Transcript
Marshall Poe:
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I am the editor of the New Books Network and you're listening to an episode in Grinnell College's Authors and Artists podcast. Today, I'm very pleased to say we have May-lee Chai on the show who'll be talking about her new collection of short stories, Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories, and it was published just this year. May-lee, welcome to the show.
May-lee Chai:
Thank you, Marshall. Thank you so much for having me.
Marshall Poe:
Absolutely, my pleasure. Could you begin by telling us a little bit about yourself?
May-lee Chai:
Sure. I graduated from Grinnell College class of 1989, and then I went on a Grinnell College Fellowship to Nanjing China and I taught at a local middle school there. And I'd also gone on a study abroad program when I was at Grinnell to China. My father's family is from Nanjing, so it was so wonderful that Grinnell had started this fellowship. It was a wonderful coincidence that it was just beginning as I started at Grinnell and it happened to have this deep family connection for me.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that's very cool. I was sent to Russia from Grinnell.
May-lee Chai:
Oh, Russia.
Marshall Poe:
China would've been better I think. But can you tell us a little bit about your background, where you're from and that kind of stuff?
May-lee Chai:
Sure. Well I'll start with the Grinnell background, we have to start with the most important things first, right? But my personal background, I was born in California. My family moved around a lot. We also lived in the New York City metropolitan area when I was a kid and then we moved to rural South Dakota when I was 12. And then after Grinnell, I started working for the Associated Press as a reporter. And then I changed my careers and I went to grad school and began studying East Asian studies. And I ultimately went into creative writing as a field. Tomorrow in Shanghai is my 11th book.
Marshall Poe:
Wow. Wow. Let's just say wow.
May-lee Chai:
And I've published novels. I write short stories, I've written narrative nonfiction and memoir. And also in a work of literary translation.
Marshall Poe:
Oh, really? So you've lived a lot of places. You're like me, peripatetic.
May-lee Chai:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
I've lived in, I don't know, 10 states and several foreign countries.
May-lee Chai:
I've lived in 15 states and four countries.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, that's a lot of experience. So you probably know America pretty darn well.
May-lee Chai:
I know different parts of America. I think I know some of out of the way parts of America pretty well, but that's more interesting, right?
Marshall Poe:
Right. So how did you get to Grinnell from South Dakota? Is that right?
May-lee Chai:
Yeah. I was looking for a very liberal arts college. My experience in South Dakota was not a happy one. We faced a lot of, just frankly speaking, racist violence when I was living there in the early 1980s. My father's Chinese, my mother is white and people in the community did not like mixed race marriages.
Marshall Poe:
Uh-huh.
May-lee Chai:
And they also thought that when people of different races had children that the children were what the devil intended for Earth. This is what people actually would say to my face. God had put the races on separate continents deliberately to keep them separate. And so there were white people who would just come up to us on the street and shout racial slurs at us. People shot at our house, they killed five of our dogs, shot them in front of the house and just left their bodies there. It was really horrible. So when I started looking for colleges, I really, really, really wanted a liberal arts college. And I didn't have much money. I was going to be totally financing my college by myself. And so one, there was need-blind admission at Grinnell, plus it had excellent academic reputation. Plus, the people in the town had heard of Grinnell and they spoke about it with just horror because they remembered that Grinnell had been shut down for... Do you remember that? For two years during the Vietnam War era?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, '69, '70 it was shut down I think. Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
They could still remember that in this town.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
And they said, "Oh, I was at Grinnell. They had to shut down their school because it was hippies." And I thought okay, that sounds like a good school. And so I looked into it and I decided to apply early admission.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Well part of it is a tragic story, but part of it is a wonderful story. I'm from Kansas originally so I know a little bit about what you're talking about in terms of, let's just call it, the attitudes involved in parts of the Midwest, not all of the Midwest. What was your experience like at Grinnell though, Grinnell itself, the college?
May-lee Chai:
Well I think that Grinnell, especially in the years that I was there, and I wouldn't know about the years that I wasn't there, but especially in the years that I was there, I felt like it attracted a lot of students who had felt like outsiders in their home communities. And they had been attracted to Grinnell for similar reasons because it was this beacon for the smart kids in various towns of communities where being the smart kid wasn't valued in various high schools. If a parent had said that everyone at Grinnell had been bullied, probably. Not with everyone, but there were certainly quite a few of us. And I felt like that was a good fit for me. I felt like students for the most part that I got to know were kind and also very open-minded and were really very academically inclined, but in a very free spirited way, right? I think it gets people who are looking to forge their own paths. And I thought that I could fit in with that.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I didn't know as much about Grinnell when I got there. I really went there to play basketball and I was not bullied as I recall. But my experience was very similar in the sense that I met people who were very serious students and obviously the faculty was just great. And I met my mentor there and I went on to become essentially I will call it a clone, but I worked in the same topic as my mentor, Dan Kaiser was my mentor there.
May-lee Chai:
Oh, cool.
Marshall Poe:
And it set me on the path to becoming an academic. And then I spent years and years as a professor at the University of Iowa.
May-lee Chai:
Oh, wow. Just down the Highway 80. Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Just down Highway 80, that's right. So I know Iowa pretty well, but my experience at Grinnell was really wonderful and I'm very honored to be able to do this podcast for them because I owe them a lot. And I should also say about the need-blind admissions part, they essentially paid for my schooling. So that's very nice of them.
May-lee Chai:
It's very nice of them and it's rare. I mean that was why it was also a beacon because a lot of schools don't have that. And so if you don't come from generational wealth, if you don't have families that can contribute or will contribute, it can be really hard to get a stellar education. And I felt like I got a world class education.
Marshall Poe:
I did too. And I remember a meeting that I had at the end of my, I guess it was my second semester, and coming back I had with a financial aid officer and I said, "I just can't afford this." And she said, "Marshall, we'll take care of that."
May-lee Chai:
Those were the days, right? Those were the days.
Marshall Poe:
And I'm like, "Really?" And she was like, "Yeah." And I was like, "That's great, glad to hear that." So I'm always glad to give something back to the college. So you started your career as a journalist and you became a writer. I'm very interested in that transition. Can you talk a little bit about it?
May-lee Chai:
Sure. Well I started off as a journalist for the Associated Press and that was great experience for news-gathering. I mean, I was a writer, but writing mostly short spot news stories, which is under 750 words. And you write a lot of them. I remember one shift, I wrote 20 different stories in a four hour period of time. You're just constantly banging out news and writing it up in as fast as I could type. And once a month, you're allowed to do what they call an enterprise story which is a feature, but you have to spend most of your, "Free time," to do the interviews. So I was working 12 to 15 hour days and then on the one day, we give an actual time to finish writing the feature. And feature writing is more interesting to me than the spot news. And finally, there was a gang story that I was covering looking at Southeast Asian gangs that had been targeting businesses owned by the Southeast Asian community in Denver.
And I had spoken to so many people in the community and they said this was a real problem, they were all being hit up for, "Protection money." What that means is basically extortion money from the gangs. And I had worked with the one member of the Denver Police Department who was assigned to Asian gangs and he had volunteered to do this. And I was working so hard. And I put out the story on The Wire and none of the local papers picked it up because they thought, "We don't have a problem with this." And then the gangs hit during the Tet Lunar New Year Festival and there was a shootout, and a 70-something-year-old Vietnamese man was injured. And he ended up having to have his leg amputated. And eventually the police captured the gang. But I thought, "What is the point of working so hard?" And then after that, of course after that, then there were no stories on it. So they all said, "Oh, wait, there was this AP story about gangs." And so I made the front page, but it was too late to do any good.
And I felt what am I wasting my life for? I'm so exhausted, I'm working such long hours, basically six, seven days a week. You don't get two days off in a row in the AP. So it was just brutal. And I thought I'm just covering news after the fact. And I found what was more interesting to me is the why's. Why's does this happen? What is causing people to behave in certain ways rather than a short spot piece on an actual crime? So then I decided to go back to grad school and I went to Yale and got a master's degree in East Asian studies because what I really wanted to write was about China and about the Chinese diaspora. And I felt like I needed to get more information and do more research. And I was originally going to go for a PhD, and while I was at Yale, I found a lump. And the lump in my breast grew from the size of a pea to a size of a walnut over the course of basically a semester.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm.
May-lee Chai:
And I had been accepted into a Ph.D. program at a prestigious school, full fellowship, but they wouldn't let me miss the first semester otherwise I wouldn't be able to keep my fellowship. But I really thought, "Man, I really need to get this health thing taken care of. I need to get this growing tumor taken out," and I wasn't sure if I would be able to pop right back and go to school. And so they wouldn't let me defer. And so I just had this life changing moment when I thought, "I could die. I could die before I ever pursue this dream of writing a book and writing a novel."
And so I ended up applying to a creative writing program, one I could find in Colorado that still the deadline is not completely over, I could get my application in. And I got in and I got a fellowship. And then so I spent the summer, had my surgery and it turned out to be not cancer. And so I could start fresh in a creative writing program and just really pursue the dream. But I didn't dare to pursue that dream until I literally was faced with potentially dying first.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
So my message to people is if you have a dream, pursue it.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
Don't put it off, don't keep deferring because you never know how long we have.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. There are a couple of interesting things you've said, one is about Southeast Asian gangs actually because I don't think many people know this and we're going to talk about Asian Americans pretty quick. When I was in high school, this was in the late seventies, suddenly there were all these Vietnamese students. They were boat people. I of course didn't know this being a clueless jock in Kansas. And there's actually quite a sizeable Vietnamese community in Wichita believe it or not.
May-lee Chai:
Oh, I know because there was a sizable Southeast Asian, it was Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese in the eighties in Grinnell, in Grinnell.
Marshall Poe:
Really?
May-lee Chai:
Yes.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's right. And I don't think many people know this because they think of the Midwest as being extraordinarily homogenous, which in many ways it is more homogenous than other places. But I remember this very well, these Vietnamese students showed up, actually played soccer with some of them. So let's talk a little bit about the book Tomorrow in Shanghai. How did you come to write it?
May-lee Chai:
Well I write short stories just in general. And so I just am always writing something. And so I was writing short stories and publishing short stories. And then my publisher wanted another book from me. I had published a previous short story collection with my publisher Blair called Useful Phrases for Immigrants. And it won the American Book Award. And then they came to me and said well do I have another book? They would like to publish something. And so I had suggested another short story collection. And so I put together a proposal and I put together some of the stories I had published and I proposed writing some more and they wanted to publish it. So that's how that comes together at this stage in my career. I didn't have to pitch it to anybody.
Marshall Poe:
Well that's very nice. Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
Well it took a long time to get there, let's say that.
May-lee Chai:
Yes. Yes.
Marshall Poe:
It's not like it just happened. Yeah, right. It didn't just happen.
May-lee Chai:
And the collection this time was inspired by, frankly speaking, the events going on in the world and in the United States since the election of Donald Trump. And many of the stories were inspired by the violent rhetoric, the anti-immigrant rhetoric, the xenophobia. And also, frankly speaking, the anti-Chinese rhetoric. He was saying he's always positing China as an enemy of the United States. So they're raping us, China, China, China, blaming China. And then of course then when the pandemic hit, all across the United States, Asian Americans were targeted and Asian travelers were targeted for violence because people blamed Asians for the pandemic as opposed to the non-response when the pandemic first started being identified around the world. So although none of the stories in the collection is set in the present moment, they're all in some ways reflecting these feelings of potential violence. But I wanted to show it from a Chinese and Chinese American and Chinese diasporic perspective.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm.
May-lee Chai:
And I'm showing how the violence of the present is rooted in the past and global competition and xenophobia. And then I want to show hope. I don't want to repeat violent tropes and stir people up in a way that's really negative. I wanted to show resilience and hopefulness. And so I show characters dealing with this and working it out in their own lives and in their families. And then in the final stories actually set 100 years in the future on a Chinese Mars colony. And I was trying to make that the most hopeful, even though maybe the most dystopian in terms of setting and to try to find a character who could still find hope and resilience even when you're a worker stuck in a space colony on Mars.
Marshall Poe:
Right. Well it's Tomorrow in Shanghai, not Today in Shanghai.
May-lee Chai:
Yes. Yes, exactly. That's the metaphor.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So you anticipated some of my questions here, one of which was what role did current events play in the crafting of the stories? And you've made that clear. What themes were you hoping to explore in the stories? For example, there's a mother-daughter theme in one of them. One of the stories deals with the organ trade, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what themes you were going to explore in the stories.
May-lee Chai:
Well I can maybe talk about how I put the stories together, the way I wanted the themes to come together as a journey for the reader. So the first story, which is the title story, is based on news reports that I have read. There was in China these mobile blood units, these blood merchants who would go to rural areas in Central China and they would buy people's plasma and they would then collect it and then they would bring it to city hospitals and they would sell it to the hospitals. And this was a condoned practice. China needed blood, didn't really have a donor culture back in the eighties.
Marshall Poe:
They don't have donation centers in China?
May-lee Chai:
They do now.
Marshall Poe:
Oh, they do now.
May-lee Chai:
But back in the eighties and nineties, they were just coming out of this-
Marshall Poe:
Because I've donated blood and plasma. I mean it's very well worked out in the United States. Yeah, go ahead.
May-lee Chai:
Yes. And it is now in China. But in those days, there wasn't really this practice, it wasn't culturally known yet. And so they didn't have enough blood. So they would go to rural areas and they figured well people need money so we'll offer to buy it and so it'll overcome some stigma. But what unfortunately the so-called blood merchants [inaudible 00:18:48] didn't know was that they didn't have a strong science background. They were hired to do this, it's a rough job, you've got to go on these back country roads that didn't have the highway system. China now has a wonderful highway system, it has wonderful mass transit, much better than the United States. But back in the day, as China was just opening up to the world after decades of isolation, not so much. So they also didn't have regular electricity, right? So they weren't able to sterilize their equipment. And so in addition to not being able to sterilize the equipment properly, some of the so-called blood merchants didn't know better and they re-injected blood.
After they had taken it, spun out the plasma, they would [inaudible 00:19:31] it and just divide it evenly and re-inject it into the farmers who had sold their blood as a way to restore their energy quicker. Well that led to an HIV epidemic. It led to an AIDS epidemic. And so then when the central government found out what was going on, they then made it illegal to do this what had been a perfectly legal job and then they started executing the blood merchants. So the story starts off with a man who he's being charged of a crime that he didn't even know he was committing and he's being sentenced to death. And at the same time, there's a surgeon who's been hired, which again was legal back in the day, to extract his organs so that those organs of the executed prisoner can then be used. And in this case, the surgeon's doing a side job so it's not really going into an official organ pool, but somebody in the hospital is selling it on the side.
And there's been congressional testimony about this, so I know that this occurred. So I wrote a story and trying to think about well what are the forces that make people do these things? You could just say, "Wow, that's so terrible." But really it's the same difference, right? The poor blood merchant needed money. It was a job. It's a terrible job, but it was a job he could do and did do. Same thing the surgeon is rationalizing, "Well it's terrible extracting the organs from executed prisoners, but it's a job and somebody's got to do it." And so it might as well be he and he figures he needs the money. And so the idea of this is, again, these pressures that people are on under capitalism and to make as much money to survive or to thrive. And that makes people sometimes do terrible things. And so that first story is I call the Story of The Path of Least Resistance, right? Because for the poor guy who's being executed, there was nothing else he could do. It's the end of the road for him.
And for the surgeon, he's just going along, right? He could choose not to do it, but he's choosing to because it helps him. And then as we go to the stories like the mother daughter stories, they're facing a lot of tension. They've been facing some racism in a small town. It's a white mother and a mixed race Asian American daughter, Asian presenting daughter. And the mother has remained silent in the face of this racism the family has experienced and the daughter has been just trying to reach out and can't understand why the mother is silent. And part of it is it's how they've been raised, it's part of how they experienced life. And it's like can I have them reach a point where they get to an understanding? And if you read in the story, they do get to an understanding. It's not this understanding that either of them wanted, but it is an understanding. And then as we go forward, we get more and more characters trying to reach out, trying to overcome these differences. And the last story I hope is the most hopeful.
Marshall Poe:
Can you talk a little bit about it?
May-lee Chai:
That's the one set on Mars.
Marshall Poe:
It's the Mars one. Yes.
May-lee Chai:
That's the Mars story and that's called The Nanny. That was actually also inspired by current events. I wrote this one during the pandemic and San Francisco had gone in a partial lockdown. We had a curfew and malls and many public places were shut, were closed, people weren't allowed to congregate. And so on Nextdoor, if you're familiar with that lister.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
It's a neighborhood lister, wealthy people were frantically talking about their nanny situations. So now, nannies were not coming to work so they needed a nanny or else they were going to leave the city and go to a summer home or a second home, and they wanted a nanny to come with them. Or they were leaving and leaving Nanny behind, and they actually called their nannies, "Nanny." I thought, "Wow, that's interesting."
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
Who knew? And so there were all these ads going up on Nextdoor. And it was really interesting for me, who not part of this culture, to read what they wanted the nannies to do. And man, that is a whole lot of work. And they were saying, "Oh, nanny will not have to do maid work." They have someone else do that, but just some lighthouse work and some light cooking and fixing the snacks and then schlepping their child here and there for all their lessons. And schools had gone online, so not to school, but to all these lessons. And then one person even wanted the nanny not only to take care of the toddler during the day, but to sleep train their infant. And I was like, "Oh my God."
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
That is horrible.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
That's a nasty job. And at the same time, there were starting to be all these anti-Asian attacks and there were a number of attacks on older Asian women, got national attention both in San Francisco and in New York, in which younger men just came up and punched them or stabbed them, or in one case murdered an older Chinese woman. And in San Francisco, there was a case of a Toisanese woman who was just waiting for the minibus and a younger man came up and just punched her. And she was so shocked. But she had the wherewithal, she picked up a piece of debris on the street and hit him back and broke his nose.
So when the ambulance came, the EMT looked at them and took the man and left her, left her on the side of the road because he couldn't understand what she was saying. And I just thought, "Oh my gosh." And I wanted to write a story about a nanny. And they would address these issues of just the workload and violence and being scapegoated. But I just couldn't bring myself to write it in the present because it was so depressing to me as this was ongoing. So then around this time I was watching, I've been watching on Twitter, the Chinese lunar probe, the Jade Rabbit YouTube.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
Have you seen that? And it was broadcasting all these really interesting images of the so-called dark side of the moon. And so that's when I thought, "Oh, now I know." And so I decided China has this really advanced space program. They have said they want to have a space station. They have also I think have said eventually someday they want to go to Mars. And so I just thought let's just have that happen. And so I decided to set it on Mars in the future and have my nanny working there. And it was just enough removed from the present so I could have the same issues of the workload and some issues of workplace violence, but in a fantastical science fictional setting so that I don't have to be depressed by it in the moment. And I can think of how can I show resistance within this family, within this workplace setting? So that's where that story came from.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. In a lot of the stories, it seems like people have trouble being or finding a home. They don't ever seem to be settled. They're never there. "Okay, here I am in front of my TV eating whatever I'm eating with my family," and it's all really nice and it sounds good. There's never any moment like that in the stories.
May-lee Chai:
No, everyone's still looking for their home.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah, everyone is looking for some place to be. Can you talk a little bit about that?
May-lee Chai:
A safe place to consider home. And part of that was just from I guess my own feelings, because I said, I started these stories after Trump was elected and I just didn't feel safe. I didn't feel safe anywhere. I feel many of us felt that way, right? It just felt like what is this country? What's happening? But where do we go? Where is going to be safe? And so eventually, you just have to stay and fight, right?
Marshall Poe:
Right.
May-lee Chai:
Nowhere is safe because it's spreading around the world. So I felt like that definitely influenced the stories I was writing. And then also from my own background, as I said when we moved to South Dakota when I was 12, it was not safe. I never felt safe there for a moment. We tried to move, we couldn't sell our house so we were stuck there for many, many years. And we were always thinking, "Where can we go? Where can we go? Where will be safe?" And as you and I had discussed, you've lived a lot of states and a lot of countries, I've lived in a lot of states, a lot of countries so I have continually in my own life been trying to find that safe place that I can call home.
And I think that that is for my characters part of being in diaspora, part of being immigrants or migrants. And that's also why the title is Tomorrow in Shanghai, as one character says, "Well tomorrow in Shanghai, things will be better." It's that idea that it will be better sometime in the future and there will be this place. Shanghai in China is always considered the most magical, most cosmopolitan, in some ways the most desirable city at least for the 20th and earlier 21st century, certainly before the pandemic, Shanghai was it. And so for me, it's this aspirational place, but it's always in the future, right? It's always tomorrow, it's not right now.
Marshall Poe:
I find something, I don't want to generalize my experience, but something American about it in the sense that I think the longest I've ever lived in one place was about six years. I really move around a lot and a lot of people in my circle do as well. And we're looking, but we're not finding, we're uprooting ourselves and moving to do something.
May-lee Chai:
That's so interesting you say that because I think that was also my experience. Six years was the maximum. As a kid, we moved when I was six, we moved when I was 12 and then I left when I was 18. So every six years.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
And then after that, it was even shorter terms because I moved for work, I moved for school.
Marshall Poe:
Right.
May-lee Chai:
Or moved for a job. As academic, you know that if you want a promotion, you often have to move. And that means moving far away because academic jobs are few and far between.
Marshall Poe:
Right. Right. Right. Well it contrasts very sharply, I mean thanks to Facebook I'm in touch with a lot of people that I went to high school with in Kansas, and they are all still in Wichita. Not all of them, but most of them are.
May-lee Chai:
Interesting.
Marshall Poe:
And I do wonder about whether I made a mistake.
May-lee Chai:
What do they do?
Marshall Poe:
They are plumbers and they work in businesses and they're lawyers. [inaudible 00:30:05], they work in companies of various sorts. There's aircraft manufacturing in Wichita. A good friend of mine is an accountant at one of these aircraft factories. And they went to the local university and they came back to Wichita and they stayed there. And very nice people. And it's very different than my life though, I have to say. Yeah. I want to project onto them a feeling of being settled, but I don't really feel comfortable with that. For all I know, they're not as settled as... They are geographically settled, but I mean their lives are probably as full of turmoil as everybody else's life. Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
It's interesting to know that Wichita has such a great economy that it can sustain people going to college, coming back, finding good employment. Some of the problems that... Again, the place that my family moved to in South Dakota, there were no jobs there. So I didn't want to go back, but even if I'd wanted to, there would've been no way to sustain a life for myself there. There was no work. And then my family ended up moving to Wyoming. And again, Wyoming, they joke, but it's not really funny, they say their greatest export is are there young people, right?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
Because it's also not a lot of jobs. It's hard to stay unless you have land or something.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. I can't explain the Wichita economy, it's a pretty big city. It's 300,000 or more people now. And I can say that there's a large aircraft manufacturing industry there still to this day. And so I don't know, I have one friend who works in it, but I don't know exactly what led them to stay there and I don't exactly know what they do. I don't really inquire. But they did stay and they seem very happy to do this. This may be an unfair question, are there moments in the stories that are drawn directly from your personal experience, like this happened to me?
May-lee Chai:
Not on the same way that it happened to me, right? I mean writing fiction, I think we all take in... Well many of us take inspiration from things that happen in life or inspired by life. But as someone who also writes memoir and essays and nonfiction, it doesn't always work out really well to take an incident that happened in real life and try to make it into a story. If it works, it cannot work in fiction the way it happened in real life. It just doesn't. I wish it would because it would be so much easier to write, but it just doesn't. In order to make it fit, it's got to have fiction in it, whether the characters, they have to be unlike me in some significant way, things have to change in some significant way in order to just work as a story. And I think it's because in life, things don't necessarily have meaning in the moment.
Marshall Poe:
No, they don't.
May-lee Chai:
They just happen.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
And then something else happens and then something else happens. So there would be no ending. And also, there'd be no significance. It's only later when you think about it or when you connect it to all these other things, but then to make that happen in a story, you have to compress it so that the significance happens for the characters in that moment. Otherwise, why are you reading it?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah.
May-lee Chai:
And I think I really only became aware of this difference when I started writing nonfiction, right, narratively. And then I could see, "Oh, I have written memoir," and so I can put it together chronologically and I could think, and then I don't deviate from what really happened because I'm trying to mine it and I'm trying to figure out what was this meaning? But it usually takes longer. And in an essay, I have to step forward more really as a narrator and to explain why I'm putting episodes, I have to have that voice weaving it in. If I in nonfiction just presented the moment, it'd be like a crime story, right? And it's the flash spot news, but you don't get to the deeper significance.
Marshall Poe:
Well I mean it's interesting you mentioned that because when I think about what I remember about my life, it's a collection of anecdotes. It's just episodes that happened, they don't really have any meaning. It's like this happened, this was the time I spilled a coke on my grandma and it doesn't have any... It just happened. And I remember because it was terrible, got in a lot of trouble because I spilled an entire cup of coke on my grandma. But it's just a huge collection of those things without rhyme or reason. And I don't know how I could ever weave them into some story, they just happened and they are like spot news in that way.
May-lee Chai:
I mean but you can, right? [inaudible 00:34:39]. It's what historians do, right?
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Well tell very long stories, that is exactly what we do.
May-lee Chai:
We go through a lot of spot news, a lot of incidents, but I think you have to come with a theme. And so you know which spot incidents to describe which are relevant and which don't fit the theme.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. Yeah. We've taken up a lot of your time. I do have one final question though. I was just rereading Tolstoy's short stories, I don't know why I read these things, but I enjoyed them. I was introduced to them at Grinnell College. I'd like to say thank you Mr. Mohan. And I'm interested to know whether the short stories you write ever end up as novels for something longer. Are you ever tempted to say, "Okay, I'm taking this one all the way this time?"
May-lee Chai:
I did do that with a short story I wrote called “Saving Sourdi,” and I turned it into the novel Dragon Chica, which then spawned another novel, Tiger Girl, which won the Asian Pacific American Award for Literature from the Asian American Pacific Islander branch of the ALA, American Librarian Association. So that short story not only became a novel, it became two novels.
Marshall Poe:
Yeah. So is there a temptation in writing short stories to make them long stories so to say?
May-lee Chai:
As someone who also writes novels, it's like sometimes I think about it, but also sometimes I think that this is the key moment, right? And so if this is the key moment, do I need more? I mean there's other things that could happen. Within this collection, I have two short stories from different points in the character's life. So they're linked stories. And I mean I could keep going. One could always keep going, but I didn't feel inspired to do so in this particular time.
Marshall Poe:
Mm-hmm, I see. So we have a traditional final question on the New Books Network and that is what are you working on now?
May-lee Chai:
Oh, what am I working on now? I'm working on an essay collection and I'm working on a novel. I won't say anything more about that.
Marshall Poe:
You're not going to say anything more, you're just going to leave people in suspense. That's good.
May-lee Chai:
Yeah.
Marshall Poe:
All right. Well thank you very much for being on the show. Let me tell everybody that we've been talking to May-lee Chai about her new collection of short stories, Tomorrow in Shanghai and Other Stories. It's out this year. May-lee, thanks for being on the show.
May-lee Chai:
Thank you, Marshall. Thank you so much.
Listen to more episodes of the Grinnell College Authors and Artists Podcast.
