![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
meikureetoday's "buy 1 get 1 free" deal on fannish commentary: elsewhere, have some tumblr meta I've written about Zen Cho's Black Water Sister.
while writing fic for BWS for![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
bethefirst, I juggled three goals:
but the essay later acknowledges that:
I’ve opened with this discussion because BWS explodes neat correspondences between cultural perspectives, the noticed/visible place, and insider/outsider positionalities in a way I found intriguing as I wrote this fic. I'm sorry to cite myself, but as I mention in my tumblr meta, "[Black Water Sister] implodes some conventions in malaysian fiction about divisions between the westernised, cosmopolitan affluent overseas malaysian and local, ‘left behind’ malaysians, who are often more invisible and considered parochial characters in the global fiction landscape; jess’s grandma and her literally share a body and her grandma is a tour de force in her own right, strategically overpowering jess at points, but they also work together.” the book pulls you in at the start with the impression that it's the usual predictable story about an American Chinese immigrant returning 'home' and feeling conflicted between two clashing cultural contexts, with the resultant story focusing myopically on their cultural alienation and rootlessness, but Cho subverts certain tropes in those stories. case in point: Jess becomes fluent in Hokkien halfway because of body sharing shenanigans, which perplexes her relatives, and easily holds lots of dirt for resolving her family's secrets. Cho in general has a nice way of harnessing kernels of originality within the Malaysian supernatural and cultural canon, so that her stories are resonant and recognisable but not trite. it's a fine line to tread -- she manages it well.
anyway: all books will use both 1st and 2nd order descriptions and BWS does the same, though to me it's weighted a little more towards the 1st, not that it matters. it also plays with notions of cultural distance. the premise of Jess's old cranky grandma possessing her means that the book doesn't have to dwell all the time on Jess's out-of-placeness (and the book is helpful to braid it with Jess's interpersonal and familial issues than just treating it as inherent to the act of returning to the Homeland) and also allows the pov to go beyond Jess being a fish out of water. that always has the potential to get old fast if you're a reader already familiar with Malaysia's context, but Jess's newfound double vision due to Ah Ma residing in her body means that BWS can balance seemingly incommensurate audiences. Jess's pov is helpful for readers who may not have prior ties or familiarity with Malaysia, while Ah Ma's knowledge is a nice anchor for those who do in fact know Penang's context.
while writing foreign sky that translated into similar... see-saw concerns with the narration too. obviously Jess would not be familiar with Singapore but I wanted to sidestep clownish foreignising depictions of the places she visits a la the infamous USAmerican tourist gaze. I have familiarity with and some ties to parts of Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Singapore, and tend to reach for specificity and precision in my writing. but that doesn't guarantee much: I also rely on 1st order descriptions with name dropping and dense writing that can call attention to a place in an unnatural way ("she heaped a generous helping of pandan kaya from Heavenly Wang onto her bread with a bread knife from the Lotus supermart"). since I just wrote fic for a cultural context I'm less familiar with for Exordia (namely, Southern Kurdistan) I've been comparing how I handled setting writing in both fics, and I'm not necessarily 100% satisfied with both, but I've contented myself with the fact that I wrote both under time constraints (read: my procrastination) for Be the First's deadlines.
is the end product a good one? I'm not the right judge, and I think that's beside the point, but most of my writing choices in foreign sky were intentional and had justifications for them. I also enjoyed the process. it was done, and good enough.
on writing style
I'll be honest. Cho's style is much more direct/straightforward than I'm used to and sometimes a little on-the-nose for my tastes, although that says more about my reading tastes than any faults in Cho's style. I went out of my comfort zone a lot here by writing my first fic ever where a character explicitly names herself as a lesbian and has a coming out storyline (a storyline I'm usually lukewarm about), but also by angling towards a less repressed and less ornate narrator voice. tbh, I winced at the screen several times while writing, but I wanted to put my style into dialogue with the book's.
Cho fought with the editors, I think? not to include a glossary of Malaysian slang or terms in the book, and that was a holdover I happily followed suit with for my fic.
characterisation
Cho is good at painting a sympathetically unflattering portrait of Jess. her flaws are on display through the book. she's a more compelling protagonist for it. but I have to be real: Jess struck me as naive on occasion for someone who graduated from Harvard. this is not a "Harvard doesn't have stupid people" issue because there certainly are idiots who go to Harvard (and in general, people should disabuse themselves of the notion that prestige = intelligence). I mean that there are certain things Jess sees as a revelation which I'd have expected her to have a bigger inkling of given someone of her interests and family situation:
there's nothing objectionable about this segment and it's well-written, thoughtful. but this isn't as convincing to me (and I speak as one of the indefatigable Chinese diaspora strewn across the globe) as if Jess had grown up seeing her parents call home several times a week and chatting on the phone in fluid Hokkien with their siblings and extended family or the Malaysian Chinese immigrant community in the US. immigration displaces you, definitely, but this reads to me more as "Jess was unobservant and didn't realise her parents have emotional lives of their own" than "they underwent interpersonal constriction due to the move". it also depends very much on where exactly in the US they moved to, which (IIRC) isn't mentioned in the book, but imo if her parents are Malaysian immigrants it's reasonably likely they stayed in touch in ways that'd leave an impression on Jess. it's not impossible that they lost all connections, but I'd have needed more substantiation than "they were immigrants" (e.g., they did not have capital, they were in an especially white area), because being an immigrant often pushes you to forge networks in the destination country that are very much essential to survival, even if you're introverted.
this is, I think, a recurring issue in the book's early parts. I wondered at times if a heavy-handed editor had told Cho to write in lines about Being An Immigrant for a presumed white or non-immigrant audience. and I can see the value of a section like the one quoted above -- it adds to Jess's sense of feeling adrift, footlooseness, etc. perhaps I am pedantic. but BWS has many other cases where it trusts the reader to connect the dots of cultural context and get it (and some of those are HYSTERICAL and gold!), and it works much better for me at those times because it's not trying to hammer the point home insistently. an example:
I tried to flesh out aspects of Jess's life that were drawn in negative space in the book, like her time in Massachusetts and how she met Sharanya. I settled on a major like... creative writing, English, or filmwriting for her? based on one little line about her taking up a job to be a creative writing TA in Singapore.
the use of the 'supernatural' in BWS
I've thought about whether Cho's positionality influences her writing, particularly the fact that she grew up in Petaling Jaya as part of the 'economically substantial' Chinese minority in Malaysia. (BWS's Penang setting itself is likely significant, cue discussions of bumiputera politics and Penang's position as one of the few relatively Chinese-dominant places in Malaysia.) I hesitated over including this because I think it can be gauche to look for neat seductive lines between someone's background and how they write, in the vein of exaggerated cultural determinism. but the topic of how Malaysian supernatural figures and folklore are deployed in her writing is an adjacent topic that is worth discussing and also much more interesting.
I don't have a lot of articulate thoughts at this point, but Zen Cho's stories frequently connect supernatural occurrences to humorous contemporary concerns for Malaysian characters, in ways wiser people have elaborated on elsewhere. there's a lot of fertile ground here for conversation with the fact that supernatural entities (and they way their stories are wielded) often say a lot about modern anxieties around, say, societal trends like development or colonialism. in Malaysia's context I'm thinking for instance about the rise of orang minyak films from the 1950s in response to the encroachment of crude oil refinery industries, which you could call a reaction to petro-modernity. (the orang minyak's been called a 'strange case' as a distinctively modern ghost.)
Cho's oeuvre tends to have the... affect... of light humour (which is not to say it ignores serious topics; there's plenty of that in her writing too), I think. one thing I'm interested in as someone who's only read bits of her writing here and there is whether she has also tackled Malaysian politics in connection to the supernatural. I'm willing to suggest that she has likely thought about exploring this and decided not to given the state of Malaysian politics and censorship (😐), but that's one area I'd willingly follow her to if she decides to delve into it.
this is where I'm stopping this for now; there might be a pt. 2 or I might just update this post when I feel like it.
while writing fic for BWS for
bethefirst, I juggled three goals:- staying faithful to the spirit (ha) of the book, if not Zen Cho's prose
- expanding on jess's relationship with her girlfriend
- post-canon expansion on what happens after jess's decision to come out
wrt 1, there’s a theory I have for setting/“enculturated” description or experience in fiction, which I personally call first-order and second-order description. they have less to do with psychic distance, familiarity with, or proximity to specific cultures and more to do with expected audiences, writing ‘voice’ (or the grooves a writer finds themself resorting to), genre conventions, and interplays between form and content.
for the purposes of explanation, first-order description involves what I’d imperfectly call exteriority for now. it includes but is not limited to setting details that tend to be accessible with secondhand research but not always, and are anchored upon “facts” like:
- the names of businesses or trees in a locale
- important landmarks, habits and customs
- local creole languages
- the intricacies of a governance regime
- the fallout from neocolonial IMF economic restructuring on the Global South
- and much more
second-order description involves interiority: the sculpting of perception, experience, and interpretation. one can perhaps call it "thick description" too. it might include a character's note about the cool parade of sunlight that filters through palm fronds outside his window like nightsticks, an 18th arrondisement resident's mental map of roads, the soft squelch of rice as you eat it with your hands, the struggle of fighting windchill on the way to work, the mundane sedimentation of narrative and history in a sultan's grave in Melaka that one passes every day, etc. you get the idea.
it's tempting to associate first- and second-order description with dichotomies like objectivity vs. subjectivity, insider/outsider, nomothetic/idiographic, static/ephemeral knowledge or plain old show vs. tell; to say that 2nd order description is the elaboration of facts laid out by 1st order description and the real meat of cultural habitation. the ability to refract the big hegemonic cloud of "culture" through the prism of individuated senses and impressions, supposedly, is what demonstrates a writer's real thoughtfulness about what living somewhere is like. but I'd argue that both orders alone say little about style and power topographies and cultural credentials in a text at all, because 2nd order description is also something you'd find in colonial anthropological writing, where the Other is treated to the exoticising gaze of a (presumed) white audience. it says little about a writer’s motivation for including certain details. depending on your response to this essay on stylistic differences between diaspora and “mainland” fiction, you might come away thinking that 2nd order details are the remit of people trying to overplay the culture card:
It’s something I encounter frequently as well in Chinese literature – there is a divide in tone and content between that of the mainland, what we might call again that ‘authentic’ Chinese writing, and that of those who have grown up not even in Hong Kong or Taiwan but in the diaspora, their Chinese nature ‘diluted’ by the presence of American, English etc. cultural experience. Very few of the mainland Chinese novels I’ve read deal with ‘China’ in that grand abstract way; while many of the diaspora books I’ve read either focus with intense detail on the protagonist’s personal relationship with ‘China’, or zoom out to some grand imagined mythology of say, the imperial past reinterpreted through a modern lens, grappling intimately with the clash between the author’s modern values and Chinese traditions. [...] The majority of mainland novels do not address these things and instead, as Svejk does with the Czech experience, tell a story dealing with them – if at all – in the background [and ... ] as matter-of-factly as possible.
but the essay later acknowledges that:
For these books the national themes – the chaos and excitement of reform and opening and the experience of being a woman in the ugly patriarchal world of modern China, what the searing experiences of the twentieth century might mean blown up into universe-spanning, existential implications, respectively – are not national but simply themes. Is that a good thing? It might be. The ‘real’ Chinese literature is contained, after all, within these novels rather than those, however lovingly detailed and heartfelt, which come from outside of the country: you can probably learn more about the vibe of early reform-era China, its thrills and injustices, from Northern Girls, written by a woman who actually lived through that time, than for example from an equivalent novel written by someone who grew up in the US, who is to a greater extent imagining it. But ‘real’ should be viewed as a suspect term. Literature after all – art, in a broader sense – doesn’t exist to paint a ‘real’ picture of anything, and no artist whether from the motherland or outside of it seeks to do so; we shouldn’t talk of words like real and authentic but instead of differing perspectives. These are the perspectives of the visible and invisible place.
I’ve opened with this discussion because BWS explodes neat correspondences between cultural perspectives, the noticed/visible place, and insider/outsider positionalities in a way I found intriguing as I wrote this fic. I'm sorry to cite myself, but as I mention in my tumblr meta, "[Black Water Sister] implodes some conventions in malaysian fiction about divisions between the westernised, cosmopolitan affluent overseas malaysian and local, ‘left behind’ malaysians, who are often more invisible and considered parochial characters in the global fiction landscape; jess’s grandma and her literally share a body and her grandma is a tour de force in her own right, strategically overpowering jess at points, but they also work together.” the book pulls you in at the start with the impression that it's the usual predictable story about an American Chinese immigrant returning 'home' and feeling conflicted between two clashing cultural contexts, with the resultant story focusing myopically on their cultural alienation and rootlessness, but Cho subverts certain tropes in those stories. case in point: Jess becomes fluent in Hokkien halfway because of body sharing shenanigans, which perplexes her relatives, and easily holds lots of dirt for resolving her family's secrets. Cho in general has a nice way of harnessing kernels of originality within the Malaysian supernatural and cultural canon, so that her stories are resonant and recognisable but not trite. it's a fine line to tread -- she manages it well.
anyway: all books will use both 1st and 2nd order descriptions and BWS does the same, though to me it's weighted a little more towards the 1st, not that it matters. it also plays with notions of cultural distance. the premise of Jess's old cranky grandma possessing her means that the book doesn't have to dwell all the time on Jess's out-of-placeness (and the book is helpful to braid it with Jess's interpersonal and familial issues than just treating it as inherent to the act of returning to the Homeland) and also allows the pov to go beyond Jess being a fish out of water. that always has the potential to get old fast if you're a reader already familiar with Malaysia's context, but Jess's newfound double vision due to Ah Ma residing in her body means that BWS can balance seemingly incommensurate audiences. Jess's pov is helpful for readers who may not have prior ties or familiarity with Malaysia, while Ah Ma's knowledge is a nice anchor for those who do in fact know Penang's context.
while writing foreign sky that translated into similar... see-saw concerns with the narration too. obviously Jess would not be familiar with Singapore but I wanted to sidestep clownish foreignising depictions of the places she visits a la the infamous USAmerican tourist gaze. I have familiarity with and some ties to parts of Southeast Asia, including Malaysia and Singapore, and tend to reach for specificity and precision in my writing. but that doesn't guarantee much: I also rely on 1st order descriptions with name dropping and dense writing that can call attention to a place in an unnatural way ("she heaped a generous helping of pandan kaya from Heavenly Wang onto her bread with a bread knife from the Lotus supermart"). since I just wrote fic for a cultural context I'm less familiar with for Exordia (namely, Southern Kurdistan) I've been comparing how I handled setting writing in both fics, and I'm not necessarily 100% satisfied with both, but I've contented myself with the fact that I wrote both under time constraints (read: my procrastination) for Be the First's deadlines.
is the end product a good one? I'm not the right judge, and I think that's beside the point, but most of my writing choices in foreign sky were intentional and had justifications for them. I also enjoyed the process. it was done, and good enough.
on writing style
I'll be honest. Cho's style is much more direct/straightforward than I'm used to and sometimes a little on-the-nose for my tastes, although that says more about my reading tastes than any faults in Cho's style. I went out of my comfort zone a lot here by writing my first fic ever where a character explicitly names herself as a lesbian and has a coming out storyline (a storyline I'm usually lukewarm about), but also by angling towards a less repressed and less ornate narrator voice. tbh, I winced at the screen several times while writing, but I wanted to put my style into dialogue with the book's.
Cho fought with the editors, I think? not to include a glossary of Malaysian slang or terms in the book, and that was a holdover I happily followed suit with for my fic.
characterisation
Cho is good at painting a sympathetically unflattering portrait of Jess. her flaws are on display through the book. she's a more compelling protagonist for it. but I have to be real: Jess struck me as naive on occasion for someone who graduated from Harvard. this is not a "Harvard doesn't have stupid people" issue because there certainly are idiots who go to Harvard (and in general, people should disabuse themselves of the notion that prestige = intelligence). I mean that there are certain things Jess sees as a revelation which I'd have expected her to have a bigger inkling of given someone of her interests and family situation:
She hadn’t known her parents still knew that many people in Penang. She hadn’t really thought they knew people anywhere. She’d always seen them as introverts, their investment in work and family leaving no space in their lives for so tenuous a connection as friendship.
She saw now that this was one of the unnatural changes being immigrants had wrought in her parents—one of the ways they had been warped under its pressures. Among their friends and relatives—people who shared their language, accent, values, preoccupations—Mom and Dad were different people: confident, gregarious and witty. It was Jess who was out of her element, navigating unfamiliar waters.
there's nothing objectionable about this segment and it's well-written, thoughtful. but this isn't as convincing to me (and I speak as one of the indefatigable Chinese diaspora strewn across the globe) as if Jess had grown up seeing her parents call home several times a week and chatting on the phone in fluid Hokkien with their siblings and extended family or the Malaysian Chinese immigrant community in the US. immigration displaces you, definitely, but this reads to me more as "Jess was unobservant and didn't realise her parents have emotional lives of their own" than "they underwent interpersonal constriction due to the move". it also depends very much on where exactly in the US they moved to, which (IIRC) isn't mentioned in the book, but imo if her parents are Malaysian immigrants it's reasonably likely they stayed in touch in ways that'd leave an impression on Jess. it's not impossible that they lost all connections, but I'd have needed more substantiation than "they were immigrants" (e.g., they did not have capital, they were in an especially white area), because being an immigrant often pushes you to forge networks in the destination country that are very much essential to survival, even if you're introverted.
this is, I think, a recurring issue in the book's early parts. I wondered at times if a heavy-handed editor had told Cho to write in lines about Being An Immigrant for a presumed white or non-immigrant audience. and I can see the value of a section like the one quoted above -- it adds to Jess's sense of feeling adrift, footlooseness, etc. perhaps I am pedantic. but BWS has many other cases where it trusts the reader to connect the dots of cultural context and get it (and some of those are HYSTERICAL and gold!), and it works much better for me at those times because it's not trying to hammer the point home insistently. an example:
Even Ah Ma thought [Jess] looked good.
“Not bad ah,” she said. “But what for you did your hair like that?”
It had caused huge drama when Jess had come home from a clandestine appointment at the hair salon with an undercut and a pompadour bleached platinum blonde.
Mom acted like the world had come to an end. She could hardly have responded worse if Jess had come out as a lesbian.
“How are you going to find job like that?” she’d wailed. “Or get married? The man won’t want you, the boss won’t want you. You look like—like a bad girl!"
I tried to flesh out aspects of Jess's life that were drawn in negative space in the book, like her time in Massachusetts and how she met Sharanya. I settled on a major like... creative writing, English, or filmwriting for her? based on one little line about her taking up a job to be a creative writing TA in Singapore.
the use of the 'supernatural' in BWS
I've thought about whether Cho's positionality influences her writing, particularly the fact that she grew up in Petaling Jaya as part of the 'economically substantial' Chinese minority in Malaysia. (BWS's Penang setting itself is likely significant, cue discussions of bumiputera politics and Penang's position as one of the few relatively Chinese-dominant places in Malaysia.) I hesitated over including this because I think it can be gauche to look for neat seductive lines between someone's background and how they write, in the vein of exaggerated cultural determinism. but the topic of how Malaysian supernatural figures and folklore are deployed in her writing is an adjacent topic that is worth discussing and also much more interesting.
I don't have a lot of articulate thoughts at this point, but Zen Cho's stories frequently connect supernatural occurrences to humorous contemporary concerns for Malaysian characters, in ways wiser people have elaborated on elsewhere. there's a lot of fertile ground here for conversation with the fact that supernatural entities (and they way their stories are wielded) often say a lot about modern anxieties around, say, societal trends like development or colonialism. in Malaysia's context I'm thinking for instance about the rise of orang minyak films from the 1950s in response to the encroachment of crude oil refinery industries, which you could call a reaction to petro-modernity. (the orang minyak's been called a 'strange case' as a distinctively modern ghost.)
Cho's oeuvre tends to have the... affect... of light humour (which is not to say it ignores serious topics; there's plenty of that in her writing too), I think. one thing I'm interested in as someone who's only read bits of her writing here and there is whether she has also tackled Malaysian politics in connection to the supernatural. I'm willing to suggest that she has likely thought about exploring this and decided not to given the state of Malaysian politics and censorship (😐), but that's one area I'd willingly follow her to if she decides to delve into it.
this is where I'm stopping this for now; there might be a pt. 2 or I might just update this post when I feel like it.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-12 08:08 am (UTC)Your theory of first- and second-order descriptions, exteriority and interiority, is beautifully described. I want to spend some time with it for purposes of worldbuilding--the balance between the first and second order if you're writing in an SFF context, for instance (especially in a secondary world, as opposed to Black Water Sister which definitely has fantasy/supernatural elements but is set in our world, as far as I know)--different ways to present information so that the world both makes sense and feels real and lived in, without labored infodumping etc.
Cho fought with the editors, I think? not to include a glossary of Malaysian slang or terms in the book, and that was a holdover I happily followed suit with for my fic.
I think we've talked about this before, but this is something I really love; as a language geek I find it way more rewarding to work out terms from context and/or residual knowledge than to have them all explained on the spot.
I'm too uninformed re much of the rest of your post to have anything useful to say, but very glad to get a chance to read your thoughts (especially related to your very good fic). Looking forward to an update/part 2 if you feel like it.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-17 05:15 am (UTC)same here, and it's fun to look up 'cultural references' afterwards as well!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-18 12:17 pm (UTC)I haven't come up with anything coherent yet, but I want to think about it and maybe post something about it at some point! (with a link to your post here if that's okay). Also I don't want to drag the discussion here too far away from the specific ideas you've raised (about what you call enculturation, diaspora, hegemony etc. etc.) into generalities. So much to think about though, in that connection as well as elsewhere. Agree very much also that as you say exteriority/interiority boundaries often blend together in practice (if you know the whole "telling is in fact a form of showing" spiel it's similar to that.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-22 12:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-23 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-13 09:52 pm (UTC)Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading this, and the linked review.
whether she has also tackled Malaysian politics in connection to the supernatural.
This may not be exactly what you're looking for but in Spirits Abroad, Zen Cho has a short story titled First National Forum on the Position of Minorities in Malaysia, and it has orang bunian attending the forum.
no subject
Date: 2024-07-15 07:47 am (UTC)are there any Zen Cho novels or short stories that are your faves?
no subject
Date: 2024-07-16 03:58 am (UTC)Highly recommended! (but I'm biased)
Some of the stories in Spirits Abroad can be read free online, e.g., The House of Aunts
(Zen Cho is good at writing a very specific type of older lady)
no subject
Date: 2024-07-17 09:49 pm (UTC)One of my buds
no subject
Date: 2024-07-18 04:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 01:14 am (UTC)I read your BWS fic and liked it! Laughed at the comparisons between Malaysian and Singaporean words (word differences is definitely something that comes up a lot in my conversations with Singaporeans with a side of good natured ribbing for common Malay misspellings)
no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-08-01 06:34 am (UTC)Fic looked good to me and nothing jumped out!
no subject
Date: 2024-07-18 04:14 pm (UTC)Interesting!!! I know we've talked about The Night Tiger and the POV character's elaboration on nasi lemak, and while I don't remember if that book included a glossary or not, I think I would have preferred a glossary (that I could then ignore at my leisure) than that hammered-in text description of a well-known dish.
Tangentially, while I greatly enjoyed Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, that book did have footnotes and some historical context at the end, which...I actually enjoyed and appreciated the historical notes at the end, but not the in-text footnotes that translated/explained Chinese dishes or phrases. While I appreciate context and notes for a historical novel (not the least of which because they often give me ideas on further reading for a topic I'm interested in), the 'explanations' of Chinese dishes or red pocket money felt like the author expected the audience to otherwise flounder, and felt like I myself was being 'othered' by the text.
I'm looking forward to a part 2 or update if you ever feel like it! :D
no subject
Date: 2024-07-19 06:53 pm (UTC)always feel like a depressing statement on what's considered visible/invisible for the author's expected audiences. as if the bar is on the floor.