Jenny Zhang: On Being Baby, Public and Private Versions of Ourselves, Writing in a Gig Economy and Her Latest Poetry Collection
Jenny Zhang is a force to be reckoned with. In the 30 or so minute conversation we had back in April, she packed so much into our chat that left my head spinning, in the best way possible. Her fabulous new poetry collection, My Baby First Birthday, explores innocence, accepting pain, love and who is worthy of it, womanhood, motherhood, patriarchy, capitalism, and whiteness, while also addressing how women are treated, fetishized, and reduced to their body parts and trauma. With anger and empathy, Zhang calls out the animals within us all as she grapples with understanding innocence and if we can get it back once it’s lost.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Jenny over the phone where she discusses what it means to be baby, writing about the body, collective justice for those writing about sexual violence, identifying what is the truest expression of yourself, the private and public versions of ourselves, and her latest poetry collection, My Baby First Birthday.
Kailey Brennan: I was wondering if you could speak more about the title of your collection. There are a number of poems throughout the sections with the same name. And what it means to you?
Jenny Zhang: The title actually comes from this Facebook post that my uncle posted around eight years ago. It was a picture of me as a baby between him and my dad. This is back in Shanghai where I spent the first five years of my childhood. My mom commented underneath the Facebook posts and said my baby first birthday. This is the second time I've been guilty of using something my mom wrote as a title for poetry collection because she also used to write me in emails, dear Jenny, how are you? We are all find. English isn't her first language and technically it's not my first language either. Chinese is. I learned English when I immigrated here. So I've always been fascinated by the process of learning a language. Usually, the first language we learn is as a baby, so we don't remember any of the things that we learned. But when you're an immigrant, you actually have that experience of kind of being a baby all over again. So I was just sort of interested in these ideas of being a baby. And then I liked the way it sounded: My baby first birthday. Does it mean it's my baby's first birthday? That picture of me on my first birthday and her being nostalgic about it. Or is baby a modifier and it’s her baby first birthday? The first birthday where she felt something akin baby?
It sort of just set my mind on fire in a good way. It sent it racing. Usually, language is utilitarian and it's functional and we don't stop to ponder often what something means because we're on the go, we're trying to communicate something as clearly as possible. It's usually a good thing for words to have solid meanings. But of course, in poetry, the point is to slow down. The point is for a word to be capable of sparking all these other connections and meanings more than its dictionary definition. So I just really liked that. I'd been writing all these poems that were about existence and about not choosing to be born and about people who feel like they never got to be as innocent as a baby or maybe that time was snatched from them or they didn't really get to exist. It just felt appropriate to call it My Baby First Birthday.
And then I guess in 2019 everyone started saying I'm baby. Do you remember that?
KB: Yeah.
JZ: So I was a little self-conscious that it would seem like I was hopping on the I'm baby bandwagon, but I'm going to post-date this and say that I was interested in this before then. But it was funny because I think collectively as a society, things were so not innocent. We were in such a guilty country led by such guilty leaders and everything was so messed up that I think people had a yearning for a return to innocence or return to baby, if you will, where all you have to do is exist and people take care of you the way that you're supposed to be taken care of.
When you're a baby, it's just assumed that you deserve all the protections. You deserve to be fed. You deserve to be clothed and shelter and cared for and loved. It's assumed that there are no strikes against you. And as you get older, for some reason we are less and less deserving. I think it's very hard to feel that way. So baby is kind of a thematic yearning that goes through the whole poetry collection.
KB: You speak a lot throughout these poems about how women are reduced to body parts. You also speak about how trauma and women in pain can often be eroticized. I’m thinking specifically in the poem needs revision! That was one of my favorites. You say “how was I supposed to know/ nothing counts if you’re a woman in pain.” I was curious why you think society is so obsessed with reducing everything, it seems, about the female experience, even violation and trauma? Why do you think we’re so obsessed with that? And what angers you the most about that?
JZ: Good question. I mean, all of the major milestones in a girl's life, in a woman's life are related to her body, right? Like getting your period —it's also very cisnormative and heteronormative— breaking your hymen, no longer being a virgin, giving birth and being a mother finally. It's interesting because in the end, it's not that I would say that men are not reduced to their bodies. I think in some ways men also are reduced to their bodies, but they're encouraged to have a different relationship with talking about it.
It's so animalistic to feel your body and that's not actually a bad thing. But so much of the trauma to a woman's body is not processed. It's dismissed or invalidated or it’s overly focused on. I'm having a hard time articulating, which is maybe why I wrote these poems because I can't articulate in sentences. Obviously, I'm someone who has written a lot about the body and in some ways, words are so woefully inadequate to describe bodily sensations in some ways. It’s why I decided I would write about it in poetry and in a collection that is all about being innocent. Of course one of the greatest losses of innocence in any girl's life is the first time she realizes that her body can be used as a site for violence and violation.
To be totally honest, I was writing that poem in I think 2018 when there were all of these stories coming out for #MeToo. I was very grateful for that movement. I was very grateful to see that people were caring. It did feel like it was the same people who had always been caring and the same people who didn't care still didn't care or they cared in so much as it affected themselves.
I started to get a little cynical —so all these editors are asking me to write stories about the time that I was sexually assaulted. First of all, I've never said that I was, but it's very telling that basically everyone assumes that every woman has a story like that. That's already upsetting. And then second of all, even if I were to write that story, what is that going to do to add another? The people who know that this is rampant still know and the people who have been seeking some sort of justice, some sort of healing, are they going to get it? Or are they going to regurgitate another story of pain to add to the swell of stories of women's pain? And then that publication feels good for having published that story. But does anything happen in terms of collective justice?
That’s kind of like where my mind was at. It was very negative and it's because I had seen so many women really put their heart and soul out there and be really vulnerable and tell their stories that no one had cared about for so long, that they had buried for so long. And in some ways, the release wasn't enough. It felt exploitative rather than healing. Because in the end, they didn't get the justice they were seeking and people criticized and tore their stories apart and they were sort of in a sense emotionally torn all over again and traumatized all over again. That’s the opposite of my baby first birthday. (laughs) It made me feel so despondent, kind of like why was I ever born into such a wretched society? How do I honor all the things that have happened good and bad and share it in a way that doesn't put the onus on the people who have already experienced bad shit to fix it or something?
It was just such a big topic and it all swirled around me and I just kind of wrote it one day. I wrote on the top of that poem, “needs revision” because this is a subject that will never end. Like we will always be grappling with what do we do about violence and sexual violence against women. I would have to say that most of the men in my life were more worried about being called out than actually examining their actions or examining their complicity. Or they were more giddy about other men or enemies being personally called out because it meant that there was one less space for a man like themselves to have to evaluate themselves. So I just put “needs revision” because I was like, I'm sure I'll go back to this to get mad about this at some other point. And then I read it at a really amazing poetry reading with Mindy Nettifee, Dorothea Lasky, Anaïs Duplan, and hosted by Amber Tamblyn. It was all women at the reading and they really cheered me on and they were like, keep it as needs revision, call it that, call it that. For all of my cynicism and all of my feelings of nothing can ever change, I did feel like that was healing for me. I hope healing for everyone who was there. So I decided to memorialize that moment and keep the poem that name.
KB: Your passion and anger comes right off these pages within your poems. Did you ever experience fear or self-doubt when writing such intimate and emotional poetry, that also showcases your anger?
JZ: I think it's always a risk to be emotionally bare and vulnerable. It's like a muscle I've had to build over time. This is going to sound like a strange comparison, but I joined a gym like a year ago — of course now I can't go to it anymore. But I started going to the gym and I was like, Oh my God. Men are really insecure about their bodies. They also have horrible issues with their bodies. I saw these men in the gym and they'd be there for like three hours, every single day, no matter what time of day I went in. It was their place to go and attend to their bodies and be kind of obsessed with how strong they could be. And that in and of itself is an obsession and addiction —the quest for perfection. But I also realized even if that obsession leaves you vulnerable —because there's no such thing as perfection. Perfection is just an ideal that drives the person mad— in that same way, I realized that that discipline that those men had to work out that I was seeing at this gym, I was in my own way trying to do that with emotions. I was learning how to build up my emotional muscles and learning through trial and error and through applying myself in my writing to write in a way that was emotionally bare and being strong about doing that.
There's a huge toll on writing things that are emotionally intimate and vulnerable. I think a lot of people, including myself, have burned out on doing so. And it's very gendered and it's very racialized because of patriarchy and because of racism. We are drawn to stories of pain from those who are considered oppressed. It's very easy to burn out on writing those things if they come from outside pressure and not an internal desire. If it comes from outside pressure to produce those works, I think it's very easy to burn out and be like, I can't do that anymore. I've been exploited or I'm doing this for all the wrong reasons. I did have to learn to identify what was something I truly wanted to say that came from me, that was a true expression of myself versus and what was pressure that I was getting from other sources. That was also something I had totally practiced and trained myself to do in the last few years.
KB: How long did it take you to write this collection? Do you keep a specific kind of poetry writing routines and is that routine different from your short story writing process?
JZ: I have noticed that I tend to be a little bit more erratic in my poetry writing. I decided I was going to organize the poems by the time of the season that I wrote them in. So there's not a grand mystery of how I formatted the collection. There are four sections and it starts with this fall and then winter, spring and summer. Summer is the longest section. So I did notice that I seem to write more poetry in the summer. I don't know what that means. I think because in the summer I just don't want to stay in and write like 5,000 words for prose because it's nice outside and I actually want to go outside. (Laughs) So to be honest, it's just a question of time. Poetry is something I can usually spend a little bit less time than prose in terms of hours of the day. Winter seems to be when I write longer pieces of prose.
This collection I think took about seven years or so. I started in 2012 and I finished in 2019. I always take a really long time for some reason. I'm not actually a slow writer, but I think everything is so quick. You know, right now everything is so condensed. Everything is like, do you have a hot take? Now, if not, it's irrelevant. I just felt like I wanted things to sit for a few years and just be like, I do still like it? So I tend to drag my feet a little bit.
KB: Yeah. I love that you do that though because you're right. Everything does feel like you need to have a thought right now and it needs to be fully formed and developed right away. I like that you allowed yourself to do that, sit with it, because I feel like as writers, we really aren't encouraged to sit with your work. It's like write it and get it out there, you know? And that always feels so overwhelming.
JZ: So much of that is tied to just making a living, right? As writers, we're in the gig economy too, and the gig economy is colossally failing us. It’s the pressure to pump out more and more stuff. It's not good for any writer, even journalists who are supposed to write as fast as possible. The media cycle is so fast. It's like if you're not online, the minute something happens, people have already moved on. I think because this is poetry and it's the most, in some ways, financially useless segment of writing, I was like, let me just take advantage of the fact that no one cares and take as long as possible. (Laughs)
KB: You’ve given so many great pieces of advice throughout this interview, but I'm curious if there was any advice for aspiring writers or poets, something that helped you along your writing journey or maybe it's something that you have just learned on your own, that you could share.
JZ: Related to what we were just saying, always maintain a practice of writing that you don't immediately share with the world or with someone else. I think there's so much blurring of the public and the private. Especially now, it's like we're seeing the insides of public figures’ homes because everyone's at home and everyone's broadcasting from their literal home. And I think when you know that something is going to be shared and when something is going to have an audience or when you're writing something with the expectation of the audience, it warps the thing that you're writing.
You asked me how I was able to write things that were so intimate or emotionally bare. I had to trick myself into thinking no one cared, not in a dishonest way, but in the way of no one's going to see this. And if no one's going to see this, do I really want to perform in my writing or do I want to write the thing that is the truest, truest thing I could possibly write. We're constantly having to perform for work, for our relationships, for the likes. And some people have been performing so long that they don't even have a core self anymore. It's just merged with their performative self. And that to me is the antithesis of art and writing, which is our last refuge and last sanctuary for getting to process and think and experiment.
It's all of the things that are not necessarily condoned or celebrated by society or whatever. Those are the most interesting things that each person has to bring as a writer, in my opinion, if you're writing creatively. So I think it's always good to just have a practice of writing things that are just for you. You can share it, of course, at some point when you're ready. And you can also be writing things that are meant to be published and then to be shared. Even if it's just a journal or if it's just a sentence or two every day, I think it starts to work that muscle that isn't optimized for likes, but it's actually interested in something deeper.
Jenny Zhang was born in Shanghai and grew up in New York. She is the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find and the story collection Sour Heart.
