Vanessa Hua’s new novel, “Coyoteland,” tracks four families in El Nido, a fictional East Bay suburb near Berkeley.
There’s an affluent White family, the Belles, who are stretched thin as they look to cash in on building a new development; their live-in nanny Ana Rodriguez who is trying to provide for her daughter after escaping an abusive relationship; the new next-door neighbors, the Changs, a family of Chinese immigrants whose financial struggles are loosening their desperate grip on the middle class American dream; and the Washingtons, a Black family in mourning just as much on the outside in El Nido as the Changs and Rodriguezes.
There’s one other major character: a coyote, who is encroaching on the humans’ habitat just as they have done to him and all the other animals.
Amidst the stories of the parents and their children, Hua explores issues of the economy, housing, politics, immigration, race, class, eating disorders, domestic abuse, the climate crisis and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
In a recent video interview, Hua discussed the characters and the ideas behind the book and also explained why, in addition to having her previous works (such as “Forbidden City”) on display behind her, there was also a pillow bearing the likeness of Keanu Reeves in sequins or “flippies” that enable you to erase the image.
“During the pandemic, two Asian American friends and I would send each other random gifts as a surprise and this was one of the gifts that I received — Keanu is a quarter Chinese through his grandmother, so we claim him as our own,” Hua says.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. How do you balance your reporter’s instinct to examine the issues with the novelist’s need to focus on character and plot?
I want to shine a light onto untold stories that aren’t part of the dominant discourse. But I don’t want my books to feel didactic, like an ABC after-school movie. I want them to be entertaining page-turners. So I always start with a character and ask how they got themselves in that situation. But I also look at what forces shaped them.
Q. You’re writing from the perspective of characters in four families … and a coyote. How did that come about?
I like to always take on a new challenge. I’ve never attempted anything with so many perspectives, but I felt it was really important to be able to tell the story of this community and to have different voices to get at their struggles.
I was out on a walk in the early months of lockdown and saw deer chasing a coyote. It got me thinking about territory and predator and prey, and just how things felt topsy-turvy. In the book, the issues with the coyote are metaphorical, not just advice for when you’re encountering a wild animal.
Q. Like the wild animals, many of these characters are quite territorial. How much of that is our nature, and how much of that is American society, especially in the suburbs? And how much has it been exacerbated by modern times — our isolation made worse by social media and a pandemic?
There’s now a sense of precarity, no matter what social class you’re in, that’s pervasive. That feeds into the sense that “I have to protect what’s mine.” And the suburbs are different. During the pandemic, I think there was more mutual aid in cities where you’re cheek and jowl with your neighbors. But I wanted to shine a light on possibilities for how people can help each other or care about each other, even if it’s not in their immediate interest. There’s hope despite these historical or social or economic forces that divide people.
Q. In the book, people use social media to lie about who they are and surveillance to try and find the truth about their neighbors. Where does this leave us?
We’re the most surveilled at any point in time in human history, and yet we feel more isolated. Surveillance is sold as the promise of feeling safe, but in fact, people feel more isolated, which leads to territorial disputes. Everybody tries to use these technologies to their advantage, which speaks to the high level of distrust people now have about them; the novel’s action predates AI, but that’s added even more into the churn of raising questions about what’s real.
People want to protect what’s theirs and to protect their family. But even with the best of intentions, one little lie leads to a big lie, and then you’re just working to service the lies.
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Q. That sounds like Walter White’s lie in “Breaking Bad,” “I’m doing it for my family.”
There are no meth labs in my book. But that’s how we live with ourselves. We have our own narrative.
Q. The coyote is present because his habitat is disappearing. There are also wildfires encroaching. We devastated nature, and now the tables are turning. How conscious were you about raising environmental issues as you wrote?
There is a genre of books called climate fiction that squarely grapples with these ideas. But for me, living in California, it’s part of our lives, part of the air and water – we know about the day the sky turned orange or about how smoke blocked the sun, and birds didn’t sing because they mistook day for night. It’s not the focus of the novel, but if you’re writing about a place like this, then that’s part of what’s shaping it, and it’s contributing to the characters’ sense of precarity, that things feel out of control. And that makes people more likely to hunker down.
Q. How do you approach the ending and whether the characters get what they deserve versus what might really happen in our society?
There are characters where you might think from the surface that they prospered or got off easy, but I think they consciously changed their behavior. So it was realistic that their privilege in the end would protect them, but they are changed. And others, through friendship and allyship and working together, ended up in a place that I felt they deserved because they worked for it.
I explore characters in situations under extreme pressure or oppression, but even when times are overwhelming or bleak, people can find agency or ways to resist, even if it’s just in changing how they think.