New England Review

Behind the Byline

May-lee Chai

Imagine if my grandmother had given up when the Japanese invaded, or when she had to flee her hometown, or when there was nothing to eat, or when the Civil War raged on. I wouldn’t be here but for her faith that the future could be better.

Bob Hsiang Photography

May-lee Chai, author of the essay “Women of Nanjing” (NER 41.3), talks to nonfiction staff reader Belinda Huang about the determined strength of women, from those she has seen in passing in Nanjing to her very own grandmother. Their stories assure her that she, and we, will get through this current moment in history because, as she says, “I have resources and tools and I can fight.”

Belinda Huang: Part of what drew me to this essay is how you situate yourself as an observer, even though you have visited Nanjing many times and have a family connection through your grandmother. Your focus seems to be on presenting these women to the reader without embellishment, creating a kind of patchwork portrait of the women of Nanjing. Why did you choose to write this essay in this way, instead of centering your own experiences?

May-lee Chai: I’ve written other essays that did center my experiences, so for this particular essay it really began with my memory of the middle-aged woman in the fabulous yellow chiffon outfit carrying her fluffy white dog across a busy street in Nanjing. Something about this image really struck a chord with me and moved me quite deeply. I wanted to unpack that, unpack my feelings and memories and try to understand why I felt I had witnessed something special. Growing up in the US, I saw so few images of Chinese women, and historically the American media has typically portrayed Chinese women as victims, as weak and subservient and oppressed creatures who need to be saved. And here was this woman on a street in Nanjing who looked like she’d lived through some things and yet here she was decked out in yellow chiffon, and I was just so happy to see her. I decided to start the essay with this memory and see where I could move from there.

BH: You move between women of different generations, who have had varying experiences at the intersection of gender and history. But to me, many of the women do share a kind of strength, determination, and perhaps even a sense of humor when reacting to unexpected or difficult situations. How do you approach the tension between the universal and the particular when writing about Chinese history, culture, and people?

MLC: I was very aware of writing about the passage of time and generational shifts in this essay. I wanted to pick examples from women whom I had met in Nanjing that I felt could illustrate these very great changes that had occurred in the span of a little over 100 years. For me those changes are most visible in particular examples, in the specific women I’ve known or encountered or who are family and friends. The “strength, determination, and . . . sense of humor” are there because that’s how these women really are!

BH: In this essay, you touch briefly on the history of the Nanjing Massacre and comfort women, but what we really see is how quickly the past can fade into museum pieces—quite literally. While your grandmother grieved the family and home she was exiled from, many of the women who grew up during the Cultural Revolution have now adapted to a modern China, and though they may be driven by their history, they do not seem weighed down by it. How do you think our relationship with history changes? What draws you to continue examining your family’s history through essay and memoir?

MLC: In the US, “The Rape of Nanking” is still the one thing that Americans might associate with Nanjing, but other than that, there may not be any reason for most Americans to think of the city. But for me, the city was always my grandmother’s hometown. It was the home she was never able to see again after she left China in 1949 at the end of the Civil War. I grew up with her sorrow and her pain. I witnessed that at every family dinner which erupted into an argument about the past. History wasn’t just a series of dates in a textbook, something dead and finished and knowable; history was family, was pain, was memory, was very much a living, changing, omnipresent relationship to the past. Chinese history isn’t something that my teachers talked about at all when I was growing up. I had to seek out this history in college and then by returning to live and study in Nanjing. By engaging with Nanjing in the present, I could try to come to an understanding of how this history lived in my own family and in me and how this personal family history differed from how other Chinese people and families experienced it.

BH: Your Nai-nai is such a strong presence in this piece, and I can imagine she was in life as well. You write that “her faith in the future was surely not rational, but it was essential, and it was ultimately effective.” Faith as a necessary, active state of mind seems as applicable to the challenges of today as it was to surviving revolution in China. How does this notion of faith hold true for you when thinking of the women in your essay, and in your own life?

MLC: Well, 2020 has been a year that required all of us to have a lot of faith that a better future was possible. Without that kind of faith, hope is impossible, and without hope, activism seems futile. In the present things have been pretty awful from week to week; the increase in anti-Asian and anti-Chinese racism and violence is scary. And the rising appeal of fascism in the US has been a very ugly thing to witness. It’s easy for me to get depressed if I just look rationally at the state of affairs. However, I have to give myself the pep talk: imagine if my grandmother had given up when the Japanese invaded, or when she had to flee her hometown, or when there was nothing to eat, or when the Civil War raged on. I wouldn’t be here but for her faith that the future could be better. Despair is easy but we have to keep making decisions and work for the best, and that requires hope and faith. And I’ve never had to live through an invasion, as she did, so I remind myself that I can get through this moment. I have resources and tools and I can fight.

BH: Your essay takes us up to the present day, highlighting the resilience Chinese women continue to demonstrate in the face of racism and worsening US–China relations. We are corresponding in the week after the 2020 US election, with Joe Biden as president-elect. Does that change how you feel about the way Asian and Chinese immigrants are being seen and treated? How do you see this essay, and/or your work, in this context?

MLC: My writing is definitely one tool that I use to fight against stereotypes and to fight the anti-Chinese/anti-Asian racism. It’s one way that I can center my humanity. So much of this election season has been a painful reminder that we Asian Americans are still seen as eternal foreigners in our own country and as threats to the US. President Trump kept calling the COVID-19 virus the “China virus” or the “Kung flu.” When Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris was on the campaign trail, various Republican officials made fun of her name, calling her “Kamala-mala” or deliberately mispronouncing her very easy-to-pronounce name. It’s so juvenile, but it’s also effective racist rhetoric to Other her, to demean her, and to make her seem threatening because of her Asian first name. This racism is familiar and exhausting but, at least this time, it did not work. Biden/Harris won. Their win won’t be enough to end the racism. I have no illusions about that, but it gives me hope and energy. I will keep fighting, I will keep writing.

May-lee Chai is the author of ten books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation, including her latest short story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants (Blair, 2018), recipient of a 2019 American Book Award. She teaches in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. Her writing has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman (selected by Tayari Jones), a Jack Dyer Fiction Prize, an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and others.

Belinda Huang is a writer, editor, and NER nonfiction reader living on Darug land in Sydney, Australia. She holds a BFA from Emerson College, Boston, and previously worked at Ploughshares. Her work appears in Story Cities: A City Guide for the Imagination.

Shara McCallum

Writer’s Notebook—No Ruined Stone

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond.

A serendipitous moment in Scotland sparked NER poet Shara McCallum to answer, in her poems, the questions What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Where history ends is where literature and the imagination often begin. No Ruined Stone, the book from which the poems in this issue are drawn, emerges out of history’s omissions and silences. It uses the lyric and dramatic modes of poetry to reconstruct and reinhabit a speculative account of the past.

The book was in some sense born of a chance encounter. On my first visit to Scotland in 2015, having just come off the train in Edinburgh with my husband and our then young daughters and climbing a million stairs with bags in tow, we stopped at a candy shop off the Royal Mile before even reaching our hotel. The owner of Lickety Split was an artist and, as with so many Scots I would come to meet over the next five years of returning, open and easy with conversation. She also shared one of my children’s names, and we got to talking. On learning I was a poet and from Jamaica originally, Naomi announced, “You must know the story of Robert Burns and Jamaica, then?” I didn’t.

Late in the summer and into the fall of 1786, it turns out, Scotland’s great bard had actively made plans to migrate from Scotland to Jamaica. He’d contracted himself to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation on the island’s north coast—though “bookkeeper” in this context is linguistic misdirection. Were it not for his ultimate abandonment of his plan, Burns would’ve been responsible for daily overseeing and managing the work performed by enslaved Africans.

At the time I learned of this fork-in-the-road in Burns’ life, I was living with my family in London, feeling the layers of history beneath my feet and everywhere I turned. For months I carried this story around with me, like a sore in the mouth one’s tongue keeps finding. Walking the city that winter, a question entered my mind and took up residence: What would have happened had he gone?

Answering such queries typically falls to novelists. But, being a poet, I felt compelled to ask poetry to respond. Doing so, led me to archives and travels in Scotland and Jamaica, into the pages of biography, literary and cultural history, and back to Burns’s poems, prose, and songs. It returned me with full force to some of my earliest and ongoing obsessions and vexations, including with Romanticism and the Enlightenment’s ideals and occlusions.

What resulted is a book-length sequence voiced primarily by two figures: Burns, transplanted to Jamaica for the last ten years of his life, and his granddaughter Isabella, a black woman born into slavery at the start of the nineteenth century, who migrates to Scotland and passes for white. The book dwells not only in the question that prompted it but in the many that persist for me as a writer. What is our responsibility to the past? What are the whole truths of our inheritance? What choices do each of us face and make, within the circumscription of history?

Shara McCallum, originally from Jamaica, is the author of six books published in the US and UK. The poems in this issue are from her forthcoming verse sequence, No Ruined Stone, a speculative account of Scottish poet Robert Burns’s migration to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Her previous book, Madwoman (Alice James, 2017), was winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club. McCallum is a professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program. 

Behind the Byline

Kate Petersen

She said: that’s the first line to something you should write. And she was right.

Kate Petersen, author of “This event occurs in the past: an aubade,” talks with NER editorial panel member Evgeniya Dame about form and character in fiction, the troubadour song that inspired her story, and the importance of “staying naïve to aspects of craft.” 

Evgeniya Dame: Could we start by talking about this word, aubade? At what point did the word (and what it stands for) make it into “This event occurs in the past: an aubade” (NER 41.3), and its title?

Kate Petersen: I thought of this as an aubade fairly early. The aubade, or song to a lover departing at dawn, has a long poetic tradition stretching back to the troubadours of the Middle Ages. And while I, a mere fiction writer, must step into such a tradition with some winkingness (or at least a sense of humor), the story’s concerns align with many elements of aubades as I understand them: not just the ache of parting, but the sense that one has overstayed, missed or overslept a warning. I was interested in the narrative spark embedded in the form: that parting is always a decision, and morning requires it.

ED: A story that admits to traveling “in rough reverse” presents a challenge: was there a particular entry point? Did you play with the structure, reordering, as you went along?

KP: The door to this story was the first line, which I carried around until I said it to a friend; she deserves the credit. She said: that’s the first line to something you should write. And she was right.

To the rest of your question, yes: order and structure were paramount, and I revised toward them. Asking the reader to move across so many lanes of time in quick succession required a structure that would make this easy for them, or at least not too harrowing. Refrain is a kind of guardrail, I suppose.

ED: “No one wants to put their people in peril,” the protagonist comments, “but they must.” How do you define peril for your own characters? What are they most likely to suffer from?

KP: That’s an excellent question. I don’t know if I can generalize about all my characters. But certainly a large subset of female characters I have written suffer from taking a picture of the book instead of taking the book. They discover, too late, that they have been a polite observer to a chapter of their own life that required further action. This is not unrelated to a social conditioning I believe is gendered: the pressure to be “a good person with a second-hand coffee table”—often at the cost of one’s own desires.

The peril for these characters, and the rest of us, is that the clock is running down. We each hear or see the clock differently at different points in our life, and I think figuring out what clocks a character is attuned to—and which ones she’s not—is one of the central ways I come to understand what a character’s story is about.

ED: The fiction writing students are another sort of character here, their unspoken practices, habits, concerns forming a part of this story. Did your teaching experience affect your own writing, and if so, in what way?

KP: Yes. How could it not? Teaching young writers was such a big part of my life for such a long time, I can’t imagine it not getting in. And I’m grateful for that.

Teaching has probably affected me in all sorts of ways that I can’t recognize. But among those I can: teaching invited me to articulate why we believe the things we do about how stories operate, to try to shape those ideas into questions that are relevant and pressing to students who begin as strangers to me, and then to challenge those “rules” or customs together (“What if we’re wrong, and fiction doesn’t have to do this?”).

Away from the classroom, I’ve found myself engaging in this sequence alone, writing stories that could fairly be labeled “grumpy pedagogy” tales. This is one.

ED: Your fiction appears to alternate points of view, including working in third-person omniscient. Do you often write in first person? What are the rewards and considerations you usually think about when settling on a point of view in the story?

KP: As a teacher of fiction and a member of a writing workshop, I’m acutely aware of point of view strategy: how it’s shaping or torqueing the story, serving it or not. But when I’m writing, I try to stay naïve to aspects of craft. Then, I am just listening to my narrator’s voice, trying to stay close enough for long enough to channel them faithfully.

That doesn’t mean that I haven’t ever changed the point of view of a story in the course of a workshop or revision. But I think of such moves as etudes, lessons one undertakes to strengthen some muscle.

ED: The quarantine, and the general lack of stability people have experienced this year, have affected so many aspects of writing, reading, and publishing. Could you talk a little about your daily routine, your writing practice and whether it has been changed?

KP: Well, there’s what we came to call quarantine which, for many, is effectively over: movie theaters and restaurants near me in Arizona have re-opened, college football is being played against all public health recommendations. And then there’s the pandemic, which still rages on in the US and is worsening elsewhere in the world. The week I e-mailed this to you, the US hit a new record of reported COVID-19 infections: more than 83,000 new cases in one day. But to listen to the news, leading with clips of maskless blather from various stumps, one understands that science writer Ed Yong’s ninth error of intuition that will keep us locked in a pandemic loop—habituation to horror—has, in many places, come to pass. “The US might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is,” he warned. “Daily tragedy might become ambient noise.” I worry that to put my writing practice up against this daily tragedy is to participate in that habituation.

I finished a book (of epidemiology fiction, oddly enough) that was sent out before the pandemic, so my writing practice this year has operated in various states of suspension—first, waiting to hear about the book, then, in the suspension of life-as-planned that occurred for many of us in the US in March. I manage communications and outreach for an ecosystem science research center, and I am grateful for work, and for work that feels urgent. The writing goes on, though it is not what the moment calls for.

Kate Petersen’s work has appeared in Tin House, Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Paris Review Daily, Epoch, LitHub, and elsewhere. A former Jones Lecturer at Stanford, she has been the recipient of a Wallace Stegner fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota and lives in Arizona, where she writes about the science of our changing climate for the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University.

Evgeniya Dame is a Fulbright scholar and a 2020–2022 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University. Her fiction appears in Southern Review and Joyland. Her nonfiction and interviews have been published in Electric Literature and New England Review online. She grew up in Samara, Russia, and currently lives in Northern California. 

October 2020

New Books by NER Authors

October continues to be a busy publication month for NER authors!

More new books this month include a memoir from poet Natasha Trethewey, a book of bedtime stories for adults from Charles Holdefer, a volume of poetry from Jan Beatty, and a new novel in a multi-volume masterwork from Eugene Mirabelli.

You can shop these October books and more from fall 2020 on the New England Review‘s Author Books Fall 2020 Bookshop page.

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