Poured Over Double Shot: Claire Jimenez and Elaine Hsieh Chou

By Miwa Messer / March 18, 2023 at 6:00 am

Who gets to tell our stories? Two debut authors use their powerful voices to show strong female characters navigating family, race and colonialism with unfailing humor and heart.

In Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou we find a young Taiwanese American woman mired in the world of academia and all the challenges that privilege and power can bring. Chou joins us to talk about Asian American identity, how she changed while writing the book, what she’s working on next and more.

Claire Jiménez’s What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez follows a family in the wake of a tragedy as they attempt to move on — and up. Jiménez talks with us about finding the voice in her work, telling Puerto Rican stories, how she uses perspective and humor and more.

Listen in as both talk separately with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer.  And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Jamie and Madyson. 

Featured Books (Episode)
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jiménez
The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki
Another Country by James Baldwin
Dear Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell
Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson
Yellowface by R.F. Kuang
Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez
War Against All Puerto Ricans by Nelson A. Denis
Velorio by Xavier Navarro Aquino

Featured Books (TBR Topoff)
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer the producer and host of Poured Over and I’ve been so looking forward to this taping and actually, we’re taping on Valentine’s Day even though you guys are gonna be listening to this in March. Elaine Hsieh Chou is the author of Disorientation. And if somehow you did not read it when it came out in hardcover last year, this is an academic satire that you do not want to miss. And Elaine, I’m so happy to see you. But I’m going to ask you to introduce Disorientation to our listeners.

Elaine Hsieh Chou

Thank you so much for having me, Miwa. Disorientation is, you could call it a campus satire, I get a lot of feedback that it’s not satire, and it’s real. But I’m like, I love that too. So is it satire I still, I still don’t even know. But it’s, it’s, I hope funny, and it follows Ingrid Yang. She’s a PhD student, studying a very famous Chinese American poet Xiao-Wen Chou. But we found out she never wanted to research him in the first place. And she’s in her eighth year of her PhD program about to be sort of kicked out after this year, what happens is she finds this mysterious note in the Shaolin Chow archives, and it sends her down this wild goose chase, she thinks she’s found the key to her dissertation. But it actually is much bigger than that. And what happens afterwards is she really has to confront the things she believes sort of the life she thought she wanted. All the relationships around her, really, she has to confront herself, and I think, look in the mirror in a way that a lot of us could happily live our lives and not look in the mirror. So yeah, I would say it’s a journey of her sort of self-discovery.

I really love Ingrid. But there were moments where she frustrated me, and I get exactly who she is and where she’s coming from. So, I don’t want anyone to think that, you know, I didn’t like Ingrid. But I did have some moments where it’s like, okay, girl. And you and I are gonna stay spoiler free. Even though we are talking about the paperback of your book, there was so much gleeful discovery, and there’s so much what so many great things happened in this book. And some of them are terrible, great. And some of them are great, great. But I think I was laughing really, really hard as I read it. But there were also a couple of times where I had to put it down because it hit a little close to a couple of nerves. And I’m glad you hit those nerves. But I still had to put it down for a minute and give myself space for a second. And I think, you know, it’s interesting. You just said though, that there are people who don’t think of this as a satire, and yet, I just reread the book, obviously prepping for this. So I’ve read it twice now. And I don’t know if I agree that it’s not a satire because you have some really big set pieces, some really big satisfying set pieces. And there’s some characters, where it feels like, oh, maybe you haven’t dialed it up to 11. This is just reality, we have all met some of the folks in your book, in real life, whether we liked it or not. You have this big heart, this big sense of humor. And I feel like you pull back just in time in a couple of places. Where shall we say people break into other people’s houses? Like there’s some caper flick stuff that happens in this book, and there’s some friendship stuff that happens because our girl Ingrid is evolving. And luckily, she does evolve. But she has some moments where I’m like, Don’t, don’t be the one who’s can only be the only Asian in the room. Don’t be that. Yeah, she that person.

EHC

For most of her life, that was her identity, being the only Asian.

I mean, even when she’s like, well, I don’t want to eat Asian snacks. It’s like, well, then you’re missing out on the tasty stuff. So that’s just more for the rest of us. I did have moments. I mean, Ingrid grows up in Massachusetts. Her parents are the only immigrants for miles around, let alone the only Asian immigrants and she’s part of a program. She’s part of the East Asian Studies Department at this tiny college that is not known for a lot except for the archive of this poet that she ends up studying and she doesn’t even really want to and can we talk about her professor? Can we talk about Michael for a second?

EHC

Michael Bartholomew, I feel like there’s one in every East Asian Studies department across America. What am I saying— across the globe? Even in Asia there’s, so I taught ESL after I graduated from undergrad I went to Taiwan and lived there for a year. And Michael really epitomizes this type of white man that I would meet in Taiwan who is perfectly fluent in Mandarin, and probably another Asian language and likes to lord it over you and has memorized all these facts about Asia and likes to also Lord that over you usually is married to an Asian woman and uses that as extra proof. He is somehow, I don’t know, Asian on the inside, it’s very frustrating when these men use their partners and children as a way to sort of prove something about themselves. But I think they make Asia their personality. And I just found that so ridiculous that one could take an entire culture and try to make it their entire life. When a culture is not something, it’s not like a hobby. They’re everywhere. And I think, because they’re everywhere in all these departments, and they have a lot of power. They end up shaping narratives about Asia, and they publish a lot of books about any of these definitive academic texts, quote, unquote, explaining what Asia is to, presumably a wide audience, and they really frustrate me. And so when I created Michael, I really wanted, it was my chance to sort of reveal him for the ridiculous figure that he is.

There’s this presumption of authority that makes me edge. It just makes me itch and, you know, small example. But if you’re digging around for translations of Japanese folklore and mythology, even in in the US in 2022, 2023, the vast majority of translations are all done by men, white men, and I’m just kind of like, Hi, I’m pretty sure they’re Japanese people, Japanese Americans, Japanese, Japanese, you can also translate. And some of them might even be women. And you know, when you consider the feminine in Japanese folklore and Japanese mythology, you know, and also, Tale of Genji was the first novel ever written, and it was written by a woman, but hey, tiny things, tiny, tiny, tiny things. And yeah, you know, having been an Asian Studies major in college on the East Coast. I mean, we didn’t have Asian American Studies. It just it didn’t exist on the East Coast when I was in school. So yeah, it hits a little close to the bone. And then we have Ingrid’s boyfriend, Stephen.

EHC

Oh, Stephen, yeah, he’s, he’s, I feel the younger generation of Michael. So he’s maybe not as obsessed with, you know, ancient China, but he fixates on Japan. And this is something that I’ve just joked a lot about with my Asian friends is that, for whatever reason, a lot of people who have an obsession with Asia choose Japan as their entryway and Stephen is I think of that generation. That’s, I don’t know, I Well, I don’t really say that he reads manga or watches anime, but that sort of genre, you know, or maybe that that sort of hipster white dude who’s really into Kurosawa films or something, you know.

Kurosawa, you know, Tanizaki short stories, but not the Makioka Sisters, but definitely, you know, the creepy weird stories and Mishima, you know.

EHC

And Murakami, Yeah. Oh, yeah. I remember this, this became another running joke is when I would meet guys like this and they even dress a certain way and we all have like the same glasses. And then I was working at a bookstore in Brooklyn, and one of my coworkers was sort of this type, maybe I shouldn’t be saying, but anyway, one day, I just heard him saying favorite author is Murakami. And I’ve read like every book and was like recommending him to a customer. And I was like, tripped on myself. And like, of course, of course the pieces all come together. Why are you all the same? Please be more original.

But we’re talking about performance art. I mean, it’s all a level of performance art. And again, it’s this presumption of authority. And it’s this presumption of understanding and the thing that you did for Stephen that, I don’t know if I’m still rolling my eyes or if I’m— the dude is a fake translator, dude does not speak Japanese and yet gets a contract to translate a Japanese novel and he basically writes an English version of this book that makes no sense. And of course, the sex scenes get twice as long and everything else gets left out and it’s like, oh, oh, yeah. okay.

EHC

Yeah. And that’s where we see translation as discourse and it’s not an invisible sort of the you know, vessel or what have you. There is always some distortion there is always subjective means to an end, I think.

And Ingrid’s bookended herself with these two dudes, has bookended herself with Stephen her fiancé and Michael, her thesis advisor. I guess we could call him a mentor. But I mean, he’s, I can’t really imagine being mentored by this dude. I’m just gonna sit here and make faces for a second because they do. You know, certainly they’re not the only piece of her orbit. There are women in this book who were offended. There’s Eunice, her best friend, who I did also, I had a couple of moments with Eunice where I like, huh, okay, sweetie, we need to talk. And Vivian, who I love. I love Vivian. She’s also strikes me as she should be six foot tall. And she’s probably not but she really does like to have that larger than life personality. But I want to talk about the women for a second. They’re much stronger together than they are apart. They don’t really realize that until, you know, a good chunk of the way into the book. But I’m assuming Ingrid shows up first. And then Vivian and Eunice show up sort of as they need to as you’re writing. But am I right about that?

EHC

Yeah, no, you’re very much right. So, I wrote three different versions of the novel. Okay, from scratch, because I had failed. Yeah, each I wrote, you know, the first version and then hated it. And I was like, I’m never going to write a novel. I failed, and then try it again. A few months later wrote it all in the first person. So, in the very first version, Ingrid is actually in her 50s. And she’s married to a congressman, have two children. So, it was a completely different, okay. Yeah, I mean, she’s still a professor researching Chow, but a second version she’s, I think, 35, and she has this sort of love hate relationship with a student named Jeremy Yuen, who’s a really big activist on campus. He’s the only Asian student in the Black Student Union. His girlfriend’s also a Black activist. And so he sort of looks at someone like Ingrid and thinks, well, she’s just sort of a lost cause. Right? Well, she has this attraction to him, and I thought it went ended up being a little to pat for her sort of Nemesis to be the one she falls for. So Jeremy’s character became Vivian and then Alex sort of both. He separated into both of them. And I’m so glad that happened, because I really, yeah, I think I needed both of them to be in Alex. And then it was in the third version, I realized Ingrid was just doing so much alone. And I was like, I haven’t given her a friend.

Yeah, no, she needed someone to be her partner in, kind of, crime.

EHC

Yeah, yeah. And she needed a partner in crime.

She needed someone to be like, sweetie, let’s do your hair or something, which wasn’t always the most opportune moment. But sometimes you need a friend who’s like, just step away. Yeah, sit down.

EHC

I thought it would be so fun for Ingrid to have this friend who is the polar opposite of her and her upbringing, because I feel we haven’t seen I think as much representation Asians who have grown up in in huge Asian enclaves, like in the San Gabriel Valley, where, Eunice is from and I think, like, we all have the hang ups, but their hang ups are a little different. And friends I’ve talked to who grew up in these sorts of towns would feel actually a lot of anxiety and insecurity over not being completely fluent in their mother tongue. Like that was the cool standard. And that blew my mind because where I grew up was mostly white. It was that was not cool. You didn’t want to be able to be perfectly bilingual. You’d be sort of made fun of for that. And I thought it was beautiful and incredible that that flipped well. Not that kids should feel insecure about anything, but I was like, I love that universe and imagining a character who grew up in that world and doesn’t have the hang ups Ingrid has.

Yeah, and Ingrid sort of bounces back and forth between being really hard on herself which I wish she would do less of I really wish she would be less terrible to herself, and I can only imagine eating that many antacids and many allergy pills like…

EHC

Her insides must be a mes…

Completely but watching her do this I’m like, oh yeah, that is kind of her answer to everything. Take an antacid and ignore it. And it’s like, well, sweetie, you kind of can’t. It’s kind of a lot bigger than that. But to have Eunice there as sort of a check in a way because Ingrid’s not really letting anyone else in. That tick that Stephen has where he is constantly saying “dear” every time he talks to him is he channeling like a 65 year old white woman?

EHC

So patronizing.

It’s one of those words where I’m like, I mean, I have very sarcastically said that to my partner. We all have moments where we say something very sarcastically to our person. And “dear” can, you know it can be deployed carefully, but Stephen’s just using it with abandon. I’m thinking, who is this guy? And he’s who he is. And Ingrid chooses to be with him and for a while she’s very happy being engaged to him. I do love the fact that her dad is not so thrilled. Go Baba.

EHC

He knows what’s up. What are you doing with this clown, is basically what he’s thinking.

3 different versions from scratch. Ingrid is the most consistent piece of it, whether she’s 50 or 35. Or she is sort of the whole of it. So, when did you know you had Ingrid’s voice? Because it’s a tricky voice. It’s a great voice. But it’s tricky. She’s not simple. She’s not hanging out in the corner going, Okay, well, what’s next? It’s more a matter of “oh sweetie.”

EHC

A lot of people want to shake her by the shoulders, which I again, I really needed the reader to hang in there with me to be like, don’t give up on her. You know, it’s coming. But she is very frustrating. So that the voice was really, really hard. I struggled a long time with that. So, in the first version, it’s in the third person, a little more omniscient. This Narrator who’s very snarky. And I had recently read The Sellout by Paul Beatty and I was enamored, and I think that version was me trying to be Paul Beatty. And you know, there’s only one. So, I think I didn’t really, you know, I couldn’t find what my voice was for Ingrid. And then the first person, I think it really helped me to be in her head. But as I found out, after I wrote, you know, 70,000 words, finished that version, it really doesn’t work, because she’s so clueless. Yeah, you need when, when you’re in the first person, how do you have that distance to show sort of how she could be interacting with the world, but you’re just already in her head. And so, I realized, okay, I have to go back to the third person. And I was, yeah, I feel that there’s a certain comic voice that you can see in A Confederacy of Dunces where this character is so inherently comic in that they are just at almost living in their own bubble, you know, bumbling through the world. And we can see them as the slightly ridiculous figure they are. But at the same time, I think in both those novels, there is a great tenderness for this character, right? There’s still we’re still meant to empathize with them. So I think there aren’t a lot of books that do that. And I really struggled with finding that voice that how can I gently sort of portray Ingrid in a way where we see oh, why? Why are you doing that your life could be so different, but at the same time, not to be so harsh to her that we don’t understand what she’s going through. And yeah, it took a while to find that that exact sort of sweet spot.

Ingrid’s bubble feels very real, though and I think there are a lot and not just Asian Americans, but I think for any nonwhite and I’m going to use a giant umbrella term, but I think there are lots of folks who, you know, they’re struggling with where we are, as a country, where we are as a society, where we are I mean, language changes, there are people that have a hard time with changes in language. There are people who have a hard time in structural changes. And, you know, obviously, a lot of folks have been doing a lot of work to make significant structural changes, whether it’s financial or housing, or we just, there’s so much going on in the States right now. And it felt very real and very organic for her to sort of be a little clueless. Not every single one of us is banging on the door saying we’ve got to change; we’ve got to change. She’s just sort of trying to live her life. And she’s given herself these guardrails, right, like, I’m supposed to be engaged, I’m supposed to get a PhD, I’m supposed— she’s just set up all of this stuff. And none of it seems to particularly be bringing her any kind of joy.

EHC

Exactly. Yeah, I think Ingrid, really clamped on to that model minority upward mobility lie that we were all sold to sort of be that the closest you could have to safety, true safety was to be white adjacent in the sense of seek that sort of upward mobility. But keep your head down. Don’t ask for too much. And obviously, you’re not going to get promoted anyway. But it is our I want you to do the busy work and not take their power. And so Ingrid, I think, yeah, I think a lot of Asian Americans have fell into this sort of life path. Sometimes it’s pressure from, you know, could be all different reasons. But I wanted Ingrid to realize that’s not what brings you happiness. And she really struggles with basically acting out other people’s expectations. One of the myths I really wanted to combat is that Asian women are apparently inherently submissive and obedient. Yeah. Which I think is so hilarious when you like, have you met any Asian woman?

I just, I think of my coterie of women and cousins and friends and everything. And I’m just like, nope, nope. Not even the eight-year-old, not even the eight-year-old. And I showed up with this personality.

EHC

Submissive is just not your turn on. Yeah, the TV are you going to leave, that’s how we’re portrayed, like, we’re bowing half the time and giggling, you know, behind our hands, unable to make eye contact. Like that’s how, I don’t know, timid and docile we’re portrayed as so I wanted to show she is not inherently, none of us are inherently like that. But this is what happens when the discourse around who you should be what you’re allowed to be is so overwhelming, that she doesn’t have the ability to question it, and just adopts what other people put on to her and mirrors it back. And I think that’s, that’s what it means to be complicit, right. And it’s so hard to liberate yourself, the box people have written for you and to the boldness, it takes to reimagine that it’s not easy, and I think it takes a lot of us many years and the younger generation, that’s why I’m envious of them. Because this kind of talk and this discourse, it’s on, you know, TikTok and they, I think, have a cursory understanding of it. But for my generation, the pain of just gradually unlearning everything had been.

It always gets me to when I see someone sort of attempting the model minority life where I’m just like, you know, we didn’t choose this for ourselves, right? You’d like you know, this is a label that was ascribed to us by people who are not us, as a tool to use against people who are also not us. And I’m like, I’m not someone’s chess piece.

EHC

Right?

You know, I’m just, I’m not your chess piece. And why? Why it’s so frustrating to me when I see people. And we do we see it in the community where we’ve got folks who are buying into, you know, I’m not woke or I’m not, and I’m using buzzwords for a particular effect. But you know, I don’t believe in cancel culture, I don’t believe in this. I don’t believe in that. I just want to flip it back and say, well, do you believe in evolution, because things can change? Sometimes, you know, sometimes we move, you know, we change trajectory a little bit, or we, you know, our orbit shifts, like pick whatever metaphor you want. But maybe it’s not moving against something, maybe it’s moving forward towards something that’s better. And that shift isn’t really hard. For some people. It is so hard for some people, and I’m just thinking of Timothy, our buddy, Timothy. Oh, Timothy, yeah, he means well, he means, and we’ve all met a dude like this, again, we’ve all met a guy like this.

EHC

They’re in office, winning to the size of our community are more and more elections that I’m just, you know, it’s terrifying. You know, community is always full of multitudes. And so every community has people who are on every side of the spectrum. So it’s weird, because at the same time, I’m like, am I being sort of unfair in saying we should all be united on this side? Or do I owe it to my community to recognize that we are full of multitudes? And so some of us are Trump supporting gun, you know, is this equality so that we can be as bad as white Republicans? These are questions that keep me up at night.

Yeah, well, luckily, you write fiction about them. I do think all of this needs to be turned into art, whether it’s film whether it’s you know, music, whether it’s books, obviously are my preference, but they’re conversations that I wish we were having, I would love to see us just be able to write about whatever we feel like writing about. I would like to see the multitudes represented because I’m not going to put and that we don’t exist the way we exist. We are complicated. We are layered. Some of us are immigrants. Some of us are not. Some of us want to move towards the future. And some of us certainly do not. I mean, but we’re all here. And if we’re not having the conversations, there’s almost no Venn diagram in some parts of our communities. And I’m just looking at this going, what is wrong with us? What, why are we not like, go ahead, you really want to give money to that? Okay, fine. I can’t stop you. But like, can we at least have the conversation and we are so shut down in so many ways. And Vivian is a character I love. She is the absolute polar opposite of Timothy. But she does pay a price for her activism and her belief. And when I say she pays a price, it’s just her physical health, her emotional health, her relationships. I mean, she’s absolutely fighting what she believed for what she believes in. And I absolutely respect that. But wow, it takes a toll on her. And that’s another piece of the conversation we have to have is we’ve got the same people fighting all of the battles at once and other people saying, well, I just can’t do that, or that’s not convenient, or that doesn’t impact me. So I’m not going to do it. And I’m just kind of looking at everyone going, well, if everyone did a little bit, it would be less stressful for all of the people who are in all of the work.

EHC

For Vivian, activists burnout, we don’t talk enough about how you’ll see an activist like I remember, you know, during Ferguson, 2014, you would, you’d see videos of them, you know, standing up speaking at protests, and then well, at every sort of police shooting, you would happen again in 2016, of course, and then 2020. But a lot of these activists we don’t hear from again, because it is such a heavy position to be put in to carry the way of justice for your entire community. And I wanted to show with Vivian that there is this fine line between taking care of others and then taking care of yourself. And I remember at one point, nothing as extreme, but I think because when I was doing more organizing, and when I was sort of more publicly speaking out against injustices, I had sort of put myself into this position where suddenly, if something tragic happen, and I didn’t stand up and say something, it became, oh, do people think I don’t care anymore? Do people think I have become desensitized or it suddenly felt like, I didn’t know how to balance, not wanting to watch, you know, for example, very brutal, violent videos, and then find the emotional energy to write about why it upset me and, and then to find the resources of how we could try to you know, I was at one point, like looking up all the sheriff, police work, creating emails, like, you can just fill in this email and say, why we will need justice for this person. And it was, it took a toll. I don’t know how any of us can be reasonably good, because activism is a job. But it’s such an emotional job. And people take that for granted. People think it’s easy to just show up at a protest and like, talk on top of a trash can be but it’s you don’t know what’s behind that person’s life. You don’t know, if they’re breaking down the minute after. We look up to them as pinnacles of strength so then they carry another burden of people who don’t feel able to publicly do something, and then they think we’re relying on them. I don’t know the answer. But I just knew, within the end, I could try to show something I think we don’t talk about which is long term activism is rare. Many people bow out for different reasons.

I mean, the book is divided into four parts. I mean, it’s essentially if it goes through the year, fall, winter, spring, summer, and I love some of the chapter heads, they were a treat. Totally good. But one of the things I really appreciated reading Disorientation is the fact that the characters are real. And yes, we’ve made fun of Michael and we’ve made fun of Stephen and Timothy. And, you know, here we’ve got the women as well. And, you know, Ingrid, I love her. But there were a couple moments, I’m not going to pretend— there were a couple of moments where I was like, oh, come on, and get it together. But you’re not writing about caricatures. I mean, these are and again, this comes back to something you said very early in the show, which is there are people who do not consider the satire and I think that is a legitimate point of view. I’m just saying that for me as a reader, I did not feel that way. I felt like everything was on 11 for a reason. And you know, the laughter got me through some of the stuff I’m like, Ah, yeah. And one of the things you do too, is that Ingrid’s parents are not pushy. They are not those parents. You have freed us, you have freed us from the Immigrant parent trope, which I would be perfectly happy if we all just stopped doing, I don’t care where your parents came like that. And stinky lunchboxes like I’m sorry, can we stop with the stinky lunchbox thing? Because it’s not stinky just because the kids sitting like, that’s their issue, not yours, like stop at the stinking lunch. Also, I didn’t even get to bring my lunch to school because I went to day school and they’ve served us lunch and if I never have to eat Chop Suey again, which is elbow macaroni hamburger and tomatoes. Like Yeah, I’m good. Thanks. I don’t know what this is. I don’t want to eat it. But I don’t have a choice because this is what you’re feeding me today. Okay. Why is it called chop suey?

EHC

I have no idea, that’s the first time I’ve heard of this.

II think it’s an East Coast thing it many of the things from my childhood I just ascribe to being weird East Coast things because I don’t want an explanation.

EHC

I just had a really terrible thought because, yeah, no, I just thought if they if it looks sort of gross or an appetizing and that’s why it was called that. I learned just the other day that a restaurant in Louisiana and the 90s went out of business because other restaurant owners started this rumor that they serve dog meat. I feel part of the myth of dog meat is using words like Chop Suey, or moo shu. Like I think like if you’re from Chinese culture, you’re like, I’ve never heard of a chop suey. I’ve never heard of a moo shu. Anyways, I thought that was really depressing and also absurd that were that would be so difficult to procure. Like how easy it is to get chicken and beef like, why would you go out of your way to get it?

I got nothing. I’m just gonna sit here kind of horrified awe, that’s othering on steroids. And I mean, obviously othering is a piece of your— but the dreaded other. Ingrid. Kind of doesn’t know she’s been othered we need to talk about Ingrid in the other thing for a second because she could do better than this dude, Stephen, she really could. And yet, she settled. And she’s being othered by her person. Which you but she’s okay with it. She’s not leaving.

EHC

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a lot of relationships out there. Where if the woman is Asian, for example, and the man is white, like he has a pattern of dating, just Asian woman. And I’ve heard different justifications of why they would like to stay with this man. Yeah, who am I to judge somebody’s personal relationship, I guess. But for Ingrid, this was part of her journey. And in terms of she thinks Stephen is all she can get in a way. I mean, I think the fact that he’s white, it’s a lot of internalized messaging growing up in white America that I think we the surface level is people say Oh, Western beauty standards. I’m like, It’s deeper than that. It’s about evil and good. Literally Chinese people, our first introduction to this country in the 1800s was that we were evil. And we were portrayed as like, monster serpent like looking creatures in all these propaganda photos. And that I truly think has never gone away the yellow peril.

I know, I’m right there with you.

EHC

I’m just like, isn’t this this is why the fear of yellow peril has never left since its inception. And so I think Ingrid and so many Chinese Americans, Taiwanese Americans internalized that America, white America is the hero. They’re the goodness that can save you from the you know, evil, whatever, China that we want to ban and it’s, you know, send back to China and whatnot. Anyway, so Ingrid has all of that inside her when she decides to consistently date white men that suck, and I think don’t deserve to touch a hair on her head. And I wanted to show the flip side like the pain of I think Asian men who are interested in her in her past that she just shut out completely. Yeah, so there are all these Yeah, messy reasons why she ends up with a guy like Stephen and why think a lot of Asian and not just women, you know it’s across genders can end up with people who you don’t know if they actually objectify you, behind sort of, you know, closed doors.

Ingrid needs to start asking questions. And I think that’s the beauty of so much of what happens in Disorientation is because when she starts asking questions, you can sort of mentally see her eyes getting really big and she’s not fully prepared for consequences. She’s not fully prepared for her own responses to things. I mean, in some way she’s really immature, which I wasn’t expecting. I mean, she’s 29. She’s in the eighth year of her PhD, that that, that I, obviously grad school was never gonna happen for me. But at the same time, I’m kind of like, oh, you are really young. And it’s kind of refreshing to see, because if she had all the answers, we’d have a little less fun.

EHC

Yeah, no, I think it makes sense that she was a little older, just purely for the generational thing. I think, her being younger, because the book is set in 2016. And I think her to be younger than Vivian’s a few years younger. And so she captures growing up more with the internet and in tune with sort of just what’s going on in the world in a way that Ingrid isn’t, I wanted to show it makes more sense. The older you are, the more you are entrenched in a way of thinking. And it’s, yeah, you really have to challenge yourself to unlearn things. I think when you’re older versus when you’re younger, you’re just maybe more naturally exposed to them. And so it’s not as necessarily as much work. Yes, but Ingrid, she the most terrible thing to happen to her that that could happen to her has to happen for her to finally have her awakening. And if if she hadn’t made that discovery, I fear poor Ingrid would right now be married to Steve.

Yes, but luckily for us, you have control of the narrative. Did writing Disorientation change you?

EHC

Well, that’s a wonderful question. Yeah, writing Disorientation was me slowly trying to unpack my relationship to my identity. Yeah, my relationship to white men, white institutions. My relationship my childhood. So I think not that to conflate me with Ingrid, you know, but I think Disorientation was, in a way, my ode to parts of Asian American reckonings. And that happened, I think, in those years, around 2016. Before and after, a lot of us, I think had to with someone like Trump, and then now with all the COVID induced hate crimes, it’s how can any of us think we are safe in this country or that the model minority myth is the thing that’s going to save us and keeping our heads down and not complaining is gonna say this. And so I had been reading a lot of things, collecting little tidbits of history, and I would just copy and paste document and I, you know, I’d be I was on ready, I was reading some scary stuff there. You know, read a little about the Amerasian group and terrifying and at the same time I understand the pain is I understand that pain is real, you know, where it stems from, and it obviously is then comes out in a toxic way. But absolutely, the pain is real. And all of these things that were knocking around in my head as I was learning about activist spaces and learning to be in them and to shut up and be an ally. Maybe I did too much. You know, it was like to put it all in Ingrid’s story, but it was all the things that I wanted to talk about with my community. And it’s, it has been so great to open the door to these sorts of sticky conversations. And, you know, many people have told me, I heard that exact same line about redheads. Italian, the whole, it’s normal to have racial preferences. Just knowing people feel seen and knowing that, you know, as if we bring this out in the open, I hope it is that much harder to fly under the radar, and that men like Stephen in their personal lives, but also professionals who are I think, taking away opportunities from us and profiting off of us. I hope they can be called out for what they are. I hope Yeah, we can have these honest conversations about what we have at stake is always we would not even greater it’s just we have things at stake, and they don’t and so I think when it comes to talking about making our it must be said, you know, things changes if you have something at stake.

I would just like us to get as many stories out there as possible. I think that’s a big piece of it is just why can’t we have messy domestic dramas? And why can’t we have academic satires? Or why can’t we just have comedic novels that kind of make you sit and say, okay, I’m laughing, but maybe am I supposed to be laughing at this, I just want us to be able to tell the range of stories and for a really long time, we’ve been ascribed a certain role and that role is not interesting. And I really would just like to see us do whatever we feel like doing whenever we feel like doing it. And if some people are made uncomfortable by that, well, you know, life can be interesting.

EHC

Yeah, and we have to be able to disagree with each other. I think there’s such a fear that if we publicly air our disagreements, we will never achieve sort of a united liberation. But I think that it would be so dangerous to erase the differences between us. And I think, have you seen the newest season of Atlanta?

I haven’t, and I need to.

EHC

I won’t mention it. Okay. There are a few episodes, especially one I think that’s called Mr. Chocolate. It’s an example of when you’re acknowledging, like with Donald Glover, I think in the Black community there is division which is natural among any as we talked about, with your human this happens, I would love us to be able to make art that can shine a light right on those, those messy parts of ourselves that don’t fit into these neat little boxes. I’m trying to get it there in my little corner of the universe. I’m trying to write my messy.

Yeah, well, I’m gonna shout out your story that just ran in the Atlantic “Background”, which if listeners have not read it yet, go find it. It’s fantastic. It’s part of your story collection that’s coming out in 2024, which I have seen you tease is kind of a genre busting, I’m playing with lots of stuff, I’m doing interesting stuff. And I’m dying to read this book. Also, “Background”. It’s just it’s a terrific story. It’s unexpected in some ways. It is a father daughter story that I have not seen before. And right there. I really respect a lot of the choices you made. And yes, I’m not going to spoil this. It’s a short story, go find the short story very quickly. But it’s fantastic. It is absolutely fantastic. And it was really wild. I just didn’t know what to expect. I was like, well, here’s this new story. Okay. And the entire time I just, I could not stop reading. And yes, short stories are designed, you know, to be devoured quickly, but this was, yeah, I love this story. So, I can’t do where does the story collection have a title?

EHC

Yeah, it’s called “Where Are You Really From?”

Oh yes, that line. When you hear that line, you just start to laugh.

EHC

Just laugh and slowly walk away as you continue laughing.

Or you just have fun and say Boston and watch people…

EHC

Keep going like, do you want the address of the hospital where I was, what you want where I was conceived? I got this question so often in France. Oh, no, they phrase it as your “origine”. That’s how, what’s your origine? And so, I actually just started saying, I don’t answer that question. And they would be like, why because I think they think they’re owed this information as if it’s public I don’t know, but I would just say political reasons. And then they couldn’t, they didn’t know. If anyone has been struggling with that. Maybe you could try this just you don’t answer for below. Oh, let them do what they will with that. But thank you for shouting that out. And well, I mean, I’m still revising, we’ll see if it comes out in 2024 maybe 2025. But you know, fingers crossed.

We can be patient. It’s okay. We have Disorientation we can hang out for a minute. And also, Disorientation— you’re working on the teleplay, right?

EHC

It’s the film adaptation.

Oh, okay. So, it is film. I wasn’t sure if it was a limited series or, but so that’s coming at some point. So it’s not going anywhere. We know where to find you. And I don’t mean that in a creepy weird way. I mean, uh, yay. Let’s create all of the art. Let’s have all of the conversations, even if they make us itch a little bit, and, you know, because the way we’ve been doing it has not been working well for a lot— why don’t we just change how we engage and when we engage in what we’re doing and see if maybe that gets us to a different place or something because it’s, we can do better.

EHC

And we and we have, I think is a thing, our history as Asian Americans in the activism in the 60s and before and after, so much of that has been also kept from us. And I had to learn as an adult, no one taught me in school. So I hope it’s, it’s us recognizing, oh, we have been trying to subvert this system, we have been holding space for ourselves taking care of herself and ourselves and not relying on these other institutions. And so I hope we can feel inspired by our past too when it comes to you know, what lies ahead.

If you look at what we were doing in the 60s and 70s model minority is not a phrase that comes to mind. And there’s some great photographs and there’s some great literature I like there’s a lot of stuff that I would love to see some younger generations hit up. Yeah, there’s a lot of really interesting folks who did interesting stuff that I think not everyone knows.

EHC

I’ll shout out a book: I Hotel. I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita. That was how I found out a lot about the history of Asian American activism, she did like years, it was amazing research. Yes. So if people who are listening want to know more about this period, that’s such a great book that it’s fiction but it also is like this sort of beautiful ode, I think to this real like, you know, nonfictional ode to our history, I would love to see a movie— I was thinking that would be so you period piece of Asian American activism and even just sort of the collaboration with Black activists and then someone like Richard Aoki is that you pronounce his last name. You know, I think he’s a really fascinating figure to that. Who knows. I mean, he he when she passed away, and he took so many secrets with him and fascinating stuff. Yeah, I think me and you could talk for…

no, it’s totally great. No, it’s totally great. But yeah, maybe we should just do a whole different series but oh, wait, no. Hold on, hold on, dialing it back. Elaine Hsieh Chou, thank you so much Disorientation is a treat. It’s a roller coaster ride. It is all of the things you want in a novel including a couple of moments where you want to put it down for a second and think about what you just read. But for the most part, it is just wild fun, wild, wild fun. Thank you so much for this book. And thank you for joining us on Poured Over.

EHC

Thank you. This was so wonderful getting to know you and it just felt like talking with a friend. Thank you.

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Claire Jimenez. Oh, some of you may know her debut story collection. It was a while ago called Staten Island Stories. But What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, everyone needs to read this book. Everyone. Wait until you meet Nina and Jessica and Dolores. They are just going to— It’s so great, Claire, it’s so good to see you. But can I ask you to introduce yourself and the novel just because it’s fun?

Claire Jimenez

It’s so wonderful to be here and thank you again for inviting me. So my name is Claire Jimenez. I’m originally from New York, but right now I just moved to South Carolina, South. I’m an assistant professor of English and African American Studies over there. So yeah, and I’m a writer, and I just got my novel coming out. So very excited.

Okay, but let’s talk about these women. We do open with a rough spot. I mean, their sister has gone missing. And we’re 10 years after that event. But Nina and Jessica and Mama Dolores, where did these women come from? Where did Ruthy come from? How did this novel start?

Definitely, I was thinking a lot about, you know, missing Black and Brown girls and women and Indigenous girls and women and how there’s less play and there’s less attention to those stories, when they happen. That was definitely inside of my mind when I was writing. And I was also thinking a lot about reality TV. At that time, you know, at the beginning of the millennium when reality TV was just everywhere, and everybody was watching it and it was addictive. But it was it was violent and problematic, right. And then thinking about how often the bodies of Black and Brown women become sites of violence, those for entertainment, that combined with working retail, and just thinking about Puerto Rican woman and Puerto Rican voices, those all came together as I was writing the novel,

You are very funny. Your women are very funny. You set up a lot of very funny, let’s call them set pieces, right? Because there are there are moments in the in the story, you’re moving the story forward that Dolores spends a lot of time talking to God, and she has opinions, and she is awesome. But you’re also talking about colonialism. You’re also talking about poverty. You’re talking about, you’re talking about really big, sometimes hard ideas. But the way you sort of pass it off to us in this novel is such a delight because of these women. And I have to come back to it. So who showed up first, which of these voices showed up first?

Oh, man, that prologue, I think was actually the the first thing that came I remember writing it in Nashville. I was in the MFA program there at Vanderbilt. And I remember, I actually was at this thing. It was Cafe Cocoa or something like this. I lived very close to it. That was back when you can like live in Nashville, close to Vanderbilt. Now. It’s like, you know, million dollar houses everywhere. But this was 10 years ago. And it was it. It was that voice that came to the surface, thinking about disappearance, thinking about Nina is kind of, you know, quick wit and summary, but also grief. And so once I had that voice, I’m a writer who thinks first about voice. And then who listens to the way people talk. And you know, sometimes I have a document that has random words and quotes, things that I think about or things I might overhear on the bus, and I may never see that person again in my life, but it might trigger something inside of me. And so once I nail down that voice, the rest of the story came together. But it first started as a short story. I didn’t have a novel until many years later,

I heard it started as a short story called Catfight, the name of the show itself. So instead of a book about a book, you’ve written a book about a TV show, a certain extent, but here’s the thing. So, sister Ruthy, who— it’s Jessica, then Ruthy, then Nina, right. Ruthy is the middle child. She has disappeared, and at the end of the 90s, and we meet everyone as adults and it’s been made very clear that no one knows what’s happened to Ruthy, the police are not particularly interested in helping the family find out what’s happening, and dad has died. It’s really at this point. It’s Jessica, it’s Nina. Still worse. Yeah. But you give everyone sort of, let’s call it a turn of the microphone, right. Like everyone gets to narrate their own chapters. Nina sort of lays everything out for us. Jessica is a working mom. She’s got a toddler. She’s got a partner who loves her. It sounds like they’ve known each other since junior high. Right? Okay, so we’re in this really tight community. And Dolores knows everything on else’s children. Yeah, everyone knows. So you kind of can’t keep your business to yourself. Yeah. And Dolores was also very young when she got married and had her first child. So how do you set this up? I mean, you know, this world. You started with the story. This is not autofiction. I mean, there’s a little bit of overlap. There are some details. I mean, Nina is going to work at the start of the Great Recession. So, she ends up with her fancy college degree selling underpants. Yeah, mom. She’s not happy. But you have so many threads working through. I mean, there’s class consciousness there, the sisters being in different places emotionally, intellectually. Where did you start? I mean, yes, you just told us you started with the voice in the prologue. But that’s not all you can do.

Originally with the short story. It was Nina’s voice. And then I had trouble really placing the story and thinking about it and then only in years later, I had already graduated from Vanderbilt MFA, I was an adjunct and I was working many jobs and I kind of tapped out and I said, you know what, I gotta go back and get my PhD and then I went to Nebraska of all places. And I remember I brought this story and, and Jonis Agee, she was, she was one of the professors there. Like, you know, Claire, I think that the problem with this story is that it’s not a story. It’s a novel. And she’s like, I needed to get the pages in a few weeks, which kind of terrified me, because I was like, oh, what will this look like? And the only way I can really envision telling this story was through multiple voices, right? And thinking about, this is a story about a family. This is a story. That’s not just one person’s voice. It’s sort of a chorus of women. We’re building and adding upon the narrative. And I wanted to build upon the tension of what is known, what each character knows and what they don’t know. So that how does that vibrate against each other as the novel progresses?

Did you surprise yourself at all, while you were writing What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez? Can we have an example that’s not a spoiler.

Oh, man. Well, yes. You know, I think that I surprised myself with the mother. I think I was worried about, you know, writing the mother’s perspective, because at that time, I wasn’t a mother. Only recently, I became a mother, you know. And so now and, and then I understood a little bit of what was happening there. And I think I surprised myself, when I realized that so much of like that, I could frame I could frame her sections as sort of this one-sided prayer, completely to myself. Like what would that mother’s voice sounds like? It’d be after missing a daughter. And for me knowing that this this character, it would be that you’re constantly praying, you’re constantly hoping, you’re constantly thinking about your daughter. And that’s how that section kind of unraveled, I also surprised myself with Irene who is like, Dolores’ friend.

Dolores, his friend, Irene. Yeah.

I wanted a trickster character. And I was like, okay, Irene is the perfect trickster. Like, I gotta have her come in and be like, comedic relief, but also be like, you know, it really be a comadre to Dolores, like, okay, you know, she’s, she’s there to help her through these moments.

You know, the other thing I appreciate about Dolores, too, and when she’s talking to God, it’s very funny. I mean, it is very, very funny. But she’s also really angry. She’s angry at what she’s saying happened to other women, not just her daughters, but like, she teaches a parenting class at a church. And she’s like, you sent us a priest who’s like, 20. How is he going to manage us? He has no idea what he’s doing. Yeah. And, you know, women don’t often get to express their rage. It makes other people very uncomfortable. and Jaquira Díaz actually said, Ordinary Girls, the author of Ordinary Girls, she actually has a very cool line about how your characters reject respectability and I love that. Thanks. So can we just noodle around with that idea for a second, because I think that’s really important that these women are kind of like, you can judge me however you want, but you’re wrong. And they will go to the mat for each other these girls that are there, they’re great. But they don’t owe anyone an explanation. And that just feels so refreshing to read in fiction right now.

Yeah, I love Jaquira for saying that. I mean, just, you know, because I feel like as another Puerto Rican woman, I feel like she really got and understood the novel. And you know, there’s for Dolores’ section in particular, I wanted it to be a prayer, but I also want it to be profane prayer. I wanted it to have that anger. That’s honest, right. And the way these women grieve might not be the way somebody else grieves. But that is just as legitimate. It makes me cringe when I hear people say, you know, like, oh, this feels too profane, or I don’t like the way these women talk, or they should talk a certain type of way. Because what that says to me is like, you care more about profanity than femicide, right? Or you’re, you’re asking somebody to talk in a polite way, about something that has ripped their life in half. Right? And respectability politics are often a tool of white supremacy, right? It says, you know, tell me your story, but in a way that won’t offend me and that to me is so troubling. And, this book is absolutely against that, you know and I unapologetically and I, as an author am unapologetic about it?

Oh, yeah, I would never ask you to. And I think what you do is so smart, though. But by making these women’s so engaging, and so funny, and so smart, I was just pulled through. And also, I mean, it moves. You do not, there is no slowing down or breaks anywhere, which I really love. Because I needed you to know and that’s kind of all I’m gonna say, because I do not want to spoil this book for other people. It is so good. This book, it is so good. You know, and I know you and I were talking about this, before I hit the record button, we have to talk about Puerto Rico, because I feel like there are a lot of folks out in the world who don’t understand that Puerto Rico is part of the United States, it is not in fact, a separate entity. And that really does inform your women too. I mean, Nina and Jessica, Nina doesn’t speak Spanish, just doesn’t speak Spanish. She’s a New Yorker. She’s a New York kid. And at the same time, there is some internalized colonialism happening that she and Jessica are kind of butting heads over and a little bit with mom, but mostly it’s the sisters. So let’s bring people into that part of the conversation.

Well, yeah, I think that the first thing is like a lot of people don’t understand the colonial relationship between the United States, Puerto Rico, the way in which the United States has not treated Puerto Rico well for you know, since they acquired it, right, and they don’t understand that because of the nature of citizenship, that there’s often a circular migration, or that migration is violent, or that there are people in Puerto Rico who want independence, right? Like, what that that history of that migration, how that might shape the lives of people in the diaspora. So for this family, divorce is very much shaped by that. And so the question that I kept on coming to while I was writing the novel was, how do how do these daughters inherit that, right? Even though they’re not first-generation immigrants ot migrants, right would be the right word, but their ways in which that experience overlaps a little bit to coming to New York? And what ways do they inherit that? Right, and how does that play out inside their lives? So, I was really interested in exploring that for Nina, right. There’s, there’s a loss of language that brings shame. And what does that mean? How does that affect the way she, you know, talks to Jessica? What the resentments, right, you know, or the way in which she feels mean, as a person who doesn’t really feel like she belongs anywhere, right? She doesn’t fit in with the cool girls in her middle school when she’s trying to dance and she’s not a person who fit in at the predominantly white college, she went to right. And then she also feels like sort of like an outlier in our family. And so, I really wanted to play around with that.

I sort of feel like Jessica’s happier and more settled than Nina in a lot of ways, even though things are not the easiest for her. But I do feel like she’s got a little bit of a better handle on things. But let’s give listeners an example of what Jessica’s own internalized colonialism looks like, because she’s doing it too. She’s doing it too.

I feel like with Jessica, she wants a better life. You know, she wants, you know, to be better paid, she wants these things, whether she knows how to get them. You know, that’s, that’s something that she’s definitely struggling with. I think she you know, early on in the novel as she struggles with the whiteness of Lou’s family. And I think this comes up inside of the inside of the novel. She’s also unapologetically Puerto Rican, but she’s also very light skinned, right. And so this comes up inside of their conversations, too, right. But she also speaks great Spanish. Yeah, like so there’s a reason I wanted to make characters that were complicated. And yeah, that were complicated linguistically, racially— Jessica is light skinned, but her mother is not right, Nina is not you know, so I wanted to represent the diversity inside of that family.

Yeah, no, I really appreciated that because I mean, the thing is, too, we love reading stories about sisters because they’re complicated and we do get to meet Ruthy. Yes, Ruthy has disappeared, but we do get to meet her sort of in the days and weeks leading up to her disappearance. And she is very much her own person and very much not like her sisters. She’s a great character. She’s a, she’s a fantastic character. She’s also very 13. She has like, all of the big emotions, and all of the things and all of the feelings and it’s just like the energy that Ruthy brings to the page even which is wild. It’s so great. Can we talk about structure for a second? I know you said earlier in the show that, you know, obviously you knew you needed multiple voices to tell the story, you still keep it very tight. I mean, this is under 300 pages. I mean, this is a very tightly told novel. So what did you have to get rid of? Because you and I both know that first drafts are not that clean.

Oh my god, I wrote hundreds of drafts, hundreds, like, that feels like it’s an exaggeration, but it’s not. You know, like, at first, I wrote the story backwards. You know, at first, the novel looks like a lot of short stories, right. And so, every time I changed the structure, I had to cut something off, you know, and so like things didn’t fit, or it felt sort of superfluous, you know. And I think at one point, I decided like, okay, so I’m just going to tell it straight, I’m going to do a typical kind of journey narrative, because everything else is so complicated, right? Having a multi voiced novel, and being able to make each of those voices distinct, being able to switch throughout, you know, let’s switch perspectives and have a Ruthy perspective as well, like, I was like, okay, so maybe I should try to find in terms of plot, to shoot straight with it, even though in ways I think I subvert that at times, I make little turns.

You definitely do that within each section. And I think there are a couple of moments where you play with time in a really interesting way. But they also feel dangerously spoilery. Very, very spoilery. Yeah, and I do I like the fact that everyone’s always in a very contained space. So you’re in a room, in a church basement, you’re in a specific place in school, you’re in the, you know, one of the apartments, there’s almost a language that goes with each place. And Dolores kind of says this, and in a couple of different ways, where she’s like, well, there’s the face you show here, and the face you show there, and the face, and yet I feel for these women, you know, this code switching that they have to do. Oh, you can’t catch a break.

Yeah, I think that’s really apparent with Nina, you know, especially being, especially during the sections where she’s at college, where she really navigates and has this awareness about like, what she looks like to white people, right? And then she plays around with it a little bit, right. But I did I wanted to think about place for Nina, for example, you know, there’s the retail store, right? Mariposa laundry store, for Jessica, there’s the hospital, for the mother to the church and to bring those places alive. You know, of course there’s the island, Staten Island is like the stepchild of New York, to sneak it in there too, the Staten Island wall, the ferry, the water.

And we have a store in Staten Island, and I’ve been there multiple— I’ve been to both a new store and the old store. So I know at least that piece of it, but yeah, Staten Island really like there are times where you kind of look at it and go right, that is one of the boroughs. It’s no disrespect to Staten Island. It’s just if you live on Staten Island, you know what I’m talking about. And I think too, like the southern tip, people forget that it’s very suburban, and not at all like, there are parts of Staten Island that feel a little like New Jersey.

Oh, yeah. South Staten Island, South Shore.

It is kind of its own place. And you know, Dolores certainly ends up there by marriage. I don’t think it was ever in her plan to have her children, like Nina was not planning on coming back. Jessica is kind of like I have a nice life, I’m going to do my thing. This is home.

Yeah, I think Staten Island— I mean, there is this trajectory of folks moving from Brooklyn to Staten Island and things got kind of overpriced, right? So Staten Island used to be much cheaper now I’ll sit down and I’m like, they’re charging what for a townhouse? Why, you know, but I think back in the 90s it was definitely much more affordable. You know, Brooklyn was much more affordable back then too but you could probably get more and so it’s a family that you know is looking for the nice house you know, is looking for something that resembles like the American dream, right, which of course collapses when we think when Ruthy disappears, which I mean, this is why also I when I fast forwarded it to when they think they see her on a reality show. I really wanted to put it in 2008, because I wanted to talk about the economic crisis there. I wanted to talk about all of the ways in which, you know, this idea of the American dream, it felt fragile, right.

I think it’s still fragile for a lot of people. I mean, you know, you have a PhD. I didn’t know you went to college and like you did your undergrad in Maine, like, you really can’t find that many points that are further from Staten Island on the East Coast. Like physically, I think technically. I say this as a person who to college in Maine too.

Where did you go?

I went to Bowdoin. So, like down the road from you. Yeah. But I mean, you go to college in Maine, you then go to Nashville for your Master’s in Fine Arts, you get your MFA in Creative Writing in Nashville. And then you end up in Lincoln, Nebraska for a PhD. And now you’re living in South Carolina. And part of me is wondering if you needed to leave Staten Island to be able to write about it.

You know, that’s a really good question. Because actually, when I went to Nashville, I got into this program, never thinking I would get in, and then it happened and then they paid for everything you stay in even during recruitment, I remember they paid for the whole time, like, oh, my God, this is so different than what I’m currently living. But I say all of that, because having that time was really important to me as a writer, because I was able to get writing done, you know, and I also say that because being inside of Nashville, I realized that I was constantly writing about New York, you know, when you’re inside of the water, you don’t think I’m swimming in water, right? People were like, listen, you’re always writing about women, you’re always writing about Staten Island. And for me, when I was writing my stories about Staten Island, I wasn’t thinking of writing about Staten Island, because that’s where I lived. And I think that that’s the beauty of having a program like that, because it helps you understand, what are the themes and obsessions? What are the places you keep on going back to no matter where I live? I always go back to those places. You know, I haven’t really written about living in the South, right? Even though I live in the south right now. I haven’t really written about living in the Midwest. And I think sometimes that’s because I’m not that far away from it. Whereas New York, I was born and grew up there and so that’s where I keep on returning.

I mean, one of the beautiful things about New York is you kind of do have to leave every now and again to remember why you’re there all the time. Yeah, it’s a great place to come back to and I do I love living here and I love being here. But sometimes you have to just remember that there are places that aren’t here, because we’re such a weird little microcosm of, you know, some pretty great things. And then some things where you’re like, oh, yeah, we could do that better, we could really do that better. Like, why are we doing it that way? That’s just seems like a bad idea. All right. So let’s talk about literary influences for a second, though, because you’ve always been a reader. I’m pretty sure you’re one of those folks who’s also always wanted to be a writer, whether you knew it or not, like stories were always that thing. So, let’s dig in there for a second and not just the people you studied in school, and not just the people you studied with. Because, I mean, that’s a delight. And that’s great, but I think it goes deeper than that.

Oh, yeah. I mean, I’ve always loved writing, I’ve always loved reading. I mean, books have always been a part of my life in storytelling as well. I really love authors like James Baldwin. I was telling somebody else in another interview that I was like, I’m a very different writer than James Baldwin, because he’s— I always wanted to write like James Baldwin, because he has a wonderful expansive like, creature voice, the beautiful control over sentences and clause upon clause. But even though stylistically I’m different, I’m still inspired by him every day. Like I remember rereading Another Country over and over again, and just thinking about like, wow, how did he do this?

That opening where Rufus is walking through town square, and you’re just like, oh, hi and because I mean, also, I mean, that book. Wait, am I right? It’s set in the 70s. So, Time Square was kind of gross.

Yeah, yeah. He’s doing so much there for me, it’s because it’s also like dealing with lots of different characters, things like dipping into different points of view. For me, I feel like, really, the question that book is posing is given all of the violence, and all of the terrible things that our country has done, how can we ever love each other? I mean, he was brilliant, you know, but he’s another one who was doing lots of point of views. I think about the I’ve always loved books that are about characters, that are about characters’ voices, that are really getting into the heads of people. Books with a lot of seeing, right, I love Grace Paley, you know, I love writers, like, you know, Pedro Pietri, these are the poets of Puerto Rican poets of that age. Toni Cade Bambara, you know, like, writers who are really thinking about voice, those are some big influences. There’s so many more, you know, when I get stuck, I go back to the books I love and you know Sigrid Nunez, I think is wonderful, but I just think she has an excellent command of sentences.

Now, that’s one of the things I really appreciate, as I was reading, What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is, you clearly are thinking about all of the different pieces, you’re using characters to move the story forward, you’re using characters to play with time, you’re using character to play with perspective, and we get this sort of really dynamic 360 in a really tight story, like I can’t stress this enough, you were just like, I don’t need 600 pages. I’m just doing this how I’m doing it. And I feel like I know, these women really, really well. And I feel like, everyone’s gonna be okay. I do. Like, I don’t feel like I’m spoiling anything by saying every, like, they’ll get there, if not right this minute.

Thank you for saying that. Like, it is so nice for somebody to notice craft. You know, like a lot of times people look at writers of color. They’re like, oh, you know, they only talk about like, what the book is about, as opposed to how the book is built and it’s so nice to feel seen and to be seen.

Craft is important. Craft is really, really important. I mean, for me, I know you said at the top of the show that you read for voice first and I read for voice first too. I mean, there’s some people who just want to be told a story and there’s some people who have to like the characters. Like yeah, that’s not me. I don’t, I don’t have to like the characters, but I need to care. I need to be invested; I need to have skin in the game. If I’m sort of shrugging my shoulders if the characters good or bad, then there’s no there there for me. But language matters, I think language gets thrown out occasionally. Now granted, also like was I taught to, you know, diagram sentences as small as I was, okay. I went to one of those schools. And it’s a really useful thing to know how to do. I do have feelings about grammar that you and I can save for another conversation and there would be a lot of aha, oh, yeah, absolutely. I think grammar can be used in ways that, you know, are not good for the wider conversations we need to have about class and privilege and other things. And to know that these women can navigate their world, right? And just be who they are. Like, yeah, you can tell me what you think, you’re telling me now and I love that it’s happening at all their different ages. I mean, Dolores, I’m guessing Irene is you know, Dolores, roughly Dolores’ age or maybe a little older. And she’s just like, oh, you girls, I there’s a moment where Irene and Dolores get into a club, and they leave the girls outside. And the girls are like, hey, wait, we’re with them. And they’re yelling the names. And Irene just turns around? No, we don’t know you.

Yeah, that was so fun to play to was so like, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot, I’ve been talking to my students. I teach an MFA program over here and I’ve been, I’ve been talking to them a lot about play. And you know how sometimes when we’re in workshop, we forget to have joy while we write. And that was so much fun to write, it reminded me it was like, this is why you started writing and I’ve been thinking about incorporating that more into my practice.

It’s so important. It’s so so important. And the other thing is to like you’re not telling just one piece of the story. Yes. Ruthy disappears. It has a huge impact on her family. But Ruthy’s disappearance is one piece of this family’s life. It’s a very extreme piece. Did you ever read Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Farrell?

I haven’t but that’s been on my to be read list forever. It came out last year, the year before?

In hardcover I think it’s a couple years old, the paperback is out. But what she does with voice, right, because it’s a harrowing story. I mean, these girls get kidnapped by creep, he keeps them in the house. It’s very, very loosely based on that guy in Ohio. And when I say loosely based, it’s just the structure of house, girls held captive, very bad guy. But there are Greek choruses throughout. So there’s a great chorus of neighborhood ladies. And the girls themselves are a singular voice and what Carolyn does with voice in this. Oh, that’s wild. But there are moments to where there’s genuine laughter, there’s genuine joy because otherwise we’d all just be holding our heads in our hands going. I don’t know if I can keep doing it. But the way she structures this very intense story about missing Black and Brown girls to use voice in this way and to have this chorus of women who are probably you know, roughly Dolores’ and Irene’s age, right? The ladies of the neighborhood, it’s so smart. And it’s just, and I feel that way about what you’re doing with What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez, because there are ways that you could have presented the story and still covered what you needed to cover, but it’s the humor, it’s the joy. It’s the moments where someone does something and you’re like, oh, yeah, that’s amazing. Because we need space to breathe. I mean, that’s like, we need space to breathe. We still need to have the conversations about colonialism and respectability, and all of these terrible legacy things, and grammar, grammar. It really annoys me, it really annoys me, like language should be constantly evolving, right? And we see it with disruptors like Uber has become synonymous with not calling a taxi and calling a car, whatever it is, but, you know, we do it for other things. And I’m like, yep. But we don’t often extend that grace to people who are doing different things with language, because we somehow have decided that, you know, they’re not smart. I don’t like, I mean, if you think of like, the entire history of rap music, I’m like, Hi. Yeah. Hi, how to manipulate language.

Really poets or lyricists, you know, or rappers. It’s so unfortunate how limited people are sometimes. And when they think about literature, when they think about art, like you said, I think grammar is something that constantly evolves. And it’s a tool that we use to benefit us. Yeah, considering that we bow down to.

Anyway, like I said, that’s an eight-hour conversation for you and I have. Do you miss these women? Do you miss this world?

I think it was a really hard book to write at times. And so there are moments of play, but it was also a very painful, book to write. And so, you know, there’s a part of me that’s even in thinking about the book and sometimes talking about the book, it can be a little bit hard for me, you know, I guess this goes back to something that you were saying about humor, but I really do think for a lot of, for Puerto Ricans, especially humor is a way of survival, right. And that’s true about a lot of, you know, Black and Brown cultures. And I see that in a lot of the literatures and so I do like, there are moments where I’m like, oh, that’s, that’s kind of funny. Well, you know, like, got to pat yourself on the back. It’s kind of embarrassing to say, but, you have fun, you have fun as you write it. And so those are fun places to be in the novel. There’s a lot of other places that are hard, you know.

I mean, sometimes it’s just reflexive when you’re laughing at the thing that is horrific, because you don’t know what else to do. It sounds very counterintuitive, but there are times where you’re just like, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know how else to respond to this piece of information, because I’ve never experienced something like that. But I do want listeners to understand that there is a big beating heart in What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez. And I know you and I have covered a lot of ground where people are like, wait, am I listening to a history pod? What is that? No, this is what art and literature is supposed to do. Like you’re supposed to be able to capture the moment that we live in, and like, reflect it back at us and just be like, oh, hi. you may not know this. Have you had time to read anything else? I mean, I realize your novel is coming out into the world you teach. There are a million things going on. You probably have already started the next book, but have you read anything lately that has just knocked your socks off?

Oh my god. Yes. I read Post-Traumatic by Chantal V. Johnson and I just think that novel was just so good. Also a Puerto Rican writer. So that was exciting to see. It’s kind of wild, because there’s two other Puerto Rican writers coming out and Melissa Coss Aquino and Jennifer Maritza McCauley are coming out with books at the same time, that never happens, right? Like that never happens that three Puerto Rican women are publishing at a big five and coming out in the same season. So I’m really looking forward to those books as well. I got the ARC for Yellowface the other day. Oh, my God. Have you started reading it yet?

I have. I have and we’re going to be live on stage in May.

Oh my god, the first few pages, no spoilers, but I was just laughing the first few pages. I mean, it’s also one of those difficult books that balances the tension between the serious and humor, you know, so that has been really fun to go back to.

Yeah, it’s a really exciting moment. I mean, you know, we don’t always do everything perfectly, but to see more voices being added to what’s being published is I mean as a bookseller it’s wicked exciting. Sorry, my Boston keeps flying out every now and again. If you can represent the island from South Carolina, we just need as much noise as we can get and as much noise as we can make and I think it’s delightful and there’s also a new Esmeralda Santiago novel coming, totally stoked about Las Madres is coming and then Xochitl Gonzales’s Olga Dies Dreaming is in paper. You know, she’s doing a little bit of what you’re doing to that balance of humor and oh, did oh, I mean, there’s some stuff that happens in that book.

Oh, it’s a very Puerto Rican characteristic, the balance between humor and tragedy. It’s something, you know, that’s our people.

Given what I know about the history of Puerto Rico. I mean, my book club read War Against All Puerto Ricans, which I highly recommend if you need like a basic history of mainland US relationship with Puerto Rico, it is absolutely worth reading. Nelson Dennis’s book, it’s not an easy read. But yeah, really important. Especially if you want to know what we’re doing, like, as Americans, like, we should know these things. We really should know these things. Are you working on the next novel?

You know, I am, and I’m, but I’m working on like two things. I don’t know which one will win. It’s like you, you’re taking care of one kid and then you’re like, oh, no, that kid is eating that. I’m trying to figure out what to do with it, but it’s so at the early stages, but I’m excited. I want to go back and play. I’m excited to write again, you know.

Okay, before I let you go, though, can we talk about the Puerto Rican Literature Project? You’re the co-founder of this and I think it’s really cool. And I don’t feel like I knew about it until I started doing my homework for this episode. So can we talk about this? Because it’s an online resource. It’s available to everyone. It’s really kind of groovy. So would you just riff on that a bit.

Yes, most definitely. Okay, so The Puerto Rican Literature Project is a digital archive. We recently received over a million dollars from the Mellon Foundation over the next over three years. We have one more year left in the grant cycle to create this digital archive, which is basically documenting the lives of Puerto Rican writers, a team, I should say who they are, because it’s important you know, at the University of Houston and I work with a team of other Puerto Rican scholars and writers. Eddie Olivares Vicente, Ricardo Maldonado, Rivera, Gabby and Caro at USLDH are amazing. I mean, they’re original founders or not original founders, but basically at Arte Público Gabby’s, the head. So under right under Nick, but yeah, so these people are, it’s a big team. And we also have Ana Castillo Muñoz and Anna Portnoy Brimmer. And I mentioned, I, it’s important to mention all of these people, because the project is enormous. And we’re working in interviewing hundreds of poets, the goal is to get some 100 poets on the site by next year. And we’re interviewing poets in the diaspora and, and in the archipelago. We’re focusing on poetry the first phase, and then fiction in the second phase.

so I just this makes me really happy. That’s just the idea that this exists. And you guys are just making sure that it gets out into the world. My eyes are getting really big talking about it.

We were over in Houston, working on it on the metadata, which is the less sexy portion of it.

it. We live in a data driven world we can’t ignore it. I was willing to ignore it. And I just can’t.

You’re right. Oh, my God. Yeah,

We do what we can we tell stories, we give people you know, a little bit of laughter and a little bit of, hey, could you think about this for five minutes? Because yeah, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s worth knowing. And it’s worth understanding. And it’s worth knowing these characters. I mean, seriously, Nina? Jessica. Ruthy. It’s really, I mean, there’s some fun, fun stuff. We’re going to drop. Obviously, the other books that we talked about, we’re going to drop them in the show notes, because I agree. Pretty important. And Post-Traumatic was a great read. Yes, yeah. And this is where I get to say thank you so much for making the time.

I wanted to also mention another Puerto Rican writer, my dear Xavier Navarro Aquino, who wrote Velorio and so he wrote this last year, and it’s an excellent book talking about hurricane Maria, sort of mythical, it’s, it’s a great book. I recommend for folks to read it.

We definitely need that in the show notes. And I will get them in there. Claire Jimenez, thank you so much. What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez is out now and everyone should read it. Thank you.

Thank you.