May-lee Chai: On the Experience of Co-writing With Her Father, Her Short Fiction Process and Her New Collection, "Tomorrow in Shanghai"
May-lee Chai’s newest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai follows a diverse set of characters as they grapple with identity, gender, wealth, and class across various cultures. The collection includes stories such as a young Chinese boy working to make a life for himself in the US, a white mother and her biracial daughter facing further connection and disconnection while on vacation in France, and a working-class woman working as a nanny in a future Chinese colony on Mars. Each unique story connects to the next through a strong theme of identity, displacement, and longing for connection.
I spoke with May-lee about her writing process, where she gets her inspiration, and what it was like writing a novel with a family member.
Kasia Merrill: The short stories of Tomorrow in Shanghai, particularly in the beginning of the collection, vary greatly in perspective and setting, yet have a strong thematic current. Were these stories written around the same time, or over a longer period? What was your process in writing these stories and creating a collection?
May-lee Chai: I wrote the majority of the stories either during the Trump presidency or during the pandemic. Although none of the stories are set in the present, some take place in the past, and one takes place 100 years in the future, but all of them reflect some of the anxieties of the present day. These eight stories are the ones that I chose specifically for this collection and with these themes in mind. The title “Tomorrow in Shanghai” is a metaphor for hope, for a kind of resilient belief that in the future there is a safe home that my protagonists can find, but that they currently are not in that safe space.
KM: After you have written a short story, how long is your revising period? Do you typically let a story ‘sit’ for some time, or are you usually able to revise it soon after writing it?
MC: It really varies by story. Some stories can take me years to finish! Some stories come more quickly. I can’t really predict.
KM: This collection is wonderfully diverse, with a wide range of characters, locations, and even genre (I’m thinking of the sci-fi story “The Nanny”). When you’re starting a story, do you usually begin with a character, location, or plot idea? What usually causes the initial spark?
MC: I generally begin with a character in a situation and I want to see what happens to that character. For example, “Life on Mars” is about a teenage boy, Guo Yu, from China who’s sent by his parents all alone to live and go to school in the U.S. He’s a so-called parachute kid, the term for kids who are sent alone to foreign countries to try to set up roots and sponsor their families later. I wanted to write about such a situation and I thought about who this boy is, his personality, his attitude, all the things that will help him to survive in this completely new, strange land.
KM: I really loved how the short story “Slow Train in Beijing” is, what I assume to be, a continuation of the previous short story “Jia.” They are linked with the narrator having the same first name, among some other more specific details. Did you write this as one story previously, or was it the same character ‘visiting you’ twice? What made you decide to share Jia’s past and present as two stories?
MC: Lu-lu is the same character from “Jia,” but in “Slow Train to Beijing” she is now an adult in her early 20s, having left her family and now living and working in China. Her last name is spelled differently because she’s in the PRC which uses the pinyin romanization system, whereas her immigrant family used an older system, Wade Giles, for rendering their surname into English. I wanted to show the character of Lu-lu at different points in her life. In “Jia” things are fraught and she’s facing a lot of tension within the family, plus racism and homophobia from outside the family, such as from neighbors and from kids at school. So I wanted to show her in the process of becoming herself more fully, of coming into her own as a person over the course of the two stories.
KM: I read that you have published eleven books, including both short story collections and novels. Do you prefer writing short stories or novels? What is it that you like more or less about one or the other?
MC: I like both forms! They serve different purposes. Short stories allow me to explore many different lives and different characters and experiences. Novels are an extended look at one particular character or set of characters.
KM: I also read that you have co-written multiple books with your father, Winberg Chai. That’s so impressive! What is your process when working together? How do you influence on another’s work?
MC: The process has varied depending on the project. Our first book together, The Girl from Purple Mountain, was a family memoir. And I began that with my father in order to cheer him up. I had been doing research on the book for more than 10 years myself, going to China to study and to re-trace the steps my father’s family had had to take across China during World War II to keep ahead of the invading Japanese army. I even went to grad school at Yale to study this era’s history so that I could write the book. Then we experienced many difficulties. My mother died of cancer, and then one of my father’s students was murdered. My father fell into a kind of depression and he himself experienced ill health. I became a caregiver to my father to help him after he had open-heart surgery. I suggested we work on a family memoir as a way to take his mind off the troubles of the present, and also to put to use all my research. At first it was difficult to work together, and we argued a lot, but eventually he came to enjoy the project! The other book after that, China A to Z, came from our time teaching together-- an introductory class on China, and that was a much smoother process.
KM: Are you working on anything new?
MC: I am working on a novel and an essay collection.
May-lee Chai is the author of the American Book Award–winning story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants and ten other books. Her prize-winning short prose has been published widely, including in the New England Review, Missouri Review, Seventeen, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose, Chai is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
About the interviewer
Kasia Merrill is a fiction writer based in Maryland. She holds an MFA in creative writing and works as a publishing director for a children’s publishing house. Her fiction has appeared in Breadcrumbs Mag and Fiction International, and in 2022, she was selected to be a Peter Taylor fellow for the Kenyon Writer’s Workshop. She is currently at work on her first novel.
