Hyphen

At the Heart of Every Story Is a Mystery:

Evelyn Ch'ien — Thu, 07 May 2026 04:17:56 +0000

When Dahee Shin was nine years old, she made a promise to protect her favorite cousin, Channing, who has always been like a sister to her. Now, at thirty, Dahee has found herself in a Korean American community in a New England beach town, once more running to the rescue of the debt-ridden Channing. Ever the idealist, Channing—who has spent her life haunted by the tragic story of Chunhyang and Mongryong, Korea’s version of Romeo & Juliet—has fallen in love with Minjae Oh, all the while fending off the advances of powerful, manipulative Kent Cho, a local politician. As Channing and Minjae’s romance blossoms, and as Kent’s suspicion and obsession grow, Dahee begins to realize that it may be up to her to make sure her cousin and beloved escape Chunhyang and Mongryong’s doomed ending.

As the meet-cute romance pivots into a gripping mystery swirling around a town’s hidden financial corruption, Dreamt I Found You explores the double-edged community dynamics of an insular, small town. Lyrical, tender, and propulsive, Dreamt I Found You takes readers on a transformative journey.

Hyphen: I’ve always been a fan of Romeo & Juliet stories. What’s your relationship to these tales of thwarted love?

Han: I think every book I’ve written is about how stories we hear and read when we’re growing up impact our sense of what’s possible for our lives. We might agree with those stories or prove them wrong, but our imaginations work in intricate ways from the very beginning.

I was told early on how dangerous romantic love could be. My grandmother was disowned by her family for marrying my grandfather, since they were from different classes. She moved to the north side of the Korean peninsula with her husband (and my father was born there), but when the Korean War began and men were conscripted, her husband and son fled south. They assumed they’d return when things calmed down, but the border closed. My father never saw his mother again. Cautionary tale? You could say so.

I was told early on how dangerous romantic love could be.

I romanticized my grandparents’ relationship when I was a little girl. My father missed his mother terribly. I was also repeatedly told I looked like my grandmother, so there’s that too! Later, my college boyfriend had a coffee mug depicting a Chinese Romeo and Juliet story and it made me wonder about a Korean version. So I asked my aunt—she’s the great storyteller in our family—and she told me the story of Chunhyang.

Hyphen: Myths and fairy tales play a big role in our understanding of love. K-dramas too! Why do you think we love to see these familiar kinds of stories play out in different ways?

Han: Love is such a private choice, but it’s also so public—people have rules about who you’re allowed to date. And I think that’s why these stories have endured—K-dramas and the like—because love stories can be subversive. The Tale of Chunhyang story spread widely during the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early part of the 20th century. Part of the reason it’s endured for so long in Korea is that it’s a tale of resistance.

As a love story, it comes in under the radar. But if you’re opposing any kind of rule, or any kind of law, that’s subversive. It’s a rallying cry. These days, we’re also dealing with a really oppressive government that’s taking away rights, so I think it’s a great time to have this kind of story out there.

Hyphen: Let’s talk about your beautiful and haunting setting. I grew up in a coastal resort town (I was a townie!), and I really connected to East End. Could you tell me about crafting this town? What were your experiences as a kid like in New England?

Han: As immigrants, my family had a rocky start when we first arrived. Eventually, we landed in a three-family house in Providence, Rhode Island, with my aunt, uncle, and cousin living upstairs. I was four years old, and I have great memories of playing with my brothers and cousin on the grass and in our large concrete driveway. We moved away to Dayton, Ohio, and then to Jamestown, New York, but every summer, we visited my aunt and uncle in Rhode Island.

It meant so much to me to return; it was like a homecoming. There were more Korean families in Providence than in Dayton or Jamestown, so East End is a fictional version of that feeling. A close friend of mine now has a house on Cape Cod where she hosts an informal writer’s retreat, so I get to visit New England in the summers again. I get the most writing done during those weeks.

In terms of a large Korean community in a small town—one can dream, right? I think when you’re an insider versus an outsider, sometimes it appears a certain way to you, so that’s why Dahee thinks it’s so wonderful when she first arrives. Then she finds out it’s much more complicated.

Hyphen: I was struck by the narrator’s vantage point. Dahee is Channing’s cousin, and has both the objective remove of someone outside the love story, but she also has her own projections about love, family, and power. She reminds me a bit of a Korean-American female Nick Carraway! Why was it important to have her as the narrator?

Han: I love that you thought of The Great Gatsby. Nick is a fascinating character. You mentioned Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story earlier. I always thought the minor characters were really pivotal in those stories. Okay, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are featured in the Stoppard play, but what about the nurse and the friar? What about Anita? We know they were key to the tragic ending, so why not give them their own story? My cousin Sherry and I are the only girls in a family of a lot of boys, and we’ve always been really close. I’d do anything for her, so she’s the inspiration for Channing—though she’s nothing like Channing.

A lot of my books come out of me circling ideas. I was really interested in writing about two Korean women who had different approaches to life. And I wondered, why is that? For the two characters, did it have to do with a story they were told that shaped their outlooks? And then I thought, what if it’s the same story? What is it about what we tell ourselves that shapes us?

Liao: I love that it started with Dahee and Channing, because that relationship is so central. That love is so important, too—sisterly love, taking care of each other. Without spoiling plot events, we see men abusing their power and corrupting what should be a fair and legal justice system. I couldn’t help but wonder if you were commenting a bit on recent national and political abuses of power. Why did you decide to include these types of bad actors?

Han: Great point. It was important to me that the system was critiqued in this novel, especially how we rely on people to be fair within that system. This has always been true—as an Asian American woman I’ve experienced that. Now with ICE, it’s so much worse. In the original Tale of Chunhyang, a local magistrate imprisons Chunhyang for rejecting him.

For me, it’s always interesting to see what’s going on behind the scenes. It takes an entire group behind someone to actually enforce and allow corruption to occur. Compare the first and second terms of the current president? It takes a lot of enablers on many levels to make things happen. So I decided Kent would be the mayor’s chief of staff, the man pulling all the strings and having the relationships with other key people in town. While we do have Asian American political figures—like Mayor Michelle Wu in Boston!—it’s still pretty rare.

Liao: Intergenerational family dynamics are also at play. In a flashback, we see a beautiful moment when Dahee connects with her aunt, Channing’s mother, over reading and books. In some ways, I feel like your novel is haunted by ghosts of previous generations. Your previous book was literally about a ghost! How did you approach writing about these different generations?

Han: My aunt is still a major influence in my life. She introduced me to the Brontës and Jane Austen when I was a kid. She read all of them in translation in South Korea when she was in college. She gave me permission to read all day. And you’re right to call it a haunting.

When I was nine years old, my friend Amy’s mom died. It was a shock. She was the first person I knew who vanished. Here one day and gone the next. She was unlike any of the other mothers in my neighborhood. She read books and newspapers when Amy and I played with dolls, she took us out to eat in restaurants, and she was just this cool woman. I thought a lot about her when I was writing this book. Both Amy’s mom and my aunt, they were women who loved books. They were surrounded by books. They were great role models for me in that way.

Hyphen: I was surprised to find a mystery about a past financial crime embedded in the second half of the book! Did you set out to write a genre-bending approach to this love story, or was it a surprise?

Han: I love that you say it’s genre-bending. Is it? Every book I write seems to be on the border of two things. This one I thought was a romance but you’re right, the mystery of Channing’s family’s downfall in the town reads like a mystery. It was important for that element to be in the story, so I was thinking about feuds in the town. My working title for the book was The Feud, so the conflict of the families was always in this story. It just took me a while to figure out how to tell it.

I think at the heart of every story is a mystery—because why else are we reading?—whether it’s to get to know the character or understand why they did something. I absolutely love mysteries. We can all be haunted by things we don’t understand, or things we did in the past, or by what other generations did or didn’t do. It’s about history, and trying to rewrite history.

Hyphen: What else would you like to share about this book, or about the writing and publishing process? Does it get easier—since this is your third book?

Han: I’m very lucky, because I have the same agent and the same editor, and I know that that’s not the case for everybody. Publishing is shrinking in so many ways right now—they’re closing entire divisions, and editors are losing their jobs, and authors don’t have editors to go back to. So, in that way, knowing that someone’s waiting, that’s always my great motivator. I love a deadline, and I hate to be late, so that helps me write, absolutely. In terms of getting easier, if you accept that that this is your process, it doesn’t necessarily go faster, but you get there sooner. It’s like procrastination: I’m a big procrastinator, but if you know that you're a procrastinator, just do the procrastinating and then get on with it.

We change as we write and we have new experiences and the world changes, our lives change. I hope people enjoy this book and find it connects to their experiences in some way. There’s power in working together. There are so many kinds of love, and the most vital kind right now for me is how we care for each other actively as a community.

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Books

Diaspora

Finding Satisfaction

Evelyn Ch'ien — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:42:45 +0000

I first made meet-cute level contact with Kathy Wang when, at the indie bookstore where I worked, I wrote a staff recommendation for her first book Family Trust and she emailed me her thanks. Over the years, we have weaved in and out of each other’s lives, staying in touch 21st century-style: liking each other’s Instagram stories, texting questions about the publishing industry and sending occasional emails and family pictures. A life, it turns out, is made up of these ordinary interactions.This is the ethos underlying Wang’s third book, The Satisfaction Café, a novel about an ordinary woman, Joan Liang, who inadvertently inherits an extraordinary life when she marries a wealthy older man. Once the glamorous dust settles, she sees that life, at any echelon, struggles to be satisfying.

Wang and I spoke over Webex — after catching up on our own ordinary lives — about her experience creating Joan, our immigrant parents’ relationships with risk and safety, midlife crises, the peaks and valleys of a full life and what it means to have enough.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hyphen: I want to start with the very first paragraph of your book because it's such an arresting one. We're introduced to Joan and before the end of the paragraph we learn that she stabbed her husband. Can you tell me a little bit more about how Joan evolved for you as a character to get to the point where you could introduce her to the reader in such a bold way?

Kathy Wang: I generally write chronologically, so the way it appears in the book is the order I wrote it in. I'll write a book from start to end, and then in the revision process I'll end up inserting a chapter here or moving stuff around. But for me, the first paragraph and chapter has always been what I started with. It’s almost like that paragraph where she stabs her husband is the seed for how I developed Joan and what her character centered around.

At the time I wrote that I said, “Okay, I'm just going to see where it goes. This is who she is, and then I'm going to put her in a situation that I think would be interesting.” I have always wanted to write about one of those old Chinese video stores I remember seeing growing up. I understood that I was going to put her in that store and then see what happened, see why she would have stabbed her husband.

Hyphen: Why were those old Chinese video stores so evocative for you growing up?

KW: It’s funny, I don’t think they were necessarily memorable to me at the time. I do remember that in those stores they usually had a section behind a curtain that had pornography. And as a kid, you’re always interested in what lies beyond the curtain. That’s probably why those stores stuck with me.

And I guess now at my age, I’m thinking more about businesses that no longer exist. Those things that only existed in a very specific time, I think, can become more vivid to you because they only live in your memory. The video store was definitely one of those settings. My parents would go there every weekend and check out videos and then watch them in the house.

I feel sad sometimes for my kids because stores are so homogenous now. There’s Target, there’s the mall. I mean, not that I want to take them to a pornography store. But maybe some place with character.

Hyphen: When I was reading about the video store, it reminded me that my parents would also go to one. It was part of the routine of our family's lives, and then one day they just stopped going. It was like they no longer had, or needed, that connection to home. Going back to Joan, did you always know that you were going to write a protagonist who was an Asian immigrant or a Taiwanese immigrant?

KW: I always wanted to write an Asian immigrant story, and I wanted to write it in the style of an author like Elizabeth Strout or Anne Tyler, where it's just a very ordinary life told in vivid detail. I also wanted to write an Asian protagonist who was someone that my mom or someone her age would want to read about. Sometimes I'll recommend a hip new book that has an Asian character to someone like my mom, and then she’ll read it and say, “I don't want to read this. What’s all this discussion about trauma? I just want to read a good story.”

Hyphen: You mentioned you wanted to write a “very ordinary” story in the style of an author like Anne Tyler, and those stories typically do not engage with race directly. How did you decide how much of Joan’s race was going to impact her story?

KW: I don't know if it's true or not, but Joan is my mom's age, and sometimes I feel like race has been a bigger part of my identity than it has been for my parents. They probably faced more discrimination than I do, but they didn't really ruminate on it the way that I and maybe some of my contemporaries have. They just moved on, to put it simply, and there are all sorts of reasons for why that might have been, but the point here is that they didn’t talk about it much. And so in the book, there are a few events which may take place because of Joan’s race, but the way she thinks about those events are not necessarily centered around race.

"... sometimes I feel like race has been a bigger part of my identity than it has been for my parents. They probably faced more discrimination than I do, but they didn't really ruminate on it the way that I and maybe some of my contemporaries have."

Hyphen: That makes a lot of sense. I think having a flashback to her childhood in Taiwan gives us an understanding that Joan grew up in a fairly homogeneous environment, racially. And for her, immigration is a purely economic decision. Which is perhaps why a lot of this book has Joan thinking about the inequalities of her life as more economic.

I just loved that one of the central relationships in this book is Joan and Bill’s. From the very beginning, it is very transparent: there is a wealth gap, an age gap and a culture gap. It's not a transactional relationship, but it's a relationship that you can't romanticize. It seems like such a challenge to write a love story that is so unromantic.

KW: I think the relationship is romantic for Bill because he's someone who falls in love quite easily. He knows his money is probably what makes him an attractive candidate, but it doesn’t bother him. It's funny because my mom is divorced, and some of her gripes with my dad were economic, and so I think for someone like my mother or others of her generation, Joan’s relationship is romantic. A great marriage to them is one where the man has way more money than you and comes with a super nice house in the San Francisco Bay Area to boot. What could be more romantic?

Of course, that doesn’t mean Joan isn’t aware of the discrepancies in their relationship. As you state, there is an age and financial and cultural gap. And sometimes those gaps are uncomfortable for Joan, but in the end she’s pretty clear-eyed. For example, there’s a scene early on in their marriage where she feels embarrassed because she doesn’t have a job. She doesn’t need one, but that’s all because of Bill, not her. They’re at this party, and she can tell that everyone knows she’s one of those “younger” wives as well. When she feels embarrassment, or maybe even some shame over her circumstances, she's also able to recognize that it’s a result of her choices and that those are feelings she has to live with.

Hyphen: Like, you get what you deserve?

KW: Yes, you get what you deserve, though Joan also never fully thinks she deserves her privileges either. I think some people, when they marry someone much wealthier and older, can quickly feel entitled to their new lives. Of course they deserve it, otherwise they wouldn’t be here. They’ve got something special about them! Whereas I think someone like Joan never fully thinks they deserve it. They can never get rid of that voice in their head saying, “I'm here because I married someone wealthy and way older than me.” And though I don’t think Joan regrets her choices, you still see her later in the book telling her own daughter to have a real career. She recognizes that her own choices were limiting. She judges her own life.

Hyphen: That’s so interesting compared to the idealism that Bill gets to have.

KW: Very idealistic. I don’t know many Asians of that generation that were very idealistic, and if they were, they didn’t always seem to fare very well. If I think about it, a lot of my mom’s cautionary stories were about idealists: “This guy dropped out of engineering to follow his dreams. And now look how unhappy he is!”

Hyphen: Toward the end of the book when Joan’s son Jamie is thinking about her, he describes her as so practical and yet at the same time impulsive. At the heart of it, a person who immigrates, there has to be some kind of, if not optimism, some momentum that shoots them out of a place where they technically belong.

With Joan’s decision to immigrate, she seizes an opportunity to take her brother’s place after he’s unable to go abroad. It’s a tale of one woman’s ambition and what that looks like over a lifetime.

KW: It’s interesting that you bring up impulsivity. I’ve noticed that when some non-Asian readers read this book, they describe Joan as passive. That this is a book where things just happened to her. And that's so interesting to me, because knowing that generation, she's actually not that passive. She does take action. She tries.

I turned 40 last year, and I was in my late 30s when I wrote this. At the time I was just so much more aware that you truly only have one time around on this earth, and why not try for something more? And so I wanted to write a character that does just that. Because I think so many of us, myself included, don't try for whatever reason — because we're scared, or we’re comfortable or we don’t want to lose a bunch of money, which are all valid reasons.

Hyphen: Trying is also how you feel alive or vital. It’s not actually satisfying to get everything that you want as soon as possible.

KW: No. I mean even when you publish a book — and that generally does take a lot of work and time — it's satisfying only for a little while, to be honest. So you keep writing.

Hyphen: Going back to that word, “satisfaction,” why did you name your novel The Satisfaction Café?

I always wanted that title. It was my title almost the entire time I was working on it. I think because satisfaction is just such an interesting word. Another definition might be that it’s a reasonable amount of happiness, right? By the way, that was an alternate title choice. My publisher wanted to change the title at one point, so we were going back and forth.

When we were all discussing the title, I don't remember who said this, but someone said, “You're going to get eviscerated on Goodreads because people are going to say, ‘The cafe doesn't appear until the end of the book.’” And that’s a valid point! But to me, the Satisfaction Café isn’t just a place but a general concept. It's this idea of a place where you can find enough happiness for you to keep going.

Hyphen: When I think of satisfaction, I feel a great weight lifting off of me. If I think about joy or ecstasy, I don't feel that. The idea of enough, I mean that's actually humongous in a world where you’re taught to get more and keep striving.

As you mentioned, in the book the Satisfaction Café does not come along for a while, but the book also doesn't end with the Satisfaction Café, which is what I think might be more of what is expected in novels today that typically end on an upswing where you’re better off than when you began. But you keep going after the upswing. I wanted to know why you decided to give us the whole span of this person's life.

KW: I always wanted to do a full life. For me, the café is not the point of the book. The point of the book is Joan’s entire life.

Hyphen: Going back to those comments about passivity, I think what people are responding to is not that Joan is passive in her own life — because she makes such active choices. She's so much more active than a lot of Bill’s family members, for example. But what might be misconstrued as passivity is how she accepts the limitations of life and her station in it.

It reminds me of that “inspirational” and apparently false fact that bumblebees are too heavy to be able to fly, but they just don’t know it, and that’s why they can. And that's an active story, where you're so active, you defy the laws of gravity. So when people comment on Joan’s passivity, it's like they're asking for fiction that breaks rather than adheres to the laws of how the world works. They want fiction that defies gravity for them.

KW: You're really changing how I feel about that statement because now I feel that I finally get what those people were saying when they called Joan passive. That makes so much sense. I think there are many times in her story where Joan is presented with a series of choices, like whether she should leave her husband, or have a child or start a business. And sometimes she makes the more predictable choice and at other times she doesn’t. But she doesn’t get to have everything. She knows she may not have always made the right choice. And, you’re right, in that I think that is real. I can't imagine that character having behaved differently. It would be a totally different book, right? Then it's not called The Satisfaction Café. It's called, “I had a midlife crisis, and now I'm happier than ever.”

Hyphen: Also, if it had ended with the Satisfaction Café’s success instead of continuing, it would be a totally different book. The thing is that life continues. You have this huge peak, and then it goes back to a plateau or gets worse. You can defy gravity in one moment and create this revolutionary café concept, and then gravity reasserts itself. At every point if you just continue the story, it will always rebalance to neutral. Satisfaction is the best you can get, basically.

KW: I think that's totally correct. That’s what's real. And what’s more, that’s the best case. I still struggle with that now, asking, “Is that all that life is?” And I know there are going to be times when I have to be less passive and maybe actually do something — try a little harder or make a difficult choice — but then I also have to accept that even if I’m ecstatic with the outcome, I’m never going to be able to keep that high.

Hyphen: This is actually a hopeful book because you gave us an entire life, so we can actually say that Joan lived a satisfactory life.

KW: Yes, I don't think she regrets her life.

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Magazine Fever Exhibit & Hyphen Merch Revival

Melissa Hung — Sun, 29 Sep 2024 02:08:45 +0000

Hyphen will be part of a new exhibit, Magazine Fever: Gen X Asian American Periodicals, at The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in New York City. The show opens on October 3, 2024 and will run through March 30, 2025.

Magazine Fever presents stories of Generation X magazines — how they were founded and sustained; how they captured the essence of multiculturalism and Generation X paradigms, and how they impacted the ways Asian American identity is understood today. (For the record, the Hyphen staff will have you know we are made up of both Gen Xers and millennials.) Drawn from MOCA's archives, the exhibit includes A. Magazine, AsiAm, AsianWeek, Audrey, Giant Robot, Hyphen, Jade, KoreAm, Rice, Transpacific, YOLK, and others.

MOCA TALKS: The Making of Asian American Magazines
October 3, 2024, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm

On Magazine Fever's opening night, MOCA will host a discussion on the creation and evolution of Asian American magazines with the founders and editors behind some of the most influential publications, including Melissa Hung, Hyphen's founding editor in chief. These pioneers will share their experiences and challenges in launching and sustaining culturally specific publications in a pre-internet era, where ethnic media served as crucial platforms for representation and community building.

This free event will both be in person and online. Register here.

Hyphen Merch Revival

To celebrate the exhibit, we're re-releasing Hyphen merch! If you, like us, no longer fit into your old Hyphen T-shirt or your kid is now wearing it, you can now get a replacement. Visit our new storefront on Tee Public, where you can find our iconic bowl cut design. Other designs may be added if we can find the files. Please note that we are only offering merchandise through Tee Public, so if you find our designs on other sites, those are thieves and proceeds will not go to your friendly neighborhood indie magazine.

Shop Hyphen merch here.

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The cover of Hyphen issue 3 is featured in graphics for Magazine Fever.

Lives and Afterlives: An Interview with Kim Liao

Evelyn Ch'ien — Fri, 13 Sep 2024 19:37:53 +0000

In 2010, Kim Liao traveled to Taiwan to learn the truth about her family. Her grandfather Thomas Liao was the leader of the Provisional Republic of Taiwan in exile after World War II, but she knew virtually nothing about his life and what had happened to him. What Kim did know was that Thomas’s wife Anna, her grandmother, moved to America with her four children to start a new life and leave Thomas Liao’s past behind.

During the year she was in Taiwan, Kim discovered that Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) government had erased much of the history of the independence movement from official and public memory. Luckily, she was able to track down former freedom fighters and other family members who had preserved this history in their memories and personal archives. Not only had Kim’s own family been silenced throughout the White Terror period, but so had the millions of lives and voices of those Taiwanese citizens who endured decades of martial law.

By unearthing the stories of her grandfather Thomas and his brother Joshua, her grandmother Anna, as well as her Uncle Suho, who was at one point sentenced to death, and many others who were sent to prison, Kim brings to light an extraordinary story of grit and perseverance. Anne Hellman met Kim through their mutual writing group and recently interviewed her about the book.

***

Anne Hellman: I’ve had the privilege of reading earlier drafts of this memoir and am in awe of how you achieve such a high level of complexity as well as fluidity in its structure. What is key is the way you begin. In the opening pages you talk about the “silence” surrounding your grandmother Anna’s life and how this led you to find more and go to Taiwan on a Fulbright scholarship in 2010. You say, “Tell a child nothing and she will become obsessed with knowledge.” Do you feel far away from that self now, in 2024? How does it feel to “know” what happened to your grandfather Thomas and his movement?

Kim Liao: I do feel quite far from that self! I began this book in 2008, which is kind of horrifying in some ways, because if the book were a child of mine, he or she would now be old enough to drive. But this was definitely a coming-of-age process for me, and the book’s impetus was driven by my being in my 20s and not knowing anything about my father’s family’s origins.

Perhaps the joy and promise of youth is that this writing project was important enough for me to drop everything and go to Taiwan for a year and have an adventure to find the truth. I didn’t have a family or a partner or a great job keeping me chained to daily life — I was free to follow these questions as far as they led, and the rabbit hole just got deeper and deeper as I dug more and more.

Ultimately, knowledge is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was so satisfying to meet long-lost family members, to interview freedom fighters who knew my grandfather Thomas and Uncle Suho, and to learn the truth. I’ve always been someone who asks a lot of questions, who is hungry for knowledge, and who wants to understand the truth about something fully. But with knowledge comes the sadness or the emotional heft of loss and difficulties. When I was 24, I wished that Grandma Anna had shared more of her memories with us before she died. But now, I appreciate that trauma is devastating, and she kept that silence because it was the only way she could survive.

AH: Not only do you integrate creative nonfiction, imagining scenes of family life in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, and New York City, but you also weave in detailed historical information that helps readers understand exactly what happened in this period in Taiwan’s history. It’s quite a feat. Outside of the year you spent in Taiwan, how did you go about your research from a distance here in the United States?

KL: Oh gosh — the research was such a long and meandering process. Before I left, I read history books about Taiwan in English that gave a good window on the Japanese colonial period from 1895-1945 but very little insight on 1945-1987 (the White Terror martial law period). I also interviewed my family members, and the recollections of my Aunt Jeanne created a great framework for the story of the Liaos coming to America that helped me frame my research in Taiwan.

Once I returned to the United States, there was a lot of trying to make sense of what I had found, reading translations and interview transcriptions, and trying to fill in the blanks. There’s a collection of George Kerr’s papers at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives at Stanford University, which offered great global foreign policy information. I should also say that during my year in Asia, I took an extremely fruitful research trip to Hong Kong, whose libraries contained a number of writings by Thomas and Joshua Liao, articles from the 1940s and ’50s, and other books that had not made it to the United States or Taiwan (probably because of decades of KMT government censorship). Hong Kong libraries for the win!

AH: There is a fascinating uncovering in the book of the United States’ policy against communists in China and its support for Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT. You strike a tone here in the retelling of this history that is both personal and factual, and it totally works. How did you go about crafting the tone for this book?

KL: This is an interesting question, because it highlights a real pivot point for me when I was revising the book. I had originally taken a more expository approach of laying out the history — here’s everything that happened, chronologically, so that it can make sense for the reader and trace the trajectory of Thomas’s independence movement. But then, as I was revising, I made a conscious decision to turn away from this historical recounting and frame the events more as a narrative thriller.

Once I knew that I wanted to highlight the drama, this tone emerged as a way to highlight dramatic irony: the reader learns long before Thomas and Joshua do that the U.S. government is not going to support their would-be revolution. I was thinking about tragedy here, and in Romeo and Juliet or the tragedy of Oedipus Rex, the audience knows before the characters do that something has gone terribly wrong, and an important part of the catharsis is seeing it all play out.

This more dramatic tone took the form of a roving close third–person narration: zooming in closely on Thomas’s perspective, Anna’s perspective, and even giving points of view to American diplomats. Ultimately, human drama is tracing the path of how people try to get what they want, and what they do when they encounter obstacles. It was definitely a delicate tonal balance to strike.

AH: You begin and end your year of research in the month of August, which is interesting because, in the Taiwanese tradition, August is the “Hungry Ghost Month” when one’s ancestors return to visit their living relatives. Likewise, you begin and end the book with your taking part in a ritual — the fortune ritual at Longshan Temple in Taipei in the beginning and the Hungry Ghost Festival at the end. Do you think these bookends represent a shift you went through in writing the book?

KL: That’s a great observation, and it was not initially intentional at all! During the revision process, I struggled with whether or not to include the temple scene. But it was important for me to emphasize this connection to the uncanny — the spiritual side of things, the idea of hungry ghosts, and the idea that I was accessing the legacy of my Grandpa Thomas and the victims of the White Terror period. I was not a spiritual person before I arrived in Taiwan, but I had always relied heavily on my intuition to help me make decisions and find the best way forward. There was something about all of these events falling into place and the immense generosity of the folks who helped me in my quest that made me believe in fate and trust in forces beyond rationality. Did my time in Taiwan make me believe in ghosts? Maybe. Yes.

AH: In many ways, by publishing this memoir and getting your grandfather’s story out into the world, you are finishing his quest and shining a light on Taiwan’s struggle for autonomy and the people who fought and died for that cause. What do you think this book says about Taiwan’s current state of democracy and its non-independence from China?

KL: I think at its heart, this book is about Taiwanese people who fought for freedom, and it tells their story on their terms, not on China’s terms. Taiwan as a place, nation, and people has been forever defined by others. I consider it a fairly revolutionary literary act to say that Taiwan is its own place with its own history, and actually, that history is entirely separate from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I hope after people read my book, they can start to think of Taiwan as its own nation, not as a renegade province of the PRC.

But then, in terms of global politics, it’s a nightmare. No one wants war or invasion from China (even China doesn’t want that). I think that the longer the status quo continues, the more Taiwan’s individual identity as a place evolves organically. This generation of young people is more likely than ever before to identify as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and I think that’s tremendous.

I think at its heart, this book is about Taiwanese people who fought for freedom, and it tells their story on their terms, not on China’s terms. Taiwan as a place, nation, and people has been forever defined by others.

AH: That is definitely a good thing. Your grandfather certainly had a vision! You admit how little you know about what your grandfather was like as a person. It must have been quite an experience for you to imagine yourself in his shoes. How did you do it?

KL: First, I tried to surround myself with as many of Thomas’s writings, articles, photographs, and other artifacts. Then, I interviewed as many people close to Thomas as possible. I read Thomas’s letters to George Kerr and to my father Richard, and this personal correspondence gave me a better sense of his voice and personality.

From there, I made the imaginative leap into his perspective, trying to imagine why and how he did what he did. But there are so many gaps — even as I turned Thomas into a character and shared his story, I had to acknowledge that there are still aspects of Thomas Liao that are a mystery to me. Sometimes, the truth lies in that negative space — in the shadowy abyss of what we cannot fully know or grasp.

AH: When you follow Grandma Anna and her young children to New York City and trace how they established their new life in the United States, it shows to the reader such a breadth of generations shifting location and lives across the globe. How do you think you have been changed by the history of Taiwan and by your search for your family?

KL: This search has changed me in so many ways. First, just the experience of going to Taiwan, muddling about in terrible Mandarin, and having so many people help me in such magnificent, generous ways. I would also say that the search gave me courage in my life. I had been so afraid to ask these questions, afraid of getting it wrong, of hurting my family members, afraid of the truth. Afraid to be my true self. When I got back to the United States after my 13 months in Taiwan, I was utterly fearless. I was fine with tackling very daunting challenges because at least they were in English!

Working on this book over the years changed me by making me into a writer, forcing me to grow up, to deal with my insecurities and self-indulgent early drafts and overuse of commas (my copy editor cut something like 75 percent of my commas, and I put 15 percent of them back!). But in all seriousness, I learned to take a book apart and put it back together. I learned to take breaks. I learned when to ask for feedback, and when to try to solve my own problems. I had to confront the possibility that the book might never get published and consider what that would mean. I had to grow up. And the book grew up too. I hope the next book has a shorter germination period!

AH: I certainly hope that for you too, Kim! But in terms of this book, you can most definitely be proud of the “child” you have raised.

KL: Aww, thank you! It has been an era in my life, researching and writing this book. This is the culmination of that era, for sure.

Categories:

Books & Literature

Books

Creative Nonfiction

Credit Kim Liao

Shells and Homes

Evelyn Ch'ien — Wed, 23 Nov 2022 17:45:39 +0000

“Los Angeles” is the first short story in Ling Ma’s new collection, Bliss Montage, and a city that I moved away from six weeks ago. When I left, I said goodbye to friends, family and familiarity for a new life in Montana. Under these circumstances, reading Bliss Montage became a source of comfort. Ma weaves the surreal with the fabric of everyday life until they are nearly indistinguishable, with such seamlessness that there is great pleasure in visiting the world through her eyes.

In “Los Angeles,” a woman lives in a sprawling complex with her wealthy husband, children and 100 ex-boyfriends. She has attained a monied, respectable life, but she is adrift, coasting through the L.A. sprawl with the ex-boyfriends, touring the recent past. From her expensive new home high in the hills, she watches the girl who lives in her old studio apartment — the girl is drinking juice, the girl is standing hunched over the kitchen sink. The girl lives in the real world; our narrator’s world is hollowing out from the inside. Still, the narrator tries to build a new life for herself, though the past and its attendant memories of violence will not leave her. All of her boyfriends leave, her husband crumples into himself — what is left for our narrator but a magnificent shell of a life?

It's these shells that characters in Ma’s new stories are frequently trying to fill. They’re stuck in place but alert to opportunities that will shake them free from stasis. Some of these themes are familiar from Ma’s first novel, Severance (2018). In her fiction, the unknown often provokes one of two reactions: fleeing, literally and metaphorically, or grasping at the familiar, scrabbling for anything that might constitute a home.

I first read “Los Angeles” in 2017, in Granta, and in the years since, have returned to the saved tab on my phone again and again. The story captures disorientation in a way that helped me understand my own disorientation in the first strange, fragile days of crawling back to a city whose suburbs I had grown up in, where I thought I’d never return. That disorientation has now taken on a new shape — leaving a place that was once alien, but that from the rearview mirror, looks a lot like home.

Putting down roots, yanking them up — the hope for escape into new lives runs throughout the stories of Bliss Montage. In “G,” a woman named Bea visits her childhood friend, Bonnie, for the last time before moving across the country. She’s persuaded to take a last trip together on G, a drug that drapes like an invisibility cloak, allowing its users to lay themselves bare. Its properties can be harnessed to wreak havoc in the city, or to drift further and further out into the sea of the mind until the user loses her corporeal body. Bonnie is Bea’s anchor to the past, and she can’t allow Bea to go swimming freely towards her future. As Bea loses her body, she tries to speak: “Except what came out weren’t words, only a sound like ocean waves seething against beach pebbles. As soon as I heard myself, I had the sensation of sinking.”

The fantasy of a new life, Ma shows us, so often drowns under the weight of the past. It’s hard to wrestle free. It’s a familiar theme in immigration narratives, but in these stories, the rupture of leaving the homeland is already in the past, an old wound — healed but puckered, never completely smoothed away. Instead, Ma’s characters attend to what comes after, contending with their sense of difference, of not-quite-rightness. They rest lightly in their lives, waiting to see if they’ll find themselves at home here, even when there’s no other home to go back to.

In “Tomorrow,” a woman, Eve, falls pregnant in a near-future where American global power has finally collapsed and where birth defects — such as her fetus’ arm hanging down from between her legs — are not uncommon. She feels that surging call of “returning, of a homecoming” back to the homeland. Once back, there’s comfort and nostalgia, but there’s also the palpable tension between what should have been and what is. Details, like the clipped British voice of the translation app Eve uses to speak to her great-aunt, press up against scenes of intimate histories, such as a great-aunt showing Eve the building where she was born. In the end though, the rupture of the past wins out, and Eve has the hard-won knowledge that “she would never return. She would never come here again.” Sometimes, in order for these characters to have a fighting chance at happiness, they must enact their own ruptures, relentlessly severing away the baggage of the past to surge forward into an unknown future.

An undercurrent of violence is palpable throughout the collection. Sometimes it manifests in the physical — a man’s fist in a woman’s face. But mostly, it thrives in charged moments that balloon with their potential for harm. Ma’s characters are human enough (even the yeti of “Yeti Lovemaking”), but they’re the types of humans whose acts of negotiation thin the surface between the ordinary and the primal. She beautifully tracks these strange edges between not-violence and violence, love and unease in a way that understands how violence can bubble forth from the constant frustration of living with the feeling of not-quite-right. These are characters who are often struggling and flailing, hurting themselves and others along the way.

In the penultimate story, “Peking Duck,” old family memories are re-examined from every angle, seeking to understand the difference between “appropriating someone’s story and making it new through retelling.” The narrative turns into itself over and over again, revealing new angles with each retelling. When the point of view passes from daughter to mother, it feels right — a kind of backwards generational passing of the baton illuminates how the past can ripple forward with its consequences.

Framing and reframing are necessary to untangle the nameless emotions that lie at the intersections of love and violence and shame — those emotions that Cathy Park Hong would call “minor feelings.” These stories have to be told and retold because some of us, immigrants and children of immigrants, are always trying to understand how to find a place to call home.

Reading the stories of Bliss Montage now, several stops removed from a place I might call home, reminds me of the emotions of moving: This is your real life, but it’s a life you might not fully understand yet. But these stories are also a reminder of how to bravely embrace life in a new world. Disorientation is inevitable, time will move in sprints and spurts, but to be startled by the seemingly ordinary can be utterly thrilling. Perhaps it’s better not to fully settle in place but to remain curious and collecting, ready to re-examine everything. It’s wonderful to be lifted away, drifting into another world.

Categories:

Books & Literature

Books

Fiction

We Are Never Just One

Evelyn Ch'ien — Thu, 03 Nov 2022 18:58:20 +0000

It’s been more than a decade since I lived in Cerritos, California, the Los Angeles suburb where I grew up alongside countless other children of diaspora. As we near the holiday season, my mind naturally gravitates toward “home” and missing the particular closeness — and claustrophobia — that I associate with that place and stage of life. I recently returned to Anthony Veasna So’s short story collection, Afterparties, seeking some form of solace and familiarity.

What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be Cambodian? The idea of trying to pin identity to any singular trait is an impossible task; So’s debut, Afterparties, instead leans into the complexity of both these questions by revealing just how much our identities rely on our particular web of imperfect relationships. Remove any element of that web — the overbearing aunties or the quick-witted cousins, the would-be badminton pro or the mysterious, deviant monks — and we become smaller, flatter versions of ourselves. In other words, being part of the diaspora means we are never just one, for better or for worse: We are always a multidimensional amalgamation of our family’s, and community’s, traumas and joys.

The stories in Afterparties take place decades after the 1975 Khmer Rouge genocide, set in the “valley of dust and pollen and California smog” that defines one Cambodian American community — presumably So’s own hometown of Stockton, California, though the exact location is never outright named. So’s characters are all suffering from a stifling mixture of intergenerational trauma, boredom and general malaise, trying to maneuver through the slog of daily living to claim a small slice of the American Dream. His characters are at times pompous, disloyal, angry and uncaring — but you still find yourself rooting for them. They’re cool in that too-cool-for-school kind of way, reckoning with their own internal turmoil and sometimes wreaking havoc along the way.

But they are also, importantly, justified in their shortcomings because of the atrocities their ancestors endured and the ways they still shoulder that pain. The genocide is always looming in So’s stories, as integrated into the fabric of his characters’ lives as the physical reality of their daily routines. Its ever-presence is a reminder to readers that the trauma of that time period — in which anywhere between 1.5 to 3 million people were killed by the Khmer Rouge — has inevitably seeped into the culture and the language of the diaspora. Or, as one of So’s protagonists notes in “Superking Son Scores Again,” he and his peers are endlessly tussling with that “pent-up refugee shit,” regardless of whether or not they themselves are refugees. It’s an unavoidable history, even as subsequent generations struggle to free themselves from the sadness and guilt that it demands.

“Cambodians, we never let ourselves enjoy life,” one character says in “We Would’ve Been Princes!” “It is always thinking about the past, worrying about the future.” But in So’s fictional world, he dares to depict a different parallel reality. The long shadow of the genocide notwithstanding, there is a whole lot of living, too, oftentimes in defiance of its enduring legacy. Or at the very least, a lot of attempts at living. Because while yes, So’s characters are constantly hustling to make ends meet — as in the the family-owned businesses in “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” or “The Shop” — in other stories, like “Maly, Maly, Maly” and “We Would’ve Been Princes!” they’re also partying, getting high and having lots of sex with the understanding that there must be more to life than just eddying in a liminal state.

Each story drops the reader straight into the middle of a scene without explanation or context, and this is also a kind of defiance. Come be a voyeur, So seems to say, but don’t forget to take off your shoes. There’s no catering to the white gaze, no characters writhing helplessly, expecting to be saved. There is electricity in his stories, an energy that doesn’t ask permission so much as it just takes up space. And by allowing his characters to be messy, emotional and just a little bit haunted, he is reclaiming the complexity of words like “diaspora” and “refugee” and “survivor.” In “Superking Son Scores Again,” for instance, So’s narrator refers to the titular character as “an artist lost in the politics of normal, assimilated life,” a hero in the eyes of young Cambo kids rather than what society might define him as: a refugee, an outsider, a “goddamn grocery-store boy.”

So digs into the depths of what it might mean to inhabit different relationships to these terms by jumping freely between generations and collapsing time within a single sentence. “Tevy wonders if her mother has ever loved someone romantically, if her mother is even capable of reaching beyond the realm of survival, if her mother has ever been granted any freedom from worry, and if her mother’s present carries the ability to dilate, for even a brief moment, into its own plane of suspended existence, separate from past or future,” So writes in the first story of the collection, “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts.” It’s an impactful way of showing how kaleidoscopic the diasporic experience really is, even within the same extended family.

This is the thesis of So’s wide-ranging collection: we can only know ourselves through our community. The idea of the web is woven throughout; community is self-knowledge and vice-versa — they are intertwined; they are not dichotomous. Part of laying out the unknowable elements of a different generation is also admitting that gaps will always exist. When one part of the web is missing, we’ll spend a lifetime trying to fill that gap — with narrative, with sex, with drink, with a longing for elsewhere. So’s own untimely death in December 2020 feels like an extension and even an ode to that fact. Perhaps the elsewhere he sought was in rebirth, a way to enter a new generation and to continue his search for belonging in a different time. Reincarnation, after all, is a central Buddhist belief, and one that appears in various forms throughout the collection.

The implied message here is one of hope: that even in “the busted potential of [a] small city’s downtown,” there is always the possibility of a different ending, a new beginning. In “Human Development,” So’s protagonist describes his Grindr date as someone who makes him feel good “in ways both tender and ugly.” This is also, arguably, an apt way to describe So’s Afterparties. Because even in the most unsavory of scenarios, So’s characters manage to find the humor, the joy and the camaraderie that make life worth living — it’s the web that keeps them afloat in the end.

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(photo courtesy nplusone)

Dreams and Dares

Evelyn Ch'ien — Sat, 17 Sep 2022 00:59:25 +0000

On a balmy afternoon in San Francisco, I Zoomed with author and professor May-Lee Chai, whose short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories, was just published in August. Chai’s collection takes readers to a new Shanghai outside Earth; contemplates the modern complications of two women who fall in love in China despite the odds; and bears witness to a Chinese immigrant boy’s first moments in America.

Chai’s characters find and lose their dreams, which are often vulnerable, diaphanous and fragile, pitted against a hard reality. In the second story, a young immigrant boy is rescued by a cook from the full force of gang brutality, then befriended by a boy who saves him from drowning. In quiet moments the boy ponders how to describe his American life to his parents in China. Inspired by Bill Clinton’s speech about life on Mars, he decides to write about Mars and tattoo his ankle with the red planet. In another story, a nanny travels to space for her job. Chai deftly conveys the inequity of care work, detailing the nanny’s financial pressures to send money back home to Earth, all the while offering fascinating extrapolations about the AI and robots of the future.

Chai says, “I love short stories as a form and I teach them and read them. Readers ask me how to read them and, like watching a series on Netflix, you can binge read them all at once or read them individually.” Because of streaming subscriptions she is wondering if this conceptual connection with the short story format will hail a new renaissance for the form.

While the collection showcases her creative imagination, Chai began her writing career as a journalist. Her first job out of college was with the Associated Press. At the time, she was disturbed by anti-Asian racism triggered by the rise of the Japanese auto industry. She remembers visuals from that time, including “a magazine with the Statue of Liberty remade as a geisha and an image of a sumo wrestler straddling Rockefeller Center,” as well as lampoons targeting Japanese real estate acquisitions. Relatedly, she recalls traumatic memories of Vincent Chin’s murder at the hands of bitter auto workers. Chai was no stranger to racism in her formative years. After being born in Southern California and living in the New York metropolitan area, at 12 she moved to rural South Dakota for her father’s job. “And that was hell,” Chai says emphatically. “We were there for the 1980s and faced a lot of violence from the white community there who resented our presence.”

Reflecting on her parents, Chai says, “My father is Chinese and my mother is white, and [the community in South Dakota] didn’t like mixed marriages. I think in particular because it was a Chinese man married to a white woman. If it had been a white man I think they would have reacted differently.” She recounts how “white people would come by and shoot at our house and kill our dogs and leave them in the driveway. We also got a lot of hate mail.” People would approach her family and shout racial slurs. Chai’s family tried to move after the first year but they couldn’t sell their home; prospective buyers would find their loan applications mysteriously denied. Their home was finally purchased in cash by someone who had won the Iowa state lottery. Nine years had passed by then.

As soon as she turned 18, Chai left the midwest and moved nomadically. She credits her experiences wandering as motivating her to become a writer. Pieces of that experience find their way into the story “Hong’s Mother.” One of the first places she went was China for a family reunion in 1985. It was the first time her father had returned since he was 16. On the trip an uncle of hers described surviving the Cultural Revolution. In front of his old house in Nanjing, Chai says her father had a meltdown and started shouting, “The communists have ruined everything; everyone is poor!” Chai later attended Nanjing University and later returned to the city on a fellowship to teach English at a local school. She was later accepted into a university’s doctoral program in Chinese history but soon decided to pursue creative writing instead. A cancer scare in her early 20s made her realize that she should follow her dream to write rather than wait or enter a program that could not accommodate her health concerns at the time.

Chai has combated racism for many years of her life, and her stories reflect an engagement of the topic with a profoundly thoughtful and often gentle lens. Her characters sense that the world is wayward but do not succumb to bitterness. Rather, they display incredible inner strength. In “The Monkey King of Sichuan,” two former grad students muse about the chair of their department who preys on Chinese graduate students. In “White Rabbits,” a college student remembers with fondness a time when she, at 6, got lost with her grandfather, who hesitates to ask an older white man for directions. Chai says that her stories are inspired by things in the present but set in different time periods. “It was unbearable to write about them in the present. Things have been so intense with Trump, the pandemic and Asian American violence that I had to mentally be in a different time period.”

Despite these dangers, Chai is excited about the progress of Asian Americans in the arts: “We have so many community building things going on, making us more visible.” She is especially excited about the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, which appealed to many people across diverse communities. “It’s very specific to a Chinese American immigrant family. But now it doesn’t work to put in just the Asian sidekick in a Marvel movie or have the Asian woman sex worker get rescued, and it took another generation of Asian American creatives to produce new stories.” She continues, “Michelle Yeoh has been working for decades as an international star and had the talent to carry this movie. And [the film’s co-star] Ke Huy Quan said he didn’t want to work in Hollywood for decades until this role came up. Let's hope we can keep building and never go back.”

Chai’s optimism and appreciation for the progress Asian Americans have made was infectious. It inspired me that such a generous heart was teaching others to fulfill their dreams in a classroom. “So many of us don’t see our stories reflected; we’re not in the canon. It may not be something we’ve seen at school or in the mainstream media. And as someone who was once in that place, I’d say, dare to write.”

Categories:

Lyrics Without Songs

Chris Karnadi — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 14:07:27 +0000

It was an idyllic spring afternoon when my mom beat the shit out of me, the zeppelin inside my heart bursting into flames. Before I stepped inside the house, the treetops were drenched in untranslatable komorebi amid the rolling green hills of yesterday. Dandelion clocks disintegrated in a puff. Posters of paint-smudged fishing towns hung from living room walls of houses I passed on my bike. The fuzzy navel sunset spilled onto the parchment horizon. When my mom wailed on my body like a disobedient dog in the kitchen, I lost faith in the entire world. My adolescence became scented in its own fragility. The ground around me slowly disintegrated. I lay in a daze that night, daydreaming on my bed about the butterflies that had hovered over my bike like protective spirits. I craved a magic eraser for every mistake I’d made and every rule I didn’t understand. I cried until the darkness shushed me to sleep.

My mom had told me not to play with Blain because he was weird, an argument that felt sophistical. As a hapa family, we were always treated as racial spies collecting intelligence for both sides of our racial identity unless we played white. I was biking around Traverse City, a small hamlet in Northern Michigan where sakura groves exploded with pink hues like touched-up impressionistic stills, tart cherries and morel mushrooms were sold in cardboard crates on the corner and the sunlight dripped down the foliage like exquisite nectar. I remember pedaling through a cloud of pulsating monarchs. They flexed their wings on my handlebars like Icarian parables. That’s when I noticed Blain standing in front of his house like an inscrutable omen. We played until the galvanized scent of sautéed ground beef and broiled cheese stuck to the air like sensory ornamentation. I biked home, cloaked in the fading mango sunshine, my face baptized in flower pollen and birdsong.

When I walked into the kitchen, my mom scrutinized me. — Where you been?

— Nowhere, I said.

— Did you play with him after I told you not to?

— No, I said, confused.

— Tell me the truth! she yelled.

— I didn’t, I pleaded.

— You little liar, she screamed.

My mom grabbed a yardstick from the kitchen closet and struck me on the backside with all her force. The house was hauntingly empty except for this sound: wack, wack, wack. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I hurled apologies at the air with a quivering voice, but she hit me again and again with incanted strength until the yardstick splintered into two pieces. In my mind, the broken weapon was clemency. The clumsy providence of a lazy god. But then she grabbed a three-foot clothespin from the closet and started wailing on me again. In syncopated sobs, I begged her to stop. I pleaded. I whimpered in contrition. I apologized for my existence. I promised never to play with Blain again. I promised not to be myself if it would protect me from myself. Nothing got through.

The trauma of that day lingered in my mind for years afterwards. After all, trauma isn’t just cellular pain. The indefatigable memory of trauma is itself a survival strategy. By not allowing me to forget the things that destroyed me, my trauma tried to protect what it refused to erase. I have never located the boundary separating pain from trauma. I don’t know if we overcome trauma, or merely coexist with it. I just know that kids used to point and laugh at my Miami Vice sport coat in sixth grade and tell me I looked gay. I just know the random violence of neighborhood boys punching my pretty hapa face for made-up reasons, coming home to a dark and silent house on the hill that signified I was alone and the abuse of gravity breaking apart my daydreams with every bike wipeout and playground felony. The psychological arithmetic of childhood pain never disappeared because my survival depended on not forgetting the numbers.

Like all perpetrators of violence, my mom was intransigently unmoved by my suffering as she beat me into submission. The only sound inside the vacant house was this: wack, wack, wack. The next day there were indigo bruises covering my ass and thighs like divots in a ravaged lawn. When I looked at myself in the mirror, my relationship with my family that had failed to protect me or notice my temporary limp had changed radically. I was the only one who knew about my secret secession, the only person in my house who dreamt of running away to Tokyo or Paris or Interlochen to find safety and community. What my mom did that day she never did again, but I’ve remembered it for the rest of my life because of the way that pain became the dominatrix of my memory: restraints to my rage, paddle to my oblivion, my boyhood in handcuffs, my hope tickled by the popper, my safety words smacked hard by the whip.

When my parents got divorced, I had to choose a parent. I picked my dad, not because we were close or because he was affectionate with me or because he showed any interest in me, but for the simple reason that he’d never hurt me. He’d never left his signature on my body. Pain requires intervention, and he lived on the sidelines of every conflict. I picked my dad because pain is always an overdeveloped photograph of the psyche. I was just a 12-year-old kid trying to survive in a world that kept changing its rules and then falling apart on me like a window display of Styrofoam. Our dad may never have consoled us, asked us how we were doing, expressed explicit affection or displayed solicitude or empathy for us during the divorce, but at least he’d never written us letters saying we’d killed him because we were selfish sons as our mom had done the day we’d stopped by her apartment on Center Road to take her out to dinner for Mother’s Day. We picked our dad because the atomic weight of our pain was enormous and invisible and neither parent acknowledged it, but only one parent intentionally caused it whenever she felt betrayed or ignored. Neither parent acknowledged how much the divorce blew up our lives in the house on the hill, but only one parent tried to perform normalcy even in the face of bankruptcy and familial detonation, an illusion I craved during every catastrophe. Shock prevents victims from grieving for themselves in the beginning. I think it also freezes their hearts to other people’s suffering. This is how my mom ignored the trauma she’d caused me in the kitchen, convinced that her own trauma was an alibi for the damage she caused me. But pain is a morphology of the self and no one knew this better than my mom. Her pain changed her and her pain changed me.

I was broken for a very long time after she beat me and I broke at inexplicable moments afterwards as a teenager. Sometimes, I wished someone in my family would have cared or at least acknowledged how fucked up it was to make me attend four high schools in four years. Sometimes, I wish my dad or anyone in our extended family had asked Wick and me if we were okay, if we needed anything, if someone was abusing us.

Because I was broken, I learned to glue myself back together through trial and error like a stepped-on, torn-up, crinkled origami swan. This is how I survived:

1. I found refuge in obāchan: she took me to piano lessons, baked TV dinners for me, sang along with me when I played “Sakura” on her piano, watched me play video games in the arcade and played gin rummy with me at the kitchen table before I took a nap on her couch.

2. I found refuge in my body: I biked around town and pretended I was in the Tour de France. I took baths religiously. I ran through thunderstorms in the summer. I went sledding in our backyard during sunsets and winter blizzards. I played Chopin nocturnes in the dark. I discovered pleasure in puberty, the thrill and the charge of every movie-theater kiss.

3. I found refuge in performance: I listened to Pet Shop Boys and the Breakin’ soundtrack on the stereo and pretended I was a dancer in ’80s music videos. I pretended I was a French exchange student visiting America for the first time. I made up stories about robot guardian angels from the manga my parents brought back from Japan.

4. I found refuge in desire: I crushed on flirty girls in the hallways, at pop-and-potato-chip parties, under the shimmering disco strobes of the roller rink, strutting down Front Street in a new outfit of denim and plaid and sitting on the beach all alone. I freestyled fake Shakespearean sonnets at parties before I kissed girls.

5. I found refuge in storytelling: I was a cultural spy, a double agent and a secret ninja. These hidden identities helped me feel like I controlled my own alienation and belonged to an underground society of badass revolutionaries who sought their own marginalization as a means of maintaining their secrecy.

6. I wrote unfinished handbooks about a society of ninjas that was supposed to protect mixed-race, hapa and Japanese American kids like me from bullies.

7. I created talk shows with a tape recorder in which I interviewed mushy apples.

8. I survived the way only a kid could, through unbridled imagination and unjustified hope. I frequently invented alternate destinies inside my head as an emotional counterbalance to the real world.

Victimology has no first cause, no first victim. It’s a tragic part of the human discourse. To be human is ultimately to participate in the discourse and the dynamic of trauma. My mom victimized her sons because she was a victim herself. When my white grandfather came home drunk, his pores gushing with stale whisky, he molested my mom, hit my obāchan and sometimes raped her. He forbade his Japanese wife and his hapa daughter from speaking Japanese in their own home even though Japanese was their first language, and they lived in Yokohama. He shipped my mom off to Buckley, Michigan, where she lived with her xenophobic aunt who locked her in a basement and forced her to clean the house like a contemporary hapa fairytale. My mom washed dishes, cleaned the house and cried herself to sleep while her white cousins stared at her and made fun of her beautiful hapa face and called her a Jap. My obāchan sewed clothes for my mom and sent her care packages from Japan along with money and letters, which my aunt promptly gave away to her own daughters. She pocketed the money. This is a circuitous way of saying that victims replicate their victimization in others because at first they don’t see themselves as victims and then later because they see only themselves as victims. I make no excuses for my mom’s intermittent abuse. I only place her trauma in context, situating it within a continuum of violence, assault and dehumanization that will outlive all of us. We cannot erase it. We can only leave bite marks with our crooked teeth.

The cyclicity of pain is often a cold and plummeting fall that girls cushion with their braids and warm with smoldering hearts, a broken place that men rebuild over and over again with giant cranes, that women prop onto their shoulders and throw back into the sky, that boys hurl rocks at ever since the days of Goliath and the age of fox spirits. In my best moments, I know how to help others with their pain by simply listening, entering into their emotional space, holding their hands, itemizing everything that pain steals from them, loving them for their vulnerability and leakage and forgiving them for their brokenness and shedding, but I have no solutions to my own pain and trauma. I only know how to stab the monster with the sharp edge of my sentences and hurl words at its jugular like shuriken. When everything is said and done, I only know how to hold hands with the blade. Despite the insight I have about my own pain, at heart I’m just a punch-drunk karaoke singer who knows the lyrics to every love song but can’t sing them out loud when the mic is live on stage. The truth is that I don’t want other people to know how deep the pain goes inside me, how much I crave the balm of the melody or how afraid I am of being seen and dismissed. If they see me, then they will see right through my gossamer heart. They will know that I’m still in love with this disastrous world, even after all this time.

Categories:

Books & Literature

Creative Nonfiction

Hyphen Presents “Creation: A Hyphen Original Video Series” Starring Maria Zhang

Christian Ting — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 21:09:27 +0000

Maria Zhang, an award-winning Polish-Chinese actress and artist, is a talent defined by her multitudes. The accomplished actress, who just wrapped filming the guest lead role of Suki on Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender, has been on a roll recently, captivating audiences with her lead role in All I Ever Wanted, a 2021 Film Independent Project Involve short film that broadens what an Asian and Asian American experience looks like by showcasing a joyful queer love story between two teenagers. The short was the official selection at Outfest Fusion 2022, at Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival 2022 and at Wicked Queer, Boston's LGBTQ+ film festival.

Fresh off the coattails of the festival circuit and an ever-growing list of performances on leading streaming services, in independent features and in international theater, Zhang was the obvious choice to kick off CREATION, Hyphen’s original video series.

This series, co-created by Hyphen’s Video Producer James Chung and Senior Film and TV Editor Christian Ting, seeks to bridge the gap between the talent and the personal projects that have inspired them. The results are illuminating, reflexive short films that encapsulate each talent while offering a glimpse into their worlds, hopes and dreams. The exclusive online video series hopes to further cement Hyphen’s connection to the entertainment and media space, highlighting a mix of up-and-coming and established talent across all industries including film, television, music and more.

Zhang, who is no stranger to film projects, from mainstream commercial features to award-winning independent cinema, deconstructed her worldview by bringing our crew into the fold, sharing candid poetry, drawings and reflections on her life. Zhang floated between scenes with charismatic flair and rooted her exploration of self with sincerity and intention. Reflecting on the origins of her story, she talked about her upbringing performing local plays and enjoying summers in her native Poland with her family:

“We created this bubble of a world purely based on our imagination, where people get to come and be a part of [it] and be transported,” she said of the nostalgic time she spent there.

Like many creatives looking to formalize their passion in a meaningful way, Zhang reached a point where natural steps toward legitimizing her career started to take shape.

“I just felt like it was a calling, and thinking back on my life, the happiest I’ve been was when I was in Poland, running around on the field, rehearsing these dances, running these lines; I felt like I would always regret it if I didn’t try it — which then led me to L.A.”

Landing in L.A., Zhang attended USC, where she studied acting as an undergrad before being discovered while performing the play “Amsterdam” during her junior year. Her breakout performance in the play drew the attention of a talent manager, who signed her, and then the work began to build out her next steps as an actress.

Zhang’s big break occurred when she was cast as Suki in Netflix’s upcoming live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Far and away the most anticipated new TV show on the popular streaming service next year, Zhang reflected on her time on the historic set for the flagship, Asian-led show, which featured Asian American showrunner Albert Kim, a primarily Asian cast (a faithful nod to the source material) and even a mainly Asian crew. These remarkable precedents, which exist as a rarity by most Hollywood production standards, were not lost on her during her time on the show.

“Film has the power to make people feel like it’s okay to be a little different, and it’s okay to not know who you really are and where you belong just yet. I just hope I can continue to inspire people through my craft and give back to the community that gave me so much while I was growing up,” Zhang said.

By all accounts and multitudes, she’s well on her way.

(Courtesy of Lulu Hu)

Maria Zhang is a Polish-Chinese actress who trained in the bachelor of arts program in Dramatic Arts at the University of Southern California. Maria has performed at the Beijing Playhouse as a part of China’s English Broadway Theatre, as well as part of a nonprofit community theatre group in Poland, “Stowarzyszenie De-Novo.” She speaks English, Mandarin, Polish and Russian.

Categories:

Film

Performing Arts

Diaspora

(Courtesy of Lulu Hu)

Zones of Explosion

Evelyn Ch'ien — Mon, 18 Jul 2022 21:37:43 +0000

As the title’s pun suggests, Joseph Han’s ambitious debut, Nuclear Family, playfully fuses and refuses tropes of the Asian American novel. The titular family, the Chos, are an intimate yet expansive unit, the novel’s nexus as well as its slipknot. The Korean American household of four are settled in Hawai’i and run a Korean restaurant-cafeteria called Cho’s Delicatessen whose charm invites comparisons to Kim’s Convenience. The store, and at some levels the novel, neatly collapses the zones of family, domesticity, community, ethnic enclave, capitalism, colonialism, and globalism, into a single pressurized space, all of it poised to combust.

While this range of registers is explored in Han’s short, alternating chapters (mostly third-person singular perspectives), the novel is primarily a coming-of-age narrative for the two siblings of the family, Grace and Jacob. The parents also feature, grappling with aging and generational losses, as do snapshots of the community (i.e. store regulars, gossipy neighbors, and the requisite church ajummas). But their voices are mostly ancillary to those of the younger two. To find themselves, the kids who are no longer kids feel they must leave Hawai’i. For Grace, this means coping through her final years of schooling by smoking and dreaming of the contiguous states. For Jacob, the older, his leaving is also a return to the peninsula and a reckoning with his sexuality.

The big red button here is an interesting body takeover: While Jacob is in South Korea, teaching English after college, the ghost of Jacob’s grandfather essentially enters—or colonizes—Jacob’s body and tries to use him to pass through the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) into North Korea, to reunite with his (the grandfather and Jacob’s) family, separated by the war. Jacob (or his commandeered body) sustains a gunshot wound, reminiscent of an actual news item from several years ago when a North Korean soldier defected the other way across the Joint Security Area, to the South, so the novel rearranges and fabulizes the event, which is not the only of its kind. Needless to say, the act is deeply consequential. The moment a body steps into the DMZ the zone becomes militarizable. The Cold War, seemingly frozen, erupts.

Although the conflict between North and South Korea can be metaphorized as both an historical and pending explosion—Eric Wagoner, for example, calls it a dormant volcano in his 2011 Smithsonian article—there is no single site of detonation in Nuclear Family. The shockwaves of Jacob’s transgression are transpacific, as social as they are political. Both Hawai’i and the DMZ, of course, are sites of the U.S. conquest. That the DMZ was disputed into being by the U.S., Russia, and China, and that it is still technically under U.N. jurisdiction, makes it inherently unsettled and even palimpsestuous. It’s the frontline of U.S. military control in Korea, though there are many satellites of that control, like the base in Itaewon, the international district where Jacob goes drinking with his program participants. Hawai’i, a U.S. military stronghold, bears a similar network of burdens. Putting these zones into direct correspondence relates and even conflates their legacies as colonized lands, a new fission and solidarity that the Cho family represents. If the Cold War is the new Korean American metanarrative, the DMZ is the new metaphor for our loss.

So Hawai’i maps onto Korea, and Korea onto Hawai’i, as if both are semi-translucent, ghostly. Joseph Han cleverly maps geopolitics onto the family unit and the family unit onto the geopolitical arena, then maps them out onto the novel as a form. Atmospherically, the effect is sometimes turbulent, but maybe this speaks to the borderland’s indeterminacy: it has many moving voices. There are places in the novel when you can feel the realist and surrealist conceits battling each other tonally, like differing internal and external temperatures. Sometimes we fall on the less compelling side of that artistic negotiation, but zoom out and the negotiation itself compels. The reader can appreciate Han’s positioning of an Asian American family’s plight on the same stage as American Pacific conquest, bringing together the registers of geopolitics and home.

The humor in Nuclear Family is tactically similar to Percival Everett’s recent novel The Trees, which looks unflinchingly and bombastically at American lynching. The humor in Nuclear Family is maybe less morbid and slapstick, but it’s consistently present as a way to maintain a realm of buoyancy through the gravity of war. It’s worth noting the DMZ is spatially deeper than how it’s portrayed by Han: in the novel, it’s a kind of supernatural membrane akin to the filmic depictions of the iridescent advancing airwall of Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X, rather than the 2-by-240-kilometer ecology of contested airfields, de facto wildlife, and thousands of scrambled landmines that it is in reality. War tourism on its southern front briefly features when Jacob visits on one such excursion, but many of its ironies are left unprobed.

Han may be avoiding the Pandora’s box of the DMZ to avoid overextension. The borderland proves to be more of a looming aura in Nuclear Family than an actual metaphysical dimension, more a front than a full-on ecology. The true north of the novel is the story of Jacob and Grace—human, heartfelt vectors in a simultaneously sprawling and shrinking world. And just as important as any physical barriers or liminalities they must face, Han shows us that there are also borders in ourselves, drawn outside of our power, that family and art can help us reclaim.

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