[2] Her father was a physician, and both of her parents fled North Korea to the South, eventually moving to Minnesota when her mother secured a United States visa.
"[10] Lee's novel Saving Goodbye is a sequel to Finding My Voice, which follows the character of Ellen Jung as she graduates from high school and enters her freshman year at Harvard University.
Necessary Roughness is about a Korean-American boy named Chan Kim who moves from Los Angeles to the fictional city of Iron Town, Minnesota, and plays football in order to deal with the racism he faces from his peers and to escape problems he confronts with his parents and the rest of his family.
Lee's novel, Somebody's Daughter (2005), is based on her year as a Fulbright Scholar to South Korea, taking oral histories of Korean birth mothers.
[13] Her stories and essays have been published in The Atlantic, Witness, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Newsweek, Slate, Guernica, The Guardian and The New York Times.