Sanjena Sathian: On the Importance of Reading Widely, Ambition, Adulting in America and Her Novel, "Gold Diggers"
Sanjena Sathian’s debut Gold Diggers is a darkly comic tale of the American dream that begs the question who gets to dream and at what cost? Set in the Bush era Atlanta suburbs, second-generation American teenagers tirelessly scramble to accrue the type of success that leads to ivy covered walls of elite colleges, but beneath the surface of A+ papers and esteemable extracurriculars, they struggle to carry the dreams of their parents. Desperate to succeed and win the seemingly unwinnable game of life, the book's protagonist, Neil, finds himself in a gold kissed world of magic and crime. Neil’s coming-of-age takes him from the Atlanta suburbs to the San Francisco Bay Area where he tries to find his place as an American Indian in a country whose systems have fractured immigrant histories. Seeped in magical realism and social satire, Sathian artfully examines issues of erasure, identity, and desire all while taking her characters on a wild ride of gold theft, love, and one final heist to win it all.
I spoke with Sanjena about the proverbial room of one’s own where she first wrote Gold Diggers, the Indian diaspora in the U.S., the struggle to be an adult in America, and the importance of reading widely as a writer.
Shelby Hinte: I have to say I loved this book so much.
Sanjena Sathian: Thank you so much.
SH: Can you share a little about the evolution of your initial idea for Gold Diggers to its final publication?
SS: I started trying to write something about the Atlanta suburbs where I grew up over eight years ago. I had like two separate kinds of failed novels about the suburbs, and they were really bad. Like, they were each bad in their own unique, terrible way (laughs). They had a sort of somber realism and I was taking myself really seriously. I thought that there was a kind of intense, mulling tone that I would have to strike in order to be taken seriously. Then I threw those books away and I started writing almost exclusively speculative fiction for a couple of years when I was living out in San Francisco. Once I switched over everything became more playful and enjoyable.
I had become sort of obsessed with this idea of gold theft in the suburbs where I was growing up and it had happened in a lot of other suburbs such as New Jersey, Texas, California; they were all in Indian American families’ homes and my mom used to say there was definitely an Indian person involved because they know exactly where to go in the house in order to find the gold.
So, I had been thinking about that and wondering who in the Indian community might be sufficiently of the community to know where the gold might be, but also sufficiently apart from it that they might be willing to betray them. Once that fascination met with my speculative fiction brain, all of the sudden I had a little bit more of a world. I imagined a mother and daughter as gold thieves. I wrote from their perspectives first. Then the book really took its shape when I met Neil in my mind which gave me a voice.
SH: It’s interesting to hear you speak on the straddling of different worlds, and one thing that is so compelling about Neil’s character is that he is both so resistant to ambition, and yet because everyone around him, including his crush [Anita], is so ambitious, he seems to want to have more [ambition]. Considering it as a story about ambition, what was the intrigue for you to write about a character that was in this in-between state?
SS: I think it was just where I was as a teenager. On the outside in high school, I looked a lot more like Anita or even his debate partner Wendy who are like these comically ambitious young women who are just constantly overachieving, but on the inside, I was sometimes like what is this all for? What are we doing here? I really liked to read. I really liked history. I felt this divide between my private life and my public life. I think that is an experience a lot of Asian Americans and Indian Americans have.
The older I got, after college, living in the Bay Area, I felt like I could chill a little more and it made me see what was strange and weird about the intensely ambitious culture which I had grown up in. I was excited to write about a character who could experience that duality the way I had.
SH: I am glad you bring Anita’s character up. One of my favorite lines from her early on in the book is when she is referring to no one being as ambitious as them, and says ‘This is immigrant shit.’ The desire for ambition and having more feels very American in the way the characters perceive it, as I think it is in our culture in general. Can you talk a little about where you think this specifically “immigrant ambition” comes from that is maybe different from white ambition?
SS: I think it is a couple of different places and I should say I wrote my way into these understandings. I did not have any of this vocabulary when I started writing. In communities like mine, which is certainly not every Indian American community, but I grew up in a very particular southern-suburban, upper-middle class Indian American bubble. There were other Asian Americans, there were children of African immigrants and all of us were a sort of unit. The culture that was threaded throughout was we were children of doctors and finance professors and our parents had arrived in the US because of those accomplishments, literally only because of those accomplishments. In fact, the way the contemporary Indian diaspora is shaped is around a set of visas that you can almost only get if you are coming on a STEM job or creating a small business. It is truly difficult to enter the US unless you already meet those requirements. That already is a kind of social engineering that I think restricts a community’s values.
Now I have a little more empathy for the adults in my community because I think they had a little bit of a limited understanding of what their kids’ futures could look like because they were not permitted to have a more textured understanding before they arrived here. If you are calling back to the old country and bragging about your kid, your family members in even the remotest village know what Harvard is.
SH: Totally. There is this moment in the book where the question is asked “What happens after Harvard,” and so I wondered about your own experience, particularly in becoming a writer. Do you see any relationship between yourself and your characters trying to forge careers that are different from what their parents might have had in mind for them?
SS: Yeah, totally. I mean I made it to the promised land [Yale]. I went to a fancy school and when I got there I was like shit, what now? I struggled.
For people with even less of a safety-net it is so terrifying to arrive at that promised land and realize that no one helped you make plans for what comes next. It is like a rug is pulled out from under you. I watched that happen a little bit to me and a lot to other people around me.
I feel like now you have to reinvent a community’s idea of itself. For children of immigrants or people who went through a coming-of-age that took them away from their class roots, ethnic roots, or any journey away from the place they were raised, there is this imaginative work that has to be done later in life that asks, ‘What else can I be?’ That is a strain and I still feel myself doing it. I mean, I have no idea how to be an adult in America.
SH: Yeah, I think a lot of people can probably relate to that and it makes me think about how childhood trauma plays a role in the characters’ adult relationships. Their childhood traumas in some ways feels like a sort of emotional currency. I’m curious what your thoughts are in a generational sense and in relation to the book on how we handle trauma. Do you see trauma as being monetized in any way or do you think it is that through trauma and the sharing of it where we find real connections?
SS: I think it is both, right? For Neil, sharing that vulnerable part of his past where he did something terrible with Anita really is the only space where he can seek the possibility of, if not redemption, then the acknowledgement of what’s there, so in that sense he is wrong to think it is cheesy to share what happened.
At the same time, that maybe generationally you’re right, when we’re in our twenties we have to account for ourselves. I saw this tweet the other day where someone wrote I hate when people say ‘Tell me about yourself,’ like do they mean my favorite color or my trauma? You’ve got to specify. (Laughs) That does feel like the way we are conditioned to be close to one another.
I think this happens a lot in dating and Neil bristles against this in a particularly Indian American male way. People can’t account for the nature of his trauma. The assumption is that he is doing ok. He is educated and middle class. What could be wrong? But what could be wrong is this sense of invisibility and erasure that the girls he is dating do not get.
I feel that all the time. I feel like now there is a little bit more of a starting point for Asian American identity dialogue that unfortunately seems to have only been triggered by really awful events. I think that people are starting to see for the first time that they have not been able to conceive of what groups that are cast as model minorities go through and so there isn’t a cultural script for understanding certain kinds of trauma.
SH: Especially considering the setting of your book and what has recently happened in Atlanta. Has that been triggering for you in any sort of way and what has your take been on this shift in dialogue around these things?
SS: Just frustrating and infuriating, honestly. In some ways the spa shootings are so different from the world that I come from. It was much more working-class women. The six women who died were East Asian. Some of the women lived in the spas that they worked in. In that sense, the world of my book is much different. The characters in my book are much more affluent, they are more Indian than East or Southeast Asian, but there is something that is really familiar. Two of those spas were 4 minutes from my house. I think more than anything it has been frustrating to realize that it takes a news cycle event for people to realize what is missing in their conception of selfhood.
It is hard to feel like the experiences I have are even worth talking about compared to the large scale of violence, but because I am doing this book tour and my book has some of these connections, all of a sudden, I am being asked to speak about things I feel a little unprepared for. I wrote this one particular story, and the world wouldn’t need me to say something about this larger problem if there were already a better cultural imagination for it.
SH: Well, I wouldn’t sell yourself short either because you have this brilliant part of the book that uses an intertextual colonialist tale of Isaac Snider that provides a lot of cultural context including California, Asian American, and Colonialist History. It shows a lot of the layers of oppression within different racial groups and for Snider he seems to tack himself onto a different culture as a way to be safer than identifying as his own. Craft wise, how did you arrive at this moment of the book with Isaac Snider?
SS: Well, I already had the contemporary conceit for the book when I found a tale in the Library of Congress archive that was basically the “Tale of the Bombayan [Gold Digger]” as it appears in part one of the book. It just blew my mind. I already knew my characters were going to be gold thieves. I already knew I was interested in adding a historical element in the book because immigrant stories often involve history in some way. They involve this nod to the old country and I wanted to play with that trope of there being history but not in the way you expect. So, I was digging around in the past and I couldn’t believe I found this potential story of an Indian in the gold rush because that is not in most mainstream accounts of the gold rush. You hear about Chileans, Australians, Chinese workers, but you don’t hear about Indians because there wasn’t a mass migration. But then I couldn’t corroborate this guy’s existence. For about a year and a half I was emailing historians; I was going through archives; I read a lot of books on the international history of the gold rush. It could be that I am just a bad historian.
(both laugh)
Maybe some historian is going to read this book and be like there is an obvious way you could have gone about solving this, but at some point, I realized I wasn’t going to do more research because I wanted Neil, who is not that great at his job, to have the frustration I had and be like ‘I can’t find this figure. What do I do? I have to invent him or imagine he undertook this project of passing.’ Which is the story of a lot of people in American history who could pass for who they were not where racial lines were blurred. I took some of the inspiration from the documentarian Vivek Bald who does amazing work on South Asian American history and he records a lot of stories of Indian men jumping ship in New Jersey and New Orleans and integrating into communities of color where a lot of them are “passing” as Black and Puerto Rican men.
After about two years looking for the case of the Bombayan to be corroborated, a friend of mine found an obituary in San Francisco for someone who seemed to be an Indian man dead in a mining camp. I thought maybe it’s the same person, maybe it isn’t but that could potentially disprove the possibility of Isaac Snider’s character. This is really the story of colonized people and places. They aren’t legible. You just don’t have the fullness of history that friends of mine who come from dominant cultures have access to. That’s not just an intellectual problem. It’s personal.
SH: I really admire the work that part of the book was doing. Another theme of Gold Diggers is addiction which plays an interesting role in the book on both a literal and metaphorical level. The characters experience addiction to both substances and people. How do you see Gold Diggers in conversation with more conventional addiction narratives?
SS: I didn’t think too much about it in terms of addiction narratives. I did talk to friends with more addiction experience than I personally did to make sure things didn’t feel wrong, but for me it was always a story of an addiction to values and how that seeps into other things.
One of the addiction novels that I think is really stunning is Infinite Jest. That too is a story of an addiction to a concept. In Gold Diggers the gold is sort of like entertainment is in Infinite Jest. For me it was addiction to greed, achievement, and something that is empty.
SH: I am so intrigued by that word empty and one question I found myself wondering as I read was whether the gold was a placebo or not.
SS: It’s funny, you’re not the first person to ask the question about the potential placebo effect. The lemonade was always very real to me. I think of writers like Shirley Jackson who brought me into the speculative tradition and how [Jackson’s] stories can give you the possibility of bothness. That something can exist in a material reality and magical reality. It has been cool to hear that some people can follow a full realist reading of the book because I wanted it to succeed in emotional realism and magical realism.
SH: Can you share a little bit about your writing routine? What’s your process like?
SS: Right now it is all a scramble and a mess, but when I am in the swing of things I try to get to my desk as soon as possible in the morning. I might read a little bit first.
When I was writing [Gold Diggers] I had this magical attic office in my house in Iowa. So I would eat my breakfast, read a book downstairs, and then I got to go up into this separate room with a door that shut behind me and it was all my space. That was the first time I ever had the proverbial room of one's own.
I usually try to write from mid-morning to early afternoon. Then I usually have to do something to turn my brain off. Afterward I often watch a half hour to an hour of television during lunch which is like the only way to turn my brain off. Then I will work out in the evening and sometimes return to do some editing in the evening, but usually the evening is just reading.
SH: What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
SS: Read widely. Read out of your genre. Read out of your comfort zone. Then I would also say reread. I have found that people who are just starting out as writers don’t always know how to read for craft. That requires understanding an author’s obsessions, understanding how their worldview filters into their craft choices, and I don’t think that comes from reading a million craft essays. I think it is important to develop your own working thesis of how an author’s body of work functions and that comes from re-reading.
A Paul and Daisy Soros fellow, Sanjena Sathian is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has worked as a reporter in Mumbai and San Francisco, with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food & Wine, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more. And her award-winning short fiction has been published in Boulevard, Joyland, Salt Hill, and The Master's Review.
About the Interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a writer and educator living in the Bay Area. She received her MFA in Fiction from San Francisco State University where she was the recipient of the 2019 Distinguished Graduate award. She has been a contributing food and beverage writer forEdible Santa Fe. Her fiction has appeared inEntropy, Maudlin House, Witness Magazine, Hobart, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a novel about women and vortexes in the desert. You can follow her @shelbyhinte and read her work at www.shelbyhinte.com
