Angie Cruz: In response to Trump’s election and the rise of the #metoo movement, Irina Reyn and I imagined a way to bring immigrant women fiction writers to Pittsburgh. We were interested in creating a space where we as immigrant women writers, could speak to each other with the hope that these conversations would reveal overlapping concerns, urgencies and interests and address what does it mean to be an immigrant women writer today.
Irina Reyn: This also falls in tandem with a graduate course I taught in the fall on immigrant literature. We started with Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in 1989– I decided that I was going to begin with Amy Tan for certain reasons, because I felt like that was just the way things were breaking out. The Joy Luck Club came out in ‘89. She had written one single short story and because of that short story, she got this incredible book contract practically overnight. That was when “immigrant fiction” exploded. What was interesting about the experience of reading thirty years of “immigrant fiction” was to see what has changed and what has not changed. I want to start by asking you, Cristina, because you actually experienced the emergence of “immigrant fiction” —what was it like publishing in that moment? I would love to hear everybody’s experience of being published in the category of “immigrant fiction”, specifically. A category that we didn’t choose, was chosen for us, and what the implications of being categorized as such was.
Cristina Garcia:. It felt like arriving into a room early and no one was there. That your cohorts weren’t around. Where’s everyone else? I remember distinctly in the late ‘80s, I was already a journalist for a number of years, but I started seeking out specifically Cuban-American literature. Who should I be reading here? I pretty much read everything that I could get my hands on in American literature. What was American literature then?—it’s so much more interesting now.. I wondered, where are the Cubans off the island? All I found was a single anthology, Virgil Suarez had been published in it. I found a poet at Mills College who is still my friend. I wrote her a letter, back when you still wrote letters, put a stamp on it. I waited for months, until the ship rounded the Cape of Good Hope and made its way to California—and I got a letter back. She had a little journal called El Gato Tuerto. How would you translate that?
AC: The crooked cat.
CG: Right? And so that was what it was like: barren. But as we were saying, yesterday at dinner I connected with Toni Morrison. Does anyone read Gloria Naylor anymore? I love The Women of Brewster Place. I remember Ruth Jhabvala—I connected internationally with what was considered an outsider perspectives. I felt, even then, that these were very privileged perspectives. There was a kind of blindness to what could or should be visible at that time. When I started writing my first novel, Dreaming in Cuban, and focused on four women almost exclusively, the biggest comment I got was, where are the men? It was a completely alien concept to have women protagonists front and center on their terms without being defined by the male gaze. I didn’t feel like a pioneer , it was more the sense of, where is everybody? Well, here you all are now. And I’m so delighted.
AC: I started Aster(ix) to create a space we can gather as writers of color and have a laboratory where we can play and write to or for each other. I have found, as an editor, that some of the writing I get from women of color, I feel like they’re writing for someone else outside, maybe their MFA cohort or the imagined white literary establishment? I don’t feel like they are writing or thinking an editor like me, like them, will be reading their work. Their work includes all these cultural explanations; I realize that’s a game changer when the editor or gatekeeper speak Spanish, or does not need the cultural translations, I wonder what freedom can the writer be offered, what else can the work do? Toni Morrison once said something along the lines of I love their books, they’re beautiful books. But who are they writing for? Who is Invisible Man? Invisible to whom? Not to me. I see him., about Baldwin. Thank god for Morrison’s vision. She acquired and edited writers like Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones, who did not address white audiences in the same way as Baldwin. When you’re writing, do you ever think about audience? Has that shifted over time?
Shobha Rao: I should perhaps think about audience, but I don’t. Because I can’t imagine—I want to be able to think that anybody would pick up the book. I think what I am true to and who I try to be true to is myself, and my characters. As I walk through the world I don’t think, oh I’m an immigrant. I don’t think I’m Indian, I don’t think I’m American, I probably most often think, I’m a woman. when I write I’m like, what is it that I’m preoccupied by? And it’s the human journey, right? How do I explain to myself that I am brought to tears by Bolaño’s work? Or Han Kang? Or Elfriede Jelinek? Why do these writers speak to me in ways maybe some Indian American immigrant fiction perhaps isn’t moving me? I find illumination in the strangest fictions, in the strangest places. I try to be true to that light. Which is the human experience, the human state of conflict and yearning. What more can I do? I can’t write to this fictional person, who may or may not exist, and may or may not ever encounter my book, but what if I write to that place inside of me that just lives in a kind of suffering? And wants to explain it to myself?
AC: I love that. To write in order to “ explain it to myself”. I feel like that happens to me too. I hear the voice speaking to me, trying to tell me something. Sometimes it’s a place that speaks to me. Cristina, I think about what you said yesterday—about how when you walked to Berlin you heard whispering—how things started to whisper to you and you pursued it.
IR: Back to the question of audience and the writing process, on the one hand, Sobha, you are influenced by Jelinek, or Sebald, or whoever. But of course, when your work is read, it’s most likely read in reference to Jhumpa Lahiri.
CG: You have one intention, but you’re read through a different lens.
SR: Right. When the reviews come out, they’re like, in contrast to Lahiri’s work, or whoever, but I’m not writing in contrast to them. I’m writing as me. Out of my very unique loneliness.
AC: For my book, Dominicana, a senior editor who was interested in my book asked, “could you add in more food and joy into your novel? More food scenes please.”
::Laughter from panel members::
AC: I thought I already had too many.
Wayetu Moore: I make this reference of a cul-de-sac when I’m talking about identity as it pertains to literature. Last night we were talking about a friend–he’s a white male writer– who felt embarrassed submitting his work, because he feels like it has to have some form of identity in it. And of course I let him know, there are statistics that prove otherwise, but the larger conversation was around the expectation bias that comes with any identity that’s outside what the literary canon has identified as their mainstream, or their prototype, and so he can write about a family on a cul-de-sac, and the most dramatic thing that happens is the dad loses his job at the local college. That’s the book.
::Laughter from panel members::
WM: If I were to go to my editor and say, hey, I want to write a book about a family on a cul-de-sac, and I think the dad might lose his job at some point, they would say, okay, well was it because of race? And if I’m a woman, it’s like, what are the gender politics in play? And as an immigrant, it’s like, when did the family move to the cul-de-sac? If I’m LGBT, it’s like, okay well did they come out? Is that why they lost the job? So you’re always sort of seen through the lens of your identity when you assume an identity that is outside of this prototype that’s been designated as normal. And so just reminding ourselves of that.
When I write, I’m not writing with an audience in mind, the editing process is where that happens. When art marries commerce, it becomes something else. They’re publishing these books to sell. And so they have to have in mind who they’re selling to. And the only sort of framework they have is, okay she’s Indian American so maybe the people who bought this book will buy her book, so let’s get it as close to that as possible. And these are people who are thinking very methodically because the heads of a lot of these publishing companies—they went to school, right? They have MBA’s, and went to law school, and so they’re thinking purely in the form of formulas, and what sells, to the disadvantage of writers of course—particularly writers of color.
Naima Coster: Yeah it’s interesting to hear you say that because, going through the experience of publishing my first book, I’ve become skeptical of algorithms publishers use, I’ve met so many writers of color and immigrant writers who have a story about how no one thought their book would sell, and then they did. I never used to think about the market, and then when you’re trying to sell a book you encounter this phrase: beautiful book, but how would we place it in the market? Where does it fit? Halsey Street is a mother-daughter story, but it’s also about gentrification. One editor actually told me, if I’m going to take on this book I’m going to need you to pare back on all the Brooklyn gentrification stuff and turn it into a true immigrant mother-daughter story. I didn’t do that, and I worked with another editor instead. But I often wonder if those ideas about what will sell—what are they really founded upon? Like is there some expertise that we can’t see, that is sound?
Crystal Hana Kim: I think there’s something really special about the first book, because you don’t know—or I didn’t know—anything about the publication process. When I was writing, I was thinking of a reader in the sense of someone like me, and as I wrote, it’s like you were saying with the whispers, I wanted to figure something out for myself. And then, when it went out to editors, that’s when I started encountering this idea of marketing and identity. I was saying this at last night’s dinner, but when my book was out with editors, one editor declined the book because she had a Korean-American author already. It made no sense to me because my book is set in Korea from 1950 to 1967, and it’s about the war… The editor’s client was writing about completely different issues and a different time period, but we were both Korean-American. This happened to me in 2016. This sort of bias is happening now. But returning to the idea of writing the first book and audience, I was kind of shielded from expectation. That protection breaks once you’ve published, so there is something very special about the first book.
AC: There is this kind of freshness in the writing of the first book—not knowing the business. But I was able to trick myself while writing this most recent novel, to totally liberate myself, to be like, I don’t give a shit.
CG: Once your first book is out, the expectation is not just from editors, and this mysterious public that is supposed to absorb it. I fought the italics before the non-italics became common. Why do I have to italicize Spanish? Anyway, I kept the Spanish, but they kept the italics, for my first couple of books. But our cultures of origin bear down hard on our work as well, for not presenting it in more ideal ways—for airing the dirty laundry. For years I felt there was some Mami-like emissary at all my readings saying, Cuban daughters would never speak to their mothers like that! Like I’m the black sheep? Just all of these constraints that come from our cultures themselves, to feel like you’re representing us too. And that often can be very burdensome.
AC: But how do you let go of those outside voices that burden us when writing? I’m aware you can shut it out. How have you been able to shut out the pressure? Because you continue to write these strong female characters.
CG: I surrender so much to what is actually happening of interest to me. And those voices are not so much of interest to me. Actually, pretty much less than zero of interest to me. So yeah, I would rather follow the lady matador around. I would rather be absorbed and populate a world in a more fantastical way than all of these naysayers. I just feel like, get a life guys. And you can also just close the book if you don’t like it. I just had this conversation with my brother the other day. He was complaining about something from twenty years ago, in a character that wasn’t him. Oh my God. And he says, well I don’t know if I’ll finish it. And I said, close the book. You actually have that option. Half the time people complain and they haven’t even read the damn thing.
IR: I think the pressure that comes from modulating both these worlds. I’ve definitely been at enough events that are primarily a Russian audience and they’ll say, “But you’re not even Russian because you came as a child. What are you, anyway?” or “This is wrong on page 45” or “This never happened. It’s completely inauthentic.” So there’s this kind of strange authenticity battle, a kind of strange tug of war with this something called authenticity. I did an AWP panel and people in the audience came up to me and said, that I wasn’t born in this place so how can I write about it? I think a lot of young emerging immigrant writers feel a lot of those pressures. I don’t dare tell those stories. Maybe I will write the cul de sac. But not a good cul de sac, you know? Because I want to write that other story, but I end up writing the cul de sac story because I don’t feel like I could write that other story. You can’t win with that cul de sac.
AC: So it’s hard—what is authenticity? I love what Cristina is saying, about giving more space to the thing that actually interests you, just follow that knowing space, that questioning space, that curious space, and shut everything else out.
CG: Right, because everyone’s waiting around with straitjackets. Just resist it.
WM: I think it also depends on what’s going on at home. I know my parents tried to tether us to our culture. We weren’t raised around other Liberians, or other Africans. We were raised in a very white homogenous, southern conservative town. But when I went home, it was Liberia. We had the meals, we listened to the music, my dad as always talking about Liberian history, so they did what they could to tether us to our culture and obviously that’s secondhand in a sense. And they moved back in 2012, and as soon as they moved back we started to visit all the time, and we felt the closeness to it, more so than some of our friends who were raised around black immigrants or Liberians, because they were struggling to assimilate, and that’s all they wanted—they wanted nothing to do with Liberia. Whereas we didn’t have it in our outside world so we were hungry for it at home.
SR: When do you lose ownership? I didn’t get the memo that told me that because I moved at a young age, I couldn’t write about India, which exists in me on a cellular level. I remember going back to India many times, in the summers, and we would land in Mumbai or Delhi, and before the doors of the plane would even open I could feel the heat, and the scent, and the life of India pressing against the airplane. And I also felt this weight lift. That I hadn’t even known was there for the life I was living in the U.S. And they would open the door and it would just rush in. I would just start weeping. I was home. I don’t care when I moved here, there’s an ancient feeling of home, and it will never leave me. And I can’t explain that enough to people who are like, why aren’t you writing about growing up in Indiana?
AC: And you could do that too if you wanted to. But you should be free to do whatever the hell you want, which is the whole point. I get that feeling too when I get to the Dominican Airport. I traveled there every summer. Every time there was a break, my family would ship me off with whoever was traveling, because back in the day it was free or very cheap to send your children. So I was constantly on a plane. They would put me on someone’s lap, or send me off. So when I go there I do feel this familiarity, but as soon as I’m there for like three hours, I’m like, who are these people?! I have nothing to say—it’s such a frustrating space for me. Because my politics are different, and I’m in a different place, I’m very American. So then you don’t belong anywhere. Maybe only in my fiction do I belong. That’s it..
SR: But the great thing is you can have those inverse relations. That you can have that strange attachment to that place, and you can have complete revulsion for that place. It doesn’t matter. Not revulsion, but you know what I mean. You might have much more complicated feelings that maybe are not so positive.
AC: I mean I have those feelings in America. I also am like, always in shock of the state of affairs here. But it’s interesting that feeling of, finally! A place. And then, oh my god, this is not even my place. Like, where do I go? My fiction. That’s my place. That’s why I invented this world.
CG: I was going to ask, to what degree do you think nostalgia—either your own, borrowed, inherited from parents—to what extent does that play with, distort and inform what you write?
CHK: I grew up in a very traditionally, culturally Korean home, where we spoke Korean, ate Korean food, celebrated all the holidays in our hanboks, and my mom’s whole side of the family is still in Korea. We went back every summer too. And at the same time, I was growing up in New York, where the people I encountered did not know anything about Korea—now it’s totally different with K-Beauty and everything—but back when I was little people would constantly ask me, are you Chinese or Japanese? And having that duality of knowing my culture and identity at home, but it being so confusing to everyone around me when I was outside my home, made me want to write about the Korean War, because I didn’t understand why others were not valuing my culture or identity. I don’t think it was necessarily nostalgia, because my book is about the Korean War, and a lot of Koreans or Korean families don’t want to talk about the war. So it’s not necessarily a sentimental nostalgia but instead this urgency. Like I need to write about this to affirm my own self, because my selfhood kept being denied by others in public.
SR: I don’t think it’s nostalgia either. Somebody recently said to me, well it’s obvious why you’re writing about India all the time. I was like, really, why? And they said, it’s because you were plucked out of that place, and you just want to finish the story. You want to finish that branch, that life that you could have had, and you’re just trying to write the end of it. I thought, oh, that’s interesting. That’s an interesting hypothesis.
CG: Nostalgia is such a huge part of the early immigrants, post-1959, and it was a kind of delusional existence. I mean, can you imagine hearing—well, my mother saying—oh, it was never hot in Havana. Never hot? Mom, it’s the tropics. There was always a little breeze blowing…she said. What is this? That crazy distorted mirror world. I became a journalist so that I could get the facts Ma’am, thank you very much. I’m able to quote someone accurately, I’m able to kind of ascertain what’s happening, the who what when where. After establishing that for myself, I could go back to the fantasy, but with stronger tethering. So I asked the question because a big part of my growing up was definitely downwind from all those distortions, and yet they’ve come in handy. I didn’t even realize how useful all that storytelling, and all those fabulations would be. But it was a bitch growing up with all of it. Nothing felt solid.
NC: I find myself thinking a lot about how sometimes romanticizing a place, or idealizing a relationship can be a way to give yourself permission to write about it, and I’ve tried to resist that. Like the place doesn’t have to be good or perfect to be missed.
CG: Or mythologized.
NC: Yes. And I think about that too, in terms of pressures of writing the book. Like there has to be something virtuous, or worthy of admiration for these characters to be interesting. Like they can’t be having rage, and having sex, and having problems. Like they need to go to Harvard and be lawyers or whatever it might be, and it seems connected. The way we think about the virtue of people and the way we think about the magic of a place as something that gives license to write about them. And that’s in our rhetoric too, in this moment. It is wrong to put people in cages, it is wrong to throw tear gas on people because they’re good people, and hardworking people, as opposed to these honorific things. You shouldn’t do that. You shouldn’t do that. But it’s in our rhetoric, right?
WM: I have a question in terms of immigrants and first-gen’s, who gets to write what? If someone were to hear these stories secondhand about Cuba, and then also go to Cuba and do the work, then can they write about it? Or is someone who isn’t Indian or Indian American, who maybe spent time in India, and likes the country, and did the research and writes about India. Does that make you feel a sense of—even though the criticism that you said you received, like oh you moved when you were seven, do you impose same that criticism on people who you feel write about the place you feel is not theirs to write about?
AC: So for the past ten years I’ve spent my summer in Turin, Italy. And while I’m there, I learned Italian, so I have a strong familiarity with the culture, probably, more than most people. And everyone’s like, you should write about that experience, but I’m just like, oh I don’t know, I’m not Italian, it just feels wrong. And then everyone’s like, everyone writes an Italian book Angie. So many American writers go to Italy, they get enamored, they write a book about Italy. But I felt like I don’t have permission to just write this story. It’s not my story to tell but it is my story too.
WM: And maybe it’s about representation as well. If you have a lot already in the Italian canon, but if there’s a country that’s less represented, and you have someone from the outside telling that story, then does that change the perspective of the creative as well? Like you were mentioning being a Korean American and not having many representatives, what if somebody else came in and said, oh we have a novel about the Korean War, would you feel a sense of loss?
CHK: I didn’t read Asian American writers until college, because I didn’t know where to find them. I might feel a sense of loss because there are not enough Korean American writers that are being actively published, and also so few writings about the war from Korean perspectives. I think it depends on how it’s written, whose perspective it is, whether it falls into tropes. It really depends on the quality too. But I do think that element of representation is definitely a factor. Because, it can often happen, where a white male author writes about another country and then that becomes the stamp of that country is ‘about.’ That can create missing and inaccurate narratives that marginalize the very people that are from that place.
CG: I personally have traveled far and wide in my fiction, but I also think that comes with a huge responsibility.
Bios:
Naima Coster is the author of Halsey Street, a novel of family, loss, and renewal, set in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn. Halsey Street is a Finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. Naima tweets as @zafatista and writes the newsletter, Bloom How You Must. She currently lives in Washington, D.C. with her family.
Angie Cruz is the author of two novels, Soledad (2001) and Let It Rain Coffee (2005), She is the editor of Aster(ix), a literary/arts journal. She teaches creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh and her novel, Dominicana is forthcoming with Flatiron Book in 2019.
Cristina García is the author of seven novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, The Lady Matador’s Hotel, King of Cuba, and the recently published, HERE IN BERLIN. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox, and a young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, in 2011.
Crystal Hana Kim’s debut novel If You Leave Me was named a best book of 2018 by The Washington Post, ALA Booklist, Literary Hub, Nylon, Real Simple, and others. It was also longlisted for the Center for Fiction Novel Prize. Crystal was a 2017 PEN America Dau Short Story Prize winner She is a contributing editor at Apogee Journal.
Wayétu Moore is the founder of One Moore Book, a non-profit publisher of culturally relevant children’s books. Moore is an Africana Studies lecturer at City University of New York’s John Jay College, and founding faculty member of the Randolph College MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Wayétu is the author of She Would Be King (Graywolf).
Shobha Rao ‘s short story collection, An Unrestored Woman, focuses on the lives of women and children during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. Her novel, Girls Burn Brighter, is a fictional account of poor girls from contemporary India journeying to the United States to find one another after one of them is trafficked. She also is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction and the recipient of an Elizabeth P. George Foundation Fellowship.
Irina Reyn is the author of three novels, the forthcoming MOTHER COUNTRY, as well as WHAT HAPPENED TO ANNA K. and THE IMPERIAL WIFE. Born in Moscow and raised in New York and New Jersey, she is currently Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
