Diaspora Dialogues

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entrance profile

On Doubt, Passion, and Pancakes

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I hope to develop a strong working relationship with my mentor, allowing not only my work to benefit from the program, but my daily writing practice as well.

I’ve been working on the stories and novella that are included in You and Me, Belonging for many years. Once I felt I had enough stories to start thinking about a collection, I read through them, and very clearly saw common themes. After that, I put together the stories I felt best suited the intent of the collection, struggled through another draft of my novella, and started on a new story or two.

I think selfhood, goodness, and community, all of which are explored in the collection, are highly relevant to everybody. How to belong, how to live well, how to find an identity, all of these things are unavoidably wrapped up in the cultures, politics, technologies, and institutes of the more-or-less broken contemporary world. The characters in my stories, whether they are aware of it or not, are all trying to figure out where they fit in that world.

I find that my writing process will change depending on what I’m working on at the time. In general: I try to write every day; I write on the computer, though I also print out drafts and mark them up with pen; and I strongly believe in giving my work time alone in the proverbial drawer, to cool and settle—often, when I go back to it after some distance, I can more readily see what needs to happen or change or go away for the next draft.

In a perfect world, a writer’s life would be much like my life is now, I guess: full of doubt and passion and pancakes. Hopefully, ten years from now I’ll still be writing, turning sentences, struggling and surprising myself. A book or two in the interim would be nice.

‘Zany’ is a hard word. Let’s see. I’ve seen the band Phish almost forty times, at venues throughout America. Does that count as zany? Probably.

First Comes Next

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I dream of having a writing schedule, so getting my mentor’s regular feedback will help. I also hope to be better disciplined at self-editing, and be as ruthless with myself as I am when editing others.

Many of the stories in Next started from fragments—images or headlines. If things stayed in my mind, I’d wrestle a plot out of them. The process doesn’t always work. It’s such a relief when I’m writing and find unexpectedly that I already know what’s going to happen.

I was born in China and lived there as a kid. Going back, it feels semi-strange, semi-familiar. Back in Toronto, it feels more familiar-yet-strange, a little not-home, but not in a bad way. Wherever I am, other places float around me, and a lot of writing gets done in that state.

Morality is one theme I explore in this collection. Growing up in China, my education at school and home was very focused on being a good person, the right ways to behave. In the West, children are also taught to be good, but I’ve found that the message is more about follow your dreams, shoot for the stars, you can be anything you want. As an adult, the question becomes, what do I really want? How do I lead a fulfilling life? In China nowadays, the idea of the greater good, the responsibility of contributing toward the public good, is severely eroding. But I’d say for many people the idea of morality is still an active part of life. Here, we don’t talk about it. People write editorials about it, but it’s not a part of daily life.

I don’t follow a writing process. I write in fits and starts, often driven by panic. I have condensed periods of work and then a lot of trying to work. I enjoy editing more than writing. I’ll drag a couple of paragraphs out of myself and edit the rest of the evening.

I was a Mathlete. It’s not really zany but it’s a fact. I really miss math. If I could live forever, I would like to do every job out there. And if I ruled the world, writers would only have to write, the way doctors only have to be doctors. I think there was a time when it was so, or at least there were fewer extra demands on artists. Today, as a writer, you have to be a business person, do marketing and promotion, and take good photos of yourself so people will like you. Some people thrive on that, they’re good at it. The hustle would wear me down.

In 2024, I will be making a living as a writer of essays and feature-length reporting on news stories that deserve a deeper look. I’ll divide my time between that and fiction. If I ruled the world and discovered how to manufacture time, I’ll also work in the physical sciences or pure math, but that’s for 2034.

Prison Breakout

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Pantheon actually started as an entirely different novel where the backstory was set in Greece and the main story was set in Canada, but I discovered that readers found the Greek setting more intriguing. Even though I was reluctant to undertake the amount of research involved in writing historical fiction, I rewrote the story with a focus on Greece. There is just a lot of inherent drama in certain periods of Greek history—the 1920s, 1940s, and 1960s in particular—and I had a number of family stories to draw on as well. I then realized I had a lot of material for a novel.

I framed the new draft with a narrator who is in prison, which was also well received in workshop. The prison frame, while a convenient hook, has unfortunately turned out to be something of a curse. As the project developed, it grew harder to reconcile that narrator and framing device with the rest of the story. Research into how other writers approached this technical issue didn’t yield much that was of use to me. Interviews tend to focus on other aspects of their work. Process is seldom discussed. Sometimes I think that I should have created less of a challenge for myself, but it’s a challenge that I hope my mentor will help me with. I am reasonably confident about the rest of the novel as I’ve had a decent amount of writing experience at this point and success with grants, but I still need a second set of eyes. When I talk to friends who have published books, what I’m most envious of is the relationship they have with their editors, so it will be good to have a mentor who can fill that role.

My writing process is simple: consistency. I teach at a university, so a fair bit of my time is unstructured. That kind of schedule allows me to set aside some time each day for writing projects.

As for zany facts: I’ve been writing a series of satiric open letters to Rob Ford on Facebook since he was elected. They’re written in the tone of a supporter who—like Ford—is sometimes a bit too dense to understand the implications of what he’s saying. Ford is the perfect subject for satire, although it’s a bit too easy now. By now, there’s probably a book’s worth of letters, if anyone cares to read it.

In my ideal world there would be a lot more financial support for writers and other creative professionals. We have decent support for the arts in Canada, but it’s not enough for most to subsist on.

If you ask me where I’ll be in ten years, the only thing I can predict with accuracy is that I’ll still be writing. That’s when I’m happiest. I am definitely at the point where I’ve realized that writing is something I need to do, whether it gets read by anyone else or not.

What Is Love

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I’m a self-taught writer and artist. Being challenged by a mentor will help me build confidence, proceed to the next phase, look at Love Behind the Bargain [collection of stories] from a new perspective and see where it can go. And learn what a professional writer does; I can only break the rules when I know them.

Love began as a script of a walking tour for the closing event of the Contemporary Urgencies of Audre Lorde’s Legacy about the intersecting histories around Chinatown. When I was invited to do the tour I decided to tell personal stories and my memories rather than give a history of the place. I later performed a developed version at SummerWorks 2013.

I’ve been in Toronto for 2.5 years, most of that time in Chinatown isolated from both the arts and queer communities, of which I’m now vaguely a part. Love is about that period. I hope to expand the stories to the rest of Toronto, to recall the things that linger. I am interested in processing/evaluating/redefining the meaning of living in this familiar yet still foreign city.

The sites in Love create a map of consequences to a love story. The protagonist flew to Toronto with two suitcases and a duffel bag, pursuing freedom and privilege to love. I trace the early footsteps of a queer person of color in the city from a micro perspective, through small interactions with people that make up the collection, which is not only about romantic love but also about strangers. When alone, you notice little happenings between strangers because you expect less from people you barely know. Kindness is more comforting from strangers or acquaintances: that brief relationship is more of a treasure. Those memories of momentary kindnesses rarely fade.

I don’t have a writing process. I let it happen. It’s very stream-of-consciousness at first. Start something on my phone or on a piece of paper. Only when I review do I start working toward a goal. I am also an amateur hairdresser, and a community breakfast club founder. There is only one menu item: peanut butter Nutella French toast sandwiches stuffed with banana and cinnamon. It’s irresistible.

One of the ideals in my dream world is that people’s bodies would evolve according to their professions. No carpal tunnel or arthritis for writers. And writers would be prophets that imagine a hopeful future. They foresee and write and people believe. Fiction would not be a way to escape, but to imagine and change.

I refuse to think about what my life will be like in 2024. I read a queer prophecy about a change in the idea of growing up. The heterosexist obsession with reproduction will no longer be the mainstream. In the future we will grow sideways, not up. As I get older I do feel pressure to think strategically about my career, but that’s boring. I prefer a non-linear approach to life, challenging the existing hierarchy and our perception of time.

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