Will & Way: May 2024
Will & Way: May 2024
Christine Tsai Taylor on her journey reading Asian authors
I connected with fellow writer and biracial third-culture kid Christine Tsai Taylor in late 2023, and I learned that she’d published an article about her journey reading only Asian authors. This was timely for me, as I was fresh off finishing The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen—yes, like the show!—and I was about to finish Stay True by Hua Hsu.
I wanted to talk more with Christine about why she chose to focus on Asian authors and whether her journey surprised her in any ways. Read on for her answers!
Tell me a little bit about your writing trajectory.
If you’d asked me a couple years ago, I would have said that in 2017, I started taking online writing courses with the International Writers Collective in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
However, I recently unpacked a bunch of journals and paper in our new house and realized that I’ve always been a writer. For some reason, it didn't feel like official "writing," but I've always felt most at home with words, on the page, and I am especially content with a fountain pen and notebook.
Image credit: Ampersand and Gray
Can you speak a bit about your Asian identity? You grew up in different countries and moved around a bit throughout your life. How has that impacted your identity and your understanding of what it means to be Asian?
I’m biracial. My mom’s from Taiwan and my dad is an average white guy from Chicago. When I was a kid, we lived in South Dakota. There were very few Asians around and most we knew were like us, Air Force families with a mom from Taiwan.
My mom bought Chinese groceries in pokey little grocery stores and we loved it because she also got us Haw Flakes and Botan Candy. Trips to Asian shops have always meant treats, and that may be a big reason why food is where my identity is centered.
Aside from one of my mom’s friends who was a doctor at the CDC in Atlanta, I didn’t know any Asian women who were working professionals. My mom worked in a restaurant, first as a waitress and later as the manager. Most of the Asian women I knew when I was young were her co-workers. Later, we lived in Saudi Arabia and, with very few exceptions, women weren’t allowed to work.
Going to University was a given for me; my parents expected it. When my dad retired from the Air Force, I was 12 and saw that he wasn’t qualified for most jobs because he didn’t have a degree. This was despite being a lead instructor specializing in B-1 bomber autopilot systems maintenance.
My dad’s job in Saudi gave me access to an American boarding school in Switzerland. where I did well. From there, I went on to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I majored in German Languages and Literature and Comparative Literature. It was a huge treat to study what I loved, but I had no idea what kind of careers might be open to me, and that showed.
After a few years of different jobs and travel, I did a Masters degree at the University of Amsterdam in Cultural Analysis. Around this time, I visited a friend’s family in Malaysia. Her mom was a pediatrician with her own office and a national platform on breastfeeding. Her aunt helped run a factory in Singapore. On top of that, all her friends were professionals in finance and consultancy jobs. There were ladies who looked like my mom and could “business expense” our drinks!
It was alarming to realize that my ethnicity was part of why, as a kid, I couldn’t imagine myself in profession or as an academic.
When I finished the MA, I was thinking about following an academic track. I tried it and didn’t work out, but I still regularly think about whether that PhD will be in my future one day—or not.
What or who inspired you to dedicate a year to exclusively reading works by Asian authors?
George Floyd. After his murder, I didn’t know how to express my feelings publicly. Silence wasn’t an option, but words were inadequate. I decided to post pictures of all the books by Black authors on my bookshelf at home. There were a lot—31 to be precise.
When I pulled down the Asian authors to see if I could do a follow-up post, two things stood out. First, most of my Asian authors were Indian. Lots of Salman Rushdie. Second, only a few were Taiwanese. It was striking to realize that I'd read so little of people from my own background. I decided to do something to change that.
Did you have any expectations going into your year of reading only Asian authors? Did anything surprise you about this experience?
I wasn’t that optimistic about how it would go. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989) and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991) were the books I associated with reading about China. Both felt outdated and minimizing. My degrees in Comparative Literature and Cultural Analysis focused almost exclusively on European literature. I was unprepared and uninformed.
I had Shawna Yang Ryan’s The Green Island on my bookshelf and gave it a try. It was an incredible reading experience, and I began happily devouring more books by authors like me. Jessica J. Lee, who wrote Two Trees Make a Forest, is biracial, grew up in Canada, and now lives in Germany. She feels like my people. In The Third Son by Julie Wu, her protagonist actually lives in my old neighborhood in Rapid City, South Dakota.
I felt seen by these authors, and that encouraged me to keep going.
Did you choose authors from different areas of Asia? How did you go about compiling your to-read list?
Initially, I read what I found on lists of Asian authors. After reading Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, Minor Feelings by Cathy Hong Park, and Kim Jiyoung, born 1982 by Cho Nam-Jo within the space of a few months, I realized that we are in the age of Korean culture—or at least the publishing industry was having a Korea moment. It makes sense! K-pop and Korean dramas are hugely popular; why not novels?
I made a concerted effort to include Taiwanese authors, as I mentioned already. I discovered a bunch of authors I wouldn’t have read otherwise. Some fun contemporary fiction—like Ed Lin, who wrote about the night market in Taipei so well I could taste it in Ghost Month.
Which books left the most lasting impact on you personally?
Shawna Yang Ryan’s The Green Island was a big game changer for me. It was the first time I read a book about Taiwan that felt like it was also about me. The second section of the book starts at the place and time where my parents met. Reading that was emotional, and I ended up reaching out to her. It turns out our dads worked on the same base at the same time, although we haven’t found any other connection between them.
It meant a lot to me that someone like me had written a great novel.
The experience with Shawna was so positive, I reached out to both Jessica J. Lee and Julie Wu to share my experience. They were so kind and enthusiastic. I’m learning that there’s a biracial cosmopolitan writing community out there that I can feel part of and that’s encouraging.
Did you find any common threads throughout the literature?
Specifically in Taiwanese literature, there is this gaping hole around things that cannot be spoken about, namely the White Terror years from around 1940 until the late 1980s. Writers who were publishing at the time and have been published were cautious with their words, and with good reason. So Taiwanese literature is steeped in truth questions and has a lot of layers of meaning to it, which are challenging to understand.
On top of all that, there are identity questions around who is Taiwanese and what kind of Taiwanese, and those questions are multiplied in complexity when you start talking about biracial international children of immigrants.
The question of which Taiwan you’re talking about can get complex. Did your family come from China after 1945 or before? Was your family one of the wealthy families that lost everything when Chiang Kai-Shek arrived? Is your family indigenous? And that’s before you get to questions about current politics or loyalties. It’s definitely something I realize I know less and less about with every read.
Did this experiment influence your own writing? If so, how?
Always so hard to answer, particularly because I’m reading a lot in translation. In my latest piece, though, I worked a lot harder to keep all the languages present. It centers on an event that took place in Saudi Arabia and in that moment, my mom spoke to me in Chinese.
In the past, I might have just said she used the language, but now it matters to me to have the words in pinyin on the page, in the same way it matters to find accurate transliterations for the Arabic words and terms I’m using. I guess I feel less inclined to gloss over some of the complexities. It might be a case of expecting more from my readers or just trusting them more.
How many books did you end up reading? What are your top 3 book recs for readers who might want to read more Asian authors?
First of all, I love how this question justifies my reading journal, where I’ve written down the title of every book I’ve read since January 1997. Since 2020, I’m at 42 books, across fiction and non-fiction. Lately, I’ve started reading more short stories and creative non-fiction pieces as well.
A top three is so hard because it depends so much on what people want to read about. But if I think about the books I’d like to see more of on the market, they’re contemporary books reflecting some of the real-life experiences of people like me. There are so few out there.
Here's my best attempt:
1) Yi Shun Lai’s Not a Self-Help Book because it is a journal, which I love, and made me laugh. It also gets into a character’s brain in a way that reminds us that we’re all a little bit flawed in hilarious ways.
2) Ed Lin’s Ghost Month brought the night market to life for me, and that made me so happy to read it. Plus, it was an insight into some of the street culture in Taiwan that I’m just not going to understand because of language gaps and frankly having a lot of my experiences in Taiwan mediated by my family, even now.
3) Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown showed me a new way to think about writing, and the way he deals with the idea of Asian actors as mainly background actors is brilliant. He draws his reader into caring about characters who are often overlooked because they’re part of the scenery. In doing so, he makes us ask ourselves if there are people we’re overlooking in our real lives. I love how that works.
Anything else you want to share?
It’s sometimes challenging to get past the current political conflicts and remember that Taiwan has its own culture, history, and people. Today, you’re talking about an island nation that’s regularly under threat from China and constantly navigating earthquakes and typhoons. The kind of thinking and personalities that come out of a place that’s consistently under threat like that is unique. There’s a certain wry perspective on life, a combination of fierce loyalty and a sometimes surreal ability to put things into perspective.
I thought that learning more about Taiwan would sate something in me, but it’s done exactly the opposite and made me hungry for more. I’ll be learning more and realizing how big my knowledge gaps are for a long, long time.
To hear more from Christine, check out her newsletter, Wonderings.
Check out some of my latest published work:
How the AI-Driven Job Market is Affecting New Grads—Plus, Tips To Stand Out From the Crowd (Indeed)
Jimmy Daly Reflects on a Hard Year and the Future of Content Marketing (Managing Editor)
Why Being Basic Isn’t a Bad Thing and How To Get Employees To Care About Campaigns (Goldcast)
Recruitment is Branding (DevelopWell)
If you’re looking for a writer/editor or need help with admin/project mgmt tasks at your company, let’s talk! I’m always open to new work and interesting projects.
Opportunities:
The Soujourners Journalism Cohort is a part-time, five-month remote training program for early-career, non-white writers
Listening:
This episode of This Is Love, called “A Family Secret,” was interesting!
I’m learning a lot from the current season of Serial, which is all about Guantanamo Bay (but focuses on details and stories I haven’t heard before)
I also listened to The Rise and Fall of Ruby Franke about the YouTube momfluencer who was convicted of child abuse
Watching:
Another big viewing month! April was full of intensity. We watched Oppenheimer, Iron Claw, and Civil War, all of which forced me to move my body afterward to process. Same for Baby Reindeer, the viral sensation on Netflix, which I found to be a really interesting POV on trauma.
Side note on Oppenheimer: this piece on the movie’s reception in Japan feels important to share.
I finished Manhunt, about the 12-day hunt to find John Wilkes Booth after he murdered Lincoln. I’m usually not big into historical stuff but there is so much I didn’t know about this period of time.
We also watched Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning, about a white man named Charles Stuart who alleges that he and his pregnant wife have been attacked by a Black man. As I get older, I keep coming back to the fact that the truth is always revealed, even if it takes a long time.
Reading:
April 27 was Indie Bookstore Day, but every day is a good day to support your local bookstores (or your library)! In Houston, they came up with a bookstore crawl idea that I think is so cute.
I finished and felt pretty neutral about Greta & Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly (although great job of centering neurodivergent queer characters) and Family Meal by Bryan Washington (similar note, and it’s set in Houston which is cool).
[tw: self harm] “When wellness is marketed as a product to be purchased, what does healing mean? And what should our expectations be?”
Seriously considering a dumbphone
Jane Fonda is 86 years old and out here fighting climate change
“Death may be far more alive than we ever thought possible.”
How much vulnerability with strangers is too much?
It’s May! The year is one-third of the way through. Are you doing small things every day to get closer to where you want to be?
See you next time,
Nikki
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