Your House Will Pay: A Novel

"Again, it’s like ‘Wow! I’ve read Raymond Chandler and Michael Connelly. I’ve read so many versions of Los Angeles but not this version.’ It gives me a sadness. We’re learning so many stories that were never told because the dominant lens was a white male lens, where everybody knew their place and the men were always the heroes. Steph Cha is an amazing writer. One of the things I like about this book is that a lot of immigrant stories in America are about how ‘he was beaten to death and he couldn’t speak English, and his life was horrible.’ That’s not so much the experience of second-, third- or fourth-generation immigrants. She’s talking about middle-class Korean Americans, which she is very familiar with, and African Americans in LA. It’s a uniquely American experience. One of these characters’ parents have made sacrifices, and now they’re working in a pharmacy and doing well. They’re middle class. It’s the American dream. All of that is pulled out from under them because of a racist act. It’s so prescient that she’s writing about this. She could have been writing about the racial explosion that happened before she wrote this book because it keeps happening. The book is asking, ‘Why do we keep doing this shit over and over again?’ It’s also a reminder that as much progress as we make, there’s always going to be a minority opinion that tries to pull us back. Right now, Trump has really hard support of 20 per cent of Americans. That’s too much. We’re under the tyranny of the minority: this small group of really awful people is directing the conversation. This is partly because our press is saying, ‘There are two sides to everything.’ If you go back, you’ll see that they did the same thing with Hitler before the war: ‘He’s a nice guy after all.’ Los Angeles is home to Hollywood, but it’s also one of the most racially segregated cities I’ve ever been in. It’s quite startling. When I went to Los Angeles for the first time, people would say, ‘How can you live in the South? It’s so racist.’ And I would say, ‘We see what you’re doing here. Los Angeles is not even an American word. Who named that?’ Again, it’s using crime as a fulcrum to pry the scab off the human condition. Steph Cha is an amazing world-builder. In the United States, it’s still a predominantly white audience, statistically. She’s got to explain it to everybody while not insulting people who already know. To be able to juggle that, where neither party feels they are being talked down to, is such a skill. You’re not even aware of it. It’s this fundamental ability Steph has to put you in this world. You see and hear and taste and feel it. If there’s one theme through all these books (even the one set in Appalachia, which I’m more familiar with as a setting because there are lots of hillbillies in my family) it’s that they all make you look at the world differently. I think that’s the gift of a good book. You think, ‘I thought I knew about this, but I read this book and now I have a much deeper understanding.’ Yes, it’s like the CliffsNotes of Korean American history or the Texas Rangers. It’s like when I read the Falco series by Lindsey Davis, and then I went to Bath and I thought, ‘How do I know all this stuff about what the Romans were doing here? How do I know about these bathhouses?’ It’s this very subtle education, which makes it sound kind of boring, but that’s why we read. It’s basic Harold and the Purple Crayon stuff. That’s a big American book, which every child reads, about a kid who has a purple crayon. The best thing about the book is that as a kid you think, ‘We’re different, but Harold has a purple crayon; I have a purple crayon.’"

"That’s right. This book is set in Los Angeles , and a bit like the Lou Berney book, it’s got two narrators and two different timelines. So, it’s half set in 1991 during the Los Angeles riots—when a 15-year-old black girl is shot dead by a Korean shopkeeper who thought the girl was stealing. Steph Cha, who is Korean-American, has taken the story of Latasha Harlins’s death and fictionalised it, using the crime novel to look at race in LA. It was published in 2019, but still feels very, very timely, because the other timeline in the book, in the present-day, features a police shooting of a black man in LA, and tensions rising again in the community, just like they did in 1991. It feels like something is about to kick off at any moment. A Korean woman is shot outside of the store that she runs, and it turns out it’s the same woman who, 20 years ago, shot this Black girl in her shop and got a very lenient prison sentence. Within a few years, she’s out of prison, changed her name, and is basically back living in the same community. People didn’t know who she was, but someone has found out and has murdered her. So the book is basically about the tension between these two communities, seen through the eyes of a Korean family and a Black family, set against the backdrop of racism in America and police brutality. It takes on a lot of very serious issues, and does it well—so well, so cleverly, and with a light touch that makes it very enjoyable to read. It sounds like a very serious, dark book, I know, but the experience of reading it isn’t. It’s really entertaining, and very emotional, because you’ve got the children of these adults involved in crimes of the early 1990s, having to cope with the sins of the father—or the sins of the mother, in this case—and the repercussions of everything that happened between their families years ago. As you said, this was a prize-winning novel. I don’t know if it was a big commercial hit, but it’s one of those books that other crime writers read and rhapsodise about, because it’s so well done, so well-written."