“On Such a Full Sea” is your first dystopian novel. Are you a fan of dystopian fiction? Do any books in particular inspire you?

Image Chang-rae Lee Credit... Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

I’m not automatically drawn to tales because they’re dystopian. The classics from Orwell and Huxley, and contemporary works by McCarthy, Atwood and Ishiguro are excellent because they expose our condition, certain possibilities of human expression and conduct, and not just because they’re set in some imagined or futuristic realm. The altered context of these realms should surely be diverting, but it’s how the context forms and deforms the characters that compels me as a reader. Otherwise it’s just fancy scenery and essentially repetitive episodes.

Though “On Such a Full Sea” is set in the United States, you began your research in China. What led you to change the setting?

Glimpsing, for the umpteenth time, an abandoned residential area of Baltimore from my seat on the Amtrak train. I intended to write a social-realist novel about the factory towns of the Pearl River Delta, but on seeing that neighborhood yet again I was struck by an odd, idle notion: why not have the people of a small city in China, say, one that was environmentally fouled, come over and resettle this forlorn place? Of course such a thing could never happen now, but the idea seemed less implausible when I considered it in the context of a very different future, a future when America was in significant decline. That was the moment that I began musing about a different novel, thinking of the details of that future society. And so those details evolved from there, Baltimore becoming “B-Mor,” a specialized labor settlement/facility that produces pristine fish and vegetables for an elite “Charter” class, and a whole set of characters emerged.

What might we be surprised to find on your bookshelves?

Lots of cookbooks. My friends would tell you that I like to cook and eat. But I rarely use the recipes, and if I do I seem to have a pathological urge to revise them until they’re altered profoundly. I hope not disfigured. I suppose this comes from equal parts egomania and laziness (for not wanting to go out and forage for the ingredients, or follow the prescribed manner of cooking). I simply like to look at the pictures, to be honest, which spur my appetite and make me imagine what might soon appear on the table.

What were your favorite books as a child?

I didn’t read the canon of classic children’s books, at least not until I became a father and read to my own children. No doubt this was because my parents were new to the country and not comfortable speaking English and didn’t read to me at night. I didn’t speak English myself until the first grade. I read lots of books in elementary school — I remember winning a prize for reading the most books one year — but I can’t recall a single title. What I do remember finding enduringly fascinating were some of my father’s books — he was a psychiatrist who also hoped to be an analyst — and he had all the works of Sigmund Freud. “The Interpretation of Dreams,” “Civilization and Its Discontents,” “Totem and Taboo,” et cetera. I couldn’t understand any of it. But I could glean something from “Three Case Histories” and “Studies on Hysteria,” which featured patients like the Rat Man and the famous Anna O., whom I considered to be story characters. I loved reading about these very anxious people with all kinds of fascinating ailments and tics, even if I didn’t really understand why they were fascinating. I suppose someone might say this was my literary “primal scene.”

Which novels have had the most impact on you as a writer? Is there a particular book that made you want to write?