![]() ![]() When the reader stumbles on something-the neopronouns, for example-I hope that makes them question their assumptions. Instead, I mostly leave it to the reader to do the other half of the deconstructing. But I don’t actually make the ideology explicit. In the Watchful City presents a world that is queer-normative, where gender is a nonbinary system and there’s nothing unusual about a relationship between two people of the same gender. In that sense, I find science fiction to be a great tool to deconstruct our assumptions, as there’s more room to create alternate ways of viewing society and culture. The environment we’re in shapes how we conceptualize the world, and those views influence how we conceptualize the future and the unreal. It’s said that science fiction reflects the author’s time. The Chinese Exclusion Act positioned Chinese immigrants as unassimilable and fundamentally un-American, creating the stereotype that fuels a lot of the xenophobia we keep seeing, especially in the wake of COVID. And people’s perceptions of Asian Americans have their roots in early policies and discourse. history, we see that racism against Asian Americans never truly goes away. Written before COVID-19 and the appalling violence against Asian Americans, it seems scarily prophetic. “Where There Are Cities, These Dissolve Too” envisions a future in which the Chinese Exclusion Act has been reinstated. I think all my stories have some thread of love that pulls characters through even the darkest moments. And it’s not just romantic love-we experience so many different forms of love, and it sustains us as people. The love that emerges from difficult narratives has faced a trial and come out stronger. Only after you experience deep sorrow do you have a true appreciation for joy. It’s the extremes that make love as strong as it is in my work. Your stories tackle sexual assault, suicide, loss of cultural identity, mental illness, who gets to be human. My writing has always been in conversation with the norms of genre fiction. Over the years, I gave personalities to Yu-Gi-Oh! cards I filled in backstories for the villains of Hunter × Hunter I wrote a coda for Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy I ran with the mythos of Supernatural and imagined what angels could be like in nonhuman bodies. I began writing around fifth grade, when I started with fan fiction. The capacity for imagination is what brings me back over and over again to speculative fiction. All the work that captivated me had strong world building, which brought to life things that don’t exist in our world-yet the stories also centered on human feelings and experiences. ![]() I grew up with anime and manga and Western writers like Terry Pratchett and Diana Wynne Jones. What drew you to speculative fiction? Who were your early influences? Just among Chinese Americans, there are a ton of origin stories, cultural practices, political viewpoints. ![]() I also feel that the heterogeneity of the region has made me more sensitive to the variations within groups. I find myself trying to incorporate a diversity of cultures in my writing as a way to reflect the reality in which I grew up. You’ll hear at least three languages on an average day-I learned to identify multiple languages from an early age simply because I heard them spoken around me. The Punjabi grocery store has “Indian Market” on its window in Chinese. For example, you can find Spanish-language churches right next to Buddhist temples that conduct services in Vietnamese. I find language to be one of the most salient markers of that coexistence. People of different backgrounds coexist in the same spaces. The biggest impact is that it normalized cultural contact and mixing. You grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, known for its Asian communities but also significant Latino communities and general diversity. A deft and intricate look at a utopian society that isn’t all that utopian, the book combines a wide array of influences to tell a series of stories that add up to more than the sum of their parts. Butler Memorial Scholarship-has just published their first novella, In the Watchful City. The speculative fiction writer-based in Los Angeles and a recipient of the Octavia E. ![]()
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