Jenny Tinghui Zhang: On the Importance of Rest, Organizing Novel Research, Cutting Chapters and Her Debut Novel, "Four Treasures of the Sky"
Set in the 1880s American West, Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s debut novel, Four Treasures of the Sky, is a story you won’t be able to put down or forget. Young Daiyu is kidnapped and smuggled from her home in China into America. In a fight for survival, we follow her from a San Fransico brothel to a shop in the Idaho mountains just as the Chinese Exclusion Act begins to take effect. Not only must Daiyu navigate a country she never asked to be a part of, but she must also do it as a wave of anti-Chinese violence rushes in.
Zhang’s radiant prose mix with history, folklore, and magical realism to create an epic tale of longing, survival, family, and claiming your own story.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Jenny where she discussed her research process, the importance of rest, weaving in the familiar, cutting chapters, and writing her debut novel.
KBD: I was so impressed with the amount of research this novel took to come together. It seemed like it might have been a bit overwhelming considering the horrific violence and discrimination towards the Chinese, but also the look into calligraphy and the passed down fairytales and folklore. What did your process look like for researching?
JTZ: I think the very first hurdle of research I reached was around the calligraphy aspect. I realized that if I were to stop at every single moment and go and do research and then come back and write the book, I would probably never finish the book. So for maybe the first three drafts, I only did enough research to where I could kind of finish out the scene and move on to the next portion. So that very first draft was very research light. Then in revisions, I would come back having done more research every single time, building and building until I felt like there was this robust manuscript that was kind of iron clad with all the research that I had accumulated over my time writing. From a technical aspect, I used Scrivener. They have a whole research tab in there and I made categories for every single avenue that I was exploring. Whether it was the Chinese immigrant experience in Idaho or just Chinese women in general or transportation, I had separate categories that I could funnel all of my research into and that's how I kept track of everything. Scrivener honestly made it really easy for me to reference it at any different point.
KBD: One of the things I loved most about this novel was the origin story of Daiyu’s name. She hates that she is named after a tragic heroine and often wonders if the events and tragedies of her life are happening because of her name. Can you speak about why you were drawn to this origin story? Was folklore a part of your life growing up or did you find it later in your writing life?
JTZ: Yeah. So as I was writing, I just honestly needed a name. This name, Daiyu, was kind of top of mind because the book that it comes from, Dream of the Red Chamber, is one of my grandmother's favorites, if not, favorite book. She's obsessed with it and constantly tells me about it. So knowing that story, it just seemed natural for me to use the new as a placeholder for the moment. As I continued writing, I realized that actually, her name was one of the defining cores of her character. And that this question of like, who is she named after? And what does it mean to be named after something like this? And what does it mean to her - that ended up becoming one of the main tensions and explorations of the book.
So yeah, I wish I could say I had planned everything out and it was always supposed to be the way it was. But similarly, with calligraphy, that was another thing where I just needed to give her something to hold onto in the moment. I landed on calligraphy because again, it was kind of top of mind. My grandfather used to write really beautiful Chinese characters and, I think I was just reaching for things that seemed familiar, but not too familiar to me to make it through these moments of the story so that I could see where the story was going and come back later if I needed to change anything. But these things that initially were supposed to be placeholders ended up becoming integral parts of her journey and of the book.
KBD: As read in the author's note, I love that this story came out of a question from your father and his desire to understand what happened in the Midwest all these years ago. I think it's so beautiful that he trusted you could tell the story and you obviously did because this book is absolutely amazing. With the event in mind, how then did you begin crafting the story? Did character come to you first or was that after you understood the plot?
JTZ: So I initially envisioned the book as a similar conceit to Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. If you're familiar, it has five characters that are part of a family and each of the stories is told from each of their perspectives. They each get alternating chapters. And so my initial plan was to write from the point of view of each of the five Chinese men from this historical marker that I mentioned in the author's note. So I actually started with Nelson's character. He was the first creation that I had around this thing. I was doing research wondering, okay, if this is around the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act, how were Chinese people getting over to the States during this period where they were very much not welcome. And I found research, I think it was a scholarly article, where they had found that Chinese girls and women were being shipped over to the States in buckets of coal or crates of china. Just stuffed into these very small tight spaces and crossing the ocean in that way. And when I read that, that was when the character of Daiyu came to me. Just thinking about the image of a young girl floating across the ocean in that state. It was like all the other characters that I wanted to explore got shoved aside and I could only think about her and the story really took off from there.
KBD: In researching for this interview, I read a bit about your journey to publication. It seems as though you had a quick turnaround in an industry that can take months and months of querying to get recognized. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
JTZ: Yeah, I agree with you. I feel like publishing is so slow that I'm honestly flabbergasted at the pace with which we've moved. I think that just speaks to how much my publisher, Flatiron, has just supported me and put everything behind this book.
I started writing this in April of 2019. I believe it was the last semester of my MFA program. I had some agents who I was speaking with. They found me through my Catapult column where I was writing about living in Wyoming in nonfiction essays. They were reaching out and asking me, hey, do you have anything that's maybe a novel length project? And so I shared with them the first like hundred pages over the summer of 2019. A few of them got back to me. My agent who was not my agent at the time, but would become my agent, said this is really interesting and good, but what if you got rid of the Nelson perspective altogether and just wrote from the perspective of Daiyu. And she was right. Once I got rid of Nelson, it was like the book became what it was. So I owe a lot to my agent's suggestion. (Laughs)
I resent these revised pages and signed with her in October and just spent that entire year pretty much writing and getting it to a first draft where I felt comfortable sharing it with someone. I shared it with beta readers, I think about six, and then edited it. I gave it to my agent in July and she got back to me and said, I think we're ready to go out on submission. So we did, I think at the end of August and the book sold in September, I think. I might be getting these dates wrong, but you're right, it was a very fast turnaround. I think part of that might just be because I wrote the majority of this book when COVID was kind of taking hold and I was definitely quarantining a lot. So in a way, there was nothing else I could do with myself except work on this book. And the book felt like the only thing I had to hold onto. So, that might also be why there was such a quick turnaround here.
KBD: And I feel like the story is just so important. I feel like the people who grabbed onto it quickly knew that this is something that is just really powerful and timely and a needed story, in my opinion.
What was it like to have to then cut all the Nelson chapters? (Laughs) I feel like that must have been tough.
JTZ: You know, it actually wasn't that bad at all, because when I was writing the Daiyu sections, I was like, this feels so good. I just want to keep going and keep going. This feels easy. Then when I was writing the Nelson chapters, the insecurities popped up in ways they didn't for Daiyu. So cutting them, it honestly felt right.
KBD: You mentioned you wrote a lot while quarantining but what did your writing routine look like?
JTZ: So I still had a job during this time, albeit a remote job. I dedicated the late afternoons when my job kind of tapered down to writing. I would write for about two hours every day. I think I can’t actually work on writing for more than two hours, even now. Sometimes it was a time limit or sometimes it was a word count goal. So I think the most common word count I worked by was trying to do a thousand words a day. And this was when I was in the very first draft phase where it was all just about putting words down, moving the story forward, not caring if it was grammatically correct. Just lots of fragments everywhere. So I would write Monday through Wednesday for about two hours, pretty much for the entire time until I finished the book. I did make sure to build in rest time, which I think is really, really underrated. Some people say you have to write every day, you have to do some work on the book every day. And for me, what worked was working on it, during the week and reserving the weekends for absolutely nothing. I think that was also a reason why I was able to finish the book in the way that I did. I had time to replenish. Even though I was still working on it heavily.
KBD: Yeah, that's great. That's actually very similar to the routine I'm discovering for myself too. I think it really is good to take the weekends off too. Of course, you're still thinking about it, but I agree with you, the breaks are needed as much as the work is.
JTZ: Yes. I feel like some of my best ideas in writing come from when I'm not writing and after I've not written for a very long time.
KBD: Yeah, definitely. I feel like I always get my best ideas when I'm driving in the car.
JTZ: Yes! I love a driving brainstorming writing session.
KBD: As a debut novelist, what advice do you have for others who are working on novels right now? Or what was something you held on to that helped you finish your book?
JTZ: I've talked about this quite a bit to my students. Especially for emerging writers. Don’t get distracted by the progress of others and that’s a roundabout way of saying, you know, don't compare yourself to the progress of others or what others are doing. Don't feel panicked or in distress because something good is happening for someone else. You know, they got an agent or they sold their book or whatever it is. The goals that you have and the work that you're trying to do, remember that you're the only one that can tell the story you want to tell. I hate to use this platitude, but it really is a marathon and not a sprint for people who want to be writers and write books. That's a lifelong thing. That's a lifelong journey. And hopefully, you will write many books over the course of your lifetime. I certainly hope I write more books after this one. But zoom out from all of the announcements on Twitter and all the book news on Instagram. This is our life's work. So just remember that you have all of your life to make it happen for yourself.
KBD: Who are some other Chinese American writers you are loving right now?
JTZ: I love Kyle Lucia Wu - Win Me Something is her book. Of course, How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang. I read this over Christmas. It’s called A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo. I’m not sure if she is Chinese American. She might be British but those are the ones that are on top of mind.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang is a Chinese-American writer. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Apogee, Ninth Letter, Passages North, The Rumpus, HuffPost, The Cut, Catapult, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of Wyoming and has received support from Kundiman, Tin House, and VONA/Voices. She was born in Changchun, China and grew up in Austin, Texas, where she currently lives. Four Treasures of the Sky is her debut.
