Between work and home, Sharon S.Y. Lee found she was pouring a lot of herself into others, but she was starting to run low.
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“After I had my daughter, life got a little crazy and I was really looking for a creative outlet. At the time, I felt like I was giving too much of myself away—too much to my clients, too much to my daughter—I felt like I just needed something for myself,” she says. “I took a class at San Diego Writers, Ink around 2022, which I loved and I was just hooked immediately. After that, I signed up for a novel writing course with one of their instructors, and here I am.”
Lee is a staff attorney for Elder Law & Advocacy, a nonprofit that provides legal and Medicare assistance for older adults and their unpaid caregivers in San Diego and Imperial counties. As an undergraduate at UC San Diego, she’d taken some career aptitude tests and one said she should pursue life as a lawyer or a priest. “Obviously, I wasn’t going to be a priest,” she recalled with a laugh. Although she’d always wanted to write and had done a little of it here and there, she’d never fully committed to it until recently. Rediscovering this creative outlet has led to numerous awards for her work as an author, including receiving the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction from Reed Magazine earlier this year, for her short story “Only Son,” which is “told from the perspective of dead ancestors, and it’s about a Taiwanese American boy who’s facing his bully during a judo tournament.”
Lee, 43, lives with her husband and daughter, is a board member with San Diego Writers, Ink, and she’s currently working on a forthcoming short story collection called “Isolation Tank.” She took some time to talk about her writing and the challenges that come with telling difficult stories.
What kinds of stories were you most drawn to when you were growing up in the Bay Area, and do you think that shows up in any of your current writing?
I don’t think much of my reading from my childhood shows up now, at least not consciously because back then I was reading a lot of “Babysitters Club” and “Sweet Valley High.” That being said, I always remember food descriptions in all the books that I’ve read, and food descriptions are very important to me, though they don’t seem to show up much in my own writing. I think it’s the visceral details of being hungry and smelling the food, that’s always stuck with me more than anything else.
My dad is a storyteller, so there was a strong oral storytelling tradition in our house, and he would tell us stories about ancient Chinese battles, but also a lot of stories with animal characters always learning a lesson. It’s not that fun when you’re a kid, but it’s at least more digestible. As far as books, I read Roald Dahl.
You won the John Steinbeck Award for Fiction from Reed Magazine for your short story, “Only Son.” What inspired this work?
I used to do judo when I was younger, and I had started judo kind of to appease my dad. My dad is this tough guy who used to do judo, and I had done judo for a number of years, even though I wasn’t really good at it. It was only recently that I seem to have suffered some injuries that may have been a result of all of the judo I had done earlier in my life (tore both rotator cuffs), so thinking about that inspired the story.
What does it mean to you to have your writing recognized with this award?
I’m just over the moon, I’m so happy. It is a confirmation of my hard work, it is a recognition of a story that wouldn’t have been told when I was a child because the two main characters, one is Taiwanese American and the other is Japanese American. I do think that’s a reflection of our literary landscape today, so I’m not only happy on a personal level, I’m just also happy on a larger level.
What I love about Mira Mesa…
It’s ethnically and culturally diverse, and there are a lot of good people who live there who care about each other and have love for each other. There are a lot of parks, it’s got great proximity to beaches, and then the food is fantastic.
Are you a Steinbeck fan?
Yes, I am. I remember one of the first books I read that changed my life was “The Pearl.” After I read that story, I was so depressed I had to go outside and take a walk and have a long cry.
What is it that you enjoy about his writing?
Well, I don’t know if you could say I enjoy it, but those moments of terrible humanity and suffering really resonate with me on some level. Maybe it’s because I’m a second-generation Chinese and Taiwanese American, and so I was raised with these stories of how our generation is too soft and can’t handle any hardship, so any way that I can live vicariously through hardship was something that I embraced a lot when I was a child. I don’t embrace that now, that’s just how I was raised.
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You also won third place in last year’s Friends of San Diego Library’s Short Story Contest for your piece, about an older woman retiring from her job at a dim sum restaurant and rethinking some of her life’s decisions, like a cruise to celebrate her retirement and a close relationship with a coworker. I have to say, I was ticked off with the customer at table 24 and I really wanted Ellen to eat that last dumpling. Do you find that you’re particularly partial to short story writing?
Yes, I love the short story form. I have a very short attention span, so it works well for me. I think there’s a lot of room for experimentation, so it’s my preferred form at this moment.
Can you walk us through a bit of your writing process for stories like “Only Son” and “Ellen’s Last Day”?
It usually comes from an unanswered question, or some random inspiration. The inspiration will come from anything—my daily life, my family, my clients, something I’ve read, or even a dream. I’ll dream up the story and write it down, but I’m a perfectionist, so I tend to write very slowly and every story that I write goes through many, many rounds of revisions. I’ve got two different reading critique groups, so they will look at the story several times. I might also have some family members take a look.
Who are some of your favorite writers/works?
Oh my gosh, there are too many. The problem is my favorites are always changing and they’re usually whatever I’m reading at the moment. Right now, I’m reading “Severance,” it’s this novel by Ling Ma. I tend to read books at the same time, and there’s this other short story collection called “A Lucky Man” by Jamel Brinkley. Both are brilliant in very different ways. “Severance” has this dark, dry humor. It’s about a Chinese American who is trying to survive when the world has essentially ended. Then, Jamel Brinkley’s short story collection is about the experiences of African American men, and the level of emotional depth is so touching and universal. I absolutely love it.
What’s been challenging about your work?
I write about a lot of difficult topics. I’ve written about sexual assault, microaggressions, sexism, abuse, and it’s very hard and challenging to write about difficult topics with compassion and nuance. I want to be fair, and I want to present more than one point of view, so it involves a lot of putting myself in other people’s shoes. It also involves a lot of research. For example, when I wrote this one piece about sexual assault, “Hulk Princess Birthday Party,” it was a really difficult story to write because I had to do so much research. I researched , about Chanel Miller and Brock Turner (the 2016 case found Turner, a student at Stanford University, guilty of felony sexual assault of Miller, who was then referred to as “Emily Doe” before revealing her identity in 2019; they’d met at a party on campus and were heavily intoxicated, with Miller unconscious during the assault. Turner received a sentence of six months in prison and was released after serving three months). I read her victim’s statement, and I also researched the lawsuits that were filed against Kevin Clash, who was the Elmo puppeteer (Clash was accused of sexual abuse in lawsuits filed by three men, alleging the abuse occurred when they were minors; a judge ruled against the accusers in 2013, saying the lawsuits weren’t filed within the required time frames). I also talked to some sexual assault survivors, so it’s the amount of effort.
What’s been rewarding about this work?
It’s a creative outlet for me, and I don’t take myself too seriously, so I still really enjoy the process. Along the way, I’ve met a lot of wonderful people and made a lot of new writerfriends.
What has this work taught you about yourself?
Writing has really forced me to meditate on my own life choices and to work through some of my issues. It’s also taught me to be a better person, to look at diverse viewpoints, and to really listen.
What is the best advice you’ve ever received?
The best piece of advice I received was to focus on myself, and by that I mean there are so many ways to get distracted, there’s so much noise all the time, and as a writer, it’s tempting to compare myself to others and chase publishing trends. If we let all of that fall away and just focus on yourself and your work, and on working at your own pace, you’ll find satisfaction and creativity. No matter what, you’ll find like satisfaction and creativity that’ll nourish you and sustain you, no matter what other people say or do.
What is one thing people would be surprised to find out about you?
When I was in law school, I snagged an internship in a Mongolian law firm that dealt with mining rights. So, I flew to Mongolia to do this work, and when the internship was over, I went camping, and I lived in a ger for a few days. That was really fun, but really uncomfortable.
Please describe your ideal San Diego weekend.
My family and I would grab banh mi and we’d go to one of our favorite beaches, like Sea Grove Park in Del Mar, or La Jolla Shores, or Moonlight Beach in Encinitas. Then, we grab ice cream afterward. There are so many places, but there’s this new Persian ice cream place in Del Mar, I think it’s called Saffron & Rose. It’s so good, you’ve got to check it out.
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