How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

by Alexander Chee

  My father’s siblings had lined up to ask for their lunch money, and after the youngest had taken her turn, I went and asked for my lunch money, as they had. My grandfather was so charmed—he was worried I would never speak Korean—that he came downstairs, laughing, and gave me some money, just the same as he did them. I was then allowed to spend the money across the street at the small market, to get a treat.

  I did the same the next day, and the next, as it made him laugh, and he gave me money for treats. Soon he gave me the money daily.

  My father’s siblings still resent me, I think, because of it. I became just another sibling to compete with for attention, approval, and money.

  I was born slightly premature, and so at age two, because I was underweight, I was allowed to use my daily allowance to buy a chocolate bar at the snack stand across the street. This is the context for the next story my mother likes to tell about me from this time: She decided one day to punish me for something, and told me I could not go to the stand. Later, she found me eating my chocolate bar. Confounded, even alarmed, she asked me how I had done this.

  The maid explained that I had sent her with the money I’d been given.

  My mother tells this story as an example of my shrewdness in the face of an obstacle, also my devilishness. And I do like to think the story is about my improvisational mind. But it also shows that even at a young age, I understood how power worked. I was adapting to my sense of the class I belonged to, as all children do. That this class would change, that I would become a class traitor—as all writers are, no matter their social class—was all ahead of me. Perhaps this was preparation for that change: reading context clues for signs of how to get around the stated rules—how to find the real rules, in other words, that no one ever tells you but that everyone obeys.

  However it happened, my relationship to money began before I can remember it, and it seems it started that way.

  I WAS A TRICKSTER child, whether by accident or fate. My first Korean words were “Obi Mechu,” the name of a beer (the Korean Budweiser, really), spoken as I sat on my mother’s lap and saw the sign over her shoulder while we were driving in a car through downtown Seoul.

  I am still someone who absent-mindedly reads aloud from any signs I see, as if it is some way of learning where I am.

  I was also a regular source of anxiety during my time in Korea, most of which I was not aware of. Biracial Korean and white Amerasian children in Seoul in 1968 were typically thought to be the children of American GIs and Korean women, and were often kidnapped and sold, as, for some time, your patrimony was your access to personhood. Put another way, if your father was a white GI, no government authority automatically thought of you as a citizen. My mother was warned never to let me out of her sight in public, and I did have a knack for disappearing. My eyes had been blue when I arrived, alarming my father’s family, my grandparents especially, but they quickly settled into hazel, green coronas with brown rings, which was seen as more acceptable. As the eldest male child, certain responsibilities and privileges accrued with that status: during the first months I lived there, until my eyes changed, the family struggled with the idea that a blue-eyed half-white boy might become the jongson of the forty-first generation of Chee.

  My father liked to joke that, as a part of my status, a house in Korea would be mine when I got older, and only as adults would my younger brother confess to me just how unfair this had struck him. I used to wonder sometimes if this was why he went into private equity. But in truth, his first distressed assets were those cars he’d refurbished in auto shop. And being the jongson was not exactly a prize to be jealous of.

  The jongson does typically receive a greater share of the inheritance. He does not always get a house, but he often does, because when he becomes the jongga, the head of the family, he is supposed to care for his parents in their old age, hold the jesa—a ceremony held annually to honor one’s ancestors—and tend the graves of the family’s ancestors. In the most conservative families, he isn’t supposed to live anywhere but Korea. He looks after the entire family, the living and the dead. My brother and sister and I now joke that Korean traditions like this exist only to create conflict and pain—and that has certainly been our only experience of it. Brothers turn against each other; sisters feel invisible and powerless. Most of what I know about my nonmonetary, spiritual responsibilities came to me from people who were outside the family.

  My father, the middle child, was forever settling disputes between his siblings, and they were always over money and patrimony. After he died, no one was left to settle these fights, and after the death of their father, the siblings sued one another for a decade. I will forever remember my oldest aunt, a respected translator and professor in Korea, when she reflected on the long battle over my grandfather’s estate, saying, “My sisters were so talented. And yet they did nothing with their lives except this—this fight over money.”

  She said this, though she had joined in too.

  MY PARENTS DID NOT give me lessons in money so much as they enacted them. My father spoke of money only rarely. He explained his absences from church on Sundays by saying, “My church is the bank, and I’m there five days a week.” He dressed for work in well-tailored suits from J. Press, wore handmade shoes from England, and was uninterested in cutting a low profile. He was the first nonwhite member of his golf club and the Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, and he never looked less than sharp. That this sort of dapper dressing was something he had to do—that his appearance, as an immigrant, required him to be tailored, impressive, to project wealth or at least comfort, just to be treated with respect—would not be visible to me until much later. I remember he said, “I’m treated better when I fly if I wear a suit jacket,” and each time I put one on to fly—and he’s right, I am treated better—I feel close to him.

  Both of my parents had worked hard for what they had—my father, with his older brother, had scavenged for food from abandoned army supply trucks in Seoul during the Korean War. My mother had cleaned hotel rooms during the summer for the money she used to buy the car she drove away from Maine. My father believed money was for spending, and my mother believed it should never be spent. Her clothes were handmade also—for much of her life, she made them herself. She was as stylish as my father, but by her own hand.

  The only time I recall hearing my parents speak of money together was the day my father came home with an antique eighteenth-century Portuguese cannon, “the only one of its kind with a firing piece,” I remember my father explaining. My mother was as angry as she’s ever been. He had spent their savings on it: $750 at the time. The seller was a marine who had, with his buddies, each taken one of these cannons back to the United States from Korea at the end of the war. Or so he said. Part of my mother’s anger then was that there was no certification of its authenticity, but also, as she said that day, “What are we going to do with it? Declare war on the Mullinses?” It was a strange, brute artifact, out of place, and after the purchase, it stayed behind our blue corduroy couch alongside many of our father’s rifles, by the entrance to our suburban two-story house. As if it were hidden there in case we ever really did need it.

  After my father’s death, we considered having the cannon appraised, even selling it. We also thought of selling his Mercedes. We did neither. The cannon sat behind our living room couch for years and is now my brother’s. The car went into storage in Vermont during the summer of the bankruptcy. My brother may have it still. The last time I asked about the car, he never answered my question. He did recently admit to having the cannon appraised by Christie’s; it is now worth $28,000. Thirty-seven times its original price, thirty-seven years later, the lesson of the cannon is at last visible: my father was right.

  THE EVENTUAL ALLOWANCE I received as a child in America, from my own father, the first allowance I remember, was given to me to soothe the pain of the allergy shots I required, starting around age seven. There was the sharp flash of the needle’s injection, and then, at the corner st
ore near the doctor’s office, my father would hand me a quarter, which I could use to buy comic books.

  The cycle was pain, then money, then power over pain. A feeling like victory—if not over the pain, at least over powerlessness. And one of my earliest experiences of fatherly love.

  Pain, money, power over pain. My mistake being that money is not power over pain. Facing pain is.

  In the first years after the end of the trust, I had dreamed of a payday as big as the trust had been, imagining it could save me, because it was all I could imagine. I see now it never could. It was a dream that the sacrifice of the trust could return to me as a payday the size of the trust, a simple exchange that would clearly mean it had all been worth it, in the primitive religion around money and self-worth that I had made for myself. But this longing for a payday was really just a mix of two stories in my head, turning the money from the father into something that both conquers the pain and also stands in for it.

  I was searching for new narratives with which to remake my relationship to money. I had several identities, whether I was aware of them directly or not: as the child of a scientist and schoolteacher; as the child of entrepreneurs; and, as a friend of mine likes to say, as a lost prince, far from his kingdom. My identity as a writer was the newest of these.

  But to the extent that I identified these ways, it is because I did not want to be a jongson, or at least not in the way it had been described to me. My experience of that role was that it had made me a target. I wanted to belong to myself, much as my father had, and the stories I had of him, as someone who had worked multiple jobs in order not to rely on his father, inspired me also—and so, with my trust fund gone, I not only waited tables, but took any work I could get. I followed the example of my father, and not his family.

  I had been raised with the idea of writing as an inherently unprofitable enterprise from which one derived token sums of money while being supported by other means, and I had to teach myself to fight this too. But my dream of a writer’s payday was just as unrealistic. My mother was fond of asking me to get an MBA and write on the side. My grandfather, in our last visit before his death, said to me, “You are a poet, which means you will be poor, but very happy,” and then he laughed uproariously.

  I laughed too.

  These allowances, this trust, had taught me one thing: money belonged to other people, not to me. I was trying to undo the spell all of this had cast on me, beginning with the lunch money my grandfather used to give me back before I could remember, which became the $100 bill he would give me whenever he visited from Korea. This was something my father’s oldest brother, my Uncle Bill, did as well. And while I could never imagine myself being like my grandfather, the self-made millionaire with an international fisheries conglomerate, and the seven children who would, after his death, sue each other repeatedly for a decade, I could imagine all too well being like Bill someday.

  Bill was a well-dressed man who favored a uniform that hardly ever varied: a chambray shirt with a paisley ascot, worn under a navy blazer with gold buttons, khaki pants, tasseled oxblood loafers—he was the man who taught me what paisley meant. When going outdoors, he topped this uniform with a Burberry overcoat, Burberry scarf, and a beret that hid his hair, a raffish comb-over that I always viewed tenderly, for even as a child I knew it fooled no one. He loved us deeply and was forever smiling and impish, so much so that when he was sad, it reverberated. A legal scholar, a lawyer, a professor of law, Uncle Bill had pursued a distinguished academic career in the United States before being summoned home by his father to be a good son. He began teaching law in Korea, at Hanyang University in Seoul, eventually rising to be a cabinet-level presidential adviser on international treaty law, and was the first Korean elected to the United Nations International Law Commission. In 1994, as I was finishing my graduate degree, Bill asked me to copyedit a translation of one of his books, which I still have, detailing his work on behalf of stateless Koreans inside Russia and China. He lived, until his death, in the home left to him, the house I had lived in as a child with my father’s family. It was too much house for one man, but he insisted on it, despite the punishing tax burden. His mother had always dreamed the family would gather there, and he lived there in a lonely vigil, against the day the next in line would take his place.

  I have always suspected that this was the house my father spoke of, the one I would have one day inherited. Bill, like me, had been an eldest son. I visit the house whenever I am in Seoul. For years after his death, it was a ruin, open to the weather, left to a cousin he’d adopted as his heir. Now it is a Vietnamese restaurant, no doubt the cousin’s decision—we do not speak, a product of the estrangement created after my father’s death, when the family’s disagreements over money took aim at what my father had left behind. The persimmon trees in the backyard still stand, taller than all of the new buildings built around them.

  I come here to see what I know, without speaking to him, is true: that he is struggling to do, even to be, that which was denied me.

  IN THE YEARS AFTER the end of the trust, which I still think of as the loss of the trust, I taught myself to do without the idea of my being jongson, except perhaps for the jesa. Two years ago in October, I made my first, but my version. I made an altar in my home with an elaborate Korean meal I made myself. I poured soju, wrote a letter to my ancestors, telling them how angry I was with them, asking them to tell me what they wanted from me. Then I burned the letter, to send it to them.

  My father’s rebellion against his family became more fully my own. I taught myself to live without so much as the idea that anyone would help me but me. Someday I would learn how radical it was to have a Korean immigrant father who asked only that his son become himself—with no expectations that I be a lawyer, a doctor, or an engineer, like him. It felt that I was learning to walk in a new world, in new gravity, and by the year 2000, when I was made the acting director of the All Souls Monday Night hospitality program, I had been living in that world for six years. I had joined the church with a boyfriend, and had stayed after we broke up. “We don’t expect to see you on Sundays if you’re here on Monday nights,” the reverend had said to me when I apologized once for missing the services—the church, on the Upper East Side, was a long way from where I lived in Brooklyn. That idea of acts of charity as service, as a way of offering something to God as well as to others—the Monday service counting as much as or more than the Sunday one—made me feel at home.

  I did not cure myself entirely. I am still curing myself. I am almost through those boxes of files. I let go of the fantasy of a massive payday and taught myself instead to get by with the shepherding of sums. I came up with rules I still live by: always keep your rent low, no matter the city you live in; write for money more than for love, but don’t forget to write for love; always ask for more money on principle; decide how much money you must make per month and then make more than that as a minimum; revise the sum upward year by year, to match inflation. Do your taxes. Write off everything you can.

  To the extent I have survived myself thus far, it began there, when I realized I treated money emotionally. I decided that I needed to treat myself as I would anyone else I was taking care of. It was just ordinary thrift and self-forgiveness that I needed to learn, together with the payday only I could provide, but this realization was the gift of that time, and as close to a Unitarian grace as I think I’ll ever get.

  These small things I did saved me when nothing else could.

  Imposter

  IN THE SUMMER OF 2003, a friend who knew I needed a place to live asked me if I would be interested in subletting her apartment near Gramercy Park in New York. She was trying to sell it, as it was too small for her and her fiancé, but the sale had taken too long, and in the meantime, she’d moved out to Brooklyn, to Park Slope, to live with him instead. She wasn’t legally allowed to rent, so the deal she offered was that I would pay only the maintenance, a more than reasonable $900 a month, and in return I would keep the place
perfectly clean and organized for when the broker came by—and move out once the apartment was sold.

  I agreed, though I wasn’t sure I could hold up my end of the deal—I’d never been regularly neat before. But once I moved in, somehow, magically, I was. The broker would call, giving me as much notice as possible, and I’d wash any dishes in the sink, straighten out the bedspread, hang the towels, wipe down the faucets, and head to one of the cafés in Gramercy until it was safe to return. My friends who visited couldn’t believe it, and neither could I. But I’d have done much more if she’d asked.

  It was the sort of apartment you dream you’ll have in New York before you live there but that you usually don’t get: a one bedroom co-op on the nineteenth floor, with views north up Third Avenue to where the horizon cuts off and across the city west toward the Hudson. And I watched the East River out my porthole of a window whenever I did those dishes.

  Every day, the apartment felt like some just reward after a long period of hard work. I no longer needed to wait tables. The paperback of my first novel had just come out, and with that money, in addition to my income from teaching, I felt rich for the first time in my life as a writer. I knew I was not rich in a way that anyone else in the building would recognize, but I was writer rich. I had money earned from writing that I would spend on more time to write, and the cheap deal on this apartment meant the money would last longer—it even felt like the beginning of more of that money and more of that success. It was a beautiful moment, when the money and the time it represented added up to a possibility for the future that felt as vast as the edges of the known world. The apartment’s views resembled the way I wanted to feel about my own future each time I looked at them.