In “Voyagers!,” your story in this week’s issue of the magazine, Cali and Ronny, two old friends, embark on a road trip from Houston to Los Angeles. College friends, they’ve been estranged for many years before reconnecting after the death of Ronny’s partner, Sho. What drew you to a road trip as a narrative structure to explore these characters’ unresolved dynamics?
Experimentation, really: I’m still growing comfortable with the third person (too much power). While I was working on my upcoming novel, “Palaver,” which is in third person throughout, I needed ways to test narrative distance and uncertainty. Short stories serve as really useful vehicles for that kind of exercise. In this one, the question of whose voice the narrative belonged to—how much agency that voice held, and which tactics best used for both the specificity and the capacity for surprise regarding the piece’s protagonists, without slowing the narrative down—was pretty challenging. But the narrative structure—a road trip—created forward motion by default, with a clear beginning and end, while allowing for malleability and emotional play. Having certainty for at least a handful of narrative junctures—whether in the form of a journey, an end-stopped event, or a clear period of time—provides for thematic flexibility and converging tangents, even if they don’t feel immediately related to the subject at hand. Eventually, you’re going to reach the place, or the event is going to happen, the year is going to end: whatever threads are untangled along the way are narrative, too, and can be internalized by the reader as such (although it’s on the writer to make those connections as both firm and transparent as possible).
Jesmyn Ward’s “Sing, Unburied Sing,” Alia Trabucco Zerán’s “The Remainder” (translated by Sophie Hughes), Madeleine Thien’s “The Book of Records,” Mariana Enriquez’s “Our Share of Night” (translated by Megan McDowell), and Jessica Au’s “Cold Enough for Snow” immediately come to mind as stunning trip narratives. Relatedly, a number of films I hold dear utilize journeys—or movement, generally—to great effect narratively: Jeon Go-woon’s “Microhabitat,” Phạm Thiên Ân’s “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Broker,” Akihiro Suzuki’s “Looking for an Angel,” Satoshi Miki’s “Adrift in Tokyo,” and Alfonso Cuarón’s “Y Tu Mamá También.” This story owes a lot to Satoshi Kon’s “Tokyo Godfathers,” and also the final sequence of Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s “Like Grains of Sand,” which is probably my favorite film.
And, as ever, music helped: while I was drafting, Lia Ouyang Rusli, Smino, Kemono, and Hamid Al Shaeri helped a ton. Patrice Rushen’s “Remind Me” and Kyozo Nishioka’s “Gloria” were indispensable.
There’s a powerful tension in the story between movement and stasis—the characters are literally travelling west, but they’re also circling back to old wounds and patterns. Was this something you planned from the beginning, or did it emerge as you wrote?
Their relationships became clearer as I spent more time with them; I knew Cali and Ronny much better in later drafts than in earlier ones. This was a goal of mine: to attempt a narrative in which key components of character were revealed throughout, in narrative time, without sacrificing comprehensibility or tension in linear page time. It can prove tricky—disclosing too much, too early, in hopes of removing all ambiguity can sacrifice surprise and epiphany, while opting to withhold information can veil essential narrative components. But, if it works out, the experience as a reader is akin to meeting and learning about a new person, with the surprise and disappointment and warmth that entails in the best of circumstances.
For me, much of the push and pull required at the line level becomes apparent in later drafts, if I’m lucky. Yáng Shuang-zi’s “Taiwan Travelogue” (translated by Lin King), Helen Oyeyemi’s “Peaces,” and Han Kang’s “We Do Not Part” (translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) traverse this tightrope deftly.
Cali lives in Houston, the setting of many of your previous stories, and Ronny lives in Tokyo, the setting of many others. What do these cities continue to provide, in terms of fictional possibilities, and how have your feelings about them shifted over the years you’ve been writing about them?
They’re rife places, you know? Their diversity of experiences, diversity of possibilities, and the infinitude of ways to exist inside each city remains a significant narrative draw. Tokyo contains so many layers, with something for everyone (for better and worse). Houston is a landing spot and launching pad for so many people from so many places, while remaining a container for any number of lived experiences (for better and worse).
That said, the more time I spend away from the United States, the more visible American loneliness, and its corrosiveness, becomes, and the ways in which that isolation at the individual level is both incentivized and exacerbated (if not encouraged, frankly) by most of the country’s essential infrastructures. It’s pretty horrifying. And the onus is on the individual—oftentimes at great expense—to cultivate whatever sense of comfort, pleasure, sense of self, and community that they can (challenges which are of course exacerbated tenfold by white supremacy, queerphobia, misogyny, and ableism). It makes sense that a country so committed to enabling genocide in Palestine and instability for the world’s global majorities would commit itself to the decay of connection, although no less dismaying. (One thing you can do, if you have the means, is support the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. While the U.S. has refused incoming immigrants from Palestine, and suspended visas for Palestinian passport holders—shortly following video footage of children arriving in Houston, no less—the P.C.R.F. continues to provide free medical care to injured and ill children in Palestine and the surrounding areas.)
