Episode Description:
Today’s guest is the author Wong Yi, who also goes by Eva. We discussed how she uses research to enrich her fiction, the experience of living and writing in the age of social media, what it's like to have one's work adapted, and how it felt to write the libretto for a chamber opera based on the works of Xi Xi.
Bio: Wong Yi Eva (fiction writer, essayist, librettist, editor; Hong Kong) is the author of short stories collections WAYS TO LOVE INA CROWDED CITY, THE FOUR SEASONS OF LAM YIP, PATCHED UP, and NEWS STORIES, as well as the libretti for Cantonese-language chamber opera WOMEN LIKE US, and multimedia concert THE HAPPY FAMILY. She won the 2018 Hong Kong Arts Development Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts) and was in 2020 among the “20 most anticipated young Sinophone novelists” in the Taiwanese magazine Unitas. She is working on stories exploring Hong Kong’s historical monuments, and on texts for performance with music and other art forms. Her participation was made possible by the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global.
Read Wong Yi's English writing sample: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/Wong-Yi-writing-sample_ENG.pdf
Read Wong Yi's writing sample in the original language: https://iwp.uiowa.edu/sites/iwp/files/Wong%20Yi%20Writing%20sample%20for%20IWP%20website_%20Chinese%20%281%29.pdf
Say the World: An International Writing Podcast is made by the International Writing Program. The hosts are IWP Director Christopher Merrill, most recently the author of ON THE ROAD TO LVIV (Arrowsmith Press, 2023) and IWP Communications Coordinator Mike Meginnis, most recently the author of DROWNING PRACTICE (Ecco, 2022). Additional research, transcription, and other support provided by Research Assistant Derick Edgren Otero.
IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) at the U.S. Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Doris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you’d like to donate to IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support.
Learn more about IWP at iwp.uiowa.edu.
Episode Transcript:
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1" by T. Bless & the Professionals]
MM:
Welcome to Say the World: An International Writing podcast. My name is Mike Meginnis. I'm the communications coordinator at the IWP.
CM:
And I'm Christopher Merrill, director of the IWP,
MM:
this week's interview subject is Wong Yi, who also goes by Eva. She works in a lot of forms. She's a fiction writer and essayist, librettist and editor from Hong Kong, she works in a lot of forms and a lot of venues she has one of the broadest careers of I think, like anybody I've met, she has worked with people on a lot of really fascinating projects. So we covered a lot of ground in this conversation.
CM:
She talked about adapting works collaborating, sense of place, research, how to how to turn research into writing, and I was struck by her comments about setting herself a weekly deadline to write something about Hong Kong as a way of getting to know her city. It was a form of research on foot, if you will, as well as in the library and the internet. But she has a large notion of what it is that constitutes being a writer who can go in almost any direction.
MM:
I was jealous of her in describing that practice of having it because I believe that was for a weekly column, right? And I, I often fantasize about having someone tell me what I should write about next, because I often feel this sense of presumption, this sense of, well who are you to write about that? And and that can be really hard to get past that. And if somebody would just would just tell me, Mike, you are responsible to write about this, I would find that tremendously helpful.
CM:
Although she's the one putting the responsibility on herself.
MM:
Yes, she is. In her case. She has the ability that I just say actually, this is what I should be doing.
CM:
Yeah. And seems to have full confidence in going forward and and that's one reason why the work is so dazzling.
MM:
Well, let's get to it.
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
WY:
"Deep Rooted," an excerpt translated by Jennifer Feeley. You were well aware that everybody was exchanging their guesses about the inside story of your broken engagement. You didn't know how many of them knew the truth. Then you just wanted everyone, including yourself to forget that you and he had once been a couple. You tossed the engagement ring into the sea in Kennedy town, and took the stuffed toys for a few books and travel souvenirs that he gave you to the dump. Not wanting to keep anything that might remind you of the past. The most difficult to get rid of was the huge oil painting of your wedding portrait that was included in the wedding photography package. Originally, you plan to place it at the entrance of your wedding banquet, and then hang it in the bedroom of your new home. Blessing and protecting your marriage from being disturbed by outsiders. After you throw the oil painting away at a dump, a nosy neighbor of past, a nosy neighbor passing by happen to see it. Even taking a photo and uploading it to the public Facebook group for Sai Wan residents. The online commenters either speculated about and mocked your engagement at length, or feigned sympathy, pasting lyrics from Kay Tse’s “Wedding Invitation Street” or Denise Ho’s “Wood Grain.” One of your old friends privately told you about the incident of netizens making fun of your wedding oil painting. In shame and anger, you blocked that old friend and that Facebook group. But what good was that? Countless netizens you didn’t even know had already seen the evidence of your embarrassment, and they recognized the backdrop where you took your wedding photos beneath the stone wall trees at the Tang Chi Ngong Building on Bonham Road, which was familiar to all the neighbors. Were you trying not only to cut / 根深 184/185 Deep-Rooted down the trees with a key but also silence everyone in Sai Wan who knew about these trees? Countless voices, whirling shadows of trees.When you closed your eyes, you could hear those faint, faint sounds, hovering by your ears like mosquitoes.
Hi, everyone. I'm Wong Yi. You can call me Eva. I'm a fiction writer from Hong Kong and I write in Chinese. I also host a radio show about book reviews, I write librettos for music and operas. And I also help edit a literary magazine called fluid alette, which is a Chinese literary magazine, that is probably one of the oldest ones that are still standing right now. So I'm very excited to be talking to everyone today.
MM:
We're really happy to have you. Thank you for reading your excerpt. I was interested in that because you mentioned when you sent it in, and you said this was the one that you wanted to read from, that it was especially interesting because you have an unreliable narrator who's speaking in the second person, and then it was adapted into a drama. And I was wondering-- adaptation is always tricky, right? So I'm interested in adaptation generally, in your experience of working with the folks who did that adaptation, but then also specifically, what sort of choices were made in the form or structure, the performance to bring in that element of the unreliable narrator, because that's a really important part of how this is structured, right? We begin with sort of one sense of how things have happened here. And then then we continually discover new layers of of horror and awkwardness, as we find out what's what's really been happening.
WY:
I really liked "Deep Rooted" because I had a lot of fun writing it trying to force the reader into the position of you, using the second person narrative, as if I were forcing you into a chair. And me as a person telling the story, I am going to tell you what I want to tell you at this point, as a reader, you're naturally inclined to empathize with the main character feeling like Oh, I'm a good person, I'm a victim in this, there must be something wrong with my fiance if he didn't want to marry me. But then as the story progresses, I will start to tell you things that make you feel like oh, wait, maybe I'm the bad guy in here. So I feel like it was like a rather cruel trick that I play on my readers. But apparently, they liked to be tricked. And it's also something very interesting about trying to figure out how memory works. Because in terms of storytelling, you're telling the readers in a specific sequence. And you can control what kind of information you provide to them and the readers at the same time. But then, in reality, things are not quite like that. You have to actively go out and figure it out yourself. So I feel like with "Deep Rooted," I was taking readers through a journey of the character navigating this broken engagement and trying to figure out how much I can play with the readers' feelings and tricking them into feeling like oh, no, now I'm the bad person. But also at the same time, showing them the story of this particular banyan tree in an area that I grew up with, because I was very fond of this very old banyan tree. For some reason it got chopped down. Because someone decided that it was a hazard to have a very old tree next to a very busy road on a very narrow path. I felt very upset that the tree was chopped down and decided to write it in the story and keep it in there. This whole story came from a project that was commissioned by the House of Hong Kong literature, they started a project called Writing Hong Kong where they invited authors and basically everyone in Hong Kong to write about a street that they felt connected to. And for me, when they approached me, I immediately thought of these trees. I thought, I need to write something so that I could bring these trees back to life and I can keep them alive in my story forever. And then the story ended up in a book that had a very bright orange cover. And somehow this was the reason why my story was adapted into a drama. Because the person who adapted it was the director and playwright, his name is Henry Chen. He said that he walked into the bookstore, and he saw a very bright orange book. And he thought, oh, who would use such a color for a book cover? So he was very interested, he picked up the book, and he found my story in this anthology. And he thought, Oh, this is so incredible. We can do something about this. And then he asked permission to adapt this. I asked him to meet me in a cafe that was right across the street from where the trees used to be. And he walked in without shoes, because he decided that it would be interesting to experience walking on the street without his shoes and feeling like the texture of the road and all that. I found it quite adorable, also slightly scary because you never know what people would do with your work. But I have been adapting other Hong Kong writers' works into performance art pieces as well. So I knew that sometimes you just have to let go and let them do their own thing. As long as they are respectful of the text, they should be allowed to do any kind of creative choices they want. So I said okay, I'm not going to ask you for the script. If you invite me to rehearsals, I will come. Maybe I'll tell you what, I think maybe I won't. I just want this to be your thing. Don't worry about this. I know that you have read the story and I know that you respect my work. Just do it. So he took the story. And he started his first experiment, he saw that in the story, there were a lot of whispering. Some of these voices were imagined by the main character, she was imagining that people were gossiping about her broken engagement. She was imagining what her friends and family were thinking or talking behind her backs. Some of these voices turned out to be real, some turned out to be not. So Henry thought maybe I could try something, maybe I could make every person in the audience wear headphones. And I can whisper into a microphone and control what you hear through the headphones and have actors act in front of you. So maybe what they're seeing on stage and what you're hearing in the headphones are different. So that was very interesting. He did a private showcase of that. But then afterwards, he thought, No, this is not what I wanted to do. This feels like too high tech, I feel like I wanted something a bit more down to earth, something that's more intimate. So he completely ditched the very high tech headphones/microphones idea. And he completely rewrote the script, which turned out to be the final version that was premiered in Cattle Deport, which was an artist village that was formerly basically where you raise cattle to be slaughtered. He only chose one act actress and one dancer to be in the show, despite there being so many voices in the story. And he made the main character read every single thing with different voices. So sometimes she would sound like her fiance with like a very deep voice. Sometimes she would sound like her mother, sometimes, she would sound like herself being very emotional and screaming at people. And the dancer would be moving around the space looking at her and interacting with her through every stage. And we can really get that very haunting kind of effect. And we didn't know who was talking, because there was only one actress, reading the lines from every single voice. It was a very, very interesting performance. And I really, really liked it, Henry did take a lot of liberty in changing the ending of it and introducing new characters into the story. But I felt like he got the essence of the story of being one where the multiple voices of everyone in the community coming together to tell a story. And also you will not know what is going on until the very, very end. So I felt like he got that very important bit of the story. The rest of it is just a beautiful kind of adaptation that he added onto it.
CM:
I love the way you describe this proliferation of voices. And the trick of implicating the reader, which also dovetails with the fact that there's a lot of emphasis on social media. So we're hearing different voices, echoing from social media, as the various members of that community tried to make sense out of this broken engagement. I wonder if you could talk about the role of social media in your writing, writ large. And in this particular story.
WY:
I am on social media, but I'm not fully writing there. I know a lot of authors from Hong Kong really like to engage with their readers on social media. Sometimes I tried to do that. But then I get lazy. And I just want to look at cat videos, dog memes and all that. So I would mostly just use it for telling people, Hey, this is a reading I'm doing if you want to come or hey, look at this cat that I found on the bookstore. But I do find social media to be a very interesting way of observing what other people are thinking and doing with their lives. Sometimes a lot of readers would ask, Hey, how do you write so many characters that are not like you, because I write short stories. And I have to be able to imagine how other people are living, how a man would be living or how a cat would be living how a tree would be feeling, then sometimes I don't have that kind of experience. But social media became like a treasure trove of people sharing their experiences. So maybe I wanted to write a story about a woman who is having problems with a mother in law. Well, I don't have a mother in law, how am I supposed to know? So I would go into social media or an online platform where people complain about their lives. And I try to see what they're complaining about. So how exactly are mothers in law? Bullying, the daughters in law, and the specific Chinese culture? What are other people saying about this? Are they siding with mother in law or the daughter in law? What are they saying about the husband? Who is in the middle of this? Are they saying that he should be doing more? Or are they making excuses for him? So I feel like through reading social media, it's not just scrolling on the phone before you wake up because you don't want to it could also turn into a very interesting form of research into how other people are living. And also it's something that you can do from anywhere in the world. Like if I wanted to know about something that's happening in Taiwan, in America, and somewhere else, I could just go there through social media, I don't have to you know leave my bedroom. So that also kind of taught me that there is a way for a fiction writer to do research. That is through social media.
CM:
Because among other things, it turns out that people like to overshare. I keep thinking of the line in the Tarantino movie, too much information, often when I'm scrolling through social media, but, of course, it's a great reservoir for writing possibilities.
MM:
At the same time, though, it's interesting--and I wonder sometimes about how this distorts, like my own understanding of, of the people in my life--because, I mean, this story in particular focuses on, one this protagonist has been curating her life and curating images of her life very aggressively, to give one impression, and then she also has this awareness that is, is maybe maybe excessive, of what people are saying, to the point where she's probably to some extent, imagining a lot more discussion than there actually is, I would guess. But on the other hand, she does have hard evidence that people have gotten together to be cruel to her. I remember, what this reminded me of when I was like 14, or 15, I was dating, like, the second person I ever dated, and a photo of us got posted to a web forum. And people photoshopped it for like pages and pages and pages. And I never told her, because it was like, you know, this is this is really stressful for me, I can't imagine how bad you would feel because they were terribly mean. But to me, this is one of the like, troubling things about how much of our social interaction how much of our self awareness and our self understanding is filtered through this, this medium that I find to be incredibly cruel, which I thought was sort of a something that you were you're getting at in this story in particular.
WY:
Yeah, in "Deep Roots" I really tried to play with what you were saying, like the main character was, she was trying to pursue presents herself in a way that she thinks would shut everybody out. She wants to show everybody that I'm really happy in this relationship, despite what you were thinking, despite the huge age gap, despite me being a student that didn't really pay a lot of attention in school, I am going to be that person that you're going to be jealous of. But then she also knows that the people out there are forming their own opinions. And this is what is so tricky about social media, because from someone who's putting content out, you can try as hard as you can to shape the narrative about you. But also other people are free to form their own opinions. And then feed that narrative back into a sort of public domain where other people looking on can choose who to believe or not, sometimes those things can be incredibly cruel. Sometimes there are a lot of secrets hidden in, I'm sure everybody has this experience of you actually not liking someone, but you still publicly congratulate them on something just so you don't seem petty every day. Yeah. So there's, with the understanding of there being layers of expression and secrets, see to what you do on social media. Sometimes people would be cruel, just because they want it to appear a certain way. Or they hide something because they don't want to say something or someone will might be upset that hey, why didn't you say something about this? I thought this was important to you. So it's sort of like publishing something really. How much do you put out there? When do you put it out there? Who are you speaking to? All of these things are really a social interaction, but also manipulating a narrative. And that was sort of something that I wanted to get into with "Deep Roots," it is to show people that yes, this is a very complicated space where you can try your hardest to manipulate everything, but then sometimes you will lose control of and sometimes we will come back and bite you. And what is the most difficult is that once things are out there, there's no way you can forever remove it completely. There were bits in the story where I said that she really wanted to destroy all records of there ever being an engagement to this particular person, but then you could not delete the pictures off of someone else's phone. You cannot erase that memory out of someone else's brain because it's theirs. So there was nothing she could do. But she still tries so hard and struggles and struggles.
MM:
Well and you went, you went further. You kept reminding us, it's not possible to murder everyone who knows about the marriage. That's not feasible to do.
WY:
That's very illegal.
CM:
And we can't unsee what we have seen. Yeah. I love the fact that the story came out of the desire to make an anthology of writings about Hong Kong and I noticed that in a 2022 interview, you talked about that you are a Hong Kong writer whose work focuses on Hong Kong's daily life history, culture, language, memory, and emotions. What makes Hong Kong such an irresistible subject for you?
WY:
Well, first of all, I'm born and raised in Hong Kong. So a lot of it has to do with nostalgia. And yeah, of course. And I find that I'm very easily attracted to and stimulated by the very small things in everyday life that a lot of people would overlook. So a lot of the times, my friends would be like, Why aren't you looking into my eyes, when I'm talking to you, you look like your eyes are catching butterflies. But then I would point out to her that, hey, did you know that there's a cat behind you in the past 30 minutes staring at us, and they will be so surprised, because they never noticed. And these are the kinds of things that I feel like, would be very interesting to my readers, I want to show them that, hey, this space that we're all familiar with, actually has a lot more than what other people might be able to notice. So with that, I tried to look into things that people might look overlook, maybe the smaller voices, maybe layers of things like history that people don't usually spend a lot of time reading, I try to read the history of the neighborhood and try to see oh, so that is the reason why there's this weird piece of rock standing there for the past couple decades. Or this is the reason why we have this strange law of this underground public toilet in the middle of Central that only has male bathrooms. Because at one point in the history of Hong Kong, there were only 1000 women and children. So there was no need to build female public bathrooms in the city. So these are the very interesting things that I like to look at. And personally, I find delight in finding these little secrets and gems in this frankly, very rich historical and cultural and linguistic fabric of Hong Kong. I tried to put that into a story.
CM:
So does the story begin with you uncovering a historical nugget or something you see on social media a little fact or secret you under somewhere? How does the story begin for you?
WY:
I often like to use the metaphor of a seed flying into my brain and just stubbornly decided to grow. So sometimes I would be scrolling on social media when I was working on one of my short stories collections about the historical monuments of Hong Kong. So I've been working on that for a couple of years now. One time I was struck scrolling on social media. And for some reason, an advertisement by a major property development company showed up, like I didn't follow them. But for some reason, the algorithms showed me that and they said, Hey, did you know that we have a very old clay pipe? Within our neighborhood? I said, Why? Why is a clay pipe. So interesting. I thought it's just a pipe. I mean, it helps us flush the toilet, what's so important about that. And then I did some more research into it. And apparently, the existence of this particular pipe proved that Hong Kong used to have an industry of producing clay objects. And the technique was so good that you could build pipes with it, which is incredibly difficult. That was before metal was highly utilized material for building. I thought, Oh, this is so interesting. Maybe I can look into doing that. So instead of going around drinking bubble tea, I was standing in front of the pipe in the middle of the shopping district staring at it and people were like, is she okay? Or I would be walking around and Central, which is like the center of commerce and shopping and government and everything. And I would notice this underground public toilet that only has male bathrooms in it. And I would just stand there and be very upset because as a woman, I cannot go in there. And the first thing that my history teacher told me when I was in high school was Do you know that the word "history" has the word "his" in it. So it's basically told from a male perspective, and I thought, Oh, this thing is coming back to me 20 years later, because I'm a woman, I cannot go in and look at this historical monument. So I got so upset that I wrote a whole story about it. I said, Okay, this street is a misogynist. Of course, it's not, it's just a street that doesn't have feelings. But I made it so that it sounds like this street and has an agenda against women. This is why he's so proud of having this male only public bathroom underneath the staircase that is basically his face. And then I also found some news clippings from maybe 50 years ago, where some women just so happened to be walking down the street and slipped and fell. And I said, Hey, this is evidence that this street hates women. So I tried to play with actual historical facts and sort of evidence and quotes and twist it in a way that the readers will see oh, you're obviously joking. But there's something in this logic that is so playful that you want to keep reading and seeing where I'm coming. from and where the joke lies.
CM:
So history becomes her story.
WY:
Yeah, and perhaps a kind of a game.
MM:
You talked about, in the in the interview that Chris referred to, a literary tradition in Hong Kong, you said, probably traced back to Xi Xi, the author and poet who you you've talked about a lot, giving Hong Kong a nickname. In your case, you said you gave the nickname of "City Y" in your first collection. And that that was a way of exploring what real life events in Hong Kong meant to you, but it from a little bit of a remove, because you felt at the time like you were too young--you said you were like 18--to be making a lot of like big claims about the city, which I totally get. I'm curious what other sorts of devices you've used, like how you negotiate the relationship between the reality of what you're writing about, and a need to keep that kind of fictional remove--the ability to write about it in a in a free way. Because like, I mean, the example of those trees is really interesting, right? Because those are a real thing that I'm guessing a number of your readers would recognize and would have their own relationship to, and you're sort of creating this new relationship to a real thing, in the in the process of writing a story like that. So I guess I'm curious about that negotiation of intimacy with the with the real subject and the need to fictionalize it and to create your own new stories on top of that.
WY:
Well, that's actually a very interesting thing to think about. Because when I started writing about Hong Kong, and using a nickname called City Y, to talk about Hong Kong, instead of just naming it as Hong Kong, part of it came from what you said is like the sort of lack of confidence and saying that I should be allowed to make a lot of very bold claims about what Hong Kong is because I was obviously a teenager, and I wanted to keep myself humble, and remind myself always that whatever I say is only from my own perspective, I have my limitations, I have my own biases. But if the readers are willing, you're welcome to come into my story and see how I view the world. So that is something that I still carry with myself, sometimes I get more confidence and making more bolder claims. So I am slightly more confident in addressing Hong Kong as it is right now. But also back in the day, I feel like I was very influenced by a lot of the fiction writers that I look up to at the time, such as Dorothy Tse and Hon Lai Chu, who are both IWP alumni. At that point, when I was starting to write stories, they made this thing about magical realism in talking about Hong Kong so fabulous, like everybody, we're reading their work like, Oh, this is such an interesting way of talking about Hong Kong. This gives us so much freedom, and using all kinds of creative allegories, and hiding things you don't want to say or amplifying something. So I feel like maybe I was quite influenced by that as well. Xi Xi as well, who I've mentioned, she wrote a very famous short story called "Marvels of the Floating City" where she basically imagined Hong Kong being a tiny city floating on top of a big rock hanging over the ocean in one of the great paintings. And that sort of told every writer in Hong Kong that yes, you can do this, you can invent a whole version of Hong Kong, name it whatever you want, and do whatever you want in it. Maybe it's magical realism, maybe it's realism itself, you are allowed to build your own version of Hong Kong. So that was sort of how I started writing about everything I see and interest me in Hong Kong. Now that I've been writing for maybe 15 years or so I feel like I have a slightly closer relationship to this Hong Kong that I see where I feel like, okay, I've lived a couple more decades, I feel like, I'm okay standing here saying that I'm from Hong Kong. This is the version of Hong Kong that I see. I also know that I still have my biases and limitations, and my own preferences, and what to see and what to write about. But I also realized that this is literature, I'm writing short stories. This is not an endeavor to write actual historical facts. I am not trying to make a population census, or tell everybody exactly what Hong Kong is, this is my interpretation. I trust that I can do that. And I trust that my readers will understand. So now I kind of move towards naming things more specifically, I use more concrete things in my stories where I name the streets name, the people name the events. But of course, sometimes I will still hide behind the mask of fiction and my characters because that's what fiction is most fun about. So I feel like it's very interesting to think about how this sort of mentality evolved as I grew as a writer.
CM:
the relationship between the urge to document and the desire to invent is fundamental to writing fiction, isn't it?
WY:
Yeah.
CM:
You may have more place names now. But I, my sense is that the urge to invent remains just as lively.
WY:
Yeah, just like the historical stories example I was giving. I was still inventing things. But I was dancing on top of very concrete and solid evidence of what Hong Kong used to be like and what Hong Kong is now, because that particular project actually had a part of it being run in a newspaper column. So I was invited by one of the most prominent newspapers in Hong Kong, Ming Pao, to write short stories for them every week, which is something that I'm used to doing since the beginning of my writing career. But then this is about history. So imagine having six days to write a whole story where you spend two whole days doing historical research where you go to the library, you go through the online archive of newspapers, and you physically go out and get bit by mosquitoes trying to look at these historical relics. And then you come back, spend two days writing a story, and then spend the other two days letting the story rest and put in final edits, submit your story, rest for the Sunday, when the story comes out in the newspaper, and then you do it again. And then you do it for maybe 10, or 15 weeks in a go. So it was a very stressful process. And it's very labor intensive, and entailed so much research, that my friend was doing a PhD in history started screaming at me saying, Why are you doing this to yourself, even I'm not doing this to myself. But I found that it's so important for me to actually go back into the actual streets, the actual historical documents and finding these building blocks on which I can invent something that feels authentic and feels like I'm actually respecting the history, not just reading a few lines from Wikipedia, and then going off from that I want to go in and feel the emotions of a neighborhood. Oh, how did people feel when this particular historical monument got torn down? Oh, when that ship sank? what were people doing? Were they eating on the streets looking at this particular ruin? Or were they somewhere protesting or something. So it was a very, very difficult project to work on. But I'm very proud that I put myself into this task, and it did turn out pretty fun.
CM:
That's the difference between doing your research entirely in a library or an archive and actually having tactile sensations that might seep into your work in different ways.
WY:
Yeah, one of the very memorable things was, there was a big rainstorm maybe 50 years ago in Hong Kong, and that caused two major landslides in two different parts of Hong Kong. One was a very middle class neighborhood with a lot of expats university professors. Of course, a lot of people died. But also at the same time, there was an even bigger landslide in the slums, somewhere in Kowloon, even more people died. And a lot of people would only focus on the landslide near the slums, because they thought, hey, who needs to give empathy to these middle class people who also died. And 50 years after this sort of tragedy, I decided to write a story about this. And I had to physically go out and try to see if there's any evidence at all about these things having happened. When I went to the slum side, there was a whole temple dedicated to all those who lost their lives. I could go in and offer some incense, offer some money, and tell everyone in the supernatural world that, hey, I'm doing a story about this. I hope you're okay with this. There was a memorial park. So there was even a whole exhibition nearby in a shopping mall telling people about the history of this. But then when I walked to where the landslide happened in the middle class neighborhood, there was nothing. There was just a nondescript park that was very oddly shaped. They had the decency to not build another building on top of that particular space. But there was absolutely nothing telling you that something very horrible happened. So I thought, Hey, it's only been 50 years. And people are already forgetting about this. Maybe my story could be a way of telling people that hey, something happened. And the way we remember it, on the appearances of the city is very different depending on the neighborhood, maybe if they did put up a plaque or have a little temple in the middle class neighborhood. Everyone would protest saying this is going to bring down property prices, but nobody cares about the other one because they they're near a public housing estate. Nobody cares about property prices over there. So that's sort of also goes back to my sort of question to myself about what actually is history, how do we remember things? What kind of things do we choose to keep, and what to discard and what to hide? Because of what we right now, want, we want high property prices, maybe, then maybe the solution to that is to erase a particular part of history from our neighborhood where this isn't a problem, maybe we will allow it to stand there. Or maybe we're trying to actually genuinely respect the people who lost their lives over there by having a whole temple erected over there. So a lot of these questions are raised in my head, sometimes I try to answer them sometimes I don't have an answer. But I feel like fiction would be a very interesting way to open up the discussion and draw people's attention to these things.
MM:
Well, it's interesting to me hearing you say that, because I don't know if this was your experience in hearing that story, Chris, but my expectation when you started describing the landslide, and who it affected, and how there were different responses, I was sure, because I think this is what would happen here, that you were going to say everybody was very sad about the middle class people. And there was a lot of discussion of that. And even there were things memorializing that. And no one talked about the about the poor people who were affected by the landslide, because I think that's what we would have was that also you're exactly,
CM:
Exactly. I thought so too. And the turn was so was so dramatic.
WY:
Yeah, I thought so too. But then I started doing research about this thing. And I found that some high school students were tasked with writing a historical report about this. So they had to go in and do research and, you know, write a report about what happened. And I think I read one of these students works that said, Oh, since they were middle class, we're not going to talk about them, because they were okay. After the landslide happened, the authorities put them into hotel rooms. So I thought, hey, wait, they also lost people, and they're, you know, displaced. And just because they ended up in a hotel room doesn't mean that they were not suffering. But then apparently, in the poor neighborhood, they didn't have the luxury of being put into hotel rooms, because there was such a larger scale of tragedy over there. There were less resources on the Catalan side as well. So it was practically impossible to give them the same treatment. But from the 21st century student point of view, they said, okay, they had hotel rooms, we're not going to, you know, feel too much about that. So I thought that was a very interesting thing to observe as well, like, how are the like newer generation responding to something that they actually have no personal connection with? How are they imagining suffering. There are other writers in Hong Kong who have taken this incident and trying to write it into fiction. And they come at it as at a very sympathetic perspective. They're writing about suffering, regardless of how rich they might be, what races they might be. It's just that this is a natural tragedy, and a lot of people died. And there was a lot of heartbreak, a lot of chaos, people were not sure whether they would be able to see the families come out of the landslide alive. That was something that I feel like the fiction writer cares about, instead of judging whether they're worthy of our empathy just because they ended up in a hotel room.
CM:
Eudora Welty once remarked that people were surprised that even her most despicable characters always had good traits about them, and that perhaps she loved all of her characters. And I can't remember exactly what she said. But the gist of it was that you have to love your characters to be able to bring them to life, faults and all.
WY:
I feel like none of us, or no fictional character, is fully one dimensional, and that they're good or bad. There's always something deeper behind them something that we can all find, to empathize with, or something that we could criticize them for. And I'm trying to do more about that in fiction to try to make the characters more three dimensional. And that's what I also really love about "Deep Rooted." I tried to make you fully go in empathizing with the main character and then completely twisting it around. Maybe that was something that I was trying to play with as well.
MM:
So as I understand it, you wrote the libretto for a chamber opera whose title is translated as "Women Like Us." And this was based on, was it several stories by Xi Xi?
WY:
Yeah, it's inspired by two short stories she wrote. One is called "The Cold," the other one is called "A Woman Like Me." So these two stories are very famous in her work because she she is not a fiction writer or a writer to typically directly write about romantic love. And I heard a story where she decided to write these stories because one of her friends said, Hey, why do you never write about love? She said that well, I will write about love. But then these two short stories are not just like a rom-com kind of story. She was trying to ask questions about where love stands, if other people tell you that you're not worthy of love. So for "A Woman Like Me," it's about a female mortician in the 80s, where death and anything related to death is still very stigmatized. She's very proud of her job. She thinks that this is something that everybody would need to use. At some point, everybody would die. So everybody would need a mortician to help them look their best when they were going out. But then she has a boyfriend. And she has to tell him that her job is actually not making faces of brides but making up the faces of someone who's no longer breathing. And throughout the entire story, we go into a monologue, where she talks about how she became a mortician, how she saw that her aunt, who was also a mortician lost her boyfriend, when she told him the truth, he basically ran out the door screaming, never to return, despite vowing that he will love her forever. And she was wondering what will happen because she has a date with her boyfriend. And she promised to take him to see where she works. And towards the end of the story, she was very, very upset, because she saw that her beautiful boyfriend brought a bouquet of flowers. And she said, Oh, he looks so happy. But I'm filled with sadness, because he doesn't know that in our industry flowers mean a final goodbye. So that was very, very haunting. And then we see "The Cold," which is sort of related to the story, in that "The Cold" features a woman called Fish. She's very smart, very beautiful, but she was unmarried at the age of 32. Her parents thought This is unacceptable. So they went out and found her a fiancé. And she thought, Oh, well, maybe there's something really wrong about me that I'm still not married. I'm making my parents worried I would just marry whoever this person is. But then after she got engaged, she met up with one of her old schoolmates. And she finally realized, oh, actually love this person. But then she was already engaged, and everybody was so happy. The fiancé was rich and handsome, upright, a little bit boring. But, you know, he seems like a good guy. So she decided to ditch her actual love and get married to the other person. And on the day of her wedding, she caught a cold that never went away. And through this sort of depression, she started working through the question of what is love? What is being true to myself? Why am I doing this to myself. And we follow her through a very beautifully written change of heart and see, oh, she finally came to the realization that she needs to do something to be true to herself and not look at what other people want her to do. And in the end, she got her swimming pool, told her husband that I'm leaving, the husband thought she meant I'm leaving the swimming pool. But what she meant was I'm going home, I'm going to pick up my bag of love letters that my true love sent me, I'm going out, I don't know where I'm going, I might go watch a football match. Because that's what I really want to do right now. And I find that these two stories actually speak to each other. In that Xi Xi wants us to see that women have the right and power to control how their lives want to go, and what kind of love they feel like they deserve. So when Daniel Lo, the composer who wrote the opera with me, approached me with the idea of bringing these two short stories into the form of an opera. I said, Yeah, despite not knowing anything about music or opera at that point. I basically grabbed my friends who majored in music in university and said, Can you teach me every single thing I would need to know in like two days, so that I could do this. They were like, Oh, no, this is a huge task, but I'm going to help you as much as I can. And it turns out that a lot of librettists actually don't come from a music training. They come from training as writers as playwrights, maybe even as poets or fiction writers. And one of the reasons why she she actually recommended me to Daniel to write this libretto was that she thought that I would have a good enough understanding of the story. And Daniel thought that he wants it a fiction writer instead of a playwright, to be the librettist, because playwrights in Hong Kong usually write in spoken Cantonese, which has a different grammar, and vocabulary and texture of language compared to standard written Chinese that most literary writers in Hong Kong use. And he really wanted this to sound very literary, very poetic. So he thought, I need a fiction writer, I don't want a playwright to do this. So I spent a lot of time researching the story, trying to figure out a way of bringing these two female characters into a completely new story where they get to meet and tell each other their problems and try to figure out a way where they can support each other in moving forward wherever that path would be them.
MM:
I was I was thinking about that, as you describe the process of having your story adapted into the play because you said--I think that you're right, I think that what you said about about the importance of letting the people that you're working with, trusting your collaborators to make creative decisions and adapt things in a way that makes sense to them. But you, in saying that you didn't even necessarily want to see the script, and didn't necessarily want to see your performance, and might not even give any feedback once you did that. I also agree with all those things. But I'm not used to hearing people take such a such a radical perspective on that of saying like, no, go ahead, do what you're going to do with it. I trust you. And I wondered if--my guess is that that happened after you wrote the libretto, right?
WY:
Yes.
MM:
Would you have been able to make your peace with that style of creative relationship before you had adapted somebody else?
WY:
Well, definitely not. Because you're absolutely right. And observing that the experience of writing the libretto actually sort of educated me in what kind of an author I want to be when someone else does my work. So, Xi Xi is a legendary writer. And she's very famous for being secluded from a lot of people. So it's very rare that you get invited to be in her presence, she doesn't go to, well, almost every reading, like you never see her at public events, unless it's a very, very special occasion. And I'm very honored and privileged that she decided that she wants to reach out to me, after reading my work in a newspaper that we're both writing for, she's like, Hey, maybe this little girl has something interesting to say. So she invited me to go have tea with her. And then we became friends. And from then on, we started, you know, hanging out a bit more, and after taking on the task of adapting her stories into an opera, Daniel and I would often go have tea with her. And we would sometimes try to sneak in questions about, Hey, what do you think if we did this, or, I have a draft of my script, would you like to read it? And she would always make it very clear that she trusts whatever we're doing, she doesn't want to give us any sort of feedback during the process. Because she said that this is our work is not her work. She wanted to give us the freedom to do what we want. And she obviously noticed that Daniel and I were both very, very nervous, because we're very young. This is the very first time I'm ever writing an opera. And I think, Not everybody even gets the right one in their entire lives. So this is a very scary thing. And she thought, I should not put more pressure on these young people. And she promised that she would give us her feedback after the actual performance is done. But then she passed away before she ever had the chance to see a stage live. So that was kind of a shame. But her attitude kind of had huge impact on me, because throughout the whole process of adapting her stories, we had to throw everything out and start again a couple of times, because we figured out what didn't work. And we had to do it again and again and again until we found an angle to do it. And one of the breakthrough moments was that her close friend Mr. Ho Fuk Yan read our script and said, You know what, you should just go for it. You know, this is a story about two women. But from my perspective, this is actually a story about three women, the two main characters and Eva, you need to put your own voice in it. And that basically clicked and changed everything for us. Because she she is such a well respected writer. And these two short stories are so legendary that people like sort of use the phrases in the story as sort of like, quotes everywhere, and it influenced so many people. And we were so nervous that if we did something wrong with it, people would be upset. We were not doing that work justice. But we forgot that this is also our work. This is from our perspective. Trying to stick too close to the original text actually would prevent anything interesting from coming out of it. So after knowing that, we are allowed to have our own voices in this as much as we want. We brought the whole story into the contemporary times. We didn't put in like iPhones or you know, social media in it, but it was obviously very contemporary. In the beginning, we tried to keep it very '80s where death is very obviously stigmatized. But now we have, you know, people talking about morticians on social media, people are okay with that, we have award winning movies talking about donating your body to science, but then there's still the sense of stigma about the relationship between life and death. Whether you want a funeral home, in your neighborhood, maybe not in my backyard, or whether it's still such a huge problem if a young woman is not married by the age of 32. Maybe it was a huge deal in the '80s. But now, maybe slightly more subtle. Maybe it's not that frowned upon, but people will still gossip about you, wondering if there's something wrong with you that you're still single. So I try to see what women are facing nowadays, and feed that into the story instead of just using the exact measures of anxiety and gossip that were inherent in Xi Xi stories from the '80s, I twisted that a little bit and changed it to a level where everybody in the contemporary times could empathize with, and I felt like that was the moment it clicked. So when, when the time and opportunity came for other people that that might work. I remember the experience of being so nervous and wanting to make sure that I did the original work justice. I just told Henry who adopted my stories to be like okay, I heard you explain my own story to me. And I heard you explain your vision for the story I feel like I can trust you enough that you can go off and do this. She she never gave me any direct direct feedback on my libretto. Sometimes she caught a few typos, but that was it. With someone else adapting my work, I basically read the scripts when I absolutely had to because I was being interviewed by it so I had to know what was going on. But even after that, I didn't directly tell Henry, Oh, this is brilliant or this is not brilliant. I told him after watching the final performance that actually you did a really good job thank you so much for doing this. So I feel like my own creative process and my interaction so she she was a very educational thing and helped me become this person that would have the ability to let go of a lot of anxiety when other people come in wants out my work.
[music: "Hazy Sky" by nuer self]
WY:
[Reads from the original Chinese text of "Deep Roots."]
[music: "Gymnopédie No. 1 - DoGBeaT Remix" by DoGBeaT]
MM:
Say the World: an International Writing Podcast is a production of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. IWP programming is primarily funded by the University of Iowa and the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs at the US Department of State, with additional funding provided by organizations like the Dorris Duke Foundation, as well as donors like you. If you'd like to donate to the IWP, go to bit.ly/iwp-support. Links to further information and additional credits for this episode are in the show notes.
