Claire Jia has had a busy year.
The Los Angeles-based author, who wrote for the Peabody Award-winning video game “We Are OFK,” recently released a comedy series, “Crash Outs,” written and directed by her and her friends Jennifer Kim and Lisa Deng, on its own app.
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Jia has also published her first novel, “Wanting,” out now from Tin House Books. The book, set in Beijing, features two storylines. In the first, Lian, who works for an American education company, reunites with her childhood best friend, Wenyu, who has moved to the U.S. and become a popular YouTube influencer. Both have partners: Lian is searching for a new home for her and her boyfriend, the staid Zhetai, while Wenyu is engaged to Thomas, a wealthy American with a tech job.
Wenyu returns to Beijing to oversee the renovation of a house that she and Thomas plan to use as a summer home. Enter Chen, a Chinese architect educated in the U.S., who Wenyu and Thomas hire for the job. Chen’s own life is threatening to fall apart — his wife has recently told him that she’s leaving him, and he runs into permitting difficulties while planning construction on Wenyu and Thomas’ home. Meanwhile, Lian and Wenyu wrestle with their own infidelities.
Jia talked about “Wanting” via Zoom while she was on a book tour. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the origin of this novel?
I’m Chinese, my family is from Beijing, and I grew up going there every three years since I was a year old. It is the city that I consider my second home. I love it so much. Growing up and in college, my dream was to become the U.S. ambassador to China. I was obsessed with all things China, and I wanted to focus on it from a political standpoint for most of my young life. I had this complete 180 in my last year of college, where I was like, “Actually, politics is really dark and boring and scary.” I didn’t even know if I could do much good in that arena. And I always loved art and writing, but I shelved those artistic desires as a kid.
In college, I hit a wall, and I was like, “I actually can’t continue down this road anymore.” But I was still really passionate about Beijing, and in my senior year of college, I was still pursuing a political science major, and I wanted to do my thesis about how propaganda influences people’s intimate lives in Beijing. So I went back to Beijing in the summer of 2014 to do research for the thesis.
After I came back, I realized what I really liked about this was the stories that people told me, and I didn’t want to write another research paper, so I wrote it as a novel. Then I met my agent, and it became a real thing. I never really thought it would become something real, but here we are.
Q: Did any of the three principal characters arrive first?
The novel has gone through so many iterations, but it has always been [focused on] Lian and Chen. It was always from the point of view of this discontented, late-20s woman, though when the novel first began, she was a little bit younger. I always wanted to write from the point of view of this person who feels very restless, but is not capable of changing her life.
Chen was actually the very first character I wrote for the novel. I found his character to be very tragic and interesting, but with the potential for redemption. He and Lian are both similar because they both feel like other people have things that they want and they feel incapable of getting those things for some reason or another. And it’s through the novel that we realize a lot of it’s due to personal limitations and feelings. Once you think you’re that kind of person, you may never achieve those things because you’re the kind of person that won’t get those things.
Q: What is it about Lian and Wenyu that they aren’t satisfied by what they have?
It’s both their innate personalities, but also that kind of upwardly mobile, middle-class ennui feeling. They’re both hitting that wall of, “Is life just about stability and progression, or can it also be about excitement and making mistakes and feeling?” Lian is certainly someone who has always prioritized the easy path, and she’s now craving something that makes her feel anything. Wenyu is someone who has always prioritized feeling and been very spontaneous and gone for the risky thing, and now she’s kind of settled into this more stable partner who’s healthy and takes care of her. She’s trying to find the authentic original version of herself.
Q: You write in the book, “Wenyu’s devil-may-care attitude electrified Lian; she wanted some of it for herself.” Does that influence Lian’s actions in the novel after she reconnects with Wenyu?
Yes. I think she is someone who is very much influenced by Wenyu and wants to have this devil-may-care vibe as well. She doesn’t go all the way with it, because at the end of the day, she is still this person who ultimately craves stability. I see Lian’s urges in the novel as trying to push the envelope as much as she can, so when they reunite in a novel and they start their twin affairs, essentially Lian is doing her version of a rebellion that is a little less scandalous, less extreme than Wenyu’s affair, but to her, a big deal. I wanted to kind of illuminate what rebellion might be like for someone who is not used to it, and it still feels very big to her.
Q: What was it like getting in the head of Wenyu, who has crafted this curated version of herself for the world to see?
I intentionally never gave Wenyu a point of view because I want her to be this aspirational person that we never fully see. We will see sides of her at different times, but it’s hard to see the whole picture. She kind of represents the person that I have always envied; things come easily to her that don’t come easily to me.
But I also wanted to bring her down to earth and try to gain some understanding of her as well. She’s not just this beautiful, charming person where life just kind of arrives for her. She also has her own struggles. She’s a chameleon. She’s someone who, as a child, very much stood up for who she was and didn’t want to be forced into any boxes or follow any rules she didn’t want to follow. But then in the U.S., she realized that is what she has to do. It’s really my commentary on the nature of America and its demands for assimilation. Even someone who never followed anyone has to follow the rules of being an American. So she’s a really tragic figure in my mind because she does lose this authentic self by forcing herself to become the thing that the country wanted to see.
Q: Wenyu and Chen both go to the U.S., but realize it’s not what they thought it would be.
I am always very curious about the failed immigrant. We see so many success stories — in many ways, I am the child of a success story of immigration, but at the same time, there are so many layers of disappointment and expectations not met even in my own family. So I was always really interested in what happens when someone tries to go somewhere but is not able to stay and is not able to fulfill that dream, and where the dream reveals itself to be flawed or false.