Fred R. Brown Literary award-winner and Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers’ Series guest Elaine Hsieh Chou was gracious enough to have a conversation with us. Pitt MFA graduate students Sangi Lama and Sandra Lee spoke with the writer about her debut novel Disorientation (Penguin Random House), creating bodies for her characters, the permanency of books, and her multi-genre short story collection Where are You Really From.
Sangi Lama (SL): Thank you again, Elaine, for all your time and effort and being willing to do this interview. We’re very excited to chat with you. I would love to start with asking you what your writing process is like. How do you generate ideas, or get started, or are there certain things that you get inspired by?
Elaine Hsieh Chou (EHC): Thank you for having me. So happy to be here. So with ideas, they come at the most random times. I might be falling asleep, or walking, or sometimes I’ll be watching something, or reading something, and it’ll spark another idea. So the ideas—I never know what triggers them or where they come from, but I always write them down immediately. Even when I’m tired and don’t want to look at that blinding phone screen at night, I’m like, ‘oh, no, open the notes app.’ Always write it down because even when you’re like, ‘that’s such a good idea, I’ll remember it’—no, you won’t. And then once I have an idea, I just start building on it, I suppose, in different ways. If the idea is a really strong voice, I try to figure out, okay, who’s this person and why am I interested in them?
And sometimes, I feel like in the past I’d be a little more concept-driven. Like, a story that I need to rewrite a lot that I actually wrote during my MFA is about this Asian-American man who’s a hardcore Republican—not a great guy, in terms of like his beliefs and everything.
And he joins this softball team of all racist white people, but he still really wants to join. That’s his people. It turns out to be a KKK chapter. So he becomes the first Asian man to join the KKK. And that was such a concept-driven theme. I struggled with it so much because I just liked the idea of it, but I didn’t want to spend any time with the character.
I didn’t want to go into his head. I think I finally figured out a compromise. But it took many years because it was a cool idea. I remember when I was thinking about it. I was angry. I can’t remember what it was, but it was our community being anti-Black, supporting the cops, whatever.
But because it was just content, it took me so long to go in and figure it out. I was trying to then honor my resistance to it because I was like, why do I have to go into his head? Why do I have to listen to that advice? And now I’m hoping to write it almost like an interview expose, you know of like awful people who have done awful things and interview them in jail or wherever they are.
Anyways, long-winded answer to say, sometimes it might happen that way, that it really takes me a long time to figure it out, and then other times I’ll see really vivid scenes and I’m like, okay, so these scenes—I’ll let them kind of guide me. And I just start writing down random ideas. I’m like, okay maybe this you know, he has a daughter. Hmm, what kind of job could she have and I just try to brainstorm as freely as I can and to try out any possible idea and possibility, and in the end begin to pick through it all right.
I always have a document that’s literally called “brainstorm” for a specific idea, and then after I’ve emptied my head, I can think of nothing else, I’ll try to find the thread of like, okay, I think this is where it should start. And I always try to play around with different beginnings for fiction, because I feel like the beginning tells you everything like that. Literally the first word, the first sentence is like, this is the voice of it, this is the point of view, and I have to feel it so specifically and strongly, or else… I’m not going to know where to go, and I get lost. I was just saying yesterday that I don’t know if I’m a planner or a pantser, and I say I’m more of a pantser, but I guess I do prepare a lot for just that first part. And then when I feel confident in it, I feel like I can be more loose. like, okay. Now I can see sort of what happens and not be as strict.
Sandra Lee (SLL): Thank you so much for sharing your process with us. I’d also be curious to hear sort of how you got to the writing life. I know you mentioned yesterday that you started off in a PhD program and I’m curious how you then went from a PhD to an MFA.
EHC: I mean, I think I was always a writer. This is such a common answer. It’s so boring, but I journaled a lot as a kid, and I wrote a lot of poems, like really emo poems, so I was always writing. And I remember in sixth grade, we had to write a short story. It was an assignment, and I loved it, but it was just like, oh, that’s homework. I never really thought of it again, but I was always writing in some way. Then I got to undergrad, and there, I was an English major, but there was an emphasis in creative writing, and I was like, oh, that sounds fun. I’ll take it and, and see what happens. I loved it.
The stuff I was writing—I didn’t know what I was doing, because I didn’t know who I was. And so I kept trying to mimic the authors we were reading. I didn’t know what stories I needed to tell. All I knew was I loved this magic trick that I can make fake things seem real and, and make people feel things. And it’s fake though, but what they feel is real. I was having a great time, definitely not writing the type of stuff I should have been writing, and then towards the end of my undergrad, I was like, okay, I have to find a career.
And I didn’t even think of creative writing. Like it was so far, so divorced from what I thought a job was. And the funny thing is, our teachers were professors, and at no point did I ever really ask them. Maybe because they were professors, I ended up choosing academia. But, you know, at no point did I ask, like, how did you become a writer? Like, I didn’t even entertain that thought. I guess my brain completely shut out and was just like, oh, well, I like my English classes, and maybe I’ll become an English professor. So that was my journey for a long time.
I’ll skip over everything that happened with a PhD, that’s another long story. But when I decided to quit and was like, what am I going to do with my life? Part of why I left was also this confrontation with my mortality and thinking about what do I want to do if I were to die? It was very dramatic. It was like, do I want to die in this musty old basement researching dead white people?
And I was like, no. I could resoundly say no. And instead I was like, well, what is the thing I would die doing that I would risk it for, and I thought back to writing. It was just this dormant desire inside me that was too frightening to ever entertain. But when I was pushed to this certain place in my life, I was like, what am I waiting for? I have one life.
I quit the PhD program and started working at Shakespeare Co. in Paris, so I was surrounded by books and authors. It was a great space for me to be and to start writing. I was reading all the time, and just experimenting—writing little things here and there, and I was like, okay, well… I’m stuck here in France. I still don’t really know what I’m doing, I don’t really know how to become a writer. And the one thing I could find that seemed concrete was an MFA program. And I was like, okay, well, I’ll have a reason to go back to the US, like I don’t have to move back to my parents. I was like, I think this is what I should do, this could be my path back in. I applied and ended up going to NYU and that’s really how I found my way back.
SL: I found a thought that you mentioned last night super compelling about subconscious thinking about how Ingrid having the most non-invasive foreplay and how that was directly related to the medical resident boyfriend and the trauma she suffered from that. I was really just struck by how you mentioned that you recognized that connection so much later into the writing, like, published process. I’m curious to know, how much do you see writing as being a really intuitive or instinctive process? In what ways do you think you cultivate that or really try to protect those intuitions?
EHC: I have talked about trying to find the feeling of being alone in the room again. It’s funny when writers are actively querying or they’re waiting, you know. Right. Like they have an agent and they’re on submission and they’re like this is the worst time of my life, like all I want is to be published, and I was like that too once, right? But the thing I realized is I can never get back, really, I think, to what it felt like to be alone in the room. And by alone in the room, I mean you’re writing with the belief and the sort of certainty that no one’s ever going to read what you’re writing.
So it’s a sort of privacy and freedom, you know? Whereas now… if I write something with the intention of like, oh, this is a short story, in the back of my head, it’s like, well, if by the time I finish it, if I like it, I’m gonna try to publish it. AndI will probably have a means to do that now.
I don’t have this protective cloak of like, will anyone read this? I don’t know, but I’m having a great time. I’m always trying to get back there.
I think protecting that instinct is so key. Something I do is when, like, zero drafting—pure, pulling something out of thin air—I can’t have any distractions. I need to feel like I can disappear from the world. And I think it’s harder and harder to do.
I think it is harder and harder to find that space. But I think writing, in terms of it being intuitive, I think all our first entry points into writing are intuitive. And then I think it depends, you know, because it’s like revision you could call not intuitive. You could call maybe all first zero drafts intuitive, or maybe they should be because you kind of have to turn off the critic inside yourself, right?
The person who decides this is good or this is bad, you know, whatever that actually means and just shut it off. Let the faucet run. But then in revision—is any of that intuitive? Revision that you have to sort of step away and dissect and look at it from ways that maybe aren’t intuitive, which is why they’re like so many books and tips and tricks on how do you exit yourself.
The last step for me now, always read it aloud because hearing it changes. I’ll discover all these things I couldn’t have discovered because your eyes just skip over things naturally, like this is how our eyes work. They fill in all these gaps. So I have to hear it and I’ll be like, oh, I’m repeating this word like five times in a paragraph. I had no idea until I just kept saying it out loud or something.
No matter how many notes you get, something has to sing in you. And it sometimes will take me a couple weeks.I need time to let it melt. But even after a few weeks, if something makes me want to die, I’m not going to take that note. Like it literally has to be that intense. If you’re like, this note makes me want to die, please don’t take it. It’ll ruin your story. It’ll be against who you are as a writer.
SLL: I was really struck by the empathy with which you drew Ingrid, who is very much this flawed character who is struggling with a lot of her problematic views on whiteness and whatnot, but, there is one section in particular where you delve into her past where it sort of addresses her growing up and developing her internalized racism, which I thought was really interesting because I feel like so much in writing, that’s not really a topic that I feel like I’ve seen a lot written about. But I feel like it’s also this very real thing that a lot of people of color, especially those who grew up in predominantly white spaces, have gone through and have had to grapple with. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the experience of writing that section.
EHC: In so many ways, I think I didn’t want to write it, because I think it was sort of like fulfilling audience expectations. Like if someone’s an abuser or bully in a TV show, you bet on episode six, you get that flashback, and his father’s beating him with a belt, and it’s like, ah, the world makes sense. Everything fits together. Everything has a clear cause and effect.
But I think our world is not actually like that. And I think I was resistant because I didn’t want to fall into that trap of like, She’s the way she is because of this very clear XYZ. And yet, I couldn’t escape the fact that she was the way she was because of XYZ.
And so I think I cheated a little bit. I sort of put this line that was like, I think this is me. I think it’s me talking. It’s not necessarily the narrator anywhere. It’s the line where it’s like, if a truth is repeated too often, it risks sounding untrue. I wonder how you guys feel about this too.
Please share. I always love when we can just talk like conversation. You guys talk to me too. The problem of wanting to write something truthful, that maybe like a lot of other Asian kids have experienced, and then you’re like, well—but I can’t write that, my mom being mean to me, because that’s been done before or something.I can’t write about my parents forcing me to go to Kumon after school. That’s such a cliche now. I don’t know how to feel about this because I feel subjected to the same pressure. I also will feel this itch to try to write outside that. And yet, I’m, like, why? Why can’t we write about real stuff? If a memoirist can write that, and have no qualms about it, because it’s like, that’s what happened to me, why in fiction do we necessarily have to avoid truth? Like, if your mom was mean to you!
Why do you feel like, well, I need, for the sake of, variety in Asian representation, make her like a white mom who served cookies after school, and was like, tell me about your sex life or something. And this way I’ll be helping Asian representation or something. I don’t know. I feel like then we’ll dig ourselves into this other hole,
So that’s what I felt with Ingrid’s backstory, and I in the end decided… I must be truthful to her character and this was the only way I could see how. So I just gave in. I gave in. In early drafts, I think that wasn’t there. It seemed right in the end. It seemed I needed to, and I’m glad I wasn’t on my high horse trying to avoid it.
SLL: No, I read that and I was like, okay, this really unlocks something about the character for me. So I needed to bring it up.
EHC: Think about how many novels might feature, let’s say, a single white woman living in a city like New York, or LA, who sort of wears this type of clothing, goes to these types of restaurants—there’s a million of those novels. Or like the white woman—they’re all around white women—who’s like divorce and loneliness. So she goes to Italy, or France, or Greece, to find this local man. So I feel like sometimes it is worth asking, are we unfairly put under a kind of magnifying glass where they seem to be able to write very similar tropes, and then we’re just like, excellent, the next one, next year we’ll put her in Spain.
Same thing, same thing, and how is that okay? So I’m also like, I think we can butt up against these ideas and throw those stats at them. One day we should compile how many novels have been written about this type of lonely white woman in her 40s or such, you know?
SLL: I feel all of this very strongly. I remember I was in a workshop a few years ago, and I had submitted this story—I don’t even remember what it was about at this point—but there was another Asian American writer in the workshop, and he was like, I feel like I’ve seen this story before, it sort of falls within the tropes that I’ve seen. And I was like, on the one hand, sometimes it is good to hear that feedback, because there are probably gaps in my literary knowledge at that point, but at the same time, you don’t want to limit what you’re writing about.
EHC: Exactly. You’re writing about the thing that you are writing about because it’s important to you in some way. And no one can write it the way you write it. Like his note should have been like, oh, how can we make this more specific? If it’s a mom, what about her is weird and unexpected? I find that very unhelpful, because no note should make you stop writing.
It took me so long to hear, I think this was like another screenwriting thing I heard, was like, you should never give notes that make someone think, oh, I need to give up. And I’ve gotten a lot of notes that made me feel like that. But good notes should leave you like I’m itching to go to my, WordDoc and I had this idea—like that’s what a note should do, it should be generative. I’m sorry that he said something—literally, what is that comment gonna do?
Yeah. It’s like, useless. It’s only one direction he’s leading towards—I don’t think this is worth writing. Which is so unfair for someone to call, and as readers, our duty is to be like, how can we make this sing the way you want it to?
SLL: Yeah. That’s why it’s so important to find your people and find your community who you do trust and can be vulnerable with.
EHC: Yes. Not all feedback is created equal. I also learned that, because I used to feel guilty. I was like, oh, I’m not being a good writer if I don’t weigh all of them equally and consider all of them.
And I’m like, no. If something makes me wanna die, I’m literally gonna throw it in the trash. And I think that is a good way to just go about it.
SL: Very good advice. You’ve been talking about this, but I love the kind of emphasis and importance that you place on the embodiment of a character, on the physical body of a character. Especially because it’s so apparent, it’s so present in our daily lives, and yet can be so easily overlooked in our stories. And it’s something that I find myself having a lot of difficulty writing in. I’m curious about how you go about researching or writing about the bodies of characters that you might not be totally familiar with.
EHC: Oh, that’s a great question. This is also something I feel I’ve been thinking about more recently. So when I look back at certain stories now that I wrote when I was in the MFA program, I’m like, oh yeah, this character doesn’t have a body.
SL: How do you notice that?
EHC: I don’t mention it at all, you know? With Ingrid’s character—I think she was the first character that I tried really hard to do. I think at that point I couldn’t even intellectualize it in terms of like, oh, I’m trying to embody her, it was more like, she’s so nervous, and I don’t know how to make that apparent, but besides the fact that her stomach is a wreck, her internal intestinal situation is a wreck, and it’s not helped by all the junk food she eats. I was trying to be like, this is how I can show the audience she’s not in a good place. She’s very stressed out all the time.
So that was, I think, the first experiment. Later on I was like, oh, I wonder why haven’t I done that with other characters? In a story I wrote maybe like a year or so ago, I wrote from a perspective I’m really not used to writing.
It’s a man, an Asian man in his 60s. I was like, listen—at my age, I’m already feeling aches and pains. I think at 60, there’s no way he’s not going to move through a day without feeling something. I didn’t give him any kind of specific illness or injury or anything, but we’re with him for this whole day, and he’s standing a lot and so his legs really hurt and he just feels, you know, uncomfortable in that way and I try to like, build in those little moments. There’s a great story and I just remembered it, I should have mentioned it, by Nafisa Thompson Spires in her collection Heads of the Colored People, and it’s a short story where the main character has endometriosis, and I had never read anything that made me understand what it felt like. And it was like, oh my god, yeah. And it affects her life. So I think it’s like, you know, we don’t have to put pressure on ourselves, like, every story should be super, super embodied, you know? Like, maybe your character just has a headache at one point, and that’s it. Whatever, you know? But that story you could tell was so intentionally embodied because it was a story about how endometriosis affects her, her day to day life. But yeah, that’s a great, great story.
SL: Sandra and I both went to your AWP panel where you moderated. It was such a thought provoking panel about reclaiming the Asian femme body in speculative fiction, and I guess just a general question about that is, how you go—if you do—about writing Asian femme bodies in speculative fiction.
EHC: I felt like all the authors on that panel, so talented and all right in such different ways—and it was great to hear how they approached it differently. I think for me—so these stories haven’t been published—but like, one is, about this Chinese ghost, like a mythological creature, ba jiao gui, which is a banana tree ghost, and it actually has roots also in more like southern China and Taiwan and Thailand, this creature.
She reads as, you might just imagine, the girl from The Ring. So she’s got long hair. She’s sort of terrifying. I put her in a sheet, and she’s frightening looking and I think so, but she still reads as a small, short, pale-skinned East Asian woman. That’s how she reads and, and so in that sense, we might, I guess people might slot her into those stereotypes of women who look like that, right?
And so I had so much fun with making her character gross. She just pops out her eyeballs all the time and, and inside her mouth—whenever she opens her mouth—she has this suctioning void. It’s basically like a black hole. So she can’t feel food, but she loves eating.
She’s able to levitate too, I gave her that. So I was just having a lot of fun with making her body not a sexual site. And I got to make her weird and cool and I got to think of that type of body in a way I never had, because if it was a realist story…
So, oh, here’s the thing. She’s a mythological ghost who’s adopted by white parents, and they bring her back to Indiana, and they enroll her in high school, in like a suburban high school.
So let’s say I took out the speculative part of that, and she was just a teenage Chinese girl that was adopted, and same exact scenario. To stay within the bounds of reality, guys and girls would have said messed up things to her, you know, and it would have been a very different type of story.
In the beginning, there’s this one cool girl who’s actually Chinese-American and adopted, but she’s not a creature. She’s the cool girl, and she’s really mean to her. So at first you think Banana—her nickname—is just gonna be bullied.
But I had so much fun with it, because she can do all this cool stuff and she terrifies people. They’re afraid of her, she actually ascends, like she just keeps getting cooler and has a sort of respect, and so I think none of this could have been possible with a realist story. But because I opened up that door, and was just able to be like, I can make her body—cause she actually identifies as ace, asexual, because people ask her to prom because she’s so cool, and people like, fight over her to go to prom, and she’s like, no, I’m ace—and I’m like, I love that part. I love that, and it just made so much sense. I remember that was like a couple drafts in where I was like, oh yeah, she’s asexual because she’s, her body. Like sex is not a thing for her, it doesn’t even compute. And so I think it was thrilling to write for the first time a completely desexualized, Asian femme body.
Yeah, now that I think about it, it’s like maybe we write these stories—a lot of us and on that panel—because it’s something we can’t have in real life. It’s like this wish fulfillment like wow, what would it be like?
SL: You’ve mentioned multiple times how you started from scratch for each draft of Disorientation and never copied anything over from the previous draft. First of all, it’s an impressive feat, but I’m curious to know if you have at any given point, gone back to those drafts, and taken anything from them, like specific lines, or images, or metaphors, and maybe even used them in other creative works.
EHC: Yes.That’s a great question. I’ve never been asked that question. I did do that. I didn’t allow myself when I was drafting, wouldn’t look at it. Like, can’t open it. It’s dead to me. Draft, draft, draft. And then when that new draft was done, I’d reread the old one and be like, oh, is there anything that actually fits that I kind of forgot or salvaged?
I think maybe between the first and second version—I think maybe not a lot because I think a lot of it changed, and because the tense changed. So I think there wasn’t maybe that much, definitely ideas, but the ideas were all in my head already, you know. But for specific lines, I think it was hard to copy over and the tone had changed a lot.
And then from the second to the third version, I think there was a part where I think I kept, because it’s more just, I guess Ingrid was maybe thinking this in the second version, which isn’t the first person. And so, since it really wasn’t about her, I could just like, copy it over.
One is when she’s witnessing Timothy talk to these Barnes students about affirmative action. And he’s just like, gunning for affirmative action. That speech that he gives—that didn’t change. Pretty much when I compared them, I was like, oh yeah. It’s Timothy.
SL: There’s this thing of when you kill off your darlings for one story, I put them in a draft. I put them in a different document, because I like this image, or I like the flow of this sentence that might not work for this draft, but someday I’m probably going to use it. Do you ever find yourself doing that with those previous drafts?
EHC: I always think I will. If I’m editing a short story, I’ll have a deletions doc open, so I’ll just cut something and immediately throw it in that, the graveyard. And I think I do it for peace of mind, but I never read through them.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but maybe I just had this feeling of like, well, since I keep writing. Probably the stuff I’m coming up with now is better than the stuff I thought of that year or the year before then. Which I don’t think is true at all, actually, but I think I just tell myself that to save myself the work of going through it and reading it and trying to find how it could fit in again or something.
I want to fly through—or what is the word, like, have a seat on my pants—in the sense of, I’m gonna let fate decide. If I’m writing something new and this sentence emerges from the recesses of my brain and my memories, like, I wrote that before. Oh yeah, I remember that. Like, I was like, oh, okay, it was meant to be.
And so I just let myself off easy because I think I have so much deleted stuff. I love to delete. We haven’t talked in so long, but this incredible, incredible writer who I met at NYU, we were in our very first workshop together, he, right off the bat, everything he submitted was stunning. I mean—I was so in awe of him.
I remember he just kept submitting new versions of the beginning of this chapter. And by the third time, I was like, every one is perfect, like every one is so good. Why, why do you keep doing it instead of the next one? And he said this thing—I wish I could go back and record it perfectly, so I’m going to butcher it—but it was something like “every unexplored possibility is too seductive to ignore.”
And I was floored. I was just like, because I had been writing from this point of view. I had been writing from a space of like, I need to know what’s right, right off the bat, and I need to stick to that plan. And I need to know where I’m going and that’s it. But he wrote from a point of view that’s almost more like TV writing, which is like, you entertain every idea.
That’s why you need 12 people in a room, that’s why it’s very hard to do it on your own, because you need people to just like, throw it, pitch, pitch, pitch, like, the most wildest thing, and then in the end, eliminate, until you get to the thing that can resist elimination. And I realized he was doing that on his own, with a novel, whereas I wanted to make it easy for myself, I wanted to think a little, brainstorm and be like, I figured it out. This is how it should be written. And this is the path I’m taking. Less work for me. And here he was just like, so dedicated to the story that he refused to not explore everything it could be. And it’s just like, very few writers can do that. It’s hard. But I never forgot that and I’ve held on to that this whole time. Once in a while I’ll be like, if I was him, what would I do? I’m gonna open that door. That door’s kind of scary. I’ve got deadlines. I’m tired, but sometimes he’s right. That seduction, you know, it’s like I just let it open a little bit.
SLL: I think our final couple of questions are just about your upcoming work, if you are open to talking about it. You mentioned last night that it’s a multi-genre story collection, which is super exciting. I’m curious what some of the different forms your stories take are and if you could talk a little bit about that.
EHC: Ooh, yes, yes. This collection—I started calling it that because I feel like it’s gonna be a mixed bag of nuts. I have what I hope will be that expose of the Asian KKK member, there’s the banana tree ghost story, there’s a fairy tale that begins more like a Chinese folk tale because I was really interested in these two really old forms that date back hundreds of years—how they were written and how I can make the worlds collide. So I had a lot of fun with like that.
So it’s a big mixed bag, but I wrote actually quite a few of the stories when I was an MFA student, and then have thrown out quite a few of them and wrote new ones. So I think this collection, it’s funny to me to not—I don’t know what, how to describe it.
It’s just interesting to present a work that feels like it’s pulled from so many different parts of yourself and your life. When it comes out, it will be presented in a way that’s like, this is the Elaine now who wrote it, but a lot of these stories I recognize I was at a different place when I wrote it, and some of the stories I’ve had to revamp completely. But other ones I’m like, I’m going to stay true to that Elaine at that time, and respect how she felt about this story and why she wrote it. I think it will be—hopefully—a healthy way for me to not pick it apart.
Because with the ones I’m revamping, I sense this dangerous line of like, I can’t even tell if in two different paragraphs, have I changed the tone? Because I’m writing so my head is in a different place. I’m like, will someone read it and be like, this doesn’t make sense.
And so I think I’m recognizing that and trying to be like, okay, must be very careful not to over-edit, like a carcass—you don’t want to edit your stuff until it’s a carcass, and it’s unrecognizable to you.
SLL: It’s so interesting to look at your writing from different periods of your life. I feel like the writer you might have been even a year ago is just so different.
EHC: I agree. I agree because we change all the time. We change our minds, our moods, and our tastes too, like what you’re kind of into. Think about the music you were into as a teen, in every year of your teens was probably changing so much.
Something we should talk about more is how books are seen as so permanent, like a calling card, like a permanent this is you. And it’s like, it’s me or where my head was mostly at a very specific time. So I think books should be seen more like photos. It releases the pressure. With friends, we’ve talked about when the deadline’s coming up to like, okay, you really can no longer edit this. You’re in the final pass. It needs to go to the printers. At that stage and this anxiety of like, but what if I still want to change something, and the fact that I even found one thing to change at this stage—it worries you. I think we’ve got to take the pressure off ourselves and be like, you can’t expect this book to stand for you for the rest of your life.
Because that means you wouldn’t change as a person. So let the book become a snapshot of who you were when I was writing it. As I’m saying this now, I’m going to remember this.
SL: You have so many of these different genres and forms; you have realist fiction, but you’re also going into these really interesting speculative spaces. How did you find the connective tissue for that? How did you even market that in some way?
EHC: I haven’t even gotten to that part of the book yet—the book process where we talk about the back cover or anything. But I realized I was writing a bunch of short stories during the MFA, and I was like, oh—is this a collection?
I think by then I’d already noticed who my main characters are and I was like, is that a theme, is that a thread? But I was like, maybe it’s just writing messy, dark Asian characters. Even as I’m saying this right now, I’m like, oh we should take this off. It just sounds so cringe. But that’s what they all have in common. Yeah, I feel like it’s not an interesting theme. Like, an interesting theme should be loneliness or desire or something.
But they all shift in these, and I wanted to feel open to all of the stories going in whatever direction they went in. I didn’t want to enforce a theme. So that’s why now my theme sounds so lame.
SLL: Thank you so much for your time. You’ve been so generous with us and this has been so enlightening.
EHC: This has been so fun for me hanging out with you guys. I’m like, oh, we definitely share commonalities and the fact that I get to meet you is so cool. That was really fun, you guys. Thank you so much.
Elaine Hsieh Chou is a Taiwanese American writer from California. Her debut novel Disorientation was a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book, an NPR Best Book of 2022 and an NYPL Young Lions Finalist. A former Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow at NYU and NYFA Artist Fellow, her Pushcart Award-winning short fiction appears in Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Tin House Online, Ploughshares, The Atlantic and elsewhere.
Sangi Lama is a writer from Hetauda, Nepal. She graduated from Portland State University with a Bachelor of Arts in English and previously worked as the marketing assistant at Tin House. She is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Pittsburgh.
Sandra Lee is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the University of Pittsburgh. She is working on an interlinked short story collection about members of a Korean American church in Queens.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Images are courtesy of the author’s website.
