Growing up in Baltimore, my world of Westerns was replete with white cowboys. When the idea for my novel Book of the Little Axe came to me, white men filled my first imaginings. This was despite knowing that the story of Western America is much more than the circumscribed narrative of white man versus everything in his path. I had to do the work of undoing all the tropes, bad history, the stereotypes, and in developing my story, I found myself in awe of all the writers before me who found and created stories of non-whites in a West that isn’t always easy to traverse or love. 

In researching my novel, I came across writings on Edward Rose, a Black man who was also a member of the Crow tribe. I learned that Rose was a guide to many of the early Western “explorers,” yet somehow he’s disappeared from most historians’ accounts of the time. Rose is featured in Book of the Little Axe where I attempt to illustrate the interconnectedness of multiple worlds and challenge how we think of the West. 

I hope the 9 books I’ve chosen by Native writers and writers of color will do for you what they did for me: open you just a little to the possibility of a broader definition of what it means to be of an expansive, bountiful, multifaceted land where our stories are embraced.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

I remember the first time reading this novel, my heart felt like it was in my throat. It’s thrilling, haunting and redemptive in the best and most vengeful way. Yes, I love revenge! Set on a reservation in North Dakota, the story is told by a thirteen-year-old Ojibwe boy whose mother has been brutally raped. Like any good Western, there are good guys and bad guys, but the good guys in this story are a family who love deeply and who find themselves impotent in the face of violence. The story grapples with the startling numbers of indigenous women who are victims of violent crimes, as well as the implications of a landmark Supreme Court case that limits prosecution of crimes committed on indigenous lands. As a lawyer myself, Erdrich taught me an additional thing or two about America’s quite fallible case law. To entertain and to teach is the novelist’s sweet spot. And Erdrich does this by giving life to a story through unforgettable characters who have big hearts.

Girls Burn Brighter by Shobha Rao

Vivid and alarming, Rao introduces us to two girls who find themselves part of a unique friendship in Indravalli, a small village in modern-day India. If you read lots of immigrant literature, the story of two impoverished girls struggling to make it isn’t all too unfamiliar, but Rao manages to zoom in with a tight lens to show us the stifling existence of domestic life for these two very courageous girls. When the story nods toward the United States, I, like someone who forgets not to buy into the myth of America, grow hopeful. Seattle will save these girls, won’t it?! But Rao manages to both invite and destroy symbols of the American West. She wields this power with a series of twists and turns through a network of human trafficking that take us through a violent and rugged Western America, while keeping our hearts hopeful that these two girls will make it back to each other. 

Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo

There is something restorative about reading Harjo’s words on Cree history and her ruminations on the intertwining lives of African and indigenous peoples. I smiled a lot while reading this memoir, not that it wasn’t heartbreaking at times, but it was as if I was remembering things I’d once known and was happy to be reminded again. “Magical realism” is what some might call Harjo’s more memorable encounters with the spiritual realm, but Harjo helps those of us who believe in an ancestral world remember our connections. She says she wishes in her writing for the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors to pass through to my language, my life” and Harjo accomplishes this. 

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed

“Oh Ishmael!” is what I exclaimed after reading this book. It feels like a mad mad carnival and yet the writing is so smart and so devilish in its critique of the usual American Western narrative that you can’t help but be smitten by this story. Reed tells the story of Loop Garoo Kid, a Black man who seeks revenge on Drag Gibson, a white cattleman who murders children. The story has no regard for time or place and feels like a smoldering jazz tune that is at once joyful and raw in its riffing criticism of capitalism, colonialism, and racism. What a mind Reed must have to write such a wild jaunt! Reading it for a second time, I feel like it could’ve been written last year and I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to revisit it. But as is often the case with the best books, they find you when you need them most. 

Cowboys and East Indians by Nina McConigley

McConigley won the Pen Open Book Award for this collection, largely about South Asians living in the west. The book opens when a young Indian girl has an encounter with white boys in Wyoming who don’t seem to know or want to know the difference between her brown and any other brown. They tell her to go back to picking cotton. McConigley handles these moments with care, for her writing is both lyrical and profound. Many of the stories, rich and strange, are set in the Wyoming where McConigley spent her childhood.

Wounded by Percival Everett

Wounded is a Western in the truest sense.  Set in Wyoming, John Hunt is a Black horseman who lives with his uncle and is making a peaceful life for himself after the death of his wife. Everett offers us a twisting story of out-of-towners who come to wreak havoc, and in the face of all this, we find apathy, revenge, horses, big sky, big hearts, and lots of American-style prejudices. Hunt is a character you’ll like immediately though you might not always know why.

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

 These stories, set in Colorado, will crush your little heart. And still you won’t want to turn away. Fajardo-Anstine’s work is gorgeous, and I found characters who, like the women in my family, heal with roots, don’t believe in coincidence, and pray in many languages. Their lives are complicated and messy and the love and tenderness between the women in these stories are a clear reflection of the love and tenderness Fajardo-Anstine put into this fine piece of work.

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Wilkerson’s book on America’s Great Migration is a must read for anyone interested in understanding why America looks as it does. Wilkerson details the journeys of three African Americans to New York, Illinois and California from the South, while shining a journalistic lens to the larger Black migration from the end of the Civil War into the 1970s. Having grown up in Baltimore and a frequent visitor to cities like Chicago and Oakland, I began to better appreciate the cultural landscapes of Northern and Western cities based on the migratory paths from certain locations in the Deep South, as well as to understand that like other periods of immigration, Black migration proved just as challenging. Though it is not a book set only in the West, I don’t think you can really understand any part of America without this tour de force. 

My Brother Was an Aztec by Natalie Diaz

I probably don’t have to tell you this, but great poetry can offer a reader as much of a thrill as  a kick-ass novel. And Diaz is a kick-ass poet. These poems are earnest and vibrant with stanzas that produce heartbreak and sometimes even sobering laughter. Diaz writes about her brother’s addiction and the impact on her family. The lines she writes makes us want to call our loved ones, for they show us the commitments and bonds and resentments that make family, family. Diaz offers a rich palette of modern Native life, both on and off the reservation.

Growing up in the East, I knew little about how indigenous bodies are hunted by external and internal forces so much like in my own community; this hunting makes for both sad and triumphant stories. As a Black woman, these poems felt both familiar as in I know these people, but also new, as in why don’t I know all this?  I am humbled by a collection that shows us how the west can be a setting for both a people’s nadir and also a people’s healing.

The post 9 Diverse Books Set in the American West appeared first on Electric Literature.

For ten years I’ve lived in an apartment in New York City with a balcony that sits below a roof deck. The roof deck has a trellis of wisteria that blooms every May. I can only see it if I step to the edge of my balcony and peer up, but the fragrance is one of my favorite things. As the season wears on, the petals drop, so many of them that they make drifts like snow around my flower pots. I have to sweep before a rain comes because otherwise they stick. Every year I’ve thought of taking the elevator up a flight and knocking on my neighbor’s door and telling him or her (I don’t even know!) how much I love this wisteria. I’ve imagined seeing the trellis in full, in all its glory, from a different perspective. But I never have. And now this year I can’t.

For a time in Munich, I lived in a university complex for academics and their families. Again we had a little balcony and because the shared washer and drier didn’t work very well, I often used the railing to dry some of our laundry. One day I looked down and saw that a pair of my five-year-old son’s Superman underwear had dropped onto the patio of the ground floor apartment, two floors below us. I was the only resident that year who spoke only English (a huge embarrassment), and I dreaded the idea of going down to retrieve the underwear and trying to make myself understood in terrible German. I hesitated for a day or two and then the little mound of red and blue cotton was gone—and with it, an opportunity for connection, no matter how awkward.

At my favorite cafe on Hudson Street there is an old pair of friends who are regulars. I suppose I am a regular in that I come to this cafe at least once or twice a week to have breakfast and write, but these two women are there every day. I always see them if I pass the place while doing other errands, and I don’t believe I have ever been there when they weren’t. One is tall, the other is short. They must be in their late seventies. We’ve shared smiles, but I’ve never said a proper hello. I put a version of them in my second novel, Rules for Visiting, and I always imagined I would tell them one day. Maybe give them copies of the book. Now this year I can’t and because of their age, I’m worried about them. Will they survive? Will the café? I don’t even know their real names.

Why have I been so ridiculous about my neighbors? Why didn’t I try harder to meet these people? Now I see videos of musicians playing for their neighbors in a building’s airshaft, or a pair of children performing a duet for their neighborhood on a front porch, or that community that is putting teddy bears in the windows for little kids to spot when they are out on a safe and socially-distanced walk, and all this neighborliness looks heavenly.

I want more. I want another chance.

I know that for every one of these heartwarming stories, there’s someone tweeting about the ‘joy’ of discovering, in the middle of a lockdown, that her neighbor is an aspiring drummer. And I share the city dweller’s deep belief that when so much space is shared, you must carve out a zone of solitude around your home to maintain sanity. This is how I explain the behavior of one of my neighbors. A few years ago, he and his sons, who had knocked with a school fundraiser, spent ten minutes walking through our apartment. He said he was curious about the floor plan, so we invited him in. He has not made eye contact with us since.

Part of the problem is the repetition, the ongoingness, of being longtime neighbors. What obligations do you have to someone you merely live near? And should that change once you’ve been invited into their space, no matter how briefly? This is something we may all wonder now that we are Zooming and FaceTiming into each other’s homes.

But my grumpy neighbor is the extreme. During Hurricane Sandy, others in my building gathered in the interior hallways during the early hours of the storm. We made a potluck of it, drank wine, let the children play far from any windows. For months afterward, we greeted each other warmly whenever we saw each other. As time wore on, those greetings got shorter and shorter. Nevertheless, we smile, note how the children have grown, catch up on bits and pieces. Eventually these snippets make up a childhood, a generation, a life. I imagine the same thing will happen with all the buildings, streets, and neighborhoods pulling together in this time. Connections are being forged, even as we keep our distance. Let’s hold onto them in the after.

To all my past neighbors, I’m sorry. To my current ones, I can’t wait to share the elevator with you again. Let’s not take out our phones before the door closes. I want to know all your dogs’ names. Let’s linger by the mailboxes (if we still have US mail) and greet each other warmly. And next May, if this pandemic is over, I’m going upstairs to knock on the wisteria gardener’s door.

 

Jessica Francis Kane is the author of Rules for Visiting. The paperback is published on 18 June by Granta Books and available for pre-order (UK) and out now from Penguin (US).

Cover Image © T. Kiya

The post To All My Past Neighbors appeared first on Granta.

Date: Thursday 12 March 2020
Reported deaths in the UK: 10
Reported cases in the UK: 590
Epicentre of the virus: Wuhan

 

For a few days this March staying at home felt anarchic. The World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus a global pandemic and although the virus was creeping up around us here, life in the UK continued largely as normal. Our government simply told us to wash our hands. I called my friends in Beijing. They’d been in lockdown for weeks and spoke of what they’d been following in Wuhan: the havoc this illness makes on the body, any body; how it overwhelms healthcare resources; kills medics who are too exposed. They told me to stay at home. And so in my house we decided to join the Beijing lockdown and hope that our government would make this the plan for everyone in the UK.

That evening we listened to our prime minister speak on the radio. His strategy he said was to ‘delay’ the spread of the virus. Delay. Why not prevent? Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea, and now China was preventing the spread. His single piece of advice for the elderly, those most at risk of death, was to avoid cruise ship holidays. It was an absurd thing to say. Beneath his words I heard Dominic Cummings (his chief advisor), cavalier, cynical, nonchalant, as though he’d taken the view that pensioners were dispensable, a drain on the state.

 

‘It’s naughty to say ‘stupid’, mummy!’ my three-year-old said at bedtime. He told me quite seriously that I must stop shouting at the radio. He was upset by how furious I seemed when Johnson spoke, how worried, how out of control. But it was frightening to feel that our government wasn’t taking care of us. Or was it that we were overreacting? How could we be sure?

Luckily there were other good sources for guidance. The editor of the Lancet, the UK’s medical journal, was a vocal critic of our government’s approach. Among friends we shared articles, posted them on Twitter. BBC News had begun blanket coverage of the virus a few days earlier. Having worked there throughout my career I often find I’m critical of the news, but there was something about the corporation’s decision to focus on this story, and the calm, concerned tone that presenters and reporters had fallen into, that moved me and I tuned in. The next day the Premiere League cancelled all matches. The day after Apple closed its stores. There was reassurance in the idea that even if our government wasn’t responding then individuals, institutions, companies were taking this into their own hands.

During those early days the coronavirus was like permanent surround sound. Our red, scoured hands were wrapped to our phones obsessively retrieving and circulating information. Panic fuzzed around us. It was like being on a precipice that at any moment could give way. For a second I recognised this feeling from childhood when my father was diagnosed with a terminal illness and I was suddenly overly aware that anybody I loved could be taken. Now everybody in the world might share this fear, all of us forced to face the fragility of life at exactly the same time.

I’d just managed to convince my mother, now in her seventies, to stay at home. She’s rebellious and freedom-loving; she was expelled from school as a teenager for skipping class and running across a field to a sweet shop. It had taken days of forwarding her terrifying articles, but my brother was sending her different messages and encouraging her to go out. He had his own legitimate worries – about her feeling afraid and isolated on her own. Running a small business and responsible for his employees, the implications of staying at home without government endorsement or support seemed impossible to my brother, whereas for my family of freelancers, the decision to stay at home may have been easier to make. So my brother and I found ourselves in a battle over what we thought was best. I’d passive-aggressively dump articles on his WhatsApp, he’d respond infuriated. We’d meet on FaceTime, I’d see his face, miss him; we’d have a tender conversation about something else. Different technology platforms contained both our friction and fondness.

All our ‘real-life’ interactions seemed to be taking place across platforms now too: conversations through open windows, closed doors, across rooftops, doorsteps to front gates, from the pavement up to a balcony on the second floor.

At this moment there was still time for existential thinking. In the pre-modern age people often thought that when the natural world turned on its inhabitants it was a warning from God. This is rooted in our scriptures: the floods in Noah’s Ark, the ten plagues in Exodus. To what extent has this religious thinking seeped into our modern world? Even the secular among us, do we feel punished? Taught a lesson? Awoken? Do we try to find meaning in it? Or do we explain with science? As unbelieving as I am, I can’t resist trying to make sense of the virus in this older way. It did feel like a comeuppance of some kind. The coronavirus seemed to demand immediate responses to the questions we’d been struggling with for years. Are we able to sacrifice our consumer comforts for a greater good? What happens if we close our borders? What do we value more life or economy? Who can afford to put their life before their need for income? Who owes what to zero-hour workers? Climate change, Brexit, populism, inequality. The virus re-colours the issues that have been dividing us, the ways we’ve let things go. We thought we’d received our punishment for leaving all this unresolved when Boris Johnson won an election in the UK, when Trump won in the USA, but what we didn’t realise was that the ultimate penalty would be their leadership during a global pandemic.

A friend FaceTimed us, my son in his bath, her daughter in her bath. The kids splashed about as if they were together in the same room. After the squealing I realised that for the first time all week, for the three minutes of that call, I’d forgotten the virus.

 

 

Date: Monday 23 March
Reported deaths in the UK: 335
Reported daily deaths in the UK: 54
Reported cases in the UK: 6650
Epicentre of the virus: Europe

 

Birds sing and we hear them. The streets are quiet. Stars prickle back into the night sky. Everything has stopped to prioritise life. We’ve stopped travelling to work unless it’s essential, we’re not shopping unless it’s essential, we’re burning fewer fossil fuels, we’re not busying about. Our government finally instituted a lockdown, and all that we thought was impossible a few months ago has become the new normal. It turns out that we won’t collapse on the street if we don’t hold a cappuccino in a paper cup. We barely notice they’re gone. In many countries around the world life is being put before economy for the first time in modern capitalism. It’s beautiful, for a moment.

Not only this, but also our government’s compensation packages explode some of our myths about money. We can now see that money is not finite; the government doesn’t need to rely on our taxes to reduce its deficit. It can print money, or add zeroes to its balance, without sparking inflation if done in the right way. It can afford, for example, to fund a Universal Basic Income. Homeless people are given housing in hotels. There’s a moment of hope. People are asking: if we can do this in exceptional times, what can we do after them?

People have, over the last few weeks, been panic-buying, stock-piling, even occasionally wrestling over goods in supermarkets. But it turns out that we can still get the stuff we need. Who is making it? How does it arrive at the shops? To our doors? With what precaution? What risk to life? This is the world as it was, but now heightened to the nth degree.

The coronavirus begins to act like the ‘show all formatting’ option on a Word document, exposing the workings of our society for all of us to see. A gap in life expectancy between rich and poor has been growing in the UK over the last fifteen years. Now the discrepancy is not just about a future date, decades from now, a fiction, a statistic, a number with a decimal point inside a bracket on a category. Now it’s immediate. Today, tomorrow, people working on the supply chain making and distributing essential goods, working in hospitals, their lives are potentially threatened three weeks from now while the rest of us are relatively protected at home, tapping on screens.

Maybe this is why the coronavirus coverage feels different. During the last few years the BBC’s commitment to balance has meant that discussions have been polarised: climate change activists versus deniers; globalists versus Brexiters. Now a single value unites the coverage: what chance is our government giving each of us at life. The news has become Hippocratic. A journalist from The Times picked up a leak that Dominic Cummings’ initial advice on the virus had been (paraphrased): ‘Herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die – too bad.’ Journalists across the span of left and right leaning media outlets lean together in their horror.

On Thursday night we all stand outside our front doors at eight to Clap for our Carers, to thank the people working in our healthcare system. People are raucous with excitement at this expression of solidarity, and to be focusing on something that people feel positive about and grateful for: the courage and care of doctors, nurses and hospital workers, and the NHS which provides free healthcare to all.

 

 

Date: Saturday 4 April
Reported Deaths in the UK: 4313
Reported Daily Deaths in the UK: 708
Reported Cases in the UK: 41,903
Epicentre of the Virus: USA

 

Lockdown isn’t only about being at home, in one place, but also in one time: the immediate present. Socially agreed upon hours have vanished from the day; there are no more commuting times, no rush hour, no ‘after-work’. We no longer feature in slots in other people’s diaries, we don’t consult diaries. There is no past except for before the virus, and no future except for a thought about when the fridge might be empty and a plan for how to refill it.

Insomnia trends on Twitter.

Of all of us here, it’s our three-year-old who knows best how to be at home. On our living room floor we are diamond thieves (diamond thievery is a trope in Western children’s animation); he’s a jailer, I’m in prison (this one he likes to repeat a lot); he’s Heracles carrying out murderous tasks against wild beasts. Children build the world with their imagination more obviously than we do. I go out for a walk on the high street. Everything is shut. I pass a French clothing shop where I once bought a taupe cotton cardigan. Suddenly the making of these clothes, originating on a piece of paper in Paris, via a factory somewhere very far away, and ending up on this particular street corner seems like a hysterical act.

Just as the 2008 government bailout was distributed to financial institutions at the expense of austerity on the British public, this time the government’s stimulus package reaches businesses and people in fixed employment but leaves out the UK’s precarious workforce. People are losing their jobs, not being compensated, going to food banks so as not to starve, and with schools closed there are no free lunches being served to children who rely on them.

The world economy, we hear, is falling apart. But isn’t economy the sum of all the things that we do and we make? And can’t this pause be an opportunity to re-think, start again? Many people now wish for an index of companies that are ecological and ethical, all the ones that have treated their employees well during the virus, helped them to survive. Surely this is the time to build new businesses and an economy that fits this earth now.

The NHS doesn’t have enough personal protective equipment: gowns, masks, gloves. Nor are there enough ventilators to help their patients recover. We hear a manager of manufacturing firms on the radio who’s been trying to contact the government about supplying them but received no reply. Will is everywhere. The national effort is enormous. Instead of listening to the radio I want to work for it again. Being at home is nothing like anarchy. It’s luxury.

 

 

Date: Sunday 12 April 2020
Reported deaths in the UK: 10,612
Reported daily deaths in the UK: 737
Reported cases: 84,279 (includes our prime minister, his chief advisor and our health secretary)
Epicentre: USA

 

‘Are wizards real? Are baddies real? Are police real? I think I saw two once,’ our three-year-old asks us. The outside world gets murkier, further away, smudged. I’m sure I must be missing my old life but I can’t particularly remember it. Some days at home we don’t know how to look after each other. We get it wrong. We start again. The news becomes too awful to listen to. We tune out. It’s difficult to take in the enormity of the loss, the failures, our failures. We’ve become immune to the numbers. When Italy had as many deaths a day as we have now we were shocked, devastated, afraid. Now we can’t take in the volume of the loss. Slowly a new way of life is becoming established, and again we’re too busy to think.

Our prime minister leaves intensive care and tells us, starry-eyed, that the NHS is ‘powered by love’. As if we didn’t know. Over the last ten years Conservative governments have reduced funding to the NHS as demands on it have increased. We wonder if he might now start giving the NHS the money it needs, but epiphanies often dissipate when the everyday returns.

For now, the workings of our society still remain visible on every street. Dots in the spaces, arrows on the line-breaks. I go for a morning run. Nobody else is around apart from a guy in a high-vis jacket sweeping the street. We greet each other with a warmth and sincerity that is rare in normal times here. He has a pride in what he’s doing, and I a realisation about how easy this is for me in comparison. That was true before the coronavirus, but now it’s impossible to imagine or pretend it’s any other way. Although lockdown conditions might not be the best for us to re-think everything, if we don’t now use the clarity the coronavirus gives us – when we step back out to our cities heaving again, the moment might have slipped away.

Our three-year-old finds that staying at home is beginning to drag. He says that he’d like to go to a playground, and he misses his grandmothers. I ask him whether he prefers his life before the coronavirus came to the UK or after. ‘Before,’ he pauses. ‘And after. I like after and before.’

 

 

author’s note: All data refers to reported figures. Real figures are not known because from 12 March only people admitted to hospital were being tested in the UK. Real death figures are also unknown. Causes of death may not be clear if people haven’t been tested. Towards the end of March the government increased its targets for testing but hasn’t yet come close to meeting these targets. We attend to these reported numbers nonetheless.

Image courtesy of the author

The post Diary of a London Lockdown appeared first on Granta.

As I was reading Days of Distraction, Alexandra Chang’s debut novel, a pandemic swallowed the news cycle, infiltrated my thoughts and implanted itself into the arc of the story, inseparable now from the story of a young woman struggling to find her place in her career, family and love relationship. Such is the nature of modern life, the novel suggests. For its narrator, life proceeds in app platforms, work chat streams, text messages, media, memories, and of course, IRL interaction—and this is reflected in the novel’s fragmented form. Chang often writes in succinct bursts of narration, cutting through the din, allowing incisive commentary about racism, sexism, and the everyday multitudes of being Asian American. 

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Cathy Erway: Your book is written in fragments—the story of the protagonist’s journey from a technology reporter in the Bay area to following her boyfriend to upstate New York for his grad school is interspersed with flashbacks, reflection and often snippets of media, like historical records. Do you think that in this day in age, our lives and our decisions are more influenced by the things we’ve read, at some point in time?

Alexandra Chang: I do think that’s the case, at least for me. I, in any given day, will read bits from articles, read Tweets, go on Instagram, watch TV,  then read a book. There are so many sources of information that I’m taking in during any given period of time, and I might not be aware of each individual one affecting my state of mind or an opinion that I might develop. The form allows for a lot of different sources to fold into the narrative in a way that, for me, felt more natural to the way that I take in information. 

I was also interested in the fragmented form because it’s really malleable and can dramatize the psychological and emotional state. The fragments dramatize the ways the narrator in the book is grasping to find a sense of self, and then at times failing, and how she’s looking to various sources, whether it’s in her own past or something that her parents or coworkers say or doing research.

CE: As the narrator is struggling to feel at home after leaving her job and the city that felt like home to her to live with her boyfriend across the country, there is a fragment from Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir, Woman Warrior. Did her work have an influence on yours? I noticed there weren’t too many other novels excerpted.

AC: I read Woman Warrior when I was an undergraduate, in my sophomore or junior year. Before that, I had never read a memoir by a Chinese-American woman… It was a foundational text to me and a book that I have gone back to time and again, so it felt apt to include a bit of it in the novel. 

CE: Did you consider writing this story as a memoir? There are a lot of parallels between your life and that of the narrator’s — being a reporter for tech publications, then traveling across the country to live with your now-husband as he attended grad school.

AC: No, I never considered writing it as a memoir, mostly because I didn’t think my life was really interesting enough to be put down as memoir. I am also not as familiar with the genre and form. For me, fiction is where I feel comfortable, and where I can access and hopefully put down on the page some emotional truths about my existence and the way I see the world without having to exactly adhere to my own experiences. In a lot of ways the book drew from my life, but in many other ways it strays and it’s stylized, and in that way it’s fictional—it feels very fictional to me. 

CE: Speaking of fragments in your book that are historical records, there are a couple pages that had back-to-back clippings from American newspapers the late 19th century, discussing Chinese American immigrants. Then the narrator follows it with:

“Excerpt 1: Pit minority races against one another to benefit white supremacy. The creation of the model minority. Excerpt 2: Thirteen years later: This model minority no longer benefits white supremacy. Therefore, no more allowed in this country.”

Why do you think it was important to include these pieces, specifically? 

AC: As the narrator is trying to figure out her place in the world, she seeks out these historical documents and sees these parallels between the past and the present and [those two clippings] are important for her to recognize her place in the world as tied to a history of white supremacy in the United States. 

Racism against Asian Americans is not something that exists outside of racism against all marginalized people.

For me growing up, I was in predominantly white spaces—and this is reflected in the book in certain places—that I did sometimes have this desire to fit in or to be accepted in white society. As I got older, I started to realize that chasing assimilation was not actually the way I wanted to live. Also, racism against Asian Americans is not something that exists outside of racism against all marginalized people, so in this moment, the narrator is pointing out and recognizing how racism against Asian Americans is part of a larger system of white supremacy, how white supremacy can utilize one race against another. 

CE: Did you happen to read a recent op-ed by former presidential candidate Andrew Yang that is receiving a lot of pushback from the Asian American community?

AC: Yes, that’s an example of what I was talking about, where there is this desire for assimilation and to prove one’s humanity and existence to white society. That the burden is on Asian Americans to do this work. I could have related to that feeling when I was younger, but I have very much grown out of that. It’s definitely not the message I would want Asian Americans to hear and to follow, and I was glad to see such a concerted pushback from the community. 

In the book, the narrator is concerned with these individual moments of racism that happen to her as an Asian American woman, but she’s also on this path to better understanding how that fits into this larger system of racism which affects more than just her. It doesn’t seem like Andrew Yang has considered this yet.

CE: Unfortunately, your book’s publication coincides with a rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans. How does it feel to publish a book that explores Asian American identity in a time where racism against this group is making headlines?

AC: It’s strange and sad to think that my book might be more “relevant” now because of the increasing visibility of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia. The book takes place is in 2012 and 2013, and a lot of it is about the ways in which the narrator experiences and navigates veiled forms of racism—microaggressions from supposedly well-intentioned people, lack of visibility, lack of access to opportunities, an overarching feeling of loneliness. At one point in revision, I cut a scene where a friend of the narrator’s, during the heat of an argument, calls her a “chink.” It felt too melodramatic to me at the time, too much of a departure from the more minor, but persistent and insistent, experiences of racism in the book. Today, seeing Asians in America not only increasingly called this and other racist slurs but also physically assaulted—that scene feels, sadly, ordinary.

CE: In the book, the narrator struggles a bit with her interracial relationship. There is one passage where the narrator observes that her white boyfriend, J, can’t hear the difference in tones when she says something in Chinese. It feels like a loaded description. Do you think this reflects an inherent inability on his part to really understand her or her culture?

A lot of this book is about this experience of struggling to find a way to exist in the world authentically beyond outside perception.

AC: I didn’t necessarily write it with that specific intention. I wrote that section from personal experience, knowing that my white husband and many white friends aren’t able to hear the differences in the inflections of Mandarin. But there’s another moment where J persists in calling the narrator the family nickname even though he pronounces it differently than her family does. That is a moment that exists in this gray area, where he isn’t able to access this person who she feels she is with her family, but he persists in calling her this name. So for her, she starts to think of it as this different version of herself. I do think all of these moments add up throughout the book to show how even in this intimate relationship, they can’t ever fully understand one another. 

CE: Your novel begins with a fragment about how people underestimate the narrator’s height. Have people underestimated you?

AC: What’s interesting about that first paragraph is that it has always been the first paragraph of this novel, it has never changed. It speaks to this struggle that the narrator has in defining who she is, while she being very aware of the ways people perceive and misperceive her. It’s also about these distances in how she wants to be and how she experiences the world based off of other people’s/society’s perspective of her. 

I have been in many situations where I’ve been underestimated or made to feel small. In the workplace, for example, not being acknowledged for the work that I’ve done or having to do a lot more in order to be acknowledged or rewarded. A lot of this book is about this experience of struggling to find a way to exist in the world authentically beyond outside perception, and of course, that is something that I also still struggle with today. 

CE: Is there anything else you want to say about your book?

AC: I wanted to add that there seems to be a renaissance in Asian American literature right now and I feel like very lucky to be part of this resurgence—there are so many books by Asian American authors that have come out this year and the months to come, so I just wanted to shout out a few of the ones I’ve read and loved, including: Meng Jin’s Little Gods, C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold, Kevin Nguyen’s New Waves, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, and Maxine Mei-Fung Chung’s The Eighth Girl. I’m also excited to read Tracy O’Neill’s Quotients, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, and Asako Serizawa’s Inheritors.  

Even though this book addresses a lot about the experience of feeling invisible or feeling underestimated as an Asian American woman, what is really invigorating and heartening right now is that I do see many more stories by Asian American authors coming out and to be a part of that is really great. 

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