Interview: Alexandra Chang

(Alexandra Chang is the author of the novel Days of Distraction (2020) and the story collection Tomb Sweeping (2023). EPOCH Assistant Editor Matthew Bettencourt spoke with her late last year about the new book.)

Matthew Bettencourt: To start, Tomb Sweeping centers so much around characters whose lives have arrived at unexpected points; points, primarily, of disappointment. These are people who have imagined incredible futures for themselves and have ended up living such mundane presents. When I was reading, I thought of this disconnect in terms of the word “disillusionment.” Do you connect at all to that word? And did writing Tomb Sweeping help you see these same disconnects in the world around you?

Alexandra Chang: I do connect with the word disillusionment and experiencing that either in my own life or through watching others who become disillusioned in some way. A lot of my characters are extremely ambitious, driven by desires that they can't reach: their ambitions are often beyond either their own capabilities or their social limits. And therefore, as you mentioned, a lot of them are living these pretty ordinary, mundane lives that don't reflect their hopes and dreams and everything they want for themselves, or want for others in their lives. That disconnect is a big driver for character development in these stories.

I’m hesitant to say “relatable,” but at the same time, it’s true for many of us: disillusionment is a very relatable experience. And that, for me, is a site of interest in my fiction. I'm not necessarily drawn to characters living extraordinary lives, doing extraordinary things beyond what most people might experience. A lot of the questions that I'm trying to explore in my fiction are about what it means to be an ordinary person, to have these ambitions that you can't fulfill. How does that affect a person? As ordinary as the person is, the emotional stakes of that experience can feel very high.

MB: I love your hesitance to embrace the word “relatable,” because Tomb Sweeping feels like such like a modern collection, written for right now: it even opens with a Zoom meeting. That sense of disillusionment also feels like a very modern sentiment. I don't know how “on the internet” you are, but I remember just a few days ago a Tik Tok went viralwhere someone was talking about how upset they are that they went to college for four years, got a degree, and still can't get a job in their field.

Photo by Alana Davis

AC: Yeah, especially for younger generations, one of the dominant modes of experiencing life is through this disillusionment. I'm a millennial and we were very much told that after working hard, going to school, whatever, whatever, we were going to get a job and everything was going to be great as long as we worked hard. But a lot of us graduated into a recession. And it was very hard to find a job. There are all sorts of statistics about how there’s this three-year window of graduates between 2009-2011 who will forever be behind, even compared to people who graduated two years before or after us.

I was hesitant to say that this is “relatable” because I don't want to ever put pressure on stories or characters to have to be relatable. I consider myself a character-driven writer, but I'm not necessarily thinking about how the reader is going to perceive the character until I’m in revision. That’s the point when I ask, how do I make sure that this character is not leaving the reader with unhelpful or unnecessary questions? But that's not a relatability question as much as it is a craft question.

Going back to your point that these stories are very much about the now. I’m learning that this is pretty consistent in my writing. What I write tends to be concerned with what it feels like to be living right now, in this moment in time. And I’m interested in how “the now” be shown at different angles, through different kinds of characters, different kinds of settings, different kinds of situations.

MB: I want to grab on to one of those last things you said about different kinds of settings, because I was really drawn to the collection’s use of space. I'm particularly drawn to the way space almost defines character: “A Visit” is about how a father's presence transforms a woman's home, causing her to transform herself; “Unknown by Unknown” and the mansion that starts out as a haven and then becomes an antagonist as the protagonist’s fears become acute; and “Farewell, Hank.” I mean, how can we not talk about “Farewell, Hank?” Its orchid-filled house, a place so full of life, complicating its occupant’s relationship to death. How do you think about spaces in your work, and how do you bridge spaces and characters in your writing process?

AC: Because I think about space so much in my life, and how different places I've lived, literal spaces that I've inhabited or entered into, have changed the way that either I perceive myself or I perceive those around me, or even something as grand as how I perceive life, the importance of space transfers over into my fiction very naturally. It’s very hard for me to write character without considering setting and space.

I don't even know if it's a bridging so much as it is already interconnected, space and character are melded or woven together. They come into a story simultaneously. Like with “A Visit” there's that early mention of how this is her home, this is the place that she gets to call her own, and then that home and perception of home starts to change once her dad enters the space. Same with “Farewell, Hank.” That setting and those characters were tied together already. “Cure for Life” is another one where setting and character entered the story at the same time; one doesn't exist without the other.

“Klara” is a story where I did do more bridging of setting and character. That story is about the dissolution of a friendship, and the two end up meeting in a place where they've never met before. There’s an idea of them being in an unfamiliar place in their relationship, yet seeking out some sort of familiarity in this physical space they both know, this Blue Bottle cafe. I was talking to a West Coaster and he described Blue Bottle as the “Walmart of coastal millennials.” It’s a known entity for a certain generation from a certain area, so I wanted to incorporate both familiar and unfamiliar spaces in the story and show how it would affect this particular relationship.

MB: The more I think about it, the more I can't pull myself away from the settings in these stories. I love what you said about them being melded, because I can't see these characters existing anywhere else. Like, if “Cat Personalities” took place in a bar instead of an apartment?

AC: Oh, yeah. No.

MB: It just wouldn't be the same story.

AC: Setting affects the story so much, and affects the scene, the situation and interaction between characters, the individual characters themselves. To change the setting is to alter the story in a big way. And of course, there are times in early drafts where maybe the setting is off. But that's somewhat rare for me, because I think of setting so close to the beginning of a story.

MB: The sense of place in your work is so incredible, these spaces become characters in their own right. Now I'm thinking about “Flies,” taking place in this house infested with flies, full of them to the point it becomes almost antagonistic to the characters. Having moved to Ithaca recently, living in the middle of the woods, a fly infestation really sticks out to me.

AC: I started that story when I was living in Ithaca and had a fly infestation. It was totally consuming for two weeks. I was only killing flies all day long, freaking out about it. I had to put it into a story.

MB: We’ve covered a lot of ground about setting in your stories, but you’ve described yourself as a character-driven writer a couple times. Could you speak a little bit more to that?

AC: For me, that means the character, and who the character is—not necessarily every motivation, or background information, or whatever—but more so what they're doing, what they're saying, how they're acting, are the driving forces of the story. There are lots of car metaphors for writing fiction… Basically, character is the vehicle through which I navigate a story rather than say, plot. I'm not saying they're oppositional, but I think about character before plot, and that’s what leads me to what happens in the story. I will readily admit that I don't think about plot most of the time when I’m writing, and that could be a detriment to some of these stories, but my hope is that the characters are acting or behaving in a way that makes sense in the world of the story, and that justifies what takes place.

The other thing, too, is that character is so tied to the language and structure of a story. Those are built from the character. It all has to be the right fit because the character matters so much more to me than everything else. Through character, the other story elements arrive.

MB: When you mentioned language coming out of character, the first story that comes to my mind from the collection is “My Algo.” It is so stylistically different from everything else, but when you talk about how the language comes from the character it makes perfect sense.

AC: Thanks. Yeah, that one’s interesting, because it’s sort of a conceit-based story: what would it be like if a person were talking about their algorithm like they were in a serious relationship with it, and it turns out to be an abusive relationship? My editor actually helped me with this one. She really wanted to get more of the character into the story, especially towards the end. She wanted more specificity as to who was speaking, because I was keeping it too vague. So thank goodness for editors.

MB: I think structure is one of those craft buzzwords that writers can't escape. Every Q&A I’ve been to someone has a question about structure. There was a lecture here at Cornell recently, from the playwright Virginia Grise, and she talked about structure in terms of shapes. But it wasn't a typical stuff: she didn’t talk about pyramids or circles or whatever. She described it as movement, the ocean going in and out, or tears falling.

AC: I think this is getting talked about more. Jane Allison wrote a book called Meander, Spiral, Explode. I taught a chapter out of it. I do think that people are embracing nontraditional structure more, because even the word structure has these connotations of like: House. Container. Rigid bodies. So I like the word “shapes” or “movement” and using those instead.

That said, I do love playing around with story shape or story movement, whether it’s putting a story in reverse or in vignettes or modeling it after something like a tight spiral.

MB: Absolutely. Thinking about “Klara” again: that's a story that a lot of writers would probably feel the impulse to order chronologically. But you've arrived at this non-linear shape, this structure of recall. There's essentially two paragraphs of present plot; the protagonist gets to the Blue Bottle, she waits for Klara, Klara never shows up. But in between, we have these moments of memory where the protagonist is brought back to the history of their dissolving friendship. It's like she’s reliving all of it at this coffee shop. And thinking about all you've mentioned about character and shape, that feels like a structure built through this character and their experience of the world.

AC: I wanted the story to be told in the way the character is experiencing it. On an emotional level, those memories are coming at her. I wanted the reader to have a similar experience of these memories, to the point of some disorientation. It’s how I experience memories, especially painful ones. They don’t happen sequentially. It’s not like I sit there reliving it in an orderly way: “They did this thing to me. And then I reacted like this. And then this happened between us. And then I did this.” Instead, it’s kind of like that game Frogger, where the little guy is hopping between logs in a moving current.

I don't even remember how I arrived at that shape though. That’s the weird part about writing stories. Sometimes you don't know where along the process a piece of the story came from or how it happened. I don’t remember if the first draft was like this. I think the only answer, really, is that through revision, through rewriting, a character and the shape of their story can become much more connected.

MB: Absolutely, thank you for that. I always love when writers talk about the editing process.

AC: It's so mysterious sometimes.

MB: Oh, for sure. Movies have this idea of the cutting room floor, but stories don’t get such a neat metaphor.

AC: I know some writers who write very, very, very long stories, and then they have to cut back. And in there you can find the cutting room floor idea. For the very last story of this collection, my first draft was probably more than 7000 words. Someone read it and said, “This needs to be a lot shorter.” And I was like, “Well…” Because I was attached to everything. That’s a moment where, as people say, you have to put the story away before you come back to it, and then you can start to see all the extra stuff that doesn't need to be there and start cutting.

But the mysterious part for me, and I think other writers probably speak to this better than I do, is that feeling of reentering the story and paying very close attention to my own reactions, instead of pushing aside the feeling that something's off. In life, there’s this inclination think, “Well, if I can’t immediately pinpoint what’s causing this off feeling, then just leave it as it is.” But as a writer, it’s hard to get away with that. You have to listen to that gut feeling of something being off and actually try to figure out its source.

That feeling probably comes out of what we call “taste,” this intuitive sense of our own standards. Sometimes I have a sense that I, with my current abilities, cannot bring a story up to my own standards. So I'll just leave do what I can. That's definitely happened to me. But I think editing is about returning to those places in the story that give you that nagging feeling that something is wrong and trying to make that feeling go away.

MB: I want to circle back a little. Earlier, we talked about a disconnect between future and present, in your work, or a disconnect between expectations of the future and the realities of the present. But there exists another disconnect in Tomb Sweeping, between the present and the past. The first line of the titular “Tomb Sweeping” encompasses so much of this for me: “When the medium walked into the sea and vanished beneath the crest of a dark wave, it was clear that our ancestors were taking a man considered unfit for the world as they had known it.”

And then the final story, “Other People,” about a character who's so stuck in the past that he starts seeing it all around him in the present. How do you navigate that tension between past and present in your work and in this collection?

AC: The past is so important to these characters and affects them deeply, because it has shaped their understanding of the world. And it's not something that is easily escapable, even if they want it to be. The child in “Tomb Sweeping,” she understands the weight of the past and the historical traumas that her family has suffered, and she understands why those are carried into the present, even when she wants to resist it at times, because there are ramifications to carrying that past into the present.

The tension manifests in questions like: How much of the past do we carry into the present? Why is it important to do that? But also, what are the harms of doing that? And how can you acknowledge the past without damaging the present and the future even more? What does it mean to remember versus not let go? They're not questions that are easily answerable. And they're questions that will have different answers in different contexts. Navigating that tension in a story is about being as specific as possible to the context of the character, their environment, and how a particular kind of past is continuing to have its hold on the present. How do you navigate this in fiction? How do you navigate it in life? Beyond making sure that all those questions are present in the story, I guess I hope that the past is not only explained, but also felt.

I don't know. How do you do it? I'm not really sure.

MB: It's sort of an impossible question.

AC: It's a good question, because it's like a lot of questions in fiction: it doesn't have a clear answer. Sometimes, it's easier to talk about craft, because there are certain “answers” to rely on. For example, I wouldn't write a character who's haunted by a past that the reader doesn’t have access to until it's revealed on the last page. That to me feels cheap. And in the world of storytelling, in the world of a short story, I just don't like it when characters have some unknown past and then you find out what it is at the end, which then explains all the actions and behavior that came before. That feels fake to me.

When I think about how I write the past into stories, and characters who are either holding on to or struggling with the past, it’s upfront. It has to be felt throughout the story.

MB: This makes me think of the title of the whole collection, Tomb Sweeping: it’s a way to carry the past itself. It’s an act of acknowledgment, cleaning the grave, pulling the weeds.

AC: Yes, exactly. There are people in this world who carry the past with them in ways that are healthier than my characters often do. It is my belief that history and the past are incredibly important to understand and to acknowledge. I’m drawn to writing characters who have a fraught relationship with their pasts, personal and historical. But that is not to say that there aren't healthy and productive ways to hold the past. The whole idea of “Tomb Sweeping” and the Qingming festival more generally is to honor ancestors—which is a way of honoring where we came from, how we’ve been shaped into who we are—in a way that is respectful to those who came before. The question of that story is: How do we do that without causing further harm to innocents, and especially in the aftermath of so much war, violence, trauma? It’s hard to comprehend the power of the past, and how different narratives that we carry from generation to generation to generation completely change our perspectives of what is taking place right now.

MB: In this moment, I'm returning to the final line of “Tomb Sweeping:” “…I can and should not run.” It's not an answer, and as a reader it doesn't give me comfort. But it feels real, as a way to interact with the past. I can and should not run.

AC: That also speaks to what I was saying before. It's not that there are answers to the questions that these stories are asking, and particularly that story. The character, she's so young. She's only 12 in that story, and not settled into a concrete worldview yet, in the way that her parents or her grandparents are. She's in this developmental stage of her life, where she's not really sure what to make of all of these stories that she's hearing and that she's reading and that she's encountering in the people around her. So that final line is not answering the question so much as offering a mode of being.

MB: I think that's exactly it: a mode of being. That resonates through all these stories. People trying to find modes of being.

AC: Yeah, ones that work for them.

MB: I have one final question, and it’s about the idea of intersections. So many of these stories are about moments of intersection, someone entering or leaving someone else's life, like a highway off-ramp or something. What do these moments of intersection mean for your writing, and how do you approach them on both a personal and craft level?

AC: That's a good question that I've never gotten before. I'm thinking about it for the first time. I'm thinking about the stories where these intersections happen. “A Visit” is definitely one, “Klara,” “Cure for Life.”

MB: We haven't talked about these ones yet, but “She Will be a Swimmer” and “Phenotype” come to mind as well.

AC: “Phenotype.” Yeah, they are coming into each other's lives, it’s like intersection-slash-connection. And at times, it can be fleeting, like “Other People,” where two people encounter each other only for one night but the narrator is very much changed by this interaction. Versus a character like Judith in “Phenotype,” who encounters this older grad student. Sorry, that story, sometimes when I think about it, I still laugh about it, because it's just so awkward. It takes place at Cornell, actually.

MB: I read it in the Clark Physical Sciences building because it has one of the only libraries open 24/7 and I was like: “I feel like I was brought here on purpose.”

AC: I think that what draws me to those kinds of stories—where people are coming into each other's lives, even temporarily, or more permanently—is that these intersections feature an emotionally heightened period of a relationship. Personally, I went into writing fifteen stories not knowing what connected them all. These stories were written across nine years. I didn't sit down at any point and decide I was going to write stories about X-Y-Z. I just wrote whatever story I wanted to write. And what you come to notice when you do that is that certain themes appear over and over again; it can be almost pleasurable to notice that in stories that span a long period of your life.

So this idea of connection or intersection as a throughline is new to me, thanks to you. I knew many of the stories asked questions about how to navigate relationships. Especially the question of what we own one another. What do feel we need to do for others and what do we wish others would do for us? How do we do right by one another? I ruminate on relationships a lot. Stories are a way for me to delve into those questions and those ruminations further, and bring certain tensions or ideas onto the page, see how they turn out.

MB: Just sitting with that for a second, I’m thinking of one of the early stories in the collection, “Li Fan.” It’s a story about a woman who hasn’t been treated with grace, kindness, who hasn’t gotten what’s owed to her by others. There's a silence in that story, and I think that's what the silence is.

AC: She's a character who, from the first line, is flattened. This is another thing, like relatability, that I’m hesitant to embrace, but she hasn't been granted her “full humanity” in the beginning of that story. And it’s about showing how this person who has been flattened into “the Asian Recycling Lady” has had this full life, with joy and suffering. It’s often easy to encounter another person, or encounter a character even, and have these very flat views of them. My hope is that these stories refuse this kind of flattening, that they’re doing some tiny amount of resistance in the world.