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Synopsis

'Oh Lord! Here come the Double Happiness Twins . . .'

The Double Happiness Twins are Moonie and Mei Ling. The Double Happiness is the Chinese restaurant in California where they help out their meat-cleaver-wielding grandmother - when they're not causing uproar and mayhem. And Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen is the story of the sisters, their Grandma, a lot of animals and the topsy-turvy, surreal experience of being a pair of strangers in a very, very strange land indeed.

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Interview

Marilyn Chin talks to penguin.co.uk about writing prose, straddling two cultures, the influence of Manga on her work and much much more...

How did you find the transition from writing poetry to writing prose?
I had great fun writing Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. I was able to be wilder, bolder, to play with dialogue and dialect, experiment with multiple points of view and employ a variety of new strategies that I did not use in writing poetry. I kept most of the vignettes short and compressed, very much like poems, so that the transition wasn’t too painful in terms of feeling overwhelmed with writing too many words. The compact size of the book is perfect for the poet.

I am also enjoying a new readership, a more diverse and enthusiastic audience. The audience for poetry, albeit a faithful one, is somewhat rarified and has been relegated to the universities, which is unfortunate. I am happy to get responses from readers of fiction from different walks of life. Recently, a housewife from Brighton, Massachusetts emailed me and asked me for some of Granny Wong’s recipes!

How much of the material in the book is drawn from your own experiences?
Coming from being an autobiographical lyric poet, I can’t help but use my own life and experiences as a model. For instance, Granny Wong is definitely based on my own madcap granny. She waved her cleaver and chased our boyfriends around to instil fear in us. Mei Ling is my Chinese name, but although I named the wild girl after myself (narcissistic, yes, of course), she is really an alter-ego. I wish I could have been that slutty and brazen in my youth. But I was more like Moonie – very controlled and circumspect. Yes, there were real boys who bullied me and pissed on my shoe – but it’s the imagination that gives the writer power to have the last word, that is, to write the perfect revenge tale to axe those bullies off. Truth is different from fact – and I believe that I am always trying to get to the ‘truth’ in my writing.

Do you see yourself straddling two cultures, in the same way that your characters do? And if so, has your relationship to either culture changed or developed in any particular direction since you were a teenager?
Yes, I certainly had to negotiate two cultures growing up. And I have very painful memories. I grew up in a neighbourhood that was not very diverse. I had terrible body image and felt very ugly. The magazine covers told me that I should be 5 ft 7 and have blonde hair, white skin, round eyes and perfect breasts. America was not very tolerant in the sixties. It took the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement – a marvel of coalitions – to change attitudes.

Meanwhile, when we entered the threshold of our parents’ home, we worshipped a different God, spoke a different language, ate different food and conducted different rituals. Metaphorically, I had to put on that Mandarin frock to please the family. However, I believe that bicultural children are very cunning and resilient and are able to negotiate many worlds simultaneously. I believe that most immigrant children go through a traumatic identity crisis, but come out doubly rich on the other side.

Presently, after the death of both my mother and my grandmother, I feel that I have buried much of my ‘Chineseness’ with them. And I feel that loss every day. My Cantonese is waning and I no longer follow any of the Buddhist holidays . . . so I have to work hard at research and I try to return to Asia as much as possible.

Aside from the obvious Chinese literary influences, are there any particular works of Western literature which influenced you when you were writing Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen?
Goodness, I’m a true literature geek and I read all kinds of writers. For the crafting of Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen, I read mostly short fiction. Of course, I worship at the altar of Angela Carter – the mother of all revisionist fairy-tales. I love both the Canterbury Tales and Jesus’ parables – I say them in the same breath to acknowledge both the sacred and the profane. I am a collector of tales: from Aesop to Ovid, to Grimm to African Am Folktales. My bookshelves are jammed with tales ancient and contemporary. Kafka’s giant cockroach and Poe’s black kitty speak to me often: they want both love and revenge.

I’m kind of an ‘infantilized’ writer . . . .there is a lot of stuff from my childhood I have yet to resolve. I believe I write as a way to re-examine the traumas of my youth, therefore I love reading the voices of youthful protagonists.

I read and reread Kipling’s animal stories – and carry his creature characters in my heart. I love the adolescent voices and short novels of Twain and Salinger. I also love Roald Dahl’s mischievous tales. I think he’s underappreciated in America. As you can see, I love reading short fiction, mostly because, as a poet, I am into close reading – and short fiction gems offer the same kind of word-for-word pleasure as in the reading of poetry. Hemingway’s short stories are so beautifully wrought. I go back to them over and over to learn craft.

I also enjoy reading work that straddles the worlds between realism and fantasy. I love Latin American surrealism, but also want to introduce a transnational Chinese-American brand of surrealism to the reader as an alternate experience. Did I mention women writers?: Atwood, Silko, Erdrich, Kingston, Cisneros, Morrison, Walker . . . etc. And women poets: Dickinson, Rosetti, Plath, Bishop, Rich . . . There you go, I am influenced by a polyglot of writers, both old and new. The list goes on and on . . .

Like your poetry, the book is quite political and ideological, despite its very light touch. Did you set out with a clear idea of what you wanted to explore or get across in the book, or did the themes flower out of the words more organically as you wrote?
I am an ‘activist’ writer and I take that tag seriously. That activism is born out of bearing witness – from a psychological need to make things better for my mother, whom I felt was oppressed by both cultures. I write from my own childhood traumas and out of my own utopian wish to make the world better. Whatever I write, no matter how funny or experimental the brush, my work is always informed by the political and social context of the times. Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen is, indeed, a feminist book. It is dedicated to the younger generation, riot girls, the ‘third wave’ who is now in charge of the future. The book is also dedicated to grandmothers, who are the unsung heroes in many cultures. Because of AIDs, because of drugs, because of civil war, because of natural and manmade economic disasters, grandmothers have to step in to take care of the children. Notice, too, that Obama brought in Granny to take care of the first children soon after his inauguration.

I am also writing about the diverse neighbourhoods of southern California. Whether you are a cleaving-wielding grandmother, a blond hippy dude surfer, an Aztec skateboarder, a new immigrant working in a sweatshop or a singing fish – you all have a part in the diverse world of this novel. It’s a microcosm of the possible! A ‘post-racial’, vividly pluralistic universe. The multicultural experiment, with all its flaws, is somehow humming along beautifully in California. So there’s ample democratic critique going on: everybody is implicated in the book and everybody’s embraced as well. Equal opportunity praise and critique!

Over the years, feminists have sometimes been accused of lacking a sense of humour, but nothing could be further from the truth in the case of this book. Do you see the humour and the political side of your writing as two separate co-existing strands, or does the humour somehow become a weapon in itself?
Great question: Yes, I use humour as a weapon. But of course, the gun says bang and you might be slimed with a face full of crème pie. I learned a lot from observing American stand-up comics: they’re crude and rude, but are the only group who could critique society with an uncompromised sharp tongue. Margaret Cho, Carlos Mencia, Sandra Sykes, Chris Rock etc. – the American Comics of Colour – they’ll tell you what is really happening in race relations in America. And Monique will have you think that being a fat black woman is the most powerful and beautiful thing on earth. I also learned humour from the satirical classics – Shakespeare had a sword-of-a tongue, Swift’s ‘Modest Proposal’ can give you the willies – and rich invectives by way of Catullus. And from the east, Zhuangzi is hilarious and witty in his philosophical arguments. I also use old-fashioned punning and visual allusions: an image of a donkey can be funny, but the fact that it’s also a beast of burden brings a deeper layer about the working class. Yes, I work hard at melding humour with message – but sometimes a good joke is just a good joke! And I want to make the reader laugh out loud!

One of the most striking things about the book is its refusal to fit into any conventional literary forms. Did you have strong reasons for writing it in this way?
I decided early on that if I am going to cross-dress from writing poetry to writing fiction, the fiction must be a spectacular experience. I am tired of reading the straightforward realist formula, especially in autobiographical fiction. It is not challenging for me. I love to play with breaking form: multiple points of view, polyphonic voices. I love to shift time and landscape, to shift moods and to play up and down the tonal register: from the sacred to the profane, the sublime to the ridiculous, the beautiful to the grotesque . . . and I love to bring a little editing magic from film. Who wants to be ‘conventional’ anyway? Art must be fierce! Art must try to break standards, must ‘make it new’. At the same time, I don’t want the book to be so artful that the work is totally inaccessible. I want the book to be a fabulous good read.

Some of the sequences and fantasies in Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen could be seen as quite violent and hostile towards men, and perhaps even sexist. How would you justify them?
I am writing ‘revenge’ tales. And in the realm of classical revenge as well as in pop culture Kung Fu and monster stories, someone always gets sacrificed. Most often, it’s a beautiful young woman tied to the railroad tracks. I wanted to turn the table – to make the reader rethink the relationship between the oppressor and the oppressed. I want to give power to the smallest, most vulnerable brown girl in the room. A revisionist tale means that the little brown girl gets the last word instead of being the victim – which is what she had been in history, and still is, in fact, in the context of world politics, being the lowest person in the social hierarchy of many cultures. In this short book, she gets to be the victor, the super-hero with magical powers. She gets to confront her oppressor.

Much of the violence is borrowed from Manga and is benign. There is a dream episode in the book in which a serpent gets chopped up and ends up in Granny Wong’s stew. That’s wicked Freudian humour. But in the end of the tale, the boy is intact and goes home to his mother. The boys in the book are sometimes bullies and are sometimes victims. They are also the girls’ lovers and close friends . . . and are an integral part of Granny Wong’s village. She punishes them often but she also loves and protects them. And I believe that the reader understands that I am remarking on historical oppression against women that still needs to be addressed. I make sure that the comic violence makes its point and moves on toward some healing and redemption. Yes, my womanist/feminist lens can be extreme. But being a political/satirical writer, one must often be extreme to get the point across – as Swift had to use the metaphor of eating infants to illustrate the oppression of the underclass. We must make our reader squirm a little.

What are you reading at the moment?
I’m reading some esoteric stuff on Chinese brush painting and Taoist sexual alchemy. I’m rereading Alice in Wonderland in preparation for seeing the new 3-D film. That is a wild, chaotic book! It makes no sense at all and somehow the child’s mind can make sense of it . . .

Which book or author has most influenced your writing?
As an American poet, my name is aligned with the rich ‘multicultural’ literary period of the 70s, 80s and 90s. And I am happy to be historicized with the Asian American literary movement. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior was a very important book of that era. I read it as an undergrad and it gave me that brilliant ‘Aha!’ moment. It gave me courage and permission to become a writer and the conviction that a little brown girl must be given the power to speak and have a place in the global literary conversation.

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