I never really thought about this before sitting down to write this, but editing is an incredibly intimate way to experience a book. It’s a bit like walking down the middle of empty, snow-covered Broadway in NYC right after a blizzard; you feel profoundly that no one else will know the street the way you do. It’s a fantasy, of course—an editor is just one of the critical eyes that a book undergoes in its passage to the public. But that sense of possibility is very real—you’re working with a manuscript before it’s entirely, irrevocably set, before it has fully taken on the form that it will have for the rest of its published life, even as the story of your passage through it becomes something tucked away into its seams, unimportant and invisible, like the thread that keeps a book bound together.
I didn’t know any of this when I began working on Rolling the R’s, of course. Rolling was the first book I ever edited. I’d done copyediting and proofing before, but for Rolling, I was told to take a stab at sequencing. This was an unexpected but not unwelcome responsibility that I took very seriously. What does progression mean in a novel that thumbs its nose at a one-size-fits-all approach to genre? What did readers need to know in order to feel the full impact—the energy and intelligence and aliveness—of each character and each chapter? I remember in particular agonizing about what to suggest for a possible ending—what would be the best way to bring such an agile, multiply voiced book to a close? Should the book end with “Heart”— part reproach, part self-justification, Edgar’s cri de coeur to friends he suspected of not noticing the intense, attentive loyalty that lay beneath his pirouetting narcissism? Or “Chain Letter Translated from Saint Malas”—also, presumably, from Edgar— with its double-fisted, insistent demand for response in the form of “if-then” threats. But what I finally argued for, and what Zack ultimately decided upon, was to end the book with “F is for Book Report,” an exegesis of Judy Blume’s Forever written entirely in the voice of Katherine Trina-Trina Cruz, the sharp-tongued and even sharper-witted fifth-grader who sees the truths of her world with clarion precision but knows exactly what fictions she wants to embrace and why.
If editing a book is an incredibly intimate act, reading a book is no less so. At the time I was working on Rolling, I was closer in age to the novel’s various protagonists than I am now to the age I was then. I had no idea what it meant to work in publishing, what it meant to edit a book. The suburban mainland childhood I had had resembled the easy, multiply inflected world of Kalihi only intermittently— certainly not through the omnipresence of Asian cultures, something that would have seemed almost a miracle to me in the Midwest, but through flashes of a shared pop culture youth of lip sync battles, Judy Blume books, chain letters, and Love Boat/Fantasy Island episodes. In the carefully non-confrontational world in which I existed, the fearless take-no-shit and talk-back-to-teachers perspective channeled through Edgar and Trina and Vicente and Mai-Lan and Florante was as unfamiliar as it was stunning. The clarity and force with which Zack was able to portray these kids—their self-knowingness and their self-blindness, their clear-eyed recognition of the adult indifference and terror that swirled around them—showed me how it was possible to be braver than I felt myself to be. In editing the book, I might have been able to make my small suggestions and improvements, but looking back, through the process of reading Rolling, it had taken up root in me.
Almost exactly twenty years later, I edited a hybrid genre non-fiction book by Amarnath Ravva called American Canyon. During a particularly fraught period of editorial back and forth, Amar told me that he trusted me with his work because I had sequenced Rolling. When he was an undergraduate at Berkeley, reading Rolling was what had made him feel that he too could become a writer—he had felt for the first time that the world was big enough to include any stories he might have to tell.
There’s no denying the force of that kind of interaction—what becomes possible when you are able to walk through a door you thought was a wall. That cycle of influence—the impact that one imagination can have on another—is almost instantaneous, though it might take years to unravel and understand. That’s the beauty of books. They can transform the way you understand the world around you, working their magic on you even as you think you are standing still.
Kaya Press has had its ups and downs over the years. But if there’s a reason why it still exists today, it probably has something to do with the lessons I learned from Rolling. This past year, American Canyon was named one of the finalists for the Pen USA Non-Fiction award. This year, we’re celebrating the 20th anniversary edition of Rolling. Sometimes it takes a perspective of twenty years to understand what it meant for you to have walked through a particular door a book once presented to you. Embracing the fictions you want to. And knowing why.
I met Zack Linmark in 1996. Rolling the R’s had just been released. Now, almost two decades later, Rolling has become a mainstay in my and many other Asian American literature classes across the United States. Hearing Zack speak about gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, postcolonialism, alternative Englishes, and experiments with genre and voice in his writing has complicated students’ cognitive map of Asian America and American society as a whole. In Rolling as well as in his novel Leche, “place” is woven in as if it were a character that contributes to the web of interpersonal relationships in the work’s development, adding complex layers to the way place and physical movement relate to identity formation. His prose bears the marks of his poetry as found in numerous anthologies and his collection, The Evolution of a Sigh—multi-vocal, lyrical, and irreverent.
From New York to San Francisco and from Honolulu to Manila, Zack has been a generous and generative interlocutor for ideas on literature, teaching, and writing as a process. We continue to discuss trends in American, Asian American, and Philippine writing and the question of our relationship to “home” and diaspora communities and multiple allegiances. His articulation of cultural trends and issues as a writer has contributed productively to my own inquiries as a scholar on race, gender, and sexuality. The following is a recent exchange over email about Rolling while I was in New York and he in Manila and San Manuel.
Allan Punzalan Isaac: When I’ve taught Rolling, I usually have students take turns reading aloud passages or take parts in plays within the novel to hear not only the kids’ voices but also the cadence of the writing. I’ve also seen you do an incredible job in your readings. It has struck me that the novel is better heard while read. Why is the performative so important in the text?
R. Zamora Linmark: I’m glad you’re getting the students to read parts of Rolling the R’s out loud because it’s one of those books, like Huck Finn, that is meant to be read out loud. It’s the only way, I think, to get them to hear the music that is Pidgin, especially if they’re not familiar with the Hawaiian-Creole English language, which is the dominant vernacular among locals in Hawai‘i. Another reason is that the texts are very performance-based. Many of the forms are written in monologues or dialogues; the characters come alive when they’re speaking. Their language, Pidgin, is at the core of their local identity. Plus, these characters, particularly the kids, are always role-playing. The final reason is obvious: some of the stories are in the form of poetry, which should always be read out loud anyway. To read it silently—you might not be able to hear the music in their language, you might not hear the stories they are trying to sing to you.
When you teach the novel, how much do you focus on Pidgin, on its history, its lack of orthography? Do you find it easier to have a dialogue with your students after they’ve read it out loud?
API: I think it’s important to situate Hawai‘i and Local literature. Discussing Hawaiian and Pidgin really reveals the specific colonial and labor history of Hawaii that configures its racial politics differently from those of the mainland. I’ve had students read out loud short excerpts from Lee Tonouchi’s Da Word and listen to him lecture online about Pidgin in preparation for Rolling and Yamanaka’s Blu’s Hanging, but also to appreciate Pidgin’s structure, aesthetics, and politics. I don’t know about easier, but reading aloud certainly energizes them. I think reading aloud and listening make for a different experience of literary texts. The bodily encounter encourages students to think differently.
RZL: Wow! I’m glad to hear that you’re also teaching Lee’s and Lois-Ann’s books. Hawai‘i’s local literature is so rich (but underrated and rarely taught), and Pidgin is one of the roots of it.
API: I’ve noticed how prose and poetry seem to mix in both your poetry and your prose work. This is true in Rolling as well as in your poetry collections. What does this blending or overlap do for you as a writer and is there a difference for you?
RZL: The form, where prose melds with poetry, is called haibun, practiced by classical haiku poets like Bashō. The shift can be for various reasons (reasons which I used purposefully in my writing)—to highlight a moment, and also to create a flow with deliberate breaks. Think of the form as a journey, like those of Japanese itinerant monks who, throughout their pilgrimage, took rests to take in nature that they then transposed into prose and haikus. Plus, it’s hard for me to divorce the two genres from each other, because of my formation as a writer. I began as a poet who read lots of fiction. The writers I first gravitated to were fiction writers who also wrote poetry. Thus I was both, with a background in theater.
API: Theater! That’s why your readings are so rich and actorly. Sometime ago you expressed that you had gotten a bit tired of the novel itself?
RZL: Do you get tired teaching it? LOL. Rolling got tiring, or, rather, reading from Rolling got tiring. It was physically demanding. Like I said, it’s not a book that one could read in front of the audience without channeling the characters. Plus, after Rolling, I’d also written three poetry collections and another novel, Leche. I wanted the readers to know that I had a life as a writer outside, and post, Rolling. But don’t misunderstand me: I am grateful for the success of Rolling, and if I end up being known as the writer of Rolling—then I’ll accept it, and with gratitude.
API: Twenty years later, what part of Rolling still puzzles or fascinates you?
RZL:Rolling opened a lot of doors for me. It allowed me to really take my time with my second novel (ironically, the sequel). But at the same time, I was also faced with the challenge of: how the heck do I top a book like that? What could I possibly offer to the readers now? I didn’t want to repeat myself. I also didn’t want to bore myself. When I wrote Rolling twenty years ago, I had no particular audience for it. I was writing it because it was my passport out of graduate school. It was my MA thesis. But mainly, I was just writing, building a world that gave me numerous lenses to view my childhood, or what my childhood could’ve been. And because I had no notion of it ever becoming publishable, I took risks and didn’t care. So when Rolling came out and received all this attention, mostly via word of mouth (the big papers didn’t review it), it was very exhilarating and frightening too, because the pressure was now on the next book.
API: One thing my students tend to struggle with is the age of the characters, around ten years old or so? Does it have anything to do with the epigraph from JM Barrie’s Peter Pan about innocence and heartlessness?
RZL: A lot of students—and profs—seem to struggle with that issue, the age of the characters, even after you hear on the news that children nowadays are capable of committing—sex, crime, etc. I’m surprised it’s still an issue. Did you have the same problem?
API: Yes, especially when it comes up in class discussion. We would then talk about social views and fantasies we hold about childhood, our own included.
RZL: I didn’t want to write another coming-of-age/coming out. I wanted to depart from the dominant view that growing up begins in tween or teen hood. And since the novel is grounded on the world of presupposition anyway, then why not build a what-if universe in which the characters are going through what many tweens and teens are, but two or three years younger. Plus, keep in mind that these kids went through life-changing experiences at a very early age—the trauma that comes with displacement and homesickness (for immigrant kids like Florante and Vicente), the physical violence that results from coming out, getting beaten up by bullies and homophobic fathers (Edgar), the stigma of coming from a one-parent household (Katrina). These kids were forced to grow up fast. They had no choice.
API: What attracted you about the world, Kalihi in particular, in that decade? You said you started writing about the 90s of Manila but wound up writing about Kalihi in the 70s.
RZL: I’d have to leave this question to the mystery of writing and its process. Writers are not always (or never) in control of their projects’ destinies. Writers are always getting distracted or rerouted. The novel I intended to write when I first sat down, a novel about reverse culture shock, I would eventually write—this novel became Leche, twelve years in the making. But back then, in the early 90s, perhaps I wasn’t ready as a writer. I had just started writing. I was, as a writer, five or six years old. I had the intellectual resources for this book (since I, too, had gone through a similar experience), but I didn’t have the maturity as a writer to tackle a theme, a story, that is as old as Odysseus. Looking back, I also didn’t have the language that I felt comfortable writing in, to articulate the protagonist’s unwelcoming return. So when I sat down and realized that I was completely writing a different story that was set in a different place and at a different time, I had to make a decision right there and then: either pursue and explore further the world that I was being given or return to the original intent. Obviously, I went with the former. Writing about the 70s was fun. It also gave me the opportunity to revisit my childhood. As it turned out, this novel is directly related to the one I had initially wanted to write, for one of the characters would return to the motherland after so many years of absence. Rolling, you could say, is the can of worms that I would open and, years later, would become the source for Leche and the novel I’m working on at the moment.
API: Why do you think vignettes did a better job of telling the characters’ stories in Rolling than a more or less traditional narrative?
RZL: The vignettes complemented the energy of the characters, as well as the times they were living in—disco-paced, dizzying, in which the stories lasted for as long as a dance track. Do you teach it linearly, as a novel, from beginning to end? Or do you skip around?
API: Hmmm, I don’t think I’ve ever taught any novel linearly. I tend to obsess over opening paragraphs though.
RZL: Same here. It’s one of the hardest things to write—that damn first paragraph of a new novel or a story that, sometimes, does not end up being the opening of the novel. And the difficulty, the obsession, is magnified because I don’t structure my narratives linearly.
API: One can read a novel linearly but not usually think and discuss it linearly. Rolling, however, lends itself readily to skipping around—like tracks on vinyl, as you say. So there is a musicality there.
RZL: Most definitely. The whole book could be viewed as a non-stop remix. Think of “Stars on 45” where they mashed up a bunch of 50s and 60s Beatles songs, all connected with a refrain. In Rolling, the thread is threefold: setting, thematic, and linguistic. Kalihi, desire, and Pidgin.
API: You’ve always talked about place, like Kalihi, as a character in your novels. Could you say something a bit more about this liveness of place
RZL: It’s an asphalt jungle, hot, searing, bursting with energy. You get what you see in Kalihi. It has no qualms, no time for pretense, even for gentrification. I don’t see gentrification happening soon in Kalihi (perhaps in the valley) because it is the entry port for immigrants, particularly Filipinos, Samoans, Tongans, and, lately, Micronesians, and also because it is where the majority of the housing projects in the state is. It has been, and perhaps will always be, a working class community where, until today, cultures from these different places are still preserved. For many immigrants, it is their home; for others, it is that transitory space where you can still hang on to who and what you are before expanding your identity. You’ve been to Kalihi. What’s your experience of Kalihi?
API: Your nephew introduced me to these delicious coco-puffs at Liliha bakery. I grew up in Jersey City, another port of entry for immigrants and home to many communities of color, so some parts reminded me of the smaller Filipino neighborhoods there. However, Kalihi is a maze of warehouses, bakeries, small eateries, houses, projects, strip malls, often oddly juxtaposed then cut by a main road or highway.
RZL: A maze of warehouses. Hmmm. I never thought of Kalihi as a maze but you’re right.
API: I met you through another writer when I was still a graduate student right after Rolling’s release. It was my second trip to Honolulu, the other time covering the sovereignty movements. How are you connecting the overlapping and also conflicting histories of Hawai‘i and the Philippines in Kalihi as your locale?
RZL: Both have a particular shared history of U.S. oppression. Both became part of the U.S. empire at around the same time, turn of the 20th century. Hawai‘i was annexed in 1898, at the insistence of American sugar barons in the islands. The U.S. took control of the Philippines when Spain, which lorded over the archipelago for three centuries plus, lost the war in 1898. As we both know, this resulted in the even bloodier Filipino-American War that lasted until 1901 (though the fighting continued in certain parts of the islands). Both were exploited for their land, resources, and their strategic locations; they became the symbols for U.S. empire in the Pacific. And although one became a state and the other was granted its independence, both continue to be main sites for military bases. That said, Filipinos living in Hawai‘i, in communities such as Kalihi, see it as a unique place, unlike the other states. It is also like yet unlike the Philippines. I see Kalihi as that purgatorial site in the tropics, neither the Philippines nor the United States but including certain aspects of both cultures in its identity formation.
API: We’ve travelled together a lot to, from, and through Manila, Honolulu, San Francisco, Detroit, Rio, Buenos Aires, Tangiers, Paris, and so on. Some of those places you have stayed in for a while to write. How has this wanderlust affected your writing in Rolling and onwards?
RZL: I love cities, especially cities that are able to transport me to a different space but also give me little reminders, or awaken small memories, of the cities I come from—Honolulu and Manila. I’ve always been curious what role a place plays in a scholar’s work. Do you feel the need to stay in that place that you’re researching about for a longer period of time? Living in Manila, I sometimes hear the criticism on Fil-Am scholars, some of them anyway, on how they write about Manila but really don’t know it. They come here, take what they need, then leave. What are your thoughts on this?
API: I think experiencing the everyday of a place transforms you and your perspective. Observing and learning about a place take time and commitment, like commitment to learning another language and more importantly, its nuances, rhythms, and internal contradictions.
RZL: I agree. It’s labor, it’s method. But it’s my way of understanding not only the place but why I’m even there in the first place.
API: Right, it’s relational, sometimes self-reflexive. Those subtle observations are harder to translate. Then, whether you speak the language or not, there is always much to challenge your presumed entry points in places that are not home or places that are in-between home/not home. Manila like all other places endlessly resists and deforms easy theories, translations, and presumed access points. There is something to be said for experiencing these challenges and resistances bodily and sensorially to inform one’s writing and thinking. How have travels and itinerant life affected you?
RZL: Sometimes they’re disparate, other times, they’re striking and life-pivotal, such as when I first experienced Madrid, which, along with the novels Dogeaters, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, that I just so happened to be reading at the time, began to awaken the longing that had been dormant within me for thirteen years: the desire to return to the motherland.
This small book would not have survived if not for the scholars/professors/lecturers who taught, and continue to teach, it in their classes, in colleges/universities/high schools (excerpts, though I’ve been told that it’s passed around stealthily among high schoolers). It is because of these teachers that the R’s, well, keep rolling. But I also want to blame these beautiful peeps for my high anxiety to produce a second novel that is as risk-taking, out of the box, and transgressive. Rolling is my personal bar; it is the book I continue to write against. As a writer, it is my first home, the source I often return to when I need to escape the secondary and tertiary concerns of a writer (getting next book written, sold, reviewed, blahblahblah). Rolling never fails to remind me why I have embraced this curse/gift/ventilator.
It’s me, Augustina. I don’t know if you remember me, but I did not forget you, Katrina, and Edgar. I was on my way to the Philippines. Nobody knew it, but I was pregnant and my parents were bringing me “home,” but first we stopped and visited you and your family in Kalihi. Remember? I was moody and I hated my parents and so maybe you don’t. Or maybe you do—I had Farah Fawcett hair and you couldn’t stop running your fingers through it, remember now? We stayed with you for a week and I hung out with your sister, Jing. One night, we babysat you over at your friend, Katrina-trina’s house. You did that disco show. Oh God. That was hilarious. I was never into Donna Summer or KC and the Sunshine band. Not like you crazy little fools. You made me laugh the way you took the stage like that (love to love you baby) and lip-synced before lip-syncing was in. The way you didn’t give a shit and did whatever you kids wanted to do. God you kids were loud…“
“I’m foggy as to when I first read R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s. It’s a book that’s been a part of me, like a good friend. You don’t recall when or where or in what circumstance you met because you seem to have known each other all your lives. Every time I flip through its pages, as I do now, on Rolling’s 20th anniversary, it blows open the proverbial floodgates. Torrent of fantastical narratives, pidgin, Tagalog, 70s pop culture, Donna Summer, Farrah Fawcett, Catholicism, attitude, poetry. The book remains defiant, distorting the status quo of Western literature, populating a world with mostly Asians and Asian-Americans with more sass than a drag queen…”
“What I loved most about the book when I first picked it up twenty years ago was how it was such a strong antidote to the everyday fantasies that many of us have about Hawai‘i. When I meet people who ask me about where I’ve lived and worked, I talk about my nine years in Honolulu. For those who’ve never been there, I can see their eyes glaze over. It doesn’t take too long for someone to ask a version of the same question I must have been asked hundreds of times since I moved away in 2011: “Why would you leave paradise?”
Even today, there’s no shortage of images that go right to that lizard part of the brain that conjures durable notions of scantily clad, ethnically ambiguous women serving umbrella-topped cocktails. Fantasies crash into each other—hypersexualized natives and militarized police officers—every week, reinforced by the re-boot ofHawai‘i Five-O. And do we really need to re-hash the weird treatment of native people in Cameron Crowe’s Aloha, where the Allison Ng character (supposedly of Chinese and Hawaiian descent) was played by the Nordic Emma Stone?…”
“Rolling the R’s is near to me personally and professionally as someone born and raised on O‘ahu and currently in the midst of writing a dissertation on the literatures of Hawai‘i and Pidgin. In the so-called “melting pot”—or as R. Zamora Linmark would say, “volcano”—of Hawai‘i’s multi-ethnic communities, the aim of my dissertation has been to explore Pidgin’s role in counter-cultural manifestations to U.S. imperialism in the Pacific. In this short piece, I want to highlight some flashpoints of the history of Hawai‘i Pidgin to contextualize the power of Linmark’s novel and whatRolling the R’s has done to intervene in the usual representation of Hawai‘i as America’s fiftieth state.
As most people discover reading the novel, Pidgin, also known as Hawai‘i Creole English by linguists, is the local language of Hawai‘i. Hawaiian language is the indigenous language, but was banned in schools in 1896, a few years after the Kingdom of Hawai‘i was overthrown by white American businessmen interested in expanding sugar industry profits. English was the language taught in schools, and children who spoke Hawaiian were punished. By the latter half of the twentieth century, few people spoke the Hawaiian language fluently…”
“In keeping with its epigraph from J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Rolling is a book that never grows old, which is not exactly to say that it never grows up. The novel’s historical setting—the early 1980s—was “dated” even when it was first published, and as time passes, more and more of the cultural touchstones from that period—Charlie’s Angels and Love Boat, the film Making Love—need explaining for today’s undergraduates. Nevertheless, Rolling has retained its unsettling vitality and, from my perspective as a critic and teacher, it has kept pace with and at times even seems to have anticipated developments in the discourses of cultural and literary studies, queer theory in particular. Its young characters’ strategies for forging affective and erotic alliances outside conventional boundaries line up with the counter-hegemonic intimacies and counter-public formations Lauren Berlant, Samuel R. Delany, Lisa Duggan, and Michael Warner have sought to describe. Its representation of the ineffectual but damaging impact of heternormative institutions’ efforts to “protect” children points us toward Lee Edelman’s argument in No Future, while at the same time the poignantly inchoate ambitions of Edgar, Vicente, and Katrina participate in the queer futurity José Muñoz imagines inCruising Utopia...“
” R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s frames the tense development of queer and multiethnic youth in Kalihi Valley during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The spirit of Linmark’s O‘ahu can still be found in parts of present-day Kalihi. As photographers, we sought to capture the frames of mind prevalent in Linmark’s locales, places with multiple layers of symbolism clashing into one another—the religious with the transgressive, the public with the private, and the suppressed with the unrestricted.
“Nostalgia wasn’t really the best word to describe the feeling I got while reading and researchingRolling the R’s. I had never lived farther than a mile and a half away from the neighborhood the book describes and was just barely an adult at the time of my research. Looking back on my first reading of it, I was bewildered and very slowly surprised that yes, I was reading something that often paralleled my childhood, location memory, language memory, and feelings of being a queer outsider in a way that I’ll probably never find in any other book....“
“Zach was hitting on me. Yes, he hit on me for a good fifteen minutes over the phone. I’ve always been a dense person when it comes to these kinds of things. There came a point, however, when I finally figured out what he was doing and I’m pretty sure he figured I was interested in women. I’m pretty sure we figured each other out right around the same time. Then a whole other cascade of minutes flew by once we got ourselves “straightened out,” so to speak. We said our goodbyes, figured out ways to get in touch with each other, and then that was that.
The very next day I ordered Rolling the R’s. How could I not? I read it quickly from cover to cover on a snowy Saturday. I was intrigued by its polyglot. Its hybridity. Its cacophony. Really, it’s a remarkable novel that’s as shapeshifting as the pop culture that much of it invokes…”
“Listening to ‘70s Dance Party Playlist on Amazon Prime for get me in the mood to write about Rolling the R’s. I have a hardback copy with an Autographed Copy sticker marring the cover. Ah ah freak out. I bought it at the now defunct Lambda Rising Bookstore in DC. A mini-easel holding a gauzy glamour shot of a young Asian man topped a stack of red books. I hadn’t yet connected with a community of Asian gay men, so this was a novelty. One of his names sounded Filipino. I read the jacket flaps and flipped through a few pages. I saw that he autographed it on 2-21-96. Not really what I normally read but I bought it anyway.
Get down boogie oogie oogie. Life had not prepared me for Rolling. It actually took me many years to fully appreciate it because the dialect, structure, and characters were so unfamiliar to me. I read the pidgin and understood the words. But I couldn’t get the rhythm, so I felt like I was missing out on the meaning. It was not until two years later, when I visited Oahu for the first time, that it clicked. I reread a few passages when I got back home and it made new sense…”
“My introduction to Rolling the R’s happened in 1996, when R. Zamora Linmark read “They Like You Because You Eat Dog.” It’s a poem so entertainingly honest, it angers and empowers at the same time.
Rolling the R’s introduces characters rarely seen in American literature. They are Filipinos rooted in a place to which no Honolulu tourist dares trek. They ramble about identity, reveal secrets, and enable and deny the dramas in their tropical lives. Linmark’s teenage fantasy playground spinning in seventies soundtrack emotes the familiar to Filipino Americans and especially to immigrants like me.
In November 2008, I directed a stage reading of Rolling the R’s: The Play at Source Theatre in Washington, DC. We packed the house—standing room only. Makakoa Enterprises, Inc., a catering company owned by a Hawaiian and a hula sister, donated kalua pork, King’s Hawaiian Bread, and Spam musubi for our reception. At the end of the show, we performed a hula for Linmark, who was in town to be honored among 100 awardees by Out Magazine…“
“Katrina, Edgar, and Vicente had the “Purple Man and his disciples” at the Kam Shopping Center. We—Gerlie, Totoy, and Baby—had Philomena on Magsaysay Street. Philomena talked to herself, swatted insects with powers of invisibility flying around her head. Though she did not come to Red Cross every day, where my mother worked, she came regularly enough for us to wonder every other week if anyone has seen Philomena. Whereas Jesus of Kam Shopping Center (as christened by Edgar) rushes to a corner, curls himself up into a ball, and shrieks at the shoppers entering and exiting the automatic doors of Star Market or Longs Drugs, Philomena taps three times to the left and three times to the right before crossing any entryway. Ninang, anong trip ni Philomena? We would ask Auntie Annie. She would say anong anong trip? Ano bang alam ninyo sa trip trip? Dismissing us, saying what the hell do we know about drug trips. Sometimes, Philomena can be heard, screaming, and seen bending to one side or another, as if she’s scolding someone short next to her. One of the nurse interns at the Red Cross explained that Philomena is so smart, all her knowledge got confused in her brain...“
“Over the years, I have taught (and continue to teach) Rolling the R’s in creative writing classes for the same reason I assign As I Lay Dying. As with all of my favorite books, when I share it what I actually want to share with people is that initial reading experience—the excitement, the enchantment, the exhilaration—which I hope will be sparked in them too. I wish I could share with them my jolt of recognition that came from seeing Filipino objects, family life, religious artifacts, and people in an American setting. Normally I can’t; but there are other fruits to this manuscript and its parts. I remember, the first time I read Rolling, being blown away by the bravery of an author being willing to put himself into a narrator’s thoughts, to capture them so truly and honestly and to express them without fear that people would mistake them for his own. (Faulkner advised young writers: do not judge your characters. Does this mean that Faulkner embraces every dark, venomous barb voiced by Jason Compton? Of course not. No more than he thinks in diagrams of coffins, or believes Jesus is blameless for killing Nancy. He’s telling us not to hold back, to get rid of the self-protective armour. Comedy is a self-defense mechanism against uncomfortable emotion—embarrassment, hostility, taboo-breaking, humiliation, awkwardness, shame.) There is a certain kind of ironic distance—and certain kind of judgement— most writers put in place, especially when humor is involved, to make it very, very clear to the audience that the author does not share these ugly thoughts...“
“I started teaching Rolling the R’s when I first taught the Pilipino Literature class (AAS 363) at San Francisco State University in 1999, and continued to teach it over the next decade in AAS 206: Introduction to Asian American Literature, and in AAS 214: Second Year Composition, when I taught the course focused on queer Asian American literature and when I taught it focused on Asian American men’s issues. I’ve taught this book a lot!
One of the biggest challenges for students is the book’s language (Hawaiian Pidgin is not easy, as I found out in 1997 when I first taught All I Asking for is My Body, by Milton Murayama—students complained that the title was missing a verb!). I am not a native speaker of Hawaiian Pidgin, but Linmark’s work, like other books written in this dialect, will reward the diligent reader who takes the time to quickly look up a few words and phrases. The language is rich and challenging. Much like Zorah Neale Hurston’s capturing of a specific Southern dialect in Their Eyes Were Watching God, Linmark’s achievement in setting this language down in written forms is not to be underestimated. As a creative writer I can attest that writing in “standard” English is the easiest because there are so many models and it is what we are trained in, while writing in dialect is notoriously difficult because we have to rely mostly on our own knowledge...“
“Set in 1970s Hawai‘i, Rolling the R’s resonates with confrontational politics and poetics the period’s young Asian American writers developed to explore the dominant racial, gender, and sexual discourses that structured their marginalization. Specifically, Linmark recalls cultural reappropriation practices by members of theAiiieeeee! group, such as Frank Chin and Jeffrey Paul Chan, who used ironic affirmation of dominant stereotypes and narratives as a key strategy of undermining their efficacy. Chin, for instance, reconfigured the historically pejorative “Chinaman” as a term that could describe an outlaw political-linguistic hybridity; the empowering Chinaman identity, he believed, was best understood as a “miracle synthetic” which confounded persistent attempts to contain, and in turn, continue to marginalize and degrade Asian Americans (Chickencoop 8). Similarly, LGBT Asian American literature and criticism extend this disruptive tendency by exploiting the ways in which Asian Americans have long been “queerly” positioned along ethnic, national, gender, and sexual axes, both within and against dominant U.S. historical/cultural narratives. Certainly subjected to profound forms of discrimination and marginalization, queer Asian Americans are also uniquely positioned to identify and intervene in what Chin described in 1970 as “all the space that no one was occupying” (Chinaman 111)...“
“For the 100th year anniversary of Rolling The R’s I wanted to talk about my “bestest bestest” part, “F For Book Report,” the part I’ve taught over a dozen times in classes at UCSC.
“F For Book Report” begins with the teacher’s directions to the students about how to write a book report, which includes a list of traditional questions about theme, character, and conflict, and ends with an exhortation in caps: “NO PIDGIN-ENGLISH ALLOWED.”
The author of the report, Katherine Katrina-Trina Cruz, has chosen to write on Judy Blume’s Forever. Forever defined the 80s generation, at least for girls. In middle school many of us first read about masturbation and menstruation in Judy Blume. Then Forever blew our minds in high school. It’s a frank love story in which the teenage girl has sex and never regrets it. So, Forever: iconic book, but iconic middle class white girl book, and Katherine Katrina-Trina Cruz is about to appropriate it to tell her own story...“
“It’s been awhile. Well, if we’re celebrating how many years of Rolling, is it one hundred already? Okay, it’s not that long ago, but this is not about Rolling. It’s about Zack, Zack as a newbie teacher of creative writing. It’s all very fuzzy now, but I think my colleague Micah Perks and I convinced Zack to come to UC Santa Cruz to teach creative writing for a year, which year I don’t remember. At first he moved into a room in my house dis-occupied by my traveling daughter. But after about a month, my daughter moved back home, so Zack kindly agreed to move into his office. Well, agreed is not really true, but this is a writer who has said that his home is his email address, and it was a pretty big office. Micah helped him haul in a futon bed from her house, and he set up camp in the Kresge creative writing annex. Besides our offices, the annex had a small lounge, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. Perfecto. After awhile, he made friends with another professor who also lived in his office at Kresge College, and pretty soon, Zack knew where to take showers, where to wash and dry his clothing in the coin-operated student laundry, the route to the gym, how to order out for pizza, how to raid the student cafeteria. This business of living out of one’s office was apparently a time-honored tradition...“
“I never really thought about this before sitting down to write this, but editing is an incredibly intimate way to experience a book. It’s a bit like walking down the middle of empty, snow-covered Broadway in NYC right after a blizzard; you feel profoundly that no one else will know the street the way you do. It’s a fantasy, of course—an editor is just one of the critical eyes that a book undergoes in its passage to the public. But that sense of possibility is very real—you’re working with a manuscript before it’s entirely, irrevocably set, before it has fully taken on the form that it will have for the rest of its published life, even as the story of your passage through it becomes something tucked away into its seams, unimportant and invisible, like the thread that keeps a book bound together.
I didn’t know any of this when I began working on Rolling the R’s, of course. Rolling was the first book I ever edited. I’d done copy-editing and proofing before, but for Rolling, I was told to take a stab at sequencing. This was an unexpected but not unwelcome responsibility that I took very seriously. What does progression mean in a novel that thumbs its nose at a one-size-fits-all approach to genre? What did readers need to know in order to feel the full impact—the energy and intelligence and aliveness—of each character and each chapter? I remember in particular agonizing about what to suggest for a possible ending—what would be the best way to bring such an agile, multiply voiced book to a close?...“
“I met Zack Linmark in 1996. Rolling the R’s had just been released. Now, almost two decades later, Rolling has become a mainstay in my and many other Asian American literature classes across the United States. Hearing Zack speak about gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, postcolonialism, alternative Englishes, and experiments with genre and voice in his writing has complicated students’ cognitive map of Asian America and American society as a whole. In Rolling as well as in his novel Leche, “place” is woven in as if it were a character that contributes to the web of interpersonal relationships in the work’s development, adding complex layers to the way place and physical movement relate to identity formation. His prose bears the marks of his poetry as found in numerous anthologies and his collection, The Evolution of a Sigh—multi-vocal, lyrical, and irreverent.
From New York to San Francisco and from Honolulu to Manila, Zack has been a generous and generative interlocutor for ideas on literature, teaching, and writing as a process. We continue to discuss trends in American, Asian American, and Philippine writing and the question of our relationship to “home” and diaspora communities and multiple allegiances. His articulation of cultural trends and issues as a writer has contributed productively to my own inquiries as a scholar on race, gender, and sexuality. The following is a recent exchange over email about Rollingwhile I was in New York and he in Manila and San Manuel...“
“This small book would not have survived if not for the scholars/professors/lecturers who taught, and continue to teach, it in their classes, in colleges/universities/high schools (excerpts, though I’ve been told that it’s passed around stealthily among high schoolers). It is because of these teachers that the R’s, well, keep rolling…”
Xu Xi, raised in Hong Kong but long occupying the “flight path connecting New York, Hong Kong, and the South Island of New Zealand,” might be called a writer of the diaspora. But diasporic stories often move from origin to destination, periphery to center. This novel, however, has no center, no periphery; its origins are hybrid, its destinations temporary. That Man in Our Lives extends the transnational universe of Xu Xi’s previous novels and references some familiar characters, but through its structure the novel undermines assumptions of movement from East to West.
The novel steadily defies convention and expectations. It begins with a mystery that is neither solved nor completely explained, while moving idiosyncratically through time, place, and character. The “man in our lives” is Gordie, a.k.a. Gordon Haight Ashberry, Gordon Marc Ashberry, “G,” Hui Guo, or Bugs Bunny. Gordie disappears in transit at Narita Airport, leaving his wallet, passport, and a twenty-year-old camel cashmere coat, “purchased at the Peninsula Hotel’s shopping arcade in Kowloon.” He dons a different outfit, and, with a passport under the name of Marshall Hayden, he books a flight to Detroit. After this, his whereabouts are unknown.
Xu Xi frays the reliability of the narrative in so many small ways, calling attention to the fraught nature of witnessing. “He stayed a month, the untreated cancer raging through him, and expired one night with only Gordie at his bedside, at least, that is how Annabel recalled it.” When characters die, the reader is given no sense of closure, just more loose ends. The story always backs away from something definitive, always moves in time and perspective, depicting the hybridity and hypocrisy of globalism which offers an increasingly large and widespread cache of symbols, but their meanings are neither consistent nor static.
Gordie is an absent central protagonist.He represents a certain fantasy of place which globalism has not alleviated, only complicated: the longing of the West for the East and all its exotic promises; as well as a certain Eastern longing for the America of manicured lawns, the bright lights of New York, the sultry sound of jazz, the possibility of reinvention. After his disappearance, That Man in Our Lives winds through the lives and memories of Gordie’s friends and their families, tracing their tangled relationships with one another, with America, and with China. Gordie is the figure who helps them articulate their secret selves: longings or transgressions hidden from those with whom they are closest. Gordie, after all, is the blue-blooded, Connecticut-raised man with an English butler who takes on a Chinese name and speaks the language like a native, whose father may or may not have been a spy. He embodies Money, Charm, Freedom, Sex, Jazz; alternately, he embodies their fears: full of movement but directionless, seeking love but never content.
In Xu Xi’s work, social relationships are both globally dispersed and unavoidably interconnected. The investigator whom Pete Haight meets on the train knows Gordie’s family. Harold’s new girlfriend Laura’s ex-husband is his ex-wife Isobel’s new husband. This tapestry of interconnected and interdependent relationships brings to mind not only Dream of the Red Chamber but also Crazy Rich Asians, strikingly different books that, as Gish Jen might say, are more attentive to social roles and context than individual agency. By linking characters of heterogeneous national and cultural origin, Xu Xi challenges the implication that globalism equals Westernization. Rather than becoming uniformly Western, these characters are described as flavors of Chinese. His best friend Larry Woo calls Gordie “Sino-American, which is not the same as being Chinese-American, which is what Larry is, or not, depending on your perspective.” Gordie’s former fiancee Stella, a government advisor on Sino-American relations, has a Kuomintang family heritage but is in favor of the People’s Republic. That Man in Our Lives subverts the dichotomies still so present in writing about China and “Chineseness”: insider/outsider, native/foreigner, victim/oppressor. Characters change their names as they move from place to place, reinventing themselves in the process, drawing from a mishmash of Eastern and Western mythologies as well as high and low culture. Gordie is both the Monkey King and Bugs Bunny. Suet-fa becomes Tiara and then Tempest. Zhang Lianhe, also known as Minnie Chang, writes two different books: in English, she writes a pop culture, gossipy book; in Chinese, a serious examination of her alienation. Colette is described as “Tinkerbell, resonant as a Buddhist gong.” The pleasure of these sentences is in the way in which Xu Xi both acknowledges and subverts stereotype. To the staid, loyal English butler, Gordie says, “You sound too much like a Merchant Ivory film.” Because, let’s remember, that race/ethnicity is not a scientific construct but a social one, and we are all, in some way, defined, whether it is by favor or opposition.
The characters in this novel are all, like Gordie, in transit between cultures and languages, sometimes resisting and sometimes embracing the legacies of their parents, their countries, their personal histories. Xu Xi traces the provenance of the camel coat and the table which “once graced a tea shop in an English village and which Annabel had found in a thrift shop.” Gordie and the other characters are the sum of all and yet none of these origins and dislocations, the sum of all and yet none of their relationships. The book is never really about Gordie’s disappearance, but about the problem of knowledge and authority in this world of global interconnection.
Who, for instance, is the narrator, who begins, ends, and comments on the story through “interludes”? She last saw Gordie during Happy Hour in a bar called Morton’s, in the Sheraton in Hong Kong, when it was raining, but we never learn the details of her long relationship with Gordie, nor how she fits into the otherwise tight network of his friends and their families. Any answer to the narrator’s identity must come, not from the story itself, but from the world outside the novel. Gordie calls her “X-woman;” she hails from Hong Kong; she attends the Asian-American Writer’s Workshop in New York. Xu Xi thus invites the reader to conflate author and narrator, to be aware of the ways in which the reader brings knowledge of the novel’s context into the process of interpreting its meaning.
The diasporas of the twenty-first century are no longer East to West but multi-directional, and people don’t stay put. Rather, they move back and forth, “desires adopted and shed at will in transnational, multicultural mingling.” On one hand, That Man in Our Lives is a mystery with no resolution, a romance with no orgasmic resolution, a story with no center. But it is also a novel which celebrates the pleasure of movement, of lawless mixing of language and register, and of reinvention.
After my initial travels throughout eastern China in 2010, the writer and curator Fred Joiner made me aware of Hoke Glover’s (Bro. Yao’s) plans to travel there as well. We even began to bat around the idea of doing some kind of public event to share our ideas and writing on travelling to China, but, as is often the case, the idea for programming did not quite make it to the American Poetry Museum’s programming schedule. (It also took me a while to process my initial experience in China, and so I did not have much in terms of writing to offer.) My second trip to China was, for me, explicitly focused on writing—a novel (with no direct connection to China or Chinese culture) and a series of poems I eventually titled “The China Cycle.” Thus I returned with poems, something to actually share, and decided it was a good idea to revisit hosting the event with Bro. Yao and Fred Joiner. Yao was the one who informed me about Michael Afaa Weaver’s writing about China and Taiwan. I had known Afaa Weaver as an elder in the African-American poetry community for some time, but I was more familiar with his earlier writing. “The Plum Flower Trilogy” was all new to me, but discovering it only strengthened the impetus to host an event with African-American poets discussing their experiences in China.
I brought Afaa down from Massachusetts, and we held the event in January 2015 at the American Poetry Museum’s storefront gallery in Brookland. It was a very rich conversation—which Yao and I mostly allowed Afaa to carry—and after that moment, we kept thinking about how to recreate or disseminate the dialogue. Both Lawrence-Minh Davis and Lily Wong were in attendance and wanted, also, to create ways to continue the conversation. Lawrence brought up the idea of publishing a roundtable for AALR. Once we decided on the roundtable format, I wanted to bring in a female perspective as I had seen firsthand that travelling in China as a female foreigner, especially an African-American woman, is very different than doing so as a man. Lawrence knew of Aaliyah Bilal’s travels to China, and she graciously agreed to join in the discussion.
—Kyle Dargan
*
Impressions / Encounters
Lily Wong: To begin with, could you all share how you first encountered China and/ or Chinese culture? What drew you to it?
Aaliyah Bilal: I first encountered China through my father. After leaving the military he struggled to find decent work. It wasn’t until he developed a professional relationship with a Cantonese businessman in Washington, DC, that his life stabilized. I believe it was a combination of his gratitude as well as the sense of order that he found in the culture (reminiscent of his formation in the Nation of Islam) that made China a constant topic of discussion. The motivation on his part came out of a need to replace something that was lost. The Nation of Islam has had three major iterations. It was only before the dawning of the second iteration or “rise” of the Nation of Islam that it would take on the militaristic character with which it is commonly associated today. It was something he really took to. After the temporary dissolution of the organization (at least, as it was) I gather that an appreciation for Chinese culture (particularly martial arts) became more important to him.
My personal interest in China really grew out of a sense of lack. Growing up I was always frustrated that despite my proximity to Chinese culture through my father, I didn’t have a sense of Chinese meanings. There’s a lot built into that phrase. For one, it assumes a kind of distance between Chinese and non-Chinese subjects. In that sense, “Chinese meanings” are not things I feel that I can memorize and somehow command. It also pokes not only at Chinese concepts of their world, but where non-Chinese like me fit therein. I’m asking, “Who are you (to you)?” and “Who am I to you?” For writing’s sake, I still live in that space of lack.
Kyle Dargan: My initial exposure, thinking back as far as I can, would have been the permanent collection of Tibetan art at the Newark Museum. (I was born and raised in Newark, New Jersey.) In the Mayor’s Office, where my mother worked as a mayoral aide and eventually chief of staff, there were large posters announcing the establishment of the collection. But even then, I sensed that there was some distance or tension between the ideas of Tibet and China or “Chineseness.” Later, the Wu-Tang Clan would become a huge cultural force during my hip hopscored adolescence, but again, I was leery of the actual connection between their appropriation of projected Chinese culture and native Chinese culture. (I never actually felt I was learning anything about Chinese culture from Wu-Tang.) My sincere interest in China peaked when I was a young adult learning more about the United States economy and the national debt. Who, I wondered, were all these people willing to buy and continue to believe in the value—or promise—of U.S. treasury bonds and bills? Of course, it is not the people but the government holding those marketable securities—and, unsurprisingly, one of things that I found in my travels to China is that average Chinese citizens don’t seem to consider their country’s investment in U.S. debt to be a concern. (Although a few apparatchiks did pull me aside and tell me that the government does, in fact, weigh such things seriously.)
Yao Glover: My first encounter with China was conceptually. As a young child I remember hearing of missionaries who traveled to an Anti-Christian, Communist China, and though it did not register then, sensing a polemical distance in the portrayal of the country somehow reconciled with the way African American history operated in America. There was the sense of great distance and mystery. My understanding of such distance came mostly from visiting my father’s small town in Georgia. Those trips helped define my sense of life itself and the mystery of parents. It absolutely fascinated me that he knew of a world I did not. It was a world separated from ours by poverty, distance, time, and knowledge. If my father was the vehicle for my transportation beyond mystery and distance into the small town, literature provided me with the approach to China.
I only return to this thought now many years after learning more about African American history and culture, which helped me better understand my mother and my father. The similarity with China is that my approach to a few of the classics popular in the U.S. made clear there was more to the country than the images I had been given. My travel to the country was rooted in a clear need to reconcile some of the ideas with the practicalities everyday travel brings.
My second meaningful encounter, which began my current stage, was the occasion of finding The Tao Teh Ching in the old B. Dalton bookstore in Landover Mall, where for many years we operated an African American bookstore. The encounter was by chance and still striking for a memory that seems like it is failing. I can remember the isles of the store and pulling the book out to read the first section and being profoundly affected by the words. That Penguin Classic translation is still my translation of choice.
What struck me most was the perfect sense the passage seemed to make of my life. I experienced a union with the text that has stayed with me since.
More than two and half decades later, I am still investigating and exploring the culture of China. About a decade ago, I began to study the I-Ching extensively, along with the development of a Tai Chi practice. For many years, I read the Art of War on a seasonal basis. What fascinates me about the texts and culture is the diversity they offer in lieu of a Western view of the world.
A quest for a practical philosophy that could integrate knowledge of mind, body, and spirit, combined with an African American need for and idealism about alternatives to the West, led me towards China.
In the summer of 2010 I visited Jiangsui Province and taught teachers of English for a month. During my short stay, I had the opportunity to experience portions of the “small towns” and operate briefly as a foreigner and observer in rapidly changing China.
The trip was spawned by a bankruptcy that made me contemplate something I wanted to do, I never figured I had the time to do.
Afaa Michael Weaver: In the 1960s, Asian culture came into American popular culture via television and film. That was my first exposure. Harold Sakata, the Hawaiian actor who played Odd Job in the film version of Ian Fleming’s novel Goldfinger, brought Asia to my imagination. I read several of the novels when I was a young teenager during that turbulent time in America. I felt the need to be able to defend myself, for which I had good reason. Racial tensions were high with the rioting and violence. In that regard, there was Bruce Lee who played Kato in The Green Hornet. I was fourteen years old in 1966 when that show premiered. The now defamed Bill Cosby did a judo move in the opening of the I Spy program. When that premiered in 1965, I was in my first year of high school. When I graduated high school in 1968 and went to the University of Maryland, I found my way into naïve student discussions of Maoist Marxism. I bought a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book from a revolutionary bookstore in downtown Baltimore. When I read his thoughts on art and the culture of workers, I felt validated in my decision to leave the university and become a writer, principally a poet. I was light years from understanding that my real challenge and mission as a poet would become the articulation of black working class and working class interiority. That exploration of my interior was launched when I received my first copy of the Dao De Jing in 1973, and when I began studying Taijiquan five years later when I was twenty-seven years old. Somewhere in that five-year period I read Alan Watts’ Tao: The Watercourse Way. Of course, I was a factory worker all along. I went into the steel mill in 1970, and in 1971, I took the job at Procter & Gamble in South Baltimore, where I worked and wrote for fourteen years.
LW: It seems like, for many of you, your interests in China and Chinese culture were activated through family ties and textual encounters. I am curious about how your impressions of Chinese culture developed when you were physically traveling and living in China. Were there specific experiences that were particularly rewarding and/or disorienting for you?
AB: The most rewarding experiences I’ve had in China have always been in the countryside. It’s the place where I have formed the deepest connections to the land. Places like Yangshuo, rural Fujian, and various parts of Yunnan province have given me a glimpse of a China stripped of pretense. The “economic miracle” narrative has no weight for me in this space. Instead in the countryside I feel invited to contemplate life pared back to the essentials. The African American concept of soul—beauty through pain and struggle—is what I consider my emotional passport to the world; it’s where I connect across difference. Where cities often feel vapid in the ways that they impose abstract/non-essential concerns on the individual, the countryside resonates with this idea of “soul.” It is in these rare moments that I feel I have a window into something core to this place.
I couldn’t say I’ve ever felt disoriented. Superficially, China and the U.S. are too similar in the sense that they are countries faced with similar realities around demographics, ideology, and social stratification. Also, the ways they address these matters are remarkably similar. It’s easy to look at the record right around the time of China’s re-opening to see how aspects of its modernization were patterned after American models. Further, given China’s history (let’s say from the 18th century on) and the ways it parallels my history—the history of Africans and their descendants in America—there are certain sympathies that arise for me living here. There are any number of ways to take this point, but I think the essence here is that, to the extent that history intrudes on identity, I’ve made certain observations about the psychological profile of politically astute Chinese citizens and noted how those overlap with my own self-concept. For one, a sense of “national humiliation” tugs at our interior lives. In a sense, looking at each other provides a mirror into self, so that I can ask the questions, “how are you recovering?” and “what can I learn from you to help in my own recovery?” Where these sympathies are not met with equal enthusiasm, at least they help direct my writing interests as they relate to China.
KD: While I was in Binhai Tianjin, I couldn’t really work out at a gym, so I’d returned to my track and field workouts, as tracks abound in the Tanggu region. There, an African-American working out on a track, I’d become somewhat of a spectacle. One day I was trying to buy new training shoes at an outdoor mall, and I attempted to ask the clerk if they had this pair of track shoes I wanted in my size. Admittedly, I am much better at writing hanzi than I am at speaking in correct tones. So I wrote down the size on a slip of paper and proceeded to show it to the clerk. She just waived her hands no—not no, we don’t have it but no, I’m not even going to try to decipher what you are attempting to communicate—and walked away from me in a fluster. I left very angry because I assumed it was a racially driven denial of interaction. I carried that feeling in my mind for a week. Some time later, I walked with another member of our cohort of international writers to the farmer’s market. He was trying to haggle over some fruit, and I was trying to hurry along the transaction by, again, writing the numbers down as hanzi. Again, it proved a failure. My hanzi were correct, but it was clearer in this instance that the reason we could not communicate via written characters is that the rural farmer could not read hanzi. And when I went to research the illiteracy rates in China, especially away from the major cities, I was shocked to see they were so high. And while I was often interacting with school-age children in Tanggu (the ones who would stalk me at the track) who clearly were not only literate but knew some English, I eventually came to learn, through research, that public education in China was not mandated until the last thirty to forty years. I then began to observe, too, what could be, controlling for age, a correlation between ethnicity, class, and literacy. Though I’d just read Evan Osnos’ Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China, it wasn’t until that moment of realization regarding literacy that I could really grasp the sense of how much change China had experienced since the 1960s. I suddenly felt like I was walking through two worlds.
YG: For me China was good food and a sense of clarity that fit in with an inner desire to visit a place I had read so much about. My time was spent in Xiansui, Pizhou, and Yangzhou, though I flew into Nanjing by way of Beijing.
There seemed to be little odd about the trip though I could address a wide variety of experiences that captured my traveler’s gaze. My trip was fueled by cultural studies and the emerging practice of Tai Chi in relationship to my daily activities. In the first city, I was allowed to practice with some of the resident experts. That experience was the highlight of my trip. I was engaged as a neophyte worthy of some special attention and presented with the opportunity to practice both in the mornings and evenings for extended period of times. My escape from my duties here allowed me to take longs run in the morning and sometimes in the evening in addition to the Tai Chi. I seemed more fit than ever, though a bit run down by the constant liquor and toasting. Many years ago, I accepted social drinking, and China seemed to challenge my concept of the social. The liquor and the cigarettes (I smoke) seemed to offer a strange counter balance to all the working out I did. It seemed everywhere I went I got a drink or a box of cigarettes. An enduring image was looking at a lazy Susan that had cigarettes spinning around as though they were food.
In terms of cultural interactions, the food was fabulous. I especially enjoyed vegetables in the morning and warm soy milk, which are practices I planned on continuing once I arrived back home, but alas, that did not occur.
Interactions with people were navigated through the bridge between languages though all of my students and guides spoke better English than I spoke Mandarin (my Mandarin is still basically non-existent). I imagined the ideal culture established as a result of my reading clashing with the reality of China’s huge population. The people and the setting seemed oddly like my father’s small town in Georgia. One could see the sophistication of the people, the advanced etiquette used to engage the stranger, and also imagine the secrets of knowledge you were not privy to, though you were there. None of it seemed odd or disorientating. If anything it seemed too familiar. The simplicity of it all was partially a traveler’s luxury—the advantage of being a stranger; but I could also see the reconciliation of the culture I envisioned mostly via literature with the reality of people living their everyday lives.
I imagined the Tai Chi practitioners like those dudes who have mastered basketball in certain neighborhoods when a middle aged man waved the Tai Chi ball magically in dim light after interrupting his work breaking down a moon bounce for children in one of the parks of Pizhou. His attitude, the brief smile, and the execution of the movement rung with the bravado and ego of someone operating in the culture on the highest levels without the publicity or fame. I count the experience among my greatest rewards.
The only disorientating experience, I can describe now, occurred when I took the bus from Xiansui to Yangzhou without guide or traveling companion. Part of my trepidation occurred when I informed one of my guides in Xiansui I intended to take the trip alone and spend a few days in the city. He said, “Alone. Not so good.” I suddenly became aware of being alone in a gigantic country that I felt familiar with. I had underestimated my guides who had provided me with everything since my arrival. I contacted a young woman in Pizhou who found me a guide for my days in Yangzhou in response.
On the bus ride, I was amazed to see the bus stop in the middle of a highway and let a group of people off who then disappeared into the tall grass. It was nothing short of amazing. I watched movies anxious on the ride and imagined my father traveling from the southern town of Humboldt, Tennessee, to New York City after graduating college to escape the job of being a teacher for the rest of his life.
AMW: I have lived in Taiwan on several occasions, including an eight month stay in 2004-2005, when I studied Mandarin at Taipei Language Institute. My first time there was as a Fulbright scholar in 2002 for the spring semester when I taught at National Taiwan University, my home base, and Taipei National University of the Arts. The joy of being inside the culture that had meant so much to me was a thrill I can hardly express in words. My teacher gave me my first Dao meditation instructions just a few days before I left to serve my term as a Fulbrighter. It was fourteen years ago, in January, just a few short months after 9/11. I had an apartment reserved for foreigners on the 4th floor, which is bad luck for Chinese people but okay for foreigners. That should give you some sense of how the Chinese world is an entire world unto itself, and for me to intersect in the way that I have been is to build a house out of paradoxes. Irony is the mortar. Iconoclasm is the power source. It is a world of fractal lights, constantly reinventing themselves, falling into and out of themselves, and becoming these particular suns, exploding stars.
During my first time in Taiwan, I traveled to Mainland alone for a short vacation in Beijing, where I knew no one. After I convened the first of two international conferences on Chinese poetry at Simmons in 2004, I visited poets I knew in Mainland in the spring of 2005, and that was unforgettable. In Beijing, I had incredible moments with poets, including a trip to the Printing University for a reading. Students were so excited to see the black man, the poet who had brought Chinese poets to Boston. I also met Shi Zhi, whom some regard as the father of the latter 20th century lyric in Chinese poetry on Mainland.
Matchmakers still wait for me when I land in Taiwan and Mainland, hoping to get me into a family situation. If I go back again unattached, I might be disappeared into a small village in Taiwan where I will be straightened out and given in marriage, which is to say handed over to a sweet but no nonsense woman so my life will be as it should be. Or I will be taken into that monastery where I taught Taiji to the nuns in the spring of 2005, there to spend the rest of my life with my wayward proclivities.
What can I say? I go to Taiwan and feel as if I am home. Part of me is there.
Once when I was there electric storms filled the sky for the entire time I was there, as if in affirmation. Taiwan is where I began my Dao mediation, the next major step into exploring my interiority, and that monastery is where I began writing The Government of Nature, my fourth U Pittsburgh book, and my twelfth book overall. There is something in the math of that which makes sense.
I have been to Macao. It is the holy land for all who love gambling. If you have never been, just imagine Portuguese and Chinese cuisine combined and walking along streets in China that look like streets in Portugal but with one difference. You can walk right into Mainland from Macao.
Transpacific Reconfigurations
LW: It strikes me that there is a sense of relationality, or even “kinship,” that emerges from your encounters in China—be it developed sympathies in Aaliyah’s and Kyle’s depictions, the odd sense of familiarity experienced by Yao, or the feeling of home as described by Afaa. I wonder, then, what does this transpacific move towards Asia, or China in particular, open up for you conceptually, institutionally, politically, personally, or otherwise? Does this thinking in relation to the East enable particular kinds of possibilities for identity, community, or social imaginings for you?
AB: China is a useful counterpoint to any discussion of America and its global exercise of power. At the polemic level that’s where my interest lies—prodding at American meanings from the perch of an emerging empire in the East. As someone coming out of a black nationalist consciousness, an examination of this society also sates my curiosity about what success looks like in a second/third world liberation context. I am able to work through a lot of hypotheticals—the things I may see as desirable or necessary for the advancement of my causes—by exploring those ideas as they are manifest in Chinese society.
I see that as a separate question from the imaginative possibilities for creative work. These are endless; the challenge is blending audiences and I suppose that’s where the community piece comes in. On a mass scale, this hasn’t happened outside of the hip-hop movement, and even this discourse is circumscribed in its way. This in the sense that the protest function the music serves in its original cultural context is limited here, especially of late. It would be useful to define what community could or should look like across our differences. As for a contemporary portrait, there is a lot of suspicion and reductive thinking to be called out and worked through. Strong tendencies exist in both our political traditions whereby we are moved to assert a kind of innocence before history. It works like an emotional circuit breaker, trivializing and outright dismissing any serious reckoning with the ways we misunderstand and harm others based on a perception of our own suffering as superior. Of course, the injury is multidirectional.
This question is also gendered in a sense, which may reflect the caution in my response. Global patriarchies interact in ways that often limit the kinds of access “foreign” women can have. Depending on the metric, this culture seems less severe than some others.
KD: I don’t know if “opening” is the word I would use. So much of the exchange with China—closer to the surface, not at the political depths—still seems onedirectional to me. I felt as though there were ideas or perceptions that I could take from my experience there to complicate or destabilize my Western views, but there did not seem to be much that I could introduce. Things don’t work that way here, seemed to be a common response. Whereas in America, where we have these governing ideals that our social and civic realities have never quite matched or realized (and thus those ideas hover in the air as aspirational beacons for ourselves and the world), I don’t get a sense of a dominant “controlling metaphor” in China. As Yao said, there seems to be such a diversity of philosophy and ideology—maybe not as strong a need to displace or supersede others in the name of establishing dominance. (If true, I imagine that a result of China being a much older civilization that has seen the rise and fall of its empires.) Although that certainly does not apply to religion, and I think that is why religion is such a contentious issue there (though religious conflict, and battles for natural resources and political capital in the guise of religious conflict, has been a defining human struggle for some time now.)
I have to note, too, that both of my trips to China were sponsored and mostly led by the Chinese government, and discussing certain subjects and extending certain ideas would have been, shall we say, discourteous. I can’t really say I’ve had an unmitigated dialogue or exchange with “China” or the Chinese people yet. Unlike Aaliyah and Yao, I’ve had none of that folk exchange that they seem to have had. Maybe that is why I don’t feel any opening, as such open exchange of ideas threatens the imposed harmony the CCP works very hard to maintain and project. The fact that while I was there, being treated very kindly, the Chinese government was persecuting underground and dissident writers feeds a certain skepticism about my experiences.
Being there did make me think a lot about globalization and, emanating from the metropolises, this drive towards capitalist sameness. In a way, looking at China is like looking at a potential future where GDP growth is god and the boom/ bust cycles are so frequent that towns become these blends of gleaming luxury development and young ruin. The environment gives me the same feeling—a look into a future when we have declared the dollar absolutely worthier than maintaining the environment.
YG: China is a culture that has been documented for millennia. The presence of literature and culture for such an extensive period of time contradicts many of the myths fed to African Americans via white supremacy. I often conceptually speak of China as “a third rail” to the black/white binary that seems to dominate the conceptual framework of America. Of course, one could add India or the Middle East as alternatives that serve the same purpose. Yet China has been the culture that I have been drawn to. The yin and yang symbol, which acknowledges a binary relationship held in balance complete with designation for contradictions, serves as a useful practical tool for conceptual alternatives. We are fond of imagining black and white as opposites that can somehow be mutually exclusive. Chinese culture seems to have preserved a more complex and nuanced view of the relationship between opposites than the one present in the binary that dominates the African American relationship with America.
China is also important in relationship to the contemporary world stage. The size of its economy and the large amount of business it does with America is of great importance to members of our society. One must also add the presence of China in Africa and the efforts of the Government to gain access to Africa’s natural resources. On the most practical level a citizen of the world cannot afford to ignore China.
Institutionally, I have promoted China as an area of focus for HBCUs. Xavier, Spellman, and a few other HBCUs have Confucius Institutes. My home institution, Bowie State University, currently has a few students studying in China for semesters as part of an exchange program sponsored by the Government. China is a good focus for African American Institutions. As an African American one engages China with the advantage of being American, but if properly grounded, one also possesses a perspective that represents African American consciousness derived from our unique experience in the country. My study of China and Taoism has led to my contemplation of African American culture as a “yin” culture. African American responses to the conditions of our history have often demanded we cultivate nonaggressive forms of power to maintain our survival. To engage China with this understanding is a conceptual and tactical advantage.
The move towards China serves as a “third rail” for reconciling the encounter with knowledge via a system that operates outside of the Western binary. Often in my classes when teaching binary thinking, I ask students to give me the opposite of heaven. Students always respond with hell. For in the binary of Western religion the opposite of heaven is hell. When I explain the opposite of heaven in the I-Ching hexagrams is earth, students appear to be a bit confused. Earth could easily be considered an opposite to heaven, and the differences between earth and hell are profound. The distinction is as profound (when contemplated or meditated) as the concept of reversion mentioned in the Tao and practiced in Tai Chi. These two examples, though idealistic, begin to suggest the role of Chinese culture in my life. When teaching primarily African American students, I often set the Chinese philosophy or view of the world against the traditional views we have of Western culture.
AMW: The experience of being the only black person in a culture with very little familiarity is a matter of having your sensory systems stripped naked, having little or no access to prompts which you understand. That is a good thing. It is disorienting at first, and sometimes frightening in that there is a sense of being alone that can be overwhelming at times. It’s then that you have the chance to build a new system. Identity on an obvious level refers to the ways in which we attach ourselves to signs that indicate who we think we are, or who other people think we are. However, internally identity is the sense of how we respond to ourselves, of our inner lives. Traveling in Chinese culture in the way that I have for over a decade, I have come to the States with a renewed ability to move in the context of the other, of that which is outside African American or black references. It is a sojourn across spaces many perceive as impossible, and it is not without its challenges. Still there is the chance to have an enlarged sensibility, an extended consciousness.
In the space of the engagement of race in the United States, I feel as if I have alternative ways of perceiving, responding, and moving. These feelings of alternative actions may not materialize in the outer world, but the fact that they exist in my consciousness enlarges the way in which I see myself.
The familiarity with Chinese culture can translate into a new set of tools for forming communities of artists and cultural workers here in the U.S. Familiarity is a crucial aspect of bridge-building across cultures. We move away from clichéd ways of trying to build rapport when we have experiential knowledge of Chinese culture as a result of working in that culture. It begins with fundamental awakenings, such as to the wide diversity that is contained in Chinese culture, and of influences and tensions with other Asian and South Asian cultures.
As we find ourselves immersed in this important stage of history after the ending of formal European colonialism, we have the heavy lifting of a multitude of considerations if we are to call ourselves conscious working artists.
Finally, there is the other dimension of real personal change that happens when you practice important aspects of Chinese culture, such as the Daoist internal arts and internal cultivation. Your physiognomy changes. The ways your body moves in space, the phenomenological inquiry attendant to such changes, are profoundly intimate and affect your life in ways that are sometimes simply ineffable.
LW: Hearing your responses, it seems like China and/or Chinese cultural thought has provided ways to think through, for one, issues of empire (be it America’s “global exercise of power” which Aaliyah points to, or China’s rise as an emergent empire as Kyle and Yao both address); for another, concepts of identity and racial formation that to Yao offer a “third rail” to complicate ideological binaries and to Afaa “enlarge and extend” consciousness, phenomenological inquiry, and modes of communitybuilding.
This rumination reminds me of a number of African American thinkers who have also traveled to China and written on black consciousness in relation to Chinese cultural thought (i.e. W.E.B. Du Bois, Huey Newton, Elaine Brown, etc.) in the past. Do you read your writings on China to be alongside, intervening in, departing from, or being in non-relation to such a genealogy?
AB: I believe that my work echoes the writings of black thinkers who have pondered China and its meanings. There is certainly a departure in my writing, in the sense that I work against romanticism and ardently resist any impulse to authenticate my voice to this place. I take issue with the panacea envisioned in so much black writing about China.
Something else that I’ve accepted about the terms of the Chinese discourse on China, where it concerns outsiders, is that we non-Chinese can possess no understanding. It’s a hard thing to take into the spirit, but it’s the rule one must play by in order to survive the environment. Some of the shooing away at “foreign” attempts to understand this place is a bit knee jerk, but there is a strong argument underneath the posturing that I respect. In light of this, I have come to believe that black thinkers have our purposes with Chinese narratives and Chinese thinkers have their purposes with ours. In my writing I try to imagine our realities as separate spheres, conveying my genuine longing for connection but emphasizing questions around that project over answers.
KD: Well, I don’t want to judge DuBois for what he said in the mid-twentieth century because who can really see the future, but China was somewhat of a communist wet dream for him. “You know America and France and Britain to your sorrow,” he said from China, speaking to Africa and peoples of its diaspora. “Now know the Soviet Union and its allied nations, but particularly know China.” (His sentiment was likely fueled by disillusionment with America and its brand of racism.) But today, many Chinese are functioning as robber barons in Africa— providing infrastructure in exchange for exorbitant compensation in the form of natural resources. So I guess I am not writing with the intent of situating my American minority struggles within the politics of the Chinese people. Though, yes, I do feel a solidarity with many of the people there, but that is mostly economic. I see the people of my generation in China and recognize a similar struggle to escape the capitalist finger trap. (And I’m not just throwing that metaphor out there as cultural pandering. Think about the similarities between the finger trap and corporate capitalism.) It’s too expensive to live in D.C., New York, and San Francisco, and it’s too expensive to live in Beijing and Shanghai, and too expensive to raise a child. When I can see it in China rather than having to assume these things, it strengthens my conviction to write about this global struggle against greed and debtorship. Maybe in that way I am stepping into DuBois’ territory in regard to contemplating China, but I think my allegiance lies with the people—just the people—more so than it does with the nation. I don’t think I have a reason to trust my government any more than a Chinese citizen does, and vice versa. The mutual struggle to govern ourselves and remain human—particularly in the face of late capitalism—is what my writing on China is concerned with. But in terms of writing with cultural awareness and in a sincere spirit of exploration, I definitely take Afaa’s work as model. Compared to what he is doing, most of what I am writing is only scratching the surface.
YG: In my responses thus far, I have often referred to the idealistic. The idealistic for African Americans often functions as a retreat to the symbolic and the conceptual, which many take to be an abandonment of practicality. Elijah Muhammad calling the white man the devil, or a revolutionary blackness that ends in arms, represents expressions of our search for practical ideological expressions of our freedom. Maoist thought has fed some of these idealistic drives, but hinges itself on a different cultural model that is grounded in the particulars of Chinese culture and history, and most importantly, the specifics of the Chinese population. Writings that engage the politics of China and the practicality of Chinese tactics for waging revolutionary struggle represent a different expression of engagement with China than the one I seek.
My genre of choice is poetry, and seems different from the engagement of other African American scholars of the past on the subject. Though the work of Afaa in particular offers an objective I admire and desire to move towards. What I find in his work is a fusion of African American and Chinese culture concepts held together by the craft of poetry and a working class perspective. If one studies the two cultures or even contemplates the meaning of “working class” one finds the commonalities that give rise to a firm connection between African Americans and the Chinese. In my opinion Afaa’s nuanced integration represents a refinement of written expression that reflects the best of what I know about Chinese and African American culture. It can be symbolized by the many movements of jazz through different modalities held together by the performer’s stance on the stage in a particular time. It is the way Tai Chi though presented in forms and movements gives one an opportunity to sense the particular energy of the day through the body. Afaa’s work in particular represents a refined representation of the continuum of African American “struggle,” for lack of a better word; for his work seems to defy the concept of struggle. It seems to express that there is a way to resolve, refine, and integrate the culture into forms that suggest a balance can always be achieved. So while it represents a generation or movement forward, his relationship with China suggests a completely different possibility. In some ways, the work is so grounded in the everyday one at times imagines that there is little concept being employed. In this regard Afaa’s work represents a Chinese sensibility that mirrors some of the highest expressions of its culture that I have been exposed to. If my writings aspire to something it would be that, though desire towards such an objective seems to be a paradox, which could easily limit one’s ability to execute the task.
AMW: I would say my own writings on China or my writings influenced by Chinese cultural thought are more aligned with Huey Newton in terms of class, but the content of my poetry is more that of the cultural nationalist thinking of that period in the U.S. I am not saying I am a nationalist, and that clarification is evidence, at least to me, of a further point of departure from my influences. The confessional content of The Government of Nature does not tow the party line, so to speak.
My awareness of oppositional energies and contradictory narratives involved in being a black man from America are informed by DuBois’ overall project, for sure, not in his interest in Maoist thought—I would have to say he could only have known general things. I am not sure what he knew of Taiwan or what he thought of the Cross-Strait issues. I suspect he would have laughed to know of someone like me who was following a martial artist’s pathway in the name of self-realization as a serious poet. He might have thought that odd. I know Chinese people who find it odd.
When I left the university in 1970, and began my fifteen-year life as a factory worker, I often reflected on a quote by Mao about the need for artists to be grounded in the proletariat. I used that as a rationale for leaving my university education, but I was too conflicted to do anything except intuit my way through the paradox of my own membership in the proletarian or working class. After the publication of Water Song, my first book of poetry, in 1985, I set out to try to write more of my interior in my second full-length book, My Father’s Geography. It was my third book, and my second full-length collection, and getting to that internal excavation would prove to be a process of decades. The seeds for my Plum Flower Trilogy are in that third book, which was published in 1992, seven years after my debut collection. I was working on the Marxist idea of the establishment of working class interiority as the more effective rebellion against class hegemony, but it was a personal, felt need as opposed to something I chose from intellectual wandering. I wish I could have had a chance to discuss all of this with DuBois. That would have been marvelous. In fact, I’d like to discuss it with Cornel West one day. He hosted me at Princeton to read from My Father’s Geography about twenty-five years ago. I wasn’t ready at the time to have that conversation.
So in some ways I think my work intervenes, but there is always some relation, but that may be a generational perception. I was born during the time of de jure segregation, when the U.S. Supreme Court Plessy vs. Ferguson decision of 1896 still held segregation to that national policy, one upheld in the north by the scaffolding of northern liberalism with its lack of social intent. So I see a collectivity that no longer exists as a state of consciousness the way it did when I was a child.
Literary Possibilities
LW: You’ve all started articulating this in your responses already, but I would like to close with a question that focuses on literature and your writings in particular. What role do you see literature playing in your exploration of this cross-Pacific, crosscultural, cross-racial encounter and experience? How has this manifested in your work? How do you see your writings developing in the future?
AB: One of the areas where I am able to cultivate intimacy with the culture is through its literature. The literature of China has provided me with a deeper sense of China’s cultural foundations, how China sees itself, and how that self-perception interacts with/contradicts the historical record. Who does that vision include/exclude? One does get the sense when engaging this tradition, though, of grasping at shadows—something about the work available feels partial. I get a similar feeling when I contemplate pre-colonial African texts. There is so much interest, but at present there are so many more questions than answers, and some of the latter are forever lost.
I appreciate the prose tradition very much, especially the great classics. Even if you’re not a reader, you cannot survive an hour of Chinese television without a basic grasp of the Journey to the West storyline. I struggle with contemporary Chinese literature, though there are writers like Lu Xun, Yu Hua, Ye Shengtao, and Yu Dafu whose work to me is plainspoken, invigorating, and soul expanding.
In my own experience, sharing work by black writers has served as a means to form meaningful connections and to insist on a kind of visibility that meets my own terms. I remember teaching a course on black writers at Yunnan University. At the end one of the students told me that my pride in my heritage made her proud to be Chinese. That was a profound moment for me. Being the neophyte I was, I had no sense of the challenges history would pose to the self-esteem of the people I was meeting every day. Until then, in my perception, I was on the receiving end of hurt and harm. It was only then that I was forced to acknowledge that so many of the people I was encountering were in various states of emotional distress. It was moving to see the profound ways that exposure to black literature helped them grow a deserved sense of pride in their own heritage.
What manifests in my work is a kind of sympathy—an extended hand. I’m not interested in assuming a gaze from above; I try to write from a place of yearning. While in the past my China writings have been kind of obscure, I am more interested now in meeting the demands of the general reader, creating work that is easy and approachable, but where the ideas put forward meet a certain level of rigor. I respect that for Western audiences, interest in China is economically motivated. It’s difficult to have a cultural conversation that is not framed as tangential to this financial narrative. My challenge as a non-fiction writer is simply to see how my perspective as a black woman can intervene in the tradition of “foreign” China writing in a way that adds a new layer of richness, but my voice isn’t the one I’m most excited about. I look forward to a flowering of literature among black people raised in China as well as Afro-Chinese themselves writing about their experiences across cultures. They will have more illuminating and exciting things to say than may ever come to my mind, though it won’t keep me from trying.
KD: After my first visit to China in 2010, I left with a strong desire to edit an anthology of contemporary and modern African-American poetry translated in Chinese. I wanted to work with Rita Dove—a former teacher of mine—as adding someone of her stature to the project would give it a better shot at publication (particularly since she has had some of her work translated into Chinese). In mainland China—even in the larger cities where foreign culture has penetrated—I got a sense that African-Americans are very much an unknown entity. When I was walking through the Forbidden City in Beijing and being asked to stop and take pictures with school children, I kept wondering, “Who do they think I am, and would they believe me if I said I was a writer, a scholar and teacher?” (Yusef Komunyakaa has discussed having similar experiences in India where the popular assumption was that “black” people only rap and engage in no other lyrical production.) I think that creating a book which complicates and destabilizes the popular Chinese conception of African-Americans (mostly fueled by globalized corporate media and sports entertainment) is more important than anything I am writing about China right now. What’s sad, though, is that if I did that and did it honestly, I doubt such an anthology would be something sanctioned by the government. I doubt the complex stories and histories of African people in American would be censored because non-Han, ethnic minority people in China quietly suffer under similar conditions as “black” Americans do. At the same time, I doubt it would be easy to get access to writers who aren’t sanctioned by and ideologically aligned with the Communist Party’s Chinese Writers Association. If we were to attempt to get an anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry out of China, it would only happen in spite of many sanitizing filters. I could go to Taiwan and connect with someone like Hsia Yü, but on the mainland, it is more sensitive. Writers that provide insight into the cultural “bottom” of China are the ones who tend to get detained. I would say the internet is the way to go (as opposed to publishing a tactile, traceable text), but then I think of what happened to Han Han (whether or not the change in his public political discourse is a result of weariness or government discouragement is unsettled) and feel that the CCP’s hand in the dissemination of art is still too strong for a really open and accessible cultural exchange to develop. For now, we’ll just write on our respective sides of the firewall, which will, one day, be toppled.
YG: Ironically, I haven’t addressed China much in my writing as a subject/content. I was only in China for a short period of time. I plan to return for a much more lengthy stay in the near future, which will most likely change that. Though it seems it takes some time for an experience with China to distill into actual writing. I often use the term “reconciliation” to describe the approach I take to poems and writing. My understanding of Chinese culture broadens my concept of reconciliation between the poles of experience and words. Tai Chi often suggests that I will write less and enjoy the stillness of mind one experiences in a place beyond words. The presence of a wordless state as the pinnacle of the achievement (as compared to word production) excites me about the future more than anything.
AMW: My Plum Flower Trilogy is a project I began while I was in the Hualien temple and monastery on the eastern coast of Taiwan. It was the spring of 2005, and I had moved to Taiwan that previous fall to spend my sabbatical there studying Mandarin at the Taipei Language Institute. They were celebrating Buddha’s birthday around the time I started writing the poems that would become The Government of Nature. When I got back to the states I began compiling The Plum Flower Dance, the first book of the trilogy. The Government of Nature took seven years to complete, and I wrote the third book, City of Eternal Spring, in about two years, partly while simultaneously finishing up The Government of Nature. I was in my third year of daily Daoist sitting meditation when I began writing in the monastery. What’s significant for me in all this is that I had given up on poetry, and was considering resigning myself to the monastery for the rest of my life. The discovery of incest as my child trauma when I was in my late forties in the late 1990s had left me feeling very afraid of poetry. My lyric investigations had led me to the self-discovery, and writing terrified me because I realized the power of poetry. For me, my writing was soul work, and when I opened the door to my most inner worlds, all the monsters lifted their heads and spoke to me.
Daoism is a funny thing in the West. It gets interpreted in many ways, and I have had my encounters with racism from white Westerners who doubt I could be a Daoist. After all, I don’t wear black and white every day or have any affectation that one might call priestly. So I write and live with an inner conviction. The experience of meditation is a truthfulness not dependent on those who see themselves as genuine. I mean that kind of thinking gets into everything. So I guess what I am saying is once I began my meditation as one of my teacher’s disciples, I took the path of believing that Eastern pathways can only complement what religiosity or spiritual philosophy you already have. My path has been about integration of self over the fissures of what trauma does to people, the splitting and breaking apart. So Chinese culture is central to my soul awareness. When I am in the deepest part of my awareness, of who I know myself to be as a living being, it is the pathway laid out in ancient China and developed in following centuries, developed and refined. I can speak of opening qi channels, but the Daoist method is just that, a method. The accessibility of it, the universality of it, is in its barest application. There are, of course, the ritualistic Daoist practitioners, the deities, etc. But for me the experience of Daoist mediation is a filling in of the context of my Christian upbringing. Mine is what you might call a liberal belief, depending on where you are.
There are the American Buddhist poets, but I don’t know where the Daoists are. Well, Daoists can hide, I suppose. Buddhism is more formalized in many ways, with structures and the texts that spell out systems and places. Maybe that’s why they are more visible. I prefer the more anonymous way of being, a quieter phenomenology.
The meditation has affected my writing in the way I find myself moving associatively, but there is also the language study. I’m sure there are new neural pathways that have been opened in me as a result of studying Mandarin. The research is showing the effects of language study on the brain. So I am forever changed, and I doubt if it is good to spend too much time trying to analyze how my own brain is changed by all of this. I meditate for my health and calmness of mind, not to seek magic powers. The best teachers will tell you the latter is a path to ruination. It suffices to say my Plum Flower Trilogy would not have been possible without this level and manner of engagement with Chinese culture.
I mentioned this before, and I will say it again as I move toward some closure. There are alternative ways of being as a black person engaged in Chinese culture. There is a chance to opt out of race into something else. I am not saying you will cease being a black person, but your inner world can be reconfigured and rewired such that your perception of race and your need for identification vis a vis race will be altered. You might even say healed, if we think of America’s dance with the paradox of race as a sickness.
In closing, I want to go back to the second conference of Chinese poets I convened at Simmons College. It was where I altered the process of translation such that I used it for cultural exchange. A translator sat between native speaking poets of English and Chinese and extended the process of translation into a conversation. My goal was not so much to have them have a finished product as it was to have them experience the space between languages in poetry as a space wherein they can see each other reflected in each other, a space where they could move in consciousness. If language is the way of constructing realities, and if those constructions are not the genuine world, then maybe the genuine world is that walk among the various signs that flow in the existence of language as a thing in our minds. Maybe the poets are the ones with the most intimate connection with that space, living as we do for an art that makes language a self-conscious thing rather than an application, such as in the extended narratives of fiction or the architecture of theater. In that there may be hope.
When Earl Derr Biggers created the first Asian American literary detective, Charlie Chan, in the 1920s, he did so in contrast to the Yellow Peril depictions of Asians and Asian Americans that dominated American media at the time. Biggers’s creation resulted in the emergence of an “amiable” Chinese American detective hero whose legendary status has survived into the 21st century with dozens of literary adaptations, comic strips, radio shows, games, television spinoffs, and feature films.
But while mainstream white America warmly greeted Biggers’s hero, Charlie Chan has been the subject of much controversy in recent decades with accusations of racist stereotyping and cultural appropriation. Almost a century after Charlie Chan’s birth, the literary world of detective enthusiasts have enjoyed and welcomed the next generation of Asian American detective heroes. These characters not only offer counter narratives of Asian Americans’ relationship to crime and policing but also depict how legal limitations and restrictions affect certain marginalized groups.
Naomi Hirahara and Ed Lin are two of today’s leading authors of Asian American mystery and crime fiction. Through their own unique portrayals of Asian American detection, Asian American detective fiction now plays a more prominent role in the genre of American mystery fiction overall.
Edgar Award winner Naomi Hirahara is the author of two detective series, following Japanese American gardener and amateur investigator Mas Arai (loosely based on Hirahara’s own father) and Ellie Rush, a young LAPD bike cop with aspirations to be a homicide detective. At the time of the interview, Hirahara had just published her sixth Mas Arai novel, Sayonara Slam, and was about to embark on her seventh and final Mas Arai story. The second installment in Hirahara’s newer series featuring the biracial Ellie Rush was just published the previous year, after Murder on Bamboo Lane, the first Ellie Rush novel, won the T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award.
On the opposite coast, Ed Lin’s Robert Chow series offers an alternative perspective to the traditional hard-boiled portrayals of New York’s Chinatown as exotic and foreign. Chow, a Vietnam vet and alcoholic, is the only Chinese American cop in the NYPD of the mid-1970s. Chow’s vulnerabilities as well as the racial barriers placed upon him offer an alternative lens to the noir tradition of Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and Thompson. Lin’s second series featuring Taiwanese amateur sleuth Jing-nan delves into the pressures of a contemporary Taiwan struggling with transformations between the old and the new. The interviews occurred just before Lin’s second installment, Incensed, was released to critical acclaim.
The following interviews took place in two parts. We began the interview at a round table discussion during the 2016 Association of Asian American Studies Conference in Miami, Florida. The second half of the interview occurred in a hotel room the next day where we found respite from the humid and bright Miami heat. Conducted by Betsy Huang of Clark University and Jinny Huh of the University of Vermont, it was a pleasant afternoon of bonding over murder, sharing inspirations, and meditating between west coast vs. east coast differences. There was laughter all around.
JINNY HUH: One of the reasons why I wanted to assemble this panel is because I work on detective fiction and there seems to be something going on in the last five, ten years with genre fiction that is really important to people who do work around literary studies but also around issues of social justice, race, and diversity. I’m happy to have Ed and Naomi join us today because whether they’re consciously intending it to or not, their work reflects a lot of the larger shifts in the detective narrative over the last twenty or thirty years, especially in African American narratives. I really wanted to get some feedback from them about their writing processes, and which authors they are looking towards for inspiration.
ED LIN: In my reading experience, the detective in the English language is someone who is a societal outsider. She has to be, because it was that very society that created the criminal, the encouragement and the opportunity to commit crimes. The detective doesn’t judge the offender in particular; all of society is an offender, a criminal. In fact, it is disgust with the amoral foundation of society that has pushed the detective to be who she is: someone repulsed by its values and although she knows how the system works to profit by it, decides not to play. She is only moved to help those less fortunate, the victims, who suffer because they play fair rather than play by the rules.
Do you know the difference between playing fair and playing by the rules? Neither has anything to do with whatever laws that happen to exist. It’s about what’s morally right versus what the powerful in a society want. Before his writing career, Dashiell Hammett, who is probably best known for The Maltese Falcon, was an operative for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Apart from solving crimes they would engage in all sorts of activities for their clients, including breaking up unions. Anaconda Copper, a mining client of Pinkerton’s, offered Hammett money to kill Frank Little, a union organizer. Hammett said no. Then shortly after, a mob gathered up Little and other union organizers and lynched them. A note that read, “First and Last Warning” was pinned to Little’s thigh. No one was ever prosecuted for his murder. Frank Little is gone. So is Dashiell Hammett. But Pinkerton’s still exists. Anaconda ended operations decades ago but it still exists on the books because BP, as a successor company, is responsible for the environmental cleanup of former Anaconda mines. Trying to play fair got Frank Little killed and left arsenic in the groundwater.
You cannot write a truly resonant genre work unless you take the side of the oppressed individual. It doesn’t feel right to an emotionally balanced reader to see people sacrificed to feed a greedy machine. It doesn’t feel right because it isn’t right. Lately I’ve been seeing tweets from asshole chauvinists decrying acts by social justice warriors trampling upon the traditional white male hero in video games and comic books. Some elements of this thinking exist in the mystery and crime genre as well. Both fans and writers. Remember what I said about being emotionally balanced? These people are not emotionally balanced. Prejudice and notions of racial supremacy in adults are mental illnesses.
This isn’t to say that mysteries and crime fiction, in dealing with these issues, have to be sober and straight. I’m all about the funny. A big part of it is that I’m saying, I’m not going to give any of you jerks the power to take away my good times. Another part of it is that I like to celebrate the absurdity of life, like one of my favorite writers, Charles Willeford. Lastly, I like to employ the laughter of recognition, recognition of the struggle.
NAOMI HIRAHARA: My first book, the Summer of the Big Bachi, took fifteen years, from ideas and first words to publication. The writers who walked beside me were primarily African Americans, most importantly Chester Himes. I gravitated towards the absurd situations that sleuths got into. There’s also Walter Mosley and the way he tackles L.A. history in his books. And most personally, there’s a woman named Barbara Neely who wrote the “Blanche on a Lam” series, probably in the early nineties. She has a maid on the east coast who has some sass and solves crimes.
When I was trying to get published–and this was in the nineties–I asked myself, “Who was Amy Tan’s agent? I will send her an inquiry.” [Laughter] I got a rejection postcard. Since this was before the proliferation of computers, the rejections were printed on a card with a blank for names to be handwritten in. And someone had written “Naomi” on my card.
This went on, and I refined my manuscript. And I started to think: maybe what I was doing was not like Amy Tan’s work. Maybe it was more like Barbara Neely’s because she was dealing with race and class, which were important for me to tackle.
My sleuth in my first series is a Japanese gardener, based on my father. So I looked up and wrote to Barbara Neely’s agent this time. An associate there who is Indian American asked to see the manuscript. It took three months, and I had to rewrite it, and so on. Then the agency was absorbed by a larger one, but it continued to represent me. So, in that very direct way, an African American writer helped me get published.
During that time there were waves of local African American writers coming on to the scene–writers like Gar Anthony Haywood, Gary Phillips, and Paula Woods who interviewed me for the LA Times. In all these ways they’ve assisted me, whether alive or dead.
To the question about the limitations of the genre, one is that you need a dead body. Not all Asian American stories involve the dead. In my series with an amateur sleuth, many readers asked why this old Japanese gardener was encountering all these dead bodies? Is this becoming like Murder, She Wrote? You know, “Why are all these people in a small town dying?” [Laughter] And some might have thought that this guy was becoming a caricature. I hope I’m not doing that. Enough people don’t think I am, so that is enough for me.
Regarding race and the mystery genre, what I love–and I’m not an academic, and I’m middle-aged, so I don’t use phrases like “white gaze” that often. This is probably the first time I’ve used it in a panel. [Laughs] But this is what I love about Chester Himes’s work–it’s not like he’s worried about whether the mainstream understands what he’s writing about with Harlem and the black community. He just goes for it. I feel the same way. In the genre, there is already a kind of formula, there is a dead body, and there are expectations that readers have, so perhaps they enter not necessarily interested in Asian America. They’re interested in the dead body. But because we’re submerged in this Asian American’s world, they are too–and they are curious about it because there may be something about this world that will tell us who killed that person. Our readers are of diverse ages, nationalities, and races. I think that’s one of the advantages of our particular genre.
BETSY HUANG: I would say that what I love about the genre is that it is fundamentally about justice. More specifically, it’s about access to justice. It taps the readers’ anxieties about losing access to justice. Or, some of us come to realize that we are so privileged that we never worry about our access to justice.
What I love about writers of color in the genre is the way they reveal these vulnerabilities, particularly the precarities of communities with very little access to justice. Walter Mosley and Chester Himes are exceptional at this, and at creating alternate models of justice to compensate for the failures of the state. Writers of color do that critical work that both Naomi and Ed talked about–revealing social and political inequities that are part of the practice of daily life for members of these communities.
The detective’s character function is that she embodies critiques of justice. One can function as a Hammett figure, like the Continental Op–strictly in the noir tradition, remaining amoral from beginning to end, and fairly a flat character. But the detectives in Ed’s and Naomi’s fiction don’t remain amoral. They don’t just uphold the law, they intervene, try to circumvent it, even change it. Old school noir was in love with that amorality and is not interested in changing societal injustice or inequities. They’re more about how to survive within an unjust system. Today’s writers of the genre do both–how to both survive in it and right it.
JINNY: I am reading Viet Nguyen’s The Sympathizer right now, and there’s a scene where the narrator and the General whom he serves are in a room full of very rich white individuals. The General makes a comment about being an anthropologist observing this sea of whiteness and of the necessity of people of color to be able to “read” whites. It’s a skill that whites don’t need to read people of color.
It seems that there is an element of reporting in both of your work, about communities that the detectives are coming from. That’s not necessarily an active display of “here’s what Chinatown is like,” or “here’s what Little Tokyo is like.” It’s more through the little comments that Ellie makes about the Internment that the reader may not have any knowledge of. There is also a way of criticizing law through these very subtle ways that the characters bring up elements of their community in their detective processes that are not part of the process of detection of the actual crime. This, too, is central to detective fiction written by nonwhite authors.
How much of that type of knowledge production, and the spreading of the knowledge of difference, of the fact that Robert Chow always has to be the face of Chinatown, its symbol as the only Chinese officer in the police department, he has to represent that in all these images, and Ellie has to confront all the gender bias in the police force from her white and nonwhite male colleagues–many of the ways these characters are also commenting somewhat subtly on the injustices they have to also endure on a day to day basis–I’m wondering how much you took those into consideration when you were going through the actual plot of the detective story? How much of that do you focus on in the whodunit plot?
EL: I went to Columbia University and was lucky enough to take the first Asian American class that was started in my senior year. There were already a number of things I already knew: the railroads, Japanese internment, and so on. But one thing that was really cool was that Yuri Kochiyama and her husband Bill and a number of Asian American activists would just come in and talk to us. Even before the class was instituted, my friends and I were agitating to get this class in, so the visits by these activists from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties were really great.
Something that really stuck in my head because I never really knew about the more recent moments in contemporary history: before the Museum of Chinese in the Americas in New York City got its space, it was known as the Chinatown History Project. It had this archive that it would let you browse through, so whenever I got a week off from work, I would go there and just look through. It was a mess and there were files everywhere. Nothing was coordinated. People would bring in bags of stuff and leave it, and they didn’t have the capacity to process the material.
I read through issues of Bridge magazine–have you heard of the magazine? [Acknowledgments from the audience] All these old issues of Bridge had stories about women who were protesting the perennial Miss Chinatown contests, burning their bras and confronting these guys and I thought, “Wow, this is great!”
I talked to these retired Chinese American cops who were active in the seventies and you know, the thing about communication is that only about 15%, maybe less, is spoken. For the rest, you use your hands or other body gestures. And so, while I interviewed these cops, even though I had the tape recorder running, I was looking at their eyes and their hands, and what they would do with their bodies. I remember never listening to the tapes, because the body remembers better.
So, yes, I was a journalist and still am. While I was in journalism school, I actually wanted to work on Asian American activists in Chinatown in the seventies. There was a really big divide between Asian Americans who became politically active, protesting Vietnam, moving into Chinatown and probably not speaking Chinese and the associations that had been there for generations that were extremely conservative, right-wing, virulently anti-Communist. And these new kids would fly the hammer-and-sickle flag and play “The East is Red.” The community groups were flipping out. I remember this one guy who told me that there was someone going around with a video camera in the seventies recording all the faces. So I went to the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. It’s always suspect when a group has “benevolent” in its name. [Laughter] I went in and asked the guy at the front desk about the association keeping track of all the activists twenty years ago. He was like “Yeah, yeah,” and trying to blow me off. When I pressed him, he said, “You’re a really nice guy, but you’re looking for trouble.” I thought, “Wow! He’s threatening me! Right here! I have rights!” [Laughter]
This was in the early nineties and long before I started writing This Is a Bust, but it set things in motion. A lot of what is portrayed in the media, even in Asian American media, is often very far from what is actually happening. When I was going through those archives, there were pictures of smiling Asian cops with groups and I thought, “Hmmm…very interesting.”
NH: There was a scholar from Japan who described my work as journalistic, and I was actually kind of insulted at the time. [Laughter] I thought, “What? You mean I’m not literary?” But when I cooled down, I thought that it was true. I think it was because I was a journalist for the Rafu Shimpo, a Japanese American newspaper, as a reporter for three and a half years. I went away, and came back as editor for six years. I think that was a real seminal experience for me.
I was raised in Altadena and Pasadena, California, and I led the very typical Nisei-Kibei existence–working class, with many other gardeners’ families. I literally went to only two restaurants growing up: a chop suey in Little Tokyo called The Far East Café, and a local Mexican restaurant in our neighborhood. Then I went to Stanford, and got more involved through the arts. My introduction to Asian America probably was through the theatre project there. I was a ribbon dancer [laughter] in David Henry Hwang’s adaptation of Yasunari Kawabata’s short story “House of Sleeping Beauties,” and I was the lead actor in Momoko Iko’s play, “Goldwatch.” Later on, Momoko and I became part of the same writers group in Los Angeles.
I don’t know if you’ve been to Stanford. It’s beautiful there, and suddenly I was working at the Rafu Shimpo, right next to Skid Row. The downtown L.A. scene of the eighties was homelessness. There’s still homelessness now, but they’re pushing it into smaller and smaller blocks. Those were our immediate neighbors to the south, and our parking lot had lots of hypodermic needles, and people’s cars were getting broken into. We could see people literally carrying someone’s car battery down the street. So this was a good initiation for me into the real world. This is not my quaint, suburban upbringing. It forced me to move around–now I had to go to Gardena, Sawtelle, various Japanese American suburban enclaves, to Crenshaw, Boyle Heights, and other historic communities of color.
Strangely, I’m kind of an outsider myself because my parents were not interned. They were in Japan during the war–they were in Hiroshima. So there’s been times when they’ve sat with their neighbors at Nisei gatherings and were asked, “May and Sam, where were you?” “Oh, we were in Japan.” “You’re lucky.” And my parents would say, “No….” It’s like sometimes we get so cemented in our POV and we don’t think beyond it.
That’s where the journalism comes in. That training forced me to travel and learn about people’s experiences. It’s funny because some folks are saying, “Hey, you went to Stanford. Get a better job. Go work for the LA Times.” I got that a lot. But the funny thing was, the more and more I was covering these stories, I thought, “This was really fascinating. Japanese Peruvians? Wow!” Everything became deeper and more interesting to me. And so journalistic approaches are definitely infused in what I do. I am not interested in being a teacher and being didactic in my mysteries. I’m just naturally fascinated and curious about what is part of our American history. I want to weave the diasporas, and the various injustices committed against these people, into my stories. These are secrets to be told.
One last thing in terms of crime. We had a small staff, so we had to stretch and cover a lot of crime. There was one incident involving a judge’s son in a community, living with his grandmother who had no idea that he had all these guns. He barged into a hotel in South Bay and started shooting. This happened to be a conference of police. Apparently he was unaware of this. It was all over the news, but because the local Japanese L.A. newspaper was covering it, people were mad. But the story was all over our affiliate television and news. I think sometimes our community wants to keep this kind of thing inside. We’re the model minority and do only good. For the genre, I talk a lot about gambling because I saw that in our family and community, and this one Nisei gentleman said, “Naomi, you’ve aired our dirty laundry.” And it was just gambling! But because it’s fiction, it’s an easier way to talk about these things than writing nonfiction.
BH: This is a great segue into a question on the issue of “reporting.” I’m thinking of how Ellie, Mas, and Robert negotiate the role of the “cultural informant,” or the idea of reporting on your own people.
I think there are now more instances where people take that role and add layers to it so that it becomes less about informing on culture, but more about informing on history. Non-insider readers sometimes want a de-historicized way of consuming culture and–this is cynical, I know–read ethnic fiction as a cultural artifact that can add to their social and cultural capital. But when your detectives reveal history, obscured or erased history, then it became less about consumption and more about ethics. You are disrupting the way that non-insider audiences have always perceived the culture and moving them toward a deeper understanding. To me, Robert and especially Mas are not cultural informants, but history informants.
So here’s a question about the detectives’ relationship with the communities they serve–or surveil. There’s so much talk lately about community policing. I learned about community policing from Ed’s This Is a Bust. (Ed laughs) No, seriously! Community policing practices have been around for decades but the idea didn’t get traction until Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Black Lives Matter forced the issue onto the national stage. Still such a long way to go. Just the other day the Baltimore Police Department, which has been developing it and putting it into practice, was in the news. The police chief gave the department a grade of A while the community leaders gave it a C+.
Robert, Ellie, and Mas all have had to work very hard to maintain some degree of organic connection to the communities they serve. They have to earn and sustain the trust while they dance that very difficult line between the community and the police departments they work for, staffed by people who may not have the connection with the community. What current events from the real-life communities you’re writing about are you drawing on to depict your detectives’ negotiations with this?
EL: Well, anytime you use a term like “community,” there is not this uniform mass. There are elements of the community that are doing very well, and there are elements of the community that are being left behind. Back when I was doing interviews to form the world of This Is a Bust, I got to interview the founder and chairman of this fairly prominent Chinese American organization. I was telling him about my book and he said, “Hmm, you probably shouldn’t write about a cop. You should write about a guy stuck in middle management and he can’t advance because of a glass ceiling. But he is really the one who is qualified to be CEO.” I thought, okay, this is certainly someone’s point of view. And it’s an Asian American story. But it doesn’t appeal to me.
The kind of thing I’m seeing is that there is this shell game that goes on in Chinatown, and these restaurants work with each other to keep the wages low. And they steal the tips from the wait staff. You notice this when you go to dim sum. There are various carts going around. The guy giving you the bill is not the person serving you the food. He has a different badge. So when the state attorney general finally takes interest and is ready to sue, and there may be a settlement, or a trial, the waiters may be able to get their union recognized. Then after a couple of months the restaurant closes down, and reopens with a new name, and the former staff are not rehired, and there is a new owner. But the people who owned the old one are still somehow affiliated. This is something that has played out for maybe as long as Chinatown has been around and as long as laborers have tried to organize. It’s these kinds of people and these types of struggles in the community that I’m most interested in.
In Chinatown there’s a group called the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association (CSWA), and there’s this guy, Wing Lam, who’s been completely demonized in the Chinese language newspapers. It was so interesting talking to him. The CSWA office is in an old tenement building, and when the CSWA was gearing up for one of its fights in court against a restaurant, someone firebombed its building! But strangely, and I also think illegally, there was a layer of concrete above the offices of the Chinese staff, and that miraculously saved all the papers they needed to bring to court. They won that case and the restaurant closed down. But then a couple of months later another restaurant opened up, so it’s a struggle that continues. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who is working on that middle-management Asian American struggling for that corner office. Maybe that story has already been published–I don’t know. But that’s not my mystery.
NH: How about Robert Chow, though? How does he earn the trust of the community?
EL: You can’t ask me questions! [Laughter]
NH: Well, this is an issue that’s complicated, especially with law enforcement in the community. With my Mas Arai series, Mas is a disenfranchised character. So in some ways it was easy for me to do historical investigation with that type of character.
But then Ellie appeared–hapa, twenty-three years old, a bicycle cop with the LAPD. One positive thing about Ellie being law enforcement is that it allowed me to avoid the whole “Murder, She Wrote” thing. There’s a reason why she would encounter a dead body more than Mas would. But then law enforcement presents its own issues. I’ve written two Ellie Rush books and I’m still wrestling with it now. Ellie’s aunt is the highest-ranking Asian American in the LAPD, kind of modeled after someone we’ve had in that position but who recently retired–a Japanese American. I’ve never talked to him about this series, but since he’s retired now I think I can get some information.
The way I worked it is that Ellie is young, very optimistic, believing that maybe she can make a change. She has a chorus of friends…It’s a light, fun read, so if you’re interested in or need that, pick it up because Ellie’s friends are in Asian American studies. This is a way to elevate you guys to popular genres! [Laughter] The friends are pan-Asian and that was the purpose, too, because that’s how I see Asian Americans now–not so ethnic specific, but in mixed company with each other. So Ellie has an ex-boyfriend who is Korean and raised in Latin America; there’s a Filipino guy; her best friend is Cambodian American. And they–especially the men–are very suspicious of the police, and understandably so.
But because Ellie is low-ranking, she doesn’t have a totally jaundiced eye yet. She’s working her way into the system and trying to figure out where she fits. She still feels like she can contribute to change it. I’m not quite sure how that’s going to go. That’s going to be the challenge for me as a writer. But again, I don’t want to be didactic, especially when I’m writing a mystery that is set in the present day and has to reflect real-world circumstances.
BH: Maybe we should have a book where Ellie meets Robert and they have a talk about this issue.
NH: Robert’s going to be pretty old. [Laughter] Maybe we can do something like that!
EL: Yeah, put me in jail.
JH: Let’s open this up for audience questions. If anyone has a question they’re dying to ask Ed or Naomi, feel free.
EL: You have to be dying.
NH: That’s the theme of today’s session.
[Laughter]
AUDIENCE Q&A, QUESTION 1: What is the best way to get people who don’t want to talk to you to talk?
EL: Well, if you call them on the phone and they say no, just go to their office. It’s really hard to be mean to someone’s face.
NH: One time, I was writing on a crime story and a guy I talked to asked, “Why are you asking this question?” I said, “I’m curious.” He said, “Curiosity killed the cat.”
EL: I’m not a cat. [Laughs]
NH: Sometimes you have to play a good cop/bad cop. I’ve done that with my nonfiction work. I’ve done some hagiographies and one was on George Aratani. I went with a New Yorker…you know these New Yorkers [Ed laughs]. George Aratani was trained in Japan, and I had studied in Japan, too, so we were sympatico in that respect. But the New Yorker would barge in and say, “I want to see those documents!” And he would say, “No, no…” She would step out and George would say, “What is she doing?!” And I’d say, “Well, you know these New Yorkers…” And that partnership worked well to get information from George. So thank god for New Yorkers.
Question 2: You mentioned airing dirty laundry. My family is Chinese American. When you are talking with the older generations who are hesitant to talk about their past, what do you do? Do you tell them that it needs to be told? Or the shadier aspects of the community–Chinese triads, for example: how do you work around that, and the potential backlash?
NH: I don’t know how many of you have been in that situation where you’re trying to dig out the true stories from our elders. I have the advantage of working at a newspaper and writing these hagiographies, which helped earn peoples’ trust. I did have my share of writing good things about people and their accomplishments, whether that’d be ballroom dancing or awards received–I was there to cover it.
My mother to this day will not admit that she’s read anything of mine. When I was on a panel with an African American writer who said, “My mother reads my work and supports me,” I was thinking that my mom doesn’t say anything like that to me. But she does support me, because I would have the best food at my book parties. That’s how she shows her support. She always asks, “How is your book doing?”
As I mentioned earlier, my debut book took fifteen years. When it was finally coming out, the release became my parents’ worst nightmare. To prepare them, I had taken them to a mystery book convention. And you know these conventions–they are something like 95% white, although things are gradually changing now. Walter Mosley was being honored and I wanted them to see that this is a story that needs to be told. “I’m not airing dirty laundry and weaknesses to your friends,” I tried to tell them. “I’m trying to create a story for a larger audience for them to better understand what people in our community went through.”
I had these cards made that said, “Meet Mas Arai. Japanese American gardener. Atomic bomb survivor. Reluctant sleuth.” My dad saw that and said, “Hey! This is me!” My mother sunk into the hotel bed and said, “What are we going to do?!” [Laughter] And I said, “You know what? You guys will just have to be strong. Be tough.” And they said okay.
Today, there are so many Asian American books out there. Viet Nguyen won the Pulitzer! There’s a lot that you can point to as success stories for telling stories. Back in our day, it was hard to do it. But I think the first thing you have to do is start with yourself and get over the self-censorship. Allow yourself to put it on paper and on your computer, and just let it flow. Put the elders aside and put everything down first and see what you have.
In terms of talking to people about your work: if you just do it once and you get rebuffed and go away, that doesn’t end the conversation. You talk to different people, you give them different books, you show them that this is part of a larger movement, that this is not just me. We are all attempting to do this, all telling different stories that share a thematic similarity.
EL: My mother never told me she read my first book, but she told my sister, “I was never that mean.” [Laughter]
You know, I feel like even though Chinese people can be some of the most tactless, greedy, awful people, there’s something for them about sticking out as an individual that is really frowned upon. You don’t want your individual story out there. Even though in its history China has been an authoritarian society, the great works of literature–Outlaws of the Marsh, Journey to the West, Three Kingdoms–all have these beloved characters who flout the law, get drunk, and fight and everything. I feel like that has been very repressed in Chinese people. My dad is from Taiwan. His family has been there for hundreds of years. They went over when the Ming Dynasty collapsed. And I don’t know if you know this, but in Taiwan there’s this struggle between the people who’ve been there for a long time versus the people who retreated there when the Chinese civil war was lost.
I have this series that’s set in Taipei. When I started writing and doing research about it, I thought that my parents were going to be great resources because my dad’s family had been there all that time and my mom was among one of the contingents who came over from China after the civil war. And they told me nothing. They would refuse to talk about it. It was incredible. I tried to pry information from them and they’d say, “We don’t know anybody who was involved. We never heard anybody who was thrown out of school or anything. Those are complete lies!” So I had to give up on that front, on using my family’s personal history.
When I was in Taiwan, I met this guy online who had been an activist during Taiwan’s martial law era. I wanted to get to know him first and invited him out for coffee, but he kept wanting to go to a bar. He was all about drinking, so I was like oh-kay, I’m a horrible drinker, anyway. So we go to this bar and he introduces me to some people at the bar. And I just mention, “Hey, do you guys know anyone in organized crime?” And he says, “I actually work at a business that’s operated by organized crime. One of my friends is actually fairly high up. He’s coming in tomorrow. You wanna meet him?” And I said, “Uh, okay!” [Laughter]
So I started meeting all these criminals. One guy–I can only meet him after midnight. I remember driving up to this completely dark and abandoned park and all of a sudden twenty, thirty guys come strolling out. And we go over to this nearby McDonald’s, into the lower level, and just sit around and get all these stories from these guys. “These guys that are sitting around in the McDonald’s–they all know me, I know them, they’re all in this life”–and so on. I was like, wow, this is so wild. Because on the face of it, this could be a McDonald’s in Southern California, all these young Asian guys hanging out. But instead this is Taiwan and this is really dangerous.
I guess in the end, if you’re trying to get stories from your own family, those guards are still up. But if it’s someone you don’t know, it’s more open. I can’t help but think about the situation of Taiwan and China, and how China is very big on repatriating Taiwan and saying that it will really help the rejuvenation of the motherland. But really what China is angry about is that Taiwan is even talking about independence. There’s this Chinese thinking that we will be fine as long as we don’t talk about our problems. Which has really hurt the Chinese American communities, I think.
BH: If I ask my parents outright, they won’t want to share. But I found that they really want to correct misinformation. [Laughter] So I’ll say, “So and so told me such and such.” And they’ll say, “No, no, that’s not what happened. What happened was such and such.” The old baiting strategy always works like a charm.
Anyway, I think family members take fictional accounts of what appears to be their lives so personally because we’ve taken what they feel to be unique to them and made it someone else’s? I think there’s an ambivalence of seeing your experiences as unique or part of a common, shared history.
QUESTION #3: I’m interested in the way you made Mas Arai kibei and hibakusha–doubly marginalized in the Japanese American community. The atomic bomb was pretty controversial not just in the U.S., but also within Asian American communities. I am wondering how the genre both helped and deterred that characterization. You said earlier that compared with journalism, this was easier because it was fiction, but detective fiction targets larger audiences and so creates difficulties as well as possibilities…
NH: With Mas being kibei, nisei, hibakusha–that is my father’s story. And so it is a very personal one. Hiroshima is part of both sides of my family. My mother is a native of Hiroshima. I think there are members of your family who give you permission to write about something, and for me it was my grandmother. She lived with us for a year when my brother was born. She’s a very straightforward person, and she took me to the Peace Park and showed me a diorama. She said, “I was there with your uncle, your mother was out in the countryside, your father was right here at the train station.” She said it in such a no-nonsense way that I really felt the weight of it. I was no witness, but I was witness to a witness. And I felt she was giving me some kind of permission to keep the story going. It wasn’t that I felt a responsibility, but more like, “If you want to take this on, go for it.”
I’m also a sucker for the underdog. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in high school killed me. I just loved that play, and before it I knew that you can take an ordinary person and make him a star of a piece of literature. And so keeping the nisei experience to the fact that often their English and Japanese aren’t that refined, I wanted to give them a voice.
A question that was tossed around was: “What were some strange reviews, or the worst reviews, you’ve received?” I did encounter a group of women at one of our mystery conventions and they thought I was a bit disgraceful that I had Mas speak in dialect, that I wasn’t showing him respect. I don’t know if it’s the white gaze thing, but to me it’s my father, who has passed away. If he came back and started speaking in standard English, I’d be like “Who the heck are you?” [Laughter] That’s a part of who he is and it’s not a sign of disrespect. It’s how he communicated. It doesn’t mean he’s not smart. And the fact that a person like this is the star of a series speaks to that.
QUESTION 4: I have a question I’m dying to ask. [Laughter] When you two started writing mysteries, I was curious whether you referenced–Betsy mentioned Todorov–studies of the genre: histories, conventions, structure. Did you use these, or did you draw straight from your readings?
EL: Well, you know, I’ve always liked mysteries a lot–the mystery genre, film noir, as far back as I can remember. One of the cool things that Black Lizard did…Black Lizard was this indie book imprint that Barry Gifford edited. He brought back into print all these people who published in the thirties, forties, fifties. Later the imprint was bought out by Random House. But so many of those books… I don’t even know how I first found them, but I think maybe I saw the cover of TheSeven Slayers by Paul Cain, which was a fantastic collection of these real desperate, Depression-era stories.
When I grew up, my family had this business and we had a crappy hotel on the Jersey Shore, and the most desperate people in the world ended up there–people who lost their house who rented a room at the hotel for seventy dollars a week, with a double hot plate and terrible little fridge that I would often have to repair. It really spoke to me, that desperation. And the authors–these guys get paid a penny a word.
So after I read quite a few of these books, I thought maybe I do need to know some of this theory stuff. I picked up this collection called the Film Noir Reader that I couldn’t wrap my head around, that I couldn’t get into. I must be a terrible student! No, I am a terrible student. [Laughter] So a lot of my stuff is based on the actual work that I’ve read rather than analyses of the genre.
NH: I don’t do well with analysis either. And that’s why…I’ve only taught a few times. I do well with people who are just beginning and they have that editorial person on their shoulder. I’ll teach them to knock it off. Even journalism is so intuitive. It’s by reading and doing.
But I will say this on the Ellie Rush series. The two books were published under this imprint called Berkeley Crime, which does mostly cozy mysteries. Cozy mysteries are like the cat mysteries. There are a lot of culinary mysteries that are extremely popular. Mysteries set in lighthouses. It’s escapism. People escape and imagine that they are living in this idyllic place. I had followed my editor, who was my editor at Random House and had moved over to Penguin for commercial series. I looked at these mysteries…I mean, the Sushi Mysteries? The Origami Mysteries? [Laughter]
To make a long story short, my father had died and I wanted to write something more useful for the time being and Ellie came to be. I thought maybe I’ll try to subvert this whole notion of what is cozy and comfortable. Instead of a village in Maine, I’ll make it downtown L.A., which is geographically a very limited area, but we have the Garden District, the Flower District, Little Tokyo, all these little towns in this area. Instead of a white woman in her thirties or early forties, I’m going to make her young, biracial, and all her friends are going to be immigrants’ kids.
So that was my way of attempting to subvert the cozies.
***
PART TWO
JH: How did you begin writing detective stories? Why the detective genre in particular? Who are some authors you look to for inspiration? Is there a recent standout detective story that made you rethink or reformulate your relationship with the genre? Do you have a writing routine or must-have rituals?
EL: Very early on, I knew that rituals would kinda be my enemy because I had this thing where in order to prepare myself to write I need to have a two-liter bottle of Coke next to me with a bunch of ice, and I need to start at midnight. After a couple of weeks–I know it’s a low bar–meeting all those standards was like, “I can’t write. I don’t have a full bottle of Coke, so I need to go out and get this…” It just felt like different kinds of procrastination. So I purposely tried to break away from rituals. I’ve tried lots of different things. I tried writing on vintage PowerBooks. For word processing, I found that using a PowerBook G4 is great. I’ve installed a solid-state drive on one of them so it’s as up to date as a modern PowerBook. So I do most of my writing on that and save to a USB drive so that I have two copies.
I am against writing every single day for the sake of writing every single day, but with the whole necessity of parenthood and everything, I am writing every single day. Not as long as I like, probably about an hour every day. I used to do sessions of three to four hours at a time a couple times a week. I have an office at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop that I don’t get to often enough. I try to steal away to there as often as I can on weekends.
How did I get interested in the genre? Growing up at that shabby hotel, there were all kinds of shady things going on. I remember this guy who was staying there because apparently he was cheating on his wife. She found out and drove her car in and somehow it turned into a demolition derby. We had a U-shaped driveway and it was crazy. In addition to having family members who were going on hard times, getting thrown out of their house and getting money from the government to stay at our hotel, what really exposed me to this American Dream thing that was promoted and that my parents bought into, too, is that there’s this whole seedy backside to it as well.
Some of my favorite writers…I really like Charles Wolford. He was this guy who really liked the absurdities in life, and I laugh out loud at his books. They’re hilarious. There’s another writer, Norbert Davis, who was an old pulps kinda guy. He reached a point where he was publishing for the Saturday Evening Post, which for pulp writers–that was making it. Somehow things turned bad and he ended up committing suicide. But his stories live on. I’m a big Chester Himes fan. He’s the guy who started writing social-protest novels and later on turned to detection. He put a lot of the social issues for black Americans in these books even though he was writing from France at that point. Fantastic stuff.
NH: I’m so happy that “H-I-M” is right next to “H-I-R.” And not too far is Tony Hillerman, which is in the family.
BH: Hammett is close.
NH: Yes! I do think the newspaper was a seminal influence. When I joined the Rafu Shimpo, I was the only woman there at the time. We didn’t have cubicles. It was an old-fashioned open newsroom. Some guys smoked; I didn’t smoke. I had the filter thing, but it didn’t work. And all these guys would sit around and talk about sports. And I liked sports, but not to that degree. Then it was like, “Ok, Naomi…produce.” Remember when they used to do stories by inches? Write a 9-inch story about this.
My first story was about a woman found dead in a swimming pool, so maybe that foreshadowed things I would be writing about later. So under those circumstances, I knew that I couldn’t wait for the news to hit me. Just produce, do your thing, investigate and write! I think a lot of journalists don’t have a problem with putting words down. Other things–being more subjective or getting the voice of the character in our fiction–that’s sometimes the large hurdle.
I’m flexible, too. I can write anywhere. I can write literally on a napkin. If it’s a boring event, I enter into my stories. I don’t write everyday either. There are times I have, especially with a deadline. I do think that at the end of the book–I don’t know about you, Ed–you do need the heat on pretty high to fuse the book together. I have written a book in drips and drabs, but I find that it reflects in my work. At some point, the heat needs to go pretty high and I can lower it and everything meshes together.
I’m a Himes fan, too. It’s interesting, my education in literature. I was actually an International Relations major and I took some classes on Japanese lit. I think that was seminal. Unfortunately, most of the authors were male Japanese authors. But later, I picked up on these rebellious blue stocking women writers in Japan I found fascinating. There are some important Japanese female mystery writers like Natsuo Kirino and Miyuki Miyabe, but unfortunately their work in English translation is very limited.
EL: The first Japanese novel was written by a woman.
NH: Yes, Tale of Genji? I read that in high school! Did you like that? Did you read it?
EL: I didn’t read it. I will!
NH: There’s a lot of pillowing, lot of concubine stuff.
EL: Oh, okay.
NH: I did go through a lot of the English writers like Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, those English female masters. There’s a lot of stuff in there in terms of character development. I like Agatha Christie, but I’m not a huge fan. I’m fascinated with her background. You know she was a pharmacist, so she knew how to kill people with poisons. That’s a very female way of killing people, versus a gun. I read a lot of Native American literature, too, that wasn’t necessarily crime fiction. But it was interesting to read Tony Hillerman, who is a white man writing about the Rez. I know he’s been criticized off and on. Sherman Alexie was kinda critical of him, but after 9/11 he said he wasn’t going to get tribal and so fundamentalist. But he calls it colonial literature, and he’s cool with it as colonial literature.
EL: How did 9/11 change…
NH: Because he felt that religious fundamentalists did that to the Twin Towers, so he wasn’t going to be so fundamentalist.
EL: Wow. Yet he’s cool with publishing a white dude using as a Chinese woman’s name.
NH: Everybody evolves for the better or for the worse. I just heard him speak about that. I will continue to evolve and I think I’ll have new favorites. But I can’t name you anything at this point.
EL: I was just thinking about Winter in the Blood by James Welch because you mention Native American writing. That is not a mystery by any means, but it encapsulates a lot of things that Robert Chow feels. I didn’t read it until after This is a Bust, but there’s this sense of being in this land that you don’t belong to, yet you’re also from it. The kind of wandering and hallucinative imagery is really haunting.
NH: Steph Cha, another mystery writer and friend, was really influenced by Raymond Chandler, and her work is a response to his work. As she is thirty years old, her age may be a factor because she studied it in high school and instructors are integrating detective fiction in their classes today. That wasn’t the case for myself, so I was less exposed to the mystery canon unless I read it on my own. I do think because we’re around mystery people all the time, so many of my colleagues tell me they like this guy and this guy and this guy…
EL: But never a woman?
NH: Some, but not usually. So I think there are some gender issues involved as well. It’s going to be different as time passes. Maybe people will write more as a response to or refrain from the classic canon. I wasn’t doing that necessarily; it was just the right container for my stories. I wasn’t fixed on the container. This mystery genre was the best way to tell my story.
EL: You know, reading the classic writers, even Hammett, who was obviously much better than Chandler as a person and a writer–I’m not biased–even he had a Chinatown background or background Asian characters. Just reading that, I can’t help but feel that these are the people who–I don’t know if he realizes it, but he’s marginalizing them. They have the stories, you know they are the waiters and the butlers who know you and your habits better than you do yourself. I want Chinatown to be a character in a way.
NH: One thing that has been interesting for me is that–not to say we’re elevated to the Harlem Renaissance, but you read about these time periods where ethnic or people of color writers would come together. And there were rivalries and people would attack each other, but it was some sort of community. It was hard when I first entered the world because when I went to these mystery conventions I was routinely mistaken for the other Asian woman, who was not a writer and was probably 5’9”. It was in Pasadena, where I live, and the woman greeted me with “konnichiwa”.
EL: Do you know that one of the first times I met you people thought we were husband and wife? Based on nothing!
NH: Yes, based on nothing.
I’m a member of Sisters in Crime. When I was in the newsletter, Dale Furutani saw my name and he contacted me. He said if you need a blurb, if you need help in any way, I’ll do it. I said, Whoa. I just really appreciated him reaching out. He was an example that we need to help each other out. Mysteries in some ways seem less competitive than literary writing. We’re not after grants or things like that. And mystery readers are so voracious, so the more the merrier. I saw Steph was coming out with a book, and I reached out to her before her book was out. I was at Book Soup on Sunset Strip the night of the Academy Awards so hardly anyone was there; someone asked for a recommendation, and I said there’s a new writer, Steph Cha.
BH: Now that these writing communities are growing and expanding, and you being from the West Coast and Ed being from New York, I’m wondering from your vantage point if there is a particular sensibility to geography, namely–and loosely–east coast versus west coast. Jinny’s from L.A. and I’m from New York. All the terrains you’re writing about, Ed–I know those streets.
JH: And I know Naomi’s streets.
NH: A literary journal did something on Los Angeles, and one of the things that kept coming up was transportation. I do think transportation is integral to the L.A. novel, to the detection novel, because how are you going to get around to all these places? Ellie was fun because she was trying to get around on this bicycle.
JH: Which is something I’m totally unfamiliar with in L.A.
NH: Right, which is a new development and more reflective of her age, and I’m trying to play with that. I just noticed, it’s not that I’m super into cars, but every vehicle that my sleuths drive is a very personal one. Mas and his old green truck that kinda personifies his American soul. And that was actually a car my father had. I think because vehicles mean freedom for us in L.A. In detection, if you’re going into foreign terrain or even familiar terrain where you don’t know the outcome, it’s nice to have your trusted sidekick, the car.
BH: What does Ellie’s bicycle mean?
NH: She has 2 bicycles. One is the one she has from high school. Ellie’s story is about a loss of innocence and coming of age. She has a nondescript one for work that is not really hers. She has to park it at work.
JH: But she also has the Green Mile, right, which is her old grandfather’s car that was given to her and is very personal to her. She really identifies with it and her friends want her to get rid of it because it’s old and trashy.
NH: I’m not a super car person but I see it as important as an Angeleno.
EL: I say East Coast but I really mean New York City. The whole thing of recognition of the suspect is a lot more personal. In L.A., that’s her car or that’s her license plate. But in New York, you gotta get up close. That’s her face, that’s her jacket. It’s a lot more personal, you know, too close for comfort. When you look at a place like Chinatown, it’s so population-dense in a way L.A. is not. L.A. is so spread out. In New York, you don’t necessarily know the person, but you know where they go and what they get up to because you’re in such close proximity and you interact with the same people at times. This is how people commute in NY. You’ll probably hit the train at the same time every day and you’re riding this train every day with the same people, potentially for years. You don’t know them but you know their faces.
NH: Did you read Girl on a Train by Paula Hawkins?
EL: No.
NH: It’s like a follow up to Gone Girl. It’s about a woman on a train who notices something going on at a regular stop when something different happens. I’m just noticing that there’s a curiosity about someone next to you whom you know nothing about, but you would miss them if they weren’t there.
Mas is going to end with number 7. He goes back to Hiroshima.
JH: Is Mas going to work with Ellie because they meet in Grave on Grand Avenue?
NH: All my characters live in the same fictional world. In Sayonara Slam, Cortez shows up. If you’re a careful reader–I’ve met one so far…she asked if Haruo in my young adult novel is the same as Mas’s best friend. She followed the breadcrumbs! I want to have a purpose for the series. After the second, people were saying, “You need to take Mas over here to Seattle or there or there.” That’s crazy. I can’t just take him to all these places just because the readers want me to. But it’s great that the readers are so invested. I had to take control as a creator and figure out the arc of the series.
BH: Might have fan fiction starting soon.
NH: I would love that!
JH: Do you know how you’re going to end it?
NH: Well, he’s going back to Hiroshima. I received a grant to do some research and I’ll be going to Japan this summer.
EL: Is this an arbitrary decision to end it?
NH: I want to end it at number 7. But haven’t you read any series you thought should have ended earlier?
EL: There’s a series of this Doc character created by this writer Richard Dermody. He’s a pulp writer. I don’t think his stuff has ever been reprinted. After I started reading Norbert Davis, whose stuff has been reprinted, I thought I should read the original Dime Detective issues. This was right before the pulp fiction prices went crazy on eBay. You could still get them for $10-12.
I got the original issues with Norbert Davis stories. I started reading the rest of the stories in the issues. Richard Dermody wrote these hilarious stories about a hustler named Doc who would go into small towns and swindle people out of their money but in the end the Doc would screw up and lose all the money that he made. I’ve been trying to trace that whole trail of Doc stories. I saw that he had written a non-serial story in another magazine in the 40s and I got that. I was so disappointed. It was a Chinatown story. There’s always a Chinatown story with crazy exotic stuff. I feel like he had some outside input on it because some of the Chinese cultural stuff was right, you know? But it was like, I wanted a Doc story but I got the second episode of The BBC’s Sherlock. Ugh.
NH: Hey, speaking of Chinatown. We were talking of the Akashic stories, you know they do all the noir series. Have you ever pitched a Chinatown noir series? EL: No.
NH: What do you think of that? Do it in different Chinatowns and have interesting people write it with insider perspectives.
BH: That’s so interesting. You mean Chinatowns across the U.S.?
NH: Yes. I wanted to pitch a Japantown series, but there are not that many. Three or four in existence in the whole continental U.S.
EL: Actually it’s interesting that we went to that garden yesterday, the Yamato Colony. Do you know about the garden we went to? It’s a Murakami garden but it’s a remnant of this Japanese colony that was started by this guy who promised Japanese men $500 to cultivate the land. At one point, they had like thirty to forty people. But the number of married men never exceeded single men, and the community died away. What’s interesting is that in Florida, they didn’t intern Japanese Americans. They were still free to move around. You needed a letter to visit another town or something but they were never interned. Only the people who were in this colony who moved to the West Coast were interned.
NH: My husband loves the noir series and suggested doing a 9066 noir series. That’s Executive Order 9066.
EL: You mean like the different camps?
NH: That would be interesting!
EL: The Tule Lake Killer!
BH: The Manzanar Murders!
NH: There was a mystery set in Manzanar by a white man, right?
JH: You mean a fictional story?
NH: Yes, a fictional story.
EL: I don’t know about the Chinatown Noir series.
NH: Whaat?
EL: I’d want to read the whole thing and not just vignettes. I want a novel.
NH: There would be a market for it.
JH: I think so, too.
NH: The thing that would be cool is that you would get the people who have preconceived notions about Chinatown, you’d get Hollywood geeks interested, and then you would get actual Asian Americans interested, too.
EL: What Asian American at this point would want that?
BH: You would have to deal with the whole native or cultural informant stuff. But then it’d be great to write with an awareness that there’s a certain group of readers expecting that and to foil those expectations. Like the way Wayne Wang did it in Chan is Missing.
NH: In a way, my Mas series is a stereotype because he’s a gardener. Was it in Chinatown where the Asian gardener finds the spectacles? A part of me was responding to that. In these stories, the gardener doesn’t have a name. I give him one, Mas Arai. A part of it is subverting people’s expectations. I know a gardener! I had a gardener! That’s how they enter into it. Oh, this is a little different.
EL: I started this Taipei series because I did so much research on Chinatown and Asians in America I started looking at my own personal history. I realized I didn’t know much about Taiwan itself, even though I feel like I was living with Taiwan. After martial law was lifted, my father was like, “Taiwan must be free!” He never said this before and for good reason, too, because the KMT had spies everywhere. They would make your relatives in Taiwan suffer if they knew you were agitating for independence. So I wanted to explore this whole Taiwan thing a lot more.
NH: When did you see Chan Is Missing?
EL: This is a funny story. I saw Chan Is Missing in college. Blockbuster didn’t have it. There were a bunch of Asian Americans and we found a place that had a VHS copy of it. We reserved this room, wheeled in the TV, and we were like, “Yeah! We’re going to watch an Asian American film!” And you know like when at the end of the tape there’s a white noise? I woke up and everyone else was asleep. I read the screenplay to it, and I thought it was pretty good. But there was something about it where it was too slow for us young people.
BH: Really? I loved it. Did you like it?
NH: I loved it, too.
EL: It was probably like ’89 when I saw it. Not too long after it was made.
NH: That’s interesting. That’s a conversation, too. Pace and action and expectations.
EL: Wayne Wang is a long-take kinda guy. He’s not like a Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon guy.
BH: He was parodying a lot of those shots in older generation noir films. Some of the shots are really funny because Wood Moy, who plays the detective protagonist, is walking down the street and he does this [sudden turn of the head to look behind him, straight into the camera] thing. When I teach the film, my students are like, “That’s so stupid!” when they see those shots. But it’s parodic and intentional!
JH: They didn’t see the original films though.
EL: You know what was an influence on me, definitely, is I read one of Chester Himes’s biographies when he was writing these social protest novels and they had gone nowhere. Then he was in France and a publisher asked him to write a mystery series and he said make it like a movie. Make something happen on every page. Wow, that’s great. I think something should happen. Whether subtle or not, something should happen.
One of 6 pieces in Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health, the “Treated Pamphlet on Postpartum Depression” is a reworking of official PPD info-literature, a work of redaction, erasure, and annotation by four Asian American PPD survivors. If official pamphlets are well meaning, limited, and sterile, this pamphlet centers lived experience and licenses mothers as authorities on their own well-being. It demands an accounting of race and reframes PPD in terms of the dire lack of support structures for mothers.
By Audrey Wu Clark, Sharline Chiang, Pooja Makhijani & Mimi Khúc. Download a reading copy here. Download a hi-res print-ready copy here.
Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American MentalHealth is AALR’s most ambitious project yet, and we’re so grateful for the support from the community: so many supported our Kickstarter campaign last summer to raise funds for the issue. This project wouldn’t be possible without their generosity and investment in our collective wellness.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Rather than trying to recalibrate our existing mental health resources to better engage race and Asian American experience, we decided to start on the opposite end, with what wellness, unwellness, and care actually look like in Asian American life. With the help of an amazing group of writers and artists, scholars and teachers, practitioners and survivors (see below for a full listing of contributors), we’ve created a work of book art that decolonizes mental health and opens up a wealth of new approaches. Our existing approaches not only aren’t enough–they’re part of the problem, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes openly conducting white supremicist, heteronormative, misogynist, and ableist violence against the very people for whom they claim to provide care.
Guest-edited by Mimi Khuc, with guest curation by Eliza Noh, erin Khue Ninh, Tamara Ho, and Long Bui, this special issue works to reimagine what counts as unwellness and wellness in our communities through a dynamic mix of writing, visual art, and interactive mini-projects. It includes:
a deck of tarot cards— featuring original art and text that work to reveal the hidden contours of our Asian American emotional,
psychic, and spiritual lives;
a foldout testimonial tapestry— a collectively woven tapestry of written and visual testimonials, a process-oriented art piece that reimagines community care & healing.
a “hacked” mock DSM: Asian American Edition— a new catalog of “definitions”/reflections, with alternate understandings of un/wellness and critiques of Psychology as field, discourse, and industry,
featuring fiction and essays on neuro-diversity and race; a queer mixed race WOC self-care package; a play excerpt examining conceptions of mental illness as demonic possession in Lao communities; and poetry on the lasting psychic rupture of Partition, among many other pieces.
a “treated” pamphlet on postpartum depression— a redaction/erasure/annotation of existing postpartum depression info-literature that centers lived mother of color experience;
a stack of daughter-to-mother letters— handwritten letters that rethink intergenerational intimacies
and violences, Asian American daughterhood and motherhood.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Buy the full issue or just the deck of tarot cards (the issue includes a deck) above. For bulk orders and course adoption, please email us at editors@aalrmag.org.
We are very happy to be able to donate a limited number of copies of the issue to places of need. If your organization would like to request copies, please fill out this form.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
TEACHING PROGRAM
Open in Emergency forms the core of a teaching program that will virtually connect university classrooms across the country to teach and learn together about Asian American mental health. You teach the special issue, and we’ll provide dynamic resources and opportunities for interaction with other classrooms. The program’s primary platform will be a closed Facebook group featuring:
a series of “digital extras,” videos by editors, curators, and contributors;
a shared curriculum of activities and projects building from the issue;
a resource mini-bank with student-to-student workshop plans and additional readings; and
interactive virtual spaces designed to put students in conversation with one another.
We’ll also help seed one-on-one video conferencing between classes for those interested. The goal is a national conversation that builds academic community, a dialogue among students and teachers across the country that challenges and grows our understandings of mental health.
HOW IT CAN WORK FOR MY CLASSROOM
Because of its cross-disciplinary approaches, the issue is a fit for a range of courses: Intro to Asian American studies, Asian American literature, Asian American psychology, Asian American art and visual cultures, Asian American sexualities, Women and Gender studies, Queer studies, disabilities studies, race and health.
To accommodate a wide variety of schedules and class needs, we’re making the commitment open-ended: we’ll have the program live throughout the spring of 2017, from January through May, with curricular materials and exchange possibilities available throughout—but your class can participate for anywhere from a week to the entire academic term.
PARTICIPATING CLASSROOMS
10 professors at 9 universities have already pledged to participate, and we expect many more as the program develops: Eliza Noh, California State University Fullerton • erin Khuê Ninh, University of California Santa Barbara • Tamara Ho, University of California Riverside • Long Bui, Wesleyan University • Mimi Khúc, University of Maryland • Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, University of Maryland • Lynn Itagaki, the Ohio State University • Christine Kitano, Ithaca College • Karen Kuo, Arizona State University • Cynthia Wu, University of Buffalo SUNY
SPECIAL ISSUE/TEACHING PROGRAM SPONSORS
If you believe as we do in the importance of reimagining Asian American mental health, please consider supporting this project’s development by serving as an official sponsor. Your contribution can fund general issue production, featured work by particular artists and writers, or distribution of copies to underresourced spaces of need—libraries, community centers, counseling centers.
Our sponsorship levels as are follows:
$250 Friend
$500 Patron
$1,000 Benefactor
All sponsors will be prominently recognized in the issue and on the teaching program website. Please inquire at editors@aalrmag.org for more details about sponsor recognition, advertising opportunities, the teaching program, or other possible avenues of support.
Open in Emergency Contributors
Melba Abela aka ma • Anida Yoeu Ali • Raven Anand • Ryka Aoki • Vimi Bajaj • Lydia X.Z. Brown (Autistic Hoya) • Long Bui • Anne Canute • Wo Chan • Yoonmee Chang • Camille Chew • Sharline Chiang • Learkana Chong • Lia Chaudhary • Seo-Young Chu • Audrey Wu Clark • Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis • Jigna Desai • Mai C. Doan • Jennifer Kwon Dobbs • Aileen Alfonso Duldulao, MSW, PhD • Tarfia Faizullah • Michi Fu • Aiko Fukuchi • Rajani Gudlavalleti • Chenxing Han • Johanna Hedva • Jennifer Ho • Linh Huỳnh • Tanwi Nandini Islam • Deepa Iyer • Shana Bulhan Haydock • Sine Hwang Jensen • Priya Jha • Simi Kang • Bhanu Kapil • Imneet Kaur • Nina Kaur • Judy Kawamoto • Mary Keovisai • Mehtab Kaur Khalsa • Mimi Khúc • Susan Kikuchi • David Kyuman Kim • Joy Kogawa • Deidre Kogawa-Canute • lê thị diễm thúy • Amy Grace Lam • Esther Lee • James Kyung-Jin Lee • Peggy Lee • Sueyeun Juliette Lee • Molly Liu • Patty Liu • Gerald Maa • Pooja Makhijani • Rajiv Mohabir • Mai Neng Moua • David Mura • Karen Nagano • Aimee Nezhukumatathil • Konrad Ng • Mimi Thi Nguyen • erin Khuê Ninh • Eliza Noh • Sophanarith Nok • Genevieve Erin O’Brien • Monica Ramos • Monica Ong Reed • Paisley Rekdal • Margaret Rhee • Shawna Yang Ryan • Koji Steven Sakai • Matthew Salesses • Shizue Seigel • Sejal Shah • Chad Shomura • Maya Soetoro-Ng • Brandon Som • Sharon Suh • Raymond Tan • Ryann Tanap • Kai Cheng Thom • Tiffany • Emily Wu Truong • Laura Uba • Julie Thi Underhill • Tara Villalba • Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay • Kristina Wong • Cynthia Wu • Karen Tei Yamashita • Kit Yan • Kathleen S. Yep • Claire Zhuang
Open in Emergency Sponsors
University of Maryland Asian American Studies Program • Institute for Asia and Asian Diasporas at Binghamton University of the State University of New York • The Ohio State University Asian American Studies • Arizona State University Asian Pacific American Studies Program • Asian American Student Union (AASU), University of Maryland • Celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Womxn (CAAPIW) • University of California, Irvine Department of Asian American Studies • University of California, Berkeley Program in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies • Shift MN, a program of Rainbow Health Initiative • University of Connecticut Asian and Asian American Studies Institute • Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU • UMass Lowell Center for Asian American Studies • Kundiman • Department of English, Clark University • Betsy Huang • National Asian Pacific Americans Families Against Substance Abuse (NAPAFASA) • English Department, Mt. Holyoke • CSU Fullerton Asian American Studies Program • University of Pennsylvania Asian American Studies Program • Vietnamese American NGO Network • University of Minnesota Asian American Studies • Ethnics Studies, University of the Pacific • Friends DO Make a Difference • Roxane Gay • Kimchee Mamas • Department of English at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) • Asian Arts Initiative • University of Michigan Critical Ethnic & APIA Studies Graduate Student Group • Amherst College American Studies Department • QTPoC Mental Health • Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) Cultural Resource Center at UPenn • Asian American Studies Program, Hunter College, CUNY
Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American MentalHealth is AALR’s most ambitious project yet, and we’re so grateful for the support from the community: so many supported our Kickstarter campaign last summer to raise funds for the issue. This project wouldn’t be possible without their generosity and investment in our collective wellness.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Rather than trying to recalibrate our existing mental health resources to better engage race and Asian American experience, we decided to start on the opposite end, with what wellness, unwellness, and care actually look like in Asian American life. With the help of an amazing group of writers and artists, scholars and teachers, practitioners and survivors (see below for a full listing of contributors), we’ve created a work of book art that decolonizes mental health and opens up a wealth of new approaches. Our existing approaches not only aren’t enough–they’re part of the problem, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes openly conducting white supremicist, heteronormative, misogynist, and ableist violence against the very people for whom they claim to provide care.
Guest-edited by Mimi Khuc, with guest curation by Eliza Noh, erin Khue Ninh, Tamara Ho, and Long Bui, this special issue works to reimagine what counts as unwellness and wellness in our communities through a dynamic mix of writing, visual art, and interactive mini-projects. This special price includes:
a deck of tarot cards— featuring original art and text that work to reveal the hidden contours of our Asian American emotional,
psychic, and spiritual lives;
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Buy the tarot deck above. For bulk orders and course adoption, please email us at editors@aalrmag.org.
We are very happy to be able to donate a limited number of copies of the issue to places of need. If your organization would like to request copies, please fill out this form.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
TEACHING PROGRAM
Open in Emergency forms the core of a teaching program that will virtually connect university classrooms across the country to teach and learn together about Asian American mental health. You teach the special issue, and we’ll provide dynamic resources and opportunities for interaction with other classrooms. The program’s primary platform will be a closed Facebook group featuring:
a series of “digital extras,” videos by editors, curators, and contributors;
a shared curriculum of activities and projects building from the issue;
a resource mini-bank with student-to-student workshop plans and additional readings; and
interactive virtual spaces designed to put students in conversation with one another.
We’ll also help seed one-on-one video conferencing between classes for those interested. The goal is a national conversation that builds academic community, a dialogue among students and teachers across the country that challenges and grows our understandings of mental health.
HOW IT CAN WORK FOR MY CLASSROOM
Because of its cross-disciplinary approaches, the issue is a fit for a range of courses: Intro to Asian American studies, Asian American literature, Asian American psychology, Asian American art and visual cultures, Asian American sexualities, Women and Gender studies, Queer studies, disabilities studies, race and health.
To accommodate a wide variety of schedules and class needs, we’re making the commitment open-ended: we’ll have the program live throughout the spring of 2017, from January through May, with curricular materials and exchange possibilities available throughout—but your class can participate for anywhere from a week to the entire academic term.
PARTICIPATING CLASSROOMS
10 professors at 9 universities have already pledged to participate, and we expect many more as the program develops: Eliza Noh, California State University Fullerton • erin Khuê Ninh, University of California Santa Barbara • Tamara Ho, University of California Riverside • Long Bui, Wesleyan University • Mimi Khúc, University of Maryland • Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, University of Maryland • Lynn Itagaki, the Ohio State University • Christine Kitano, Ithaca College • Karen Kuo, Arizona State University • Cynthia Wu, University of Buffalo SUNY
SPECIAL ISSUE/TEACHING PROGRAM SPONSORS
If you believe as we do in the importance of reimagining Asian American mental health, please consider supporting this project’s development by serving as an official sponsor. Your contribution can fund general issue production, featured work by particular artists and writers, or distribution of copies to underresourced spaces of need—libraries, community centers, counseling centers.
Our sponsorship levels as are follows:
$250 Friend
$500 Patron
$1,000 Benefactor
All sponsors will be prominently recognized in the issue and on the teaching program website. Please inquire at editors@aalrmag.org for more details about sponsor recognition, advertising opportunities, the teaching program, or other possible avenues of support.
Open in Emergency Contributors
Melba Abela aka ma • Anida Yoeu Ali • Raven Anand • Ryka Aoki • Vimi Bajaj • Lydia X.Z. Brown (Autistic Hoya) • Long Bui • Anne Canute • Wo Chan • Yoonmee Chang • Camille Chew • Sharline Chiang • Learkana Chong • Lia Chaudhary • Seo-Young Chu • Audrey Wu Clark • Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis • Jigna Desai • Mai C. Doan • Jennifer Kwon Dobbs • Aileen Alfonso Duldulao, MSW, PhD • Tarfia Faizullah • Michi Fu • Aiko Fukuchi • Rajani Gudlavalleti • Chenxing Han • Johanna Hedva • Jennifer Ho • Linh Huỳnh • Tanwi Nandini Islam • Deepa Iyer • Shana Bulhan Haydock • Sine Hwang Jensen • Priya Jha • Simi Kang • Bhanu Kapil • Imneet Kaur • Nina Kaur • Judy Kawamoto • Mary Keovisai • Mehtab Kaur Khalsa • Mimi Khúc • Susan Kikuchi • David Kyuman Kim • Joy Kogawa • Deidre Kogawa-Canute • lê thị diễm thúy • Amy Grace Lam • Esther Lee • James Kyung-Jin Lee • Peggy Lee • Sueyeun Juliette Lee • Molly Liu • Patty Liu • Gerald Maa • Pooja Makhijani • Rajiv Mohabir • Mai Neng Moua • David Mura • Karen Nagano • Aimee Nezhukumatathil • Konrad Ng • Mimi Thi Nguyen • erin Khuê Ninh • Eliza Noh • Sophanarith Nok • Genevieve Erin O’Brien • Monica Ramos • Monica Ong Reed • Paisley Rekdal • Margaret Rhee • Shawna Yang Ryan • Koji Steven Sakai • Matthew Salesses • Shizue Seigel • Sejal Shah • Chad Shomura • Maya Soetoro-Ng • Brandon Som • Sharon Suh • Raymond Tan • Ryann Tanap • Kai Cheng Thom • Tiffany • Emily Wu Truong • Laura Uba • Julie Thi Underhill • Tara Villalba • Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay • Kristina Wong • Cynthia Wu • Karen Tei Yamashita • Kit Yan • Kathleen S. Yep • Claire Zhuang
Open in Emergency Sponsors
University of Maryland Asian American Studies Program • Institute for Asia and Asian Diasporas at Binghamton University of the State University of New York • The Ohio State University Asian American Studies • Arizona State University Asian Pacific American Studies Program • Asian American Student Union (AASU), University of Maryland • Celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Womxn (CAAPIW) • University of California, Irvine Department of Asian American Studies • University of California, Berkeley Program in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies • Shift MN, a program of Rainbow Health Initiative • University of Connecticut Asian and Asian American Studies Institute • Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU • UMass Lowell Center for Asian American Studies • Kundiman • Department of English, Clark University • Betsy Huang • National Asian Pacific Americans Families Against Substance Abuse (NAPAFASA) • English Department, Mt. Holyoke • CSU Fullerton Asian American Studies Program • University of Pennsylvania Asian American Studies Program • Vietnamese American NGO Network • University of Minnesota Asian American Studies • Ethnics Studies, University of the Pacific • Friends DO Make a Difference • Roxane Gay • Kimchee Mamas • Department of English at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) • Asian Arts Initiative • University of Michigan Critical Ethnic & APIA Studies Graduate Student Group • Amherst College American Studies Department • QTPoC Mental Health • Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) Cultural Resource Center at UPenn • Asian American Studies Program, Hunter College, CUNY
On November 16, 2016, I talked with poet Kay Ulanday Barrett about their book When the Chant Comes: Poems 2003-2016 (Topside Press, 2016). Kay or K. aka @brownroundboi self-identifies as navigating the world as a “disabled pin@yamerikan transgender queer.” Conducted just days after the 2016 Presidential election and in the wake of the summer 2016 Pulse night club shooting, this
interview was motivated by a spirit of resistance to the current political moment. As Kay shares in our interview, When the Chant Comes is a “book of transitions” and creates an ancestral archive of “coming of age as a disabled, queer trans mixed race person of color.” Little did we know at the time just how many transitions we would face in the coming year, and Kay’s poetry demands a legacy for SD QTPOC (sick disabled queer trans people of color) and offers all of us a road map for defiant joy
and unruly resilience in the face of devastation.
*
Laura Kina: The poems in When the Chant Comes span thirteen years of your life, flickering between resistance, rage, and resilience. Can you take us into this process—this journey?
Kay Ulanday Barrett: The title of When the Chant Comes is really important to
me as it stems from chosen fam to chosen fam, friend to friend—interaction between me and my friend Andre. We both went to DePaul together. We both went to undergrad together. We were young, tiny, queer people raised together. I thought it encapsulated what I needed for the book. The full thirteen years of my life—really some of that was written when I was just hitting my early twenties.
This book is in so many parts for myself. It’s broken up per section with death, sickness, love, and soul. This book is where I came of age as a queer person, as a trans person. This is when I first started doing work with women of color—specifically Filipina and APIA women and trans and queer people. This book is very much to me a dilapidated mapping of what it was to be a queer trans person of color who was kicked out and homeless, went to school, and collaborated with a bunch of people. What it tries to do, what it aims to do, is really just look at the full scope of what
QTPOC adulthood is.
It landmarks before my mom’s death, after my mom’s death, being able bodied, and then being disabled. There are a lot of transitions. This book in itself is a book of transitions. Not just in the most typical transgender journey of female to male in its most binary sense, but I feel and I hope that it grapples with the strangeness and oddities of everyday pieces of being—what it’s like to be mixed race, brown, and trans, the child of a migrant, fluctuating between poverty and upward mobility.
I haven’t read very many books trying to have a broader discussion of how all those pieces operate as a whole. I remember being younger, performing queer poetry, and a lot of what I was hearing being white and cis, and me thinking, “Wow, there are parts of this I can take with me and there are parts I’m still really thirsty for.” During that thirteen years, people are actually growing with me through my fumbles, through my mistakes and my own internalized misogyny, through my struggling through poverty and financial privilege, struggling with being able bodied and not.
I wanted the book to be ancestral. I wanted it to lay a groundwork for trans people of color, queer people of color, who may not have family of origin, to really try to call to the family of origin that may or may not support you, whether they are dead or alive. A lot of my dialogues are around coping with death—coping with death as a young queer person of color. I don’t think there are manuals for when a parent dies, or when a grandparent dies, or when a friend dies in the queer trans people of color community. I think we have a lot of visuals, which are important, and days of
remembrance, but I don’t think we have enough models for when—which is often for queer trans people of color—for when your friends, your lovers, your comrades commit suicide. What does that feel like? What is it like to be excommunicated from your family but still be a caretaker for somebody who has passed away?
This book is not linear. This book isn’t saying this is what the trans experience is, but this book is saying, “here’s some things that are really strangely being uncovered, let’s try to use poetic technical devices to encapsulate that experience within under one hundred pages. Go.” Hopefully every poem has some form of a chant that I’m calling, whether it’s of hopelessness, of needing support, of feeling loneliness, of feeling like you don’t fit—whether it’s in gender binaries or with your family.
LK: “If your family is forced here” opens the book, and poems to your family members are woven throughout. I was really struck by “Uncertain” and how prescient and pertinent it is to our current political moment. You set up personal and institutional contrasts between you and your “beaming activist,” college-educated queer friends and your mom—who was working class and an immigrant from the Philippines. Can you talk about your mom in terms of, as you state in your poem, knowing only two places, “work and home,” and how she told you “report cards were methods of survival”?
KUB: I was raised to understand the bootstraps that are within the American Dream, that thick space that is survival, survival, survival. It’s a weird space. Here I am, with a single-parent mom, and she is the most scary-frightening, most powerful being that I have ever reckoned with as a child to an adult, and she is deeply affected—the word “oppressed” is such a minimal word—deeply impacted by this system. Growing up with a person who could feed you, take care of you, work miracles in a super-white, super-straight, cis, skinny, white-womanhood American place. And here my mom was, and not to speak of her in isolation—I’m not the only kid who had a brown mama who worked her ass off to make sure her kid had something that she didn’t have—but what a curse the United States imposes on people of color and migrants of color to create this dynamic. My mother and I were always in tension, and this tension was always grounded in U.S. colonialism. It’s a
deep love-hate relationship.
What’s really beautiful and exquisite but also super fragile there is that…just cuz I went to college doesn’t make me better, you know? Because I was in the right place at the right time, had the right resources, I worked hard enough, this right niche in time, I was able to ascend in a way where my mom worked her whole life and couldn’t ascend. That burden that comes to both of us truly hit her as a working-class mom—of course that’s what she wants for her child. Though I’m sure from what I experienced and what I heard from her, it was super heartbreaking. So to carry that persistent heartbreak that happens from institutional, constant institutional ache— fat brown women who are working-class domestic workers are told that they are not something to be proud of, are not celebrated in this country. But your responsibility is to raise a “citizen” or somebody who can assimilate into the same system that is holding you down. That’s beyond cumbersome.
My family didn’t choose to be here. They tried to assimilate. They tried to do their best to survive. They equipped me with as many resources and educational opportunities as they could as brown people. I grew up political as a child. My mother always made sure we were with other Filipin@ folks and that we spoke her languages—not just Tagalog but the languages where my family is from. I think there is something to say about that again where you are institutionally told that white is right—when that’s just poured down your throat, right, there has to be a way where those parents teach their children to really navigate that.
My mom was like, “I know school sucks but you have to do well. That report card, unfortunately, is going to get you to places that I can’t get you to.” She would give me a real talk at age twelve like, “You don’t have the space to fuck up. You are not white. We didn’t come from money. You are a girl.” At the time I was assigned female at birth. “You are a woman. This world hates women, moreover brown women, so you just have to work harder.” I know those things she instilled in me are still lessons that I embrace enough to feel plagued by.
How do we buy into this system? How do we connect to this system? How do we disassociate from it? How do we resist it? My mother had so many tools that she used every day—she used those multiple strategies simultaneously. To try to encapsulate that in poem 1) is really difficult and 2) to try to capture that on page is tricky. I can perform it. I’ve created an embodied way to develop characters and to develop my mom throughout my poetry, but to capture it on page was a deep
challenge.
I think there are ways that that specific poem “Uncertain” just feels like it connects with how people are displaced from their countries, how the U.S. and war have impacted our parent’s homelands, our own homeland, and those residual effects that are on us. Growing up, I knew what martial law was. Growing up, I knew what a dictator was. I don’t think a lot of young white Americans who are from anywhere from third to eighth grade know those words.
LK: Yet. Sadly, yet.
KUB: Now, right! Even with the Bush regimes, I was thinking about the Bush regimes—there were children who grew up with the wars in Iraq, just grew up with that as every day. But again being in the belly of the beast, it’s different. Whereas with my mom—people had to leave the Philippines. There was always an urgency. You have to take care of family in the Philippines. My upbringing, though I am not of the Philippines—I was born here, there was always this etched in responsibility.
LK: When the Chant Comes is a familiar Asian American story of immigration, diaspora, assimilation, and alienation that explores your position as a 2nd generation “pilipinx/pin@y,” but it’s the “x” and “@” that resist normalization. How do you say “pin@y”?
KUB: I say “pilipinx/pin@y”—the “@” symbol resonates with me a lot because “pinoy” and “pinay,” to me…
LK: …are gendered terms.
KUB: Yah. “Pin@y” is non-gendered or a-gendered or represents all the genders. “Pilipinx” is a newer term.
LK: Like “Latinx.”
KUB: Exactly. We’ve come in that wave of using that term as a more queered and GNC [gender non-conforming] term. Now would I ascribe that term to folks back in the Philippines or other places abroad? Probably not. That would be assumptive.
LK: It’s a very English-language term.
KUB: Yah, and it does push back. I am not pinay. I am not binary-gendered pinay. I do not fit in the scaffold of what those scripts are. I just don’t. So there has to be another term to call myself, to call my peers, my fam in ways that resonate with us. I think that’s what the carving of language does. That’s what artists do. We try to find resilient ways—pockets where we can still feel alive, where we still feel like we are not as encumbered. People say language is just a joke, but it’s not. Sometimes we need it to hash out what fits and what doesn’t. When people say, “Oh yeah, Pinay is organizing for justice”—I’m not a cis woman. Some of those terms just don’t apply to me. So that’s where that language takes place.
LK: Earlier you were saying that this book is about “people growing with you,” and you talked about your friend Andre. Can you take us into the world of “Rhythm is a dancer” and your pop and lock, uprock, b-boying teenage years growing up on the Northside of Chicago in Logan Square? “Rhythm is a dancer” is so nostalgic and celebratory.
KUB: That poem was written ten years before Pulse Orlando. Somebody pointed that out in another review, that to them it feels like a psalm. It was a reminder about how cultural spaces, particularly for queer trans people of color, cultural spaces are a vital necessity. How do we create? My mom knew what colonization was before people taught me that word; I knew what queer antagonism or queer phobia was before I knew those words were even common vernacular.
My friend Andre, and a lot of people I grew up with, who also still now live in Chicago and organize in Chicago in QTPOC spaces, used to go to this club called The Royal. It was spelled “THE ROYAL,” but we called it the “ROY + AL—I have no idea why, but I guess it was to give it more zing. A lot of us were under twenty-one so it was an under-twenty-one club, and it was mostly POC, and they played freestyle music, hip-hop, bachata, merengue—they played everything that was possibly brown or black.
I swear going to school, there’s something about being raised working class and poor and then going to a school that is highly affluent, where code-switching becomes desensitized…growing up, I just really needed a break from that shit. And to do that, the cultural spaces like this club really enabled me to be my whole self. I didn’t need any words. I could really socialize with queer and trans people of color and discover myself. For right or wrong. For sloppy or beautiful. We had a place where we could be ourselves whether conservative schools or conservative parents or conservative systems we were surviving could hold us; those structures were always precarious. But going to a dance club and seeing yourself reflected in other young people—not being told holding another girl’s hand is wrong, not being told that wearing clothes that people feel are opposite of your assigned gender is wrong—is completely revelatory.
I can’t say enough…the loss of art in QTPOC space is basically the loss of historical archives and the loss of safe spaces.
LK: This poem is an archive. A living archive.
KUB: Exactly. I want my friends now who are in their mid-thirties, hitting our forties, to remember this is where we developed our cultural resistance. Maybe there weren’t placards there, but we knew how to take care of each other. How to dance. How to bring joy. During that time—that’s during the Bush regime. I remember the fear of the Bush regime. I remember going to protests on Lake Shore Drive and how if you don’t have art—whether that’s a dance space, a visual art space, a poetry space,
I don’t care if it’s like pottery, whatever it is—by your people and for your people, the odds of us surviving felt pretty limited. “Rhythm is a Dancer” states: “before the well-intentioned missionaries, before the rich studied our rhythms,” all of that stuff is compounded and causing so much pain and institutional pain—I want to say psychic pain, mental pain, physical pain—you need places to go. “Rhythm is a Dancer” is that place where in every city there are some queer and trans youth of color who are hella broke but they have places to go where they can juke and dance. “Rhythm is a Dancer”—that was my place as a young person, literally seventeen to twenty-one. We were out clubbing a lot! I don’t know if you knew that about some of your students, Laura?
LK: Oh, nooo…[sarcastically]
KUB: Working all the jobs, going to all classes, and going to all the clubs to balance that painful deficit that happens in classrooms of whiteness or in the streets of straightness. The places that “Rhythm is a Dancer” tries to embody are the places that I feel remind me that there is joy, that remind me that queer and trans people of color socialization is an exclusive and necessary act of resilience.
LK: I want to stay back in the past. When I first met you, it was after 9/11 and we were both part of the Asian American Artist Collective-Chicago. I was part of a group called Project A under the Collective and you were a member of the Collective’s Mango Tribe. I know you came up through the spoken word scene in Chicago. You’ve talked about not being formally trained in poetry. I still see that spoken word, Chicago style in your work. Reading this book, I could hear it and I could see it on the page too. Can you talk about that mix of genres of spoken vs. composed for the page, particularly in “YOU are SO Brave”? It’s so hilarious, pissed-off, and painful all at once. The way it looks on the page is fascinating. It’s performance on the page.
KUB: Thank you for that. That poem, I had a round of editors…it’s interesting— some people adored it and other people were just like, “trash it.” I had one particular editor who was like, “I don’t see the point in it.” I was like, “Wow!” I was befuddled. First of all, it’s from a very specific embodied location. When you build anything from scratch…I’m coming from the positionalty of poverty. I’m a poor person. I’m a person of color. I’m a childhood migrant. I build things from scratch. That is what I do. That is no different in my poetry. If I am not taught, I will find a way. What better than specifically with “YOU are SO Brave.” The connotation of sarcasm is so sharp—what better to do than to take exactly what people say to me, my peers, things people say in medical offices and at the SSDI [social security disability insurance] offices and exams, workers comp exams, take it and put it on its head; just lay it flat out for the whole world to see. This cento showcases the combination of harmful phrases said to us in one whole day. Could you imagine? It’s very hard to read. I am making the audience work.
LK: I had to hear you in my head in order to be able to read it.
KUB: Precisely. So we are shifting inflection, causing accidental indentation. We are going from lowercase to uppercase. We are going out from first person narrative to exact quotation. In that, I want my audience to work. Cuz if they feel just slightly entertained or slightly in pain or slightly exhausted from that work, then they can get just one millisecond of what it’s like to be a sick and disabled queer and trans person of color.
When I’m thinking about my lineage—my poetry lineage—as you know, the 90s and early 2000s, I feel like that was a spoken word and slam renaissance. Young Chicago Authors had just started Louder Than a Bomb in the early 2000s. I worked with Young Chicago Authors, I was with Mango Tribe, and Women Out Loud. I was cultivated by mostly queer women of color and women of color; some were educated in poetry and others were not, some went to residencies and some did not. I
got to workshop with them and draw from our mixed APIA and women of color and queer experiences.
During that time too in Chicago, it’s like super slam, super hip-hop. Hip-hop was so hyped with young people and people of color. What was missing—queer and transgender non-conforming people weren’t allowed in the fold. So we had to create ourselves in different places. There was an acceptance of white straight people in hip-hop, but a deep lack of gender non-conforming and trans people of color. Now, there are a few trans men of color, black bois, trans brown women in a cipher battling anybody. That was not always, in my experience, welcomed. If anything, it was met with discouragement and erasure.
I sought some form of queerness through Mango Tribe. Not all the members were queer, but you know, there was less struggle. I could talk to folks about my pronouns and we could get it together. My poetry was always welcomed. I worked within big cultural groups. There was always this interconnected network of Asian Pacific Islander women and women of color and queer and trans folks. Within that patchwork, I was raised to be at a mic. I learned my basic mechanics from sound
management from being in a sound booth, to being a stage manager, to coaching poetry slams, to directing plays, directing young people in theater production. Chicago raised me in my arts background from the ground up.
LK: Hoot! Hoot!
KUB: There’s nothing…even when I’m on the East Coast—I said this to another person who works in Boston who was raised by the Midwestern spoken word and poetry scene: Chicago is both literary and spoken. For me it was entirely cohesive in the arts process. If you went to a writing workshop, you would then later go to a protest where that same facilitator would be there. And then you would go to a slam or open mic, and sneak in if you were under age, and they would be performing.
During that time, I felt like cultural workers and poets weren’t just literary poets or onstage slam poets, but they worked on the mechanics of the page and the stage and also in political protest. It wasn’t like, “I’m just going to teach poetry to these young people and call that political.” It was like, “No, now we are going to do political organizing.” People like Lani Montreal and Sharmili Majmudar—those are queer women of color who raised me. Anida Yoeu Ali, who is a cis straight
Cambodian Muslim woman, who raised me and taught me theater mechanics. If you name any of those three people, I would never consider them “arm chair revolutionaries.” Those people are the down and the brown. I wasn’t raised by people who were just satisfied with poetry in the classroom or just thought the mic was enough.
My perpetual goal in any adult writing career is to engage that cohesion. I would have gotten that nowhere else. I firmly believe, having travelled nationally, and this could just be my Midwest best 773 pride, but I sincerely feel like Chicago during that time really laid a foundation for me.
LK: I see you still have a Chicago phone number too!
KUB: Yup! Not ‘gonna change.
LK: “Crip Sick Tankas: A Performance Series” is similar to “YOU are SO Brave” in that it’s highlighting disability. Is this one you would also perform? Is it written for the stage or page?
KUB: I think they are for both. They are read in a way that is everyday conversation. For me, the poems are good individually, they are also for the wingspan of someone who is sick, disabled, and queer (“SDQ” is a term coined by Billie Rain). So if you are low-spirited and down without energy, with those poems—you read one and you good.
LK: It’s like a little haiku.
KUB: It’s an extended haiku. It is actually the form of a tanka, also Japanese. It has a 5-7-5-7-7 scheme with two lines extra. I wanted to play with a very tight form and be adamant with those restrictions to demonstrate the restrictions that enable a sick, disabled, queer person on their everyday and how things sometimes come in spurts. There is humor in the sickness—when I go from “sdq love” to “ex-partnership” and then talking about my dogs and breakfast—
LK: —and “Netflix.”
KUB: Yeah, as somebody who has acquired a disability and has multiple disabilities and chronic pain, it’s an isolating life. It’s “you soon to be forgotten,” especially that poem “when your body outgrows your friends.” People forget you. We are in an age of social media, instant gratification, constant Facebook updates, and so if you are not plugged in in a particular way that is extroverted and social and public—especially in queer space—I think you become forgotten.
You don’t have energy because you are talking to doctors about reinforcing your pronouns or telling them exactly how your body feels. You’re trying to explain to your friends who are able-bodied who never felt pain. You’re literally speaking multiple languages. I tried to express to a person, “Why am I so exhausted?” and they had just acquired their disabilities, and they said, “You talk to the rheumatologist, you talk to your x-ray person, your MRI person, and none of them get your gender, right? They are probably anti-black, if you are a black person. And then you’re talking to your friends who are used to going out clubbing and used to hanging out and socializing in a particular way, and you are unable to do that anymore.” So you are traversing multiple languages just trying to prove what is happening is real. I find that to be so exhausting.
And then when you are trying to love somebody and then when you are having sex with somebody who is also in pain. And then you always have to navigate the medical industrial complex. It’s not the disability that for me is so painful, it’s mostly the harmful implications and effects of systems and of people who just don’t understand sick and disabled chronic ill experiences. That poem, I want somebody who is in pain to be able to flip through my book and be like, “I just need to read somebody who kinda knows what this is like.” And if they pass out from meds or they are in too much pain, they can look at one or two poems and be like “OK” and then that was that. It doesn’t have to be an extremely long read. They don’t have to be exactly performed in a loud or a quiet manner. It’s more so to make them accessible and short as possible.
LK: Can you tell me about the book’s title piece “When the Chant Comes,” which you dedicated to your friend Andre, and how this piece relates to your transition and “getting top surgery and being ready to be on T” [testosterone]?
KUB: I think there is this mistake that happens in queer, trans, and gender nonconforming
spaces that “we all good,” that we all get each other. We are all on the same page. Often you have communities that are marginalized that struggle to perform that everything is “all good.” But here I was in a very long-term partnership with somebody who I thought knew me through and through, and when I was finally like, “This is what I want to do with my body. Bless it, I’m finally at a financial place where I can do it. I want to engage this way,” to be told by anyone you love…and to have that deeply questioned…and also for them to not just further fat shame you but minimize basically who you want to be—it’s like denying somebody their puberty. That’s basically what happened. When you are your most heartbroken, I really feel that it’s your chosen family that can uplift you.
I remember that call. This poem—it doesn’t sway too far out there from the actual conversation. From verbatim. Andre did say, “Baby, I’ll breath, meditate, love you, and tell you when the chant comes.” It’s a place of trying to be a reckoning. I’m trying to reap some hope. There’s somebody who is rallying for me. There is somebody who knows my history. Who knows my sweat. Somebody who has known me broke. I have a history of surviving even the most painful of heartache. “When the Chant Comes” tries to create a chasm in those spaces that are the most deeply broken. Like when you think you got your shit down and you got all your ducks in a row and here you go, you deliver this beautiful gem of accomplishment and for whatever reason, whether it’s institutional, personal, whatever reason, political, it is not accepted or it’s shot down.
That momentous piece of defeat—where do you go when all you’ve got is dust? This poem also tries to scrape, to ask, “Where did you come from?” “Who are your people?” “Who came up wit’ you?” before this heartache came, and they will be there, whether symbolically, metaphorically, or literally on the phone with you, talking you down.
This is a panic attack poem. This is like, “I’m going to create the best of me. I am ready to become what I need to become so I feel safe in my body. Not just in the system but to just feel safe in my body.” And somebody I love said, “blah” [Kay makes spitting noise and laughs.] Wow. I laugh because it is still so painful sometimes to read that poem. It’s not even the person. It’s the sheer act of it and how that translates to other things.
Have you ever just wanted something so bad and you know you deserve it? It’s in you. It is yours. It is your gift. It is your right. It has been called upon by your ancestors and everybody who’s built you and mentored you and you just did not get it. I think that is a frequent arc in queer trans people of color space. We do not get what we deserve. And when we try, we have to work harder for it. Sometimes we are going to face heartaches that we did not anticipate. So where do we stockpile our
canned goods and prepare for those emergencies? Because we know we won’t always be accepted. So what does it take? Where do you scrape at the bottom of your bowl to still feel fed? “When the Chant Comes” aims to embody that feeling.
LK: A lot of your book is love poems. You’ve divided up the book thematically in Tagalog/English captions: katarungan/justice; mahal/love; karamdaman/ sickness; kamatayan/death; and kapwa/soul. But nothing stays in the “correct” spot. The themes are all mixed together, and it’s misbehaving. But I feel like there are love poems in every section, and a lot of these are beautiful self-love poems too. “Homebois Don’t Write Enough” is at once an anthem and love poem. Can you talk about this piece?
KUB: I think that it’s something I struggle with on a daily basis, along with my comrades and peers and my other trans masculine, masculine queer community. How do you value yourself and not ascribe to heteronormative, cis, white, American standards? You already know you don’t fit there. Me personally, I’m a super tender queer—not the quintessential man by any means, but depending on where people are, I reap those benefits because there is cis-sexism involved. But what do we do?
And I think I’m still answering that question, and I think I’m still doing that work. I’m constantly being challenged in ways that I need and also challenging other people around me. It’s not the same, but it’s like American privilege. It is loathsome and strong and insipid. How do you counter misogyny? How do you not benefit from it? And how do you love yourself at the same time? I want to be proud when I wear a fitted. Some of my body, actually, is not binary gendered. I am gender nonconforming. Do not mistake me for that regular bro-dude frat guy and understand that my body is not safe and my body is policed and I can be an asshole!
LK: [laughs]
KUB: I’m so glad that you say the book is misbehaving. The entire thirteen years
of my life have been dedicated to misbehaving. Nothing that I do (or a lot of my
communities do) is considered being in tow with mainstream.
So in that poem, I also wanted to take what people considered binary genders— folks who super ascribe to a certain kind of masculinity, masculinity doesn’t have to be toxic, it just doesn’t have to be. I don’t think toxicity and masculinity have to be one and the same. I think that’s a very controversial thing to say. For me, supremacy is my concern. Misogyny is my concern. If that is the primary standard of behavior that is harmful, that’s something I have to learn to undo, that I’m trying to undo. Often times I fail. Often times a lot of my peers fail.
If we are really working in transformative justice, then we have to allow for human mistakes but also human change. I hope that the poem can try to do that. I don’t think it fixes everything. I know femme transness. I know butch transwomen who are femme. For me, it’s not necessarily a debunking of the binary, but it’s like, “Yo, it has mad holes. It is not working.” If you’re ascribing to it, in a way that internalizes or perpetuates misogyny—things that I’ve done, the way that I was raised, the men in my life, cisgender straight men (white and brown) taught me many things. That’s what I thought manhood was. As I became gayer or queerer or faggyer or more genderqueer, I was like, “Oh, that’s not me at all.” I know I’m not a conventional woman, but so then what? Then we create words like “pin@y” and “pilipinx.” Then we create words like “genderqueer.” Then we go back to homeland languages.
“Homebois Don’t Write Enough” informs “you are lovable. You can be seen. You can be visible.” The system treats you like shit but it doesn’t matter if you wear a cap or if you look like a man because people read that as patriarchal misogyny, and patriarchy and misogyny want to hold their place, they will attack you for even trying to resemble them—for being non-binary. Brownness is a threat. So it’s about being a threat. It’s about being threatened. It’s about internalizing how to threat. What do you do afterwards but talk to other people who might have those same experiences and really mourn together and really celebrate each other?
That poem in particular is an anthem. It’s a hard anthem to perform honestly because I struggle with its meaning and its tenets every day, and people come to me with the same. How hard is it in this world to be told you are unloved and to be told in the same sentence that you are privileged, right? Again, it’s a both/and concept…What I’m trying to do is like, “There is nothing cut and clean.” There is nothing 100%. This is not necessarily a linear existence…this is a dream space. This is a visioning space. This is a space that people taught me way before I knew how to write poetry. The people in this book, the ancestors I brought, taught me how to write these poems. I’m not saying they are squeaky clean at all. That’s the opposite of what I’m saying. I’m saying they definitely misbehaved. I think the center of them is ruckus and at the center of them is a lot of discomfort. And it’s okay to love and still be uncomfortable.
LK: And you end it, “Make us a legacy that is beyond all this.”
KUB: There has to be more, right? In this system, in what we are dealing with now, this level of terror and trepidation, if we don’t create on-the-ground strategies to survive and thrive together and dream bigger, dream bigger than this—my worry is that let’s say we do. Let’s say we accomplish what we need to accomplish in social justice and liberation, and everybody is taken care of; what does that mean tangibly? I want to be beyond this. I want to take the parts that I need, like a fucking salad bar, eat what is nutritious for me and helpful and leave the other stuff behind and remember that’s what brought us here. Whatever this is, it’s important to say it’s valid and not good enough. It’s important to say this is real. These are the stakes we face as queer trans people of color, as women of color, as black folk, as indigenous folk, migrant folk, as disabled community. Wherever you are in this timeline of political upheaval and spiritual grace, wherever you are, you are valid, and what you are navigating, what you are mourning, what you are angry about, what you are
celebrating, those things are all valid. And you know what, y’all? Try to dream bigger.
I don’t know what those answers are, or what that looks like for you or even for me sometimes. But if I can’t fantasize about something bigger, I won’t stay here. I have to think there is something not as horrific as what is happening in our political landscape right now. I have to think black and brown and indigenous resistance is stronger. I have to think that queer and trans liberation are stronger. I have to think that youth uprise and disability justice are mechanisms and powers that are stronger. I want a legacy. I don’t want to uplift single moments, the patterns of joy and futurity we deserve. I don’t want one joyous moment. I want it to be systemic. I want our joy to be a legacy, and I want it to be systemic. Our poetry is inherently an investment in that.
What is a curse in a broken world? A kind of intervention, a magic, other language that intervenes where existing language is not enough–or part of the problem.
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Continuing the work of the AALR Tarot Cards, the AALR BOOK of CURSES is a hybrid, formally dynamic piece of magic and literature, one that opens up how we understand justice, engage injustice, and who gets to decide what counts as each—especially in the era of 45.
To call a curse a curse, to name it a malediction, is to accept an assailant’s eye view of history. It is to look from the vantage point of power upon a challenge to the status quo as necessarily immoral–when that challenge is often the only recourse of the disempowered in a world designed to keep them that way.
The curse, reimagined in this fashion, is justice inside the empire.
Join us in cursing colonialism, the English language, elephant poachers, Asian fetishists, white chefs of “ethnic” cuisine, prison guards, abusive partners, killers of hope, those who keep silent, and more. Our BOOK of CURSES includes an “advent calendar,” so we can count down to next Lunar New Year together, opening each new box to find a curse with illustrated glyph and instructions. In our accompanying spellbook are literary elaborations on each of the curses–essays, poems, fiction, graphic narrative–along with tissue paper to tear out, trace the glyph onto, and burn to release the curse into the world.
Curses by Li-Young Lee, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Kazim Ali, Monique Truong, Rajiv Mohabir, Brandon Shimoda, RO Kwon, Sally Wen Mao, Ed Lin, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Johanna Hedva, Kai Cheng Thom, Hiromi Itō + Jeffrey Angles, Shailja Patel, Ronak Kapadia, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Regie Cabico, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Shawna Yang Ryan, Brandon Som, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, Khaty Xiong, and Nayomi Munaweera, with illustration by Matt Huynh.
Issue coming in June 2018! Pre-ordering available in mid-March. To support the project by donating, visit our Kickstarter campaign.
Table of Contents for History Place Presence: 25th Anniversary of Asian Arts Initiative
Volume 9, Issue 2: Fall/Winter 2018
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Table of Contents
Excerpts from (ex)CHANGE: History, Place, Presence Artist-in-Process Pieces
Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis, Chinatown Art Brigade, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Boone Nguyen, Shahzia Sikander & Rea Tajiri
Guest Editor Introduction
Lena Sze
Microessays | Across the Map: Geographies of Solidarity
Cassie Chinn, Carmen Febo-San Miguel, Jessica Garz, Aisha Khan, Parag Rajendra Khandar, David Mura, Laurel Raczka & Amy Sadao
Inventing Asia America
Ryan Lee Wong
Foldable DIY pop-up art piece
Colette Fu
Reflections on the Asian Arts Initiative and Representational Art Politics in Philly—That’s the Jawn
René Marquez
Microessays | The Politics of Staying Put
Jane Golden, Theresa Hyuna Hwang, Fariha Khan, Jeremy Liu, Roberta Uno, Carol Wong, Sue Bell Yank & Mary Yee
Past, Present and Hopeful Futures: Situating (ex)CHANGE and Then and Now
Alexandra Chang
Then and Now, an exhibition in celebration of Asian Arts Initiative’s 25th Anniversary
Jaishri Abichandani, Anida Yoeu Ali, Shelly Bahl, CYJO, Linh Dinh, Double A Projects, Maria Dumlao, Eiko Fan, Laura Kina, Dinh Q. Lê, Ken Lum, Yong Soon Min, Anula Shetty and Michael Kuetemeyer, Jean Shin, Catzie Vilayphonh & Saya Woolfalk. Curated by Alexandra Chang
(ex)CHANGE: History, Place, Presence Process Pieces
Byron Au Yong and Aaron Jafferis, Chinatown Art Brigade, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Boone Nguyen, Shahzia Sikander & Rea Tajiri. Curated by Alexandra Chang
Microessays | Representation Matters, Or How to Build a Home for Asian American Artists and Audiences
David Acosta, Germaine Ingram, Traci Kato-Kiriyama, Julia López, Bakirathi Mani, Bi Jean Ngo, Sameer Rao, Kristina Wong & Anu Yadav
Trusting Art
Mary Jane Jacob
Artist excerpts from Then and Now
Anida Yoeu Ali, Linh Dinh, Double A Projects & Maria Dumlao
Postcard excerpts from Jasmine Blooms At Night, 2017-2018, painting and sculptures, mixed media, variable dimensions
Jaishiri Abichandani
Plastic filters for Pacific, 1993, 2018, site specific installation with archival inkjet print, embroidery on side matte net, and museum boards
Maria Dumlao
Sticker excerpt from The Sweetest Gift, II, 2018 mixed-media interactive installation
Shelly Bahl
[25] An AAI/AALR Mixtape
Michelle Myers, showcase curator and emcee; composer Byron Au Yong & lyricist Aaron Jafferis featuring singers and rappers Alex Bechtel, Richard Chan, Jason Chu, TJ Harris, Kao Nhia Kue, Marina Muryama-Mir, Daniel Park, Cat Ramirez, Jackie Soro, Twoey Truong, and Kyheem Tucker; showcase performers Sham-e-Ali Nayeem, Kao Nhia Kue, David Mura, Lovella Rose Calica, Catzie Vilayphonh, Cynthia Dewi Oka, Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay, Mytili Jagannathan, Dan Kim, Jason Chu, YaliniDream, Kat Evasco, Paul Tran, Rodney Camarce, Anu Yadav, Franny Choi, and Magnetic North and Taiyo Na featuring Mas and Takenori
Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American MentalHealth is AALR’s most ambitious project yet, and we’re so grateful for the support from the community: so many supported our Kickstarter campaign last summer to raise funds for the issue. This project wouldn’t be possible without their generosity and investment in our collective wellness.
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Rather than trying to recalibrate our existing mental health resources to better engage race and Asian American experience, we decided to start on the opposite end, with what wellness, unwellness, and care actually look like in Asian American life. With the help of an amazing group of writers and artists, scholars and teachers, practitioners and survivors (see below for a full listing of contributors), we’ve created a work of book art that decolonizes mental health and opens up a wealth of new approaches. Our existing approaches not only aren’t enough–they’re part of the problem, sometimes unwittingly, sometimes openly conducting white supremicist, heteronormative, misogynist, and ableist violence against the very people for whom they claim to provide care.
Guest-edited by Mimi Khuc, with guest curation by Eliza Noh, erin Khue Ninh, Tamara Ho, and Long Bui, this special issue works to reimagine what counts as unwellness and wellness in our communities through a dynamic mix of writing, visual art, and interactive mini-projects. This special price includes:
a deck of tarot cards— featuring original art and text that work to reveal the hidden contours of our Asian American emotional,
psychic, and spiritual lives;
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Buy the tarot deck above. For bulk orders and course adoption, please email us at editors@aalrmag.org.
We are very happy to be able to donate a limited number of copies of the issue to places of need. If your organization would like to request copies, please fill out this form.
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TEACHING PROGRAM
Open in Emergency forms the core of a teaching program that will virtually connect university classrooms across the country to teach and learn together about Asian American mental health. You teach the special issue, and we’ll provide dynamic resources and opportunities for interaction with other classrooms. The program’s primary platform will be a closed Facebook group featuring:
a series of “digital extras,” videos by editors, curators, and contributors;
a shared curriculum of activities and projects building from the issue;
a resource mini-bank with student-to-student workshop plans and additional readings; and
interactive virtual spaces designed to put students in conversation with one another.
We’ll also help seed one-on-one video conferencing between classes for those interested. The goal is a national conversation that builds academic community, a dialogue among students and teachers across the country that challenges and grows our understandings of mental health.
HOW IT CAN WORK FOR MY CLASSROOM
Because of its cross-disciplinary approaches, the issue is a fit for a range of courses: Intro to Asian American studies, Asian American literature, Asian American psychology, Asian American art and visual cultures, Asian American sexualities, Women and Gender studies, Queer studies, disabilities studies, race and health.
To accommodate a wide variety of schedules and class needs, we’re making the commitment open-ended: we’ll have the program live throughout the spring of 2017, from January through May, with curricular materials and exchange possibilities available throughout—but your class can participate for anywhere from a week to the entire academic term.
PARTICIPATING CLASSROOMS
10 professors at 9 universities have already pledged to participate, and we expect many more as the program develops: Eliza Noh, California State University Fullerton • erin Khuê Ninh, University of California Santa Barbara • Tamara Ho, University of California Riverside • Long Bui, Wesleyan University • Mimi Khúc, University of Maryland • Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, University of Maryland • Lynn Itagaki, the Ohio State University • Christine Kitano, Ithaca College • Karen Kuo, Arizona State University • Cynthia Wu, University of Buffalo SUNY
SPECIAL ISSUE/TEACHING PROGRAM SPONSORS
If you believe as we do in the importance of reimagining Asian American mental health, please consider supporting this project’s development by serving as an official sponsor. Your contribution can fund general issue production, featured work by particular artists and writers, or distribution of copies to underresourced spaces of need—libraries, community centers, counseling centers.
Our sponsorship levels as are follows:
$250 Friend
$500 Patron
$1,000 Benefactor
All sponsors will be prominently recognized in the issue and on the teaching program website. Please inquire at editors@aalrmag.org for more details about sponsor recognition, advertising opportunities, the teaching program, or other possible avenues of support.
Open in Emergency Contributors
Melba Abela aka ma • Anida Yoeu Ali • Raven Anand • Ryka Aoki • Vimi Bajaj • Lydia X.Z. Brown (Autistic Hoya) • Long Bui • Anne Canute • Wo Chan • Yoonmee Chang • Camille Chew • Sharline Chiang • Learkana Chong • Lia Chaudhary • Seo-Young Chu • Audrey Wu Clark • Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis • Jigna Desai • Mai C. Doan • Jennifer Kwon Dobbs • Aileen Alfonso Duldulao, MSW, PhD • Tarfia Faizullah • Michi Fu • Aiko Fukuchi • Rajani Gudlavalleti • Chenxing Han • Johanna Hedva • Jennifer Ho • Linh Huỳnh • Tanwi Nandini Islam • Deepa Iyer • Shana Bulhan Haydock • Sine Hwang Jensen • Priya Jha • Simi Kang • Bhanu Kapil • Imneet Kaur • Nina Kaur • Judy Kawamoto • Mary Keovisai • Mehtab Kaur Khalsa • Mimi Khúc • Susan Kikuchi • David Kyuman Kim • Joy Kogawa • Deidre Kogawa-Canute • lê thị diễm thúy • Amy Grace Lam • Esther Lee • James Kyung-Jin Lee • Peggy Lee • Sueyeun Juliette Lee • Molly Liu • Patty Liu • Gerald Maa • Pooja Makhijani • Rajiv Mohabir • Mai Neng Moua • David Mura • Karen Nagano • Aimee Nezhukumatathil • Konrad Ng • Mimi Thi Nguyen • erin Khuê Ninh • Eliza Noh • Sophanarith Nok • Genevieve Erin O’Brien • Monica Ramos • Monica Ong Reed • Paisley Rekdal • Margaret Rhee • Shawna Yang Ryan • Koji Steven Sakai • Matthew Salesses • Shizue Seigel • Sejal Shah • Chad Shomura • Maya Soetoro-Ng • Brandon Som • Sharon Suh • Raymond Tan • Ryann Tanap • Kai Cheng Thom • Tiffany • Emily Wu Truong • Laura Uba • Julie Thi Underhill • Tara Villalba • Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay • Kristina Wong • Cynthia Wu • Karen Tei Yamashita • Kit Yan • Kathleen S. Yep • Claire Zhuang
Open in Emergency Sponsors
University of Maryland Asian American Studies Program • Institute for Asia and Asian Diasporas at Binghamton University of the State University of New York • The Ohio State University Asian American Studies • Arizona State University Asian Pacific American Studies Program • Asian American Student Union (AASU), University of Maryland • Celebrating Asian American Pacific Islander Womxn (CAAPIW) • University of California, Irvine Department of Asian American Studies • University of California, Berkeley Program in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies • Shift MN, a program of Rainbow Health Initiative • University of Connecticut Asian and Asian American Studies Institute • Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU • UMass Lowell Center for Asian American Studies • Kundiman • Department of English, Clark University • Betsy Huang • National Asian Pacific Americans Families Against Substance Abuse (NAPAFASA) • English Department, Mt. Holyoke • CSU Fullerton Asian American Studies Program • University of Pennsylvania Asian American Studies Program • Vietnamese American NGO Network • University of Minnesota Asian American Studies • Ethnics Studies, University of the Pacific • Friends DO Make a Difference • Roxane Gay • Kimchee Mamas • Department of English at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) • Asian Arts Initiative • University of Michigan Critical Ethnic & APIA Studies Graduate Student Group • Amherst College American Studies Department • QTPoC Mental Health • Pan-Asian American Community House (PAACH) Cultural Resource Center at UPenn • Asian American Studies Program, Hunter College, CUNY
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story collection The Refugees was selected as the University of Maryland’s First Year Book for 2018-19, and as part of a two-day series of events launching a “Year of Immigration” initiative at UMD, Michael Collier, Director of the Creative Writing Program, interviewed the Pulitzer-prize winning author and critic. The hour-long public interview took place on October 24, 2018 in the English Department’s Ulrich Recital Hall and was followed by an open question and answer period with students and faculty. The previous evening, Nguyen had filled to capacity the 626-seat Kay Theatre at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, where he delivered the Arts and Humanities Dean’s Lecture entitled “Refugees, Immigrants, Americans: Changing Our Stories.” Nguyen’s visit to UMD was made possible by the College of the Arts and Humanities, the Office of Undergraduate Studies First Year Book Program, and the English Department’s Bebe Koch Petrou Speaker Series.
*
Michael Collier: I want to focus on the stories, The Refugees, but we’ll probably do some wandering. First, can you talk about your path to becoming a writer? There’s an essay in the back of The Refugees that talks about it, but I’d be interested to hear you tell us.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: Well, the path to becoming a writer probably began when I was in the second grade. I wrote a book and drew the pictures in it. It was a little contest—not a contest, a class exercise—to make your own book. It was wonderful because we got to do everything from writing and drawing to binding.
This epic was called “Lester the Cat.” [audience laughter] It was about—wow, I have no idea how this got in my head—a city cat who got bored of city life and ran to the countryside and found the love of his life. It was entered into a public library contest, and it won a prize, and I will forever remember this because my parents were working constantly, so they had no time to take me to the public library to pick up this award, so my school librarian, bless her heart, took me there on a weekend, on her day off, and that put the seed in my mind that maybe I would want to be a writer. And that led me to a lifetime of misery, basically. [audience laughter]
When I was graduating from college, I had to decide where I was going to go, and I was writing some stories at the time, but I had a pretty good understanding that I was a much greater critic than I was a fiction writer, so I decided to go get a PhD. I also had heard about something called tenure. I’ll let you guys know what tenure is. Tenure is what some professors get, and it basically means you can’t get fired. Even if you sometimes commit a crime, you can’t get fired. I thought, This is amazing! I’m going to get tenure as an academic and then I’m going to do exactly what I want to do, which is become a writer.
So that’s what happened. I got tenure. I’d been writing short stories for a decade on and off, on the backburner of my academic life. I had decided to write short stories because I figured they’re short, they’re easier to write than novels. Of course, poets know that isn’t true. Poems are short. They’re even harder to write than novels. That’s why I never became a poet. So I got tenure and I thought, I’ve been working on these short stories for going on a decade, I’m just gonna go off and write for a year or two, and I’ ll write a short story collection and I’ ll publish it and then I’ ll be famous. That was the thinking.
I was awarded a Fine Arts Work Center seven-month fellowship, and I got there, and as it turns out, it was seven months of mostly misery. I did not finish a short story collection. I did not become famous. [audience laughter] Instead, I spent most of it working on the story “Black-Eyed Women.” I had started that story in ‘97 and then it was 2004, 2005, when I was at Fine Arts Work Center, and I didn’t finish it until 2014. So basically, I spent 17 years working on that story and this short story collection and that’s how I became a writer.
For me, becoming a writer was partly about learning the art of writing, but mostly it was about suffering. It was about discipline. It was about acknowledging finally that writing was not about fame and success, all that kind of stuff. Although it’s nice! It was mostly about enduring and learning that being a writer is a very lonely experience. [laughs] That’s the core of it, despite all of the external recognition and publication. I sold The Sympathizer and I didn’t sell The Refugees. I thought at that point, I just spent 17 years of my life working on this book and I couldn’t sell it. [laughs] Okay, I can live with that. That’s the moment that I really understood what writing is about. In the end, it’s really about the writing and not about the publication.
MC: You were also being thwarted by the literary market because nobody wants to publish a collection of short stories and take a chance on a first-book writer. But if you have a novel to sell, then it’s a credential you can use to leverage the sale of the stories. I’m imagining that’s probably how it worked out for you?
VTN: Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. I had the short story collection and my agent found one of my short stories in a small journal Triquarterly. He says, “Do you have a book?” I give him the short story collection and he says, “It’s great, but in order to sell your book in New York City to one of the big houses, you have to write a novel.” He says, “Give me fifty pages.” I always wanted to write a novel. Amazingly, after fifteen years of struggling with a short story collection, I discovered I could write a novel. I had no idea I could. I’d never tried it before. I wrote fifty pages.
He says, “It’s really good, but it’s so good that you need to work on the entire thing. You’ll get a much better deal.” So I write the whole thing [audience laughter] and we send it out and it’s rejected by thirteen out of fourteen publishers, but we do manage to sell it to the fourteenth publisher, but we don’t sell the short story collection. I think, Oh my god, I can’t believe this has happened. The Sympathizer comes out. It’s a success. My editor says, “Do you have any other books?” I say, “Well, I gave you that short story collection.” [audience laughter] He says, “I never saw a short story collection.” What?! I think my agent, he decided not to send it out and he never told me.
MC: Oh wow. What a coward.
VTN: No, I think he was a very good marketer. He knew we would sell the book for more after the novel.
MC: Oh, I see. Good point. I had been imaging you’d struck a deal for both books.
I want to go back to becoming a writer and learning the craft. In your essay, you talk about the patience you needed and the time you spent to learn technique, but you also talk about “a habit of mind.” And there’s another phrase you use, “enduring the grief of writing.” As a writer, I understand what grief is, but there’s something in the way you use that phrase that made me think you have something more particular in mind. I wonder if you could talk about what it means to you to endure the grief of writing, and also “habit of mind.”
VTN: When I took time to write The Sympathizer, I had the best time of my life. I had two years off and the novel just sort of poured out of me. It was sort of ecstatic and that was wonderful. But before that, in writing The Refugees, it was mostly pain. Literally it was 99% pain. I sat in a room, staring at a wall. And I’m not an interior decorator. It’s just like a bare box, okay? [audience laughter] And it was mostly rejection. The only person who really cared about this book besides me was my wife, and she didn’t really have a choice, I guess. When I was writing, there was no sense that the writing would actually ever lead to anything. I had the fantasies about prizes, publications, and agents and all that kind of stuff, but mostly when I say “enduring the grief of writing,” it was the sense that I could write a story for dozens of drafts. It was fifty drafts for “Black-Eyed Women,” which was the hardest story. The grief was knowing that this may never see the light of day.
Also the grief of not knowing that it would ever be any good. Outside of whether it would see the light of day, would I ever become a writer? Would I ever become good at what I was doing? I really wanted that. There’s no consolation for that kind of grief when you’re going through it. I had the fairytale ending when the book got published and so on, but as you’re undergoing the experience, there’s no guarantee. I had a fairytale ending, but what if I didn’t? What if the book had never sold? What if it never got published? What if I never became a published writer? That is the fate of so many writers. That’s why when people ask me about publication, I feel for them.
But I also feel that we’re doing it for the writing itself. The habit of mind is the discipline and the sacrifice that writers undergo for their art. I feel that if I hadn’t become a writer, I would’ve learned how to suffer at something else. I would’ve tried to become a chef or a gardener or something. A golfer. I don’t know. Something that requires the sacrifice and the discipline to some higher calling that requires grief, without the knowledge that you would become expert or good or famous or anything like that. I think there’s a certain personality that’s drawn to that habit of mind, and that’s what distinguishes writers, for example, from other people. There are many people who want to become writers. They fantasize about being writers. But can they endure the grief? Can they develop the habit of mind that requires them to just be alone, by themselves, and realize that they’re cut off from the world? Because that’s what writing or what any other art is about: doing it for that art and not for the world.
MC: Viet and I both went to Jesuit high schools, so we’ve had a particular kind of training or way of thinking about the world. [audience laughter]. When you just said, “to do something larger than yourself,” is that something the Jesuits taught you?
VTN: Were you raised a Catholic as well?
MC: Yes, yes.
VTN: Well, if you were raised a Catholic, then you know we were born for suffering and sacrifice. [audience laughter] The whole idea of Jesus Christ suffering on the cross for the greater good, for those who do not care, for those who do not know—that’s basically what it means to be a Catholic. I grew up being taught these kinds of things, but also watching my parents endure it as well. My parents are diehard Catholics. They wanted two things for me: to get a good education and to become a good Catholic. They got one out of two. [audience laughter] I’m not a good Catholic in the sense that I don’t go to church or do any of these rituals, but the spirit of Catholicism, its mythologies and its ritual of sacrifice and so on, the lessons of endurance and dying for the greater cause, to be a martyr—I totally internalized all of that.
MC: You can tell.
VTN: Oh you can?
MC: Yeah, it’s all over the work.
VTN: Oh good.
Another good thing about being a Catholic is that we remember mythology that we can refer to in the symbolism of the work. Becoming a Jesuit, or going to a Jesuit school—their motto is being a man for others. It’s sort of hokey in some ways, but if you look at the Jesuit tradition, there is a tradition of being martyred. I think I really did internalize this idea of justice and the belief in Catholic sacrifice—as long as it’s divorced from the actual Catholic church. Art became a form, for me, of working for justice.
MC: Right, right. It’s very prominent in the work. Also, in Nothing Ever Dies, there’s a spiritual aspect running throughout that’s very subtle. It didn’t surprise me once I had sussed out you had gone to a Jesuit high school. Does the notion of spirituality in your work make any sense to you?
VTN: Even though I think of myself as an atheist, I think of myself as someone who also wants some answers to the big questions. That’s coming from my own particular background of the Vietnam War and thinking about how that War cost so many people on all sides. I couldn’t find that answer in God except through the characters in my fiction who were questioning God. But I could try to find it through our own secular quests, trying to find meaning in the sacrifices that people have endured through war whether they wanted to be sacrificed or not. Nothing Ever Dies was trying to tackle these big questions, not just of memory and forgetting, but also of reconciliation and forgiveness. These are all obviously very religious questions, but they’re also very secular questions about how nations and peoples can confront their tragic pasts and atrocities. When we’re faced with this horrendous past of millions of people having died and people doing terrible things, what can actually lead us to reconciliation and forgiveness if it’s not God?
The answer in the book, briefly, is the necessity to confront not just our humanity and the humanity of the people we’re at war with, but also our own inhumanity. This is something we have great difficulty doing. We have a hard time thinking of ourselves as capable of inhuman behavior. It’s much easier to project that out onto others. Yet if you’re a Christian or a Catholic and you actually take your religious teaching seriously, you know that it’s not just about “we’re all going to go to heaven,” but also “we have to confront the original sin.” I try to do that in the book through my own version of philosophy and criticism. For those of us who are in literature, there is a strain of literary and cultural criticism influenced by Derrida and Levinas and deconstruction and so on that is actually analogous to religious practice.
They’re also trying to find their own secular way, through language and through the confrontation with our own interiors, a way to confront these larger spiritual and philosophical issues.
MC: Let’s talk about the book of stories. I’m curious to know about its composition and when you finally finished it. Is “Black-Eyed Women” the last story you finished?
VTN: The first one I began with and the last one I finished.
MC: Really interesting. Because I know that you started the stories twenty years ago, one of the things I was trying to follow as I read them was your development as a writer. It seemed to me that “Black-Eyed Women” because of its complexity had to be the most recent story you wrote. I didn’t realize it was also the first one. That makes lyrical sense to me as a poet. As you were putting the collection together, did it click into place that “Black-Eyed Women” would be the way to start?
VTN: Yes, ironically so. What happened was I graduated, got my PhD in ‘97, went to USC for my first job. I had the summer off, so I thought, Okay, I’m gonna write my short story collection now. Three months. No big deal. I did actually manage to pump out like fifty to sixty thousand words in one summer. They’re awful [audience laughter], but nevertheless I did it. “Black-Eyed Women” had a very different title, but the genesis was there.
Part of the problem was, as a writer, I was an academic and I had so many things I wanted to say and so the original story of “Black-Eyed Women” was just way too complicated. I was trying to pack in all these different issues. I think part of the experience of learning to become a short story writer was to realize that less is more, that with a short story you can deal with one fragment of whatever larger picture you want to deal with and the short stories as a whole can add up to something larger. But I couldn’t figure that out. I just wanted to do everything in one short story. That’s why it took fifty drafts for “Black-Eyed Women.” The story wasn’t working, so I thought, Okay, I’m gonna put in a murder. I’m gonna put in a car accident. [audience laughter] I didn’t understand that plot was not the solution. The solution was about character. It took me fifty drafts to figure out what was really at the core of the story, this character of the ghost writer and what she was undergoing and then trying to make, understanding that the plot would follow from this character. In between the forty-ninth draft and the fiftieth draft is when all the other stories were done.
My ambition in writing The Refugees was yes, I was going to write about Vietnamese people, but with the caveat that we’re not all the same. There was actually an excel spreadsheet. Here’s a story about a man. Now I have to write a story about a woman. Here’s a story about a straight person. Now I have to write about a gay person. That’s why there’s a diversity of characters and viewpoints in the book. Then also I wanted to write stories that were not about or from the perspective of Vietnamese people. There’s a story from the perspective of a black bomber pilot. Another one about a Latino man who gets a transplant from a Vietnamese person. Again, the point was Vietnamese people know other people besides Vietnamese people. Also, as a writer, I wanted to demonstrate that I could write from other perspectives as well.
By the end, the agent and editor and I, we looked at the spread of stories and tried to figure out the narrative arc of the entire collection, the sequencing of the stories in a certain way. The collection begins with the spectral return of the refugee who didn’t make it, then goes into the arrival of the refugees with “The Other Man,” and then, by the end, with “Fatherland,” we see the return of the refugees to Vietnam, to meet the people who were left behind.
MC: One of the things I became aware of in The Refugees is that you found a variety of elegant structural solutions for many of the stories. In “Black-Eyed Women,” you have plots running in parallel that also mirror each other. There’s the plot about Victor Devoto who has survived a plane crash and lost his family in it. He has hired a ghostwriter to tell his story. Victor is haunted by ghosts the same way the narrator—his ghost writer—starts to become haunted by the ghost of her dead brother. These stories running parallel, feeding each other, provide a way around having the car crash, murder, and all those other things you mentioned. Also, what I noticed in your stories is their balance and proportion. What I call elegance. When you were working on the stories, how aware were you of their various structures?
VTN: For me, the short story writing process is very intuitive, which is one reason why it took so long to write the short stories. Basically I had no idea what I was doing. I’m sorry this is a terrible answer, but I would just write a draft, look at it, and say, “This is awful. How do I try to make it more graceful?” There’s no single answer for any of the short stories. Each story required its own form to achieve a certain kind of grace. You know as well as I that the writing process is ugly. You, as the reader, don’t get to see that ugliness. You just get to see the final product. Again, just to use “Black-Eyed Women” as an example, this thing that took fifty drafts and seventeen years, you get to read in about thirty minutes. That’s the way it should be because, as the writer, you’re just trying to figure out what narrative is going to serve the purposes of the characters in the story.
With The Sympathizer, I had no such problems. With The Sympathizer, I think I can explain any of the formal questions to you and how I devised the book. It was a very articulate process and for whatever reason, the short stories were a very inarticulate process. This is one of the reasons why I don’t teach creative writing. I don’t know how to talk about how to write a short story.
MC: What were some of your influences? Who were you using as models when you were writing the stories?
VTN: When I was writing the short stories, I was focused on writing them as realistic short stories because that’s what my poor little brain could understand. I knew there were other short story traditions—the avant garde, the surrealistic, and so on—but I was like, How do you even do that? I wanted to learn to write within a certain set of constraints that were more visible in the realistic short story, the kind of thing you would find more typically in the New Yorker. My influences were emerging from this kind of tradition, influenced by James Joyce in Dubliners, people in the contemporary period like Jhumpa Lahiri.
I’ll use Lahiri as an example because I really respect her book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies. Each of these stories is so wonderfully done, but even as I read them—Lahiri is not a political writer, and I wanted to be a political writer, and the gap between Interpreter of Maladies and what I wanted to achieve was this gap of the political. I could not figure out how to write a political short story. That’s why, as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to pack so much into these short stories. History and politics and everything else. In the end, I think the politics never got in there because it was such a struggle to write the stories, and if I just kept them less political, they’d be easier to write.
I read a lot of the stories in Best American Short Stories, Best American Short Stories of the Century, and so on. They follow a general lane of realism where the politics are kept to the margins if they appear at all. It wasn’t until I wrote The Sympathizer that I finally busted out of that mode and I really could claim a different set of influences that were drawing more from modernism and European literature.
Whereas The Refugees was definitely my bid to be—not just to be—but my bid to be an American writer of a realistic tradition.
MC: But because you use more conventional forms in The Refugees, there’s dramatic tension created between the conventions of realism and the lives of your Asian American characters. Another thing that creates tension with the conventions you employ is the appearance or introduction of the escape narrative, the story that relates how the refugees came to the United States. Almost every story has one. As a reader, you’re waiting for that, not in a predictable way, but in a dramatic and emotional way. When the escape narrative is told, the conventional framework of the story is reframed. I see why you would talk about the stories in relation to The Sympathizer as being more traditional, but I find they push back against the conventions they use and ask us to rethink the way we look at the experiences of refugees and our recent wars.
VTN: That’s a very generous way of putting it. Escape is fundamental to a lot of the stories, and this is where the stories are autobiographical. Oftentimes, we get asked as writers, “Are these stories autobiographical?” They’re not—except for the one story “War Years,” which is half about my life and my parents’ lives in San Jose—but the autobiography comes in through the emotional part of things and my own personal experience. I talked last night about how I felt like a spy in my parents’ household and how I felt like a spy in the larger American world. That was the autobiographical genesis for The Sympathizer, which is about a real spy. As a writer, where do we get our experiences from in order to do our writing? When I was younger, I would read about people who would become lumberjacks or join the military or do whatever. That was not me, but the experiences are the emotional experiences that I can draw from.
I remember I took a class once from the writer Bharati Mukherjee writing short stories. One short story, she said, “You’re not cutting close enough to the bone.” I think I was nineteen or twenty. I was like, “What does that mean?! How do I do that?” If you could just take a knife to yourself, it’d be easy. But I think what she was saying was, you have to look inside of yourself to where the pain is and draw from that. That is a very hard thing to do. I think most people sensibly run away from that, but as a writer, you have to run into that experience. You have to find a way into the pain. For me, growing up in San Jose was painful, and all I ever wanted to do by the time I got to adolescence was escape. Get out of there as fast as I could. And that was a direct consequence of our own escape as refugees. Yes, so I think the stories are oftentimes about the physical escape of refugees, but also about the emotional escape that so many of these people are trying to make as well. That’s why a book called The Refugees could also be about people who are not literally refugees in the case of James Carver, the African American bomber pilot, and Martín Arellano, the Latino person who got the transplant. They also are struggling with their own lives and trying to escape from the constraints they find themselves in.
MC: I want to ask you about a couple of particular stories, and one of them is “I’d Love You to Want Me.” For me, it was the most poignant and emotional story in the collection. It’s about a professor and his wife. The professor has dementia, and the arc of the story is how their lives are distorted by his deteriorating condition; not only do their domestic lives begin to change and warp, but they begin to doubt their shared cultural memory. The narrator’s distance to the subject in this story is different than in some of the other stories. I’m interested to know how the story was written.
VTN: Sometimes I write stories setting out with a deliberate plan. Sometimes I write stories because some line or some character has struck me. In this particular story, I simply wanted to write about this idea: someone loses his memory and it causes a disruption to everybody else in his family. But what if in losing his memory, he also starts to mistake his wife for another woman? How do we know that this is really what is happening? Did he or did he not have a lover in the past? That’s the crisis his wife is undergoing. In this case, there was no political point I wanted to make. It was simply I was drawn to these characters and I wanted to feel what they feel. That, again, is something very hard to teach. It’s hard to teach people how to feel. Yet that’s been one of the two most important things to have occurred to me as a writer.
This is also autobiographical. I spent most of my life running away from feeling. I had a sort of painful childhood. Not due to anything my parents did. It was painful to be a refugee, painful to be an adolescent. While I never forgot any of the things that happened to me, I survived those things by not feeling anything about them. And by not feeling anything about them, I was not feeling anything in my own life as well. So to become a writer was partly about learning the art, but also learning how to feel. Which meant to go back, to confront these things from my past. Many of these stories, including this one, are about me, simply as a writer, trying to inhabit empathetically these characters, what they’re going through and who they’ve been. This is part of the act of imagination. It’s not simply to imagine another life as a plot.
It’s to imagine another life as a feeling or as a set of feelings. Some of these realistic short stories that I’ve been talking about—I don’t mean to demean them formally because I really love these kinds of stories as well. Because a great short story, in the end, makes me feel something. That’s really hard to do. To create a story and then to put it down and to be deeply emotionally moved by that story. As a writer, you’re struggling with these formal problems and these technical issues and trying to figure out what word where, what the solutions are, but in the end, at least with the realistic short story, the solution is to try to arrive at a moment of feeling. Both for the writer and for the reader.
MC: In listening to you talk, it occurs to me that even though The Sympathizer was published first, the stories in The Refugees were written out of an obligation to your parents and community as a way to honor all the people who told you their stories as you were growing up. It’s as if you needed to fulfill this obligation before you could go on to write a book like The Sympathizer. One of the things you say about the process of writing is that it requires you to enter into something like a fog. Were you in a greater fog, let’s say, when you wrote The Sympathizer than when you wrote The Refugees?
VTN: Describing The Refugees as an act of obligation or as an act of honor is accurate. The mode I’m operating in during these fifteen or twenty years when I’m learning how to be a writer is this mode of thinking that because we had been erased as Vietnamese people in various ways from different kinds of histories and stories, it was an obligatory act for me as a writer to address that erasure and tell stories about Vietnamese people, which would include my parents and my community and so on. That’s a powerful motivation for many of us as writers. It’s also a motivation that can be deeply limiting. The sense of obligation, the sense of honor, honoring people and communities and all of that—I was perfectly willing to do, but I was also aware, as literary critic, that this is deeply limiting. Because writing should also be an act of freedom or an act of destroying obligations or an act of dishonoring or an act of acknowledging that honor may not be the best mode to operate in. But as a good Catholic, as a good son, I still felt that I had to do this book. Then, when that was done and I didn’t sell the book, I was like, Okay, I did it, the equivalent of going to medical school. This was the equivalent of going to medical school for me. [audience laughter] Maybe my parents didn’t say that, but that’s how I felt. Now I can do whatever I want.
MC: So they’re not hoping for it any longer. You’ve already done it.
VTN: Well, the good thing about winning the Pulitzer Prize is that it beats going to medical school. [audience laughter]
MC: Takes the pressure off.
VTN: With The Refugees, I felt that I was wandering through a fog, trying to find the story, this pathway. With The Sympathizer, I actually felt that I had absolute clarity. Also, I shrugged off the sense of obligation and the sense of having to do honor. I felt that now I could do what I really wanted to do, which was just to offend everybody—the real ambition—and have a lot of fun. I couldn’t say that writing The Refugees was fun, but writing The Sympathizer was a lot of fun and hopefully readers will feel that as well.
MC: There are wonderful moments in it. Your whole take on the making of Apocalypse Now is terrific, your description of fish sauce is great as well, and literary allusions you employ constantly enrich the texture of the narrative. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is hugely important to the book. The scene when they’re trying to take off from the airport—an escape story—is one of the most gripping war scenes I’ve ever read.
VTN: As I was setting off to write The Sympathizer, I knew it was going to be a spy novel and a war novel and a historical novel and a refugee novel. The war novel part was probably the most daunting because I’ve never been to war, never been a soldier. As a writer, I think we have to believe that we can write about things of which we know nothing. Stephen Crane never went to war, and he wrote the one book most of us read about the Civil War. So it’s possible for people who have not done something to be able to write about something. But again, referring to the talk last night, I was also convinced that war novels and refugee novels overlapped, that our experiences as refugees and civilians were also war stories as well.
In the opening fifty pages of the Fall of Saigon and the escape, as a writer I also wanted to make the reader feel what that experience was like. The only way to really do it was to find out what happened. I read every book available and every article I could find about the Fall of Saigon so I could have enough information to map out the space of the city and the timeline. It went from months to weeks to days to hours to minutes because I found the accounts of what the last twenty-four hours were like during the Fall of Saigon. I could accurately describe how people were trying to escape the city, how they were trying to flee the airport, how the rockets were raining down on the tarmac. Likewise, with the beginning of the Apocalypse Now satire, I read everything there was to read about the making of Apocalypse Now. It was part of what we have to do as writers. Not just feel for characters, but do the research necessary to recreate settings and people. That gets ultimately to another issue: can writers write about anything and anybody they want to? It’s a topic today, a fraught territory. I think the answer is yes, as long as you do the work. I think some writers don’t want to do the work in order to imagine these characters in these settings that are so different from them. But that’s our obligation.
MC: Yes, it has to be in good faith. I have two more things I’d like to get to. In “The Americans” and “Fatherland,” the two last stories in the collection, there’s mention of the war museum in Saigon and the tunnels the Viet Cong used that are now tourist attractions. Since we’re near a city that has a lot of war monuments, including the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, I’m curious to know how you see the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial. How do you think about that in relationship to your reframing of war and the Vietnam War?
VTN: I assume most of you have seen it, but it’s the black wall with the 58,000-plus American names of the dead engraved on it. It’s obviously become, I think, the preeminent memorial to war and soldiers in this country and, of course, I find it to be a moving experience too. Also, Maya Lin’s own observations on the design of that memorial are moving to me, and she’s clearly thought out the design. Even though the design is formal and abstract, if you read her autobiography, it’s hard to imagine that her experiences growing up as a young Chinese American woman in the midwest did not have a role in her trying to figure out her formal approach to questions of history, which are not formal. Maya Lin decided that she was going to take her experience as an other and not recount that literally, by injecting realism into the design, but try to take the experience of otherness and render it formally, in a way that makes us all feel our own otherness. That’s my interpretation of it. When you go to this wall and you experience the otherness of thinking about these soldiers who have died and what happened to them, you also hopefully experience your own otherness, in looking at your reflection in this black wall.
Aesthetically, I think it’s fabulous, but politically, it’s problematic. Because politically, however Maya Lin may have intended it, the reality is that it foregrounds the 58,000-plus American dead and relies on the absence or the forgetting of everyone else who died in that War, including the South Vietnamese soldiers and also all the civilians involved. Deliberately or not, the memorial becomes an expression of the processes of memory and forgetting that are always intertwined and that are definitely inevitable in any kind of war memorial. Almost inevitable because I’ve visited a lot of war memorials across the world and almost all of them do the same thing, which is to foreground what the nation wants to remember, typically its own dead, and to forget the dead of every other, of their enemies, including the civilians.
MC: Or their allies.
VTN: Or their allies. There are only a couple of exceptions to this. There are some memorials that are devoted to civilians. In China, there’s the Nanjing Massacre Memorial which is dedicated to remembering the Chinese civilians who were murdered by the Japanese. Great, but of course, it’s also there to oppose the Japanese. Really, one of the few memorials that I’ve seen that tries to talk about everyone is in Okinawa. The Okinawa Peace Memorial commemorates the battle there in World War II in which about 200,000 people died, and of all sides. It commemorates the Japanese soldiers, the American soldiers, and the Okinawan civilians. That’s very rare to see, something that actually tries to acknowledge that people from all sides suffered in any conflict.
MC: That kind of acknowledgement is something you’ve done with your students and the archive of interviews they’ve created with people and their accounts of the Vietnam War. The archive supplements traditional war memorials.
VTN: I teach this class on the Vietnam War, and I created an online site for it called anotherwarmemorial.com. It has 150 interviews. It’s meant to deliberately reference the Maya Lin design, but we have faces instead of names. Unlike her memorial, it includes not only American soldiers, but also Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians, both military and civilian, men and women. I just wanted to get the students involved in this kind of work where they would see the scholarship they were doing could have some kind of public legacy and public impact. Even to this day, a few years after we finished, I will still get comments on the website as people randomly find their high school classmates, for example, and leave messages about their shared experiences.
MC: It’s really impressive. I want to ask you if you were writing Nothing Ever Dies and The Sympathizer at the same time? Perhaps you were already deep into writing Nothing Ever Dies before you started The Sympathizer? I’m asking because the research you did for each must have fed the other.
VTN: Basically, I got tenure. I published my first academic book, Race and Resistance, and at that point, I said, “I hate myself.” [MC laughs] Because tenure is an awful experience to undergo for most, and also writing your first academic book was, at least for me, a misery. I looked at that book and thought, I did everything I was supposed to do to get tenure as an academic, and I hate myself because I cannot bring myself to write another book like this. It’s a great book by the way. [audience laughter]
If I have to write another book like this, I will quit academia. I wanted to be a writer, and the notion of writing in academia is very different from the notion of writing that other writers have. I thought, Why is it that I have to look forward to this future of misery of writing academic books if I want to get promoted?I need to be able to write my next academic book my own way. I need to set off on my own journey to find that.
We don’t get taught this in graduate school. We get taught how to write the conventional way. It took me thirteen or fourteen years to write Nothing Ever Dies, and the reason why it took so long was I wasn’t going to do the conventional second academic book. I wanted to write a book that was very personal to me, and I wanted to write a book that meant something to me, not simply a book that would get me promotion to the next level in academia. This meant I had to follow the book wherever it led me and unfortunately, where it led me were several different countries. I set off to write a book about Vietnam and Vietnamese Americans. I ended up writing about Cambodians and Laotians and South Koreans and Americans as well. That was where the book took me, the argument and the spirit of the book.
Also, I wanted to write the book my own way narratively and stylistically. That meant I had to take myself apart as an academic. It took me a decade to learn how to write as an academic; it took me a decade to learn how not to write as an academic. So I just wrote a bunch of articles as I did my research where I tried different styles and tried to bring myself down as a writer. Then, I was writing The Refugees at the same time, and then I wrote The Sympathizer over a couple of years. We had about fifteen months between finishing The Sympathizer and publishing it, and during those fifteen months, I went and I wrote Nothing Ever Dies, the final manuscript. I wrote that having finished all the research. I wrote that without an outline. I wrote it with all the lessons I learned about narrative from The Sympathizer. I just let myself go and tried to tell a story. I tried to allow myself to be carried by the rhythm of the stories and the rhythm of the emotions that I was trying to feel and trying to capture.
This is not how we write academic books. We write academic books setting up to make an argument. Of course, there’s an argument in Nothing Ever Dies, but we don’t set out to write academic books thinking about rhythm and narrative and emotion and character and setting. I had learned how to internalize all of that in writing The Sympathizer, and it was so invaluable then to take all those lessons that I had learned from being a novelist and put them into Nothing Ever Dies.
