Tucker C. Newsome

Game Over: A Conversation with Jenny Zhang

Jenny Zhang was gracious enough to sit down with 12th Street one blustery New York afternoon, where we discussed everything from Cold War Era espionage to the importance of staying true to oneself. Jenny’s work has been featured in Bomb, Rookie, Harper’s, New York Magazine and Poetry. Her works include the chapbook Hags (Guillotine 2014), The Selected Jenny Zhang (Emily Books 2016) and a collection of poetry entitled: Dear Jenny, We Are All Find (Octopus Books 2012). Her first short story collection, Sour Heart, will debut on August 1, 2017, as the first publication of the new Lenny imprint at Random House.

12TH STREET: What got you interested in writing to begin with? Was there a particular book or author or collection of books that pushed you in that direction?

JENNY ZHANG: I don’t know how far back it’s useful to go, but I’ve always liked language, and I was always into lying or fudging the truth to make stories interesting.

STREET: Who isn’t?

ZHANG: Right? I’m not a super introverted writer. I’m shy to an extent, though I’m gregarious. I guess people become interested in writing because they adore language and they really like telling stories—but they also have a need to be alone and to not be bothered. I think anyone with that kind of personality becomes drawn to writing, and I certainly was. For me, I was born in Shanghai and immigrated to the United States when I was about five. Language was just a thing that I constantly had trouble with when I first got here. To go from someone who loved expressing myself at a young age to literally not being able to use words—it just was really frustrating. I became very eager to master the language, and as soon as I learned English in kindergarten I became kind of obsessed with reading and writing. I guess that’s really obnoxious to be like, “I was reading when I was five!” [laughs] But it just felt crucial to me, to my identity, to be able to tell a story. I guess, more significantly, there were a lot of what would be considered bad books that I really liked reading as a child.

STREET: Of course.

ZHANG: I really liked all those books for girls: Sweet Valley High or Babysitter’s Club. They were so trashy and so formulaic, but I loved them. I loved the tropes. In the first chapter you would always find out that the twins were a perfect Size 6 and blonde. Did you know that size changed in the later books for them to be a perfect Size 2—because apparently a size 6 in the 80’s is the equivalent to a Size 2 now or something? The author wanted to let you know that they are very skinny. [laughs] I love tropes like that and I loved the formula of writing—which maybe wouldn’t be apparent in my writing—but I’m trying to hit certain pleasure points that I felt when I was reading those books. So books like those were important to me. Then I guess I loved more “serious books” like Catcher In The Rye. That was the first serious book I read that didn’t have a formulaic plot. I loved how caustic and mean the character was. I loved that a character could be mean and unlikable, and how that was likable. I thought that was cool, and I think a lot of writers also do. I don’t know if this is true, but I think a lot of writers feel that they are misfits. They don’t get viewed the way that they want to be viewed or they don’t “get” or aren’t “gotten.” I got into any type of writing about misfits or people who didn’t belong but were in the end the voice of reason or “seers.”  In college, I discovered a lot of great writers that I don’t think I would have read if not for my teachers. For instance: George Saunders and the weirder Kafka, not just Metamorphosis. I discovered so many Russian authors that I love, such as Gogol or Babel. I also experienced my peers, and they were writing things that were wilder and weirder than anything that I had read. That was a huge influence on me, as well as my friendships with other writers who were doing things—maybe they weren’t doing them well yet, but there was a kernel of something interesting and that was really inspiring to me. So, it wasn’t so much my teachers who mentored me, but my friends.

That’s the other thing, as well: People ask me what my canon is or what my influences are, and if I think about it really hard, it’s e-mails from my mom and stories from my dad. When I was growing up, my father had this encyclopedic knowledge of all the spies in the world who have ever been assassinated or killed. He would just tell me these stories of Russian spies who would be walking in the street and suddenly someone would be like, “Hey, there’s something on your shoulder,” and they would tap the spy’s shoulder with the tip of their umbrella that had been dipped in whatever poison. That set my imagination on fire. Or my friends, who aren’t even writers, are continually using weird vocabulary; that kind of stuff is more of a direct influence than the published authors I read. While I’m careful to not imitate famous writers, I feel a great liberty to include the people in my life and their sensibilities into my writing. I have a short story collection coming out in August, and my mom helped me out in a lot of ways with it. I don’t know how to even quantify it, but her input or her thoughts meant more to me than the actual writers I knew at the time. I want my writing to be read by people who like to read or write, but I also want someone who only reads one book a year to enjoy it. I would even like someone who only reads Cosmopolitan or Sweet Valley High to enjoy it.

STREET: I’m really glad you brought up things like Sweet Valley High because people don’t often acknowledge they read those. For me, it was Harry Potter, and I’ve encountered a lot of people who consider themselves part of the “literary elite” who rail against books like that.

ZHANG: I love Harry Potter! People want to reject their origins a lot. I don’t want to publish my teenage poetry or anything. Those are my origins. There’s a kernel of ideas, thought, emotions, and obsessions from my bad teenage poetry; if there wasn’t, I don’t think I would be a functioning human being. I also feel that the mass popularity you are suggesting gets vilified. J.K. Rowling, on a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence level, is not that great, but the writing shouldn’t be. The plot is so inventive that what I need to do is be racing through these sentences because I want to find out what happens. I don’t want to be savoring the sentences. I couldn’t do that. I would much rather be able to write an amazing plot that can last 5,000 pages, but I, personally, can’t. I’m really influenced by The Lord of the Rings. You wouldn’t know it by my writing, but I am. I think any reader wants to feel gripped by the writing. There are different things you look for in writing: gripping plot, adventure, experiments in structure and form, language and syntax. There’s nothing better or worse about looking for any of those.

STREET: You spoke about discovering Saunders and Gogol in college—you did your undergraduate work at Stanford, correct? How did you get from New York all the way to Stanford?

ZHANG: Oh man, that was so long ago.

STREET: Was it something you actively pursued, or was it something that just fell into place?

ZHANG: Okay, so that was in 2001, and I think college is a lot harder to get into now than it was then. I probably couldn’t get into Stanford now. I just wanted to get as far away from NYC as possible. Not for any big reason, except that I wanted to be totally free from my parents and the world I grew up in and Stanford was the best school that was the farthest away. So that became my goal.

STREET: Did you go there specifically for the writing program, or did you discover it there?

ZHANG: No, I didn’t even know about the writing program. I just knew it was a good school, and I knew my parents wouldn’t say no if I got in. I couldn’t take writing classes my freshman year because you had to take a rhetoric class before you started taking creative writing courses. I took my first poetry and fiction writing class in the winter quarter, a beginning fiction and beginning poetry class. I had never been in a class where all you did was write, read, and talk about your writing. I had never let go of my ego like that before. I think a lot of people feel like that in workshops: “So, I sit here as if I were dead and you just talk? Anything you want to say, you can just say it to my face and I can’t say anything?” That was a truly disturbing experience that I am also now addicted to. [laughs] I’m the kind of writer that wants to know about themselves, and I don’t think that I know enough about myself. I love having people describe me. I love sitting there and having someone say, “I think this is who you are,” or “I think this is what you are trying to say.” It gives me insight. I know this is sounding narcissistic, but I just feel like I don’t even know who I must seem to be to others. I think that’s what I like about teaching, too. Maybe this is sick, but I love being able to tell students who I think they are or are trying to be. I just don’t know any other environment where it’s safe to do that. If you aren’t a writer, where else do you get described? At your wedding and at your funeral, and that’s it or, maybe, if you win a huge award.

STREET: The two worst possible times to be described.

ZHANG: I know, right? You’re barely present for one, and you’re most definitely not present for the other. Sometimes I think that’s so unfair. People should be spoken of all the time. And then—I’m sure you have also reached this point—I got really sick of workshops. Like, “this is bull—shit.” I wanted to get as far away from it as possible.

STREET: After finishing your undergraduate degree at Stanford, you then attended the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop in order to get your MFA. Was that something you truly wanted to do, or do you think there was a feeling of that is what you should do in order to become a successful writer in the world?

ZHANG: That’s a good question. The whole MFA thing, you know, is so hotly contested. It’s also changed a lot since I went to Iowa in 2007. It was ubiquitous then, but not as ubiquitous as it is now as one of the primary options or pathways to becoming a writer. I would say, for me, that there were a couple of things. I worked as a union organizer, as well as a youth organizer right after I graduated from Stanford. I was obviously idealistic. I didn’t realize how much I couldn’t live with myself when I didn’t have time to write. I was working anywhere from 70 to 100 hours per week, and I just wanted to kill someone. I was doing something I believed in, but it wasn’t enough. I realized there was nothing I could believe in enough that would compensate for not being able to write. I needed to at least think about writing every single day of my life, and I couldn’t with those jobs, or any of the strings of jobs that followed. There was no job I respected as much as my own writing. To put it that way—maybe that’s not fair and maybe that’s self-serving, but I just never respected anything as much as I respected my own art. That led me to the question of: How do I live if I have this thought? How can I make enough money to live on and respect my own writing? There was also the fact that I come from an immigrant family. They didn’t not support me, but they didn’t support me either. I think it was only last year that they started saying their daughter is a writer. They’re happy for me, but they don’t care about writing. They care about everything else. They care about me getting married. They care about me buying a house. They care about me having a stable job with a 401k and health insurance. I have achieved none of those things. It’s likely I never will. I felt like I had to do everything possible to legitimize my writing for my family, and also for myself.

When I was 22, the only way I could see to make that happen was through academic institutions. I didn’t feel like I could graduate and start a writing career. That’s a long way of putting that, but I felt like I had to go through all the established channels to reach the highest level of academics. Not because I thought it was right for me, or because I believed in the MFA system, or that I believed in workshops. I just felt that I needed all the help I could get. Basically, I felt like a scraggly, trash person. [laughs] I couldn’t be part of this world without literally clawing my way in. That’s why I went to Iowa! I know that it sounds like, “Poor me, I got into Iowa,” but I applied to 10 places and I didn’t get into any place but Iowa. It’s all so arbitrary. It’s because one person at Iowa liked me that I got in. All of these markers of the best and the not best—they don’t mean anything. If I was the best shouldn’t I have at least gotten into one of the other schools that is not as good? You just never know. It takes one person to believe in you, but after that happens, then you have to convince the other people to keep giving you a chance.

STREET: Do you buy into the “hype” of Iowa, or does the “hype” even exist, in your opinion?

ZHANG: It’s a self-fulfilling hype machine. I thought my peers there were great. I don’t have anything to compare it to because I only went there and I haven’t taught at any other MFA program, but I will say that because there are so many people at Iowa—50 fiction writers, and 50 poets, as well as people that stay on for third years and such, compared to some programs where there are like five or six—there was a big range of style. I feel like a cohort is going to see this and be like, “you’re wrong,” but even the weirdest writer could find at least one ally because there were so many other writers. I liked that a lot, but I don’t think you need to go to Iowa to find that environment. I don’t know how to say this, but because Iowa is considered such an esteemed place. Editors and agents, if they see the word “Iowa” on your cover letter, are going to look at your writing for one page longer than somebody who doesn’t have that. Is that right? I don’t think so, but how do you change the reputation of a place? You can’t, right? I know people who went to Iowa and feel that it was a great experience, but I don’t know what happened with their careers. It seems like Iowa, just as much as any other program, had the same distribution of people who did really well immediately after graduation, people who did kind of well, people who did well much later, and people who stopped writing.

If you have the opportunity to go to school and you don’t have to take out student loans, and that school gives you the time to write, and you can stand living in the town that the school is in, then I just don’t see any downsides. The great thing about Iowa, and I think a lot of other programs are like this, is that they have so few requirements other than writing. You can take other classes or you can, literally, just take one workshop a week and have no other responsibilities except maybe teaching if you want to do the teaching thing. There was just no other time in my life where I didn’t have to worry about money, and my responsibilities were a total of five hours a week. It was hard to say, “No, I don’t want to do that,” especially after working 100 hours a week. It’s like, “Yes, I want this time.”

STREET: You’ve stated before that your primary interest is in writing fiction, but then somehow you drifted off into the deep, dark corners of poetry. Were you at Iowa when that happened, or was it after?

ZHANG: I’ve always written both poetry and fiction, but I think it was my sophomore year at Stanford when I got more into fiction. I think it was because I met fiction writers and they were my friends. We started a writing group—we were really nerdy—and actually, everyone from that writing group is still writing, and almost everyone has been published or is about to be. They are still my closest friends. So, I got into fiction because of those kids, and the community and just being inspired by each other. I then applied to Iowa in fiction and when I was there I started writing poetry. I had friends there who were poets and I think I was getting sick of fiction workshops and being like, “Oh, this again, I know what everyone is going to say, I know what I have to do.” I was just over it. The fun, the pleasure, was gone. Poetry was outside of the academy and the structure of school for me. I wasn’t taking any poetry workshops because at Iowa you can’t do that. They’re very rigid about genre. It was like a secret side-project, and honestly, it helped me because I needed to take a break from fiction. It’s good to be a student, but at some point you need to stop and apprentice or something. [laughs] I felt I had been a student for far too long.

From age 17 until I was 25, I’d been taking fiction workshops, and I was losing my mojo. Poetry was just a fun side project, and then I submitted a poetry manuscript to one of those open reading periods for Octopus Books, which is a really cool small press based out of Portland. To be honest, I didn’t really care about poetry because what I cared about was getting a fiction agent and publishing a novel. That’s what I thought I was supposed to do. So I think because I didn’t care as much I actually wrote better poetry. It’s like when you go on a date and you don’t realize it’s a date, so you don’t act weird and you’re comfortable—then it turns out to be the best date. When you prep for a date, you are so awkward and not very charming—it’s a disaster. I wasn’t putting any pressure on myself to be a good poet, which sounds bad, but I’m sure there are people that would argue that I am a terrible poet. So, I won the contest and I didn’t tell anyone I had a poetry book coming out until the day it came out. I told my mom and dad, but I thought people were going to think it was weird because I never wrote poetry before. The poetry community is like a tiny, little insular world, and I didn’t want people to say,“You? You are publishing a book?” Of course the irony now is that, for a while, people thought I’m was a poet and didn’t know I ever wrote fiction. The genres are very…who cares? It doesn’t really matter.

STREET: You’ve lived in the Bay Area, Iowa, and are now back in New York City. Have you noticed any distinct differences in the literary communities, or do you feel any sense of belonging in one more than the other?

ZHANG: I was in the Bay Area right after and during college. The Bay Area, Stanford, and The Stegner Fellowship are obviously one big vessel or arm. McSweeney’s or The Believer, that stuff is one big tree branch, too. It’s a much smaller community in the Bay Area. I think all of them have their own insular cliques and tendencies. I wouldn’t say I jived with any of them. I wasn’t succeeding in the world of McSweeney’s or The Believer. I think I submitted to McSweeney’s a gazillion times. I applied to The Stegner Fellowship a gazillion times, and I always received rejections from both. I even worked for Dave Eggers and I couldn’t get a foot in the door. Iowa has its own community. It’s very much the “we’re the best MFA program in the world” idea, and it has that kind of belief in its own way. There is an MFA world where people who are into that think the right track is to submit to literary journals, get a university job, and publish a novel every several years. Then there is the New York world, and it’s a real mind fuck because it’s New York and because there are so many different types of writers. There are writers who make a living from their own writing here, and that’s a whole different vibe than the MFA model or the McSweeney’s or Stegner model. I didn’t ever feel like I belonged or succeeded in any one of those places.

If I think about my own career, I did a lot of conventional things. I went to a conventional school. I went to Iowa, but then I didn’t get an agent. I didn’t write a novel. The first person to really publish me was Tavi Gevinson, who started Rookie. That was my first “big break.” I think Tavi was maybe 14 at the time. She’s incredible. You’re not supposed to get your career started by writing poetry when you’re at Iowa for fiction and then not tell anyone when you publish your first poetry collection. I don’t know. In some ways, I did everything right, and then I did everything wrong. I’m like both inside and outside of those worlds. I couldn’t claim either.

STREET: As a young writer yourself, who has achieved success and renown, do you have any advice towards navigating the various pitfalls of attempting to “make it” here in New York City as a writer? Not only in making a name for yourself, but a paycheck as well.

ZHANG: I will be brutally honest: A lot of the people who are getting published are people who don’t have to worry about money. How were they able to write a novel in one year? Because they didn’t have to work. Whether they come from wealth or they are married to someone who supports them—whatever it is, that’s just the truth. If you have to work, then it’s just a lot harder. I’ll say that you have to get crafty, like subletting your room for three months and going somewhere cheaper where you don’t have to work. I know people that have lots of student loans, obviously, and they can’t even do that. If you have to work, what is the job that you can get away with disrespecting so that you can afford to respect your own writing? For some people that job might be a service job, but some can’t do that because they’re physically too tired at the end of the day. For some people, they can’t do a writing or publishing job because they need to spend all of their free time reading and writing, and not their work time. For some people, nannying works. There are just so many things. I realized that I couldn’t do an office job. I couldn’t be in front of a computer all day and then come home and be in front of a computer again. My body just gave up. I had to find a lot of different things. Some of them were humiliating and dehumanizing. [laughs] There were definitely points where I was like, “I don’t think I could continue doing this if it doesn’t end very soon. There has to be an end.” My family lives here in New York, so that’s why I am able to stay here. If I am really flat on my ass, I can move in with my family. Honestly, I would say leave New York if you can’t afford to live here. The key is finding a lifestyle you can afford and live relatively healthy, but also a job that frees up as much mental and psychic space as possible so that you can write until you can get to a point—if you’re lucky enough—to write for a living.

STREET: Now that you are back here in NYC, do you feel like you are settled professionally? If so, do you think that lends itself to productivity or complacency? Do you feel more inspired when you’re wandering?

ZHANG: I don’t feel like I’m in a place where I feel settled and secure. I never know what will happen next. Maybe that’s the flipside of not having financial security: I can never say I’ve made it, or I can never relax. I am so lucky to have this book of short stories coming out in August, but I don’t have anything lined up after that. I haven’t finished writing a novel I can sell. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do after this year. I don’t know if I’ll keep teaching. I don’t know if I can teach enough to make enough money or if I’ll teach too much that I won’t have anytime to write. Do I freelance a bunch, so I can at least make money writing but not work on my own long-term projects?  Do I drain my savings and hope that in doing so I will give myself enough time to write something that I can sell? And even if I do write something, will I then have to sell it for two thousand dollars to a small press? What if this next book bombs, and I can’t get published again with a big publishing house? I have no idea.

As troubling as that is, I can just roll with it because that’s just how it’s always been, but that means that there is a fire lit under my ass because I truly have no security. If I fall through, there is no bottom. It’s like Super Mario Bros. or whatever, if you don’t make it—you just don’t. That is it. Game Over. Though, I don’t think that if I fall through that it is actually over for me, but it feels that way. There is no guarantee of what will happen next. I guess that is important for young writers to hear because I get a lot of young writers who say, “I want to get to the point you are at.” I respect that and I respect why they see my life and think that it is a good one. I’m happy to share how that happened, but I also want them to know that I don’t have health insurance. I don’t have enough to live off of after six months if I don’t keep hustling. At any point the attention I’m getting could go away. People get six-figure book deals and drain it in a year and then never get another book published, and then they have to get an office job. That can happen to anyone. Never get attached to hearing, “They love me.” You have to hear that for a brief second, and then it has to go away. It cannot be part of your world. As soon as you‘re in the mindset of “They love me. They’ll always love me,” then they will stop loving you, and you’ll have nothing. [laughs]

STREET: I wanted to speak about your non-fiction work as well. You have an essay chapbook entitled, Hags. You also do a lot of writing for Rookie where you cover everything from the band, Weezer, to giving reader advice. Do you do those things to keep yourself on your toes as a writer? Do you find the departure from poetry and fiction to be enlightening?

ZHANG: I got to a point where I felt very comfortable with poetry, like I did with fiction, and it started to bore me and I wanted to challenge myself by writing non-fiction. I had only written essays for school so I didn’t know anything about nonfiction. I still have a lot to learn about how to write reporting nonfiction, profiles, and journalistic type stuff. I was lucky enough that I was able, in a very unorthodox way, to join an online teen magazine, started by an actual teen, Tavi Gevinson. She, and the team, took a leap of faith and though I had never written any nonfiction they said, “Go for it!” It was the perfect place for me to learn because I was writing for a type of publication that had never existed before. I cringe a little bit when I look at some of those early essays. I was learning how to structure an essay! I had no idea! And all my mistakes are now on that world stage, forever recorded. So yeah, I started writing for them and that’s the stuff you get paid for, so I kept doing it to make a living as well. I am still learning how to write nonfiction.

STREET: You must be excited about having your first short story collection (Sour Heart, Lenny) released. What can you tell us about it? Is there a central theme or is it just an assortment?

ZHANG: So, basically, the first story I wrote when I was 19 and the last one I think I wrote when I was 25, so they are very old stories. I wrote them when I was in college and when I was at Iowa, although some of them have been revised to the point where I don’t think a single sentence has survived. Some of them are very different because I’ve changed. So it’s been like a ten year process.

STREET: That’s cool that you’ve held on to those stories for so long.

ZHANG: I did! I don’t know if it’s the right thing, but I did hold on to them. I will say the collection has been rejected. It’s like I was always the bridesmaid and never the bride. I would always get that note that said, “You were really close,” or “I really liked it, but…” I did feel really dejected and thought, “Am I delusional? Why do I keep trying with this? Why am I not moving on to a novel?” but there was something in me that wanted these stories out there, and they are linked short stories. They are all about these families who loosely know each other in New York during the 90’s. They are all Chinese-American immigrant families and they are all narrated by the young girls growing up in the family. That’s kind of the basic premise. It didn’t quite fit in with the places who were looking for the immigrant narratives because it was too weird or too gross or too obscene and wasn’t sad enough or something. Then it also didn’t fit in with the people who were looking for experimental stuff because it wasn’t experimental or academic enough. It was always in-between. People were having a hard time figuring it out; who they would market it to. I wouldn’t say that my experience is a common one, but I think I could have taken that feedback and said, “I guess I need to write this story, even though I don’t want to, because that is what everyone is looking for,” but instead I just knew—and this takes enormous ego—I just kept telling myself: “I know I’m weird, and I know when I describe this that it doesn’t sound that good, but I swear, if I can just get this out there, I know someone is going to like it. I know that people will warm up to it. I just need that chance.” I kept looking for that chance. I never gave up.

I think I was able to sell these stories because of my nonfiction and my poetry. I made a name for myself with my poetry and then I started writing nonfiction and a couple of those pieces started getting some attention. Through them I would be getting these queries from editors and agents inquiring if I was interested in writing a memoir, and I was like “Hell to the no, but I do have this thing I’m really proud of. It’s not a memoir, but it is fiction,” and they’d be like, “Sure.” It’s another weird way that I got in. I could have done what I was supposed to do, which was write a novel, or I guess a memoir, but I had to do what was right for me and because of that it took longer, but I can say that I am proud it happened on my terms. I didn’t compromise. So now if it fails, at least I know that I did it the way I wanted to. It didn’t fail because I gave in to something I didn’t want to do. If I had felt pressured to write something I didn’t want to write and everyone said it was terrible, then I would be like, “I didn’t want to write this anyways!”

With this, whatever happens—I’m happy. If it doesn’t fit in the world, that’s okay. I’m so proud of these stories and I want to share them. I’ve wanted to share them for a long time. Weirdly and sadly enough it is timely. Sometimes things are made, and they were made in the wrong time period. Sometimes you are born into the wrong generation or your ideas don’t fit into the generation you were born into, but you have to live with that. In your lifetime, what you make might never fit in, but if you’re lucky, it might. You can’t lie to yourself. You have to be true to yourself.

Be sure to pick up Jenny’s debut short story collection, Sour Heart (Lenny), available August 1, 2017.