Providence writer Marie Myung-Ok Lee was not adopted. Lately, though, a lot of people assume she was.

"People are coming up to me now and saying, 'I'm adopted, too. Thank you for writing our story,' " Lee says.

Lee says she immediately blurts out that she wasn't adopted. "I don't want to be dishonest with anyone," she says.

The confusion is understandable. Lee, a visiting lecturer at Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, has just published her first novel for adults, Somebody's Daughter (Beacon Press, $23.95), about a Korean adoptee who returns to her homeland to search for her birth mother.

The story is told in two parallel narratives, both of which have the ring of authenticity.

The first voice is 19-year-old Sarah Thorson, a Korean-American girl raised in Minnesota by parents of Scandinavian ancestry. Feeling alienated and misunderstood, Sarah decides to go to Korea to search for her roots.

The novel's second story belongs to Kyung-sook, a Korean woman who sells shrimp in a village marketplace and still wonders about the child she abandoned in the '70s after she became pregnant by an American musician.

"Including the voice of the birth mother gives the book a trans-national perspective. It takes what is becoming a very familiar story of adoption and adds a new dimension," says Matt Garcia, a Brown University professor who is using the book in his class "Sex, Love, Race: Miscegenation, Mixed-Race, and Interracial Relations."

The official release date for Somebody's Daughter was Friday, although copies were in bookstores before then. Garcia got Beacon Press to send him advance copies for the class.

To gather insights into the emotions of Korean birth mothers, Lee went to Korea on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1997-1998. There she interviewed women who had given up children for adoption.

During an interview of her own at the ethnicity-study center on Providence's East Side, Lee said it was not easy finding these women and gaining their trust. One place she tried was a home for unwed mothers.

"At first, no one there wanted to talk to me," she said. "But I volunteered to teach an English class, which they liked, because many of them hoped to come to the United States some day and reunite with their children."

Lee said she didn't use any of the specific stories she heard from the Korean women she interviewed, but their collective experiences and emotions all inform the character of Kyung-sook.

Culture clash

Lee, who graduated from Brown in 1986, said she began writing stories about Sarah Thorson back in 1992.

"I really liked the angry energy of the character," she said. "The stories were starting to jell, but I had reached the point where I couldn't go any further. That's when I came to the conclusion that I had to go to Korea."

When Lee wrote Somebody's Daughter, after returning from Korea, the novel had a third voice, that of Sarah's adoptive mother, Christine. But Christine's portion of the book disappeared during the editing process.

Helene Atwan, director of Beacon Press, in Boston, and the editor of Somebody's Daughter, said Lee's agent submitted the book to Beacon several years ago. At the time, Atwan said, Beacon was not publishing new fiction.

But, Atwan said, the novel stayed with her, and when Beacon decided it was going to publish fiction, she remembered Somebody's Daughter and asked if it was still available.

It was.

Atwan -- who happens to have an adopted daughter herself -- said she felt the story would be stronger if it alternated between just two voices, mother and daughter.

Lee said she was reluctant at first to cut out so much of her book. But when she did, she found the plot went much more quickly.

Although Somebody's Daughter is often poignant, there are also comic elements in the novel, as Lee plays with the clash of Korean and American cultures.

Sarah might look Korean, but her upbringing has been thoroughly American, and she struggles with the Korean language and the mysteries of Korean cuisine. Her classmates at Chosun University, where she is trying to learn Korean, call her a "Twinkie" -- yellow on the outside, white on the inside.

In one scene, she is saved from possible starvation in Seoul, South Korea, when she finds a 7-Eleven that sells ramen noodles.

As for Kyung-sook, when her American lover introduced her to pizza, she decided it might be palatable, if only you could add some sugar, lots of sweet-hot pepper paste, and maybe some fish. And scrape off the cheese.

Early influences

She grew up in Hibbing, Minn., also the hometown of Bob Dylan. Her parents emigrated to America shortly after the Korean War.

Assimilation was the goal when she was growing up, Lee said. The family didn't speak Korean at home, didn't eat Korean food.

"My parents treated kimchi [fermented cabbage with hot spices] like it was radioactive," Lee said. "I grew up thinking I didn't like spicy food. Now I crave it."

Lee's father, a physician, believed his children should all go to Harvard and become doctors. Lee, though, had other ideas.

"I always had stories in my head. When I was 9, my brother lent me a typewriter and I typed up my first story, and I thought how cool and professional it looked. I sold my first story to my parents when I was 9."

Early influences, she said, included J.D. Salinger, Mark Twain and S.E. Hinton, although she also read potboilers such as Valley of the Dolls and those by Sidney Shelton.

But Lee did not major in writing at Brown, choosing economics instead and writing on "The Effect of Development on Third World Women's Labor Force Participation."

After graduation, she worked in research on Wall Street, at Standard & Poor's and then Goldman Sachs.

At the same time, she was getting up every morning at 4 to devote time to her writing. In 1991, thanks to her savings and a small grant, she quit her Wall Street job to write full time.

A Korean writer

Her first book, 1992's Finding My Voice, is overtly autobiographical. The heroine is a Korean teenage girl growing up in Minnesota, with a physician father who is obsessed with getting his kids into Harvard.

At high school, she has to deal with the racism of some of her classmates.

"Oh, yes, there was a lot of it," Lee said when asked if she experienced racism while going to high school in Hibbing.

In 1996's

Necessary Roughness

The book required some extra research on Lee's part, since she knew nothing about football. (In her acknowledgments, she thanks the Hibbing High School football team for letting her watch.)

So far, all of her novels have focused on Korean protagonists.

"At Brown, Flannery O'Connor was my favorite author. I was going to be a universal writer," Lee said. "Now, being an Asian-American writer, being a Korean writer, overtly informs my work."

Adult themes

Lee said she made the change for a couple of reasons. One was to make her Korean identity clear. The other was to avoid confusion with another author named Marie Lee, who writes mysteries. (Marie Myung-Ok Lee has received fan mail intended for the other Marie Lee.)

Lee doesn't make too much of the distinction between writing a "young adult" book and one intended for a more mature audience. A lot of the distinction, she said, is a matter of marketing.

If Catcher in the Rye were published today, she said, it might well be considered a young-adult book.

At Beacon Press, Atwan said Somebody's Daughter could be read by teenagers who are sophisticated readers.

But she said the experiences and observations in Somebody's Daughter, particularly the perspective of Kung-sook, are more sophisticated than most young-adult fare. (There is also some sexual material.)

Present and future

They have a son, now 5, who has autism. In 2003, Lee wrote a "My Turn" column for Newsweek describing the time her son, identified only as J, had a meltdown on Thayer Street.

Lee described how she tried to control her screaming son as he flung himself to the ground. People stared and glared, she wrote, assuming she was a bad parent who couldn't control her child.

"My urge during J's fits is always to scream 'My son has a neurological disorder!' " she wrote. " . . . The next time you are inclined to judge a parent, stop and think. There might be more to it than 'bad parenting.' "

In her interview with The Journal, Lee said it's ironic for someone whose life revolves around language to have a child with a language disorder.

Lee plans to teach a class, "Writing History, Writing Self" next spring at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.

"Marie is an accomplished writer, and we felt having her would enrich the resources of the center," said Evelyn Hu-DeHart, director of the center. "She is also able to use our resources, so it is a situation in which everyone benefits."

Meanwhile, Lee said she's got another book in the works, although, like many writers, she doesn't want to reveal any more than that.

She compared some of her writing to driving at night -- you can only see so much in advance.