It’s hard to not constantly think about how you look these days. Our lives have been subsumed by the ultimate sensory deprivation tank that is the Internet, where all of our sensations are left unstimulated for hours on end—all, that is, besides our sense of sight.
Acclaimed author Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut story collection, Where Are You Really From, may not be a direct interrogation of the internet, yet its reckoning with our obsession over perception is undeniable. In the first story, “Carrot Legs,” a teenage girl wonders if she would have been better off had she not met her attractive cousin who, fitting the “algorithm of beauty,” has access to all she has ever wanted. In “Happy Endings,” a fastidiously “ethical” john enters a sex parlor with the sole concern that his fantasies be performed by Asian women, regardless of whether they are virtual or not. And in “You Put a Rabbit on Me,” an au pair meets her doppelgänger in France, sending her on a quest to figure out how much she can learn about herself from someone who shares an uncanny, down-to-the-mole resemblance. Chou’s stories illuminate how our modern fixation with images has trapped us into cycles of narcissistic self-consciousness. It becomes clear that the invasive question in the collection’s title is not only asked by pushy strangers, but also posed to oneself.
Initially connected via our sensory deprivation tanks (Instagram), Chou and I brought our conversation to Zoom to discuss writing from uncomfortable perspectives, how to subvert power dynamics through humor, Asian fetishization, and the resurrection of the author in the contemporary lit scene. Our interview begins with Chou providing advice on how to get over writer’s block.
Jalen Giovanni Jones: Have you ever found yourself in a rut? What did you do to fill that well back up?
Elaine Hsieh Chou: You have to keep living. That’s how the well fills up.
I’ve gone through several ruts. Whenever you push yourself to meet a deadline, you don’t really have a choice. You feel like you have to force yourself to be creative, which is not ideal, but it’s sort of inevitable. When I’ve had to write in those circumstances, I feel very depleted afterwards. It’s really hard to return to that space of writing—not as something that is looming over you, but instead as creative exploration. As a playground. For me, taking breaks from writing and doing other things fills up that well of experience again.
For example, I’d always wanted to take an acting class. They say eventually you have to take an acting class if you want to seriously become a screenwriter and learn how dialogue lives in the body, because a lot of our job is writing dialogue. I think a lot of writers would enjoy it because acting classes are about interior excavation and understanding yourself—and understanding other people. I ended up writing a new story about it! I also didn’t intend to write a story about background acting, like in “Featured Background,” but after background acting for a couple years, I became fascinated by it and inevitably, I wrote about it. That’s my advice, now that it’s happened to me accidentally a few times. I’m like, “I’m in a rut, I guess I have to take a clown workshop, or learn tap dancing!” [laughs.]
JGJ: That’s a great reminder. We’re writers, but there’s also more to life than writing.
EHC: We’re so sedentary and isolated, and the things we write about typically are not sedentary or isolated. We’re writing about people in the world, you know?
JGJ: Let’s bring it to Where Are You Really From. This collection also critiques similar themes to your last book—Asian American identity, racism, fetishization, self-discovery. How did your approach to these topics differ when writing short stories versus writing a novel?
In a short story, I’m very conscious of the fact that I may not be able to say everything I want to say.
EHC: In a novel, you have a lot more space to play with these themes in an expansive way. Ideally, the plot will shore up the actual subjects that you’re interested in. Novels give you a lot more freedom and space to go deep. In a short story, you have to use a lighter touch because of the page constraints. There are short stories that deal with complex topics like race beautifully and succinctly in such a short amount of time—but it’s trickier. You have to really isolate the situation, and stay there the whole time. In a way, it’s harder to have multiple subplots or characters.
In a short story, I’m very conscious of the fact that I may not be able to say everything I want to say. Maybe I can get across one theme I feel strongly about, or just have it manifest in a much more specific way. With “Happy Endings,” for example, that story touches on the sexpat industry in Asia. There’s so much to be said about that topic, but I couldn’t say it all. I’m just creating a spark.
JGJ: These stories are provocative in how they bring to light topics that people don’t like to acknowledge. For example, the ways that Asian women are fetishized by white men. There’s humor, but that doesn’t distract from communicating the seriousness of the topic at hand. Why do you find yourself drawn to humor when approaching serious topics?
EHC: Humor allows me to approach heavy topics that are difficult to write about. Sometimes they can be too difficult to write about head on, even when they have happened in real life in some shape or form. For example in Disorientation, some situations were so absurd that I think the humor presented itself naturally as a way to also exert some power or control over harmful events that have happened in the Asian American community.
Humor has this other power. It’s not just making you laugh, or making it enjoyable to read. There’s a history of subversion of power through humor. There’s this saying: “The worst thing you can do to someone is to laugh at them.” Not meeting them with reciprocal violence and instead laughing at them—it renders their attempts at violence even more meaningless and silly.
JGJ: Multiple times throughout these stories, you took on the perspective of the perpetrator, or of the person embodying the perspective being critiqued. “Mail Order Love” and “Happy Endings” are both written from the perspective of white men who go for younger, Asian women as part of their fetish. What pulled you to write from the POV of the perspectives under critique?
EHC: Well, I love the challenge. This is a topic I’ve thought about extensively. It’s something that has preoccupied me since my MFA. When writing something new, you don’t want to repeat the same beats you’ve written before. That’s uninteresting—ideally you’re writing to learn about yourself and what you believe in while juggling new ideas in your head. In “Mail Order Love,” I wanted to witness Bunny the way Frank first does. Reading from his point of view helped situate the absurdity of that situation—of mail order brides arriving in the mail.
“Mail Order Love” was a story I didn’t outline, and I’m glad I didn’t. Typically, that story would have played out in a much more expected way, which is that Frank is a creep, that he’s gross and he abuses her; that’s the story people expect to read. That’s a story that I expected myself to write. But it didn’t feel new to me. So it evolved to being not so much that he had a fetish, but rather that this website is mostly full of Asian women. I don’t think he chooses her with much intention, he’s just deeply in grief. Both of them are grieving in very unhealthy ways.
There’s a history of subversion of power through humor.
A lot of these choices came from a craft perspective. I’m curating the experience I want the reader to have, which is so crucial to think about as a writer. It is not just a question of, “I want to tell this story, so I’m just going to start telling it from this POV.” Considering what experience you want to take the reader on, and how the actual structure and point of view of the story informs that experience? I think that’s so necessary.
JGJ: An aspect of your collection that surprised me was how sinisterly sexy it was. I don’t see many other authors writing about sex in such a critical, forward way. What/who were some of your inspirations as you took these stories in that direction?
EHC: I was thinking of Carmen Maria Machado. Her Body and Other Parties. She’s so skilled at writing about sex and interrogating it on a larger, social scale. “The Husband Stitch” was so eye-opening for me. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian too. Before I read those stories in 2017, it was more rare to read about sexual dynamics in a way where it’s not from the straight, cis, male point of view of, “I want woman. Woman rejects me.” In “The Husband Stitch,” you can be loved and you can love this person back, but they may slowly exert their power and control over you in a way that ends up being fatal. In “Cat Person,” Roupenian does such an incredible job of delineating how women who are raised to think that “no” is almost a slur—like you cannot just say the word “no,” period. How do we try to navigate these intimate situations? When you’re so afraid of hurting the other person that you just erase yourself and erase yourself and erase yourself? I hadn’t read many other stories like that. Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Mary Gaitskill—she has been an enormous influence when it comes to writing about sex and desire.
JGJ: Why do you think it’s so hard for writers to write about sex as it relates to Asian racialization, and Asian fetishization?
EHC: It can be really hard to look in the mirror and write about something that you’ve been complicit in, which I certainly have been. For me to answer this question, I might be making a lot of conjectures about Asian writers’ sexual lives and histories and desires, and I don’t want to paint with a broad brush. But for me—turning it toward myself—I would say that when I first started writing in undergrad, I did not write about race at all. I had been taught under the aesthetics and ideologies of Raymond Carver, of Hemingway, these “literary Gods of the short form” that we were supposed to aspire to. So I’d try to write like them, and they didn’t write about racial subjects.
I’m not interested in writing that plays it safe. That’s not the writing that has ever moved me.
Looking at myself at that time, I did not understand myself enough to write about things that I was experiencing in my own life. It’s almost like you’re standing too close to the fire. It burns, so you step away. A lot of fiction writers are drawn towards fiction because it’s escapist; you can step out of your own life and into someone else’s, and you don’t necessarily want to perform self-therapy in your writing. But having gotten older, and having really thought through and educated myself on racial issues and how they’re so pressing, I’ve learned what’s at stake. Our lives, our safety, our security. It doesn’t make it necessarily easy to write about, because it’s something that I’m implicated in. I will carry my own baggage into this, and it’s pretty obvious that I stand on one side of the fetishization vs. “it’s just a preference” debate. But I would say it’s difficult, especially if you’re in a relationship. Let’s say you’re an Asian woman writer, and you’re in a relationship with a white man. Maybe that would make writing about it very uncomfortable, because you’d have to examine your attraction to and relationship with that person. I would say Jenny Zhang and her essays in [the now defunct teen magazine] Rookie—R.I.P. Rookie—are so frank. I think she wrote “Far Away From Me” 10 years ago, and she was writing about this question with such openness and vulnerability and self-criticism that I had never seen before. To this day I don’t often see the level of self-critique that I found in Jenny Zhang’s essays.
JGJ: Did you ever find yourself having trouble writing what was necessary to tell these stories?
EHC: Ideally when you’re in that creative womb of total safety and privacy in your head, you’re thinking, “No one’s ever going to read this.” That’s where I’m always trying to write from. When I’m in that space, I allow myself to write without constrictions. To just say the thing I’m afraid of saying. When I was editing the collection and was very much aware that, well, people are going to read this, I actually challenged myself to keep inhabiting that creative womb space. I thought about the fiction that has moved me so deeply, that has resonated with me and stayed with me. It’s the fiction that says the thing we’re all thinking, but aren’t supposed to say, or that you’re afraid to say because you’re afraid of being judged.
In the history of literature, typically we didn’t think of the writer as much as we do now. We would read a book, and we would not necessarily think about the writer as a person, right? But now the writer and the story are so intertwined. Your book is almost always seen as a stand-in for you as a person. That pressure can be terrifying and limiting. I resist that. I want to write what I feel is necessary. The thing that scares me to write because otherwise, what’s the point if you’re going to play it safe? I’m not interested in writing that plays it safe. That’s not the writing that has ever moved me. When a writer is extremely self-protective and recalcitrant, I’m not really sure what the process of writing is doing for them. I believe in the transcendence of the writing process. I believe that if you want to reach that transcendence, you have to let ego—which is ultimately where the fear of judgment comes from—drop away, so something greater can emerge from behind it. The greatest way we can explore what it means to be human is to look at ourselves and say the thing that we’re most afraid to say. So I challenged myself to do that. Ultimately, this unzipping of the self is what draws people to literature.
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