Anne answers ““History has failed us, but no matter.”...”

Toni Johnson asked this question about Pachinko:

“History has failed us, but no matter.” What does this mean?

Anne I read in an interview with Min Jin Lee (in a Dutch newspaper, though) that when she was 19, she went to a lecture of an American missionary who had s…moreI read in an interview with Min Jin Lee (in a Dutch newspaper, though) that when she was 19, she went to a lecture of an American missionary who had served in Korea. He told the room about the fate of Koreans in Japan during the Japanese occupation of Korea: discrimination, racism, the whole lot. For example, the missionary talked about a teenager committing suicide, and his parents finding his yearbook in his room after it happened, in which his classmates had written racist comments about him being Korean, telling him to leave the country, telling him to die. She says that that story has always been with her after she heard it.

This sparked the idea for the novel. She says in the interview that "Nobody knows anything about this group, because it's not being taught anywhere".

The "no matter" part reflects the spirit of Koreans in Japan. She says in the interview that until she lived in Japan herself, she never knew that Koreans there do not see themselves as victims, but as survivors, "people who have made decisions in their lives".

Here's the link to the Dutch interview, but I guess she must have talked about this stuff in English-language interviews too. https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-med...(less)

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