Reclaiming the Loss: Saeed Jones Talks with Jade Chang

JC: Absolutely. Yes. But there are a lot of people very much like Charles Wang, whose stories are never told. This is not the kind of person who we see in literature, in movies, on TV, and I knew that I wanted to tell that kind of story. I knew I wanted to tell a very over-the-top, exciting story that would feel like it was a new take on the immigrant novel.
SJ: You have to hear Charles’s voice. Because I think if you’ve already read the book, or even just looked at the first paragraph, he’s a character that comes at you with the full force of history. Yet, he’s absolutely human, and that was the first thing that kind of grabbed me by the collar. Would you read the first section?
JC: OK. I’m not going to set it up at all, because we’re right at the very beginning. But I will tell you that it begins in Bel-Air, California:
Charles Wang was mad at America.
Actually, Charles Wang was mad at history.

If the death-bent Japanese had never invaded China, if a million — a billion — misguided students and serfs had never idolized a balding academic who parroted Russian madmen and couldn’t pay for his promises, then Charles wouldn’t be standing here, staring out the window of his beloved Bel-Air home, waiting for those calculating assholes from the bank — the bank that had once gotten on its Italianate-marble knees and kissed his ass — to come over and repossess his life.
Without history, he wouldn’t be here at all.

He’d be there, living out his unseen birthright on his family’s ancestral acres, a pampered prince in silk robes, writing naughty, brilliant poems, teasing servant girls, collecting tithes from his peasants, and making them thankful by leaving their tattered households with just enough grain to squeeze out more hungry babies.

Instead, the world that should have been his fell apart, and the great belly of Asia tumbled and roiled with a noxious foreign indigestion that spewed him out, bouncing him, hard, on the tropical joke of Taiwan and then, when he popped right back up, belching him all the way across the vast Pacific Ocean and smearing him onto this, this faceless green country full of grasping newcomers, right alongside his unclaimed countrymen: the poor, illiterate, ball-scratching half men from Canton and Fujian, whose highest dreams were a cook’s apron and a back-alley, back-door fuck.

Oh, he shouldn’t have been vulgar.

Charles Wang shouldn’t even know about the things that happen on dirt-packed floors and under stained sheets. Centuries of illustrious ancestors, scholars and statesmen and gentlemen farmers all, had bred him for fragrant teas unfurling in fresh springwater, for calligraphy brushes of white wolf hair dipped in black deer-glue ink, for lighthearted games of chance played among true friends.

Not this. No, not this. Not for him bastardized Peking duck eaten next to a tableful of wannabe rappers and their short, cubby, colored-contact-wearing Filipino girlfriends at Mr. Chow. Not for him shoulder-to-shoulder art openings where he sweated through the collar of his paper-thin cashmere sweater and started at some sawed-in-half animal floating in formaldehyde whose guts didn’t even have the courtesy to leak; not for him white women who wore silver chopsticks in their hair and smiled at him for approval. Nothing, nothing in his long lineage had prepared for the Western worship of the Dalai Lama and pop stars wearing jade prayer beads and everyone drinking goddamn boba chai.

He shouldn’t be here at all. Never should have set a single unbound foot on the New World. There was no arguing it. History had started fucking Charles Wang, and America had finished the job.
SJ: Wow! So I immediately have a few thoughts — and let me know if you agree. In a moment of absolute crisis, your family fortune is about to be destroyed because of the financial crisis of 2008 — who has the presence of mind to notice the Italian marble? The details are so rich, and you immediately get a sense that father is a force of nature. Which then brings us to the next question. What would it be like for this person to be your father?
JC: Good question. So it’s through the three kids that we figure that out. I wanted to look at it from a bunch of different angles.
So the oldest daughter is Saina. She is an artist. She was very successful, and then has recently retreated from New York City in disgrace. I think she is probably the one who is most similar to her father. She has that same kind of desire for bigness, that same drive, that same desire to really kind of be part of the larger story and say something, and make some kind of mark.
Then there is the middle son, Andrew, who I have a real soft spot for. He’s in college. He is holding out for true love, but he’s also a wannabe stand-up comic — there’s a few stand-up comedy sets for him. He wants a more traditional kind of dad —  the kind of dad who is going to play softball with him. But Charles happens to be the kind of dad who is going to introduce him to some models and ask him if he’s gotten with them yet — which is not what Andrew is looking for.
SJ: One thing about Charles is  that he thinks the point of America was to have sex and learn how to play the guitar. He’s not pressuring his kids in the way I think even the kids expect.
JC: Yeah, exactly.
SJ: How did you get to that point? Was he always going to have that relationship with them?
JC: Then there’s the youngest daughter, Grace.
SJ: She’s very angry.
JC: She feels things very deeply, yes. She is currently in high school. She gets pulled out of her boarding school to go on this cross-country road trip with her family.
But I think part of it is that there are so many different ways to be a person. Right? There are so many different ways to be a parent. There are so many different ways to be an immigrant or a person of color in America. And this father . . . I’ve seen guys like that. I’ve seen kids who have grown up in families like that. And yeah, there is part of me that is like, “What is up with this group?” But that’s what made it a story that I wanted to tell. For me, things are so much more exciting if they’re just way over the top.
SJ: Yeah, and complicated. What’s cool is that when we see people like Charles or Andrew or Grace or Saina, we see only one side of them. Right? Because often, I think, we see characters either as individuals out in the world, and in romance and in relationship and building their own lives, or we see them in the context of their own family. Often we don’t get to see both sides forced together in such a way. Was that a challenge to write it in that way, where we get to see the facets?
JC: That’s interesting. I don’t know that I had really thought about it that much. But I do think that I always want fiction to show everything. I want to see people in all parts of their lives, but I also want to see them eating. I want to see them having sex. I want to see them taking showers. There are no showers in here — next book, there will definitely be some bathroom time.
SJ: It’s important to leave your options open.
JC: It’s important. It’s part of life. But you know, that I think that I really wanted to tell a story that went into every part of somebody’s life. I think often in books that kind of like have a glitzy fun side, we often don’t see the family.
SJ: Right. With a character like Grace, who is very precocious, she’s aggressive, she says she knows what she wants even if she maybe doesn’t always. Often that kind of character, it’s really fun, and great to see her at school by herself, kind of tearing into her roommate, or colorizing suicide. But then, when we have to see that same child in the context of her family, and whether that’s listening to the siblings on the phone or talking to her dad , it’s another facet to the diamond.
JC:  Exactly. Also, we know that each person is so many layers. Right? You know that when you guys go home and you’re with your families, the way that you relate to them is totally different than I think maybe when you relate to a friend, or someone you have a crush on, or someone who you’re trying to impress in the work world. I remember the first time that I really kind of got this, it was my first job out of college. I was an intern at the L.A. Weekly, and it was this very alternative newsweekly, and one of the people who worked there was a performer named Vaginal Davis.
SJ: Oh, that’s why you couldn’t remember what her job title was.
JC: Right. I only remember her name. Another person who worked there was a performer who had recently gotten into some serious trouble with the NEA, named Ron Athey. I remember one day I was out in the parking lot. It was like a mandatory valet system. I was out in the parking lot, and I looked at the kind of panel of keys, and I saw this one set of keys that kind of looked like mine. It had a Ralph’s Club card on it. (Ralph’s is one of the supermarkets in Los Angeles.) It was Ron Athey, like, renegade performer, who of course also wants to save money at Ralph’s.  That moment still sticks out in my mind so clearly.
SJ: No one is any one thing.
JC: Yeah, no one is any one thing. Everyone is sort of very normal, day-to-day prosaic things, and also, every kind of crazy kind of thing they can come up with as well.
SJ:  Can you talk about the structure?Some of the sections are even just a page or two long, and then we’re seeing another perspective. We’re all very postmodern here, but it doesn’t feel like we’re being jostled about. It’s so interesting. We’re getting an individual feel as we’re getting the whole family. That seems really complicated and hard to pull off. How did you do that?
JC: I’m not sure. I worked on this book for a really long time. That’s kind of how.
The book is told from alternating points of view. Each of the five family members, you see chapters told entirely in their voice. Writing in close-third like that, where it’s third-person but you’re essentially seeing the world from their eyes — I really enjoy that. I like that sense of being able to both have that omniscience of knowing everything that’s happening in their world, and yet also seeing something through a very particular specific set of eyes.
SJ: Absolutely. One of the first times I noticed it was with Grace, for example. She’s sharp and cutting and sassy, and then right at the end there’s a line in third person where you see a moment of her admitting . . . where maybe she wouldn’t have said it herself, but the perspective allows her to see that. She’s still trying to figure out what happened in her own family with her mother. I thought that was really powerful, because, of course, she’s really tough — she’s not just going to come out and say that.
JC: Yeah, exactly. I think you can also show more empathy for your characters than your characters might necessarily have for themselves.
SJ: Because you love these characters. Did you have fun writing one kid more than the other?
JC: You know, I think that definitely I really enjoyed writing Andrew, who is the wannabe stand-up comic. Because I wrote two stand-up sets for him, and that was really fun to research. I took an improv class.
SJ: Really? Oh, that’s so great.
JC: I did. Yeah. You know, half of the people under forty in Los Angeles have probably also taken improv classes.
SJ: Touché.
JC: It’s not that unusual. But I wanted to know what it felt like to stand up in front of a room full of people and try to make them laugh . . . and the kind of fear that someone might feel when they can’t. So researching him was so fun. He also has this sweetness that I really feel for.
SJ: Did you do particular research for Saina, since she’s an artist?
JC: For a long time, I worked as an arts journalist. So for her, she definitely helped me fulfill my secret dream of being a conceptual artist, in that I got to come up with a bunch of different art projects for her that she did. But in terms of special research, I think I had gotten so much of that. I got to be immersed in the art world just in that job.
This book is a way to play out all the other jobs that I kind of wish I had. I get to, like, design things, do stand-up . . .
SJ: Obviously, when life comes hurtling at people, the way people respond is fascinating and illuminating.  At one point, all the kids find out what their trust fund would have been, what they just lost, and it’s been abstract. So it’s interesting that his response to this disaster is: We are going to gather all of our family together, we’re going to get into a station wagon . . .
JC: A Mercedes station wagon.
SJ: Of course. You lose everything, but not everything. And do a road trip across the country (which you could literally not pay me to do with my family under the best of financial circumstances), go live with our daughter, and then do what?
JC: And then, try to reclaim the land that the Communists took from his family in China.
SJ: An especially important part of that amazing opening paragraph. How did you come up with the way that Charles was going to both respond to disaster and chart a course forward?
JC: People often ask me if this book is based on real life at all or if any of it is true. None of it is true except for the Wangs’ family story. Both of my parents are from parents who had owned a lot of land in China for generations, and then, because of World War II, the rise of Communism, the Chinese Civil War, they were essentially chased out of China, and there are all kinds of harrowing stories of boats taken under cover of night, and running down roads while Japanese warplanes fired at them.
So both sides of my family fled to Taiwan, and my parents both grew up in Taiwan. They grew up with their parents always talking about the land that we lost, the land in China — we need to go back and reclaim that land in China. I think that loss and that desire definitely filtered down to them. Although to me, it doesn’t seem like a real thing, I think that the mythology of it feels very potent to me. So in thinking about Charles’s drive…
SJ: Which is this kind of epic, Herculean . . .
JC: Yes, this quest, his impossible quest. Because the Communist government is never going to say, “Here you go. Sorry, dude. We didn’t mean to take all this.” So that was, in a way, something that’s always been with me.
SJ: You’ve mentioned that part of the appeal of  writing this book was that you get to explore the different professions and lives that you’ve always been curious about. Were there any particular moments maybe in the book that surprised you?
JC: I’m a very forgetful person. There are parts of the book that occasionally — and this is true — I don’t necessarily remember having written.
SJ: In writing you have a sudden idea in a character, you go, “Oh, this is how the character is going to react,” and then you go, “Whoa, I didn’t know Charles would do that or Grace would feel that way.”
JC: Honestly, I don’t think so. Some writers really kind of like to talk about the characters speaking to them from on high. And that is a perfectly valid way to feel and to write. It does not happen to be the way that I feel or write. I am the master of these people. I created them. I think what they do doesn’t surprise me in that way. I outline pretty extensively, and I do know what’s going to happen, but I don’t know how I’m necessarily going to get from one point to another.
SJ: It makes sense. Because they are all such strong personalities. They were definitely very much rooted in what they thought was their lives and their futures before everything changed.
Can you talk about Grace in that way? She has a lot of really elaborate ideas about the world, like the way she talks about all of the art she has in her dorm room.
JC: Well, Grace is the youngest daughter, and she’s in high school right now, and she really is in this time. She was really exciting to write; I mean, the whole family is in a state of transition, but she is, of course, the person who, in her own life, is at the very most in a state of transition. So she’s kind of trying on all of these personas for size, and she’s trying to figure out who she wants to be, and who she thinks is cool. She changes the most emotionally. So in the beginning the pictures that Saina is talking about, she has all these photos on a kind of corkboard in her dorm room, and it’s like Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, who I don’t know if you guys remember . . . they were the artists who committed like a double suicide. They were  glamorized by Vanity Fair. It’s a really fascinating story. She has a photo taken by Diane Arbus, a famous photographer who also committed suicide. So I think at the beginning she’s trying on this idea of the glamour of not-being, of . . .
SJ: And the control.
JC: Yes, exactly. But then, as she goes on, I think that she starts to think about the world really differently. She starts to think about Love and Beauty as being very real things that she cares about.
SJ:  Of course, she grows up. But she really blossoms amid this . . .
JC: Amid the chaos, yes.
SJ: Was there a part of the book that was harder to pull off than you realized before you started it?
JC: Yeah. This book took me five years to write. It felt like fifty. There are two things. One that I was not surprised was really difficult:The book takes place during the financial crisis, and it’s something that happened that was talked about so much in real time. We were analyzing that as it happened. I wanted to talk about it in the book, but not in a way that felt like you were being kind of taught a lesson — except then I chose to, in fact, put it in a class where you were being taught a lesson. So the challenge of doing that while keeping it kind of fun to read was really hard. First of all, I had to understand everything that was happening there. And then, to try to write that.
SJ: And keep everything moving. The movement and the velocity is such an important part of the book.
JC: Exactly. Keep it snappy and exciting — but it took months to write. Then the other part, which you would think, having been a journalist for years, I would be kind of OK at. There is an article in the book that someone writes about Saina that kind of glorifies her while taking her down at the same time. It’s the kind of article like, say, New York magazine does so deliciously.
SJ: And often about artists.
JC: Yeah. I think there is that sense of how did they get so famous and celebrated, and then, “Look at them now.” That also took me forever to write and then ended up being mostly cut out.
SJ: The last question: you’ve been out, and you’ve done a few events. What’s been your favorite reader reaction so far, or surprise from that end?
JC: I’ve had several people tell me that they feel like they see themselves or their families, or they feel like it’s a kind of story that both feels familiar to them and that feels like they haven’t sort of seen it. That just makes me really happy.