 |
| Courtesy of Susan Deragon |
Kirstin Chen's new novel, Bury What We Cannot Take (Little A, March 2018), has been named a Most Anticipated Upcoming Book by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle, among others. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She was the fall 2017 NTU-NAC National Writer in Residence in Singapore, and has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Born and raised in Singapore, she currently resides in San Francisco. Visit her at kirstinchen.com
EC: Welcome to
AsianBooksBlog, Kirstin Chen and congratulations on the launch of your most
recent book, Bury What We Cannot Take.
KCC: Thanks so much, Elaine! Thrilled to be chatting with
you.
EC: To start off our dialogue, will you give us the skinny
(or taster!) on what Bury What You Cannot Take is about and also, who are our
main characters?
KCC: Bury What We Cannot Take opens in a once-opulent villa on a tiny island in Southern China
in 1957. A brother and sister catch their grandmother taking a hammer to a
portrait of Chairman Mao. The family gets in trouble with the authorities and
must flee to Hong Kong, but when they attempt to get the necessary permits,
they're forced to leave one child behind as proof that they'll return. Bury What
We Cannot Take explores how we rationalize impossible decisions, persist in the
aftermath of agonizing loss, and probe the limits of familial love.
EC: How long did the
entire process take, from initial inspiration to completion?
KCC: I heard the story that would inspire the novel’s
premise back in 2010, but I didn’t start work on the novel until almost a year
later. And then, soon after I’d begun Bury What We Cannot Take, my agent sold
my first novel, Soy Sauce for Beginners, so I was pulled away for substantial
periods of time to get that book ready for publication. So all in all, the
entire process took about 8 years (yikes!)
EC: What was the initial inspiration?
KCC: In 2010, I went out to
dinner with a dear friend, who told me a story about his family: his father was
the little boy who saw his grandmother hammer the portrait of Chairman Mao, and
his aunt was the little girl who was left behind when the family fled. That
premise was so vivid and compelling that I eventually asked if I could use it
in my novel. (And to be clear, all of the details from my friend’s story are in
chapter 1 of the novel; everything else, I imagined, from the setting to the
characters to the precise time period to the rest of the plot.)
EC: Were there bumps and hiccups along the research process or was that all pretty smooth sailing?
KCC: So many bumps and hiccups! I knew very little about my
chosen setting and even less about the time period, so I began by reading very
broadly: novels by writers like Eileen Chang and Yu Hua, memoirs, history and
economic texts. I visited Gulangyu (as Drum Wave Islet is more commonly known).
I spoke to my aunt, who knew the region and time period well. The most
challenging part of research was knowing when to stop. At a certain point, after
I'd been working on the novel for about a year, I realized I could spend
another 10 years on research and still have more to learn. That’s when I put
away my research and forced myself to just keep writing, knowing that I would
go back and fact check later.
EC: How different was the process for you (in terms of
research, writing, revising) between your first book, Soy Sauce for Beginners
and Bury What You Cannot Take, your second book?
KCC: The writing process for each book was quite
different—not because of the topics, necessarily, but because of where I was in
my writing career when I worked on each one. I started Soy Sauce for Beginners
when I was a graduate student in an MFA program. There, I could count on
workshop deadlines and feedback to keep me motivated. (And, in retrospect, the
workshop model probably encouraged me to over-revise too early in the process
when I should have been focused on just getting to the end.)
By the time I started work on my second book, I had to
figure out how to create my own deadlines and keep myself motivated. My dear
friend and former classmate Matt Salesses and I committed to sending each other
a thousand words a day, and that’s pretty much how I drafted Bury What We
Cannot Take. In fact, it worked so well, that we’ve stuck with the program
through our new projects.
EC: You recently completed a residency at Nanyang
Technological University Singapore. What was that like? Are there highlights
you’d like to share with us?
KCC: I had a wonderful time at NTU! In addition to getting a
ton of writing done, I got to teach an introductory creative writing class, and
the students were a delight. They were diligent and enthusiastic—and often
asked for permission to go over the required word count. At the end of the
semester, they turned in essays reflecting on their writing journeys, and about
a quarter of them said they wanted to go on to be professional writers. (Again,
this was an intro class filled with accounting, business, and psychology
majors.) I found that so heartening.
EC: You also recently
wrote a very interesting piece for LitHub on voice and cultural
appropriation. How does it tie in with
your writing and your voice?
KCC: In hindsight, I can say that my anxiety around cultural
appropriation made me approach the research for Bury What We Cannot Take with
more rigor; it also made me a more careful and empathic writer. Too often, I
think, writers view the conversation around cultural appropriation as something
limiting, but for me it’s been quite the opposite.
EC: Food seems to
figure quite prominently in your writing – in the title ‘soy sauce’ and content
for your first book, and in the role of French pastries in Bury What You Cannot
Take. I’m curious about how you see food
illuminating our social and cultural relationships and how one brings that
about in fiction.
KCC: I’m Singaporean and I’m Chinese, so, yes, food is a big
part of my life and of my writing. Because I write mainly Asian characters and
settings for a predominantly American audience, food is just one more way to explore
my characters’ cultures and customs in a manner that (I hope) never feels
forced.
EC: Who are your literary influences? Who, in contemporary
literature today, do you admire or you think is worth watching out for?
KCC: I find the first question quite hard to answer because
when I think about the books that have meant the most to me through the years,
I must conclude that I write nothing like their authors. For instance, the book
that made me want to start writing, back when I was a college sophomore, is Bad
Behavior by Mary Gaitskill. As you well know, her writing is edgy and
subversive and dark—and mine is quite the opposite—and yet something about the
honesty and rawness of those stories transfixed me and made me want to try to
write.
EC: Book marketing. You are about to embark or have just
embarked on a full-scale book marketing plan for Bury What You Cannot
Take. What’s your advice for emerging
writers tackling the book marketing process, and do tell us where audiences
around the world can catch you live.
KCC: My approach to publicity has changed a little between
publishing my first and second books. This time around, instead of trying to do
a little of everything, I’ve decided to focus only on the aspects of publicity
that I enjoy and do well. For instance, I am not a natural essay writer. It
takes me a lot of time and effort to write a good essay, so I’ll do it if a
publication asks me to, but I’m not pitching various websites and magazines and
churning essays out by the dozen. On the other hand, I’m happy to give readings
or participate on panels because I don’t get stage fright and I enjoy meeting
readers. (My upcoming events can be
found here: http://kirstinchen.com/events/)
EC: This book was
absolutely gripping for me. What’s the
secret to writing a literary page-turner?
KCC: I’m glad to hear it! I thought a lot about the pacing
of this book, especially because it’s told from multiple rotating
points-of-view. We’ve all had the experience of reading a novel with multiple
points-of-view and falling in love with one of the perspectives, and then
impatiently speed-reading through the chapters told from other perspectives to
get back to the character we most care about. So, I knew that if I was going to
rotate through different characters’ points-of-view, each of them had to be
compelling enough to earn the right to tell their side of the story. I tried to
make sure that each character had strong, meaningful desires that were often at
odds with at least one other member of the family, and I think that helped to
create momentum and suspense.
EC: This book was
absolutely gripping for me. What’s the
secret to writing a literary page-turner (tongue-in-cheek question)?
KCC: I’m glad to hear it! I thought a lot about the pacing
of this book, especially because it’s told from multiple rotating
points-of-view. We’ve all had the experience of reading a novel with multiple
points-of-view and falling in love with one of the perspectives, and then
impatiently speed-reading through the chapters told from other perspectives to
get back to the character we most care about. So, I knew that if I was going to
rotate through different characters’ points-of-view, each of them had to be
compelling enough to earn the right to tell their side of the story. I tried to
make sure that each character had strong, meaningful desires that were often at
odds with at least one other member of the family, and I think that helped to
create momentum and suspense.
EC: Thank you for spending time and sharing your
insights and thoughts with us on AsianBooksBlog. We wish you every success with
your wonderful book.
Details: Bury What We Cannot Take is published by Little A, and widely available in various formats, priced in local currencies.