Lecture Notes on Author Chat with Jenny Ting Hui Zhang

never know all right we are live oh my gosh okay hello everybody hello Jenny uh thank you so much for being here um so to get us all situated everyone my name is Jody and bury I'm a speaker I'm a writer who works at the intersections of race culture and Health Equity I am here on behalf of one Ken one of my favorite organizations companies um that's around right now it's a mission driven tech company that creates Tech solutions to help small businesses and entrepreneurs gain more visibility and grow and so that also includes a curated Online Marketplace for Brands authors creatives all folks of color and with onekin I've been hosting these author chats in my lit Lounge I have a curated book list on Lincoln's site until you'll find them in chats links to get all these books and I had to had to had to had to have four treasures of the sky on the curated list for this go round and so I am here with author Jenny Ting Hui Zhang who wrote this Inc incredible novel truly I could not put it down and so we're gonna chat about all things writing process craft writing life some of the themes and characters from this incredible incredible book Jenny thank you so much for being here yay thank you so much for having me I I know we've we've talked before so I'm just really excited to chat more oh yeah like I don't know if y'all know this but I purely do this just so I can have new friends and Jenny's gonna be a friend of mine from now on makes me feel so good um I'm calling from Seattle where are you calling from Jenny I am in Austin Texas so right now the sun is truly high in the sky and slowly making its way down but we've got a while okay great great great I'm in Seattle uh as I said it's overcast as per Seattle is around this time of year and so I'm excited uh to just kind of cool down a little bit because it's been uh quite a summer um so I just want to ground us a little bit and I'm gonna have you do this work because I don't want to be responsible for sharing information that should not be shared about this book um at this time um so I want you to do that work but could you just summarize uh for Treasures of the sky for people who are watching who haven't had the chance to read it yet yes uh hello everyone it's been a while since I've done this so let's see how it goes uh so four treasures of the sky is uh it's about a young girl a 13 year old girl named dayu who is kidnapped from her home in China and shipped across the ocean in a bucket of coal and in a brothel in San Francisco Chinatown um and ends up making her way across the West to Idaho and from there trying to get back home to China and this is all happening um in the 1880s you know against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act so not only is she dealing with just the wear and tear of the environment uh weather the time but she's also dealing with um the anti-chinese sentiment of the time from from the people and the legislation and it's interesting that you talk about like the history that surrounds the events of this of this main character uh daiyu and kind of how she sits within this historical context and so would you count for Treasures of the sky as a work of historical fiction does that feel weird to call it that it I know it is historical fiction like by definition it is but in my mind it's just it still feels kind of odd even when I see it in the historical fiction section of a bookstore it feels odd because I've never I've never written historical fiction before and I've I've actually never had an interest in doing it so for it to now just be so categorically that is it's an odd feeling for me for sure yeah for sure and so I think I don't know if I knew that it was historical fiction when I went into it but I have this weird habit these days of I read the acknowledgment section before I actually read the book yeah um and then you have an author's note and so I read the author's note acknowledgments and then I actually read the book and so I went into it knowing that the main impetus behind this story is this um a story that your father told you about how he happened upon like a Chinese Hanging Tree and the story about these five uh Chinese men around that time who were lynched in Pierce Idaho and so that was like the Nugget of information that your father shared and it was just like okay go write me a story write me a story Jenny just whip me up a piece of historical fiction it must be so easy yes that is exactly it it's so I it's so weird because like I knew okay cool this is the inspiration behind this but as I'm going through the pages you it's you I kind of forgot that that's that happens right and there's this one um quotation that I cannot get unstuck from is um in the book you say I think a number of times you repeat this idea around you know as in calligraphy in calligraphy as in life you know we do not retouch Strokes what is done is done right and I'm like holding onto it the whole time because it's like I'm so connected to these characters I'm so connected to the story that I keep trying to will a different ending but I'm like what it's done is done and so can I look at these characters and look at the story for who they are like the richness of who they are regardless of what I know will happen to them um and I'm curious as a writers from the writing perspective knowing the ending quote of the story how do you can you speak to the evolution of like how you imagined the lives of these five I think still Anonymous uh men who were hung yeah um so yeah for for folks who don't know the the story of the kind of um Genesis of four treasures comes from my dad driving around in Idaho finding finding this historical marker that talked about you know these five Chinese men were hanged in Idaho in 1885. um and I always knew that that was going to be something that I wanted to kind of end up at because that was the one of the questions of the book for me especially when I first started writing it that was the question of the book for me so what I envisioned was let me explore who these five Chinese men were and I thought I was going to do a whole you know like everyone has their own chapter we follow their narratives throughout but as I was kind of working my way backwards from that and doing research around you know how are Chinese people getting to America during a time when they weren't legally allowed to to come over um I found research talking about how they would smuggle girls and women over in buckets of coal or crates of China to end up in the brothels in Chinatown in San Francisco and so it was almost like that was that became my new starting point in the creation of the character of diet and everything else kind of came off of her still knowing that there would be an eventual conclusion where we end up at a possible hanging because I'm not trying to spoil things um but I think trading the lives of each of these five Chinese people came from me focusing on this one character's journey and connecting her her with the people she meets along the way who may or may not be involved with the hanging yeah and I think that's important too because you don't even in the information that you're sharing is just like you don't know as a reader you really don't know what is going to happen like in terms of who these people are and you just they're so pointing many points in a story that you forget like at least for me like I just kind of forgot you're so entranced on this you know little girl's Journey like right through this process and so I'm actually curious like how so how your dad uh thought the book turned out did he read it he did he read it via audiobook so yeah he listened to it and then once he finished he told me it was good but I still have some questions which I I will take it um I'm happy with that because ultimately like I I think he's more happy that something he told me had import enough to kind of engender this entire piece of art I love that I love that so the main character her name is daiyu and I want to get a little bit into the name and you know coming to the events around her but um when I Was preparing for this I read a article that you wrote for lit Hub about um how watching the men's uh figure skating in the Olympus kind of help you fall back in love with writing and I read that and it was so emotional for me I was actually crying a little bit towards you I don't know why I'm in the emotional state I don't know why but I want to read this quotation um that you have in that piece so you say every writer has different reasons for why they write hair online I wrote to keep myself company I wrote to make myself feel moved most of all I wrote because I was trying to make sense of the world and of myself I realized this early on it was a joy to be able to tell stories that came from inside myself and so when I read that I thought about Gayu and Lin zayu's relationship right and in the story there was this character lindayu who often physically is coming inside of daiyu the main character and out of right and so I'm curious if you can share a little bit about the origin story lindayou for people who are not familiar with it and that relationship between this whole other being coming from out you know outside or inside of our main character yeah yeah I love this question and thank you for reading that piece um I also cried while I was writing um so Linda you is a character from a very real uh Chinese classic novel it's there are four kind of great classical novels of China and this is one of them it's called Hong long or dream of the red chamber and um Linda you uh her character in that book um is one who is very sensitive um she is very sick from a young age she has consumption which kind of follows her throughout her entire life and she ends up dying from it um she's also a poet um the best poet of her time uh at least in her neighborhood and she's also kind of involved in a very tragic love story uh where she's in love with her cousin but he ends up marrying someone else who he thinks is her but is not her due to these uh familial family politics um and so she ends up dying at the end from book consumption action and heartbreak so in four treasures of the sky my main character dayu is named after Lin daiyu and from the very beginning you know one of her core questions is is everything that happens it's everything bad that happens to me in my life such as her parents disappearing when she's very young and her being sent to the city all alone and then getting kidnapped you know is all of that because I am named after this tragic figure who has a tragic end is everything written out for me and is it always going to be immersed in tragedy so that from the very beginning we understand like dayu kind of hates her name um wants to get away from it wants to get away from this perceived fate that she has but does not know how um and eventually Linda you kind of as you mentioned she manifests as some could say she's like a ghost this could say she's maybe part of daiyu's imagination but she ends up kind of um appearing during times when daiyu is in the utmost um trouble um for example when she's floating across the ocean in this bucket of coal when she's at the brothel and kind of about to take her first customer so I think what I was trying to do was um one give her kind of a tool and a resource and a companion for dealing with all of these difficult times but also I think it started becoming a symbol of um what she wanted versus what she should do or think thought she could she should do because another question that comes up for her as we get further along in the book is um what is the right thing to do um you know is should I say in America and kind of help um fight against the anti-chinese sentiments of the time or do I do I kind of follow my heart and go back to China and and you know go back home and Linda becomes a manifestation of this child childlike desire to return home um and to return to like childhood and being a child versus you know the growing up of it all and and taking ownership and responsibility so that's kind of how how I came to understand it as I I was writing it yeah so much just swirling in my head around that right because it's like yeah what is the right thing and like which version of our like different versions of who we are have different answers to that you know and so who do you listen to right um and then also knowing that value and lindsayu are in some version of reality the same person right um I like to do a reading of this where Lynn value is real yeah I I know I believe lindsayu is real and I'm curious too like even just getting outside of the characters just for a little bit because what's coming up for me is I have personified parts of me that arise when I'm in a crisis um I have Francis who I've named as my depression um Francis is a I will tell you but I lose so much weight every time Francis is around so it's like I don't know how I feel about that and then then I have Francine who I'm writing a book right now she shows up all the time any time I wanna she's like myself without voice right and she's like you can't do this you know very negative and so I've been trying to Manifest this other version that I'm calling like JB which is the version of me that like fights for myself and like advocates for myself and I'm just like I don't need to talk to Francine right now JB will talk to her and then I can just like kind of get to writing so yes when you're writing do you have these different versions of you that have to show up in order to do this work oh my gosh I I love that you kind of you assign roles I love that um I think for me I'm just constantly in that state of like negative self-talk and I don't believe in this I'm not doing a good job it's not good and I don't know what compels me to like not listen to it because I do listen to it every single day but I think ultimately we're we're the like the voice of reason or maybe the self-love voice comes in is you know by reading other people and and especially by listening to other people who have gone through that same hardship because I realized like every author feels feels that to some extent um and yeah for me it's just I I have to find solace in someone else's work to remind me that I do can kind of figure it out yeah yeah were you reading besides the research for this and we'll get into that but what what's so I'm writing my book right and then I was like okay I have to read this book for this conversation and so I'm reading it and as I'm reading your work I'm getting so inspired I don't know what it is because it's not like we're writing about the same things or even in the same genre but it just propelled my work in some way I'm curious if you had that like the people that you were reading for fun or inspiration or just because as you were writing this book outside of the work and the research yes yes the one I always say is uh Alexander cheese Edinburgh um subject matter is completely different but it does also feature a kind of 13 year old or 11 year old narrator um but that book I just had on my desk and every day before writing I would read one or two pages from it and it was kind of what you're talking about I read it because it made me feel inspired not not like I'm inspired by this book but I was so inspired by how beautiful the language was and how um precise and intimate the writing was and it inspired me to kind of try to reach any sort of level of that with my own work so yeah I think some people call it like a totem a writing totem um that book was it for me yeah I love that you said that because you know your writing is so clear like it has such a beautiful Clarity to it it also has a wonderful Melody to it um and I was just like really soaking that in and I think gave me permissions because sometimes I try to write I think my style is melodious and then I get self-conscious because I realize that my sentences start to rhyme and I'm like girl you're not writing slam poetry like but as I was reading yours like it had such a melody and a rhythm to it um that was just very inspiring and I think that's a good place if we can hear a little bit from you um from the book um because I want to also go back a little bit deeper into daiyu and um thinking about like how despite this lack of control that she had of the events surrounding her like throughout the book right she is finding these ways to ground herself and like ground her agency and so I wanna if you could read a little bit for those who are reading along um page 33 for the US hardcover edition of this um so we can hear a little bit of that your writing style the voice and also when I get a bit at daiyu's own agency and how she how she's been holding on to that so okay 33 to end of 34 or 30. um if the spirit moves you after 34 feel free but um we'll we'll start with that first section and tell me I mean you go with how you feel feels right for you okay yeah I began at once in the courtyard with a long Birch branch in hand I traced over the characters in The Stone tiles waving and flicking the branch as if I could conjure something from the Earth it felt silly and I knew what it must have looked like to an outsider a girlish looking boy a boyish looking girl playwriting and thinking he or she could be brave the branch was foreign in my hand The movement's Awkward the class finished for the day and the students exited I did not have enough time to hide what I had been doing they found me scratching at the tiles with my branch and began laughing pointing to the stick dangling from my untrained hand I dropped the branch and ran back inside searching for the broom biting my lip and furious with myself the value of a few months ago the one who still had a grandmother at her side and a warm bed that was all hers would have let the dream of mastering calligraphy rest trying hard at something and being scoffed at for it had never been part of that diuse understanding something was happening to me had been happening from the moment my grandmother sent me away on the cartridge food I would ravenous for what calligraphy might bring me and just as I knew I would never be a city man's wife I also knew that calligraphy must be in my future it would not be easy it was just as Master Wong said I had to practice my first few days in jifu had prepared me for this moment every store owner who had turned me away every disgusted eye I defiantly faced was a stone given to me until eventually I had enough stones to build a fortress around myself let their scoffs come I thought that night at least I have my Fortress and it is impenetrable the next afternoon after my chores were complete I was back in the courtyard Birch branch in hand the day was cooler than usual and the windows were open Master Wong's voice floated through and I let it envelop me guiding my hand through the air look closer it said your calligraphy will reveal much about you from one glance at what you have written I can determine your emotions in your spirit I can gauge your discipline and identify your style there are many more secrets your writing will uncover and you will meet them when the time is right I pocketed every word this knowledge was precious to me my way forward into the world I never had a formal education but under master Wong's tutelage I could feel myself becoming the person I thought I wanted to be that person was someone strong and Noble like my father someone good-hearted and skilled like my mother someone who could someone who could care for things with a gentle judiciousness like my grandmother if I could come that person I thought then I would at least remain close to them even if they were no longer near and I thought none of those things involved Linda you or her story the day came when I no longer needed to trace the stone tiles in order to write instead I turned my gaze upward letting the characters appear before me thick and muscular and straight just like the ones inside Master Wong's school I carved and whipped my hand through the air until the characters could fill up the sky they were inviting me to take hold of them to mold them out of nothing or perhaps to mold them out of myself I'll stop there so good I I love this section because you know she's at a very fragile time right at this phase in the book and it's also very early in the book and I think for me it's where she's getting a sense of okay this is who I can be right this is what I want for my future um and I think it's one of the first times since things started shifting in her life that at least as a reader I saw her thinking about herself in the future um I'm wondering if like as you re-read that piece of it um kind of what it conjured for you around that you and how she started stepping into her own agency yeah I think this was one of the first moments when um I don't I don't know if it's in this section [Music] ah it is okay um but this is one of the first moments where um she meets resistance to kind of a yearning that she has or something that she wants to do which is the other students laugh at her for trying to practice something and rereading it I just I don't know I felt so proud of her all of a sudden because you know so many things happen to her later on in the book where it's a very obvious hardship that she has to attempt to overcome and this I think this is one of the first moments for her where she meets that resistance and says no I'm going to overcome it because I want to yeah I love that too and I wrote in the margins that section where she talks about building a fortress around herself like the ways that you harden yourself to the world when those things start to happen and then I started you know in my own life have hardened in a lot of different ways but was so comforting is that she is not hardened to herself right she still has this grounding in a sense of beauty and what could be possible um for her and in grounding in her family as well um and so is there anything you want to see on the next I have another question related to this I I would just add on yeah I agree with you and I I think that comes from her background in the Arts whether it's you know gardening or the tapestry weaving that she learns from her mom um or like and the appreciation for calligraphy and the letters that she learns at this uh school I and maybe I was making a commentary on the important role that art plays in our life but I do think it it has a way of keeping you soft not in a weak way but in in a just like a tender gentle I'm porous way no I absolutely I absolutely felt that and I think there's this connection to it's not in this section but plays throughout the book this recurring Motif about like being good with your hands right because as you're talking about the tapestry you know her parents are artists her her grandmother's a gardener she's in this calligraphy school and so yeah she's working with her hands and has this artistic sense of beauty even later in the book there's a character who also works with his hands right as a violinist um and so to see the hands of this place of beauty and strength and grounding right but also your hands as a means for survival right and for some of the characters later in the book was the site of punishment right and so as the reader I can see these um you know motifs throughout the book I see these themes sharing but I'm curious for you as the writer at what point do those motifs kind of show up in the process of developing the story like is it beforehand you're like okay Beauty softness hands got it is it throughout is it after you know a combination of all three like how do you leave that so beautifully throughout all these different sections of the story thank you um you know I don't think I ever went into it thinking okay hands are gonna be a thing that just reoccur and I'm gonna use them as a symbol for something else but I do think they kind of organically like I would get to a point and the hands would make sense to bring in and it wasn't because I was thinking hard about like oh how can I connect this to something I've mentioned in the past it was like the character it was the character almost guiding it um and and same thing where she notices this this other character his name is Nelson she notices his hands first and that's kind of what arrests her about him that was completely unintentional I did not you know I was not trying to connect things but I think if I were writing it at which I would writing it from dayu's perspective that made sense for her character at the time because it's a part of her character to notice the hands at this point yeah yeah and so into the hands to again this part that you just read she's at a calligraphy school um and calligraphy plays a big role in like how she grounds herself I think probably because of these Reflections that she's having right now right like connecting all these things and so I know that you are not a calligrapher right right so um I want to see how you and the writing of it navigated having calligraphy be such an integral part of the story and just kind of building in the kind of facts and metaphors around calligraphy in your storytelling but also I'm very curious because for those who haven't been able to open the book yet the characters like the actual characters are in the text right and we are so far from the days where I'm sure you've seen this when our writers are writing in English but the characters speak other languages those other languages are always italicized like we are so far from that right and Jenny you're just like no I want actual characters in this thing like how do you even navigate that with the design of it and working with the publisher and all of that so if you can speak to like building it into the actual story and and the work of doing that like from a craft perspective and then this like business side of writing which is now you need to get flat iron to like get an artist and draft these up in the text yeah yeah uh so the calligraphy aspect it was It was kind of similar to how I happened upon including Lin's IU as you know either real or imagined figure in diu's Journey um I just I figured I need to give her something to hold on to as she's making her way through this journey which is going to be very difficult I don't think she can do it alone she needs some sort of like grounding in terms of philosophy or morality um and calligraphy was kind of the first thing that came to me I felt somewhat close to it because my grandfather has has written it in the past and he actually is the one um it she kind of talks about this in the book but he used to rest his hands on his knees and you could be his finger moving on his leg and it was because he was writing out characters or practicing them so that's where that detail came from but you know at the time I was just thinking oh I just put this in here for now it's fine um and then as I started researching more about the practice of calligraphy um I realized that the philosophy behind it and there are many different schools of thought and training but it was so parallel to kind of the journey that diu was going on which was a question of how do I become my own person how do I take Agency for myself and make it in this world and then calligraphy one of the main things is you know no matter what you have to kind of be a good person inside in order to create any sort of good art on the outside and that you know um and when I happened upon that I realized it there's no way to write about um her practicing calligraphy without also integrating this very vital philosophy that that will be kind of the basis for how she goes about it goes through the world so um that was the kind of research and integration portion I think I just got very lucky like it was very easy to um bring it in because it so matched what I was trying to do with the character in this story as far as the business side of things also the easiest thing in the world to incorporate the Chinese characters um you know and I also don't italicize um the opinion in this book when when some characters are speaking Chinese and they're living in and out of English um my editor was amazing Carolyn flaky at Flatiron she's never had any questions about it she you know fully trusted that this was what I wanted to do and it was the right thing to do and I truly you know it's so funny that you asked about it because it was the last thing on my list of anything that that I I needed to address with with the publisher yeah yeah no I love that I love that so much because I think particularly for folks of color um and anyone who holds any type of marginalization especially in publishing we hear these horror stories of how difficult it is to Advocate um for the things that you know are right for your community and I also love to hear those stories where it's like well if you find the right people right then these issues are they're fabricated right because when you have the right people they're not issues they understand what you're trying to do and who you're writing for yeah yeah no I love that I love that and so um I want to get back on this topic of agency because uh agency is not always a weapon for good okay and I think that you know anytime we talk about women or you know a young girl in this case like seeking developing her own agency we assume that it's going to be used for good right you know break those glass ceilings girl power all that kind of stuff um I think we can see this with what's going on with in Italy right now you're like oh yeah a woman is a leader of this country but politics are a little sketch right so um you know there are a lot of you know young girls and women in the book who do make very strong um hashtag girl power choices for themselves cells that are harmful for diet right and they think a really good example of this is I want to speak to the brothel manager you know Madame Lee um who I read in the authors though is based on you know our toy uh please tell me if I'm mispronouncing that who according to wikipedios like the most famous first and highest paid Chinese uh uh sex worker uh in San Francisco and so what was it like for you to discover like a Toy Story in your research process and how you made a decision around portraying women who would not actually be supportive of that you right and there's in their search for their own agency compromise the agency of other girls yeah um I so I think as I was kind of starting out doing research for this book A lot of it was based around you know the anti-chinese violence that occurred at the time and many many instances and so you kind of go into it from the lens of oh like many Chinese folks didn't have a lot of agency at that time but what was interesting especially when I was looking into the brothel stuff and found a toy was that you're right like there were some women who did whole hold certain degrees of power and certain degrees of agency and you could argue you know that wasn't true agency because they're still operating under you know systems of Oppression um but finding that um I wanted to include it in the book because I didn't want it I didn't want the book to just paint this narrative that the Chinese were helpless and um always kind of in despair um no like they had some stake in their lives and in the world and the brothel scenes were kind of a portion of that um what was the second part of your question Jody yeah no no sorry I like asked too many questions at once um but like when you saw her story like I think you're answering it right it's a decision to like kind of bring her into the into the fold of the story and I just thought it was important for me that daiyu wasn't just surrounded by I mean she's a vulnerable girl so she is surrounded by men that could create harms you know for her and in her life but there are also women who you know not every woman you come across is going to be nurturing and trying to save you from kind of this thing that's happening to you and I think that at least for me as a reader raised the stakes of oh diet really has to find herself in this process because the people that you would think would be in her Corner are not there exactly it has to come from within and maybe that's kind of where you know talking about Linda you going in and coming out of her that was also maybe a metaphor for finding that strength from women rather than relying on the people around you because what ends up happening for her is she gets betrayed many a Time by people that she trusts um and it takes a lot for her to end up learning how to trust again in the second half of the book yeah no for sure and I think um related to that trusting in the sense of agency um I think for folks who have like content related questions feel free to put those in the chat um before we go on into some of the like writing process and writing life type questions but I wanted to talk about the cover and I did not realize this until we talked about this so I'm specifically talking about the U.S uh hardcover cover cover um as I learn more about the world of publishing like the UK has a different cover maybe the paperback might have a different cover so this is the cover I'm talking about and so when we were discussing it um I immediately thought because you're like oh the wave like what what is this figure and I don't know for people like what you saw when you saw this arrangement of colors but for me it didn't even really register right and so I've been thinking about it you know as we talk about calligraphy like uh ink block test or like the Rorschach test right these optical illusions of like what do you see right do you see the young woman or do you see the old lady like those images people are familiar with it and so I think when I first saw it I saw water um like I saw something natural and I think my brain was conditioned to to see that because the sky is in the title of the book right so I was just like oh okay cool something environmental um and then when we were chatting or at least when I um got a little ways into the book I think probably past the section that you read and I was so deeply involved in zaidu I looked at the cover again and then that's when I saw the face yeah and so it became this test of like do you see the person or do you see the thing that happened to them right do you see daiyu or do you see these like Milestones of her life kidnap check smuggled across in a barrel across the ocean check brothel check right and so I just and it particularly for women particularly for women of color this idea of that we have interior worlds right when you think about this one sentence that was in the New York I looked up from 1885 New York Times it's one sentence right about these men who um were lynched right to create the interior world of these characters who have thoughts and feelings and hobbies and things that excite them and you know bad friendship habits of not telling each other things that you should tell each other you know um and so could you speak about that process of how do you actually build the interior worlds of people that don't exist that's a great question um I'll speak for at least the building of Dieu because I think that's the one where it was like this is the most interior I'll ever be um but it started from that little nugget of research um and it it kind of just went from okay imagining her in this bucket of coal imagining what it must have felt like to be crammed in a bucket of coal for three weeks bobbing along the ocean um what that must have felt like for her legs um you know the delirium she must have experienced um all that and then kind of kind of like stepping out and imagining what must have happened to lead her to this point um yeah I think for me I naturally because I come from a non-fiction background um you know I write a lot of personal essays interiority is something that just it feels very natural for me to explore and put on the page because I'm constantly exploring what's going on in here and so when I took over dayu's voice from the first person perspective it was kind of like stepping into her and and living in her for a little bit and going through the motions with her um and in that way you know I was thinking about what is she noticing um when she's standing on the steps of a calligraphy school um what does you know a dumpling feel like in her belly um what does like the concept of Love feel like for someone who's never experienced it in a non-platonic way before I think like in terms of writing interiority and imagining interiority for these characters it I really had to kind of place my like close my eyes and just place and and think about everything that they're seeing and everything that they're feeling and kind of narrow zero in on the things that um progressed their Journey whether you know it's in the plot or it's their spiritual journey yeah and I think you do it still well I was chatting with another writer friend of mine about how you describe the things that you're experiencing and how complex the translation of those senses are um I there's this one sentence that you have where you describe the fish market I think you say um it smells wet and damp and I loved that so much because wet and damp are not smells but I read it and I'm like I know exactly what that means and because I think that's how we experience the world right it's some combination of Senses where something can smell wet right it can smell damp and that it just fills in so much for the reader so I there's I mean the book is filled with these um such sensory moments um where I can feel you in their worlds um I'm curious if like if there's a character in the book um that if you or someone were to write uh write them as the protagonist in another book right like who would you choose you know I guess I'm still asking like which character are you still curious about that you would want to say like okay what could 400 Pages look like in this person's world oh I love that question that's a great question um I I think swallow um I'm really interested in swallow and like clearly daiyu is also interested in swallow as well but yeah she's so for those who haven't read it she's one of the girls in the brothel who um di becomes close with um and they develop a sort of friendship but yeah I just you know I want to know more about her um because she's in a very interesting position in the ranks of the brothel and maybe also Nelson I but I also just I love Nelson I have a soft spot for him so those would be my two I have feelings about Nelson I imagine like if this were to turn into like a Apple TV or Hulu series or something that the first time Nelson comes in the door there's just like the winds blowing in his hair or whatever music starts playing Slow Down slow motion so emotion with like dyu's eyes she's looking at him I when he came in the room I was like girl you I love child you are in love okay um I all right we're gonna go into a little bit of the writing process this is the smallest silliest question but I have to ask you this like um I noticed that everything all the dialogue is not bracketed with quotations I noticed that and I was so excited by that that I stopped reading so I could Google like this as a style and so I'm curious like about your choice or how it came to be around choosing not to bracket dialogue yeah it's a very controversial topic uh based on what I've seen in terms of reviewers and people's reactions to it but for me it was always just I'm a very like feelings oriented writer so if something doesn't feel right then I I follow that but for me yeah when I put quotation marks in it it didn't feel right it didn't look right and it didn't feel right when I was reading it to myself um and I think maybe maybe partially that's because so much of this book is die you you know her thoughts and what she's seeing in the world are kind of interchangeable like you you never know if she's telling you a story if she's just kind of telling herself or experiencing something so I think it works by not having the quotation marks in aiding that continued sort of interchange I felt that actually because there were some moments where I'm like is she recounting this story like very Titanic style where the whole movie is someone telling the story to someone else right or are these her thoughts like but I loved it like I love the absence of the quotation marks I felt more grounded in kind of what you were saying in The Full Experience so I did notice that I had to Google I'm like what is this about because I'm into it like okay another uh technical question um how did you deal with the overwhelm of research that went into this book like practically how do you organize it um and I'm also curious like what of that is still on The Cutting Room floor somewhere that just didn't make sense to put in the story um yeah like how do you deal with the amount of research that you did oh it was a lot of research but what's interesting is when I look back on it it never got to a point where it felt overwhelming and I think that's because um my method for writing this book was I for the first few drafts I was thinking Jenny just get through the story just finish the story um anytime I've reached a place where I knew oh I need I need to research this or I need research to inform this I would just kind of put brackets around it as a note for myself come back later to this so in those first few drafts I only did as much research as was necessary to kind of be able to move on to the next scene um so that I could get through to the end and then with each revision with each draft I would come back in and layer in more research so it was like I never did research in one Fell Swoop and then said okay I'm taking all of this and I'm just going to somehow distribute it into my book it was one draft done I would research one particular aspect maybe focusing on like the brothel system or um you know the Joss houses or the temples or the tong system or what fashion was like back then and I just layer it in with each draft until in the end it was like there were no more windows or holes it was all filled in um practically I use scrivener when I'm drafting and scrivener has a research function within it where you can just drop in all of your research um and you can reference it at the same time as you're writing so for me I would create categories and just drop in any sort of research I found site citations included and it made it easy for me to be like okay I'm writing a scene where they're eating food oh okay I'll go to my food Tab and see how much the food costs that day or back then what were the typical menu items of the time and so I kind of organize it in a way that made it easier for me to reference it quickly I love that and it's also a lot of shade to me because I've been writing one chapter of my book for like a month because I won't move on and so I think for all the writers in the room this idea of bracketing and not getting overwhelmed with the information is really critical so if my editor is watching this I promise I will take the tips from Jenny and move on just to get to the end because you know you can always come back to it I think I forget that sometimes because it's like I can't move forward if this isn't right and that's not true because it's a computer I'm not chiseling right my ideas that's right so um on on the writing process like who were some of your early readers and like at what stage of the development did you bring other people into your process yeah my first readers my first reader was my mom um she's she's always my first reader um and she's a good litmus test for like the emotionality of this story but also the level if the pros is doing what I want it to do um and then I had one of my best friends read it who's also Chinese American um and mainly I just wanted to get her take on kind of you know the the chinese-american experience in this book and whether or not she felt like it resonated and felt accurate um those were probably my two initial first readers and then once I got to a stage where I had a full draft that I felt good about I sent it to about six people um and they were my my writing Community folks from previous workshops and Retreats in my MFA program that I had done but it was it was Mom and best friends in the beginning oh my God I love that I love that so much I need to I have a couple of readers but I'm like so terrified of sending them anything so um I think it's helpful to like maybe there's one or two people in the beginning people that you really trust and then you can bring more eyes in as you feel more secure and like what it is that you're writing yeah I think I so I took a novel writing workshop with Alison hayey which is where this book came from but I remember she was always so protective of because we were just writing the first 20 Pages the first 40 pages and we were workshopping them and she was always so protective of people who were being worked flopped because it's so easy when you're in those beginning stages to hear feedback from someone and think this is how I need to alter the book and sometimes I feel like you just need to be alone with it and spend time with it by yourself so that you know what it is before you let other people in yeah yeah I've been realizing that too it's like asking people for feedback but on ideas but they're not responding to something that like actually exists yet you know yeah um how did you cope with um like mentally emotionally and also logistically with uh the Lost pages right all the ideas and the drafts that just sit in your computer so yeah so I I know I mentioned this to you last night but I started this book writing from Nelson's active who is the character we meet in the second half of the book I have like 70 to 120 pages of him and you know once I started writing from Daddy's perspective and my agent had looked at it and she agreed like get rid of the nose and portions this is not a story about him so those pages are truly lost to the ether I still have them but they're never going to see the light of day I was I was fine saying goodbye to them because once I found IU's voice it was like this is what I care about most Nelson I'm sorry to you you are so handsome but you have no business here you have no business here anymore um I I was not weirdly and I'm a very sentimental person I was not sentimental about cutting things because each time I did it I like it just it made the story better and I I just trusted that that was the right thing to do I love I wonder what mentally what the mental purpose is because I have like a separate document for every chapter that's like outlined or scraps for this document and so the chapter I'm working on now is like five pages but my scraps document is 52 pages long yes oh my goodness I don't I don't know why I need to have it because it's not like I look at it again it just exists just to have I do the same thing like mine is called orphans because you know like maybe one day I'll use them again um I never that's the thing I never go back and and copy paste and bring it back into the main document I never have yeah so where's one of your favorite places to write oh before the pandemic it was in coffee shops around Austin um particularly when the weather is not so blazing hot outside I could sit outside and write with a little croissant or something but since the pandemic you know I just write in at home I just alternate between my desk which is where I am now and my couch and sometimes my bed it's just a matter of like which surface do I want to sit on today and do you have like a writing or like an ideal writing routine and then how far is that from your reality my ideal writing routine is probably one where I get to read like other people's work for a good bit before I get to my own writing and ideally like I will not have done any other thing in the day that requires brain activity um so it's like words and writing creation and generation are the first things of my day yeah but that is not my reality I don't I don't know if it can be many people's reality so what it actually is is I do all this stuff and then at like 3 P.M I'm like okay Jenny just get to the desk just go there open that laptop up you can do it no I that makes me feel better too because I went to this Workshop um for anyone who's watching listening who uh follows Roxanne gay and trusty McMillan cotton they have like hairlessly they had a hair to slay Camp retreat thing slay camp and uh Tracy who talks about and writes about the fact that so many black women so many I think in general like uh thinkers and creators of color don't get to just have one job right we have so many different jobs and so she was describing her writing routine and she doesn't actually start writing until 6 30 p.m and I'm like okay that Vibes with me because I end up writing like later in the day but I'm also feeling bad that I didn't start writing at five o'clock in the morning um in any case I'm curious because you have a job right you have a uh things that you have to do outside of writing and so what does that mean for your life to have this identity as a writer have the work as a published author and also have a day job yeah I think for me at least it knowing that I have this of their life as a writer it makes everything else that I have to do in order to survive bearable um and it almost makes me excited to return to the writing every single time because I know that it's not currently at least it's not you know it's not the only thing in my life but it is the most important and the most pleasurable thing in my life yeah I know I love that I love that so when it comes to the business of writing again like not as it is not just another job it's your identity as a writer um but also comes with work right people that you're accountable to is there anything that surprised you around like the business of writing or being a published author that you could give advice for people that are navigating this in some way yeah um this is less so about the business and more so maybe about the spiritual but I realized you know it can be very jarring when you're going from being the only person in the room working on your book being so close to it and having everything just like live within yourself to suddenly having this like product that you know people can now have opinions and reactions to um it no longer kind of belongs to you it has to kind of stand on its own without you supporting it like Parenthood I suppose um and that that jump can be very jarring at least it was for me um and it sometimes it can like lead to questions around who you are as a writer and and your relationship to writing I would just say you know try to keep no matter where you are in your writing Journey or the publication process try to keep the joy of writing and like remember why you're doing this at all and you know remember for me it's like remembering when I was a child child in writing and it was fun and I wanted to do it remembering that feeling and holding that onto that even when you're at a place where it's like maybe I don't have a good relationship with writing right now um trying to keep that Joy alive I think I love that because like there's some days I go to the page and I'm like how you feel about this does it matter this is a job like get it done and then there are other days where it's like you should be joyous you should be happy like you want that to read on the page like how cool is it that you could just create something that doesn't exist right how can I find the fun and the beauty and joy in the art um and I every day I go back and forth of like is this art is this a job is it both what you know so um it's just weird so I think in speaking to the Joy I'm curious for you these are my last two questions um what's your favorite part of the book like what of this book like is bringing you Joy oh it's those small moments that where zai gets to experience Joy too one of those I mean the brothel scenes I just I loved writing those because I loved kind of having her interact with other women but I think my favorite like the most joyful part was when she's in Idaho and she's kind of goofing off with Nelson in the store and they're trying to teach each other Chinese or oh she's trying to teach him Chinese that like small moment of Joy where she just gets to be a young person interacting with another another young person I was so happy yeah I love and I I think those are the moments too where she inhabits a bit more fullness of herself because there are a lot of times where you note that she forgets that she's hiding a lot about who she is and so it was nice to just see like she's just like having fun with her friend yeah you know her friend wink wink her friends so last question you know I'm curious like what do you need from your writing and what do you think your writing needs from you oh I think what I need for my writing is for it to do like all the things that great literature does for me which is like move someone and make them you know feel close to something or resonate with them or speak to their experiences and also like be good I want it to be good um and I need it to I think I need it to also kind of be a way of expressing myself um in in whatever shape or form that is um be kind of true to what I want to do as a writer and an artist and who I want to be as a as an artist what my writing needs for me is probably the same thing I need from me which is care and grace and patience and time and attention all the things that get pushed aside when we're you know we talked about this doing everything else instead of taking care of ourselves I think my writing also needs all of that from me just love it needs love for me it's love yeah we all like love we all need love and I think we all need this book right absolutely I think everyone who's watching this I think it'll be a better person having read this I really do think that um and I just I so appreciate you and I so appreciate this work and I don't want to say that I'm excited about what you have to come next because I want to get outside of this capitalistic mindset that you're always producing um but I'm really excited for the fact that this lives in the world now um and can create something for somebody in some way so thank you so much Jenny I think I do and I these questions were amazing by the way amazing questions make you think that's what we do here at the lounge and so for everyone thank you Jenny thank you to onekin uh thank you for everyone who's watching and thank you please tell five people to get this book bye everybody bye all thank you foreign

never know all right we are live oh my gosh okay hello everybody hello Jenny uh thank you so much for being here um so to get us all situated everyone my name is Jody and bury I&#39;m a speaker I&#39;m a writer who works at the intersections of race culture and Health Equity I am here on behalf of one Ken one of my favorite organizations companies um that&#39;s around right now it&#39;s a mission driven tech company that creates Tech solutions to help small businesses and entrepreneurs gain more visibility and grow and so that also includes a curated Online Marketplace for Brands authors creatives all folks of color and with onekin I&#39;ve been hosting these author chats in my lit Lounge I have a curated book list on Lincoln&#39;s site until you&#39;ll find them in chats links to get all these books and I had to had to had to had to have four treasures of the sky on the curated list for this go round and so I am here with author Jenny Ting Hui Zhang who wrote this Inc incredible novel truly I could not put it down and so we&#39;re gonna chat about all things writing process craft writing life some of the themes and characters from this incredible incredible book Jenny thank you so much for being here yay thank you so much for having me I I know we&#39;ve we&#39;ve talked before so I&#39;m just really excited to chat more oh yeah like I don&#39;t know if y&#39;all know this but I purely do this just so I can have new friends and Jenny&#39;s gonna be a friend of mine from now on makes me feel so good um I&#39;m calling from Seattle where are you calling from Jenny I am in Austin Texas so right now the sun is truly high in the sky and slowly making its way down but we&#39;ve got a while okay great great great I&#39;m in Seattle uh as I said it&#39;s overcast as per Seattle is around this time of year and so I&#39;m excited uh to just kind of cool down a little bit because it&#39;s been uh quite a summer um so I just want to ground us a little bit and I&#39;m gonna have you do this work because I don&#39;t want to be responsible for sharing information that should not be shared about this book um at this time um so I want you to do that work but could you just summarize uh for Treasures of the sky for people who are watching who haven&#39;t had the chance to read it yet yes uh hello everyone it&#39;s been a while since I&#39;ve done this so let&#39;s see how it goes uh so four treasures of the sky is uh it&#39;s about a young girl a 13 year old girl named dayu who is kidnapped from her home in China and shipped across the ocean in a bucket of coal and in a brothel in San Francisco Chinatown um and ends up making her way across the West to Idaho and from there trying to get back home to China and this is all happening um in the 1880s you know against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act so not only is she dealing with just the wear and tear of the environment uh weather the time but she&#39;s also dealing with um the anti-chinese sentiment of the time from from the people and the legislation and it&#39;s interesting that you talk about like the history that surrounds the events of this of this main character uh daiyu and kind of how she sits within this historical context and so would you count for Treasures of the sky as a work of historical fiction does that feel weird to call it that it I know it is historical fiction like by definition it is but in my mind it&#39;s just it still feels kind of odd even when I see it in the historical fiction section of a bookstore it feels odd because I&#39;ve never I&#39;ve never written historical fiction before and I&#39;ve I&#39;ve actually never had an interest in doing it so for it to now just be so categorically that is it&#39;s an odd feeling for me for sure yeah for sure and so I think I don&#39;t know if I knew that it was historical fiction when I went into it but I have this weird habit these days of I read the acknowledgment section before I actually read the book yeah um and then you have an author&#39;s note and so I read the author&#39;s note acknowledgments and then I actually read the book and so I went into it knowing that the main impetus behind this story is this um a story that your father told you about how he happened upon like a Chinese Hanging Tree and the story about these five uh Chinese men around that time who were lynched in Pierce Idaho and so that was like the Nugget of information that your father shared and it was just like okay go write me a story write me a story Jenny just whip me up a piece of historical fiction it must be so easy yes that is exactly it it&#39;s so I it&#39;s so weird because like I knew okay cool this is the inspiration behind this but as I&#39;m going through the pages you it&#39;s you I kind of forgot that that&#39;s that happens right and there&#39;s this one um quotation that I cannot get unstuck from is um in the book you say I think a number of times you repeat this idea around you know as in calligraphy in calligraphy as in life you know we do not retouch Strokes what is done is done right and I&#39;m like holding onto it the whole time because it&#39;s like I&#39;m so connected to these characters I&#39;m so connected to the story that I keep trying to will a different ending but I&#39;m like what it&#39;s done is done and so can I look at these characters and look at the story for who they are like the richness of who they are regardless of what I know will happen to them um and I&#39;m curious as a writers from the writing perspective knowing the ending quote of the story how do you can you speak to the evolution of like how you imagined the lives of these five I think still Anonymous uh men who were hung yeah um so yeah for for folks who don&#39;t know the the story of the kind of um Genesis of four treasures comes from my dad driving around in Idaho finding finding this historical marker that talked about you know these five Chinese men were hanged in Idaho in 1885. um and I always knew that that was going to be something that I wanted to kind of end up at because that was the one of the questions of the book for me especially when I first started writing it that was the question of the book for me so what I envisioned was let me explore who these five Chinese men were and I thought I was going to do a whole you know like everyone has their own chapter we follow their narratives throughout but as I was kind of working my way backwards from that and doing research around you know how are Chinese people getting to America during a time when they weren&#39;t legally allowed to to come over um I found research talking about how they would smuggle girls and women over in buckets of coal or crates of China to end up in the brothels in Chinatown in San Francisco and so it was almost like that was that became my new starting point in the creation of the character of diet and everything else kind of came off of her still knowing that there would be an eventual conclusion where we end up at a possible hanging because I&#39;m not trying to spoil things um but I think trading the lives of each of these five Chinese people came from me focusing on this one character&#39;s journey and connecting her her with the people she meets along the way who may or may not be involved with the hanging yeah and I think that&#39;s important too because you don&#39;t even in the information that you&#39;re sharing is just like you don&#39;t know as a reader you really don&#39;t know what is going to happen like in terms of who these people are and you just they&#39;re so pointing many points in a story that you forget like at least for me like I just kind of forgot you&#39;re so entranced on this you know little girl&#39;s Journey like right through this process and so I&#39;m actually curious like how so how your dad uh thought the book turned out did he read it he did he read it via audiobook so yeah he listened to it and then once he finished he told me it was good but I still have some questions which I I will take it um I&#39;m happy with that because ultimately like I I think he&#39;s more happy that something he told me had import enough to kind of engender this entire piece of art I love that I love that so the main character her name is daiyu and I want to get a little bit into the name and you know coming to the events around her but um when I Was preparing for this I read a article that you wrote for lit Hub about um how watching the men&#39;s uh figure skating in the Olympus kind of help you fall back in love with writing and I read that and it was so emotional for me I was actually crying a little bit towards you I don&#39;t know why I&#39;m in the emotional state I don&#39;t know why but I want to read this quotation um that you have in that piece so you say every writer has different reasons for why they write hair online I wrote to keep myself company I wrote to make myself feel moved most of all I wrote because I was trying to make sense of the world and of myself I realized this early on it was a joy to be able to tell stories that came from inside myself and so when I read that I thought about Gayu and Lin zayu&#39;s relationship right and in the story there was this character lindayu who often physically is coming inside of daiyu the main character and out of right and so I&#39;m curious if you can share a little bit about the origin story lindayou for people who are not familiar with it and that relationship between this whole other being coming from out you know outside or inside of our main character yeah yeah I love this question and thank you for reading that piece um I also cried while I was writing um so Linda you is a character from a very real uh Chinese classic novel it&#39;s there are four kind of great classical novels of China and this is one of them it&#39;s called Hong long or dream of the red chamber and um Linda you uh her character in that book um is one who is very sensitive um she is very sick from a young age she has consumption which kind of follows her throughout her entire life and she ends up dying from it um she&#39;s also a poet um the best poet of her time uh at least in her neighborhood and she&#39;s also kind of involved in a very tragic love story uh where she&#39;s in love with her cousin but he ends up marrying someone else who he thinks is her but is not her due to these uh familial family politics um and so she ends up dying at the end from book consumption action and heartbreak so in four treasures of the sky my main character dayu is named after Lin daiyu and from the very beginning you know one of her core questions is is everything that happens it&#39;s everything bad that happens to me in my life such as her parents disappearing when she&#39;s very young and her being sent to the city all alone and then getting kidnapped you know is all of that because I am named after this tragic figure who has a tragic end is everything written out for me and is it always going to be immersed in tragedy so that from the very beginning we understand like dayu kind of hates her name um wants to get away from it wants to get away from this perceived fate that she has but does not know how um and eventually Linda you kind of as you mentioned she manifests as some could say she&#39;s like a ghost this could say she&#39;s maybe part of daiyu&#39;s imagination but she ends up kind of um appearing during times when daiyu is in the utmost um trouble um for example when she&#39;s floating across the ocean in this bucket of coal when she&#39;s at the brothel and kind of about to take her first customer so I think what I was trying to do was um one give her kind of a tool and a resource and a companion for dealing with all of these difficult times but also I think it started becoming a symbol of um what she wanted versus what she should do or think thought she could she should do because another question that comes up for her as we get further along in the book is um what is the right thing to do um you know is should I say in America and kind of help um fight against the anti-chinese sentiments of the time or do I do I kind of follow my heart and go back to China and and you know go back home and Linda becomes a manifestation of this child childlike desire to return home um and to return to like childhood and being a child versus you know the growing up of it all and and taking ownership and responsibility so that&#39;s kind of how how I came to understand it as I I was writing it yeah so much just swirling in my head around that right because it&#39;s like yeah what is the right thing and like which version of our like different versions of who we are have different answers to that you know and so who do you listen to right um and then also knowing that value and lindsayu are in some version of reality the same person right um I like to do a reading of this where Lynn value is real yeah I I know I believe lindsayu is real and I&#39;m curious too like even just getting outside of the characters just for a little bit because what&#39;s coming up for me is I have personified parts of me that arise when I&#39;m in a crisis um I have Francis who I&#39;ve named as my depression um Francis is a I will tell you but I lose so much weight every time Francis is around so it&#39;s like I don&#39;t know how I feel about that and then then I have Francine who I&#39;m writing a book right now she shows up all the time any time I wanna she&#39;s like myself without voice right and she&#39;s like you can&#39;t do this you know very negative and so I&#39;ve been trying to Manifest this other version that I&#39;m calling like JB which is the version of me that like fights for myself and like advocates for myself and I&#39;m just like I don&#39;t need to talk to Francine right now JB will talk to her and then I can just like kind of get to writing so yes when you&#39;re writing do you have these different versions of you that have to show up in order to do this work oh my gosh I I love that you kind of you assign roles I love that um I think for me I&#39;m just constantly in that state of like negative self-talk and I don&#39;t believe in this I&#39;m not doing a good job it&#39;s not good and I don&#39;t know what compels me to like not listen to it because I do listen to it every single day but I think ultimately we&#39;re we&#39;re the like the voice of reason or maybe the self-love voice comes in is you know by reading other people and and especially by listening to other people who have gone through that same hardship because I realized like every author feels feels that to some extent um and yeah for me it&#39;s just I I have to find solace in someone else&#39;s work to remind me that I do can kind of figure it out yeah yeah were you reading besides the research for this and we&#39;ll get into that but what what&#39;s so I&#39;m writing my book right and then I was like okay I have to read this book for this conversation and so I&#39;m reading it and as I&#39;m reading your work I&#39;m getting so inspired I don&#39;t know what it is because it&#39;s not like we&#39;re writing about the same things or even in the same genre but it just propelled my work in some way I&#39;m curious if you had that like the people that you were reading for fun or inspiration or just because as you were writing this book outside of the work and the research yes yes the one I always say is uh Alexander cheese Edinburgh um subject matter is completely different but it does also feature a kind of 13 year old or 11 year old narrator um but that book I just had on my desk and every day before writing I would read one or two pages from it and it was kind of what you&#39;re talking about I read it because it made me feel inspired not not like I&#39;m inspired by this book but I was so inspired by how beautiful the language was and how um precise and intimate the writing was and it inspired me to kind of try to reach any sort of level of that with my own work so yeah I think some people call it like a totem a writing totem um that book was it for me yeah I love that you said that because you know your writing is so clear like it has such a beautiful Clarity to it it also has a wonderful Melody to it um and I was just like really soaking that in and I think gave me permissions because sometimes I try to write I think my style is melodious and then I get self-conscious because I realize that my sentences start to rhyme and I&#39;m like girl you&#39;re not writing slam poetry like but as I was reading yours like it had such a melody and a rhythm to it um that was just very inspiring and I think that&#39;s a good place if we can hear a little bit from you um from the book um because I want to also go back a little bit deeper into daiyu and um thinking about like how despite this lack of control that she had of the events surrounding her like throughout the book right she is finding these ways to ground herself and like ground her agency and so I wanna if you could read a little bit for those who are reading along um page 33 for the US hardcover edition of this um so we can hear a little bit of that your writing style the voice and also when I get a bit at daiyu&#39;s own agency and how she how she&#39;s been holding on to that so okay 33 to end of 34 or 30. um if the spirit moves you after 34 feel free but um we&#39;ll we&#39;ll start with that first section and tell me I mean you go with how you feel feels right for you okay yeah I began at once in the courtyard with a long Birch branch in hand I traced over the characters in The Stone tiles waving and flicking the branch as if I could conjure something from the Earth it felt silly and I knew what it must have looked like to an outsider a girlish looking boy a boyish looking girl playwriting and thinking he or she could be brave the branch was foreign in my hand The movement&#39;s Awkward the class finished for the day and the students exited I did not have enough time to hide what I had been doing they found me scratching at the tiles with my branch and began laughing pointing to the stick dangling from my untrained hand I dropped the branch and ran back inside searching for the broom biting my lip and furious with myself the value of a few months ago the one who still had a grandmother at her side and a warm bed that was all hers would have let the dream of mastering calligraphy rest trying hard at something and being scoffed at for it had never been part of that diuse understanding something was happening to me had been happening from the moment my grandmother sent me away on the cartridge food I would ravenous for what calligraphy might bring me and just as I knew I would never be a city man&#39;s wife I also knew that calligraphy must be in my future it would not be easy it was just as Master Wong said I had to practice my first few days in jifu had prepared me for this moment every store owner who had turned me away every disgusted eye I defiantly faced was a stone given to me until eventually I had enough stones to build a fortress around myself let their scoffs come I thought that night at least I have my Fortress and it is impenetrable the next afternoon after my chores were complete I was back in the courtyard Birch branch in hand the day was cooler than usual and the windows were open Master Wong&#39;s voice floated through and I let it envelop me guiding my hand through the air look closer it said your calligraphy will reveal much about you from one glance at what you have written I can determine your emotions in your spirit I can gauge your discipline and identify your style there are many more secrets your writing will uncover and you will meet them when the time is right I pocketed every word this knowledge was precious to me my way forward into the world I never had a formal education but under master Wong&#39;s tutelage I could feel myself becoming the person I thought I wanted to be that person was someone strong and Noble like my father someone good-hearted and skilled like my mother someone who could someone who could care for things with a gentle judiciousness like my grandmother if I could come that person I thought then I would at least remain close to them even if they were no longer near and I thought none of those things involved Linda you or her story the day came when I no longer needed to trace the stone tiles in order to write instead I turned my gaze upward letting the characters appear before me thick and muscular and straight just like the ones inside Master Wong&#39;s school I carved and whipped my hand through the air until the characters could fill up the sky they were inviting me to take hold of them to mold them out of nothing or perhaps to mold them out of myself I&#39;ll stop there so good I I love this section because you know she&#39;s at a very fragile time right at this phase in the book and it&#39;s also very early in the book and I think for me it&#39;s where she&#39;s getting a sense of okay this is who I can be right this is what I want for my future um and I think it&#39;s one of the first times since things started shifting in her life that at least as a reader I saw her thinking about herself in the future um I&#39;m wondering if like as you re-read that piece of it um kind of what it conjured for you around that you and how she started stepping into her own agency yeah I think this was one of the first moments when um I don&#39;t I don&#39;t know if it&#39;s in this section [Music] ah it is okay um but this is one of the first moments where um she meets resistance to kind of a yearning that she has or something that she wants to do which is the other students laugh at her for trying to practice something and rereading it I just I don&#39;t know I felt so proud of her all of a sudden because you know so many things happen to her later on in the book where it&#39;s a very obvious hardship that she has to attempt to overcome and this I think this is one of the first moments for her where she meets that resistance and says no I&#39;m going to overcome it because I want to yeah I love that too and I wrote in the margins that section where she talks about building a fortress around herself like the ways that you harden yourself to the world when those things start to happen and then I started you know in my own life have hardened in a lot of different ways but was so comforting is that she is not hardened to herself right she still has this grounding in a sense of beauty and what could be possible um for her and in grounding in her family as well um and so is there anything you want to see on the next I have another question related to this I I would just add on yeah I agree with you and I I think that comes from her background in the Arts whether it&#39;s you know gardening or the tapestry weaving that she learns from her mom um or like and the appreciation for calligraphy and the letters that she learns at this uh school I and maybe I was making a commentary on the important role that art plays in our life but I do think it it has a way of keeping you soft not in a weak way but in in a just like a tender gentle I&#39;m porous way no I absolutely I absolutely felt that and I think there&#39;s this connection to it&#39;s not in this section but plays throughout the book this recurring Motif about like being good with your hands right because as you&#39;re talking about the tapestry you know her parents are artists her her grandmother&#39;s a gardener she&#39;s in this calligraphy school and so yeah she&#39;s working with her hands and has this artistic sense of beauty even later in the book there&#39;s a character who also works with his hands right as a violinist um and so to see the hands of this place of beauty and strength and grounding right but also your hands as a means for survival right and for some of the characters later in the book was the site of punishment right and so as the reader I can see these um you know motifs throughout the book I see these themes sharing but I&#39;m curious for you as the writer at what point do those motifs kind of show up in the process of developing the story like is it beforehand you&#39;re like okay Beauty softness hands got it is it throughout is it after you know a combination of all three like how do you leave that so beautifully throughout all these different sections of the story thank you um you know I don&#39;t think I ever went into it thinking okay hands are gonna be a thing that just reoccur and I&#39;m gonna use them as a symbol for something else but I do think they kind of organically like I would get to a point and the hands would make sense to bring in and it wasn&#39;t because I was thinking hard about like oh how can I connect this to something I&#39;ve mentioned in the past it was like the character it was the character almost guiding it um and and same thing where she notices this this other character his name is Nelson she notices his hands first and that&#39;s kind of what arrests her about him that was completely unintentional I did not you know I was not trying to connect things but I think if I were writing it at which I would writing it from dayu&#39;s perspective that made sense for her character at the time because it&#39;s a part of her character to notice the hands at this point yeah yeah and so into the hands to again this part that you just read she&#39;s at a calligraphy school um and calligraphy plays a big role in like how she grounds herself I think probably because of these Reflections that she&#39;s having right now right like connecting all these things and so I know that you are not a calligrapher right right so um I want to see how you and the writing of it navigated having calligraphy be such an integral part of the story and just kind of building in the kind of facts and metaphors around calligraphy in your storytelling but also I&#39;m very curious because for those who haven&#39;t been able to open the book yet the characters like the actual characters are in the text right and we are so far from the days where I&#39;m sure you&#39;ve seen this when our writers are writing in English but the characters speak other languages those other languages are always italicized like we are so far from that right and Jenny you&#39;re just like no I want actual characters in this thing like how do you even navigate that with the design of it and working with the publisher and all of that so if you can speak to like building it into the actual story and and the work of doing that like from a craft perspective and then this like business side of writing which is now you need to get flat iron to like get an artist and draft these up in the text yeah yeah uh so the calligraphy aspect it was It was kind of similar to how I happened upon including Lin&#39;s IU as you know either real or imagined figure in diu&#39;s Journey um I just I figured I need to give her something to hold on to as she&#39;s making her way through this journey which is going to be very difficult I don&#39;t think she can do it alone she needs some sort of like grounding in terms of philosophy or morality um and calligraphy was kind of the first thing that came to me I felt somewhat close to it because my grandfather has has written it in the past and he actually is the one um it she kind of talks about this in the book but he used to rest his hands on his knees and you could be his finger moving on his leg and it was because he was writing out characters or practicing them so that&#39;s where that detail came from but you know at the time I was just thinking oh I just put this in here for now it&#39;s fine um and then as I started researching more about the practice of calligraphy um I realized that the philosophy behind it and there are many different schools of thought and training but it was so parallel to kind of the journey that diu was going on which was a question of how do I become my own person how do I take Agency for myself and make it in this world and then calligraphy one of the main things is you know no matter what you have to kind of be a good person inside in order to create any sort of good art on the outside and that you know um and when I happened upon that I realized it there&#39;s no way to write about um her practicing calligraphy without also integrating this very vital philosophy that that will be kind of the basis for how she goes about it goes through the world so um that was the kind of research and integration portion I think I just got very lucky like it was very easy to um bring it in because it so matched what I was trying to do with the character in this story as far as the business side of things also the easiest thing in the world to incorporate the Chinese characters um you know and I also don&#39;t italicize um the opinion in this book when when some characters are speaking Chinese and they&#39;re living in and out of English um my editor was amazing Carolyn flaky at Flatiron she&#39;s never had any questions about it she you know fully trusted that this was what I wanted to do and it was the right thing to do and I truly you know it&#39;s so funny that you asked about it because it was the last thing on my list of anything that that I I needed to address with with the publisher yeah yeah no I love that I love that so much because I think particularly for folks of color um and anyone who holds any type of marginalization especially in publishing we hear these horror stories of how difficult it is to Advocate um for the things that you know are right for your community and I also love to hear those stories where it&#39;s like well if you find the right people right then these issues are they&#39;re fabricated right because when you have the right people they&#39;re not issues they understand what you&#39;re trying to do and who you&#39;re writing for yeah yeah no I love that I love that and so um I want to get back on this topic of agency because uh agency is not always a weapon for good okay and I think that you know anytime we talk about women or you know a young girl in this case like seeking developing her own agency we assume that it&#39;s going to be used for good right you know break those glass ceilings girl power all that kind of stuff um I think we can see this with what&#39;s going on with in Italy right now you&#39;re like oh yeah a woman is a leader of this country but politics are a little sketch right so um you know there are a lot of you know young girls and women in the book who do make very strong um hashtag girl power choices for themselves cells that are harmful for diet right and they think a really good example of this is I want to speak to the brothel manager you know Madame Lee um who I read in the authors though is based on you know our toy uh please tell me if I&#39;m mispronouncing that who according to wikipedios like the most famous first and highest paid Chinese uh uh sex worker uh in San Francisco and so what was it like for you to discover like a Toy Story in your research process and how you made a decision around portraying women who would not actually be supportive of that you right and there&#39;s in their search for their own agency compromise the agency of other girls yeah um I so I think as I was kind of starting out doing research for this book A lot of it was based around you know the anti-chinese violence that occurred at the time and many many instances and so you kind of go into it from the lens of oh like many Chinese folks didn&#39;t have a lot of agency at that time but what was interesting especially when I was looking into the brothel stuff and found a toy was that you&#39;re right like there were some women who did whole hold certain degrees of power and certain degrees of agency and you could argue you know that wasn&#39;t true agency because they&#39;re still operating under you know systems of Oppression um but finding that um I wanted to include it in the book because I didn&#39;t want it I didn&#39;t want the book to just paint this narrative that the Chinese were helpless and um always kind of in despair um no like they had some stake in their lives and in the world and the brothel scenes were kind of a portion of that um what was the second part of your question Jody yeah no no sorry I like asked too many questions at once um but like when you saw her story like I think you&#39;re answering it right it&#39;s a decision to like kind of bring her into the into the fold of the story and I just thought it was important for me that daiyu wasn&#39;t just surrounded by I mean she&#39;s a vulnerable girl so she is surrounded by men that could create harms you know for her and in her life but there are also women who you know not every woman you come across is going to be nurturing and trying to save you from kind of this thing that&#39;s happening to you and I think that at least for me as a reader raised the stakes of oh diet really has to find herself in this process because the people that you would think would be in her Corner are not there exactly it has to come from within and maybe that&#39;s kind of where you know talking about Linda you going in and coming out of her that was also maybe a metaphor for finding that strength from women rather than relying on the people around you because what ends up happening for her is she gets betrayed many a Time by people that she trusts um and it takes a lot for her to end up learning how to trust again in the second half of the book yeah no for sure and I think um related to that trusting in the sense of agency um I think for folks who have like content related questions feel free to put those in the chat um before we go on into some of the like writing process and writing life type questions but I wanted to talk about the cover and I did not realize this until we talked about this so I&#39;m specifically talking about the U.S uh hardcover cover cover um as I learn more about the world of publishing like the UK has a different cover maybe the paperback might have a different cover so this is the cover I&#39;m talking about and so when we were discussing it um I immediately thought because you&#39;re like oh the wave like what what is this figure and I don&#39;t know for people like what you saw when you saw this arrangement of colors but for me it didn&#39;t even really register right and so I&#39;ve been thinking about it you know as we talk about calligraphy like uh ink block test or like the Rorschach test right these optical illusions of like what do you see right do you see the young woman or do you see the old lady like those images people are familiar with it and so I think when I first saw it I saw water um like I saw something natural and I think my brain was conditioned to to see that because the sky is in the title of the book right so I was just like oh okay cool something environmental um and then when we were chatting or at least when I um got a little ways into the book I think probably past the section that you read and I was so deeply involved in zaidu I looked at the cover again and then that&#39;s when I saw the face yeah and so it became this test of like do you see the person or do you see the thing that happened to them right do you see daiyu or do you see these like Milestones of her life kidnap check smuggled across in a barrel across the ocean check brothel check right and so I just and it particularly for women particularly for women of color this idea of that we have interior worlds right when you think about this one sentence that was in the New York I looked up from 1885 New York Times it&#39;s one sentence right about these men who um were lynched right to create the interior world of these characters who have thoughts and feelings and hobbies and things that excite them and you know bad friendship habits of not telling each other things that you should tell each other you know um and so could you speak about that process of how do you actually build the interior worlds of people that don&#39;t exist that&#39;s a great question um I&#39;ll speak for at least the building of Dieu because I think that&#39;s the one where it was like this is the most interior I&#39;ll ever be um but it started from that little nugget of research um and it it kind of just went from okay imagining her in this bucket of coal imagining what it must have felt like to be crammed in a bucket of coal for three weeks bobbing along the ocean um what that must have felt like for her legs um you know the delirium she must have experienced um all that and then kind of kind of like stepping out and imagining what must have happened to lead her to this point um yeah I think for me I naturally because I come from a non-fiction background um you know I write a lot of personal essays interiority is something that just it feels very natural for me to explore and put on the page because I&#39;m constantly exploring what&#39;s going on in here and so when I took over dayu&#39;s voice from the first person perspective it was kind of like stepping into her and and living in her for a little bit and going through the motions with her um and in that way you know I was thinking about what is she noticing um when she&#39;s standing on the steps of a calligraphy school um what does you know a dumpling feel like in her belly um what does like the concept of Love feel like for someone who&#39;s never experienced it in a non-platonic way before I think like in terms of writing interiority and imagining interiority for these characters it I really had to kind of place my like close my eyes and just place and and think about everything that they&#39;re seeing and everything that they&#39;re feeling and kind of narrow zero in on the things that um progressed their Journey whether you know it&#39;s in the plot or it&#39;s their spiritual journey yeah and I think you do it still well I was chatting with another writer friend of mine about how you describe the things that you&#39;re experiencing and how complex the translation of those senses are um I there&#39;s this one sentence that you have where you describe the fish market I think you say um it smells wet and damp and I loved that so much because wet and damp are not smells but I read it and I&#39;m like I know exactly what that means and because I think that&#39;s how we experience the world right it&#39;s some combination of Senses where something can smell wet right it can smell damp and that it just fills in so much for the reader so I there&#39;s I mean the book is filled with these um such sensory moments um where I can feel you in their worlds um I&#39;m curious if like if there&#39;s a character in the book um that if you or someone were to write uh write them as the protagonist in another book right like who would you choose you know I guess I&#39;m still asking like which character are you still curious about that you would want to say like okay what could 400 Pages look like in this person&#39;s world oh I love that question that&#39;s a great question um I I think swallow um I&#39;m really interested in swallow and like clearly daiyu is also interested in swallow as well but yeah she&#39;s so for those who haven&#39;t read it she&#39;s one of the girls in the brothel who um di becomes close with um and they develop a sort of friendship but yeah I just you know I want to know more about her um because she&#39;s in a very interesting position in the ranks of the brothel and maybe also Nelson I but I also just I love Nelson I have a soft spot for him so those would be my two I have feelings about Nelson I imagine like if this were to turn into like a Apple TV or Hulu series or something that the first time Nelson comes in the door there&#39;s just like the winds blowing in his hair or whatever music starts playing Slow Down slow motion so emotion with like dyu&#39;s eyes she&#39;s looking at him I when he came in the room I was like girl you I love child you are in love okay um I all right we&#39;re gonna go into a little bit of the writing process this is the smallest silliest question but I have to ask you this like um I noticed that everything all the dialogue is not bracketed with quotations I noticed that and I was so excited by that that I stopped reading so I could Google like this as a style and so I&#39;m curious like about your choice or how it came to be around choosing not to bracket dialogue yeah it&#39;s a very controversial topic uh based on what I&#39;ve seen in terms of reviewers and people&#39;s reactions to it but for me it was always just I&#39;m a very like feelings oriented writer so if something doesn&#39;t feel right then I I follow that but for me yeah when I put quotation marks in it it didn&#39;t feel right it didn&#39;t look right and it didn&#39;t feel right when I was reading it to myself um and I think maybe maybe partially that&#39;s because so much of this book is die you you know her thoughts and what she&#39;s seeing in the world are kind of interchangeable like you you never know if she&#39;s telling you a story if she&#39;s just kind of telling herself or experiencing something so I think it works by not having the quotation marks in aiding that continued sort of interchange I felt that actually because there were some moments where I&#39;m like is she recounting this story like very Titanic style where the whole movie is someone telling the story to someone else right or are these her thoughts like but I loved it like I love the absence of the quotation marks I felt more grounded in kind of what you were saying in The Full Experience so I did notice that I had to Google I&#39;m like what is this about because I&#39;m into it like okay another uh technical question um how did you deal with the overwhelm of research that went into this book like practically how do you organize it um and I&#39;m also curious like what of that is still on The Cutting Room floor somewhere that just didn&#39;t make sense to put in the story um yeah like how do you deal with the amount of research that you did oh it was a lot of research but what&#39;s interesting is when I look back on it it never got to a point where it felt overwhelming and I think that&#39;s because um my method for writing this book was I for the first few drafts I was thinking Jenny just get through the story just finish the story um anytime I&#39;ve reached a place where I knew oh I need I need to research this or I need research to inform this I would just kind of put brackets around it as a note for myself come back later to this so in those first few drafts I only did as much research as was necessary to kind of be able to move on to the next scene um so that I could get through to the end and then with each revision with each draft I would come back in and layer in more research so it was like I never did research in one Fell Swoop and then said okay I&#39;m taking all of this and I&#39;m just going to somehow distribute it into my book it was one draft done I would research one particular aspect maybe focusing on like the brothel system or um you know the Joss houses or the temples or the tong system or what fashion was like back then and I just layer it in with each draft until in the end it was like there were no more windows or holes it was all filled in um practically I use scrivener when I&#39;m drafting and scrivener has a research function within it where you can just drop in all of your research um and you can reference it at the same time as you&#39;re writing so for me I would create categories and just drop in any sort of research I found site citations included and it made it easy for me to be like okay I&#39;m writing a scene where they&#39;re eating food oh okay I&#39;ll go to my food Tab and see how much the food costs that day or back then what were the typical menu items of the time and so I kind of organize it in a way that made it easier for me to reference it quickly I love that and it&#39;s also a lot of shade to me because I&#39;ve been writing one chapter of my book for like a month because I won&#39;t move on and so I think for all the writers in the room this idea of bracketing and not getting overwhelmed with the information is really critical so if my editor is watching this I promise I will take the tips from Jenny and move on just to get to the end because you know you can always come back to it I think I forget that sometimes because it&#39;s like I can&#39;t move forward if this isn&#39;t right and that&#39;s not true because it&#39;s a computer I&#39;m not chiseling right my ideas that&#39;s right so um on on the writing process like who were some of your early readers and like at what stage of the development did you bring other people into your process yeah my first readers my first reader was my mom um she&#39;s she&#39;s always my first reader um and she&#39;s a good litmus test for like the emotionality of this story but also the level if the pros is doing what I want it to do um and then I had one of my best friends read it who&#39;s also Chinese American um and mainly I just wanted to get her take on kind of you know the the chinese-american experience in this book and whether or not she felt like it resonated and felt accurate um those were probably my two initial first readers and then once I got to a stage where I had a full draft that I felt good about I sent it to about six people um and they were my my writing Community folks from previous workshops and Retreats in my MFA program that I had done but it was it was Mom and best friends in the beginning oh my God I love that I love that so much I need to I have a couple of readers but I&#39;m like so terrified of sending them anything so um I think it&#39;s helpful to like maybe there&#39;s one or two people in the beginning people that you really trust and then you can bring more eyes in as you feel more secure and like what it is that you&#39;re writing yeah I think I so I took a novel writing workshop with Alison hayey which is where this book came from but I remember she was always so protective of because we were just writing the first 20 Pages the first 40 pages and we were workshopping them and she was always so protective of people who were being worked flopped because it&#39;s so easy when you&#39;re in those beginning stages to hear feedback from someone and think this is how I need to alter the book and sometimes I feel like you just need to be alone with it and spend time with it by yourself so that you know what it is before you let other people in yeah yeah I&#39;ve been realizing that too it&#39;s like asking people for feedback but on ideas but they&#39;re not responding to something that like actually exists yet you know yeah um how did you cope with um like mentally emotionally and also logistically with uh the Lost pages right all the ideas and the drafts that just sit in your computer so yeah so I I know I mentioned this to you last night but I started this book writing from Nelson&#39;s active who is the character we meet in the second half of the book I have like 70 to 120 pages of him and you know once I started writing from Daddy&#39;s perspective and my agent had looked at it and she agreed like get rid of the nose and portions this is not a story about him so those pages are truly lost to the ether I still have them but they&#39;re never going to see the light of day I was I was fine saying goodbye to them because once I found IU&#39;s voice it was like this is what I care about most Nelson I&#39;m sorry to you you are so handsome but you have no business here you have no business here anymore um I I was not weirdly and I&#39;m a very sentimental person I was not sentimental about cutting things because each time I did it I like it just it made the story better and I I just trusted that that was the right thing to do I love I wonder what mentally what the mental purpose is because I have like a separate document for every chapter that&#39;s like outlined or scraps for this document and so the chapter I&#39;m working on now is like five pages but my scraps document is 52 pages long yes oh my goodness I don&#39;t I don&#39;t know why I need to have it because it&#39;s not like I look at it again it just exists just to have I do the same thing like mine is called orphans because you know like maybe one day I&#39;ll use them again um I never that&#39;s the thing I never go back and and copy paste and bring it back into the main document I never have yeah so where&#39;s one of your favorite places to write oh before the pandemic it was in coffee shops around Austin um particularly when the weather is not so blazing hot outside I could sit outside and write with a little croissant or something but since the pandemic you know I just write in at home I just alternate between my desk which is where I am now and my couch and sometimes my bed it&#39;s just a matter of like which surface do I want to sit on today and do you have like a writing or like an ideal writing routine and then how far is that from your reality my ideal writing routine is probably one where I get to read like other people&#39;s work for a good bit before I get to my own writing and ideally like I will not have done any other thing in the day that requires brain activity um so it&#39;s like words and writing creation and generation are the first things of my day yeah but that is not my reality I don&#39;t I don&#39;t know if it can be many people&#39;s reality so what it actually is is I do all this stuff and then at like 3 P.M I&#39;m like okay Jenny just get to the desk just go there open that laptop up you can do it no I that makes me feel better too because I went to this Workshop um for anyone who&#39;s watching listening who uh follows Roxanne gay and trusty McMillan cotton they have like hairlessly they had a hair to slay Camp retreat thing slay camp and uh Tracy who talks about and writes about the fact that so many black women so many I think in general like uh thinkers and creators of color don&#39;t get to just have one job right we have so many different jobs and so she was describing her writing routine and she doesn&#39;t actually start writing until 6 30 p.m and I&#39;m like okay that Vibes with me because I end up writing like later in the day but I&#39;m also feeling bad that I didn&#39;t start writing at five o&#39;clock in the morning um in any case I&#39;m curious because you have a job right you have a uh things that you have to do outside of writing and so what does that mean for your life to have this identity as a writer have the work as a published author and also have a day job yeah I think for me at least it knowing that I have this of their life as a writer it makes everything else that I have to do in order to survive bearable um and it almost makes me excited to return to the writing every single time because I know that it&#39;s not currently at least it&#39;s not you know it&#39;s not the only thing in my life but it is the most important and the most pleasurable thing in my life yeah I know I love that I love that so when it comes to the business of writing again like not as it is not just another job it&#39;s your identity as a writer um but also comes with work right people that you&#39;re accountable to is there anything that surprised you around like the business of writing or being a published author that you could give advice for people that are navigating this in some way yeah um this is less so about the business and more so maybe about the spiritual but I realized you know it can be very jarring when you&#39;re going from being the only person in the room working on your book being so close to it and having everything just like live within yourself to suddenly having this like product that you know people can now have opinions and reactions to um it no longer kind of belongs to you it has to kind of stand on its own without you supporting it like Parenthood I suppose um and that that jump can be very jarring at least it was for me um and it sometimes it can like lead to questions around who you are as a writer and and your relationship to writing I would just say you know try to keep no matter where you are in your writing Journey or the publication process try to keep the joy of writing and like remember why you&#39;re doing this at all and you know remember for me it&#39;s like remembering when I was a child child in writing and it was fun and I wanted to do it remembering that feeling and holding that onto that even when you&#39;re at a place where it&#39;s like maybe I don&#39;t have a good relationship with writing right now um trying to keep that Joy alive I think I love that because like there&#39;s some days I go to the page and I&#39;m like how you feel about this does it matter this is a job like get it done and then there are other days where it&#39;s like you should be joyous you should be happy like you want that to read on the page like how cool is it that you could just create something that doesn&#39;t exist right how can I find the fun and the beauty and joy in the art um and I every day I go back and forth of like is this art is this a job is it both what you know so um it&#39;s just weird so I think in speaking to the Joy I&#39;m curious for you these are my last two questions um what&#39;s your favorite part of the book like what of this book like is bringing you Joy oh it&#39;s those small moments that where zai gets to experience Joy too one of those I mean the brothel scenes I just I loved writing those because I loved kind of having her interact with other women but I think my favorite like the most joyful part was when she&#39;s in Idaho and she&#39;s kind of goofing off with Nelson in the store and they&#39;re trying to teach each other Chinese or oh she&#39;s trying to teach him Chinese that like small moment of Joy where she just gets to be a young person interacting with another another young person I was so happy yeah I love and I I think those are the moments too where she inhabits a bit more fullness of herself because there are a lot of times where you note that she forgets that she&#39;s hiding a lot about who she is and so it was nice to just see like she&#39;s just like having fun with her friend yeah you know her friend wink wink her friends so last question you know I&#39;m curious like what do you need from your writing and what do you think your writing needs from you oh I think what I need for my writing is for it to do like all the things that great literature does for me which is like move someone and make them you know feel close to something or resonate with them or speak to their experiences and also like be good I want it to be good um and I need it to I think I need it to also kind of be a way of expressing myself um in in whatever shape or form that is um be kind of true to what I want to do as a writer and an artist and who I want to be as a as an artist what my writing needs for me is probably the same thing I need from me which is care and grace and patience and time and attention all the things that get pushed aside when we&#39;re you know we talked about this doing everything else instead of taking care of ourselves I think my writing also needs all of that from me just love it needs love for me it&#39;s love yeah we all like love we all need love and I think we all need this book right absolutely I think everyone who&#39;s watching this I think it&#39;ll be a better person having read this I really do think that um and I just I so appreciate you and I so appreciate this work and I don&#39;t want to say that I&#39;m excited about what you have to come next because I want to get outside of this capitalistic mindset that you&#39;re always producing um but I&#39;m really excited for the fact that this lives in the world now um and can create something for somebody in some way so thank you so much Jenny I think I do and I these questions were amazing by the way amazing questions make you think that&#39;s what we do here at the lounge and so for everyone thank you Jenny thank you to onekin uh thank you for everyone who&#39;s watching and thank you please tell five people to get this book bye everybody bye all thank you foreign

Transcript for:Lecture Notes on Author Chat with Jenny Ting Hui Zhang

Transcript for:
Lecture Notes on Author Chat with Jenny Ting Hui Zhang