"My research interests and my activism get funnelled through my creative writing"

Your new book, What We Left Unsaid, explores a divided USA through the eyes of three Asian-American siblings. What real-world issues motivated this approach?

If you look at America today, it seems like a country so full of paradoxes. On one hand, there’s incredible wealth disparity, where the phenomenally rich live alongside the homeless. You also have this nationalist rhetoric about a singular ‘melting pot’ country where anyone can come and live the American Dream – alongside this anti-immigrant rhetoric about who gets to be an American. So I wanted to take something iconically American – a road trip down Route 66 – and explore it through the eyes of three adult siblings, who have each taken a very different approach to navigating around their own Asian-American identity and their own family. I also wanted to address the myth of the American West from the perspective of people of colour.

Your first novel was autofiction, and your second also closely informed by your time working in the film industry. To what extent does your new book draw on your own life experiences again?

In What We Left Unsaid, the youngest sibling, Alex, left the US decades ago for London to pursue a career in the arts – and she feels quite distanced from her home country now. That’s not too dissimilar from my own situation. But I also felt like I had to actually drive Route 66 in order to write the novel properly. So my ‘fieldwork’ involved driving 3,400 miles over three weeks from Chicago to California back in Autumn 2021 – with my partner and then one-year-old in tow. I don’t think I could have authentically portrayed those places in writing, without first visiting them in person.

As the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants to the US who has now made the UK her home, does your background give you a unique perspective on Western culture and world events?

I think any time you move, you gain a new perspective and expand your understanding of the world a little bit. That’s why travel is such an important part of my life. So absolutely, moving away from the US gave me the opportunity to view that country in an entirely different light. At the same time, being the child of Taiwanese immigrants, I’m very aware of differences between East Asian values and modes of being, vs. American or British ones. All of that goes into my writing, because until recently we haven’t seen very many ESEA diaspora perspectives published in the West.

How does your creative writing dovetail with your research interests and activism?

I’d say my research interests and my activism get funnelled through my creative writing. That means I use fiction and fictional characters to dramatise the issues I’m interested in, and to provide a human understanding of these concerns, which readers can emotionally connect with. This approach also makes the work personally sustainable for me, because the very act of creation and using my imagination is what keeps the process fun and rewarding. In my more academic research, I’ve written a lot about emotional labour. Creative practice necessarily involves emotional labour (because you can’t be emotionally distant from your own art), but it also provides emotional rewards for the creator. For me, there’s a joy in writing creatively that I don’t quite get from academic writing.

Why did you first start writing novels and are you driven by different motivations now?

I’d always wanted to be a writer since the age of 6, but I never took the idea seriously as a profession until I reached my 30s. Until then, I’d worked in the film industry as a producer and later festival programmer -- and of course, I’d secretly harboured a hope of one day writing a novel. I’d also learned filmmaking is a very expensive form of storytelling: as a producer, you have to raise a lot of money and line up many many moving parts within a complicated industry, just to get the point of shooting a film. But as a novelist, if you have an idea, you sit down and you start typing. It’s a much simpler creative process. For me the motivation has remained the same: to tell a good, thought-provoking story and to tell it well.

You’ve been described as a chronicler of the #MeToo movement with your novels on surviving rape (Dark Chapter) and misogyny in the film industry (Complicit). Where do you think society and the movement is at now?

Just because #MeToo is no longer trending as a hashtag, doesn’t mean the problems have gone away. There will always be a vital need to speak out against misogyny and reform institutions to better support gender equality. #MeToo was sparked by the Harvey Weinstein investigation in 2017 and dominated media headlines for a few years. It may have led to some reform within the film industry and other work places, it may have encouraged more women to speak out. But the criminal justice system in the UK still has a very poor record of convicting rapists, and rape crisis centres are still in dire need of funding in this country.

Which writers and artists do you most admire and feel most influenced by in your work?

I’m a huge admirer of novelists like Barbara Kingsolver and David Mitchell, whose novels can have both an epic sweep and an intimate poignancy to them. I suppose they inspire me to be ambitious in my own novel-writing and to go for telling ‘the big story.’ Other writers whose work I admire include Joyce Carol Oates, Donal Ryan, Thomas Hardy, Toni Morrison, Daphne du Maurier, and Edward Abbey.

What are you working on next, both creatively and in your academic work?

I have an academic chapter coming out in The Routledge Companion to Gender, Violence, and Popular Culture (2026), which looks at the struggles survivor-authors face when working with publishers on books informed by their own experiences of sexual trauma. For my next novel, I won’t go more in depth at this point. But I’ve been partly inspired from witnessing the deep fascination that some of my students have around the SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) genres. While I won’t be writing in those genres, I may be writing about the SFF fandom… Anyway, ask me in another year!