An Interview with Alexander Chee

Posted on 24. Feb, 2010 by New Forum in Interviews, New Forum

An Interview with Alexander Chee
By Warren Fong

Alexander Chee was born in Rhode Island, and raised in South Korea, Guam and Maine. He is a recipient of the 2003 Whiting Writers’ Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in Fiction and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the VCCA. His first novel, Edinburgh (Picador, 2002), is a winner of the Michener Copernicus Prize, the AAWW Lit Award and the Lambda Editor’s Choice Prize, and was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year and a Booksense 76 selection. In 2003, Out Magazine honored him as one of their 100 Most Influential People of the Year. His essays and stories have appeared in Granta.com, Out, The Man I Might Become, Loss Within Loss, Men On Men 2000, His 3 and Boys Like Us. He is a graduate of Wesleyan University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has taught fiction writing at the New School University and Wesleyan. He is currently the Visiting Writer at Amherst College and lives in Western Massachusetts.

His second novel, The Queen of the Night, is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Edinburgh deals with the subject of pedophilia which is controversial and thus vulnerable to moralizing or demonizing. What amazes me is the way in which you portray Big Eric not as evil incarnate but as human. He has a son who he wants to reconnect with after he is released from prison. He mourns the death of his stepson who drowns on the lake during a storm. How did you go about writing Big Eric as a character and additionally how did you decide you would include the subject of pedophilia in your novel?

I think your novels choose you. I didn’t so much decide to include it as it moved to the front of what I was writing about and became the novel’s topic. I sat down to write a conventionally autobiographical novel. I wrote 135 pages, sent it to my agent at the time and she said, You know, the writing is beautiful, but probably no one is going to believe this much bad stuff happens to one person.

My life had seemed implausible to me, oddly. But I saw how she meant it–a life is not a story–and the novel lacked story and structure. She also said, It really picks up after page 90, and that was where I began writing about a sex scandal I’d witnessed as a child.

I went to Aristotle’s Poetics, for his rules for the structuring of tragedies, and proceeded to alter my book from there, erasing the way it resembled my life and making something more and more fictional as time went on. So it’s as if I erased the core of my life and left the details to help convince, inserting an impostor who resembles me into the scene.

And I should say, I really did want to humanize Big Eric. Oddly, having him murdered accomplishes that in the novel. I tried to keep him alive and was blocked for 4 months on how to proceed. And then I understood that when he dies, that is when you realize he really is a man and not a monster.

Can you describe the relationship between Fee and Big Eric especially concerning Fee’s developing sexual identity and their competition over Peter?

Big Eric sees himself as a rival to Fee, an unwelcome surprise to Fee. And it happens as Fee is figuring himself out. So he comes to believe that his desire for boys is like Big Eric’s, which it is not, as Fee is still a boy as well. But that mistake, that’s one of the central pieces of the novel. That homosexuality is distinct from the ironically named pedophilia, which is not about loving children, as that Latin name implies, as much as desiring to sexually control them as a way of feeling power and agency. And worse, the helplessness the perpetrator feels that creates this desire is usually a result of having been a victim of this himself.

I once received a postcard from a convicted pedophile who described reading the book over 4 days and being silent the entire time. And he said, ‘This is the only thing I’ve ever read that showed me what I did was wrong.’

The protagonist of Edinburgh is both gay and of mixed ancestry (Korean and Scottish). Yet the novel cannot be pegged under such terms as “Gay Fiction” or “Asian American Literature.” Though both Fee’s sexuality and ethnicity are important to the novel—and in a lot of ways more insightful than works which fall under those specific “genres”—his sexuality and ethnicity never become the point of the novel. They are qualities of the character. Writing Edinburgh were you conscious of these two frames? Did you have to negotiate between the two terms so as to avoid a label?

Well, it happened as a result. I was not so much aware of it during the writing as afterward, when it began to be rejected for not fitting into either genre. But now it is taught in many settings–gender studies, LGBT Lit, Asian American Lit, and…American Lit. Publishers initially were saying, We just don’t know how to market this. Is it a Gay Novel? An Asian American Novel? And I kept thinking, I…wrote a novel. I did not set out to fulfill the expectations of a niche. But you can’t say this to publishers.

The publishers who ended up taking it on understood this, though. Which was a tremendous relief. I do worry, though, for the way niche marketing acts as a censor on writers as a result. We might complain about some of the books that get published, but just know there are, all over the country, novels you don’t see because they don’t fit a niche. This seems unconscionable to me, a real crisis for American literature.

In Edinburgh, I notice you refrain from using quotation marks for dialogue. Often the dialogue is integrated into description or thought as though it were part of the thought, as though it were assimilated into the mind of the speaker. What rationale or effect did you have in mind when you chose to represent dialogue this way?

Initially I took the dialogue marks off because it just felt like it was too loud when they were on, as if everyone was shouting. It began as part of the novel’s use of tone. But also, I wanted it to feel like it was happening inside the reader’s mind. To feel like a voice in their head. My editor wanted me to add them back in, but I fought back, saying, In the first person, technically one person is speaking the entire time, even if they quote someone, and so it is not out of the question to leave the marks out. He conceded, and I was able to publish the book this way.

Some people have disliked it. But it is a commonplace of fiction writing, many writers do it. Cormac McCarthy, for example, and he does it in the third person.

Singing plays a significant role in Edinburgh. Choir is more than just a plot device. It functions on a transcendent communicative level. Upon losing his voice, Fee reflects on the importance of singing:

We weren’t something to struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air… Singing is touching, you bang the air and the air moves something inside you and the thing moved registers, says, That is a sound. When we sing to each other we are touching each other through this sleeve of air between us.

Can you comment on how singing functions in the novel? Are there similarities between singing and writing to you?

Well, it is enormous. One thing that you don’t need to know to enjoy the novel is that the book is structured as a piece of choral music—the 1st, 2nd and 4th parts of the novel act as soprano, second soprano and alto parts, the 3rd as a descant, all in relation to the novel’s sense of time, at the level of story. But this happened naturally, and was not intentional, and I didn’t realize it until near the end.

I think I write meanwhile because when I lost my own soprano voice after a professional choir career as a boy it was devastating. I could only hear the voice I loved in memory. I really didn’t begin writing until I could no longer sing.

Myth plays a role in the way in which Fee understands the world. To tell his own story, he appropriates Korean folk tales, Greek myth, and the story of a man buried in a church during the black plague. In what ways do myths or histories influence your writing? The story about the fox, Lady Tammamo, is a continuation of a Japanese myth. To what extent do you make myths?

The way I see it, I used all of those to reinterpret the idea of the Fox Demon into what could happen if a Fox Demon took the shape of a boy. In the myths I’d read, it said the Fox could be a man or woman, but the seducer myths were constantly of women foxes seducing men. This was really interesting to me, and I wanted to queer it. To see what would happen if I introduced one single difference into the machine. For a myth really is a kind of machine–it is a series of formal restraints, like a sonnet.

As with all good writing, it is difficult to describe Edinburgh in terms other than urgent and necessary. Did you have the sense that Edinburgh needed to be written? Can you describe the process of writing Edinburgh and the motivation behind it? Additionally, you are soon going to release your second novel The Queen of the Night which is set historically in the time of the Second Empire. What do you feel is vital or necessary about The Queen of the Night?

Thanks. I did feel it was both urgent and necessary. In the sense that within the literature of surviving pedophilia, there was nothing that I could find that really touched the way the anger lived inside you for so long.

For myself, it was as if I were building a prosthetic voice. Something that could say what I couldn’t say about my own life.

The Queen of the Night sort of picks up in some ways from where Edinburgh leaves off, in the sense that it is about a young woman who believes her voice is cursed, and if she uses it, terrible things will happen. And then she does, and they do. And she tries to put it right as best she can. There’s a lot more to it than that, but her and her cursed voice, this has always seemed to me to have a relationship to Edinburgh, if indirect.

As to what is urgent or essential about that novel, I think what drove me to write it was the desire to write a story about someone who believes that if she is as she was born to be in this world, she won’t survive, and so she buries that person alive inside herself, and hopes for the best. And the best isn’t what comes for her.

The Queen of the Night is set in a historical and cultural period with which many are not commonly familiar. How did you go about recreating the world of the Second Empire and how important was research to your second novel?

Enormously important. Robert McKee in his book Story talks about how if you don’t do research, you reach for cliche instead. I think that’s right.

My interest was initially somewhat clinical–I knew I wanted to write a historical fairy tale of a kind. Or that, rather, I was doing it already. But to succeed with historical fiction, you need to create an idiom that is both modern and archaic at the same time. So that it casts the illusion of that time, even as it mirrors this one. So I read many personal documents–letters and autobiographies and journals. And there I found the voice I needed, the tone to carry this forward.

I also traveled to Paris extensively, researched archives, interviewed people, took photographs and even videos of the places that are in the novel, where possible.

I think people think they know about this period, but what I found was, with its lavish excesses, couture clothing, the gossip news industry, real estate junk bonds…it was our time. We are reliving that time now, I think. In the way we’re not supposed to if we learn our lessons from history.

Switching gears to more general questions, how would you describe your experience with the workshop both as a teacher and student? What are your feelings about MFA programs as an institution for writers?

Hmm. I think of it as getting together as a group to solve writing problems. And so you encounter writing problems you haven’t had yet from the perspective of other people, and these help you, either now or eventually, maybe years later.

MFA programs turn 20 years of wondering if your work reaches people into 2 years of finding out. They aren’t for everyone, but I still value mine. I think what is often lost on people is the way it is an atmosphere, for those years of the program, and you live, eat and breathe (and dream) writing the whole time. Yes, the classes were important, but so also was running into Tessa Rumsey as she left Jorie Graham’s class, and her teaching me about the writing of Pantoums, or being in class with Chris Adrian, or Kirsten Bakis, or Emily Barton, Ben Anastas, etc. I was a part of a brilliant peer group that would stay with me for long after the program. I didn’t know that until years later. More than any teacher you have, I think, your peers in the program have an impact on you for life.

Many writers including myself grapple with the fact that creative writing in American culture is for the most part considered leisure or hobby at best. There is an essential and important urgency which underlies passion for literature and yet remains beyond my ability to explain. How do you articulate your passion for writing? What is the role of creative writing to you and what do you envision its role is in society?

Well, for example, what I know about the Chinese emperors of times gone by is from Mencius. A poet. Not from any historical record those emperors commissioned.

What does that mean? It means what we do is not frivolous. What we do is record the culture, for the times we live in and the time to come. We communicate the values of the culture to each other and to posterity. This is so important. But we’ve been made to feel it is not important because of a war against our culture waged by people who have a vested interest in obscuring their role in what is happening now. The treatment of the arts as decorative is criminal. Art, as the comic artist Lynda Barry says, is an immune system, for each of us. If we don’t participate, we’ll die.

The language in Edinburgh is poetic. By that I do not mean to say the language is merely decorative but that it enacts experience in wonderful ways. How do you approach writing? Do you start with a character, a scene, a sentence or a phrase? Do you think of the language first or the narrative?

Thanks. I started as a poet, so I often write based on lines that come to me, so…we could say I start with a sentence or phrase. But those lines are typically born out of an inarticulate sense of character, something I feel but work to describe–I often hear a narrator before I know who he or she is.

What I do is I write and then I go through and see what I can remove and still have it all make sense. So, compression–the most information and feeling from the least words. But I can do nothing without the right tone.

I’ve learned to make decisions about plot and scene as much as possible in advance, but there’s really nothing more thrilling than what I call the discovery draft, when you write to find out just what is on your mind.

You have two blogs which you write for, Koreanish and The Red Room. How do you feel blogging changes the relationship between reader and author? How do you think blogging will affect literature and how the literary community interacts?

Writing is a social act. I think blogging just makes that literal in our age, and even vivid. Also, now with the way the industry works, you can’t fumble your way through a series of okay novels before you write an amazing one—you need to really deliver or you’re cut off. But you also need to write to grow. I think this is a terrible conundrum, but one way through is blogging. Writer friends of mine who blog agree. Now, rather than write a series of terrible novels between your best books, you have your blog, sometimes it is amazing, sometimes not. And it builds you an audience in a way those bad novels between your good ones maybe won’t.

As for how it interacts, well, I think of the world as being like one of those enormous Illinois high schools, where there’s just one football team for a school of say 3000. And it means many people who might otherwise play, can’t. Well, the internet has meant that everyone who wants to can play. You realize X at the Times is sometimes awesome but many times not as on top of it as X blogger over here. So it is an enormous democratization.

I do think it’s interesting that at a time when there are more people in MFA programs than ever before and so many, many blogs, we have publishing saying it is near death, we have magazines bewailing the death of print. It seems to me there’s a huge crowd of people excited about writing and literature, and an industry that can’t seem to turn them into consumers. This is a crisis for us now.

What writers have influenced you most and what are you currently reading?

Anne Carson, for sure. Vita Sackville-West. Robert Lowell, James Baldwin, Guy Davenport, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Deborah Eisenberg, Marilynne Robinson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Jeanette Winterson and Julian May. Also my friend Chris Adrian, who I went to Iowa with.

Right now I’m reading Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic, which I love to pieces. Also Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.

Finally, what advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Know that what you think a story or novel is will determine what you will write–you will write to fit the shape of what you think a narrative is. So to be free as a writer, read as widely as possible, and expand your sense of that, as these books will set you free in a way you would never have thought to be free. And know that your eventual book will help someone else do that, and so on.

When I write, I think of the kid I was who loved to read, and just wanted to be thrilled every time I opened a book. He’s the one I write for. So think about who you were when you first loved reading, think of what that person wanted, and then make something amazing.

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http://www.alexanderchee.net/

http://koreanish.com/

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Tags: alexander chee, edinburgh, the queen of the night, warren fong