The WD Interview: Jean Kwok
This interview first appeared in the Nov/Dec 2023 issue of Writer’s Digest.
When I catch up with Jean Kwok, she’s just returned from the American Library Association conference in Chicago to her home in the Netherlands. “Librarians are the best, aren’t they?” she says. “They’re a very important part of my life because I was so poor. The library was an incredible refuge for me. I would not be a writer today without the library.” But that isn’t the only reason why Kwok was at the ALA conference. “Nowadays with banned books, they’re really under siege. I think this is the time when we need to step up and show our support for our librarians and our schools.”
Banned books are something Kwok knows a thing or two about. Her debut novel, Girl in Translation, which she describes as “my most autobiographical novel based on my working in a factory as a kid and living in an unheated rat-infested apartment in Brooklyn,” was recently a subject of the rampant and overreaching book-banning efforts currently on the rise in the U.S. So, when a parent asked Kwok to write a short defense of the book that could be read at the school board meeting, Kwok agreed. “As I was writing it, I got more and more riled up,” she told WD. “… And I thought, I have to go there. I can’t let that stand. So, I flew from the Netherlands to Pennsylvania and defended it in person.”
Making the trip wasn’t without its risks though. “I really didn’t know how much aggression I would be facing, and I also could have hurt my career,” Kwok says. And while her attendance didn’t prevent her book from being banned, it was the principle of the matter: “It’s about saying what’s right and what’s wrong, and also speaking up for other authors who might not be able to, might not be safe doing so.”
Speaking about her life, as she did during her speech defending her work, is nothing new for Kwok and if there’s one word to describe her work, it’s personal. Her novels have been published in at least 20 countries and taught in classes around the world, many of which she visits to share her story. Like the main character in her sophomore novel, Mambo in Chinatown, Kwok was also a professional ballroom dancer for years. Her third novel, the Read With Jenna book club pick Searching for Sylvie Lee, was inspired by the disappearance of Kwok’s brother. So when Kwok said her newest novel, The Leftover Woman, was her most personal book since her debut, I had questions.
What sparked the idea for the story of Jasmine and Rebecca and Fiona in The Leftover Woman?
The Leftover Woman was really born from my own struggle as a woman in a traditional Chinese immigrant family. In a Chinese immigrant family, what happens is there’s a hierarchy based on age and gender. As the youngest of seven children, after a whole bunch of boys and as a girl, I was at rock bottom of that hierarchy. We lived in poverty, and I was working as a child in a clothing factory …
I grew up in a family where when my brothers spoke—they were just my brothers, but they were older and they are male—when they spoke, even if what they spoke was ridiculous, I wasn’t allowed to contradict them ever. When my father had something to say, I wasn’t even allowed to look him in the eyes, let alone voice a kind of opposing opinion. Women are just supposed to be vessels, silent carriers of male children. So, for me, it was a struggle to grow up. I basically had the opposite of tiger parents. It wasn’t considered necessary in my family for a girl to go to college. I mean, I don’t think girls were really considered necessary at all. So, in my life it was really the two choices: the factory or finding a man I could marry. And I decided to go to Harvard instead.
I thought it was interesting that Jasmine’s chapters were written in first-person point of view, and then Rebecca’s are written in third person. Did you always know that you were going to have those perspectives? How did you know what was the right point of view for both of those women?
It’s at the heart of the structure of the book because I think one of the things I do in the novel that is interesting is that I use a genre plot twist to replicate the white gaze, and that’s tied into those uses of point of view that you just mentioned.
I always wanted first person for Jasmine because I wanted us to be able to see Jasmine from the inside, from her own interior language of speaking and thinking in Chinese. Even though it’s not explicitly stated, her chapters are actually all in Chinese; they’re in her mind in Chinese. Rebecca is really about a Western point of view that is seeing this world from outside the Chinese language barrier.
… There was a point when I was writing the book when both were first person. So, when both points of view were actually in first person, I felt I loved Rebecca and I loved Rebecca’s voice, [but] I never felt like my first person for Rebecca was right. And it might be because I am not white. She’s a white wealthy executive editor. I wanted to be close to Rebecca, but I wanted a slight bit of distance, and it really felt right to put her in third person, in close third, where we could really follow her and be interior. But it isn’t quite as close as that first person of Jasmine’s.
“I believe that fiction can tell the truth in a way that sometimes an accurate reflection of the facts can’t. When we write a scene in fiction, we are trying to tell the truth of that moment.” —Jean Kwok
Writer’s Digest
I feel like that’s another connection between Searching for Sylvie Lee and this book. I heard you talk about being able to see the interiority of those characters who have full and complete and complex thoughts in another language and then seeing them from another person’s perspective.
That is absolutely what I was intending to do as a theme that runs through all of my novels—starting with Girl in Translation to The Leftover Woman—I’m deeply concerned with interior and exterior. What is a person like on the inside, and what do they look like on the outside? I think that in a lot of ways, The Leftover Woman is really about looking at women. How do we look at women? What do we see when we look at women, and is that accurate? Does that reflect what’s interior? Especially when you have an Asian woman, for example, or a woman from a different culture who speaks a different language, how are outsides the same or different from our insides?
Exactly. I read that you wrote and then rewrote your first novel more than once. The Leftover Woman is your fourth novel that’s been published. How has your drafting process changed since that first book with this new one?
I definitely changed how I approach a book from Girl in Translation. When I wrote Girl in Translation, I was really learning how to write a novel. I finished that book once, and it was like 400 pages, and I had to throw away 350 of those pages. I kept the first 50 pages, and I rewrote it again with a completely different story and completely different arc from what I had done previously. That was, needless to say, an extremely painful experience—I’m not somebody who can crank out pages very easily. It takes me a long time to write those pages, and then to need to throw them away because it was structurally flawed and the overarching skeleton was just not working, made me change my process.
From then on, there’s been kind of a gradual process where I do plan my books more as I go on. That said, it’s not at all like I can outline them and just pound them out. I wish I could. But I am very aware of the outline of my book. I feel like writing a novel is like building a ship, and you have to have the architecture, you have to make it correct. It has to work; it has to be watertight. When we go back and we revise, we all love to fiddle with commas and ands and punctuation, but that’s like the paint, you know? I mean, as much as I love language, I feel like if the fundamental structure of that ship is not built correctly, it’s going to sink. …
That said, in writing The Leftover Woman, at some point in the story, every single character was in jail, in bed with each other, or dead. I have killed everybody off in some draft, because when you are a writer, what you do is, of course, you set up an impossible situation. Here, I have an impossible dilemma. The tagline is “two mothers, two worlds, one impossible choice.” It’s about an adoptive mother who desperately loves her child, it’s about a birth mother who desperately loves her child and wants to get her back. And in the end, the child goes with one of them. I had to figure out which one. How do I do this in a way that reflects a kind of balanced perspective? I had, of course, interviewed people from all different parts of the story. … In the end, it’s not that you have to please everyone, but that you resolve this dilemma in a way that feels right to you personally as an author. And I just twisted myself into a pretzel trying to do that …
That is the most difficult part of wrapping up a book. The ending has a lot to do with how people will feel afterward. I wanted an ending that was both realistic and felt right, and felt earned, and that’s also uplifting. That kind of gives value to both women and their desires and dreams. To make it a story about learning and changing despite our flaws and talking about the things we have in common, and valuing, honoring the things that these two women have in common, instead of all the issues that can drive them apart.
This book has some complicated timeline stuff going on. How do you keep yourself organized as you’re drafting and working through those timelines?
I have meticulous notes. When I was a debut author, I winged it. I was just like, Woo, I’m gonna feel my way to the end. Then you feel your way to the end, and your editor’s like, “So, was that six months? What season was that?” And you’re like, The whole thing doesn’t work! She’s wearing a T-shirt, but it’s got to be the winter because of the amount of time that needs to have passed. What I have learned is that the clearer I am to myself during the writing process, the more creative I can be. Your first instinct is that you think, I want full creativity, so I’m not going to nail anything down. But the truth is, the more you nail it down to the real world, the more possibilities you open up to your brain, the more specific you can be.
The Leftover Woman, by Jean Kwok
William Morrow & Company
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Thinking about all four of your books, they each have some element of, I don’t know if grittiness is the right word … But this one seems to really take that to the next level. Is this a start of a new tone in your work?
Well, I don’t know. I think as writers we’re always developing, right? I always think the role of the writer is to create and not to judge. And I think it’s very easy to say, “I’m this kind of writer,” or “I’m not as talented as X, Y, Z. This famous writer, by the time she was 25, had already published all these great books. And I’m not like that.” Whenever I hear someone say that, I always think, That’s not your job. … you are gifted with the desire and this kind of burning urge to write, and that’s your job. It’s the job of the rest of the world to judge you and to categorize you and to say you can do this or that. Because I think that sometimes when we judge ourselves, we wind up limiting ourselves and our potential.
But that said, I do think I’ve become more and more structured as I write, and I think I understand story much better than I used to. It’s something I really work on. I read Writer’s Digest, I read craft books incessantly. I study, I read other people’s books, and I outline them. I really try to understand how exactly they put this book together so that when I read this reveal, it was really exciting. I think I’m developing as a writer by making more intricate plots. So I don’t know if I would say that I’m going in a new direction, but I’m definitely moving forward as a writer in a way that I enjoy.
One of the other things that I like in all four of your books is how they celebrate art and creativity. Has creativity always been something that you were drawn to? How did you get your creative start?
That’s such an interesting question because I was not brought up in a household that valued creativity, although there was a lot of art in my household. Despite our poverty, my father painted in his free time, and my brother played the violin for us in that incredibly rundown apartment where we had nothing else. He would stand and play the violin after working for hours at the factory. So, art was a kind of salvation, but I didn’t understand that you could make a living at it. I didn’t ever hope to make a living creating art. I just hoped to make a living. That was my only dream, to be able to actually survive and have a job that paid the rent, that was my goal in life.
I was at Harvard, and I was a physics major because, you know, that’s a “real” job, right? I was up all night writing this problem set, and I was making notes on a piece of paper, and I wrote a poem. My hand wrote this little poem, just a couple of lines, and I felt like I had laid an egg. I was just like, What is that? What have I done? Oh my god. What’s so strange is that from that moment on, it was the only thing I wanted to do.
That’s why when I say to people who want to write, it’s like that desire to write alone makes you a writer. I had so many years in which I wrote nothing. But I agonized. I might have written nothing, but I did a lot of agonizing about not writing [laughs]. And I think the agony lets you into the writers’ club because I realized one day, investment bankers don’t stay up late at night thinking, Oh god, I didn’t write a word today. I feel so bad about myself. You know? I realized that agonizing meant I was a writer. I was not yet in a state where I could express what was inside. I wasn’t able to actually do the writing yet. But, I was a writer because I was so deeply consumed with it, and from that moment on, that was all I ever wanted.
I do believe that art is what separates us. Art makes us human. Art is the deepest part of our souls. It’s the entryway into our deeper selves. You have a surface self that’s doing your email and paying the bills and saying hi to your neighbor and doing the groceries, and that’s a very important self. But we have this huge part, like an iceberg that’s underneath the surface. Art is a way of accessing that part.
Girl in Translation has been used for first year reads, common read programs, and book clubs, and Searching for Sylvie Lee was a Read With Jenna pick. What kind of responses have you gotten from readers in those discussions, and have you learned anything about your writing from those conversations?
Having spoken at places around the world, some places don’t have a large budget, but some places are very posh and very exclusive. Everywhere I go, people say to me, “This life of poverty was also my story,” or it was [their] mother’s, or was somebody else’s. There is so much that’s hidden underneath the surface that you think, Oh my gosh, I’m in this place and everyone here is affluent and comfortable. It’s never true because somebody will come and whisper in my ear about their secrets. There are so many double lives we don’t see that are happening across the world.
What I have learned from it is that, like for many people, when I started writing, the writing was really for myself. It was a means of communicating my anger, despair, happiness, joy, elation. It was a means of trying to become in contact with a deeper part of myself and it was a real adjustment to make it public. …
I would say that maybe the thing I’ve learned from being a published writer and going around and giving talks, is that opening is actually very valuable and meaningful because people tell you that your work touched them in a way, gave them hope in a dark moment, made them look at things differently, made them feel heard and understood. And that’s one of the things I say with this whole book-banning thing—I was a kid who found myself reflected in characters in books, who felt a deeper connection to books than to people in my real life for many years, and that was something extremely important to me.
When it comes to having those kinds of conversations with people, how do you go into that in a way to protect yourself and set boundaries about what you are willing and not willing to talk about?
I think that begins with what you write. That’s why I write fiction and I don’t write memoir, because fiction is already a process of transformation. I also write fiction because I believe that fiction can tell the truth in a way that sometimes an accurate reflection of the facts can’t. When we write a scene in fiction, we are trying to tell the truth of that moment. What did it really feel like? And sometimes that might mean we have to change what actually happened or what was actually said to make it truer than it would be if you just had a recording of whatever inspired that scene in real life. So, I feel that fiction already gives you one layer of transformation.
It’s something every author has to decide for themselves. How much of yourself are you willing to put into your book? And how much of it are you willing to expose when you talk about it?
Do you have any last advice for the readers of Writer’s Digest that you want to share?
… When you are revising your work, it’s a long path to go from conception to a finished project. A lot of times, there’s a lot of feedback along the way, or you are not sure how to change it, how to improve it, how to do X, Y, and Z. Once you get a little more professional, people are saying things like, “Well, this really has to fit more into the thriller format.” Sometimes, what they’re telling you actually is right, and you have to be as flexible as you can in hearing the feedback you’re getting.
But the thing I always say to writers is that you never should forget the flame that made you want to write this. It is better to have a strangely proportioned beast that burns and is alive and stalks across the page than a perfectly proportioned corpse on the page. That is what you run into the danger of. It’s possible from too much feedback, too much confusion, that you wind up taking out whatever is at the heart of your work. So, you always have to remember that and keep that flame alive.
If you love to write and have a story you want to tell, the only thing that can stand between you and the success you’re seeking isn’t craft, or a good agent, or enough Facebook friends and Twitter followers, but fear. Fear that you aren’t good enough, or fear the market is too crowded, or fear no one wants to hear from you. Fortunately, you can’t write while being in the flow and be afraid simultaneously. The question is whether you will write fearlessly. In this workshop we’ll look at several techniques you can use to keep yourself in the creative flow.
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