Interview by Nick Young
Kathryn Ma recently released her first short story collection, All That Work and Still No Boys, and it won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. The title story from that collection was the recipient of the 2008 David Nathan Meyerson Prize for Fiction. A former lawyer, Ma has been a Bread Loaf Scholar, and she previously taught in the University of Oregon’s Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing. She is an active volunteer in the arts and education, serving previously as the founding board chair of the San Francisco Friends School and currently as a director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Q: How long have you been writing seriously? What got you into writing in the first place?
A: It took me a long time to begin writing and after I began writing, it took me a few years to take possession of my fictional material. I was a lawyer before I began writing. I enjoyed practicing law but my heart was always in reading and books. Around the time of my fortieth birthday, I left my law practice, set up a small office near my home, and began writing. That was over ten years ago.
Q: Who were some of your primary influences?
A: I love the work of William Shakespeare because his plays contain multitudes. The great American writers of the twentieth century have been important to me: Updike, Roth, Cheever (the big red book of his Collected Stories), Eudora Welty, Doctorow. And I love the writing of the sharp, intelligent, humorous British women writers like Margaret Drabble, Iris Murdoch, Edna O’Brien. Lynn Freed, a South African writer now in the U.S., was a teacher of mine who continues that tradition of concise, sharp, clean prose. I learned a lot from Lynn.
Q: I’m curious about your statement of taking “possession of my fictional material.” By this, do you mean that you needed time to develop your craft, or to discover yourself in your writing? Or perhaps both? I know that some writers search for their “voice” for years …
A: I think I had a narrative voice early on, one that asserted itself naturally on the page, but I groped around trying to find what I wanted to write about. I was a Chinese-American kid who had grown up in largely white, middle class communities, and my educational and professional life kept me harbored in those places for many years. Eventually, and after several trips to China, I began to understand that I wanted to write about families who are trying to negotiate modern lives while living with history perched on their shoulders. Even though I am a thoroughly assimilated, western-educated American woman, I am shadowed by my parents’ experiences of immigration and exile. Many of the stories in my book deal with those themes, and with the dark and light sides of belonging.
Q: These themes really resonate in your stories: immigration, exile, displacement—the main characters all deal with certain aspects of these ideas/notions/swords dangling by a very thin thread over their heads. Each of the main characters is displaced to a certain extent, at least psychically or emotionally—they dwell just outside “the norm” (whatever that is; however it’s defined). Was this something you were aware of when writing the stories, or did this perhaps become more obvious as you began to assemble the stories together in one package?
A: I focused on one story at a time. I didn’t write with the idea of assembling a collection. My aspiration was to write stories about characters that became real to me as I wrote, to write with specificity and detail, and to give them lives that could, in a reader’s imagination, expand beyond the page, so that there was lingering effect. Often I think of something I read about Peter Brooks, the great British theatre director. I don’t have the exact quote but this is how I remember it: he tried for art that had “the closeness of familiarity and the distance of myth.” If a story or a novel or a play can do that, then it can touch many. Once I had written a number of stories, I realized that they did connect; they were roped together, in a way, along the theme you’ve identified, of displacement and belonging. And that holds true not only of the stories about Chinese Americans, but also for the stories about non-Chinese characters that are outsiders or otherwise struggling toward an identity.
Q: I love that you make that last point, and I think, perhaps, that this sense of belonging—of “struggling toward an identity”—is key for the success of these stories. For instance, young Charley learns about prejudice—and his position in the cultural context of that time, in “For Sale By Owner”; Daisy and Sam try to navigate the concept—in a foreign country—in “Second Child.” These characters (and I’m also thinking of Marsha in “What I Know Now”) are all struggling to understand not only who they are, but where they are metaphysically … it’s almost as if you’re painting pictures of instantaneous “growing up” experiences for the reader. I wonder, do you find that the capacity of understanding “belonging” is something that can occur in certain, specific instances, or does it take time? Is it a full-life process?
A: A character’s search for identity, just as in real life, will take place over a long period of time, maybe an entire lifetime. The beauty of stories is that we can use compressed narrative to open up moments of clarity for a character, or maybe for more than one character. In “Second Child,” the story takes place in China, where an American family is taking their adopted Chinese daughter to her orphanage for a visit. For her brother, the American boy, Sam, it is in fact a “foreign country,” as you say. But for Daisy, their Chinese tour guide, China is her home. Their intersection sparks a conflict that leads both of them to discover something about their own identities.
Q: This idea that intersections between people/cultures (as you noted in “Second Child”) can make the involved parties examine their own shifting and evolving identity is present in one of my favorite stories here. “Prank” seems to deal directly with this issue and involves three parties: Chan, Anthony, and then Anthony’s parents. Is it safe to say that the character of Chan, perhaps, is indicative of those moments in life when one is completely side-swiped by life itself? That is, we often learn more about ourselves when we’re not trying to?
A: Ha, yes, denial is a very useful tool in fiction (and in life!). In “Prank,” Chan is an assimilated Chinese American with firm ideas about who he is and how one gets along in white American society. Then a recent immigrant boy, Anthony, ruptures Chan’s comfortable illusions. In “Second Child,” two very dissimilar characters cross paths. Conflict in both of those stories is created by rubbing two unlikely people up against one another. I’m going to steal your line about getting “side-swiped” by life. Look for it in my next collection of stories.
Q: Because many of these stories seem to revolve around certain moments, there’s a real sense of character history at work in these stories. Though your characters have specific pasts and futures, their tales investigate/interrogate their here and now, almost as if to say, “Every second counts in life. Every moment is important; every event means something, whether we know it now or not.” Is this a fair assessment?
A: I’m interested that you mention the specific histories of my characters. It fits with my notion that I am writing about people who are shadowed by history—by their own family history, and by world history, both ancient and modern. One thing I work hard on is giving my characters complicated histories that the reader will glimpse as the story propels forward. Stories have to move—you can’t weigh them down with long back story or lumps of narrative exposition. But because I am interested in how the past shadows the present, I do work out in my imagination lots of brambly past for each character. One has to find a balance on the page.
Q: The “brambly past” of each character … one of the most compelling components of your stories is the real, essential “humanness” of each person. Would I be terribly off base in asserting that your characters seem to be trying to solve the riddle of their own, personal pasts in these stories, even while they’re dealing with the specific events that the stories put forward?
A: I think you are right that my characters must deal with past and present, though I don’t know that I would say this is a conscious act on their part. In fact, they are bogged down or confused by or unaware of how the past infiltrates the present; it is in coming to terms with their histories that movement toward an identity can be made. Denial, as we said, is a good way to befuddle characters; giving a character a subconscious that trips him up is another mean, fun thing to do. And one always hopes to inject some humor. Humor is one way that families communicate, and of course humor keeps us from killing each other, too.
Q: I’d like to ask a couple technical questions, if I might. How do you, as a writer, know when the story is done?
A: As to the question of when a story is done, it is something experienced rather than analyzed. [The end arrives when] I feel that I have reached a kind of natural resting place, like taking a breath. I love writing endings. They arrive as a kind of gift.
Q: What’s your process of revision like?
A: It’s all about the revision. Getting a first draft on the page is difficult, but it is just the start. I do as much revision as I can before showing the work to my (few) trusted readers. That means letting the story rest for a good long while so that I have the discipline to rewrite it. I am so in love with my sentences shortly after I write them that I am lousy at changing what needs to be changed unless I have let time pass. After a few weeks, or even months, have passed (during which time I write other things), then I am not in love anymore and can see the work more clearly. Once I have done as much as I can do by myself, I show the work, but you only have one or two chances to get a fresh read, even from your most trusted readers. That’s why it’s important to me not to show my work too early or to show it too often.
I also want to give thanks to editors of literary magazines who can do great things for the work. A thoughtful editor provides very useful criticism and can help steer one through the difficulties of revision. It is not easy to receive their criticism or suggestions, but usually I find that, if I can relax and pay attention, their suggestions do, in the end, improve the work.
Q: You seem to be a woman of many diverse interests—The Grotto, the San Francisco Friends School … . How/where do you find the time to write? Do you have a specific routine or schedule that you follow?
A: My old boss used to joke that he had a mind “an inch deep and a mile wide.” Sometimes my life feels like that. I have three children and I am involved in various arts organizations and schools. But the drive to write is always there. The best thing I did for myself was to get an office outside my home. I don’t think I could have written this book otherwise. If you work from home, there is always another load of laundry calling your name. “Kaaathrynnn, Kaaaathrynnn.” It doesn’t have to be a big office; a tiny space will do. Just some place where you can be yourself, not beholden to anyone but your own Muse.
Now, I have an office at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, which is a collective of writers and filmmakers. We share office space in an ugly brown building south of Market Street. It gives you somebody else to talk to when you are beating your head against the walls. But since we have to pay rent, we take the work seriously. There isn’t much chit-chat during the day. People come in and put their heads down and work.
Q: What are you reading now? What authors do you find most enjoyable and why?
A: I just finished reading Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens. I had been meaning to read it forever and finally tackled it on vacation. Dickens seems to love his characters like an indulgent father. The plots are overwrought and, by today’s standards, some of the people are smarmy. But he knows a great deal about many things, all of which he stuffs into his books, and he is a lot sharper and funnier than he is given credit for by modern readers.
The books I most enjoy reading are ones that make me reach for the story while I am reading. I like to meet the author as the story is progressing. A book like The Blind Assassin, for instance, by Margaret Atwood [contains] a tricky plot, compelling voice, complicated characters. I want to be fully engaged. I want to mourn a little when I am finished reading the book; that a wonderful experience has come to an end. If it’s a great book, you feel your heart sinking as the number of pages in your right hand diminishes and the number of pages in your left hand grows fat. After I’ve finished a great book, I can’t read another book for several days. That’s what magazines are for, and movies.
Q: What are you currently working on? What types of writing projects intrigue you the most?
A: I am writing a novel and also working on stories. I am trying to be freer about taking chances at starting things that I might not finish. Everything goes in to the pot, one way or another.
Q: If you could articulate a personal writing ideology, what would it be, and why?
A: Perhaps what I said earlier: try to write “with the closeness of familiarity and the distance of myth.” And, as one writer said, “Never hurry. Never rest.”
