A Warm and Inviting Door: A Conversation with Tammy Heejae Lee by Star Su
Our latest Tenth Anniversary Interview is with Tammy Heejae Lee. Tammy’s remarkable story, “Roe Soup Dance,” was a Runner-Up in Split Lip Magazine’s 2020 Flash Fiction Contest, judged by Bryan Washington. Tammy is now a flash fiction reader at SLM. I always look forward to her insightful comments and our discussions on submissions.
Tammy is a Korean American writer from Davis, California. She holds a BA from UC Davis and an MFA in fiction from the University of San Francisco, where she received a post-graduate teaching fellowship. A 2021-2022 Steinbeck Fellow and a Tin House Summer Workshop and Sewanee alum, her writing has appeared in Sundog, The Offing, and PANK, among others. She is currently working on her first novel about hagwon and expat culture in Seoul. Some of her simplest pleasures are found within sidewalk flower shops, fries dipped in sauce two at a time, and life advice conveyed through neon signs.
We talked over Slack about what haunts her, delivery food as a temporary fix for loneliness, a treasure hunt she made for herself, and her draft novel.
Star Su: How are you doing? Where are you writing from?
Tammy Heejae Lee: I keep alternating where my writing spot is because I like switching up my environment (maybe too often), but currently I’m writing to you from my dining room table. This one is out of necessity: it’s the darkest and coolest part of the house, and it’s currently over 100 degrees in this area of Northern California and SUPER dry. My DM’s are open to all the popsicle and grocery store ice cream recs…
SS: The poet Truong Tran asks his writing students: “What haunts you. What hunts you. What are you hunting.” Choose one to answer for me. You don’t have to say which one you chose.
THL: Around six years ago on a random weeknight, my friends and I decided to hang out in a neighborhood we rarely had a reason to go to. We were at that age where you could just jump into a taxi and decide where you wanted to go right on the spot, with no real preference of where it was for the sake of a spontaneous adventure. We had dinner and drinks and then ended the night with karaoke, but the whole time, something felt off. Like I just had this really uncomfortable gut feeling that I couldn’t place. Later, when we were getting ready to leave, we saw a bunch of police cars down the street, and when I checked the news the following morning, I learned that a girl had been murdered in a public restroom nearby where we were. She had done nothing wrong and was killed by a stranger (more about the incident here). She was the same age I was, and the hours leading up to her death had progressed similarly to the way mine had—drinking with friends, karaoke afterwards. It really messed me up for a while, and I still think about the incident from time to time now. It’s the kind of thing that never leaves you.
SS: You shared that “Baedal” in Sundog is thus far your favorite published piece. What was the inspiration for “Baedal”? Or if you could guess, where do you think the story came from?
THL: I had an odd work schedule back when I taught English in Korea that made it hard to get a proper meal in. A fellow teacher taught me about delivery food apps, and everything was so incredibly convenient, fast, and easy! But it also made me more introverted and closed off to other people during a time where I desperately needed to put myself out there and make new friends. Delivery food felt like a temporary solution to my loneliness and perpetuated its curse at the same time. I wanted to preserve the complexities of that kind of solitude within a story.
And just for the record—delivery food in Korea is amazing and the couriers usually leave you alone. But a handful of them could tell when they were in the presence of a foreigner and tried to strike up conversations that way. One friend I knew said the delivery driver went as far as coming inside her apartment and refused to leave for a while. Hers was an extreme case, but I wanted to write about an extreme situation like that. More than having “Baedal” be a story about the dangers of the outside world, I wanted to explore how far a person was willing to go to keep a comforting ritual, especially when it was something they knew they needed to quit, all within the confines of their apartment.
SS: What is your favorite delivery meal?
THL: McDonald’s, forever! I prefer ordering several things off their dollar menu over getting a complete meal. I feel like it prolongs the excitement and experience of unwrapping something new before you’re about to eat it. Is that just me?
SS: The last line of “Baedal” has haunted me. What rituals do you have to protect yourself from remembering? What rituals do you have to protect yourself from forgetting?
THL: I’m still working on how to stop myself from remembering certain things, but I actually love the way I keep myself from forgetting. If I see something I like or find really striking, I’ll jot down a few sentences on the notes app on my phone (as I’m sure a lot of us tend to do), knowing I’ll come across it later. But I write them in this really urgent and cryptic way, so that my future self will be curious enough to explore them further. For example, two years ago, I wrote:
“Heej, go back to this place:
The intersection of Powell and Pine (742 Pine?). There’s a stone stairway, potted plants, and something pretty up there that I can’t see right now, go & find it”
I realized I had written this while being a passenger in an Uber, which is why I left myself that note to come back to that location someday. It ended up being a staircase in between two buildings that led to a small shrine. There was a single tree in the middle of the stairs, blooming with these deep orange flowers. I could see why Past Me thought Future Me would like it: it looked like something straight out of a picture book. A tiny oasis. The whole thing felt like a treasure hunt made just for me, all because I refused to forget a place I had seen outside a car window once.
SS: What is something you can’t write without? Can be physical or metaphysical…
THL: Complete silence. My ideal writing environment would be the silent study room inside a library. Noise blocking headphones have helped me a ton, but I still prefer being somewhere so quiet you can’t really hear anything except for your own thoughts.
SS: I read in your bio you’re working on your first novel about expat and hagwon culture. I’m so excited to read it. Does “Baedal” exist in the same universe as your novel? Do the stories share anything?
THL: Ahh thank you! You know when I first started this novel, I kept thinking of it as a short story collection. Eventually in workshops, people pointed out that all of my stories were really similar: I was always writing about the same narrator (a lonely expat), struggling to find her place in the same city (Seoul). It made me realize that I was writing different episodes of this character’s life, and I was so attached to her because I bequeathed her a lot of different experiences I was obviously very familiar with. When I took a step back, I realized that every single short story I’d ever written so far—including “Baedal”—has had this character at the center. And she really was the same person every time, struggling with the same issues every time, always desperate to fit in in this new city of hers. So I re-labeled some of these separate “episodes” into chapters and it worked. Suddenly, I had a novel in my hands.
SS: And finally, what has Split Lip meant to you as a contributor and now flash fiction reader?
THL: Split Lip for me is like a warm and inviting door, like the entrance to a close friend’s home. They took one of my first publications after I entered a flash fiction contest, and that single pub felt like my first big break. The staff treated my work with such precision, excitement, and care. They really do root for you and all of your future writing endeavors with the utmost sincerity and warmth.
It’s for these exact reasons that I knew I wanted to be a reader for SLM’s flash fiction team. I love reading alongside the other readers and learning from their comments, it feels like a mini masterclass every week. And I’m forever inspired by our contributors and all the submissions we read—I come away from them wanting to take risks in my own work and write stories outside of what I’d typically gravitate towards. That, in addition to being blown away with every new issue we publish because of the range we get from every team, really does feel like the best of both worlds for me.
Star Su is a writer and engineer, currently living in Brooklyn. Star wants to adopt three cats in the near future and name them 南瓜 (pumpkin, though translated more literally it would be southern melon), 西瓜 (watermelon), and 冬瓜 (winter melon). Star is a fiction reader at Split Lip Magazine, and her fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Black Warrior Review, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. Find them at starcsu.com.