that's probably the end of their relationship. In K-drama, there's an emphasis on this lasting love that goes sometimes across dozen centuries. Sometimes these are faded loves from a thousand years ago that the characters have been reborn into and are now reliving.
Allison Stewart: What is an Easter egg that you'd like people to look for in the book?
Matthew Salesses: If you like K-dramas and you've seen a lot of them, you'll probably notice some of the titles are taken from famous K-dramas, and if you've read my previous books, you might also notice that one of the titles in here is the title of a previous book.
Allison Stewart: The name of this book, which is out today is The Sense of Wonder, it is by Matthew Salesses. Matthew will be in conversation tonight with author, Kirsten Chen at Books are Magic at 7:00 PM. Matthew, happy Pub Day. Thanks for spending part of it with us.
Matthew Salesses: Thank you so much. This was such a joy.
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