How do we share history after it has already been claimed? That is the question at the heart of Ed Park’s latest novel.

A fiction finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, Same Bed Different Dreams is a riveting, revisionist take on Korean and American history—or at least what is assumed to be Korean and American history. The reconstruction of history from 1919 to the contemporary era, with multiple characters intersecting through parallel timelines, propels the head-spinning momentum of the book, centered on the true but stealth, ghostlike existence of the Korean Provisional Government that existed from 1919 to 1945. To map the course of this regime, Park creates intersections between countries through major and minor as well as real and fictional characters, including South Korean president Syngman Rhee, science fiction writer Parker Jotter, Marilyn Monroe, modernist poet Yi Sang, the Moonies, a spy named Sadako, and Monk Zingapan.

Same Bed Different Dreams is Park’s first work of fiction since Personal Days (2008), a darkly humorous and widely acclaimed account of several office workers waiting to be fired.

Park is a founding editor of The Believer and former editor with the Poetry Foundation and the the Village Voice’s Literary Supplement. He has also been a graphic novel columnist for The New York Times Book Review, a science fiction columnist for the Los Angeles Times; a senior editor at Amazon Publishing, and an executive editor at Penguin Press. 

In Same Bed Different Dreams, Park frames the plot within three narrative arcs. The first, titled “The Sins,” is narrated by Soon Sheen. The second are the “Dreams” (Dream One, Two, Three, etc.)” written by a Korean novelist named Echo whose book Sheen discovers. And the third voice is that of a Black writer and Korean War veteran, Parker Jotter, who survived a crash of his jet in North Korea in 1952 but whose memory is denied validation by the community at large; for this reason, he repackages his experiences as a series of science fiction books set in 2333—readers assume the books are a futuristic time stamp, but they actually allude to the mythical founding of Korea.

Same Bed Different Dreams glitters with Park’s ingenious wordplay, intertwined narratives, contrasting voices and vibrant characterizations, and it held me in its thrall, a meta-historical account that plays with the recording of experience and how it shapes or destroys communities.

Park and I spoke by Zoom. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

ZYZZYVA: Were you thinking about starting out with dreams when you began writing Same Bed Different Dreams?

ED PARK: I had a week by myself. My wife and kids were visiting my in-laws, and I thought, let me try to write something. The second, long chapter, the big dinner party scene with all these guests, mostly Asian and American literati, is very satirical. That was really the first scene. And I realized as I was writing it that I was finding it entertaining. By the end of that week, it was nearing fifty pages. And I thought this could be the novel.

It’s a long and winding road in terms of how I integrated things like the dreams, history, and the Korean Provisional Government. I kept using the same narrator, Soon Sheen, who was around my age and shared some of my background, in a variety of scenarios moving forward in time. There were a couple flashbacks. I dug into the past but nothing like what you finally see. I wrote a long first draft that was not working and was longer than the book you see here. But with the process of writing at length, one response is fear, like, I’ve gotten in too deep, it’s a mess, and I’ve wasted all my time. I’m ruining my life. The other option is to take a step back and see that all of this is coming from you, it’s coming from your mind and your memories, and how do you figure out what’s important? I realized that Korea was important to this book. 

Unlike Personal Days, I deliberately had a Korean American narrator. For a lot of writers, I suspect, it’s like, Fine, you’ve got a Korean American protagonist, just go write your thing. But for whatever reason, I kept thinking, what do people even know about Korea? Korean Americans, and non-Korean, non-Asian readership, but also Koreans themselves, even friends of mine, even myself, there’s still so much that is unexplored, hidden, forgotten. So why this character? How did Soon come to be, you know, born and raised in America, and what is his trajectory? Then I found myself thinking about the very early Korean Americans, people like Syngman Rhee, the novelist Younghill Kang, Philip Jason, whose Korean name was Jaisohn. And I loved how they anglicized their names. Suh Jae-p’il rearranged the syllables of his name so that he became Philip Jaisohn. Ee Seung-mon becomes Syngman Rhee. 

Z: The Dreams are disorienting, because many of your fictional characters interact with people who really lived in the past, and the Korean Provisional Government really existed as well, though mostly conceptually. How did you weave the real past and fiction together? 

EP: I actually needed and wanted to include all of the characters. And I figured out that the novel would contain a kind of unusual history book called Same Bed, Different Dreams  but with the comma,the sections of which I’d parcel out throughout my book. That gave me the freedom to be wide-ranging and even wild about what I included, and there is some degree of invention in how characters meet. 

I actually learned about the Korean Provisional Government in the early nineties from a Korean history textbook—a brief mention that I found fascinating. From that point on, I would keep an eye out for any stray information—if I saw a book on Korean history, I’d look at the index and see if it was mentioned. Usually there wasn’t much, but the concept was really interesting.

I was looking for something else in one of my old emails recently, and found some notes for a novel that I never finished, called Kingdom of Women. It was supposed to be the second book in a trilogy, not that any publishers wanted the first book, which I completed in ’96. Anyway, in those notes was a mention of the Korean Provisional Government. So I clearly have been thinking about it for a long time, and the KPG has just been laying low in the back of my mind for decades. And then as I was writing, Same Bed Different Dreams, it clicked: the KPG is such a useful metaphor for thinking about history and identity, because of the name itself. It was provisional. It didn’t really have any power. No foreign powers recognized it. But it felt elastic enough that I could include all these different historical figures as members, and tie together all sorts of episodes and things that I found fascinating.

Z: Regarding provisionality and how fundamental it is to identity, you show how provisionality functions in the need to survive. Syngman Rhee had so many different faces, for example.

EP: Most of the facts have some basis in his real life, or the rumors around him. For example, I knew he was living in Hawaii at this point in time, so I would just invent a little scene in which he meets a future Korean assassin, who was also living there at the time.  

Z: Can you discuss the different types of revision that occur in your work? I see both revisions of history, but also revisions of identity that characters experience in the novel.

EP: Revisions of identity and of history got baked into the structure of the book. Each of the five Dreams that make up Echo’s book—the book-within-the book— unfold chronologically, but there’s a lot of overlap around the edges. Certain years repeat. In Dream Two, I talk a lot about assassinations, and there’s the assassination of Ito, this Japanese politician who had once been resident-general of Korea. It happened in Harbin, China. And then in Dream Three, we get the events leading up to the assassination from a different angle, a different set of characters. And it’s an open question, did that actually hurt the Korean cause? Did Japan come down even harder after Ito’s murder? Because some people say he was out of the picture by then, more of a moderate, perhaps, at that point. But I think what he represented was still so abhorrent to some of these Korean patriots.

I had this idea about Sadako, who was adopted by Ito—it’s very strange. I put her in a lot of situations that don’t really come from the historical record, having her intersect with various figures, such as the poet Yi Sang, who really did come to Tokyo and died there, in captivity.

My book is very dense, but I did have that urge to make everything kind of entertaining. So, if there’s an assassination, there is action—it’s hard not to be interested. Asking a reader to kind of toggle between three different styles and three different threads is a lot, but I was hoping there would also be something about the disjuncture that would be compelling.

Z: How did you choose the historical material you included? Were you aiming to revise history?

EP: I did not intend to write historical fiction, because a lot of historical fiction is doing the research to get the details right. But since the historical parts were in the book within the book, written by a fictional author, it gave me more freedom. It’s almost like if you stopped me on the street and said, Tell me one interesting bit of Korean history from the 1930s, and then I might tell you about the strange poems and bohemian life of Yi Sang, or some other colorful episode. In Same Bed, I was trying to recover all the things that have interested me from this span of history, then imagine connections between them.  

Z: How did you research the book? Did you interview people? There are parts where the descriptions seem so real, like a scene where the corpses are hissing, and within that scene there is the skeleton of a mother and infant feeding on her.

EP: The Dreams contain a lot of Korean history through the ’60s and ’70s. So the Korean War has to be part of it. My father’s experience—he was fourteen when the Korean War broke out. So there are a couple stories in there, like in Dream Four, they are close to the way I remember him telling me about them. One was when he and a friend were rounded up and brought to a gymnasium, a school auditorium with all these other boys. This was when the North had come down, and were trying to get more soldiers for their army. My dad managed to escape, and never saw his friend again. That stuck with me for a long time. 

A lot of newspaper and magazine archives are accessible online, and there’s a book by a war reporter named Reginald Thompson. He wrote Cry Korea, which was published while the war still raged. That image of the mother and child is something he saw. He’s a British journalist who went there thinking the war would be over like that. He felt great sympathy for the kind of average Korean who’s just getting slaughtered by either side. A drawing of the mother and child is on the cover of that book.  The hissing of gas leaving the bodies, that might come from Cry, Korea.

I’ve accumulated tons of books throughout the years. There was some internet, archival, and periodical research. Also, sometimes I arrive at information by chance. For example, a reader of Personal Days who lived in Buffalo contacted me, shared some microfiche images of the issue of the Buffalo News where the editors and writers pretended that a nuclear bomb had destroyed Buffalo, that it really happened. If you’re at all interested in someone like Philip K. Dick, who writes about paranoia and media control—I was like, that has to go in the book! And it worked out timing-wise, because the Korean War was still going on. The paper was making people imagine that the war had somehow come to Buffalo.

Z: It’s such a different atmosphere now for Asian American writers. We can express and celebrate our culture, and in your book, you celebrate that Asians always have several names. Those details are important. And generational. I remember my parents knew every Chinese person within a hundred miles, and we lived in Tennessee. Part of it was my parents had written letters for people to immigrate, but it was this sixth sense, too, of nostalgia for their own culture.

EP: I think that was true for my parents as well—knowing every Korean family in a fifty-mile radius. 

Z: Tell me about the “wildwording,” like carrot being mistaken for garret, and tan gun for Dangun. 

EP: Wordplay is integral to the plot. I’ve always thought about Korea and identity in relation to the English language and how these things can be represented. But then, in the case of this book, I thought about how you can use language as a way to conceal things—to stitch together a plot, to have these revelations, especially toward the end. Soon Sheen’s name is that of a famous military hero who I name-check. The first big scene is a dinner party at the Admiral Yi, a restaurant, and Admiral Yi’s full name is Yi Soon Sheen. And so Soon Sheen’s name is actually the same as this admiral’s name, which I didn’t realize until hundreds of pages in.

It’s part of my real life too, of course. If you see a Park, chances are they’re Korean, right? But that’s not how it sounds in Korean. It’s more like Puck. Pock would even be closer, but it’s what’s recognizable. Or Li, Koreans usually go by Lee. These names are approximations. As an Asian kid, you think about how things are being translated, and whether things are crossing over or not. 

Likeke the origin of Korea-Dongun. Or carrot and garret. And 2333 sounds futuristic, like Bolano’s book 2666. The science fiction series that Parker Jotter writes is in 2333, but it’s 2333 BC, the legendary founding of Korea. And there’s a toy called the louse. I had this dictionary of anagrams, and under Louse is Seoul, Korea. It’s comic relief that even the name of a device is a nod to Korean design or structure at large in the book.

Speaking of wildwording, I guess it’s not torture for everybody, but I think it certainly can be, and I think it can be scary, you know, getting lost in your own words. You’re like, I’ve created this edifice that I’m the only one who could decode this or find their way in, but I’m lost and it doesn’t make sense. I mentioned there was originally this long first draft, all in the first person. I realized it wasn’t working, and I had other ambitions welling up inside me about what the book could be. I didn’t want to throw everything away, because it had been four or five years of work at that point, at least. I think I had fourteen chapters or something. I told myself, Just take the six chapters you like the most, that are the funniest—the ones that you still enjoy reading. Now throw away those other eight chapters, pretend you didn’t write them. So what do you have left? I think you have to be able to cast a cold eye over what you’ve done. Just be honest with yourself.