Q&A With Minsoo Kang 

A few months ago, Minsoo Kang mailed me an early copy of his debut novel The Melancholy Of Untold History. I spent the 4th of July weekend devouring it, excited about what was coming next! Minsoo is also the author of the short story collection Of Tales And Enigmas & nonfiction history books Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European Imagination and Invincible and Righteous Outlaw: The Korean Hero Hong Gildong in Literature, History, and Culture. Minsoo is also the translator of the Penguin Classics edition of the Korean novel The Story of Hong Gildong. Minsoo is also a history professor at the University of Missouri St. Louis. 

Q: Minsoo, would you give a brief description of your debut novel The Melancholy Of Untold History for those who haven’t read it yet?

A: It is a story that is part mythology, part fictional history, and part realist narrative that takes place in an imaginary Asian country called the Grand Circle, over the course of three thousand years.  A modern-day historian who is mourning the tragic death of his wife meditates on the nature of grief, fate, and forgiveness through the study of his country’s history.  From his perspective, we meet an ancient storyteller who recounts the beginning of history with four mountain gods who quarrel over a peach with terrible millennia-long consequences; a prideful ruler who sacrifices countless people in order to fabricate a lofty history for his ancestors; and an emperor, his consort, and his general whose misguided actions lead to the catastrophic collapse of a dynasty.

Q: Minsoo, what made you have Melancholy Of Untold History told from the point of view of the storyteller, the historian & his colleague & the mountain gods and goddesses? 

A: The most important motivation for writing this novel was to illustrate an idea that I have been teaching my students for many years, which my historian character also lectures on.  When a civilization tells stories about itself, it begins with tales of gods, monsters, and heroes.  As that culture develops, it moves on to historical narratives, especially of great personages like kings, generals, and sages who achieved great things in the world.  In the modern era, interest shifts to the lives of ordinary citizens, including their inner thoughts and feelings.  To demonstrate this movement from myth to history to quotidian life, I had to employ multiple voices in radically different time periods.  And so I tell stories of gods, of an ancient storyteller, and finally of a contemporary historian.

Q: The Melancholy Of Untold History is inspired by East Asian mythology. Which East Asian countries are they taken from? 

A:  I borrowed freely from myths from China, Korea, Mongolia, and Manchuria, which is a benefit of writing fiction as opposed to history.  The biggest source of inspiration for the mythical part of the novel was fantastic literature from China, including Journey to the West, Quelling the Demons’ Revolt, and Seven Taoist Masters.  But I also took elements from the Korean text Anecdotes of the Three Kingdoms and the Joseon dynasty novels The Story of Hong Gildong and The Story of Jeon Unchi, both of which I translated into English.  I was also interested to learn that when the Northeast Asian people known as the Jurchens conquered China in the seventeenth century and established the Qing dynasty, they not only changed their name to Manchus, but they invented a mythical origin story for themselves, about a progenitor who’s descended from a goddess.  That kind of invention of mythic tradition is something that I am deeply interested in, and is explored in the chapter of my novel that deals with an emperor who decides to revise history.

Q: How long did it take you to write The Melancholy Of Untold History?

A:  I write very quickly, but I take a very long time to do research.  So I think I produced a working draft of the novel in less than six months.  But I would say that it took me well over three years to think about the themes I wanted to explore in the novel and to do all the readings I felt I needed to do in order to make the writing possible.  So I engage in a great deal of preparation over an extended period of time, but once I feel I am ready to go, I sit down and churn things out fairly quickly.

Q: What’s it like being a history professor at The University Of St. Louis in Missouri? Would you say that being a history professor helped with your skill as a researcher and author?

A:  As both a historian and a fiction writer, I do a lot of reading in both history and literature.  But I actually find more of my ideas for fiction from history rather than novels.  Whenever I am researching or writing history, my mind is constantly thinking – what if things happened differently?  What if different kinds of people were involved in these events?  What if such events occurred in a different context, different world?  So being a history professor has been extremely helpful to me as a fiction writer.  I do love being a professor, teaching young people about these topics and ideas that I love.  And I find a great deal of inspiration in interacting with them and my colleagues.

Q: Since you’re a history professor, is it fair to say the history professor in The Melancholy Of Untold History is similar to you? 

A:  The only things I have in common with the historian character are our academic careers, love of history, and commitment to its scholarship.  I did bestow on him some of my personal experiences, including those of grief, love, and longing.  But we have had extremely different lives.  For my character, the loss of his parents at an early age had a tremendous impact on the kind of person he became.  I did not experience such a tragedy, and I had a much more peripatetic life moving from one country to another.  But if I were to meet him, I am sure we would get along as we would have a great amount of scholarly topics to discuss.

Q: What lessons do you hope readers learn after reading The Melancholy Of Untold History?  For me it is that fiction tells the truth with imagination. 

A:  It is my hope that I give my readers a great deal to think about the power of stories – historical stories, literary stories, personal stories, stories that are lies told for nefarious purposes, and stories that aim to tell the truth even when it is deeply disturbing and depressing.  It is true that humans are essentially storytelling creatures, but contrary to simplistic celebration of our imaginative capacity, I would like my readers to think about how distorting, damaging, and manipulative some stories can be, whether they are told about one’s personal life or about your country and your people.  That is the reason I presented stories in so many different modes in a relatively short book.  

Q: If you are working on another novel now, will it be something similar to The Melancholy Of Untold History or is it something totally different?

A: I have already written a number of novel manuscripts that I am hoping to get published.  Some of them take place in the same world I created in The Melancholy of Untold History, but I have an inherent dislike of repeating something I have done before.  So their stories are told in very different modes, including a multi-generational epic and a thriller-like tale of political conspiracy.  I am in the process of preparing to write a new one which is a largely realist narrative that takes place in a university campus but with occasional flights into fantasy.

Q: In the Acknowledgements Section, I saw that Jimin Han provided a lot of moral support and good advice. I think it’s amazing since I did a Q&A with her last summer and read her novel The Apology last year. What was it like having her give you that moral support and good advice? 

A:  Jimin is a wonderful friend and an incredibly helpful fellow writer.  I am so fortunate to have her support and advice has demonstrated for me how essential it is to have such a compatriot in one’s literary life.  As with such kindness shown by other writer friends, like John Dalton, Jeff VanderMeer, Nisi Shawl, Phong Nguyen, and Marie Myung-Ok Lee, it is hard to imagine myself trying to become a fiction writer in isolation, how lonely and impossible that would feel.  Jimin’s support has shown me that it is part of my duty as a writer to extend such help to others.

Q: If The Melancholy Of Untold History were to become a series or a movie, who would be your dream cast to play the characters you created? The entertainment industry needs new ideas again, & it wouldn’t hurt to get more great books. 

A:  That’s an interesting and difficult question because I cannot see an adaptation of my novel that does not feature an all-Asian cast in an Asian country.  It is also weird for me to imagine them speaking in English, like it was when I watched Bernado Bertolucci’s film The Last Emperor, which tells a story from Chinese history all in English.  So even if a production company were to approach me about it, I don’t know how I would imagine it.  Perhaps the mythological part of the novel could be done in animation voiced by Asian American actors.  So even before thinking about casting, there would have to be an original way of how the complex story could be represented visually.

Q: Your father was a diplomat for the South Korean government and you’ve seen and lived in Australia, New Zealand, Iran, Brunei & Germany among many other countries. What was your experience like in each of those different countries? Which places were your favorites?

A:  I did have the experience of living in many countries of very different environments, which have all fed into my historical and literary imagination.  But I honestly cannot say which were my favorites because they provided me with experiences of such varying natures.  South Korea is the place of my origin and ancestry, I have a special affection for New Zealand as the place where I learned English, the European countries inspired me to become a historian, in Iran I witnessed a revolution in process, and the United States is my chosen home.  I would say that they all functioned like different types of people I had close relationships with, learning very different things from each of them that had an impact on the person I became.

Q: What was your experience like serving in the South Korean Army?

A:  As someone who does not have the kind of personality that is a good fit for military life, it was a very difficult time for me.  But the best thing I got out of the experience was interacting with young Korean men from all walks of life, learning about their lives and their aspirations.  I think I got a much better perspective on South Korean society and the sheer variety of its people through the ordeal, one that I would never have gotten otherwise.