Vicki Xu

Carrie Hsu

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a novelist and professor of English at the University of Southern California. His debut novel, 

, won the Pulitzer Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and numerous other accolades. A regular contributor to 

Nguyen is a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship. Most recently, Nguyen published an essay collection entitled 

 — an eclectic exploration of colonialism, intersectionality, and how politics, history, and identity are indelibly entwined.

Nguyen was invited to deliver the 2023-24 Charles Eliot Norton lectures hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center, a series in which he explores the concept of writing as an “other” — writing from the margins. He takes this interview with us the day after his second one, sandwiched between two meetings.

Despite his packed day, he is unhurried and gracious. We sit in plush chairs beneath the stairs of the ground floor of the Charles Hotel where he is staying. He speaks quietly, but with a fervor that draws you in, forces you to listen.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

, there’s a lot of form breakage: you break into verse, you change font size, you change paragraph alignment. Could you talk us through the decision to do that?

The decision to play with form in this book came about from wanting to play, or becoming a father. Watching a child disregard boundaries and rules or conventions, or not being aware of them in the first place, was very inspiring. And I thought, how sad is it that he will grow up and he will probably acquire all these rules and become a conventional person. That’s sort of inevitable.

As artists, I feel that part of what we do is we also require conventions and rules. And then to be really creative, we have to learn how to break them and ignore them at the same time by getting into impulse, and getting into what feels right. That to me was a very different creative procedure than what I did before, because typically I’ve been very rational and intellectual about various things. And I can give you an intellectual explanation of the different things that I did but you know, sometimes I break up the lines or adjust them in order to draw your eye and to give you an emphasis on the ideas that are being expressed.

One of the themes of the book is that history has shattered communities, dispersed them, fragmented them, and things like war and colonialism disrupt borders. And formally, therefore, the book is responding to that by disregarding borders. I don’t think there is a relationship between national borders, identity borders, and genre borders. And I don’t think I’m unique in seeing the disruption of borders and conventions within literature as a response to historical disruption of borders and conventions.

 by Theresa Cha disregarded all kinds of conventions and forms. It’s really inspiring. I use one of her lines as a section epigraph to gesture to the fact that

 really did influence the book in a highly stylized fashion. She makes up her own rules about what she’s going to do with these words — they could be prose, they could be poetry, but they’re somewhere in between. It took the culture decades to catch up with Theresa Cha. I think we’re still catching up to that book. I’m not Theresa Cha; I don’t have her spirit, I don’t have her avant-garde in the same way. But I’m going to take what I can, and I think there’s a little trace of that willingness to rearrange the words on the page and use that rearrangement to provoke the eye; there’s some willingness to point directly to histories of colonialism. There’s some of that present in my book, but my book is certainly more conventional than hers.

The disruption of convention is an interesting idea in light of your soon-to-be trilogy, which was very much accepted by the literary establishment. When you’re putting forth work that is subversive in some way but nonetheless receives critical acclaim from that establishment, how do you square that success with the work’s intent? For 

in particular, does that indicate something about the trajectory of literature in America?

I think there is a space in contemporary American literature and Anglo-American literature for a certain degree of political and formal subversion. I don’t think it’s a huge space, but that space is created, at least partly, by people within the publishing industry — editors and so on. You may have diverse writers processing some of the ideas and themes that I’ve been talking about, but you also have editors who can be receptive to that.

Publishing isn’t a monolith, although it certainly is kind of corporate and tends to produce mainstream prose that can be really conventional. But there are openings. I’m not the only one who’s tried to go through those very narrow openings; when I look at certain writers that I admire, like Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston, I feel they’ve taken advantage of those openings by trying to be subversive politically and culturally but also trying to execute that at the highest level of their art.

There’s also a long tradition, talking specifically about Asian-American writing, where people are being subversive, politically and in terms of their content, but maybe they’re not succeeding so smoothly at the formal level. But I think that tradition is really important. Even if I found their efforts limited in some ways, they really helped me by revealing to me what those formal conventions were, and that they could and shouldn’t be broken. I think it’s very important to acknowledge that.

My books arrived at a moment in time where the whole publishing apparatus was looking for writers of color and so-called minority writers who can do horribly exciting work to give them recognition and awards and all that, and everybody feels good about themselves. I’m not naïve about the way the publishing apparatus functions as a mode of work: recognizing necessary historical discussions, but also possibly containing those as well in a mode of liberal recognition.

In another interview, you said, “I read a lot of Asian-American literature, ethnic literature, American literature in general. And I just made a decision that a lot of these works that I’ve read failed me at the level of great writing.” Is that related to what you mentioned about formal recognition and the level of high art that you’re seeking?

I don’t think it’s any disrespect to these categories that you mentioned to say that a lot of it is not great. A lot of anything is not great. As readers we’re lucky if we can just find and read the books that have achieved something really compelling; that’s what we should be spending our time doing. But for those of us who are scholars or writers who need to read widely and deeply, we’ll see a lot of the mediocrity and the failures.

You can become a writer with a minimal degree of talent. If you recognize that there are rules, conventions, forms and so on, and you study the form and practice in your form, you’ll be able to produce, for example, a novel that looks like a novel. Doesn’t mean it’s gonna be great, but it looks like a novel.

And it’s important for me to also point out that the form is not simply the arrangement of words on the page, and the way that a plot looks, and the way that a character looks. Those are aspects of form, but there’s also ideological form. And this is a part of the mediocrity — if you as a writer do not recognize ideology and how it’s operating in society, and how it percolates into literary form, you’re probably going to produce a mediocre book.

There’s a lot of Asian-American literature that paints within the lines, the lines already provided. There’s a lot of books about the immigrant experience. It’s important to have a lot of books about the immigrant experience because we want there to be plenitude, but a lot of them reiterate basic ideological narratives about what immigrants are supposed to do in American society. The writers I point to like Ellison, Kingston, Morrison — they recognize the form of both the ideology and the novel or the memoir that they’re disrupting.

Speaking of writers, are there texts that you found formative throughout your life?

The writings of Frantz Fanon — if you read 

 — it’s really disruptive work because it is political critique, but it’s also formally experimental. It doesn’t look like anything else. And that fascinates me. I like books that don’t look like anything else.

W. G. Sebald is another really interesting person, who, when I read his work, I can’t tell the difference between his fiction and nonfiction. I find it fascinating. He created his own style, and I admire writers who create their own styles, because they’re responding to something inside of themselves, but also responding to the history that they’re confronting. Fanon was confronting slavery and the diaspora and colonization; Sebald was confronting the Holocaust and World War II and amnesia.

More contemporarily, I’ve been reading a lot of poets of color in the last 10 or 15 years — people like Solmaz Sharif, Layli Long Soldier, Ocean Vuong. I can totally see the relationship between the history and the politics that they’re concerned with and the literary forms that they’ve been innovating. The formal question is so compelling to me because it’s not just about the content. It’s not just about saying, “This happened to us for whatever reason.” [It’s about saying,] “This happened to us, but I as a poet am going to use my language in a very particular way, not just to transmit the content, but the shape or experience of that content.”

And when I read the poets, there are no rules. The poets can do whatever they want with the words on the page. I thought, why do prose writers have rules? If you’re a poet, you can do whatever you want. But the prose writer — if you do so much as not use quotation marks, people freak out. (That happened with 

 — the one most common question people had when it came out was, “Why are there no quotation marks?” It’s just a stupid question.) But you know, the conventions are so deep, and that proves that if you do any little thing, there will be some percentage of readers who don’t like it or don’t comprehend it. And in poetry, poets have the license of total freedom that I just think prose writers should appropriate.

, which seems generally in the spy novel genre, and 

 which is a mafia novel. What spurred the decision to use that framework?

 as a spy novel came immediately to me because I knew I wanted to write about the Vietnam War, but I also wanted to write an entertaining novel. I mean, I’ve read a bunch of Vietnam War novels, and I’ve read a lot of Vietnamese refugee accounts and expert accounts. It seemed to me that a lot of them are very serious works, which didn’t mean they couldn’t be entertaining, but I really wanted the novel to be entertaining. And the spy novel as a genre immediately came to mind because there have been spy novels about the Vietnam War from this notably white American standpoint. I was also well aware that the spy novel as a genre has great capacity to talk about politics and history for obvious reasons. That made it the perfect genre for me, because I could be entertaining, 

 I could talk about politics and history, 

 I could be metatextual and metafictional.

As a writer, I’m really interested in layers of allusions and novels that speak to traditions or counter traditions. The novel flowed very smoothly from that — once I knew that it was a spy novel, and that there were certain conventions that I could follow, and that the character of the spy also has to fit certain conventions as well. Choosing a genre helps in a way because it gives you certain rules that you can then use to steer yourself but also deviate from if necessary.

When it came time to write the second novel, I felt that I still wanted it to be fun. Couldn’t be a spy novel because he’s no longer a spy, so I chose crime. The crime genre also works very well for me because good crime novels are very aware that street-level crime, personal crime, are interesting, but oftentimes are more interesting when we know that they are manifestations of structural crime. The most interesting crime writers I like are always careful to point out that it’s not the drug dealer on the street that’s really scary. It’s the white guy in charge of the pharmaceutical company, or it’s the nation-state itself that’s engaged in narco-trafficking. Good crime novels are very aware that crimes and gangs and so on are reflections or outcomes of the fact that the state has a monopoly on violence.

What genre framework are you considering for your third novel?

I think it’s going to be a murder mystery. Someone dies, and whodunit?

Ideas, lots of ideas. Literally just hundreds of emails to myself with ideas. I don’t carry a Moleskine around; I carry my phone and take notes on my phone.

Do you find yourself being recruited as a kind of pundit to speak on certain things, especially after the success of 

? Cathy Park Hong had some things to say about how, after publishing 

, a lot of people would ask her to give certain cultural commentary that she felt was not in her capacity to give. We were wondering if that happened to you as well, and how you feel about that.

When I was in college, I was already writing essays for newspapers on topics like affirmative action and 

 and racism. I was inspired by writers who I felt were committed writers, writing their particular novels or poems or whatever, but also engaged politically. And so that was always my idea of the kind of writer I wanted to be. Even as I was learning how to be a novelist, I worked at a creative writing blog, 

When the novel won the Pulitzer Prize and I did all these interviews, that was the beginning of this process of becoming this pundit. I’m well aware of the process that Cathy was talking about, the transformation of a writer into a professional refugee or professional Vietnamese or professional Asian-American and so on. There’s a whole mechanism to turn us into spokespeople, just as there’s a publishing mechanism that looks for the new hot young writer. I don’t think we control those mechanisms. However, I think there is a window to use the mechanism to the extent that I could just say what I wanted to say. That seemed to work for a while. I did publish essays in 

, talking about things that were important to me.

I’m always conscious of that problem, of being the professional and the spokesperson. That part has slowed down for me because a professional pundit would, I guess, keep on punting endlessly. I just felt like after six or seven years, I ran out of things to say. If I don’t have new ideas or things to say, there’s no need to continue writing these things. But instead I took all those ideas and put them in 

you write, “How do you disentangle the peculiarities of your family and your lives from adolescence and testosterone, high literature and pornography, San Jose and Hollywood?” This question, to our reading, was a kind of undergirding for the book. In the practice of nonfiction, how do you disentangle these things that seem so interconnected and make them coherent to yourself and others?

You tell me. You read the book, so is it coherent?

Well, it’s at once an exploration of the wars, Vietnamese-American identity, but also it’s an elegy toward your mother. It’s melding a lot of forms of essay into one book.

Part of the inspiration for me was this idea that you find in Edward Said’s 

. He was quoting Gramsci about the need to make an index of yourself. All of us are composed of all kinds of things, all these different genealogies and influences and histories. And it becomes that knowledge that you’re describing. The index is about going through yourself and making a catalog of all the different ways you’ve been shaped by different things in different incidents. I think a good number of people go around without that index of themselves — accept the knot — and they carry that knot for a bit but don’t question what’s in there. An index for me is a useful idea as well because an index is a list of things, lists, fragments, notes. These generic ideas were very important, versus a kind of holistic message.

You talked about the elegy, for example. The piece that appeared in 

 based on this book was the elegy part that had been extracted from the book and presented as a coherent essay. And it takes the part of the book that I think is the most appealing for a lot of readers because it performs what it is that a memoir is supposed to do.

I’m not interested in that. I think for those of us who are refugees and immigrants, it’s a form that’s easily captured, contained. In other words, ‘Yeah, our parents suffered, let’s elegize them.’ When you cry, you feel good. You have a cathartic experience. And I can point to Asian-American memoirs that do exactly that. You can probably point to them, too, and they’re very readable books.

I felt that there was room for me to do something different. I wanted to force the reader to earn the right to cry. Again, the conventional memoir doesn’t make the viewer earn the right to cry. You just read the narrative and then you cry, because that’s what’s supposed to happen, and then you forget about it, because your expectations have not been disrupted. And that’s not enough for me. I felt that if I had only narrated the story within the narrow confines of my family’s view, of course things like the war and refugee experience would be brought in, but the seamlessness of that memoiristic, elegiac approach would allow the reader to just slip in and slip undisrupted until they get to the moment of catharsis and then they can cry. I want the reader to be bothered by this book. And it’s okay if they are. It’s more important for me to give a broader picture than a smaller and narrower one. The book starts out wide, and the third and fourth parts are more personal. That was very deliberate.

We have a speed round of questions for you. The first is, you want a meal. Do you go for a hot and fast fry, or slow and braised?

Blue velvet blazer, pink shirt, black pants, patent leather shoes.

What’s something you like to do the old-fashioned way?

Take walks in my neighborhood. That’s an old-fashioned thing to do, and there’s really only one way to do it.

How about something that makes you feel young?

What makes me feel young? I don’t feel young anymore. Could be the cocktails. Or the willingness to break these conventions.

Fall / Winter 2023

Features

An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen

Joshua Park

 and an English professor at Bard College. Hsu’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir 

 is centered on his particular college friendship with Ken Ishida — a University of California, Berkeley undergraduate who was killed in a 1998 carjacking. In 

, Hsu writes about his indolent adolescence spent in the San Francisco Bay Area, and how his friendship with Ken and the aftermath of Ken’s death shaped his sense of identity.

 is Hsu’s first memoir. His other work is primarily journalistic or academic. His subjects have been eclectic: he has written about Tupac, pockets, the World Cup, 60s music, and K-pop.

Hsu was taking a break from interviews at this time, so we were lucky to have snagged time with him via Professor Louis Menand, who supervised Hsu’s dissertation when he was a graduate student at Harvard. Following a short email exchange, in which Hsu’s missives were all in lowercase, we met Hua Hsu on Zoom.

We were interested in what the research process was like for 

, which features Ken as a mythic center of the work. When you come across artifacts of life from a couple decades ago, with things that you may have remembered or misremembered, how do you deal with the challenges that those things pose to your own memory?

The book was written largely from memory and not as a research or journalistic project. Obviously I lived with the materials for quite some time. Prior to writing anything down, I did revisit my old journals or maps to figure out how far these places were in miles.

When I was in my mid-to-late twenties, I felt very uncomfortable about that gap between what I remembered and misremembered, because misremembering something could seem like a violation. I think as I got older, I just accepted that things I remembered were the things I valued at the time. Which I think is just how life goes.

It feels very rigorously researched because I have the ability to recall very inane details from the past. A lot of the fact-based stuff there sort of persuades the reader that it was a real time and a real place with real people, but I think a lot of the emotional stuff or the stuff about friendship is more just based on how I remembered things. After I wrote a draft of it, I shared it with some friends who were in the book, and they would point out some things that I misremembered, but I kept a lot of the mistakes in because it felt a lot more real. The book is really an attempt for me to demystify a lot of objects I kept.

We were wondering if the act of writing changed any of those experiences for you. For instance, did writing change how you feel about friendship and in what way?

It definitely [did] because I was remembering moments that are really ephemeral. There’s no need to remember most of the things you do with your friends, so long as you and your friends continue building memories. It’s only when that experience terminates that you have any reason at all to reflect.

This is part of where the misremembering happens, and I tried to write it into the book, where you replay a memory so often when it feels like a ritual. In reality, we were in school for six semesters, so how many times would we have studied for finals together? Four, maybe? But the memory is like an analog image, like a computer would have a flash on the screen so often that it would be burned in the monitor. It’s such an indelible memory for me that I look back on it now with such fondness and affection, when in the moment we were just studying in the library.

That’s not to say all of you should look up when you’re studying in the library and think aw man, we’re living life right now. That would be a cursed way to read the book. But there’s a way in which the small moments of friendship you may actually end up remembering. That is how our relationship with memories changes: it’s an outside observation of our own life.

You write about how you were “embarrassed about private hysterics,” and you also wrote about how “damn deep you tried to sound” in your diaries in Stay True. Confronting the self, especially the past self, is embarrassing in many ways. How did you reconcile the writing you used to have, and the writing you have now?

There are two questions here: first, whether it’s innately embarrassing to read things you wrote two, five, ten years ago, and second, in this case, whether the embarrassment had to do with the “private hysterics”. I don’t think I’m innately embarrassed by who I used to be. People find the book surprisingly funny given its subject matter, and most of that is me dunking on my teenage self, which is mostly something I would not have had the distance to understand when I was in my late twenties and thirties. It’s easier now for me as a 46-year-old to feel even more of a sense of sadness that he’s gone, because I’m like he’s missed out on 25 years of experiences, but also see how as a 21-year-old, you don’t yet understand the full scope of what you’re going to experience in life.

As for the specific embarrassment of rereading my own journals, that was actually crucial to the “research” part of the book. There was a different version of the book that I envisioned in 2018 or 2019 that would’ve been four times as long, but would’ve also contained these narrative histories of fax machines, mid 90’s internet, analog technology, a lot of the things that are in the book as things I’d experienced as a teenager. I envisioned the memoiristic part of the book pulling together the larger research history of culture in the 1990s. For a variety of reasons that didn’t seem like a useful way to approach this. But going back to my journals: I think that was why I started writing things from memory, because the only thing I couldn’t access about the past was how I felt. I could look back at an old AOL screen and homepage and listen to music, and those things are still the same as they were back then, they trigger the same sense of like, “Oh, the Internet was this,” “driving around was this,” but the depth of feeling — when you are younger, you feel things in such a wider extreme — those things are impossible to capture when you’re older.

That doesn’t make me unique, but I had for many years kept this journal where I tried to describe the highest highs and lowest lows; it was embarrassing because it’s like reading someone describing what it’s like to be on drugs or hallucinating. You’re trying to describe these sublime highs and lows with an immature grasp of language.

So that was the part where I was like, research will never turn me to that moment. But it provided a fascinating index. The book used to quote from my journals much, much more. It’s sort of like when characters in a movie are writing a song or writing a poem and you never hear the song and the poem because you’re distracted by whether the song was good. My embarrassment matters more than whether the reader finds it embarrassing.

You mentioned you envisioned the book to be four times as long. Was the intention of this exploration of friendship always the same, and you realized that the way you structured this book was not conducive to the intention, or did the intention become that as you wrote? There are still, obliquely, themes of identity or assimilation, but it’s touched upon in a more personal way rather than theoretical way.

I didn’t know what the book was about when I started writing in my journals in 1998, but it wasn’t gonna be a book then, I was just trying to collect as much trivia as I could. When I started to work on it around 2017 or 2018, it was still a story about friendship and grief, but I didn’t know it was necessarily a book about memory. I also felt insecure about writing an entire book about two Asian-American guys. It didn’t seem like anyone really cared about that. So I think part of it was a sense that making it be about more than that — maybe our friendship could symbolize something about our context, the 1990s, making it more about just two people. It’s sort of like when I’m writing criticism and I can’t think of what to write about the song itself, I write about the context, the history, it allows more people into the experience.

Then I felt that it was a dishonest way to approach it, because we were just kids. We had no idea what the history of email was, or how these things were going to evolve. What was more interesting about the experience was experiencing it, not necessarily knowing the history of it. It’s sort of like how people write a biography or memoir and know too much at every moment.

Take a very generic example of someone being made fun of because they’re Asian in elementary school. You’re in elementary school, so it’s very unlikely this would instantly cohere as an anti-racist aware of structural inequality. In your mind, you’re just like, that’s messed up.

I tried to be very conscious to what I could’ve possibly known or understood when I was 18 or 20. Turning it into a cultural history-shoehorned-into-memoir wouldn’t have really made sense, because we only understood this tiny sliver of the world at the time. Even though the book does cite theory and different thinkers, that’s also a gesture toward the 18-year-old version of me who would feel the need to cite Derrida just to have an honest conversation about friendship. There’s something slightly performative about it, but all of that is sort of the shape of the conversation. 

The question I was trying to answer didn’t start off having fleshed out political or social dimensions. The book was purely navel-gazing. Over the course of writing, the question assumes these different moments, and sort of does intersect with a lot of questions that are still relevant or part of the culture today — I had forgotten the amount of debate Ken and I had about what we today call representation. We didn’t even call it that at that time; it was just sort of a debate, like would you rather be this, would you rather be that. There were no stakes to these arguments when we were kids, and now they kind of align with these larger political and social movements we have. Which is such a delight that people relate to this book at all, because it started off as such an intimate, almost selfish pursuit compared to other things I have to do. I had worked so long as a journalist answering to other people’s deadlines, taking assignments; this was this one thing I had never stopped thinking about, and in many ways it’s the origin story of why I became a writer in the first place.

And that’s why it’s so funny I retain enough 18-year-old self to think that I’m singular and unique — "no one will understand any of this because I’m so iconoclastic" — but a lot of people were like, I was just like you, I experienced the same kinds of things. What matters isn’t the things that are most unique about ourselves, but what we share with strangers.

Did you think about how it was difficult to write about friends, Ken, other people, and whether that could feel like an act of betrayal, to paraphrase Viet Thanh Nguyen?

When I started writing [the memoir], I had a vision of it being a group biography. Not only would I research all of the 1990s, I would interview all my friends and bring all their lives into it. But that wasn’t the question I was trying to answer. The question I was trying to answer was much more solipsistic, which was, why did this man have such an abiding impact on me? To answer that, I had to engage with my own sense of self, identity, and memory.

I never felt worried about betraying anyone. I wrote a version of it, and that’s my version of it. The version that was edited and turned into a book that people read is a portion of the story I wrote, but it’s not the entirety of it. I knew that in that move from writing it all down to turning it into a book that I needed to do the first thing on my own, but the second thing required more conversation and cooperation. Anyone who was in the book once or twice were allowed to read portions beforehand, change their names, etc. I was just sort of bringing everyone together in my mind to hang out a little bit longer.

Also, Ken has this phantom presence in the book. I have a really hard time describing how people look, how someone looks or moves or sounds. Thankfully in this case that can just be mistaken as an artistic choice to leave him as more of this aura, or this brilliant specter, rather than a fully fleshed-out person.

You mentioned earlier you were “insecure about writing a book about Asian-American guys.” We were interested in whether you felt slotted into a certain Asian-American literature, or if you felt pressures to conform to that — especially since you also mentioned that the book that was published and distributed wasn’t exactly the book that you wrote.

I don’t know if “insecure” is the right word. I guess it was how I felt maybe eight or nine years ago, when I would describe what I wanted to do to other people. They would often compare it to things with built-in audiences. I don’t think there’s a built-in audience for a story about [two Asian guys]; it’s not a mystery, it’s not a love story, it’s just the story of two friends in college. It was interesting to write about it from the perspective of teaching Asian-American literature, reading it for the past thirty years, writing about it in magazines, and just having an awareness of the tropes people use. But after I finished it, I was thankful I had written this in 2020 rather than 1995 or 2004, because at this point there’s so much more space within the category of “Asian-American writing” that it’s capacious enough where you don’t necessarily have to fall within these preexisting traditions. I think my book probably does relate to a lot of those things, but I wasn’t really hung up on them by the time I started writing it in 2020 or 2019, because there were so many examples of people who haven’t had to do that, and those books were published anyway.

Also, if I had the chance to write this book in my 20s, rather than my 40s, it would have been a terrible experience. I think part of the challenge for younger writers is that every opportunity seems like it may be the last opportunity, because every year seems like the last year, like a lot of these institutions may not exist. But you have to know your own limits. For me personally, knowing that I had been waiting to write this for many years, I could not have done it when I was 30, and I certainly could not have done it in my 20s. But I would have been really tempted if someone in my 20s had said hey, I’m giving you this opportunity — but you just have to know what you’re actually ready for.

 podcast, Jay Caspian Kang asked you about voice, and you talked about how Asians are just good at imitating things. Then Tammy Kim said that you had a fairly distinctive voice, and you said you didn’t think so.

I still don't think I have a distinct voice. I think that part of what writing is is a performance of authority. Whether you’re writing an essay for class, or I’m writing a review for 

 we’re just cosplaying as experts. With a term paper, you’re just responsible for being a master of a subject for like a week or two, and then you can just sort of wipe it from your memory banks. 

 writing I do — it’s like I’m playing a character who knows a bunch of stuff about a subject. And in that case, I do end up knowing a lot about something because I just cram and I’ll read everything written about a subject, and then I’ll just sort of pretend like I knew all this stuff.

I guess when I think people have a voice it’s because they’re able to do that, but also a personality. Like there’s a sense of humor, or there’s like some strange connection they make.

I think the parts of the book that I read now and think "that's what you've been trying to say, all these years," are the very beginning and the very end. Like probably the first three pages, and the last eight pages. That's where I feel like, "this is your voice, this is you." But what's weird about it is that those are the parts that are in second person, which is not how I speak at all. I would never say these things out loud. But I felt like I still remember writing those parts and thinking like, "this is exactly what is supposed to feel like when you're writing the thing that you need to write."

But generally, I think that because the Asian-American experience is so fractured and weird, and because immigrant culture is still so foundational to that, and immigrant culture is one that prizes mastery but also mimicry, there is an element of pastiche to [Asian-American writing]. An element of being able to hear what other people are saying, and figuring out where you are based on those different polls, as opposed to growing up and being part of some hundred-two hundred-three hundred year tradition that you can seamlessly slot into. And that's not to say that everyone else feels that necessarily, but that's just what it seems like from the outside where a lot of us are trying to take what we can take.

You also talk about how tastes become personalities. Part of the book is about developing that taste, perhaps a kind that diverges from the mainstream. How did you go about that?

Taste is really about experimentation and openness. I think I thought that I was far more open minded than I indeed was — I was just open to everything that was just a little bit outside of “mainstream culture.” I don’t think I realized this at the time at all. And I didn’t probably didn't even realize it till I was much older.

But one of the things that I look back upon and felt nostalgic for was the amount of that, the degree to which that experimentation could happen in private. You didn’t leave a digital trail at all. And so you could just sort of experiment with, like, I'm gonna get these pants and see how they fit. You're never going to take a picture of yourself wearing those pants, so no one will ever know that you tried to wear the style of pants, and I'm thinking of a very specific pair of pants I used to own. Anyone with a phone has access to so much more information and so many more potential fits than I did when I was younger. And that’s both cool and very daunting. It would actually make it much harder to truly figure out who you are.

Did you ever feel like a literary outsider?

I certainly didn’t know what any of these things were when I started grad school. And then all of a sudden, I’m on the East Coast, I’m only reading music magazines and everyone’s like, I gotta pitch 

 or something. And I was like, I don’t know what that is, is that different from 

. But then you very quickly just sort of get up to speed because that’s what everyone else is a part of, but I think that there’s also this sense of alterity that you can’t let go of, even once you find yourself in those spaces.

And so for me, for a while, I didn’t really feel part of any scene. But I didn’t mind that much, because I sort of liked the freedom of not having to follow one specific path. Part of it is because that path seemed highly unlikely, like, there’s no preordained instant sense in which I felt like it was possible that I would do any of the things that I’ve done.

It was very eye opening when I was a TA at Harvard, because my students were far more pedigreed than I was, even though I was their TA. They were definitely people who were more sophisticated readers than I was. It was strange to teach undergrads and think, like, well, they're just going to leapfrog me and become my editors very soon. I didn't feel one way or another about it.

Do you have advice for people just starting out?

The hierarchy in the publishing and literary worlds was much clearer, say 20 years ago, because there were more publications and it was easier to make a living as a writer. So you could just sort of hang out with people who were all paying their rent writing for music magazines. And then there were the people who worked at like 

, but there was no need necessarily for all these different communities to eye each other, because there was just more money in writing. Whereas now I think the only way to make a living as a writer is to write for one of like, two or three publications, and even then it can still be like a real struggle.

One of the strangest lessons in life is when you realize that being good at things only matters to a certain extent. Whether you can turn things in on time is actually far more important. I think it's the challenge of being professional and being diligent, but then not letting the work consume you in ways that can be unhealthy.

I think on the more practical side of things, just figure out what people are not writing about and what subjects are not being covered, and specialize in those subjects. There's no end of people who have opinions on Donald Trump and Beyoncé. But there's not a lot of people who have ever been able to explain to me how biofuels work. The death of local reporting has really opened up a lot of opportunities in parts of America that are far less glamorous than working in Manhattan. But that’s where you get a sort of perspective on whatever is going to happen to the rest of the country.

To close off, based on your experience as a writer and being on the board of the Asian-American Writers Workshop, are there any broad trends or issues you see with the trajectory of Asian-American literature?

What makes a healthy ecosystem is diversity. And so the fact that there are incredibly successful people like Viet Thanh Nguyen or Michelle Zauner or Cathy Park Hong or Min Jin Lee — it's amazing that we have figures like that now or part of like, bestseller culture. But it’s really about ensuring that there's like a robust ecosystem of writing, and that means diversity of experiences, geographical diversity, class, writing across like class lines. I think people are doing all of these things, but they may not be as elevated. I guess the fear would be like when Maxine Hong Kingston both blew up in the 70s and 80s [and] publishers were only looking for the next Maxine Hong Kingston — like that is literally what writers would be told [by the publishers]. The important thing is to celebrate the successes, but also to stay vigilant about the stories that aren’t being pushed in quite the same way.

Thank you so much for the interview. And now to close off, we have our speed round of questions. Cafe or bakery? 

Wherever I could hang out for a couple hours, with just a cup of coffee. Preferably with no laptops.

Mountains. I can’t swim, so I find water terrifying.

That was all of our fun questions, unless you want to give one more from yourself.

An Interview with Hua Hsu

“When I think about people, I think about space, how much space a person takes up and how much use that person provides,” begins 

 by Weike Wang. Our narrator is Joan, a thirty-six-year-old Chinese-American whose life happily revolves around the New York City hospital ICU, where she works as a physician. But when her father dies unexpectedly from a stroke, and her mother returns to America from China to “become friends” with her children, and her brother and sister-in-law mount pressure on her to settle down in the suburbs and start a family, and the coronavirus pandemic shuts all life down, Joan is forced to question her workaholism and define her own cultural beliefs.

Binaries give structure and conflict to the story: Joan and her brother, work life and domestic life, America and China, present and past. Where Joan wants nothing more than to be an unnoticed cog in a machine, her brother Fang aspires only to climb ladders. “This is our chance,” he tells Joan during her undergraduate studies at Harvard, “don’t throw it away.” In the present, he and his wife Tami foist their own expectations for family and community over and over on a resistant Joan. Her new next-door neighbor, Mark, does the same but with entertainment—he unloads a green suede chair, then stacks and stacks of books, then an old TV onto her so she can watch 

 and orient herself in American culture. She is perturbed by his eagerness.

Joan feels familiar, if a little exaggerated. (It’s hard to imagine anyone who has gone through at least fifteen years of schooling to not have at least heard of John Steinbeck.) She is one archetype of Asian America, the child of immigrants who strives above all to find control in a country to which her existence has only ever been peripheral. “It wasn’t glory that had drawn me to healthcare but the chance to feel pure and complete drudgery in my pursuit of use,” she explains.

In fact, most characters are archetypes. Fang is a hedge-fund manager with an unspoken inferiority complex, who takes all opportunities to show off his wealth. Reese, one of Joan’s fellow physicians, constantly makes unintentional offhand remarks about Joan’s gender; Mark, though well-meaning, continually oversteps boundaries. “[They were] brought up with different rules,” Joan gripes of Reese and Mark; “yes, push back, provoke, assert yourself, some trouble is good, since the rest of us will always go easy on you and, if anything, reward you for being you.” Whereas she, the daughter of immigrants, “is a daughter of guests, is a part time guest herself, and the best kind of guest goes with the flow.”

But just because the characters are archetypal doesn’t mean they’re simplistic. Forced to contend with conflicting viewpoints on family, work, and identity in one place, Joan begins to articulate her own. She cannot change who she is, and she cannot expect herself to change others. “Why try to explain yourself to someone with no capacity to listen?” Others might find fulfillment in family or marriage; her fulfillment is work. This experience of being misunderstood provides a heightened level of understanding of those around her. When the coronavirus pandemic hits and frustrates Joan’s mother’s attempts to book a flight back to China, and Fang and Tami begin treating her increasingly carefully to entice her to stay, it is Joan who realizes what her mother is unable to say—“Just because I’ve lost my husband doesn’t mean I’ve lost my mind, and what I need help with is not money or food, it is something else entirely.”

The emotional core of the book is built through similar sharp epiphanies. Weike Wang’s writing is precise and measured, just like Joan herself. The prose does not draw attention to itself, as Joan would not want herself as the center of any story, but the characters come alive underneath. Told in a series of brief linked episodes, the story moves seamlessly between Joan’s experiences in the present and her childhood memories, indicating how memory informs experience and present emotion is continuous with past emotion. We slowly realize that the binaries are not so binary after all: Joan cannot be separated from her roots, which are part of who she is. We are right there with Joan as she remembers her father abandoning his frugality to take his family around town in a money-green Mustang for a day. Or as she shares the out-of-place feeling with her mother, who has freshly returned from China, in her brother’s grand gated house in Greenwich. Understated but quietly powerful, these snapshots stay with me long after I’ve closed the book.

In the end, no facet of Joan’s life is left behind. What makes 

 special is how complex and all-encompassing it is. The story is not just about Joan and her grief, not just about Joan and motherhood, not just about Joan and her work, not just about Joan and her Asian-Americanness—but altogether, a person in her entirety, handled with nuance, an incredible balancing act.

When praising her work ethic, the director of the hospital once likens Joan to a spinning cassette tape, dependable and constant. Joan A to Joan B, Joan B to Joan A. It’s a comparison that denies her directionality. By the end of the story, however, Joan is in a decidedly different place from where she started. Her relationships with her family and coworkers have transformed, and though not all her issues are resolved, Joan is finding her balance. Joan will be okay.

This book was provided as a NetGalley from Random House.

Fall 2021

Notes

In Joan is Okay, A Doctor Rearticulates Her Relationship to Work

In the days after high school graduation, having ridded my schedule of high school effects, I found myself in possession of a remarkable amount of free time. Three months’ worth, to be exact. The last time I had this much free time was probably elementary school graduation, and I had spent most of my high school years yearning for this kind of idleness.

This is great for personal growth, I kept saying to myself. You finally have time to slow down and think instead of rushing to the next thing all the time. This is great. Enjoy life.

I was very rusty at enjoying life. I had spent middle school and high school rotating through a number of bodily, social, and academic neuroses. As far as I could recall, when I last unabashedly, unreservedly, un-self-consciously enjoyed life, no-financial-social-or-existential-strings-attached enjoyed life, I was probably ten or eleven.

To occupy myself now, I spent a lot of time on Wikipedia. When I was a little kid, I imagined my own article on the site all the time: my name in Georgia heading font, a picture of myself, and detailed sections that amounted to a full, rich life. Surfing biographies, I felt like I was trying on costumes.

But mostly I tried to avoid hearing myself think. The world was unfurling and asking, “what now,” in the same way my mother would ask “what major” or my grandma would ask “what if you get a PhD,” neither question I was particularly keen to answer. A line from the novel 

 by Olga Grushin played over and over in my head: “Whenever you come to a fork in the road, always choose the harder path, otherwise the path of least resistance will be chosen for you.” So what I really wanted now was to dig my heels in and stop time. Unfortunately, I was finding that while 

 presently had the leeway to slow down instead of rushing to the next thing, time never did. 

Three months seemed too little and not enough to prepare for a four-year catapult into what I knew as a murky cycle of waking up, brushing teeth, doing things, eating, doing things, eating, doing things, going to bed, waking up, and so on. I was full of waiting.

In July, I took a trip with my mother to China. It was her parting gift to me as well as an attempt to mend our relationship, which had grown strained over high school. The plan was to hit Hong Kong, visit my mother’s college buddy in Guangzhou, Guangdong, spend a couple days in a Sanya, Hainan resort, and then go back up to Beijing to link with my extended family.

I had been listening to a lot of music. For one reason or another I never really listened to anything for fun in high school. (A small exception occurred in junior year: I cross-enrolled at a local community college for a music history class on Western pop in the latter half of the 20th century and went through a brief glam rock phase.) As if to make up for lost time, I was pounding through genres.

From now on, there’s no looking back, full steam ahead on a one way track…

I’m not a very proficient Spotify user — I usually file songs into playlists labeled with the season and year, hoping to capture some essence of the times to revisit. By the time we arrived in Hong Kong, my summer 2019 playlist was swollen.

Out on the Verge on the rest of our lives tonight, top of the world and we’re dressed to the nines tonight…

Hong Kong was a blur. My mother was strung tight. We arrived in the midst of the city’s free speech movement that year, and we spoke Mandarin, not Cantonese. “We really don’t fit in here,” she muttered to me more than once, which must’ve been a blow to her since here we finally resembled everyone else. I was accustomed to not fitting in in the United States or Asia and had no problem navigating using English.

Afternoons were hot and sticky. Having grown used to dry Bay Area summers, we took shelter in the hotel room. While my mom napped, I sat next to her in bed and rediscovered a lot of stuff:

You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies…

But time gets bolder, children get older, and I’m getting older too

Today is the start of the rest of our lives, I can see it in your eyes…

, but Christy Carlson Romano’s “Could It Be” was the backdrop recording to fan edits of shows I did watch. It hit me, as I watched the lyrics scroll across the screen, that the first time I’d heard the song was a decade ago.

For most of my life up until then, ten years ago pointed to a time when I wasn’t quite culturally sentient. But now ten years ago meant 2009. I was eight. It was a strange feeling. Ten years would turn to twenty, and twenty to thirty, and thirty to… I was joining the ranks of adults.

Once my mother had discovered a hunk of months-old bread in the back of a pantry, and you could imagine the shape it was in, a spongy body decked out in fine white lace. I imagined the lace stretching before me now. The mycelium at my feet would extend outward into a cloudy distance, and at the end of each hypha would be a different self that grew off the choices I made. I was right now a wisp of a being, not yet fully formed.

At some point it had occurred to me that to move forward happily, maybe I should first try to replicate that old happiness, of being ten or eleven and always the most important person in the world. Back when I was an even wispier being and felt so much more solid. As I was adding fifth-grade staples (Owl City, Ke$ha, Dixie Chicks) to my playlist, my mother woke up.

“Having fun?” she mumbled. She had been making an effort recently to talk about our feelings.

“Good that you’re having fun,” she said. “You should have all the fun while you still can. Before you get to my age, ha.”

That’s encouraging, I thought. “OK,” I said.

My mother’s buddy had become a hotel manager in Guangzhou, which meant we got a room at a vastly discounted price and were treated to excursions to landmarks around Guangdong and in the neighboring province, Guangxi. The last time I slept in the same bed as my mother, I was six.

In the hot, heavy Guangzhou summer we took air-conditioned rides to museums and restaurants. The Nanyue emperor’s partially excavated tomb, the sleek asymmetric Guangzhou opera house. We hiked the park next to our hotel and took shelter under a pagoda during sudden torrential rains, and my mother and I peeled and fed each other mangosteens without meeting each other’s eyes. China’s transformation-in-progress was palpable: we walked through narrow, cloying-smelling streets surveilled by CCTV cameras overhead, and shared the road with rickshaws when we rode in cars. We drank egg milk pudding in tiny dessert shops adjacent to stores selling counterfeit designer clothing.

I watched my mother unravel in the sweltering air. Reserved and compact did not fit in the effusive Guangzhou, and she loosened considerably. She giggled when the chauffeur called her a pretty lady, and cracked jokes with fellow restaurant patrons, glowing with mirth. This was the most emoting I’d seen her do in a long time, but I hadn’t observed her as a person for years.

“She’s very quiet,” one of my mother’s buddy’s friends remarked about me.

As the crowning bit of his generosity, my mother’s buddy took us to a hot springs hotel. We arrived in the early evening and were treated to a meal with a couple of my mother’s buddy’s business associates. He was networking and hosting us at the same time. Waitresses brought out platters of yellow-skinned duck and sesame buns, food I didn’t know the names for, and they sat beside us and toasted us with whiskey, and pointed out each dish’s specialty and coaxed us to eat.

“You know your mother was the top of our class in chemistry?” my mother’s buddy asked.

“Yeah,” I said, glad I finally knew something.

The men took over as the dinner wore on. They chattered and laughed uproariously, teased the waitresses, shoveled food into their mouths and pronounced it delicious. Occasionally the conversation spun to me or my mother, where they invited us to toasts, but mostly they talked politics and business. Trump was a firebrand, but at least he inspired patriotism in youth. Couldn’t Xi do the same? China was old that way, poor for too long, the kids growing up learning other countries were better.

I did not know Chinese businessmen had such specific opinions on Trump. I don’t think my mother knew either. The tightness came back to her, and we sat stiffly next to each other. I am not sure if my mother was quiet because she had been gone from China for almost twenty years and had not followed the news, or because she was surrounded by unfamiliar men, or because she was surrounded by men. I didn’t trust myself to say the right words so I smiled and nodded along. I wished my mother would say something because I couldn’t. I hoped she wouldn’t say anything because she was my mother. I stared at her. She stared at her food, lips pursed, separating duck meat from bone in little birdlike pecks with her chopsticks.

She is so obvious, I thought. If she could be more poised — or maybe if I could be more poised, or worldly, for the both of us — wait, do I look like that when I’m self-conscious?

Dinner was a cacophony of sound, but our room, located in the middle of a grove of trees, was serene and beautiful. I shoved the chewing and laughing and smoking from earlier out of my mind. After we unpacked, I spun around slowly to memorize the lay of the beds, desks, lamps. By the time I opened the glass door to the fenced-in outdoors extension with the stone tub, my mother was already halfway in.

“It’s hot,” she said with a grimace.

The sun had almost completely set by now, and the sky was purple-gray. Steam curled around my mother’s face and body.

I stepped out of my slippers onto the porch boards, then took off my robe. The night was mild and comfortable; I didn’t even shiver. I placed my foot on the raised stone edge of the hot tub.

My mother chuckled. “I wasn’t lying, right? I think I’ll just do this.” She rose out of the water. Dripping, she crouched on the edge of the tub and scooped up a handful of water, tongue between her teeth, and poured it over her legs.

“But that’s not a soak,” I said. My legs were in now. They were pleasantly numb. Only the line where the water met air was slightly uncomfortable: cool and hot at once, as if my body couldn’t decide which.

She laughed self-consciously. “Yeah, I don’t think I’m doing this right.”

I averted my eyes. Her laugh had broken the naturalness of the moment — too aware, too nervous. I slid deeper in, feeling the line of water rise up to my ribs. I watched the outlines of my thighs waver from above and admired how firm and smooth they looked, even through a watery prism.

It started to rain. Pockmarks interrupted the water’s surface, and as the steam around us thinned out, the trees in the distance grew obscure. Mist, I thought, and raised my face. Little pinpricks of coolness landed on my cheeks. I could just slightly make out the dusting of stars on the warm, dark, open sky.

I closed my eyes to the sound of sloshing water. Behind my eyelids was the image of my mom, naked — how long has it been since I saw my mother naked? — and squatting beside the pool, her pale, plump limbs like hams. She was tall, but she was getting older.

“I’m going to leave,” my mother whispered. “Take a shower, then sleep. You can stay.”

My eyelids were sticky. I nodded — did I nod? — and kept my eyes closed. I was floating in the sky, tiny among the stars. I heard the soft sloshing as she rose out of the water, the receding pat of her wet footsteps on the wooden flooring, and the sliding sound of the door as she quietly went back inside.

I do not know how long I stayed in that tub. I was warm, light, weightless, numb. Just at one point my eyes slid open as easily as they’d slid closed, and the water was much cooler than it had been earlier, and I knew it was time to go.

When I finally rose, my muscles quivered. I felt like a newborn foal. I dragged my legs heavily through the water and clambered back onto the deck. The rain had stopped, but the night was cooler too. I shivered. I was slick, but also a little sticky, perhaps from the minerals in the water. I removed my robe from the hook on the fence and wrapped it back around me.

Inside, I saw my mother emerge from the bathroom, her hair stringy from a shower. She moved slowly, dreamlike. In two days, as she’d said to me earlier, we would head back to the hotel.

The last few times I’ve been to China I’ve been too young to truly cherish it, I thought. I’m old enough now. But in years I’ll remember merely images, not videos, and not necessarily the sequence that it happened either, and I don’t even know if the sounds will stick. Probably not, we forget sounds faster than we forget pictures. How is she alive? How is my mother alive, like this? Do things stay special as you get older? I thought the shine wears off. These are happy experiences, but these days will never come again.

The trees overhead rustled softly. The light from the moon dimmed. I stood on the warm porch boards, soaking in the sight of the dark stone tub at my feet, the soft yellow glow of our room beyond the sliding doors, my faint reflection fogged onto the glass. Inside, my mother’s solid fleshy body undressed to sleep.

Yiyi was the child of one of my mom’s college roommates. I had only a faint recollection of meeting her ten years earlier, when I was seven. She had been wearing a chartreuse-yellow dress with some kind of red pattern. She was grown now, half a head taller than me, still fond of ankle-length dresses and wide-brimmed hats that prevented tanning. When we walked out of the airport terminal in Sanya, it was her waving hi that I saw first.

“I’ve always wanted a little sister,” she said. She was three months older than me.

When we headed up to Beijing, Yiyi learned that I was fond of museums, and she suggested the Forbidden City to visit. We went on an overcast day. Yiyi led me by the elbow through courtyards and gardens she’d walked through on school trips as a kid, narrating the placards out loud because I couldn’t read them fast enough myself.

Vicki Xu

Vicki Xu

Features

Fall / Winter 2023

An Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen

Fall / Winter 2023

An Interview with Hua Hsu

Summer 2021

The Rest of Our Lives Tonight

Fall / Winter 2023

An Interview with Yiyun Li

Notes

Notes

In Joan is Okay, A Doctor Rearticulates Her Relationship to Work