In Conversation with Sophia Terazawa
"I believe I'm a ghost..."
Sophia Terazawa is the author of the novel Tetra Nova, as well as two poetry collections, Anon and Winter Phoenix, all published by Deep Vellum. Tetra Nova bends the form of the novel to depict a “postcolonial identity in exile” through the blended voices of the obscure Roman goddess Lua Mater and an American of Vietnamese-Japanese descent.
For most novels I wouldn’t ask this question, but reading Tetra Nova one can’t help but wonder, How did this form come about?
It’s a little bit of mental illness, a little bit of PTSD, and it’s a little bit of me going through a very difficult time of my life when I first started writing it. A lot of my writing process generally comes from a very propulsive place. I don’t plan what I write—I think most artists can attest to this—it just shoots out of me. When I wrote my first poetry collection Winter Phoenix, I was going through a really bad break up and I needed something to tether myself to my mind. The day of my breakup was also my birthday and that same day someone had broken into our place of residence and stolen a bunch of personal things from me—a bluetooth player I loved to play music on, a bunch of cash, my grandmother’s jewelry. I went out and got a simple CD player and the first CD I got for it was Björk’s Vespertine album. I didn’t realize that I was ready for her, I think I was just so captivated by her swan cover and it was on sale at the used CD store so I got it for three dollars. It opened my brain and I listened to Vespertine 24/7 on loop, even when I was sleeping, I just listened to it constantly. As I was listening to it I started feeling like I was being visited by what I later discovered to be the previous life of my mother. My mother is very much still alive, but I dreamt of her ghost. My mother’s ghost came to visit me and she has lots of really terrible stories about being a refugee and one story became real, the story of when she lost all of her teeth on the boat when she was coming to the US. In the vision, my mother as a young woman was showing me her teeth. I remember waking up and starting to write a lot of poetry about that. I wrote it chronologically starting from the letter A to the letter Z. I finished that really fast.
Around that time I had a terrible situationship that was starting with somebody else—I don’t recommend it to anybody—if you get to know me more you realize that you ask me a serious epistemological question and I’m like “I’m gonna talk about the messiness.” [Laughs.] There’s no scholarship, it’s just mess. So I was going through a terrible situationship while I was going through this breakup, and this person happened to be a writer. They had told me about a small (but relatively known in the poetry world) poetry contest that offered a residency in the country of Slovenia. We both applied and then I ended up winning the contest. It was ironic because I didn’t know anything about the poet that the contest was named after, Tomaž Šalamun. I remember the judges panel said something to the effect that they could tell I was a scholar of this famous Slovene poet, and they were so astounded by the way my poetics mapped onto his poetics. It was so embarrassing, so I had to do all this research about Tomaž Šalamun before I went on my residency. During the residency I fell in love again! I fell in love with the city [Ljubljana], with all the people I got to meet, it was a beautiful, platonic, really romantic big love. I ended up in that month writing what became my second collection, Anon. That just burst out of me, it was very propulsive. Throughout this time I also discovered Annie Dillard and Julio Cortázar, and those two writers specifically did what Björk did for me for my poetry. Also Carole Maso, I read Ava, those three authors specifically cracked my brain.
To answer your question about form, I just started from the beginning. I knew that it was from the temple chamber of my heart, and I wrote from start to end. I felt like I was suffocating in the beginning, so I wanted to do something around the wind. I think I wrote it chronologically. I don’t really have a memory of writing it, it was just so fast. From start to finish I was writing my two poetry books Winter Phoenix and then Anon for one month, and then all throughout that I was also writing what I thought were essays at the time. I was just writing them in my notebooks really propulsively, no sense of plot. The book is very much autofiction. I had a talk yesterday with my mom about her being in the book and her reaction was exactly the reaction in the book. We have an interesting relationship about her being my eternal muse.
[Tetra Nova] probably took me a year to write, and then I put it away. For the longest time it lived in my notebooks. Then I moved to Minneapolis during the pandemic, and then I discovered Tetris, which was a bad idea. I was very depressed working three jobs at the time. I was doing live streaming work. I was a telemarketer, so I basically harassed people on the phone for random services. I worked for AmeriCorps as a tutor. I was really burnt out and to cope with it I would play Tetris when I wasn’t working. I became really obsessed with it. How Tetris came to be into Tetra Nova was when I had signed the book deal for my poetry collections, and I basically sent them [Deep Vellum] all the manuscripts I had on my computer. When they expressed interest in Tetra Nova I became terrified. I thought, this is not a novel, this is 400 pages of gibberish with no sense of cohesion. I thought I needed to have a piece of glue and then it clicked for me, that’s what Tetris is. I took what I thought was an essay and I shaved it down like concrete poetry, I made it into blocks, and then I added the scene with the tetrads in the beginning, and then towards the end I circled back to Tetris. But everything else within the sandwich of the book is pretty much untouched. Even the editing process was astounding. I worked with Jill Meyers, who is just wonderful, she took what was a very fuzzy big sheep and sheared the sheep down to be presentable. She really helped with cohesion and points where it became very odd. The original draft of the book was entirely from the perspective of Emi. During the editing process I thought this is too autobiographical, so then I imagined a son figure for Emi. I couldn’t wrap my brain around all the different perspectives, but then I became okay with it.
It’s a book where the reader almost feels as if they are writing it as they read it. I could very much feel your hand behind my eyes writing the words I was reading. Hearing you talk about that realization with Tetris matches the realization the reader has with it, with the way that geometry and numerology work in the text, that aha moment. I wanted to ask you about the numerology of the book, and specifically the number four, which is so pleasingly evasive.
In a lot of East Asian cultures, specifically Japan and China, the character for four is shi. The sound of shi, which is the sound for four (四), is also the same sound for death (死). Character wise the script is different, but the sound is the same. The number four is a very unlucky number. You wouldn’t have a fourth floor in many buildings. If people are moving into an apartment they’d try to avoid the fourth floor. I was thinking so much about the number four and my family—my mother, my father, and my sister—were a unit of four. A big part of my mom’s story was that she always wanted a third child, but it never happened because she wanted to avoid the four unit family. I think a lot about luck and unluckiness, and how some members are considered luckier than others. I’m ruled a lot by numbers. On my mom’s side we follow the Chinese zodiac really closely, so every year is associated with an animal. The idea is when we’re praying or when we’re clapping during a ritual, it has to be a certain number. I don’t always know the exact number, but I find there are always these elements of numbers leading our way of being through the world. As a witch I love tarot and the idea of sacred geometry. I’m so fascinated by the idea that everything almost has its own divine logic to it, whatever you believe divine means. Whether it’s a capital G God or a planetary force that’s throwing us across this universe. I think a lot about the DNA and how, epigenetically, trauma is passed down across generations. It’s all calculable to some extent, but I love the idea that we can blend the incalculable—which is the existential questions of our lives as humans on the planet—with the calculability of a triangle. Geometry was probably my favorite subject in school. I loved measuring circles and triangles. I haven’t psychoanalyzed this but there’s something that gave me really deep pleasure in finding the a squared plus b squared equals c squared. I think if my mind hadn’t broken when I was so young, in an alternative path I would have deeply pursued an intense math.
Tetra Nova very much feels like a geometrist’s book, like an attempt to map out and formulate things that are formless. The whole thing feels like an act of conjuring and sacrifice. I want to go back to the subject of love. You mention your Slovenia trip in another interview, where you were asked, “How do you cope with this feeling of a lack of belonging anywhere?” and you responded, “I feel simultaneously a great overlap and separation with others. I belong to love, and home is where someone loves me.” When I read that, I immediately thought of something your mother said in Tetra Nova, when you ask her, “‘Mama, how did you know that it was love?’” and she answers, “‘Passage of time, simple as that.’” It occurs to me that these two conceptions of love and time govern the book—that if you belong to love and, according to your mother, love is defined by the passage of time, then this book, in its sonic speed run through time and space, is an act of conjuring love. I was wondering if you could speak about love and time.
I think the world would be so healed if in every presidential election, every changing of the guard, it’s like not what do you think about foreign policy, not what do you think about the economy, but what do you think about love and time. [Laughs.] Growing up, my father would always have these strange stories about my birth. One of them is mentioned in the book, about him finding me in a field or finding me in a bamboo cutting. The bamboo cutting story is a story from a deity of the moon. When I was younger my father was deeply spiritual. He practiced a form of Shintoism that I didn’t really understand until I was older. The idea of his belief system was that everything is God and no one is God, or everything is divine and nothing is divine. The sacred and the profane live side by side. He always had a very large distance from earth—what I mean by that is he always placed himself outside of the orbit of our human existence. He strongly believed in the realm of the spirit more than the realm of human consciousness. From a young age he would always have me look for ghosts and demons, very concretely. I know that’s a very unusual thing, most children don’t grow up being ghost hunters or being attuned to that. So I was always tuned not just into the supernatural but the hypernatural. A thunderstorm meant that the gods were descending, or a rain storm meant the god was hitting a drum, so every single moment became so imbued in a sense that the divine and the human were tied together. And then we bring my mom into that. She calls herself a funeral Buddhist, which means that she practices her religion when someone is dying. She only goes to the temple if there is sadness in the family. She strongly believes in reincarnation and karma. A few days after I was born—it’s a common syndrome for East Asian babies—my whole body was covered in purple. I looked like I was bruised from head to toe. It wasn’t painful, I didn’t show any signs of distress, but my mom said that it was a sign that in a past life I went through some immense trauma, or I must have died very violently, and so my passage into this world was violent. Put that on top of my father’s stories about me not being his child but being a deity or spirit sent from another plane, that kind of solidified from a young age my understanding of my relationship with my parents. I’m not necessarily something that they created, but I just happened to land in their orbit.
So how does that relate to love and time… I do believe that I was put on this planet to love. I love so deeply but I’m also full of immense rage. I think the two go hand in hand. I’m very connected with my past lives. My mom certainly made a big impression on past lives. I was obsessed with dying from a young age, not in a suicidal way, but I was really excited to know what it was like to die. I remember having parent teacher conferences in first and second grade where the teachers would be very concerned about my mental well being because while the kids were doing their recess I would be out in the field lying on the ground pretending to be dead. Playing dead was my favorite activity, I loved staging my death. They were very worried about me. When I turned fifteen I went through another death cycle. I believe that a part of me was dying, I don’t know if it was an ego death or spiritual death, but I felt a whole death. My whole personality changed, my body changed, my way of seeing and speaking, everything changed. I’m in the year of the snake, so my mother wasn’t surprised by that, she said that it was classic of a snake to die every seven years. Around then I would start having visions of my past life. I had two very distinct visions, and they mostly revolved around love. As a kid I would have visions of how people would die, and I would express them to my mother and it would make her very upset, because not only would they come true, it’s just generally something you don’t want to hear about. I predicted my grandmother’s death and others in the family. Specifically, I knew when it was going to come and how it would happen. It translated into love, and so with people I was close to, I’d have visions not necessarily of how they would die but how something in the relationship would die. The significant relationship I told you about, when we first got together I started having visions of an execution, and the execution was that I was set on fire and I was burned at the stake. So in my mind I mapped onto this feeling that perhaps I was a witch in a past life and I was burned at the stake. But then I started realizing that that story maps onto my grandfather’s story, who died really horrifically with my grandmother in a car. They were set on fire, but my grandmother survived. Somehow she wasn’t burned but she had her legs shattered. The story is very confusing because I don’t know what’s real or not. According to my mother it was just an accident, but it doesn’t make sense how my grandmother made it out alive, no burns on her skin, just her knees shattered, and then my grandfather was burnt to a crisp, but they were both in the same car. I was always struck by that image of the immolation, and then I was struck by the image of my mother’s story of the burning monk, and the story of her seeing on the news the Quaker self-immolating. All of these things were mapping onto me and it's almost like these moments of intense trauma and shock were also—I don’t know if for my grandparents but certainly for the burning monks and for the Quaker and the teacher in Vietnam who set themselves on fire—those were the ultimate acts of love. It was a love not just for their people but a love of humanity, to shock the heart of a collective world to such an extent that people would wake up. That image goes across time, and it’s an image that I can feel very strongly.
This all leads me to the question of ghosts. When I first sat down to write these questions, the first one that came out was “Do you believe in ghosts?” But I sat with it for a bit and thought, this book is a ghost, it is filled with ghosts, so the question eventually became (I was going to end with it but you led me there first) “How do you conceive of ghosts? How do you live with them?”
I believe I’m a ghost. I know for a fact my mother is a ghost, even though she is physically of this world, alive, she has all of these stories of near death experiences—on the boat, with her teeth falling out, with the trauma of the pirates, with seeing people die on the boat. I wrote in a trauma about a mother and a baby, and I remember being so shocked when I heard that story that I was confused whether that was my mother’s story or a story she saw happen to somebody else, and at this point it actually doesn’t matter if the trauma of a mother and her baby was my mother or somebody else. I’ll also answer in another way: I had dropped out of school between 9th grade and 10th grade. I was going through intense psychic crises, I felt like I was dying and I remember having significant moments where in the middle of class I knew I was dying, so I would go lie on the floor and think this is it, I’m dying. I wasn’t afraid, I just felt a surrender to it, and naturally people could see it was a mental health crisis and so I just stopped going to school. Around that time my mother had taken me to Vietnam with my sister, around the time my parents had separated, so it was just my mom, my sister, and myself. We went to Vietnam and it became even more apparent there that I wasn’t just going through a mental health crisis, I was going through a psychic upheaval. Luckily in the culture of Vietnam, the sense of a psychic sickness is just as important as a mental sickness. The concept of the hungry ghost is really prevalent in Vietnam. A hungry ghost is the spirit of somebody who can’t pass on to heaven or they can’t reincarnate because the trauma of their death was so shocking or so significant that they don’t recognize that they’re dead, they actually think that they’re still alive. They’re very hungry for life. It’s very understandable that in Vietnamese culture the hungry ghost is so prevalent because of the shocking nature of so many deaths. I remember specifically I would be in Vietnam and I would see spirits everywhere, and it goes back to my father’s—for lack of a better word—training of me. I don’t want to generalize to all children, but I strongly believe that every human has the capacity to see the other side, whether or not we believe in the literal ghost, but to see the unknown. But as we start to develop language and individuation and consciousness there’s almost a sense that we start to shut that off for ourselves so that we can function. Cats are a great example, I think they see things we don’t see when they’re just staring at the wall or staring at the corner, they see something. I wonder if cats could talk, they might not be able to see the other side—I think the language is what’s getting in the way. I remember I became very catatonic around that time, I stopped speaking and I would just see so much. I had an aunt, a sister of my mother, who is very superstitious. My mother, by the way, believes in ghosts, but she doesn’t believe in engaging with them. My aunt identified me as perhaps somebody who had the Sight and her assessment was that I needed to find a guide or a way to channel it in a healthy way or else it would destroy me. She recommended another psychic that I would go see. I went to go see the psychic with my mom, who doesn’t believe in this stuff, who thinks it’s backwards and archaic. My understanding of Vietnamese is so limited, so my mom posed as a translator. My mom and I look very different, I look more like my dad, so my mom thought she could get away with acting like I was a tourist from Japan and she would be a translator. So we went to this psychic and it was like—Have you seen The Matrix? It was just a person in her apron sitting in a kitchen. We saw the oracle. We sat down and right away she looked at me and both of my shoulders and said, “Oh, I see your two brothers, I see your two dead brothers.” And then she looks at my mother and says, “These are your sons, why have you not told your daughter about these sons?” And my mom got so upset, she starts crying and then she tells me then and there that she had a boy before me and a boy after me. I think I knew about the boy after me because I know that my mom had a miscarriage sometime after me, but I didn’t know about this boy child before me. The psychic looks at me and says because I have a connection to the other side these boy children never went to the other side, they just decided to hang out with me, so they mostly pass between worlds but I’m their lighthouse, and they sit on both of my shoulders. All of a sudden it just made so much sense because I remember from a young age it always felt like I had two presences, two guardians. I felt like I was always being followed, and I was always fearful of it. But the moment this psychic named these two male presences, as she described them, and my mother is falling apart, it became really apparent that I can’t turn away from this. I’m almost like a chariot to these two brothers. My connection with ghosts is not, “Oh, I’m here to seek them out,” I just think that I already live with them. Whether it’s a literal ghost or the ghost of history or the ghost of my mother’s sorrows. And in some ways I think I’m a ghost, too. I’m really grateful you mentioned at the start of our chat about never feeling of one world or the other, you’re kind of in between—wait, but isn’t that a kind of ghost? Because a ghost is someone who is neither in the world of the living and neither in the world of the dead, you’re just constantly in between.
Tetra Nova itself is an enactment of traversing such borders, be they between reality and the spectral, nations, bodies. The wedding of the spiritual and the political that you enact here through border crossing is really essential. In one of my favorite quotes from the book you write about going to the U.S./Mexico border and telling your mother that this is your history, too. You write, “I always felt the pull to search for her between the cracks of other borders and their current points of entry, but I did not know, rather, I did not have the language yet to tell her what I meant when I said that this was an intersecting history, and what we made of it reflects upon our past as it informs our present.” Through all of this, your mother’s single one-word question of “why” stands as a border wall between her memories and, as you say, the words that seek their asylum. Where do you now stand in your own relationship to that wall and that question of why?
My only answer to why is I don’t know. I think the moment I truly answer why, I might have reached the border. I find that the more I try to look for the answer, the more questions come up for me. The classic diasporic journey is generally the idea of returning to one’s homeland, but I think so much about exile and how impossible that is. There is no true return. The fact of my parent’s marriage means that there would never be a true return. They’re both American citizens now. It would have been different if my father had married a Japanese woman, it might have been different if my mother had married somebody who is Vietnamese. Their marriage is interesting, too, they got married in a Presbyterian church even though neither of them have any Christian background. I think they needed to marry somewhere that was in the neutral ground.
I think I’m always at the border. You mentioned the border between spirit and the profane. I think about the borders between languages, too. Being able to speak about something and not speak about something. My mother is okay in English but she’s not perfectly fluent and I don’t recognize her sense of disfluency in English until I see her interact with other English speakers. Her English I understand because I grew up with it, so I know the nuances of it, but when she speaks with other people I can see there is a clear wall and I recognize that that’s where I live with my mother. I’m in that language space. I tried to learn Vietnamese and it completely failed for me because I have so much sadness from when I was a child of my mother being against me learning Vietnamese for lots of reasons around her wanting me to be more Japanese or more close to my father, or to be more American. But then as I’m older, my mother says, without the intention to hurt me, that I’m not her daughter or not somebody that she recognizes. I’ve never been somebody she recognizes, it’s almost like since I was a kid she was always—kind of like me with my books—stunned that I existed, and always treated me with this stunned quality. It goes back to the ghost, I always felt that I stood for something for my mother, but I didn’t necessarily stand as her child, I represented something else. That’s what a border is, a border is something that stands for something, and in some ways, as her child, I’m the reason why my mother exists in this world. My mother always wanted to have children, but when I asked her why she doesn’t have an answer for that either. I realize that I’m the margin around which my mother exists. Which is both nice, because in some ways it gives me a purpose, but also sad because there is always going to be the sense that my mother will never truly see me and I’ll never truly see my mother because we have our roles to play.
I’m deeply moved hearing you speak about the liminalities of language. I heavily relate to that language space you describe in my own relationship to Spanish. In another interview you mention your mother feeling unnerved when you spoke to her in Vietnamese, and that it now acts as a language between you and god. Alongside this, you write about English as the demilitarized zone in which your parents operated.
My parents are back together. That’s how they fell in love. When my mother came to this country she didn’t know anything, she knew “Thank you,” and she knew how to say “My name is,” but she didn’t know any other English. She didn’t want to be here and really resented being here. She said the reason why she was so upset being here was because she felt like she got catfished, in that in Vietnam she would watch American movies and would see all these glamorous, attractive people in the movies, so she had this impression that everyone was super hot. And then she came to America and said everyone she saw was just so ugly. [Laughs.] She said the people were ugly, the language was ugly, and she was in Michigan too so it was cold. She just hated it! So she didn’t really make any effort to learn English. She just had no desire to live here. Ultimately, she resettled in Texas with some of her kin, and then her and my father met. She didn’t know much English, but because she was so over everything—my mom has a very feisty attitude—I think my dad was just really enchanted by her. It was almost like he couldn’t identify why he was so drawn to her. She said so much without saying anything. Their courtship was very quiet, and my dad says he’s so shocked now. My mom loves to talk, even if you don’t understand what she’s saying she’ll just talk and talk about anything. She’ll mix languages. But in the beginning it was a lot of them communicating in gestures. In some ways not only English but maybe the act of the gesture was demilitarized.
Have you written in Vietnamese or Japanese?
I went to Japanese school growing up, so every Saturday I went to a school that kept up with the Japanese curriculum. I did all the subjects I was doing in American schools but in Japanese. Again, I excelled in math—I think that’s why I liked math so much, because I was equally good in math across both languages. It didn’t need a language, you just need to understand the art of the number. Japanese literature I really suffered in, because I only had a rudimentary understanding of Japanese. I spoke English at home and sometimes, with my father, Japanese, but not very well. I remember writing poems in Japanese and feeling affirmed at a young age that the poems were really good. I think it was only because my grammar was so bad and my vocabulary was so bad that I was forced in the poem to make mistakes that were otherwise seen as very creative or very metaphorical. I’ve been writing in Japanese a little bit, sometimes it’ll weave into my writing. I don’t know how you’ve been practicing your Spanish, but sometimes I’ll go to Duolingo. When I practice Vietnamese I’ll have it open on my notebook, or I’ll try to find a way to weave it into my poetry, but it’s more to practice the language, to get it to go into the music of the English. I do like to sing a lot, so I do privately sing Vietnamese karaoke. Otherwise when I’m in Vietnamese spaces I’m usually very quiet.
There’s so much research on when children are in the womb—the classic image of playing Mozart on the belly and somehow it affects the amniotic fluid, the vibrations of it, and I think about my mother surrounded by relatives when she was pregnant with me. Even from a young age I remember having lots of aunts and uncles over, going to lots of Vietnamese functions, so Vietnamese became more of an amniotic sac for me. I’m so familiar in those spaces even though I don’t understand much of it. It’s not just a relationship with God because that implies a sense that one can speak back to another. It’s almost like a relationship with the womb, that I’m back on the mothership so to speak, or I’m back in the sac before my eyes have opened, before my ears have opened.
It’s hard to know what’s the first language and what’s the second language, because growing up it was both Japanese and English, but then I was just surrounded by Vietnamese.
When I pull any thread of this book, or of you as a writer, it feels like all the other threads get pulled along with it, so I don’t feel bad about jumping around too much, but I’d like to talk about betrayal. In one of the early citations you write, “Your mother owns one photograph that proves she was a refugee. Do not include it in your manuscript of insurrection.” And a few lines later, “Betray her trust. Include the photo anyways.” I was struck upon reading that passage and turning the page, facing the cropped image of your mother’s eyes looking at me—I’ve never felt more complicit as a reader with the stakes of the text. It’s that sense I described earlier of feeling you writing the novel right behind my eyes. Can you speak about complicity and betrayal?
Betrayal is such a strong theme for me. I think about treason all the time. My parents, when they married my dad was practically disowned. He was supposed to have a somewhat loose arranged marriage to someone else his parents picked out. The history of Japan and Vietnam, much like the relationship between Japan and a lot of other Asian countries, is very fraught because of colonialism and the sense of power and oppression the Japanese imperial army has put onto other Asian nations. My father grew up in a military family, everyone on his paternal side were military. After the war, with the dissolving of the Japanese army my grandfather was the last person to serve, so my father was the first in the line to not have gone into that path. He was the only son of that family, a very privileged kid, because of that imperial legacy there was a lot of money in the family. There was this expectation that my father would uphold this family legacy that he had no interest in. Despite a lot of his flaws that I hopefully gave a lot of complexity to in the book, despite the ways he can be a harmful person, I do appreciate his strong sense of justice. From a young age he was sensitive to a lot of injustices in the world. He was a pacifist, anti-war, discovered Bob Dylan at a very young age and knew that he wanted to come to America. Unlike my mother, my dad knew that he wanted to live in America because he wanted to meet Bob Dylan and Seeger and go to Woodstock. He wanted to become a hippie, that was his goal in life, much to the chagrin of his parents who thought this was a phase and that he would grow up to be a man, but he never did. He went to the US and learned about transistor radios, how to build them, and that became his passion. The fact that he married my mom was such a big betrayal to his parents because not only was he going against their wishes but he was spitting on this legacy they had planned out for him.
On my mother’s side, betrayal is such a hard topic. The sad thing about colonialism is not really the pain that happens between the colonizer and the colonized, the actual tragedy of it is when the colonized start to oppress each other. The colonizer leaves and the country continues to fall apart. That was very much the story of my mother’s side. She had two mothers—my grandfather had an arranged marriage with my grandmother and a love marriage, and he had eight kids in both of those marriages at the same time. During the war, most of the children on the arranged marriage side got to leave Vietnam, and everyone on the love marriage side were forced to stay. My mother has all these stories about family members turning on each other, neighbors turning against neighbors, people outing each other. At the university my mother was in her first or second year as an economics student—I wonder if that’s where I picked up math as well, because my mom loves numbers and adding things up, she loves trends and bar graphs—she has memories of everyone being in a state of fear of being outed. I wrote in Lit Hub about when I went back to Vietnam most recently, about an uncle who outed my mother. My mother was the biggest traitor because she was a really good communist during all the school assemblies. She volunteered to be head communist whatever of her grade, but secretly she was a chicken, she was just a very good actor who was dynamic and charming. She would be all, “Uncle Ho, Ho Chi Minh, yeah!” but behind closed doors she couldn’t care less. She was very apolitical, versus some aunts of mine who were very political and would always butt heads with her. Now my mom is here and is very “Yay America!” in some ways, but I recognize I’m not to condemn her because that’s her survival. She was the youngest of 16 kids, she considered herself very ugly, in an Asian household to be the last of 16 kids you are the lowest of the low in terms of priority. She had to be really scrappy and adaptable. I feel for her being a traitor is more just being a survivor. So much of what I’m interested in is shape shifting, one has to shape shift constantly to soften oneself so that they can slip out at the right time. My mom has these memories at the refugee camp where she saw people hardened, and the people who often hardened were the people who died first. My mom always remained very fluid, she’s silly, she’s a jokester. I think so much of being a jokester is also being a traitor. A punchline is the ultimate treason. You lull somebody into thinking one thing and then you say oh, just kidding. You just betrayed somebody. Except, you know, in one instance we laugh and in another instance we kill each other. But really it’s the same, everything is one big punch line.
Does your mother sense your writing as a form of betrayal in the same way you do?
I think about this so much and I start to recognize that I think about this so much more than my mother does. The relationship I have with writing is very different from my mother’s. My mother’s side, we don’t have as many instances of artists. I have memories of my mother talking about artists in Vietnam who were the first ones to be executed or jailed or disappeared, so her conception of art is that it’s a dangerous thing. She couldn’t separate art from protest, to be an artist was to be somebody who protested. She had one sister who was a singer who would sing in protests. In other contexts art can be separated from protest—I oftentimes hear from people that they’re shocked when the art becomes a protest, like that becomes the scandalous thing. But to come from my mom it’s interesting, she sees it backwards. She only asks me why I write about her, but she’s very cute about it. You know that Mariah Carey song, “Why are you so obsessed with me?” My mom is like “Sophia, why are you so obsessed with me?” And then she’ll giggle and ask “What am I wearing in the story?” So I tried to capture that sense in the book. She’ll tease me about being so obsessed with her, like “Can’t you write about anything else or am I just that fabulous that all you can do is write about me?” So I never get the sense that she feels shocked. I will say with this photo of the eyes, I did include it once in a chapbook and my mom became upset, not because I used that photo or invoked her, but she said that she felt really ugly. That was at the refugee camp and she was very hungry, and she said she didn’t feel like she was put together. She offered me wedding photos and in my mind it’s like, thank you but that doesn’t work for the context of the book. She does want to be written about, because from when I was young she knew that my job was to carry her story. She would always tell me stories, always tell me to listen, and she would say the same stories over and over again. My job was to be someone who remembered for her, the margin, the container for her. It was the natural step that I wrote about it, because then it helps me to put it into a text. She’s surprisingly not upset about me writing these stories because I think she recognizes that this is what she’s been asking of me all this time. My father, ironically, is one of my biggest champions, even if I really go into harsh difficult things. We’ve had reckonings of our own, we’ve had conversations about his pain and how his pain was passed down to me. I find that the book becomes symbolic, a family work, really. Thank you for that question, I didn’t really recognize that until now.
I find that that generation of immigrants to America has such a nonchalance about the past. People who are the children of immigrants, we’re often a little shaken by that nonchalance and don’t know what to do with it. It goes back to the idea of the border, with the second generation being stuck in its state of in-betweenness as opposed to the first generation that crossed over and that’s it, it’s past tense, it happened. Whereas for the second generation it's present and active.
There’s a sense of movement, too. My mother was born in ‘56 and her life story has always been about how do I move forward, while I’m always looking back. It’s like one has to look forward while the other looks back. It also calls to mind languages, how the grammatical structure of the language changes our relationship to the past. In Vietnamese there is no past or future tense, so everything in Vietnamese is in the present. There’s also no subjunctive tense, which means there’s no speculation. French has three of them, which is why French tends to be very good for philosophy because you can existentualize in three different tenses. In English you can only existentualize in one tense. But in Vietnamese you can’t do that, there’s no future or past, even linguistically you can’t. I think that’s also why my mom accepts my work so much. She’s always been very accepting of things, and I think that’s how she conceptualizes her language around me.
I find that much of the power of your writing stems from earnestness. I notice with diasporic writers of my own generation and younger a heavy aversion and cynicism towards earnestness. I can think of many diasporic writers and novels of the past few years that have been poorly received by diasporic writers of my own generation because their earnestness is considered to be in poor taste or regressive. As a professor of creative writing, have you observed this with your students?
I don’t say this as a humble brag—I actually see this as a personal flaw—but “earnest” and “genuine” are the two most common words I hear about myself from students and friends. It makes me sad because aren’t we all trying to be genuine? What makes me more genuine than other people? With the students there is a strong sense of not wanting to embarrass themselves. I have this ritual where at the start of every class I have them offer a song to play, and I find it gets harder and harder every year because they’re so afraid of their song choice being judged. I find that student's reactions to me have tended to change over time. I get very different reactions from students. I’m not a natural teacher, I’m very shy and self-conscious, but when I’m on stage or teaching it becomes a performance art and I become a big caricature of myself—I’m sure most teachers feel this way about themselves. But even with that, the students say they appreciate how honest it feels. I wonder if that has something to do with the internet. I quit the internet—that makes it sound like a drug—my last sip of the internet was after the breakup, so probably 2017-2018. I deleted my Facebook and made a conscious effort since then to stop being online. It’s changed my brain a lot. For a short period of time when I was a Telemarketer I had a LinkedIn for about six months and it felt awful. Just being in a space of the feed, the feed is such an interesting world to sit in, but I really could feel my brain shift when I was on the feed. Luckily I quit my sales job so I quit the Linkedin, and then my brain went back to being what it was before. And I don’t want to sound like I’m condemning the internet, because of how it’s connected so many people and communities and it’s how we learn about what’s going on in the world, we’re more informed, it’s just for me personally it probably goes back to ghosts. I already see so much in my waking life, I’m already plugged into three other dimensions on my own, so to then have another dimension on top of it—my little tiny brain would short circuit.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Panda—
Do you want to meet him? He’s been waiting, but I told him: “Don’t have expectations, only if Joseph brings you up naturally.” One second! [Runs off camera. Returns with Panda a moment later. Panda is wearing pajamas.]
If Panda has ever wanted to speak on anything or have a space in which to speak, feel free!
He is giving me a really dramatic look right now. I think he got really shy.
Panda is so essential to this book, it would not be what it is without him. His entrance is such a watershed moment. It’s like Panda is at the border doing some obscure thing to it: I don’t know if he’s opening the border or tearing it down or putting up new borders, or taking us off the map entirely.
Do you see his eyes are watering up? He’s on the verge of tears. [On camera, indeed, Panda is on the verge of tears.] You’re going to make him cry. He’s ironically, for me, the thing that makes the book most human. It reminds me of Bertolt Brecht who says (I’m misquoting) “Even in dark times there will be singing, and even amidst the dark times the singing will be about the dark times.” I think that’s what Panda is—Panda represents the singing. At any time he can just burst into dancing and shake his little inappropriate hips. That’s his role. For me, a mark of a good heart is people who are kind about Panda. Because I recognize the conceit of it is very unhinged. Maybe it goes back to my dad’s belief system, in animism everything has its own spirit. When you worship that object enough or you give it its dedication or honor enough, that spirit forms a good relationship with your spirit. I’ve always had a really strong relationship with objects, especially stuffed animals. I remember when Everything Everywhere All at Once came out, I thought wait, that's my childhood, sticking googly eyes on everything. During the editing process, when that movie came out, I had to go through with Jill and take out all the instances where I had googly eyes on things because I didn’t want to seem like I was copying the movie. It felt very synchronous and funny that we both were thinking about the googly eyes on everything.
How has your relationship to Tetra Nova evolved since its release?
I have a friend who recently had a baby, and she was really stunned that after a few days the baby seemed to expand five times bigger than it was. It kind of feels like that. My feelings around it have swelled. I feel kind of fragmented. With every book that comes out for me I tend to forget that it comes out. I haven’t seen the show I Didn’t Know I was Pregnant., but I know the concept of it: the person is pregnant but doesn’t know it, and then somehow they give birth in a bathroom stall of a gas station, the baby just plops out. That’s kind of how it is for me. I ran a workshop a few days before the book came out and it was my first time encountering the book. It shocked me so much to see it in person that I became very incoherent. I don’t know how other people do it.