When Dahee Shin was nine years old, she made a promise to protect her favorite cousin, Channing, who has always been like a sister to her. Now, at thirty, Dahee has found herself in a Korean American community in a New England beach town, once more running to the rescue of the debt-ridden Channing. Ever the idealist, Channing—who has spent her life haunted by the tragic story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, Korea’s version of Romeo & Juliet—has fallen in love with Minjae Oh, all the while fending off the advances of powerful, manipulative Kent Cho, a local politician. As Channing and Minjae’s romance blossoms, and as Kent’s suspicion and obsession grow, Dahee begins to realize that it may be up to her to make sure her cousin and beloved escape Chunhyang and Mongryong’s doomed ending.

As the meet-cute romance pivots into a gripping mystery swirling around a town’s hidden financial corruption, Dreamt I Found You explores the double-edged community dynamics of an insular, small town. Lyrical, tender, and propulsive, Dreamt I Found You takes readers on a transformative journey.

Hyphen: I’ve always been a fan of Romeo & Juliet stories. What’s your relationship to these tales of thwarted love? 

Han: I think every book I’ve written is about how stories we hear and read when we’re growing up impact our sense of what’s possible for our lives. We might agree with those stories or prove them wrong, but our imaginations work in intricate ways from the very beginning. 

I was told early on how dangerous romantic love could be. My grandmother was disowned by her family for marrying my grandfather, since they were from different classes. She moved to the north side of the Korean peninsula with her husband (and my father was born there), but when the Korean War began and men were conscripted, her husband and son fled south. They assumed they’d return when things calmed down, but the border closed. My father never saw his mother again. Cautionary tale? You could say so. 

I was told early on how dangerous romantic love could be.

I romanticized my grandparents’ relationship when I was a little girl. My father missed his mother terribly. I was also repeatedly told I looked like my grandmother, so there’s that too! Later, my college boyfriend had a coffee mug depicting a Chinese Romeo and Juliet story and it made me wonder about a Korean version. So I asked my aunt—she’s the great storyteller in our family—and she told me the story of Chunhyang.

Hyphen: Myths and fairy tales play a big role in our understanding of love. K-dramas too! Why do you think we love to see these familiar kinds of stories play out in different ways?

Han: Love is such a private choice, but it’s also so public—people have rules about who you’re allowed to date. And I think that’s why these stories have endured—K-dramas and the like—because love stories can be subversive. The Tale of Chunhyang story spread widely during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early part of the 20th century. Part of the reason it’s endured for so long in Korea is that it’s a tale of resistance. 

As a love story, it comes in under the radar. But if you’re opposing any kind of rule, or any kind of law, that’s subversive. It’s a rallying cry. These days, we’re also dealing with a really oppressive government that’s taking away rights, so I think it’s a great time to have this kind of story out there.

Hyphen: Let’s talk about your beautiful and haunting setting. I grew up in a coastal resort town (I was a townie!), and I really connected to East End. Could you tell me about crafting this town? What were your experiences as a kid like in New England?

Han: As immigrants, my family had a rocky start when we first arrived. Eventually, we landed in a three-family house in Providence, Rhode Island, with my aunt, uncle, and cousin living upstairs. I was four years old, and I have great memories of playing with my brothers and cousin on the grass and in our large concrete driveway. We moved away to Dayton, Ohio, and then to Jamestown, New York, but every summer, we visited my aunt and uncle in Rhode Island. 

It meant so much to me to return; it was like a homecoming. There were more Korean families in Providence than in Dayton or Jamestown, so East End is a fictional version of that feeling. A close friend of mine now has a house on Cape Cod where she hosts an informal writer’s retreat, so I get to visit New England in the summers again. I get the most writing done during those weeks.

In terms of a large Korean community in a small town—one can dream, right? I think when you’re an insider versus an outsider, sometimes it appears a certain way to you, so that’s why Dahee thinks it’s so wonderful when she first arrives. Then she finds out it’s much more complicated. 

Hyphen: I was struck by the narrator’s vantage point. Dahee is Channing’s cousin, and has both the objective remove of someone outside the love story, but she also has her own projections about love, family, and power. She reminds me a bit of a Korean-American female Nick Carraway! Why was it important to have her as the narrator?

Han: I love that you thought of The Great Gatsby. Nick is a fascinating character. You mentioned Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story earlier. I always thought the minor characters were really pivotal in those stories. Okay, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are featured in the Stoppard play, but what about the nurse and the friar? What about Anita? We know they were key to the tragic ending, so why not give them their own story? My cousin Sherry and I are the only girls in a family of a lot of boys, and we’ve always been really close. I’d do anything for her, so she’s the inspiration for Channing—though she’s nothing like Channing. 

A lot of my books come out of me circling ideas. I was really interested in writing about two Korean women who had different approaches to life. And I wondered, why is that? For the two characters, did it have to do with a story they were told that shaped their outlooks? And then I thought, what if it’s the same story? What is it about what we tell ourselves that shapes us?

Liao: I love that it started with Dahee and Channing, because that relationship is so central. That love is so important, too—sisterly love, taking care of each other. Without spoiling plot events, we see men abusing their power and corrupting what should be a fair and legal justice system. I couldn’t help but wonder if you were commenting a bit on recent national and political abuses of power. Why did you decide to include these types of bad actors?

Han: Great point. It was important to me that the system was critiqued in this novel, especially how we rely on people to be fair within that system. This has always been true—as an Asian American woman I’ve experienced that. Now with ICE, it’s so much worse. In the original Tale of Chunhyang, a local magistrate imprisons Chunhyang for rejecting him. 

For me, it’s always interesting to see what’s going on behind the scenes. It takes an entire group behind someone to actually enforce and allow corruption to occur. Compare the first and second terms of the current president? It takes a lot of enablers on many levels to make things happen. So I decided Kent would be the mayor’s chief of staff, the man pulling all the strings and having the relationships with other key people in town. While we do have Asian American political figures—like Mayor Michelle Wu in Boston!—it’s still pretty rare.

Liao: Intergenerational family dynamics are also at play. In a flashback, we see a beautiful moment when Dahee connects with her aunt, Channing’s mother, over reading and books. In some ways, I feel like your novel is haunted by ghosts of previous generations. Your previous book was literally about a ghost! How did you approach writing about these different generations? 

Han: My aunt is still a major influence in my life. She introduced me to the Brontës and Jane Austen when I was a kid. She read all of them in translation in South Korea when she was in college. She gave me permission to read all day. And you’re right to call it a haunting. 

When I was nine years old, my friend Amy’s mom died. It was a shock. She was the first person I knew who vanished. Here one day and gone the next. She was unlike any of the other mothers in my neighborhood. She read books and newspapers when Amy and I played with dolls, she took us out to eat in restaurants, and she was just this cool woman. I thought a lot about her when I was writing this book. Both Amy’s mom and my aunt, they were women who loved books. They were surrounded by books. They were great role models for me in that way.

Hyphen: I was surprised to find a mystery about a past financial crime embedded in the second half of the book! Did you set out to write a genre-bending approach to this love story, or was it a surprise? 

Han: I love that you say it’s genre-bending. Is it? Every book I write seems to be on the border of two things. This one I thought was a romance but you’re right, the mystery of Channing’s family’s downfall in the town reads like a mystery. It was important for that element to be in the story, so I was thinking about feuds in the town. My working title for the book was The Feud, so the conflict of the families was always in this story. It just took me a while to figure out how to tell it. 

I think at the heart of every story is a mystery—because why else are we reading?—whether it’s to get to know the character or understand why they did something. I absolutely love mysteries. We can all be haunted by things we don’t understand, or things we did in the past, or by what other generations did or didn’t do. It’s about history, and trying to rewrite history.

Hyphen: What else would you like to share about this book, or about the writing and publishing process? Does it get easier—since this is your third book?

Han: I’m very lucky, because I have the same agent and the same editor, and I know that that’s not the case for everybody. Publishing is shrinking in so many ways right now—they’re closing entire divisions, and editors are losing their jobs, and authors don’t have editors to go back to. So, in that way, knowing that someone’s waiting, that’s always my great motivator. I love a deadline, and I hate to be late, so that helps me write, absolutely. In terms of getting easier, if you accept that that this is your process, it doesn’t necessarily go faster, but you get there sooner. It’s like procrastination: I’m a big procrastinator, but if you know that you're a procrastinator, just do the procrastinating and then get on with it.

We change as we write and we have new experiences and the world changes, our lives change. I hope people enjoy this book and find it connects to their experiences in some way. There’s power in working together. There are so many kinds of love, and the most vital kind right now for me is how we care for each other actively as a community.