WEIKE WANG is the author of Chemistry (Knopf 2017), Joan is Okay (Random House 2022) and Rental House (Riverhead 2024). She is the recipient of a Pen Hemingway, a Whiting award and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Best American Short Stories and has won an O. Henry Prize. She earned her MFA from Boston University and her other degrees from Harvard. She currently lives in New York City and teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Barnard College.
WINSHEN LIU loves mountains, train travel, language learning, and the postal service. A few of her favorite sweets include babka, lotus-filled baos, Basque cheesecake, and unfrosted lemon cake. She is also a determined baker who has sadly only ever made good chocolate chip cookies twice. Her chapbook, Paper Money, is forthcoming with Driftwood Press.
On a sunny day in Oxford, writer Weike Wang graciously met with MFA student Winshen Liu at a beloved local coffee roaster. After perusing Exploradora’s charms, including lifelike paintings and Swedish fish fortune tellers, they dove into a conversation about writing journeys, where they find inspiration, Asian American characters, and more. Below is an excerpt of their conversation.
Starting off as a writer, the first draft of the first book can feel really long. You haven’t proven yourself and don’t know you can do this. How did you get through writing Chemistry?
Alcohol. Persistence. A lot of “If I don’t do this, it’s now or never.” I couldn’t fail. A sense of ambition, drive.
I talk to my students about this all the time. You really have to want it, you know? I had six months to write this thesis. I puttered around at the beginning and those pages weren’t very good. But I’m very all-or-nothing…I’m a very binary person. I’m also very stubborn. I’m either going to do it or I’m not going to do it.
So there wasn’t really a question of not finishing. It didn’t feel lonely for you.
It’s incredibly lonely. To be a writer, you have to enjoy being alone. I’ve much enjoyed writing over being a writer: I like problem solving in writing, and I like figuring out how the essay is going to flow. I like the story component of it. I like building a novel, building a world. I love sentences and creating a voice that’s memorable. All the other stuff with being a writer is incredibly hard, I think. That’s something that beginning writers have trouble thinking about.
What helped you get through that? Was it being in an MFA program?
I think I still feel it. I don’t think anything’s going to stop me from getting through that. It’s just the nature of it, the nature of being an Asian female writer in America. In thinking about finding your audience, thinking about having something to say, I think there’s a lot going into that.
And unfortunately, I have this responsibility of representation when, in writing, all I want to do is play, I want to experiment. Writing is so much play. I feel like sometimes I always have to stop. And I also need to do. It’s just the double standard.
I run into this a lot because I also have made it a deliberate choice to always write Asian characters. And yet, there’s the imposition of the white gaze. Do you ever have names where you’re like, “This is a great name but it has x’s, y’s, and z’s, and q’s in it”?
Ha Jin was my mentor and said you shouldn’t put a name with an “x.”
And you’re fine with that? Sometimes, I deliberately want to do that.
Most readers in this country are white women, and you have to sell. There’s the aspect of marketing and approachability. It’s incredibly hard. I just think sometimes Chinese names are not always as accepted as other names. I think as Asian people, we’ve done a really good job of erasing that by adopting American names. So it’s our own fault in some ways. But I think about, you know, the limits of what I can do.
I actually think sometimes my name on a book impedes people because it’s like W, W, I don’t know—I don’t want to pronounce this, so I’m not going to touch it. You know Rebecca Kwon, right? RF Kwon. She doesn’t go by Rebecca. She thought, “Well, it’s going to be a girl, so I’m not going to do that.” So I think the name makes a huge difference. It is what it is.
This current book I’m working on, the girl’s name is Iris, which is a more Westernized name. I sort of play around with that, but it has to have intentionality. It’s just the burden of representation.
I guess it’s also not even just choosing the name. You also tell us how to pronounce them, like Jiu An for Joan and “Keru like Peru.” Do you feel like that’s something you could ever get away from? It’s an extra burden. A lot of people don’t need to do that. I feel like you have this impulse to let people know.
Yes. I think it’s important to know how to pronounce the name. It’s something I have to do, just like I’m not going to write a non-Asian character.
Well, so for Iris, how are you signaling she is not white given that a name like Iris could be any race?
Just at the beginning. It’s a story about two artists at a residency and they’re both Asian. It’s actually been really easy to write that story. I think it’s the ones earlier—it’s just hard to do the interracial.
Right, I think sometimes it’s a common trope to have an Asian woman with a white man.
But how often is that written about? I think people are scared to write about it. Because they’re just embarrassed about it. They have to admit that there’s this line of white supremacy in Asian culture.
There’s a sense of both sides, sort of, “leveling up,” right? Like the white guy can get someone maybe more attractive and the girl can get sort of this white shield. I think people just don’t write about it because they’re scared. I don’t think it’s that obvious. And I think that’s why sometimes this book is harder for people to read. It’s not like I’m making a happy marriage—there’s so many issues with this kind of marriage—but I’m not going to ignore it, so I sort of feel like that was my motivation behind it.
But this other book now is just much more fun. I feel like with Rental House I did have this responsibility to depict this marriage in the way that I saw it. There was no way I was going to avoid that. Toni Morrison writes about Black suffering and Black joy. I think there has to be this sense of acknowledging flaws and the truth in our culture. I very rarely see an interracial marriage of the Asian woman and white male in anything. I feel like I’m one of the few people who actually writes about it. But they’re everywhere. So I’m just like, what are you doing about this kind of dynamic? Are you just not going to acknowledge it?
That’s a great point. I think there is a dearth of Asian couples too, as a result of other biases. To close, is there any advice you want to impart?
I think literacy is really important. It’s dying and it’s actually scary. Why did Toni Morrison become famous? She had white readers but she also had Black readers.
So if you want representation, you want literature, you want to be part of this culture, Asian people need to read more and not just care about name brands.
With Joan, because she’s a doctor, I got a lot of emails being like, “Why can’t she just drive a Lamborghini? I drive a Lamborghini.” There’s a huge flaw in our culture. We just want to be impressive to people and it’s hollowing. I just don’t think we care about engaging with culture in a meaningful way. That’s a blanket statement, but it’s true. They just care about name brands, they’re not interested in stuff and I think curiosity is really important.
I think if you ever want Asian writers to get to the same level that someone like Toni Morrison does, you need Asian readers.
You have Asian readers!
I do! I do. I’m just thinking about how the demographic of readers is the white woman, which means we’re writing to that.
Hence, why we have these Anglicized names.
True.
Thank you so much for chatting with me today. I’m not great with closings but I really appreciate your time, perspective, and generosity.
Thank you for having me.
Favorite snack: Flaming Hot Cheetos. I can crush a bag of those. I really like Spam…and chicken nuggets with different condiments, like kewpie mayo with honey or ketchup with honey.
Top shelf books: Classics like Brontë and Woolf. I’ve really come to appreciate Woolf. I didn’t always like her. I think I mostly gravitate towards women writers. Sigrid Nunez, Amy Hempel, Marilynn Robinson. Contemporary ones like Elif Batuman, Ottessa Moshfegh, Rivka Galchen. I just think they write better.
Place where you’d like to set a story/novel one day: I think in my mind, setting is always like it’s either city or rural. City or suburbs. I don’t really have an attachment to any particular city because I moved around so much. Maybe a boat? Like everyone is on a boat. A nomadic boat.
I think with setting, you really have to know the place. And I’ve always felt like an outsider everywhere, so it’s really hard to be like, “I own this place.” It’s a sense of imposter syndrome.