C Pam Zhang’s debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, is forthcoming from Riverhead Books (US) and Virago Press (UK). She has received scholarships and fellowships from Tin House, Bread Loaf, Aspen Words, the Hambidge Center, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She’s not quite sure where home is but lives on Twitter @cpamzhang. An excerpt from her story “The Wolf Girl of Terezia” can be found here. It appears in the Nov/Dec 2018 issue of the Kenyon Review.
You write that “there are times when the language of science fails to capture the full texture of experience.” Do you think the language of fiction is able to capture that full texture? Or is the full texture of experience something we can never capture?
The full texture seems impossible to capture. Humans are so slippery and subjective! The voice of this story arose, in part, from how I observe women (myself included) code-switching. The language of science in the story is a more extreme example. But what about the language of a lover versus a close friend versus an acquaintance versus a coworker versus the person asking for the bathroom key at a fancy art gallery versus the person trying to get my delivery noodles refunded? If we’re switching all the time, isn’t each language a representation of an incomplete self? (By the way, I suspect women inhabit many more roles than men.)
So what if I wrote a female narrator who was really, really bad at code-switching? In this story Irene is helplessly and relentlessly herself—she’s awkward, she’s terrible at reading subtext, she gets reprimanded for how her language bleeds from one arena of life into the next. I find the notion of that kind of linguistic honesty awfully romantic, if doomed.
In an interview with The Offing, you spoke about the importance of speculative fiction for minority writers. Do you see “The Wolf Girl of Terezia” as an example of that importance? Perhaps for writers whose ancestry is unknown to them?
Absolutely. Terezia is an invention, but in some sense, all “home” countries are inventions to the children of immigrants. One cross-cultural commonality I’ve observed is how the children of immigrants often experience huge gaps in our parents’ narratives of getting from there to here. The Filipina-American author Elaine Castillo calls this the “lacunae” of diaspora communities. I love that. I also like to think of it as a haze, a mistiness.
This mistiness seems particularly true for immigrants who came in pursuit of a “better” life. Maybe the mist is actually shame for their original poverty, or pain over what they’ve lost, or the all-consuming 24/7 hunger/panic/grimness/hustle of getting that new life. Speculative fiction lets me turn real-life mistiness into actual mist in a fantasy country called Terezia. There I can let my imagination tromp around without stepping on a culture I’m inexpert in.
In that vein, can you speak to the connection between the narrator and her mother, or between the narrator and the concept of motherhood?
I have no idea what a mother is. I have no idea who my mother is, I’ve come to realize. It seems impossible to see a parent clearly, though I try. And so it strikes me as true that the narrator’s mother should exist as a voice in her head, a sort of misty-smoky sound-ghost full of mangled superstitions.
Which non-writing-related aspect of your life most influences your writing?
Food and sex. I racked my brain for an inspiring hobby but came up empty, yikes. I find my way into stories through the sensory, the visceral. My first drafts are murky things where I try to let characters act at their most primal levels, and then fill in the logic afterwards.
Oh, and anger. I’ve been allowing myself the vibrating, full-body experience of rage.
What project(s) are you working on now, or next?
I’m idly putting together a short story collection called Semi-Domesticated Female Specimens. A new project is bubbling in the back of my brain, though I’m too superstitious to talk about it. I can’t even look at it directly—best to let it ferment in darkness. What’s interesting to me is how this new project is, so far, a complete repudiation of the debut novel I just finished editing (forthcoming from Riverhead).