A CONVERSATION WITH WRITER JENNY ZHANG
There are mistakes in Jenny Zhang’s titles. The name of her 2012 poetry collection, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find, misspells its final word, and the possessive “s” is lost in that of her upcoming collection, My Baby First Birthday. These are mistkes, but they are also so much more. They are acknowledgements that we live in a world of many languages. They are proof of the impossibility of communicating exactly what we mean. They are refusals to correct, to edit, to conform. This unabashedness is viscerally felt across Jenny’s fiction, poetry, and essays. The chorus of ChineseAmerican preteen girls who narrate her 2017 story collection, Sour Heart, have treasure-trove interiorities that spill into run-on paragraphs; their innermost thoughts are given weight through entirely capitalized sections. Her essays published in the online magazine Rookie orbit around ideas of coping and uncertainty—how to use humor as a foil for racism; how to resist the burden of your friends’ drama—building for her readers an unofficial survival guide to adolescence. And her poetry is tactile and urgent: the first human year ever recorded melted so flagrantly it became stylish to be poetic for the end of the world The insistence in this language—one that places geological time and notions of apocalypse in the same space as an earthly, everyday reality—welcomes a sense of extreme closeness, of enormous intimacy. It’s as if once you begin reading, a spotlight shines down, and the distance between reader and writer collapses— Jenny is speaking to you, and only you. Jenny called me while she took an afternoon walk around her new home of Los Angeles. Over the phone, her voice is sincere and measured, her ideas bursting at the seams. Here, we discuss made-up languages, texting as poetry, and how to champion living in the in-between. Alex Westfall: What can we expect (or not expect) from the poems in My Baby First Birthday? Jenny Zhang: The first thing that ever happens to us is that someone makes the decision that we're going to exist. That the first thing we all experience is non-consensual is troubling; so is the great paradox that the only way out of existence is to die. I have this dream of, “Well, what if I could go back in time? Then I wouldn't have had to ever feel like I exist.” It’s a silly thought. Or maybe it’s sad, depending on what place you're in. I’ve also thought, “Well, I've experienced life, I've made it this far.” So in some ways, I can't give up existing, but I've kind of existed against my will. Am I supposed to cherish that? I’m also interested in the fetish we have for motherhood and being a baby. I’m drawn to this idea that we get to begin innocent, how we're less and less so as time goes on, and the unfairness of that. There is a desire to return to innocence even if most of us probably have no memory of it—it feels like a fantastical place, like a dream. So the poems are about all that stuff. They’re also not
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about any of that stuff. Some of it is text messages I've had with friends. Texting is a kind of poetic because of its natural line breaks; everyone is creating poems by phone. I don't want to make it sound like the collection is lofty; it’s also extremely un-lofty! AW: I love the both-ness with which you’ve described the collection, which reminds me—in college, you studied both race and ethnicity studies and creative writing. I’ve found that the separation of disciplines in schools often makes it hard for someone who both studies theory and makes creative work—it is up to the student to navigate the realms of absorbing knowledge and creating things. Is this resonating at all?
respond, “I don't know! I'm no scholar in immigration history; I am simply someone who has immigrated to the United States.” I can't explain the ways in which policy is made and how that trickles down to affect different people—it would take days to just explain how it affected me or my friends!
There is something that happens when I read books that capture an experience that in some way is tied to the macro-changes happening in domestic and global politics and policies. I'm having a hard time articulating, but I think there is something very cerebral about policy and talking about ideology. For most people including myself, in experiencing it first-hand, politics is more like a feeling. So I try to capture that JZ: You’ve unlocked something for me, which was that feeling in my writing. I've always felt like I was neither that nor this—but I think really, it's what you were saying, that there is such AW: When you mention politics as emotion, I immepressure and a cultural impulse to have an identity diately thought of your prose poem “How it Feels,” with defined borders. I've always felt like I was floating published in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Magazine. between things, living in these interstitial spaces. I You tackle this question of turning raw emotion into was drawn to studying comparative studies in race and writing, making space for your reader to question why ethnicity at Stanford because it was interdisciplinary. we crave to process our feelings. I was wondering if you I didn't just want to take a sociology class—I wanted could talk about how you turn interiority into somehistory, comparative literature, political science. thing that feels ready to be seen publicly. Do you see value in unpolished, uncalculated art? Depending on the kind of writer you are, it makes sense to be curious about the world. But college is a time JZ: I think a lot of people come to art in whatever form where you're supposed to be “professionalizing,” and I because it gives a shade, a value, a look to something was bad at that; I don't think I respected it. So I studied that we feel but may not always be able to express— a lot of different things. I took lots of creative writing especially when we're young. Everyone has that classes because that was what I was really nerdy about memory of hearing that one song where you suddenly and wanted to do as much as possible. find that your whole body is vibrating, and you don't even know why. I was talking to my good friend, the Stanford was a pretty dorky place. I didn't know what a comedian Jenny Yang, and we were talking about Libertarian was until I got there... every freaking dude the film Mulholland Drive. And she was talking about there was a Libertarian and probably now identifies as how she'd seen it as a teenager, and how there was a a sapiosexual or something—like that class of person, scene with a singer in a club who sings this beautiful, ha! I would meet people and think, “Oh, we share haunting song. And she just started crying. I’ve had similar politics, but we don't share a similar sense of those moments too, where suddenly I see, hear, or humor,” or maybe they’d have regressive ideas about read something, and I can't stop laughing or crying. It sex. And the people I shared more of an aesthetic sensi- was like my body knew before my brain did that it was bility with, they were not people I shared a political meaningful to me. There is something so mysteriously relationship with. So that was a common thing to feel at pleasurable about that. The downside is when you need that age. It has been the project of my entire life up until to process but can’t—when you're like, “My body wants now and is still ongoing: to find people with whom you to die, I don't know what to do about it, and I don't know can be at home in all these different quadrants of your how to relieve myself of this depression, this fear, this identity. It’s been hard, but I'm always looking. anxiety.” So it can go both ways.
AW: You’ve worked as both a union and youth orga- Writing is both a very conscious and unconscious nizer. As you've moved through your life as a writer, thing. Sometimes the first draft of things I write are how have you reconciled the realms of art and politics? more unconscious—I couldn't tell you how I wrote “How it Feels,” I just remember that I was locked up in JZ: I don't want to make it sound like I'm an activist, my apartment for 24 hours on a hot summer day, and because I am definitely not—much respect to those I had no A.C. Somehow, I wrote it. Then there are who are and do that as part of their life and daily prac- other times where I do remember. Editing is more of a tice. As a writer, it was never a conscious decision to be conscious act for me. able to comment about politics or things happening in the world. I was never like, “How do I make the polit- I like when I read something less structured, that ical personal or the personal political?” It was just that I evokes a familiar feeling. But I'm also very happy had lived the life and had been around people who had reading extremely plotted things, being on the edge of lived the life. I encountered politics as a lived person. my seat. I think I try to do a combination of those two things in my work. When Sour Heart came out, people would ask, “How do you think immigration policy has changed?” and I'd AW: You've spoken before in praise of bands like the
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