Elaine Hsieh Chou knows how to keep readers off-balance.
The author made her literary debut in 2022 with the aptly titled novel “Disorientation,” a satire about a Taiwanese American graduate student who sets off a firestorm after discovering that the acclaimed Chinese American poet she’s studying isn’t who everyone thinks he is. The novel drew rave reviews from critics and ended up on best-of-the-year lists.
Chou brings her dark humor and skewed sense of reality to her new book, the short story collection “Where Are You Really From.” The book opens with “Carrot Legs,” about a teenage girl who, along with her cousin, fantasizes about killing and eating a neighbor — and things get even weirder after that. In one story, an older man gets a mail-order bride — actually delivered in a box — from Taiwan; in another, an American woman moves to France only to discover that she has a doppelganger.
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Chou was born in Anaheim Hills, raised in Orange County and the Bay Area, and educated at UC Irvine and New York University. She discussed her book via telephone from Las Vegas, where she now lives. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: How did you come to choose “Where Are You Really From” as the title of this collection?
It was originally in a story called “A Model Minority,” which is a satirical story about the first Asian American man who joins the KKK. He doesn’t know it’s the KKK in the beginning. He thinks it’s his company softball team, but he really wants to be with this in-crowd.
After the story was cut from this collection, I decided to keep the title because it just seemed to speak to the concerns over how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us, and the gap that happens in between.
It’s also a question that I got a lot when I was living in France. If I said “America” or “California,” I would confuse and anger people. Yeah. And the more angry they got, the more I would resist telling them, because I could tell they felt they had a right to know. A lot of times, they would just be like, “Well, you’re Chinese, right? You’re obviously Chinese.” I would just say, “I don’t answer that question.” And they’d be like, “Oh, why not?” And I would say, “for political reasons,” and then they would stop asking.
Q: The title doesn’t end with a question mark, like you’re presenting it as a statement. What was behind that decision?
Originally, this was the title of my NYU MFA thesis, which was a much earlier version of the story collection, and it did have the question mark. As I got closer to publication, I kept looking at the question mark, and I’d think, “This isn’t working. This doesn’t belong in the title.” For some reason, it just wasn’t landing. I think the statement is part of the reason that it lands better, that people are making a proclamation and it feels a bit more like a demand or even an idea, the concept of “Where are you really from?”
Q: What was the process of collecting these stories into a book that reads as a really cohesive whole?
I was at NYU doing my MFA, and I came in with a chapter and a half of “Disorientation” written, and my whole plan for the two years was to workshop the novel as I was writing it. I workshopped the first chapter, and quickly realized I couldn’t do that. That plan just fell apart because I realized having that feedback when I didn’t have a clear path forward hindered my creative process, and I could see myself getting really lost and pulled in these other directions.
I thought, ‘I love short stories. They’re what I first started writing in undergrad when I was taking creative writing, and I was just writing what interested me.’ I would just follow where my obsessions led. I had this goal, I’m not sure how subconscious it was, but I wanted to write Asian and Asian American characters that I hadn’t seen before. That was also true of “Disorientation.” I was tired of not recognizing myself and the people around me in any media.
I didn’t want my characters to feel boxed in. I just wanted them to be people, and I wanted them to be flawed, because if someone’s not flawed, I’m not interested in them. I don’t think perfect protagonists exist. Eventually, I think it was the end of my first year or beginning of the second year, I had written so many short stories, and I thought, “Am I creating a collection?” I started to think about them a little more intentionally. But it wasn’t until I was revising the stories after “Disorientation” had already come out that I had to reconfigure it. Ultimately, the stories that persisted were the ones that were the most psychological. I think that heart and that darkness or willingness to really see into the darkness of characters, those were the ones that moved me the most. The ones I was afraid to write, or afraid to show to others, ended up forming the collection.
Q: What went into deciding how to sequence the collection?
It was actually very hard. For whatever reason, it felt like the most organic story to begin with was the earliest story, “Carrot Legs.” That story dates back to 2016 and was actually in my MFA application packet. It goes back to the beginning of my writing career, when I was still learning a lot about myself as a writer, and the story has changed since then, of course. And after that, I would sort of think, “OK, how can I slip into the next story in a way that is not too identical in tone or mood?” I try to vary them, but not in a way that the difference in tone or mood is shocking.
Q: A lot of the stories here take place in a world that resembles our own, maybe is our own, but with these subtle, ominous differences where things just seem slightly off. How do you go about creating these kinds of alternate worlds while still having the stories be grounded in realism?
I think sometimes it happens inadvertently. At the outset, I don’t necessarily plan the world to feel that way, but then something in me wants to do it. Something is not sort of satisfied by the hard parameters of literary-fiction realism, even though that was the tradition I was raised in. People might be surprised, but one of my favorite short story writers is Lorrie Moore. She’s so granular, and I aspire to that, her ability to have these really tiny moments, but they become so vast in her stories. I think I’m still writing in that tradition, and I’m never trying to float too far away, but then there’s the other part of me that is just fascinated or tickled by the ways I can push reality a little bit. –