C Pam Zhang: How Much of These Hills Is Gold [engl.]

[Music] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] welcome everybody welcome everyone to the 21st international literature festival has this welcome francis international literature festival berlin i'm very proud humble happy and excited to be sitting here with the great author si pam jung about talking about her first novel how much of these hills this gold v field van dyson hyugen is gold and i'm also happy to be joined by xiaobina actress heaven ticking who will read two parts for us before i say a little bit more maybe let's give them both a huge round of applause again please [Applause] we are joined live now by um an audience who is watching us through the project called ilb digital digital so there is uh due to the pandemic uh mixed format so that people from all over the world i hope i don't i hope it's not geoblocked let's pretend or at least from the german-speaking um areas can watch us right now you said about this in another interview it's a very democratic thing that the pandemic did to us that more people can join us actually and don't for some reasons who can't come to berlin who can't be here physically can join us i don't know where the cameras are i know that mom and dad are watching so gabi and han is hi thanks for watching i'm gonna send you one of those copies and everyone else can watch it also on youtube later um yeah it's a highly anticipated event and a highly talked about event i'm really happy um congratulations on this novel it's your first novel i'm going to say a little bit about you first of all what do i have to say like in a sort of professional sense this book is sold here by dusman a corporation between the international literature festival and this book chain so you can buy it there will be a signing afterwards also i recommend you go to your small local bookstore around the corner if it's buchbund or buchkurnigan or she said the queer feminist bookstore in kotposadam you know go to your local book dealers support them it's been a tough time for most publishing houses and for most bookstores so please buy this book and maybe not directly online but like go go and support your local book dealer um the second thing is that there is no second thing that was the one announcement after oh there is a book signing afterwards you will be here on stage if you have a book you can have it um signed by c pam young and let's talk about you a little bit hi toby thank you for the introduction thank you everyone for being here tonight i was just saying in the room ahead that this is actually my first live event since the pandemic since um thank you since my book came out in that strange last year of 2020 so it's it's a real privilege and a thrill to be here with all of you and with toby um and with someone speaking the book in german like i don't speak german right so it's it's incredible to hear it i forgot to mention that it's uh it's been a it's been a year of zoom for you right yeah and yeah i mean it's a it's a tiring question how was that you're like what's it like to publish your first novel in the time of a pandemic but i want to repeat it i want to know i want the audience to know what was it like i mean were there ups were there downs were there also upsides to it yeah i think the overwhelming feeling oddly enough is one of surreality it hasn't felt quite real because i think what people often don't realize as readers is that writers work on a book for so long for years and years and years and exists in many different forms it exists for you and then it exists for you plus a couple of early readers and then exist for you plus your agent plus your editor etc and so i think i was like waiting for uh the publication of the book to feel like it was real that i could like walk into a bookstore and say like oh now it's real and i never got that moment i actually saw the book in a bookstore for the first time a couple of months ago um so that's been that's been an interesting thing like in some ways like i haven't quite believed that it is a real object to other people and it's it's always so incredible to hear from readers um and from others because that just cements more and more that is it is a real thing how was the first time that you touched it the book oh i definitely cried right i think all authors cry when when you touch your book for the first time it's it's overwhelming i always like to judge a book by its cover this cover has alliance not lions but tigers obviously on them um there's always an interesting answer to ask the author sometimes not so well quite personal sometimes the the publishing agency decides you know what the what the cover will look like did you have any say in it are you happy with the cover oh i i adore the cover no one has uh you know strong darned me into saying that um i actually it felt very collaborative where the design team came back with a cover that was very like this one it had these like beautiful colors it had tigers on it and i think what we actually spent the most time on honestly was figuring out what the tigers should look like because i think that i realize the tigers the look of the tigers was became very personal um it was almost as personal as like choosing the face of a character for the book to me like i wanted them to look just right like i didn't want them to look too um too old-fashioned i didn't want them to look too sort of like asians or like the kinds of tigers that you see on like scrolls from the 1400s either i wanted them to say a lot of what the book says that this is modern this is not quite real i mean they're blue tigers on the cover and i wanted the tigers to also say that this this is this is a myth right this is about the american west but it's not quite the west that you know you know i don't know if you all have ever seen those those ancient maps um from like you know the middle ages where the cartographer sort of ran out of known land right and they would write on the map at some point they would draw a dragon and say they're like here there'd be dragons i wanted the tigers to do that sort of like a warning to the reader that you're entering a different kind of world that's amazing it's definitely cover that you would pick without knowing what the book is about i want to i want to mention that it was um published in german uh it was published in actually in 16 countries in 14 languages the s fischer fellow and someone is here julia from the s fischer fellow is here and also the wonderful is here translation whether you've read it or not give her a round of applause as well because i think translators never get the respect and attention that they deserve and this is a fantastic translation let's talk about you you were born in beijing at the age of four you came to the us you've lived in many countries you lived in the valley in san francisco or in northern california for a long time and went to bangkok to actually write this book you have an education at the brown university in cambridge university a master of fine arts and fiction [Music] the book actually was awarded with the academy of arts and lettuce rosenthal award in the asian pacific award for literature and nominated for the 2020 booker prize you yourself in 2017 were a holder of the truman capote fellowship we're a participant of the iowa writers workshop and currently nominated or awarded with the title of 535 um honorees of the or people to watch of the national book foundation and no other than barack obama recommended that book or called it one of his favorite books in 2020 congratulations on your success as i said it's the first novel you you published essays you published short stories in very very very renowned publications like the new york times the new yorker and the harpist and as far as i know it took you about five years to actually start this novel i want to talk a little bit about the journey that you had that you know it's part of your narrative or part of your biography that you've been to many places or moved around a lot from a personal perspective i feel uncomfortable with that i wouldn't like to move a lot and i wonder how it is like for you is that a part of your artistic journey as an author as well does it influence your art is that something that inspires you or is it a struggle to be moving so much because as i said yeah it's it's part of this book a journey and also your personal journey yeah that's such a thoughtful question thank you for asking it um i think it's really hard to answer because i honestly don't know who i would be if i had not moved this many times in my life it's not necessarily and it was not always easy and it's not necessarily a decision i would make for myself but i think what i appreciate as an artist about having moved so many times is this quality of of newness when you're an outsider in a new place you see things differently perhaps a little bit more clearly but i think you sort of see over and under the way that people who have lived there for a long time see it this is true if you move often it's also true i think if you are a member of a marginalized population whatever that means right like if you're a woman living in a male-dominated misogynistic society if you are asian-american living in a predominantly white society you sort of see past the the simplified myths of that culture that say this is the way things are and that gives you this power of perspective that again i don't know if it's if it's necessarily always fun to have that but it is something that i think um aligns really well with being an artist or a writer in any way right because we're looking always to artists to show us the world in a slightly different way like yes every story has been told a hundred thousand times but not always from that same viewpoint not always with those same sort of like thoughts and opinions um and so that's a very long way of saying like i yeah i guess i'm glad that i moved around so much you say a lot of stories have been told a million times um to jump into the novel a little bit it's you know you might you might think it's a western i started reading it i i realized it's a genre piece i was stuck in in the concept of labels actually oh it's a coming-of-age film film i say because it's very cinematically written and novel actually um it's it's a western it's set in the us in the 19th century and you surprised me and i think a lot of people with every page there are four chapters let's go a little bit into maybe um the structure of the book there are four chapters and usually it's the publishing house that says oh yeah you know for the reader i like it that i finish a chapter but your chapters are like you know page turners but also revelations there's there's a lot of twists and a lot of changes in perspective in tone in narrative um and um you read tell or you say in your own words you reimagine the the myth the mythology the u.s american mythology of the frontier of the go west movement of the gold diggers from the eyes of two children i want to call them other children because they never you never call them asian children you never call them chinese or immigrant chinese children i'm trying to like not use words that you don't use and tell us something about the fascination first of all with that myth with that u.s american story and how you dared in a positive sense to put that mythological so well talked about so well beloved story of the becoming of the u.s into your first novel because there's such a high risk i think of failing and you know yeah maybe that's not my question um how to answer that i would say that in some senses i was not afraid of failure because i think the the myth of america and of the west that most people hold in their minds like if i say the american west almost everyone i'm sure is thinking sort of like john wayne cowboy boots high noon striding through striding through this territory riding a horse that is much that is as much a lie as anything i might put in my fictional book right that itself is a myth we live in a culture saturated with myths and one of the ones that i really wanted to topple in this novel was one that white cowboy myth and two the myth of um the american dream right which has always motivated people from the wild west frontier days to even before i wrote this novel i was working in tech in san francisco in a startup that's to me the modern version of the gold rush the modern like version of the american dream which purports that oh it doesn't matter where you start from what you look like how little you have as long as you work hard enough you know you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps everything will will come out great and not only is that a lie it's a really pernicious and and harmful lie right and i think one of the things i wanted to show in this book was that you can be surrounded by this beauty this radiance these like golden hills this natural wealth and still be marginalized from it still be put on on the outside still be looking in and i think in many ways the great tragedy of this family and particularly of the parents perhaps of this family is they all come to this place believing in that american dream and then being denied access to it and that bitterness is sort of what what kills the father and what sort of rips the family apart the novel begins with the death of the father we already know that the mother they're called ba and ma are dead and we have two people we have two siblings lucy and sam and the first chapter is written from their perspective tell us a little bit about the idea because as i said many categories or many many stables are not given we don't know exactly where we are there's a town called sweetwater we don't know if it exists or not we would have to research it we don't know what time it is exactly and we don't know that they are asian or asian american characters so we have two kids who are on a journey to one first spoiler bury the father tell us a little bit about that beginning about that you know perspective and also the conscious irritation of us the readers to start like this and have many things not be set in stone but be fluid yeah i think that um one of my great inspirations for this novel and also for life you know we just spoke about myth it has been like mythologies and fairy tales and fairy tale retellings i've always loved this form and i think that you know a lot of times we speak about the universal story and i do think those kinds of forms whether in any culture are universal partly because they sort of take place just outside time and space right in a fairy tale you're never given a country name you're never given a time and i think that allows them to to actually be outside time and to sort of be um be eternal in that way and i was definitely aiming for that effect in this novel and also i did want the the reader to be slightly uncomfortable i suppose sort of ungrounded in the beginning i didn't want them to feel like they knew this place that they knew all the answers because um one i think part of the the lack of labeling that you were commenting on was a response and sort of a defiant response to the fact that you know i i live in america i write in a predominantly white cis hetero male literary culture and it is a place where kind of by default the reader assumes a character is white when they read it on the page like all of you if you picked up an american book would really just assume the character is white and that was something i struggled against for a long time and so what i really wanted to do with these characters and with this place was i didn't want to over explain them i wanted you as the reader to for at least the first 10 and 15 however pages have that just like bodily experience of like instead of encountering this person or this place as a label i'm encountering them for who they are how they represent themselves the way they talk the way they speak the sort of personality that comes through and you know eventually because it is a novel you have to like ground it at some point um but i wanted that first encounter to just feel like very very thrilling and very very embodied instead of like in your head maybe we can invite the audience in the sense that you read a little bit of the first part the reading part and then um [Music] heaven is going to take over and read the first part of the beautiful translation by ivari yes do you want to introduce it or yeah i can i can introduce it so i'm going to read from one of the first parts of the novel and this is um right when the two children have found a place to bury their father's body they've been carrying him on their backs for many weeks now they left the town that they originally lived in sort of on the run and now they're they're in the wilderness and they found a place wind blows down the slopes a change smell in the air by the moon's keen light sam readies the sight for burial around the tiger sam lays a circle of stones home sam calls this to one side of the circle they're pot in pan and ladle and knife and spoons kitchen sam calls this to the other they're baskets bedroom sam calls this at the edge branches stuck upright walls sam calls this over the branches woven grass mats roof sam calls this the center sam keeps empty till last and i'll stop there no ah and varane sam schleft sits lucy still and laosht laosht and stark sam hattie schauffel lucid keller we take in let's talk a little bit about language and let's talk a little bit about sam and lucy maybe language okay can i just first say that was an incredible reading and also like we said ava the translators and the audience and i was actually able to follow along because ava you did such an incredible job capturing the rhythm and i'm just very overwhelmed right now that is very great and maybe let's give ivari guru the translator another round of applause because i want to know i want to know how much in touch you are with your translators is is that a baby that you give away to a different mother father sister or um is there some say in yours when another language takes over um yeah so i had a couple of email exchanges all initiated on ava's part i was really grateful because i i felt like i completely trusted her to just sort of like do what she needed to do best and then come to me only when there were sort of answers that only resided in my head for example there is a question of of gender pronouns i hear that german has no gender pronouns right um is it though interesting we'll talk more about that later um but yeah and as you know as you heard there are gender pronouns in english and one of the characters is what we would probably today called transgender gender queer non-binary i don't know what they would label themselves in in their world without this terminology um so and it was sort of like an integral part of the opening of the book so for example that was a question that ava had to ask me um but for the most part i do think that like when i approach translations or tv adaptations or anything like that i honestly like want to stay as far away from possible i think that like i've lived my life with this book and the other lives it has in the world are not for me to to monitor so closely you just mentioned a very very crucial part of the book that is identity questions of identity but not only of a sort of ethnic or racial identity but also of gender identity and then there's the character of sam and you just mentioned all the words that you could give sam being gender fluid being transgender being non-binary being androgynous one journalist said um it's a person the gender is sometimes sort of like labeled upon them um and it's more exciting actually not to label that sem that sister brother or whatever um how what was your initial idea to to put that um beautiful gender trouble into a story that's already troubling this this already written white narrative of the wild west how what was your impulse yeah i think that sometimes i'm not saying that this is you but that sometimes when people ask me similar questions they come at it with this like how yeah how could you even conceive of a transgender genderqueer character which feels so 2020 or 2021 in a book about the historical west and my answer for that is i didn't do that deliberately right i wasn't sort of like looking to insert capital i issues into the novel the two characters always came to me organically and they always came as a pair i many writers are but i am completely unable to build sort of like a character from the ground up from scratch they either have to be alive for me and sort of present themselves to me or not um but on the other hand my answer is that this this happens because i think that we we often being you know sort of narcissists as all humans are we think we've invented in 2021 or whatever the idea of of transgenderness or we've invented uh we've invented all these um words that we have for people with different gender identities but the truth is that queerness and so many other conditions of humanity existed long before there was language for them you know just because they weren't captured or weren't allowed rather weren't allowed to enter the written historical record doesn't mean that queer folk or trans folk didn't exist they always have they've always been like left out or i think of it's always hilarious to me the many instances in which um archaeologists right we'll dig up like the bones of two women buried together holding hands in in every indication of a sort of like romantic relationship and be like and then these two friends and it's just like ridiculous like come on just say it um there were like lesbians and queer people even in egypt or whatnot um so that's the other answer and then finally i think that like when i stepped back and looked at the fabric of the world and the uh the book that i was building i realized that even aside from sam much of the novel's concern and much of my concern just you know like as a woman writing this book was was the question of gender performance um and specifically the performance of of of gender by people who the world labels as female in a deeply misogynistic and problematic world i'm absolutely sure that anyone here who has ever been read publicly as female has had those moments where you think like if i wear this kind of outfit i will receive this kind of treatment if i behave in this kind of way i may make myself slightly safer or not safe and it's unfair we shouldn't have to make those calculations it's absolutely awful that we do but you know it you know that we all do that through the world and i'm just really interested in not only through sam um but through other characters the mother and lucy who just constantly perform these negotiations to gain just like a little bit more clout in a world where you know they don't have the power and the deck is stacked against them i was reminded of something that i didn't personally know about that they're apart from the algeb the the g the t the i the q there is the two-spiritness of of native american folks i think from from north north america and um you also talk about the so-called indians from the eyes of that perspective like a word that is now sort of like in its use controversial native americans tell us a little bit about um maybe the the the ethnic um dimensions of that novel how you wanted to i don't like to say rewrite because you're not rewriting any history and i don't think that history is per se written but like you know what you wanted to add to that by letting these um two asian american question mark characters um also talk about the native americans and how you know these perspectives are opened up that are usually not told yeah i think that um you know there have been lovely awards and accolades for the book but one of the things that made me feel most proud and successful as a writer was when an asian-american woman wrote in to tell me that thanks to my book and to um uh album that when she hears the word cowboy she thinks of like an asian woman and i was like that's exactly what i want to do i want to dismantle this idea of you know chimamanda adichia talks about the danger of the single story and i think also to the danger of a single image right and i i want to make sure that the image of the cowboy in my case because um you know i am chinese-american the door is opened to the image of a chinese-american cowboy and i hope that the door is also held open to the idea of there are black cowboys there were latinx cowboys there were native american cowboys right and i just hope that we keep holding the door open wider to let in more and more of these stories because i'm not it's not to say that i want to like burn all the white male western canons i love some of those books like larry mcmurtry's lonesome dove is an incredible book very flawed but incredible i don't want people to stop reading those books i just want to let more books in that give us this broader view of our past our future everything that we think of and i feel like i've lost my train of thought and i don't even know what your original question was me neither but it was very very interesting what he was just saying i was i had another train of thought and um no it's it's about canon maybe it's it's about canon history writing your book is also a lot about we have so many things to discuss i don't think we can finish this in one hour but history in itself is a very permanent topic in your novel also because there's a history teacher also because it's about oral history or like white people wanting to write down something and thereby creating truth what you just said also like going back to the western genre there is a trend of sort of like rewriting or giving new impulses into something that's already there a female ghostbusters a black this an asian that and i sometimes i'm a white male in quotation marks but you know i don't ask myself the same questions i don't have the same experience so that being said i sometimes wonder what are the pros and cons of taking something that has so much power that is clearly white and patriarchally structured some genre some film and like giving it actually more power by making that version out of it it's not a critique at all it just came to my head that why the western why don't you know why don't the western and do something else go into space you know do afro or asian futurism and you know coming just right into my head no no criticism at all but i wonder i want to hear your answer as to why why do you think you want to go back there and sort of like give it new impulse yeah i know i absolutely love that question actually you know to be honest when i was working on this book for a long time i was puzzled by why i wrote this book and i was like why am i writing this book is a lot of my short fiction that i wrote before this novel is actually speculative fiction in nature it's often either slightly dystopian futuristic or whatnot probably has like a closer uh bearing to those other genres that you mentioned um but i think one for me the personal impulse is again you know this has it has accrued its own labels in the world and it's often described as a western but for me that wasn't what it began as for me it began as just sort of like a song and a eulogy and a love letter to the landscape of the american west to me the the landscape that the characters move through the the hills is as much a character as as any other in the novel and i think that you know again as a kid who moved a lot as a child i often felt sort of like isolated from from the human communities that i had just encountered and was um was sort of a foreign object within but from the very first when i moved into the american west i felt this deep respect love and sort of connection somehow with the landscape with the wideness and vastness of the skies with again this sense however false or not of like the land being rich and filled with possibility um and i think that in many ways when you read the western genre what that is is it's a genre of love for the land um of love for the land and it's all its possibilities however like problematic the relationship of a lot of characters in the western um have to the land actually are so that i think that was the impulse for me i was like i feel like i belong here that my family belongs here and i want to write this book where you cannot question how much they belong where they are deeply embedded in every part and their sort of mythology you know why are there tigers in in my books west when there aren't tigers in the real west where their character and their their sort of relation to the land is like embodied in right there and i will say um i think now i remember the question that i forgot earlier you were asking about sort of like are there right will there be the the question of um for example ethnicity and like native characters in this book what's really really interesting is i forgive me i can't remember which native writer but i read an interview in which a native writer was asked like why aren't there native american rewritings of the western that seems like an obvious thing to reclaim or redo and their answer was essentially that like for native people that is like such a painful category that it's as you say they don't want to touch it with a 10-foot pole they'd rather invent their new categories or do something else and i completely respect that and i think that it's always going to be on an individual case-by-case basis and that answer makes sense to me and sometimes there'll be cases where someone feels like they really need to go in and and sort of mess with the guts of a genre and it's it's always going to be different i want to also before we hear another part from the from the novel talk about queerness we we we um talked a little bit about assam as as a person but that is a lot about gender or sexual identity i think coming from the film world and having just re-watched a film called poison where john queerness is is told through a mix-up of genre and gender i was so um struck by a book i think apart from the fact that there are gender fluid characters the form of your novel is queer to me um because there's a change of perspective there's a change of expectation there is a sense of convention that is broken over and over again i'm being irritated productively in a sense then i don't want to give anything away but you know maybe an already that character is having a monologue in one chapter maybe not and um maybe we're going back and forth maybe times are changing maybe they're all aliens who knows no i don't know who's written the book but you know what i'm talking about in the people who have read the book or will read it will know what i'm talking about as well there's an irritation there is an idea of like non-normative storytelling non-linear non-conventional storytelling and i wonder if that's something that makes sense in your head that the book in its form is queer yeah i i love that and i think often times you're just speaking of like the strange mutability and often insufficiency of language right is that long before queer was sort of used to mean like gay related to gender and sexuality it meant just like kind of odd and off right um and i think i just embraced that kind of offness in in writing in general so i actually really appreciate that you read the book as queer because like you know going back to something i said earlier i think it is always people who sort of look at the world slightly askew because they have been forced to the margins who have something really fascinating to say about it um and you know again this is not to say that i like don't read white men that i don't read classics but i do often find myself in contemporary literature not through some agenda but just naturally reading and being more interested in books that are doing something new that are as you said like irritating productively um that are sort of like opening my brain and forcing me to ask ask new questions and surprising me and also queering the idea of a certain genre like western and i'm talking about that you talk a lot about representation i think you've already made it clear in your statements without me asking about it there is a lack of representation of female characters female young characters asian american asian characters in those genres do you see yourself as an activist as a writer hmm i mean yes i think that all writers have to be activists again if you're going to do good writing writing that doesn't come to the page stale and boring and done 100 000 times you have to be some kind of activist because i think my friends who are activists and my friends who are science fiction or speculative fiction writers they share one commonality which is they both have those both those groups of people have incredible imaginations right you have to have the imaginative capacity to to see a world that is different from ours and hopefully better than ours and i think that is something that will always be essential to being not just a writer but frankly an artist um and i think there is overlap i mean i guess the the one reason i wouldn't say yes to all act writers being activists is like people can also imagine worlds i don't agree with that i don't believe in that i would not agitate for but yeah did you ever think about talking about something we haven't talked about the untold or not enough told about story of chinese people building up america i was wondering because you keep it so much in the not in the shadow but like you allude to it you don't like it's not an in-your-face novel about such and such so my question about you being an activist was kind of provocative and i loved your answer but you know there could be a book that could be the partner book of this telling us the story about you know chinese labor building up the u.s american continent did you ever think about like also collecting all this information having like a little parallel book that you could or could not by reading your book that's a really great question my answer to that is you know when i was doing research for that book i read those books i read really great nonfiction books i really highly recommend this novel sorry this nonfiction book called asian american dreams by the writer and activist helen zia i really recommend for more contemporary take that everyone read minor feelings by kathy hong park which also came out last year um it's really great a really great reflection on like modern asian american identity um but i think that this is and this is something i've told like younger writers um very socially conscious writers that i've i've worked with in the past is you have to be able to separate your activism from your art one can suffocate the other right i think that it's important to remember that everybody contains multitudes and if there's one thing that i've learned from friends of mine who have been like lifelong activists like you know like older friends of mine who were activists during the aids crisis in san francisco is that you can't just give and give and give and give and give of yourself and still be effective still be a human being right i think part of sustainable activism frankly is acknowledging um and relying on the fact that you have a community that sometimes some people will pick up the burden and sometimes you have to rest and then other people pick up the burden that's the only way it's sustainable right activism cannot happen within one single person whose life will eventually end um and so that's just a long way of saying like i think they need to be separated like you can and should do really good works but your fiction should be a a thing of itself it should have a life you should not have to you should not try to breathe um sorry you should not try to sort of like structure themes or issues or sort of like morals into it because then it stops being really it stops being alive it stops being good fiction um yeah can imagine it's also a big danger and i i wonder if i asked one question too many in that direction but like i can imagine i have a lot of queer friends activist friends gay friends black friends who are so sick and tired of having to be that token activist who have to explain all of that and with ocean vong who was here who was who became this star so so quickly also an asian american writer you know the gay community celebrated him then you know he was other in the sense of he also talked about his his asian country and blah blah and and do you feel that already sort of like knocking at the door that you know you get a little too many you get a question too many um of like you know sort of like being that token female asian writer like i'm actually reproducing that right now by asking you that but like is that is that already happening is that what you just said more or less yeah i think that it's it's not that like obviously like i'm proud to be an asian writer and i don't mind asking those questions but i i think it is just sort of that question i i wish that and i i feel like you've already asked this of yourself so i'm not speaking of you it feels like i wish more interviewers journalists whatever would ask themselves would i ask this of a white writer and just always ask this of yourself before you put a question forward right because it's not that i don't care about those those questions and that activism in my writing it's that the book is also more than that it's not just an asian-american book it's not just a western it's also a book about grief it's also a book about climate change which like no one ever talks to me about right it's actually a book deeply about climate change it's also about joy it's also about syntax and language and i think that's as you said that's the very definition of tokenism is like being reduced to those things that i think grates after a while you use a very interesting term model minority myth the model minority myth or the no sorry that is one thing you talked about we don't have to go into that too much but you said something um other that women and people of color are often or mostly ask about the autobiographical aspects of their work i don't want to like dig too much into it because i also feel like you know there's a there's a balance here but um it is so interesting to not be aware of this that as soon as you're a woman or a person of color you're selling me something of your own history but if i'm a white man i'm telling you the universal story do you want to elaborate a little bit on that yeah um yeah i really chafe at the question because if you go out in the world and you you look at it you will see that the question of whether a piece of fiction is autobiographical is always put to women and people of color and i think this comes because we live in a world in which historically either we are not given a voice or if we are given a voice in our platform it is our pain that is a commodity it is pain it is marginalized pain that is a commodity uh for the dominant population to consume to feel bad about for a second and then to feel proud of themselves for feeling bad about it for a second and then sort of move on um with their lives but in reality i think that i mean i did not live in the west shocker i did not live in like the 1800s but i think that all good fiction ultimately is somewhat autobiographical in nature in that it pulls from emotions real emotions that you have experienced or been on you know that you have experienced in your life otherwise it's going to ring false i mean it's interesting to me because right for example if you look at some of the famous uh white male short story writers like uh john cheever and raymond carver what did they write about they wrote about like middle-aged white white men in well-to-do suburb suburbs right having mary like having disastrous marriages and like drinking and those were their lives but no one is like john carver or sorry raymond carver okay i can't even do it they're all one person to me now um tell me about the autobiographical nature of your brilliant work no it's just tell me about your brilliant work because it's sort of assumed that they have this great as you said like universal imaginative capacity to describe the every man so um yeah it's a hard question it's a it's an annoying question i guess to encounter in the world i just like hope that all of you sort of like think about that next time you see something like that being put to a writer from a marginalized population well applause from the audience i'm applauding inside i can force you but um yeah we have a second part to here we're we're we're jumping i think 180 pages so far and pam do you also want to introduce the second part no i don't i'm sorry i don't remember oh okay okay sorry i didn't want to put you in a spot let's just read let's hear it from heaven to king we're in chapter three right now of four chapters and a lot has happened um like is [Applause] thank you so much [Applause] we are slightly running out of time and i forgot to mention one thing that is quite important here allowed or even invited to ask audience questions or make positive comments hopefully and we have a microphone there i'm just going to wait until you off town and continue the talk here until you until the ice is broken or i don't know some people will raise their hands um i want to ask you a little bit more and let's go back maybe have a full circle with with the chapters you have four chapters in different styles and um in these chapters there are some chapters and i first didn't realize it but um they have the same names it's gold plum salt skull wind earth is it flesh or is it meat in the original it's meat it's meat water and blood and they're reoccurring so you you have the same sub chapters of the chapters tell us a little bit about that idea why did you want to have that as a recurring theme and yet have it very differently um yeah so that that's a really interesting artifact of the editing process so um i wrote the first draft i wrote a couple more drafts and then at some point in the process i felt like the novel was getting sort of like baggy and unwieldy and if there's anything i personally hate in a work of my owner of other works is just like baggy bagginess so i was like okay how do i cut things down make them more honed and the sort of way into that for me was i was like what if i give each subchapter some kind of motif and it could be you know just because the chapter is called plum doesn't necessarily mean a plum that just literally occurs in it but let me give it a motif and that will just be some sort of like north star that as i'm writing i'm aiming for um and anything that sort of doesn't move in that direction i can cut it and then um i ended up realizing yeah that these motifs were recurring throughout the book and i think it really speaks to one of the themes of the novel which is this idea of intergenerational trauma right and of this family which has suffered through so many hardships but finds itself often unable to communicate about them to one another particularly the parents keeping secrets from the children how that just that doesn't address the problem it doesn't hide the problem it just means the problem comes up again in different ways um and so the i kept them in there because they they had a lot to say about i think the way the book and the world of the book moves and did you always know that you wanted to change perspectives and also um narrative style also language style because i what what struck me most is of course the third chapter where the perspective is completely radically different and you're like really taken off guard and pleasantly surprised once again but then also i think what i realized this style in um in the narration in the last chapter it gets more and more lyrically more and more poetic and more and more open in a sense sort of like a disintegration of the story in itself and i found that very beautiful as well can you tell us a little bit about the the different styles that you used yeah i think that like the number one thing as like a writer to me is that you know eventually you know that people will read your work if you're lucky but you can never think of the reader first you have to be sort of selfish as a writer you have to like please yourself and you have to make sure you're having fun and so there are many reasons that that works for the book but one of the first ones for me as a writer was simply that it it gave me pleasure to change things up and i wanted the sort of tone the style to just reflect the sort of changing emotional states of the characters like i needed to feel like there was an evolution in style as well as in plot and in substance how many people were um looking over your shoulder in a in a sort of like friendship-y way but also like in a professional sense and like was there a publisher who said like that's that's not gonna happen or like you know who who or your your who was your inner circle and did they have an essay at all i mean i didn't show the book to anyone for a very very long time i didn't show the book to anyone until draft like three four or five until i felt like it was done and then i had a couple of friends that i sent it to just to ask basically like is this a thing i don't necessarily want your comments on it but i want you to tell me does it feel like a complete thing and then at that point then i sent it out you know to find an agent and i will say that throughout the publication process i was really really lucky because my neither my editor nor my agent tried to give me sort of they were very respectful they didn't give me i mean they gave me a lot of edits but they didn't give me anything that sort of um i guess discounted my original vision of the book nothing that sort of like undercut it it felt truly like collaborative and supportive and i know that i'm just very lucky in that regard because that isn't an experience that everyone has but i will say for anyone who is like a writer uh yeah protect your work until it's ready to stand on it so it's not fair to your work to let it out too early and invite too many opinions in other actually audience questions comments anyone who wants to say something ask something too shy now maybe then on stage see people moving no no no no okay um but what you just said i mean you can still do it as we were talking i try to look more in this direction um it takes a lot of courage to do that what you say to protect your baby in that sense you know and not to be insecure and not to have other people talk about it where did you take the courage from i mean it's your first novel and it's amazing achievement it's it's absolutely magnificent so many people have pointed out how original how groundbreaking how colossal it really is and first question is like you know were you always aware of that or did it did you become aware of this because people now say it and also what does people talk about it make with you oh that's martha's media what does it do to you sorry yeah um i think that you know it's really funny i the i think i heard the writer lori moore she's an amazing american short story writer once said that like the two qualities any writer must have are they must be an absolute narcissist and they must be like the most like self-doubtful person in the world i think that's true of all writers i know and you really have to toggle between them between them sort of like in the generative state you have to believe sort of that you're writing the best thing in the world otherwise why the hell would anyone complete 80 100 000 words of anything and like spend years of your life on it you have to sort of like believe that to some degree and then the other half has to kick in the very self-critical half has to kick in because otherwise you're unable to edit your work and then it will forever remain sort of like a hot piece of garbage so um i don't even know if that answers your question but yes you always have hopes for your book that are very big and it has been very it's just been like astonishing gratifying to hear to just like hear the world's reception of the book i don't even know how to answer that question it's something i think i'm still answering and still grappling with it's also a mean or a slightly stupid question that i just asked but it's just like you know how do you feel right now that you get so much attention i mean what you're supposed to say um but maybe for us to to uh we know that the book is published in as i said in the very beginning 16 countries 14 languages and growing congratulations on that here with them title v field von diesenhugen escort by the s fischer falak publishing house as i said many times translated beautifully by ivf we want to know what's coming next if there's something to talk about of course a cliche question but why not um so all i will say is that i finished something and it is in many ways the complete opposite of this book like i didn't want to write another historical novel i didn't want to write another novel with children as main characters because it's really really emotionally draining to write children and all their rawness and i do think that like as as a writer the thing i most fear is growing stagnant i just want things to be new i want there to be new challenges um new settings so i'm i'm excited it's fun to sort of move on and like have your artistic self be obsessed with something else could you see that book turned into a film because i saw it many times i saw i thought your the way of describing it is so cinematic but it's also my background could you could you see it as a film where you don't have a say and absolutely so there's a currently like a tv adaptation in the works um and by in the works i mean that like for all of you who aren't in the know these these things take so long and often become nothing so it's like an idea it's a theory but um yeah but i think i'm really excited about not being involved i think like the book to screen adaptations that try to be too faithful to the book are doomed to failure because it's just a completely different medium and so i think i like send it forward forth with all my blessings um hoping that somebody else sort of like uses it as a jumping off point for their own vision you will be here on stage to sign books that you want to have signed please where you must if you come on stage i can't thank you enough for first of all coming being such a great chap on stage for writing this book congratulations once again thanks for giving it to the world everyone who hasn't read it should definitely read it and then buy another copy for their parents or for other family members or friends or whatever you define as family see pam thank you so much for coming thank you thank you all for coming and thank you so much for your reading of the two parts by ivari thank you so much and stay for the last days of the international literature festival thank you so much for coming to this room you

Channel: internationales literaturfestival berlin

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Id: LFBM9mjJWkA

Length: 74min 49sec (4489 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021