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I am sometimes asked to speak at public events. It is a curious thing for a writer -- a bookish person who is by nature uncomfortable with the world -- to have to get up in front of strangers and talk when her strongest skills are fretting over pieces of paper and drinking coffee. But it has been explained to me that readers are curious about writers, so every now and then we are taken out of our cages for some fresh air and we try to sing for our supper.
Thus I found myself in Seoul last month at the World Women's Forum, and after I spoke for 30 minutes about women writers, a talk that naturally included Virginia Woolf, money and suicide, a Korean mother from the audience asked me a good question about child rearing.
The woman mentioned that she had a daughter who has been praised by her teachers for being a talented artist and writer. The daughter wished to be a writer, but the woman thought perhaps her daughter should be a lawyer. I suppose she asked me, because although I had wanted to be a writer, I had gone to law school. Then after two years of practicing as a corporate lawyer, I had quit to write fiction. Did I have any advice?
First, I congratulated her for raising a smart and creative daughter. I often meet hardworking mothers who think there is something wrong when in fact something is terrific. Of course, I understood the mother's concerns. I quit lawyering in 1996, and published my novel in 2007, and I hardly earned any money in those 11 desolate years. There is little money to be made in fiction, and most novelists have to teach for their daily bread.
So I told the mother that if her daughter had only a vague interest in being a lawyer, she should work first as a paralegal, because a legal education is expensive. If she doesn't like being a paralegal, surely she will hate being a lawyer, so it would save hundreds of thousands of dollars on qualifying for a job she loathes.
How was I able to quit being a lawyer? she asked. Lots of sensible Koreans ask me this. I am not really a romantic person who decided to throw away her well-paying legal career for the arts. I had a liver disease, and my doctors said I could get cancer if I wasn't careful. I often worked seven days a week as a corporate lawyer, and my health was poor. I quit because I didn't want to die young. Having a lot less money but being healthy and doing a job I wanted to do turned out to be more important than having social status and cash in the bank. Incidentally, my liver disease has since been cured.
Finally, I shared this notion with this mother: if my son Sam had a job that imperiled his health and happiness for the sake of social status and financial security, I would have to tell him that he was wrong. If Sam went to Harvard and became a lawyer or doctor or a Wall Street millionaire but was unhealthy and unhappy, what good would it be? This seems obvious, but when I hear about the hardships Korean students endure and the sacrifices that their parents make for educational excellence when not all of us were designed to be A students, I think, perhaps, this is worth restating. The world, I humbly submit, needs plumbers, tax officials, dancers, psychologists, secretaries, florists, teachers, X-ray technicians, air conditioning repairmen, butchers, shoemakers, photographers, brain surgeons and garbage collectors. We need and value them all.
This mother and I shared just a few moments together, and perhaps that is the ultimate answer. Our life, our time, is limited. How we spend it matters.
The column was contributed by Minjin Lee, author of "Free Food for Millionaires."
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