AlliterAsian (7 page)

In Conversation with Madeleine Thien

Ricepaper
18, no. 3 (2013)

Hanako Masutani

On a bright fall afternoon in Burnaby, I met Madeleine Thien in her new writer-in-residence office at Simon Fraser University. As Madeleine prepared mugs of green tea, the window behind her displayed a long, sunny view of the university and turning fall leaves. We sat down beside a wall of books to discuss Madeleine's just-completed novel, writing, her time in Canada and abroad, and identity.

HM:
Your book
Simple Recipes,
which came out over ten years ago now, was such a big success. You've had success after success, it seems. Do you feel like you've arrived as a writer?

MT: That's a hard question. I never think of it in those terms, because you're not sure where you're arriving to. And I think each book shows you more of what you're capable of, and also, more of what you aren't capable of. So it's a continuous process. But I feel more proud of
Simple Recipes
now than I did then. At the time it was so close to me. And my reading of it was, maybe, overly critical. Now when I look back on it, it's a book I feel glad I had the chance to write at that particular time in my life.

HM:
What are your ideal writing conditions?

MT: It's been harder as I get older, because I've realized the ideal conditions for me are to be completely alone for several months at a time. That's very hard to arrange. That's hard on your relationships. But, ideally, if I can be away for two or three months and do only writing—especially if it's a novel—without teaching, that's ideal for me. I immerse myself in the book and don't come out until that time is finished. For me it makes a big difference. I can feel it in the writing, when I'm really inside it, or when I'm just dipping in and out. I feel like I make greater discoveries, and all the elements of writing—the research, the memory, the craft, the surprise—they have more of a chance of really coming together if I have periods of time by myself.

HM:
You've written about Montreal and Cambodia before. What prompted you to write about China now?

MT: It came as a big surprise to me! I've been reading and thinking about China ever since I was a teenager, but I never thought I would write about China. I never felt that I was capable or knew China enough.

This novel ended up starting with events that were very close to me, and felt very personal—my parents' relationship to China. Then it ended up becoming something completely different.

This novel is about students studying Western classical music in Shanghai. It's set in the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in 1965, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution. Writing about music opened up a whole new way for me to think about art, the transmission of artistic practices, and also the copying of ideas. It's really interesting that we see so many Western ideas as originals and so many Eastern ideas as copies, or they're not attributed to a specific person. And I want to poke some holes in that.

HM:
Was doing research in Shanghai very different from doing research in Cambodia?

MT: Yes, very different. The first time I went to Cambodia was only for two months, and I wasn't writing. I didn't even have any plan or idea that I would ever write about it. I just wanted to spend time there. The writing came much later. But when I did start writing, I was always very conscious of the fact that it was a different culture. Cambodia's religion, Buddhism, and its language are quite different from the East Asia that I know. Cambodia is where the civilizations of India and China meet, cross-fertilize, and all of that. I always felt trepidation that I would get things wrong, or that I wouldn't be able to get into the psyche. But of all the books I've written, it's the book I believe in the most. It was a big risk for me. It made me see that we actually are capable of fully immersing in another psychology, another culture. It's not that different, you know. That balance is one of showing respect but also of knowing that the identity is rich and has many possibilities. That you really can get inside if you spend enough time. If you can stop yourself from projecting and just observe. Try to take in as much as you can. And for me that expands the boundaries of what fiction is capable of doing. That book showed me the most. It was the biggest risk, because I also had something to say about the silence surrounding Cambodia's history. So, to come back from there to China is
really
interesting, because I don't take for granted that I know the culture, even though it's mine. I still feel what I felt in Cambodia, which is to not project, to not take things for granted.

HM:
In 1999, you edited
Ricepaper
5, 1–3. Can you speak about your time as the editor of
Ricepaper?

MT: Even at the time—and I still think so now—I didn't know enough. I feel like I was very inexperienced. I'd never edited a magazine before. I'd been on the
Prism international
editorial board. That was the most editorial work I'd done. At the time, the mandate was to cover as wide a range of Asian-Canadian art and literature as possible. So I had to expose myself to a lot of what I hadn't been exposed to before. I think the writers my age were afraid of being ghettoized.

I don't know how conscious or unconscious it was editing
Ricepaper
and thinking: These artists are artists first; they have many different identities, one of which is Asian-Canadian, and whether they choose that identity or not, it's really up to them. I had a lot of questions about putting a label on people. I would have wanted to choose for myself, too. I think I had a lot of unresolved questions that I didn't know how to answer in that context. I think I would be a better editor now.

I wish we could make a structure where there was more intergenerational exchange with
Ricepaper
. Because I feel that Fred Wah or Roy Miki have so much to tell us. And the structures and prejudices and ghettos that they were reacting against still exist. They haven't changed, only we don't name them the way they did then. I don't know how to have those conversations without making people feel targeted. It's very, very sensitive. And I find myself more and more curious about that conversation, even more now than when I was at
Ricepaper
. Maybe it's age.

HM:
Do you find it useful for you to call yourself an Asian-Canadian writer?

MT: I don't, partly because I feel—and I felt this way with
Dogs at
the Perimeter
in Cambodia—that the story around Cambodia is [one] that everyone should feel responsible to and that everyone should see as their own. All our governments were involved, either before or after. And with Cambodia, in particular, it's been very easy for the West to distance itself and forget. There's a lot of amnesia about the Vietnam War and the American bombing of Cambodia, which was entirely illegal and secret. It was huge. We actually supported the Khmer Rouge as the representatives of Cambodia until the 1990s, you know. Fifteen years after the genocide, we still recognized Pol Pot as the country's leader. So in that way, the Asian-Canadian box feels too small. I feel that our stories are as legitimate and mainstream as anyone's.

       
C
OMMENTARY BY
M
ADELEINE
T
HIEN
(2015)

Only two years have passed since my conversation with Hanako, and so although I've been asked to write a commentary, what strikes me most is that I find myself unable to do so. Conversations continue like stories, concluded but not necessarily resolved.

I'm at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, a country I don't know well, but one that borders my father's birth country, Malaysia. Working with writers here, I think about how words—race, Asian, marginal, centre, literature, story, reader, language, writer, history—take on different connotations, sometimes vastly different, in this political context. Concepts, even basic ones, present alternate problems and different freedoms. I think of Hannah Arendt writing about Isak Dinesen, “It is true that storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”

       
A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

Hanako Masutani is a former creative director of
Ricepaper
, whose work has appeared in the internationally acclaimed literary journal
Grain
. She lives in Vancouver, BC.

Travelling between Worlds with Ruth Ozeki

Ricepaper
18, no. 4 (2013)

Erika Thorkelson

When I catch up with Canadian-American-Japanese author Ruth Ozeki over the phone from her home on Cortes Island, BC, she's still buzzing over the European leg of her book tour to promote her third novel,
A Tale for the Time Being
. She's been to Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, and all over England, and she gushes about the independent bookstores there, which seem to be rarer every year in North America.

In Bath, England, at the whimsically named Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights, a trio of young musicians who perform under the name the Bookshop Band, wrote and performed a song in the book's honour. It was a dream response for a novelist who toils in solitude on a remote island to see her work reaching across the world to inspire other artists.

“I started to cry,” she says. “The tears were just streaming down my face—I was so embarrassed. It's hard to describe. It's a lot of hard work to write a book, but it feels like it's kind of a gift.”

According to the Zen principles that Ozeki has been practicing ever more seriously since the 1990s, when you receive a gift, you must give one in turn. Seeing that gift picked up and reinterpreted felt like another iteration of that cycle and evidence of its power.

It was a cycle that began in 2006 when Ozeki, like Ruth, her fictional counterpart in
A Tale for the Time Being
, was grieving her mother's
death and trying to write a memoir that just wouldn't coalesce.

The voice of Nao, a Japanese teenager whose family had been unceremoniously torn from their comfortable life in California and sent back to poverty and isolation in Tokyo, came to her first. Nao was intelligent, brassy, and haunted. She existed in the shadows, and with her diary she was reaching out for companionship and solace the only way she knew how.

Ozeki knew the tone would be confessional and the form would be a diary addressed to a reader, but the reader remained elusive. So she began “auditioning” readers. She cast four or five different characters for the role—men, women, young, old. The auditions “took place on the page,” and each time Nao's section would grow, but none of the readers felt right.

“Finally, at the end of 2010, I finished a draft, and it was very, very different,” Ozeki recalls. “Nao's section was similar to what it is now, but not the same, and the other half of the book, the reader's half, was entirely different. It was set in a library, in a place that was very much like the Vancouver Public Library.”

Her husband, artist Oliver Kellhammer, was the one who had come up with the idea that Ozeki, or rather a semi-autobiographical fictional version of herself, should be the reader. It was a tactic that had come into favour in the mid-2000s. Philip Roth cast himself as a fictional character in an alternative United States in
The Plot Against America
. Charlie Kaufman had written himself and a twin brother into
Adaptation
, his screen treatment of Susan Orlean's
The Orchid Thief
.

But Ozeki dismissed the idea as a metafictional gimmick, one that would take some serious manipulation to accomplish. Still, as the writing process stretched on, none of the other readers she tried made sense.

When the March 2011 tsunami struck Japan, destroying much of its northeastern coast and sending debris spiralling through the circular currents of the Pacific Ocean toward the west coast of North America, something clicked. This was a way for Ruth to connect with Nao in an organic way. All of Ozeki's work grapples with the ways in which humans connect between cultures and over great distances; here was a distant tragedy on an unthinkable scale playing out in real time on television and computer screens around the world. And it was happening in Japan, the land of Ozeki's mother's birth and a place she had spent large chunks of her adult life.

But if she were going to be a character in the book, Oliver would have to be in there too. “He thought that was fine,” she says over the phone. “He said that it was an interesting thought experiment, and so I went forward and wrote it. Of course, he read it, and he was fine with it. His only concern was that he felt I had made him too smart in the book. I disagree, actually. And anyone who knows him would also disagree.”

From there she set about constructing a fictional life for Ruth and Oliver on an island very much like Cortes. But she couldn't find space for everything. If anything, she says, the real thing is more magical. She couldn't, for example, find a way to squeeze in Cousteau, their pet turtle the size of a manhole, who resides in the Ozeki-Kellhammer living room.

“This is the kind of turtle that you find frozen and stacked up in storage in Chinatown,” she says of their massive pet. “People make soup out of them. I think she probably prefers her tank to being soup.”

Ruth Ozeki wasn't born on the coast of British Columbia. Her path, like the circular ocean currents called gyres that brought Nao's diaries to the Canadian shore, is far more complicated than that. She was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to a Japanese mother and a
European father. Her parents were both academics with graduate degrees in linguistics, although her mother left academia when Ozeki was born.

Growing up half-Japanese and half-European in a predominantly Caucasian community made her aware of the complications of identity politics from a very young age. Though she resembles her father a great deal in both height and facial structure, Ozeki says the “Asian wash” on her features, an accident of genetics, meant that she was pegged from an early age as Japanese rather than American. Fulfilling that role meant internalizing an idea of Japaneseness cobbled out of stereotypes and expectations.

“The people around me identified me as Japanese, so I kind of took on what I thought to be the traits that would be racially appropriate for me to take on,” she remembers. “When you're a little kid, that's what you do. I thought that Japanese girls should be quiet and obedient, docile, good at math, play an instrument, get good grades, not crack jokes, and all that kind of stuff. It didn't occur to me that there were other options.”

It wasn't until she encountered the real thing, travelling to Japan first with her mother and then as a student, that she discovered just how American she was.

“Hallelujah!” she thought. “I can crack bad jokes and claim my identity as an obnoxious American.” Ozeki describes one of her earliest encounters with the complicated nature of the identity that had been thrust upon her in her 2004 essay for the
New York Times
, “A Vacation with Ghosts,” which is about her first trip to Japan with her mother at the tender age of seven. There, for the first time, she saw her mother speaking Japanese. “Now, as I watched her talk to my grandmother in Japanese, switching fluidly from one language to the other, I saw that in this strange new tongue she was a different
person—possibly not my mother at all,” she writes. “It made me dizzy, all this switching, but maybe it was the heat.”

On the page as well as in person, Ozeki is a gifted raconteur. She often tells another story about a much later trip she took as an adult, when she and a Caucasian friend named Steve walked into a tiny pub on the southern island of Kyushu, and the owner addressed the half-Japanese, half-European Ozeki directly, ignoring her blond friend.

“Steve's Japanese is and was absolutely fluent,” she remembers. “You would never know he wasn't Japanese … and mine at the time was still pretty shaky. So it was one of those crazy moments where the owner of the bar was rattling on to me in Japanese and Steve was rattling back to him. Little by little it occurred to the owner that Steve was speaking Japanese, but it took a while for the information to really penetrate, because he resisted it. It was too freaky for him. So then he got on the phone and started calling his friends, and before long the entire place filled with people from town who had come to listen and see this blond
gaijin
[foreigner] who spoke
pera pera
[quickly and fluently]. Things got rowdier and rowdier, and I remember at one point in the evening, the owner just stepped back and looked at Steve with this expression of astonishment and awe.

“And he said in this very philosophical tone of voice, ‘
Ma! yappari ningen da na!
' [I guess they're human after all!]”

This is almost a seminal experience for people of Asian descent travelling in Japan, but reading it as a comment on Japanese xenophobia would be overly simplistic. As those who grow up between cultures—like Ozeki herself—no doubt understand from an early age, it's an extension of identity politics everywhere; until he spends an evening in your bar, chatting you up with clever fluency, it's hard to see the Other as a fully realized being.

After studying classical Japanese literature in Japan, Ozeki returned to America and fell into a job in film, doing art direction on such classics as
Matt Riker: Mutant Hunt, Breeders, Necropolis, Enemy Territory
, and
Robot Holocaust
. Her big break was in a commercial where she worked with an art director who had worked extensively with Akira Kurosawa.

“It was just absolutely mind-blowing,” she remembers. “We did fabulous things. We had Cyndi Lauper riding on a pink elephant at one point. What was interesting was to watch how this guy ran his department. We got to be friends, and we talked a lot. Just to hear these wonderful stories about Kurosawa was amazing.”

Speaking Japanese became her most valuable skill. On film sets, she could translate and coordinate between US and Japanese crews. But her ultimate goal was to make it to the editing room where the story finally comes together, which she instinctually knew would hold the greatest lessons for her.

“I got into film by accident,” she says. “It was never something I wanted to do. I loved film. I'd been involved with media ever since high school, but it was not my burning desire. My burning desire was always to write novels.”

Ozeki produced two films on her own—a surreal fiction called
Body of Correspondence
and an intensely personal documentary about her mother called
Halving the Bones
. The former is out of print; the latter is available on iTunes. They were wonderful experiences for her, but the idea of writing another film, of the years of collaboration and compromise, of promotions and raising money, didn't appeal. Instead she began work on her first novel,
My Year of Meats
.

“Filmmaking is incredibly cumbersome,” she says. “You have to have all these crew members around, and you have to feed them and find
bathrooms for them and pay them. If you want to blow up a building, you have to get a location permit and get the police to help. It's one thing after another. But if you're writing, you just imagine it and write it down. It's like magic. It felt like years of trying to walk through swamps in chains; suddenly it felt like, oh my, I can fly.”

But she wouldn't have been able to make the transition without those years in the documentary editing room, learning how to craft a narrative that moved quickly and compellingly through time out of the messy, disparate parts of real life. “It's one thing to learn about it, but it's another thing entirely to be in the hot seat in an editing room, surrounded by directors, producers, and clients who are barking orders at you,” she remembers. “And to do that over and over again, it's fascinating. Working in commercial television was the best MFA program I could ever have imagined.”

She met her husband during a heady residency at the Banff Centre and fell in love with Canada in the process, adding yet another hyphen to her identity. Though Ruth is the closest in external circumstances, the central characters of Ozeki's books all carry a certain echo of the author's roots. Jane Takagi-Little in
My Year of Meats
and Yumi Fuller in
All Over Creation
are also half-Japanese, half-European Americans who find themselves acting as bridges between cultures. Whether intentionally or accidentally, her characters reach out and draw distant people together, often finding some measure of peace themselves in the process.

Interconnectedness is one of the themes at the heart of all of Ozeki's work. In the first two books, the link was through food, the common biological requirement to eat that links continents and cultures.

In
A Tale for the Time Being
, the characters are literally connected by the ocean that drops Nao's diary on Ruth's island, but they are also metaphorically connected by their own personal tragedies: Nao's
grief over her former life and Ruth's loss of her mother to Alzheimer's disease. But the mechanisms—the gyres—that bring them together aren't perfect. The connection comes in nearly unidentifiable pieces that require work and care to put together.

“Each of the gyres serves to connect us, but there's something about the movement of the gyres that breaks down the substances too, so plastic becomes degraded, and so does history and so does memory,” she says.

“There's a sense of things breaking down and reconstituting as well through time. This is just another way of talking about impermanence, this idea that nothing stays the same, that things are constantly moving and changing form.”

To Ozeki, this is the struggle at the heart of our modern global existence. We live in a world where, thanks to the Internet, it's easy to feel as though we know everything about each other, but the imperfections and omissions in that network often go unnoticed. Rarely is this tension between impermanence and permanence more visible than at the height of a disaster.

For the first two weeks after the tsunami, Ozeki remembers being glued to the never-ending supply of images of the devastation on the Internet. “And then about two weeks later the attention of the news media moved on and other things were important,” she remembers. “Even though world attention had shifted to the next thing, the situation in Japan was ever more dire. The Internet gyre, the news gyre is very speedy. It cycles very, very quickly.”