212. Ela Lee

0:06Well behaved women rarely make history. Bloody difficult women do. On the face of it, this week's guest, Ela Lee, has had a charmed life. She went to Oxford, she became a lawyer. She wrote a stunningly successful first novel, Jaded, during lockdown, and her second book is out now. It's called Minbag. But reading between the lines, nothing is as easy as it sounds. Welcome to Difficult Women.

0:58Ella Lee is a bit of a prodigy. Born in 1995, i.e. could be my daughter or daughter-in-law. She's a British-Korean-Turkish lawyer who became what I think of as the secret novelist. Having read law at Oxford, she became a city lawyer specialising in anti-bribery, fraud and corruption. But during the pandemic, there came a twist, a plot twist, a pivot. She turned to writing. Ella, your first novel is Jaded, and this is your debut about a young lawyer who wakes up one morning after a work gala with no memory about how she got home the previous night. is such a fascinating premise for a novel. I want to start with that before we get on to your new book, which we have in front of us called Minback, which is about three generations of Korean women and a kind of hidden national scandal around the forced adoption of children.

1:55And again, a great, fascinating theme. But welcome to Difficult Women, Emily. Thank you for having me. You're one of our youngest guests. You're very, very welcome. come and it's very exciting because I you know everyone wants a replenisher audience um explain how Jaded came to be and why you decided on that as the plot so I was like so many people during Covid sort of slowed down for the first time I'd been speeding through life sort of since I was 16 um and then the pandemic hit and And I think it was the first time that I was able to look back on, you know, several years in the legal industry and sort of collect all these experiences in the round.

2:41And then I realized that they were quite egregious. And everyone I knew, every woman I knew had a story. and these stories were shared over dinner over lunch you know in all these informal ways because we knew that even though there were technically formal channels for us to complain we knew that that would end up penalizing us and our careers and I just remember feeling quite frustrated and outraged and it was it was coinciding with the time where the Me Too movement was gaining all this momentum and all these companies had sort of absorbed the vernacular of me too but but nothing really was changing so I started writing during the pandemic that sort of opening scene where they're at the the firm event and she's just getting plied with alcohol and and you know all these sort of inappropriate comments are being made and she's sort of um jade the protagonist I'm talking about sort of feels boxed into a corner and then you know it's not a spoiler to say that she's assaulted in the very first chapter and I didn't really intend to write a whole novel but from there it became really clear to me how a young minority woman would be treated you know in the aftermath of something like that and how and I really wanted to explore how one singular event can act like the catalyst to kind of test every other aspect of your life and just so this is a composite rather than I mean having written novels myself I know how insulting it is when people say how autobiographical is it um you've already said that you know you you people shared I'm assuming women shared their own experiences of life it was the bar rather than were you a solicitor I was a solicitor so you shared your your you know the legal eagles that you were with and so was it based on a sort of a number of of women's experiences that you'd heard and you thought you know this is a great starting point for a novel which actually exposes the kind of continuing you know sexual culture a culture of sexual abuse within the supposed industry that's supposed to actually regulate the law I mean it's just beyond isn't it yeah absolutely it was it it was sort of this building tension and pressure um you know at the time I think a lot of law firms now have sort of outlawed company drinks and company ski trips and things like that because it's just like they like to say that it's a breeding ground for improper relations to happen but actually it's a breeding ground for people to you know behave in a way that's unacceptable um but I was really young like I started I mean my first experience of of sexual harassment was when I was 19 and at a law firm dinner it was a recruitment dinner and when you're sitting next to someone from whom you want a job and they're making all these comments and they're inviting you back and things like that you know I had had no knowledge and language for how to navigate that and that was something that all my friends experienced and all of them had stories in the tens if not twenties and so I think perhaps the trigger point was because it was COVID and I was at home I realized I felt safe for the first time and I wasn't going into the office I wasn't having to go to these evening events and I realized wow it's so much easier to do my job when I'm not feeling on edge all the time.

6:28What was there a legal reception if there was one to when the publication of Jaded?

6:39There hasn't necessarily been a sort of unanimous reception. I've been invited to a few firms to speak about about jaded and about how to safeguard women um and i i kind of accept those on a case-by-case basis depending on how sort of optical it is and how much i feel like um there'll be participation like for example if i i would like to say that usually only associates should come so not partners because i feel like associates would feel much more comfortable being honest about their experiences when they're not around their seniors you know it has to be a closed event it can't just be like anyone can wander in and things like that but when when a firm takes those considerations seriously that's when i'll you know go ahead and speak but there's not been sort of a uh i don't know i get a lot of people asking me you know so did you sign an nda the way that jade does and i'm like well if i did i wouldn't have written the novel you know and explain your your as a young woman when you this was your first job you went you became a solicitor and how shocked were you to find how common it was that your your female peers and cohort had been on the receiving end of how would you describe it and also what was there a difference between women of color who had who experienced it and what they did about it and white women second question um i don't necessarily think so in terms of the sexual harassment there was certainly you know different racialized comments towards women of color but in terms of the the sexual misconduct i don't necessarily think that there was um more it was more directed towards minority women i do find that the comments that I received, for example, were much more, you know, fetishized.

8:38Why do you think that was? I think that I was possibly a bit of a rarity. You know, it's a very... Because of your Asian background. Yeah. And I think that, you know, it's a very, very white male dominated industry. So I would have a married man tell me that he had yellow fever and that, you know, his wife didn't know that and things like that. And so I would like to say that I was... I know what yellow fever is because my one had a brother who worked in Hong Kong. And so explain what yellow fever is. It's basically a racial slur, right? It's like having a thing for Asian women. Yeah. And I'd like to say I was really shocked, but I don't think I was.

9:24You know, it's sort of like the frog in the boiling water. You know, when there are so many small incidents that you brush off or that you don't want to make a big deal out of. Gradually over time, when you look back in the round and you think, wow, there have been so many of these. I can't believe I accepted every single instance. That's the shocking part rather than the actual comments being made is, you know, as a young woman, I wasn't able to stand up for myself then in the way that I would now. Going back to the incident that opens your book, Jaded, the gala, presumably the female had been spiked and raped.

10:12Is this something that actually happened? So she isn't spiked, but she is very much plied with alcohol. Right. to the extent that you know she's sitting next to a fictional managing partner and he's constantly topping up her drink and constantly kind of getting her as drunk as possible and then he's not the one who rapes her it is actually her friend at the firm and he takes her home and he argues that it was completely consensual but for her she was too drunk to consent and you You know, she has no memory of it. And the reason why I chose him instead of sort of the obvious villain and the obvious man in power is because I think it's important that we, you know, don't always.

11:00Because I think when people hear the word rapist, they imagine. Dark Alley. Stranger. But it's not. Bogeyman, you know. It's usually the friend who takes advantage of the incredibly drunk housemate. Yeah, absolutely. And usually the perpetrator is very well known to the woman. and I wanted to kind of challenge the way that we look at the men around us and also challenge our propensity to victim blame because a lot of the time you say, why did you go home with that person? Why were you so drunk? And I wanted to kind of paint a situation for Jade where it would be easy for people to say that and I wanted to put them in her shoes.

11:57After Jade is, I think it was Penguin as well. Jade did, I should say. You've got a new book with Penguin. You know, two books in this publishing climate is a huge achievement for someone your age. It really is. And I take my hat off to you. It shows incredible drive and determination. At what point did you decide you didn't need the law in your life and you wanted to be a full-time writer, if that's what's happened? That is what's happened. I carried on working as a lawyer right up until Jaded was published. So even after I got my book deal, I carried on working. I think for me, because of my earlier life, I was so obsessed with financial security.

12:45that was always thrumming in the background that even though I had this book deal and I knew this book was coming out, I didn't have it in me to walk away from this career that I'd spent 10 years. So the writing was a side hustle and you needed like the steady job. Exactly. Which is a brilliant bridge to talk about Minback because the financial insecurity of your early life, the financial crash, 2008, saw your family having to take in lodges. And so you've made this, that transition, that kind of sort of fall from status, really, to take in lodges and the family sleep on the floor in the sitting room and the bedrooms go to the paying guests.

13:29So explain your background and your early childhood and how it came to that. Yeah. So I was born in London to, as you said, a Korean mom and a Turkish dad. And even though I was born in the UK, I wasn't a British child. I didn't get citizenship until I was nine. And I didn't really speak English until I started school. So it was Korean and Turkish? Turkish, yeah. So I spoke exclusively Korean and Turkish with my family. And the English that I did speak as a young child was pretty rudimentary. So I think as a young child, by all accounts, I was pretty quiet, very introspective, but all in all, a very uneventful childhood.

14:08Bookish? Bookish, yes, of course. we should say I asked you if you wrote the books whether English was your first language and you paused and you said it's my dominant language but you've written the books in English and it's a very they're very it's a kind of wonderful sensual English and I don't know whether that's because I don't know is it the effect of Turkish or Korean or the way you see things and the way you describe things it's impossible what does your editor say I think it's definitely influenced like i mean turkish is a very lyrical language and they're always sort of all my aunties and cousins are coming up with the most sort of beautiful metaphors to describe the most ordinary of circumstances and i definitely think that influenced my writing um and korean onomatopoeia is a huge part of the korean language so okay give us an example so you know rain will be like splash splash it's the way you're describing the rain um so I think a lot of those sort of that sort of probably affected my syntax but I I did read a lot but my parents had this role when I was a child that if I wanted to watch any tv at all it had to be Korean or Turkish satellite tv so they were adamant that I would be fluent in both languages which I'm very grateful for now but I think as a child it made me um sort of almost on the outside looking in um but yeah a pretty normal childhood and then things really shifted during my GCSE years um like so many families my family really felt the squeeze of the credit crunch 2008 we were really struggling and you know we were sitting on a house but the house wouldn't sell obviously and so towards the end of the year my parents made the decision to open a minbag which is obviously the title of my novel and a minbag is a Korean guest house it's sort of similar to a B &B so at 13 I found myself or 14 rather I found myself sleeping in the living room with my parents whilst the rest of our house was open to paying guests my parents did all the housekeeping my mum would wake up at 5am to do breakfast for the guests and I remember feeling really ashamed you You know, we talked about I went to a private school and from, I mean, again, we don't know what's going on.

16:32On a scholarship. On a bursary, yeah. On a bursary. And I just didn't tell anyone because I was so ashamed. So kids didn't, your friends didn't come home from school to see the pain. No. So for about a year, I didn't go over to anyone's and no one came over because my parents believed that, you know, you shouldn't accept hospitality if you can't reciprocate it. after about a year we managed my parents managed to sell the house and things did stabilize but I don't think that experience ever truly left me and I think it's really evident in my writing style now I'm really obsessed with ordinary stories ordinary suburban people and the sort of chaotic simmering private life that is going on behind closed doors behind the twitching curtains Exactly.

17:19And that's really what I wanted to do with Minbag is sort of look beneath the surface of this family. And tell our listeners about the hidden scandal of adoption that it also treats the book. So the novel is set between 2008 London and 1985 Korea. A bit of historical context, in 1985 Korea was under a military dictatorship, under the rule of Chun Duan, who was an army general, and he took control of the country, and it was, yes, under military rule. that military government from the 50s through to the 80s developed the most systematic and efficient adoption industry in the world it started out in the 1950s as an emergency response to the korean war because obviously lots of children were orphaned during the war however by 1985 where the book is set it had evolved into something much more sinister which is a network of institutions that were competing to source and send unrestricted numbers of children abroad.

18:30We're talking about 500 children a week. And a lot, about 20 years later, when these children obviously grow into adults, it became clear that a lot of this industry was, a lot of these adoptions were on fraudulent, you know, bases. so there was the systematic practice of orphanization where children were sent abroad with all of their family history stripped and they were described as orphans when in fact they had living parents and in many cases their mothers had not consented to the adoption over that 30-year period about over 200 ,000 korean children were sent abroad um to which countries mainly mainly the united states and scandinavia some to australia and some to france um but about 70 to the u.s and at what age were the babies taken um pretty much any age i mean by the 1980s obviously newborns were ideal and when i say a network of institutions i mean midwives were on the books gynecologists obstetricians They had maternity clinics where if you were an unmarried woman, you would enter the maternity home on the basis that you would give up your child.

19:52And so by the time when your waters broke, they owned the hospital and they would contact the hospital. So it was just so streamlined. And the adoption agencies had upwards of 400 feeder orphanages where they would claim children from. So it really was this multi-pronged system to kind of collect as many children as possible. I know that if I'm thinking about this, then our audience are, but I'm thinking America, Sun Yi and Woody Allen. I mean, was Sun Yi one of them? I don't know the circumstances of her adoption, but I mean, she certainly was adopted within. She was adopted by Mia Farrow. Yeah, within, I think, 70s, maybe she might have been adopted.

20:38Andre Previn, I think. Okay, well, we'll need to verify that, allegedly, and all the rest of it. But yes, I mean, she's a very well-known so-called orphan of Korean, I think, origin. Yes, she is, yeah. And the women who gave birth to the babies that were then taken for adoption, at what point do you think in this process were they made aware that their baby would be taken from them? And to what extent could they protest what was happening? So it really depends. So again, by the 80s, the demographic had shifted where the majority of these children were born to women who were unmarried. That's the majority, but it was basically anyone whose motherhood was deemed unfit.

21:30So that could be... By whom? I mean, what if these single mothers wanted to be single mothers? I think and what I really try to show in the book is that the social conditions made it such that it was it simply wasn't possible. You know, the military government had next to no domestic social welfare system in place and in fact actively encouraged adoption as an alternative to domestic welfare systems and also as a population reduction mechanism. mechanism. But yeah, it could be anything. It could be a woman who's given birth to a fourth daughter. It could be someone who can't afford another child.

22:10It could be a divorced woman or a widowed woman. You know, a big theme of the novel is choice and agency and... And shame, obviously. And shame, yeah. if society makes no provision and doesn't tolerate single motherhood and bastardy, as we used to call it, you know, when children were born out of wedlock in this country, then I don't suppose there's any choice. Did queer women have access to birth control or was actually having these unwanted pregnancies actively encouraged by the system? I think there was access to birth control, but also the social context at the time was that the country was rapidly industrializing.

22:59So after the Korean War, the country was razed to the ground. There was nothing. And the two successive dictators made it their absolute sort of economic recovery, their absolute priority. What ended up happening is a lot of young women, 14, 15 year olds were pulled from school to go work into these factories. and all of a sudden you're taken from your nuclear family, you're taken from your entire support structure and you're put into these dormitories. Or as in the book, they're put into a minbag, which was sort of acted as like a surplus boarding house for all of these workers. And you're in close quarters with boys and you don't have the sexual education.

23:39And so as a result, these children are born. And, you know, a lot of the time when I interviewed women or when I spoke to professors who'd also interviewed women, sometimes it's not even a fleeting romance. It's, you know, a woman might have been in a relationship with a man for two to three years and fallen pregnant and thought that it was serious. And only then did he say, well, I'm never going to marry you. Or did he reveal that he was married or whatever it was. So it really was this sort of catch all for any sort of motherhood that was deemed inappropriate. How many babies is it thought were taken in adoption and sold overseas?

24:24About over 200 ,000.

24:44for your first book you talked about you talked to your fellow fellow solicitors for this book um and you know you wrote it during lockdown how different was writing this book Completely different. And who did you talk, you know, did you do a huge amount of research and interviews as well? I did. So I actually wrote a version of this book that ended up on the cutting room floor. 90 ,000 words gone. Painful. We've all been there though. We've all been there. Yeah. It still followed the adoption scandal, but it was sort of a linear timeframe and it was sort of told by this omniscient narrator. and it just didn't work because it was so distant and so impersonal and I just I couldn't see why anyone would want to stick through it for 350 pages and I remember sitting with my husband and thinking am I just a one-trick pony like do I do I even have a second book in me because this manuscript is not salvageable did you show it to anyone I showed it to my agent who agreed okay good for her him um her yeah she she was very direct thing and you know but it's it's terrible isn't it when a book is dead on the page yeah and I think on reflection the reason why it wasn't working was because I'd written it the easy way and by the easy way I mean I'd written about 1980s Korean women from the lens of a millennial Londoner um and I hadn't done my homework so So that was when I decided I had to go to Korea and I had to speak to women who had been through this experience.

26:25I spoke to professors, activists, sort of across the board, both sort of professors of the military dictatorship and that area of history and activists for adoptee rights and adoptee recognition in Korea. I went to Korea multiple times over several years conducted about tens of interviews went into archival materials and national libraries and as we discussed before Korean is my first language but the research process tested my language abilities to their absolute limits Has there been any justice for the women or for the babies that were removed from them? I guess it sort of depends on what you mean by justice.

27:16I think they've been recognized. So the government launched a truth and reconciliation commission and they published their findings last year, sort of in October last year, I think. And they concluded that the Korean state had violated the human rights of its own children and that many of these adoptions were on fraudulent grounds. and that's great but it's it still remains to be seen you know what reparations will come from that so no no reparations as yet but acknowledgement of the acknowledgement yeah and as for that's the first step have they apologized the korean government they have yeah um you know that and it doesn't go on now or do you think it does it doesn't go on now but it's a bit like is it a bit Korean Olympics, Seoul Olympics, there was a sort of explosive article in the Progressive.

28:17I think the headline was Korea makes them and we buy them about the adoptee industry. And that created so much national embarrassment for Korea that they, you know, from the 90s onwards really sort of curbed the numbers going out. Well, it's had wonderful reviews, lyrical and devastating min bag aches with the unspeakable nature of loss a beautiful tender story of displacement and loss which shows the resilience of the human spirits you've had wonderful reviews when's it when's it out it's out now it's out now thank well congratulations and we've got to move on to the bit of time the podcast when i ask you your difficult moment or when you've had to be most difficult um it seems to me you've had a rich and varied life already despite being so young and married with a austrian shepherd dog or australian australian shepherd dog who i've been admiring so to your yeah to your difficult time or when you when have you had to be very difficult so i was really thinking about this on the way here and this morning trying to sort of pinpoint one moment and I sort of realized it was it was more a time and I would say 2018 to 2019 was was the hardest time of my life I it was sort of a constellation of things I was I had been assaulted and I was recovering from that I was dealing with a really really serious um chronic health and pain issue I was unable to kind of work to the level that I wanted to and I I just found that you know when you hit rock bottom you don't tend to realize you're there um and I think even now when I when I look back on that time I kind of shiver with with the desire to never be back there and to never I you know there was a point at which I was so deeply in pain both physically and emotionally that I was pushing everyone away I you know my relationships suffered my my family suffered my work suffered and I I'm so glad to not be in that position anymore but i think yeah what brought you out of it i think medication to be honest um antidepressants was sort of the first major hurdle um writing jaded brought me out of it it was sort of a it wasn't linear at all it was this sort of multi-year process and I think it wasn't until maybe 2021 2022 that I could look back on that with a bit of daylight and and think gosh I never want to go back there again um writing jaded helped me process a lot of things um getting sort of on top of my health helped me and it was just this sort of very incremental thing of slowly moving away and slowly building my life back up but yeah it was it was a pretty unhappy time but writing is catharsis absolutely well it's been wonderful having you as a guest and congratulations on both the books and i'm looking forward to the next one i mean i'm not going to ask you what it is i tell you why because i've got a theory about creativity which is it's imagine it's a bottle of fizzy pop and if someone asks you what you're doing and you tell them it's like opening that cap and letting the fizz out i love that and you've got to keep that cap on absolutely i really love that and i couldn't agree more ellalie thank you very much for being this week's difficult woman thank you so much for having me

32:27I so related when Ella Lee told me about dumping 90 ,000 words I think I've got whole manuscripts of hundreds of thousands of words languishing in bottom drawers thank you for listening to another episode of my Difficult Women podcast just remember to subscribe and download wherever you get your podcast to make sure the latest episode is always ready to go every Friday afternoon Bye.