On one fellowship, in which the Australian-born Malaysian, Sylvia Plath scholar, is transported to Scotland to write a postcolonial novel and dissertation, she finds it difficult to do either. Followed by memories of her parents' upbringing and their tough love, the girl feels that examining Plath's work is not right for her, and begins a novel based on her family history. Things explode later when Girl shares her work with the group, and the differences between her and her white counterparts become difficult to ignore. She briefly enjoys her time at a postcolonial conference as she begins to reckon with the reality of pursuing academia, but after a family emergency, her desires become restricted and she becomes unsure of what to do. Honest, kind, and very funny, Jessica Zhan's debut novel Mi Yu is a must-read for academics or anyone who looks at life differently.
We sat down with Yu to chat about academia, autofiction, and writer's guilt.
Congratulations on your first novel! It's already been released in the UK and Australia, how does it feel to have it released in the US?
excited! It's a huge honor to be published in multiple territories – I've already received some really great reader feedback which has been great.
But the girl It is a semi-fictional story about a writer in Scotland abroad to work on a dissertation and a novel; How much of it was taken from your life and how much of it was fiction, and how do you balance the two?
I always tell people that writers write from life, that's a given, but I'll give it 30/70 – 30% taken from life and my own experiences and observations, and 70% fictional and turned into a coherent structure for the novel. , which is really difficult.
The girl always feels excited whenever she interacts with any of the fellowship staff, and it is interesting to hear the thoughts that pass through her mind, such as, “Now I have to smile to show gratitude, because I am receiving this huge opportunity.” Where do you think this hesitation and disconnection comes from?
One thing that really resonated with this novel was that I was working on a dissertation at the time about the representation of the Asian diaspora in Western media and screen texts. Have you listened to Olivia Rodrigo's new album?
Yes!
this song [“all-american bitch”] Which says, “I'm grateful all the time, I'm sexy and cool,” and I was like, “Oh, this is a great musical interpretation of the eroticization and feminization of the Asian diaspora way of presenting to the world,” 'feeling, not safe, I guess. The way I maintain my integrity is to display those qualities that are seen as a positive version of me, with this model minority. This blends with the sense of being an Asian female body in the world, how that manifests, what that means to people and how they encode and understand it. Thinking about how racialized bodies are threatening or subjugating, so it's about subjugating yourself to avoid becoming a threat or a threat.
I completely sympathize with Girl's concerns about productivity—she feels guilty when she's working on her PhD, because her fellowship was for her novel, and she feels guilty when she's working on her novel, because she feels her PhD is more of an outstanding accomplishment. . Why does she think she can't get out of her head and go wherever writing and creativity take her?
I think the strangest thing about writing is that it lives there, in your head. I know you literally have to write or write something, and it's physical work, but I feel like it's one of the least physical forms of art. One of my best friends is a painter, a visual artist, and I feel like that's an interesting experience, for your art form to be both cerebral and physical, a form of work. I feel like writing is a form of work but you're sitting there, putting things from inside your mind onto a computer or a piece of paper. I think that's what bothers a lot of writers – you're already inside your head as you go about your practice, and it's easy to get more inside your head about your worries and fears and concerns about [it].
I'm obsessed with the fact that Girl chose to do a thesis on postcolonialism because, as she says, it sounds “theoretical” and “impressive.” I enjoyed how she observed the absurdity of academia, and analyzed just to do so – was this something you wanted to incorporate into the book?
I'm an academic, I now work at a university, and even as a PhD student, it's as if you're being taught academic methods. I had to think a lot about it and read a lot about it to understand what was happening to me at that time. Which I made seem really depressing in the novel! Obviously there are some really nice things in academia as well. But there are really silly, funny, tragic, and sad things about it. I wanted to write about that because I think part of the novel is that the girl embodies the dream of the immigrant family. Her father thinks that academia is really the place to be, where she can just write her silly little books, earn a living wage, and have this privileged life. But there are a lot of difficult things in this special life, and I wanted to talk about that tension. I don't know, there's always this tension of, “Is your life harder than mine or is my life more difficult than yours?” I've lived a really privileged life as a second-generation immigrant, and I find ways to make space for both of those struggles, which girls really have.
Did you write the novel while preparing for your doctorate?
In Australia, it's very common to have creative writing programs, and you can do a PhD in them with split dissertations – half of which is a traditional critical academic thesis, and the other half is a novel or a collection of short stories or a play or whatever. I was trying to write my novel as part of my thesis, but the form it took – the way you see it now is completely different. I was so self-conscious about being in academia and not wanting it to be an academic Ph.D. novel that I tried to write this spoof novel that was really innocent. I thought to myself, “But I'm learning all this stuff now, and I probably know a lot, but I want the book to be filled with the feeling of knowing a lot and being discouraged.” It's kind of become the An academic novel, while I was a doctoral student, and I went further into it. I felt like it was more honest in some ways, because that was my experience and I wanted the book to know as much as I know, not to be this unknown work.
The girl bonds with another student in the fellowship, Clementine, a painter who somewhat selfishly makes the girl pose for a portrait, preventing her from her own work. They have disagreements about the nature of art and how to be a person – what do you want to explore through this relationship?
I did an artist residency when I was a PhD student and I felt this charged energy – we were supposed to be a community where we had all these common goals and we were in this beautiful place, but it was fraught with the anxiety of being an artist and feeling like you're fighting for scraps. What's the prize at the end of this? Maybe nothing! However, you have a lot of competitive desire. It was a way of exploring mimetic desire within one relationship, as a way of telling that.
The girl and Clementine don't really see each other, even though Clementine is drawing the girl, and the girl is thinking about Clementine. They both misunderstand each other and use each other in different ways, and that's something that happens in Plath's novel, and it's something I wanted to explore — that feeling of missing out on something when you're preoccupied with the artist's anxiety and fear of meaning. There is competition, envy, and also racism. I wanted to explore how this works. It was also an embodiment of the way the girl saw Plath, how she personified her, and saw her as something she could project all of these things onto. It's this triangle, in a way, between these three characters – Plath, Clementine, and the girl.
There is a book within a book, Salt column, a family history written by the girl rather than her postcolonial novel or Plath's treatise. When you show parts of the book to the group, all they can comment on is how diverse voices are needed, not anything actually related to the book. The girl, rightly, points this out, having suffered microaggressions and strange comments during her entire stay. Is this situation particularly painful for her because it relates to her writing?
I think it hurts because I feel like a lot of Asian diaspora girls — I don't want to generalize — but for me, you have all this pent-up anger that you can't really express because it's not completely safe to do so in public. Sometimes it just flows and explodes. The girl has been on the verge of expressing these things throughout the entire novel and the climax is when she finally does. I also think artists are very protective about their work. It's like you can insult me and hate me all you want, but insulting my work… They can be very sensitive about that. It feels like a violation of her work when she views it as this thing and a commodity, even though when she publishes a book it becomes a commodity. In that emerging state, she's creating something that's really important to her. For people to be able to see it as just a thing, in this white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist world… it's absolutely horrifying to her. I think it's that simple.
A girl is born in Australia on the day her parents immigrate to the country, which automatically grants her citizenship. Her upbringing with her family is difficult but loving, and throughout the novel, she constantly has flashbacks. Do you think that these expectations that her parents put on her, that she's out there, getting money to work, have an impact on her?
I think her parents' expectations are that she is successful in the broadest sense – I don't think they are interested in the nitty-gritty of her practice or what her work means to her. They don't really understand that part of her, but what they do understand is that they want her to be happy and healthy, and to be able to achieve the things she wants to achieve. For the girl, there's a feeling that it's really hard to ensure that this happens, as an artist or a writer, and it's very scary that the combination of the instability of that chosen profession combined with the immigrant's desire to settle down creates this very anxious mess inside of her.
Finally, you are working on an upcoming collection of articles, All spots are soft -What are some of the themes you explore there?
The way I think about it, you can't really talk about what it means to inhabit a racialized female body in the world in the way of pinning a butterfly to a card and pinning it down. It's more elusive than that in some ways, and the feelings that you have without any kind of evidence to back them up, any proof – they just flow through you in weird ways. What I'm trying to do with this collection of essays is find an unconstrained container, form, room, or box in order to somewhat collect those feelings and put them on the page. That's kind of the overarching theme of the book.
One of the essays I just wrote was a verbatim essay, about writing so-called “immigrant novels.” There's a lot of tropes and clichés that you can commoditize and feel really gross, like, not to you, the way food is commodified and made a centerpiece, but, like, what if food was really important to you, or this Is real food part of your culture? I think it's an article about wrestling when the things you genuinely love or associate with yourself become commodities – how do you write about them or express them in ways that feel right?
I've also been working on this article about Taylor for a long time [Swift]. The idea that she's, like, a refined, young femininity. It's everything, it's her. How do you respond to that like me? As a young Asian female with all my life experiences and my own personality? How do I see myself as fitting or not fitting into this mask?
But the girl Outside now.
