{"id":144967,"date":"2020-05-12T09:00:59","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=144967"},"modified":"2020-05-12T11:02:09","modified_gmt":"2020-05-12T15:02:09","slug":"aiming-smaller-an-interview-with-jenny-zhang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/05\/12\/aiming-smaller-an-interview-with-jenny-zhang\/","title":{"rendered":"Aiming Smaller: An Interview with Jenny Zhang"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

During our phone call in the middle of April, Jenny Zhang set the scene: \u201cThere is something really bittersweet about talking to you right now, because we had originally wanted to meet up in New York City. I had imagined that we would be walking around the streets of Manhattan and talking about poetry, and it would be really cinematic and literary. That\u2019s something I always wanted to do because of books I read when I was a kid, and I wanted to live that life. This is, I guess, romantic in a different way\u2014in the way that I yearn to do that, and we cannot.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Zhang\u2019s childhood became a touchstone in our conversation, memories and anecdotes unspooling in response to my questions. Her award-winning collection of short fiction, <\/em>Sour Heart, was told from the perspectives of children and \u201cin the language of childhood, with its unruly spirit and raw emotions<\/a>.\u201d Her second full collection of poetry, <\/em>My Baby First Birthday, out today, delights in the same riotous way as her fiction and her first poetry collection, <\/em>Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. She writes in a wild and phonetic vernacular, pairing the sonic incantation of visceral sounds with internet slang and bodily functions; she is playfully irreverent, deploying words like <\/em>cunt with a wink, daring you to be offended. But there is a sense of control thrumming underneath everything, the same grounded feeling communicated by Zhang\u2019s smart, down-to-earth sensibility. \u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your book of stories, Sour Heart<\/em>, received a glowing reception in 2017. Was there any temptation to continue writing fiction? Why did you turn back to poetry?<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

I did feel like retreating after getting all of that really great positive press for Sour Heart<\/em>, and doing all those interviews, and constantly talking about my process, and after the fact, trying to make a story out of the stories I had written. I felt like every time I sat down to write, I couldn\u2019t rid the audience from my mind. As soon as I\u2019m calculating for an audience, I lose interest in writing. It\u2019s just another exhausting performance. I wanted to practice writing fiction without any thought of sharing it. When I\u2019m writing, I don\u2019t write with the thought that I\u2019m going to share it with the world. Or, I prefer not to think that way. As a fanciful seven-year-old, I wrote diaries and I was sure that someone would break into my home, and steal all of my journals, and be so dazzled by this seven-year-old writing in a journal that they would come back and like, introduce me to their uncle who would be a scion of the publishing industry. I had those fanciful thoughts and would write diaries with the intention of making that happen. But now I really treasure the feeling of writing without expectation and without the thought that it would reach anyone, but just to write. Just to, I don\u2019t know, process something that maybe is a little bit more unconscious.<\/p>\n

The other thing was that I missed poetry. There was a time when I used to read my poetry two or three nights a week. And sometimes, these would be poetry readings where there would be twelve people there. You know, there\u2019d be five readers, and each person brought a friend. I missed the intimacy of poetry. I missed the immediacy of poetry. I was sick of telling narrative stories with a beginning, middle, and an end. I just wanted to go into a different place. And I also just wanted to be a little smaller. I know the ultimate goal is often to be bigger, and bigger, and bigger. But I guess I was interested in seeing if there was some other way to be.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So, poetry was a kind of a sanctuary, in a way. It was a place without an audience and a place where you could just be for a while.<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

Exactly. I\u2019m also a very slow writer. I let things sit for a while. It\u2019s like I purposefully want my things to be less relevant, or something. Because if I wait, and put things in a drawer, and don\u2019t share them for a while, then the moment where I wrote them has passed and we are in a different moment. And it\u2019s almost like I want to know with stories, those poems, whatever the thing I wrote\u2014is it still relevant now that the moment has passed?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You mentioned the childhood diaries, but was writing a part of your adolescence? Being a writer, was that something you pursued from an early age? Or did you come to it later?<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

I was, for whatever reason, singularly obsessed with writing. I suppose it was because I felt so uncomfortable speaking as a child. Partially because I had immigrated here in kindergarten and had to start over, language-wise. In fact, when I was a really, really small person, I was obsessed with speaking and oral storytelling. I spoke at a very young age, and I couldn\u2019t stop speaking. For whatever reason, I loved to \u201centertain\u201d with my stories and would tell them to whoever would listen. I had an identity crisis at the age of five, because the thing I loved to do the most for the first five years of my life, I wasn\u2019t able to do anymore. And then, by the time I learned to express myself in English, I\u2019d been chastened by the initial stages of trying to speak and people laughing or not understanding what I was saying. So, I kind of gave up on speaking for a while. And there was also this interim period where I spoke in this glossolalia, because I couldn\u2019t speak English, and then nobody understood my Chinese. I would just speak gibberish. I would read storybooks out loud. I\u2019d force my glossolalia on the unwitting friends of mine who were like, What are you talking about, babbling and sitting here flipping the pages of this children\u2019s book in front of my face? But I must have, for whatever reason, had a really strong impulse to communicate and tell stories. So, once I was able to write in English, it was all I wanted to do.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Your poetry really uses the sonic qualities of language. It seems like lines can be incantatory, and there\u2019s a kind of call-and-response element to them. Or your language feels organic, like sounds and noises grow out of whatever\u2019s being said right before them. And it all works so well together. Do you feel like the sonic quality of language sometimes takes over what you\u2019re working on in a poem?<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

You know, I know that Mary Oliver is, like, a very, very basic person to bring up. But I think she\u2019s great, and her book A Poetry Handbook<\/em> is a great book to read for anyone who wants to read a book about poetry. There\u2019s this chapter where she talks about sounds, and saying the phrases hush<\/em>, be quiet<\/em>, and shut up<\/em>. You can\u2019t say shut up<\/em> that gently or that slowly or that drawn out, but you can\u2019t help it that when you say hush<\/em>, you create this soothing effect. Be quiet<\/em> is a more neutral space, but depending on the intonation with which you say it, it can have a punishing sound. And that really resonated with me, because I\u2019m in this interesting position where English is not my first language, but it\u2019s my native language because it\u2019s the language I\u2019m best at, and I actually have a memory of what it was like to learn it. Most of us don\u2019t remember what it was like to learn our native language. So much of it was just hearing sounds and trying to understand what someone was saying just from the way it sounded\u2014not from vocabulary, but from sounds. And I remember I used to go to this babysitter\u2019s house after school, and she would babysit for, like, thirty different kids, and so she\u2019d plop us all in front of her TV, and everyone would be watching \u2026 what was that show called? DuckTales<\/em>?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Where Scrooge McDuck dives into a big room filled with gold coins?<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

Yes! Just swimming in gold coins in the intro song, right? I would watch that, and I would close my eyes and I would hear the sounds of Scrooge McDuck and his nephews talking, and I feel like I knew what the story lines were. Later in my life, my grandparents would come and visit us, when we lived in the suburbs, on Long Island, and there were no Chinese people around. I would come home from school, and my grandmother would be like, Oh yeah, I had a whole conversation with a neighbor, he\u2019s really worried about his daughter because she\u2019s eight months pregnant \u2026 And I\u2019m like, Wait, the neighbor is a white American who only speaks English and you don\u2019t speak a word of English. How did you get all that information? How did you manage to have this whole conversation? But often she would be right. There is a part of me that believes sounds also have meaning. It\u2019s not just words, it\u2019s also the vibes that sounds give out, independent of what we have decided means what.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Speaking of language, sounds, and vibes, let\u2019s talk about the way you use vulgarity in your work.<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

Yeah, it must go back to, again, a fascination with language and the power that we assign to words. I\u2019m always interested in words that create a physical reaction. The first time I heard someone say a curse word and someone else recoiled, physically, I just couldn\u2019t believe that there was such a thing as a word that could make some shudder, or boil up in rage, when previously, everything was fine. That felt so absurd. As a child, I was like, how is that possible? That if I say damn it<\/em>, someone else is shocked. Nothing changed about me as a person\u2014I\u2019m still the same person, I just said a word. I think because people also had that reaction to me when I spoke in Chinese or couldn\u2019t say a word right, there was this time where I equated \u2026 there was this period of time where I was like, what are the right words, and what are the wrong words?<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You say that you go to readings, and enjoy reading your work out loud. That seems also to have been formative for you.<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

Yeah, I guess to be honest, I don\u2019t often read an entire book of poetry silently. I read out loud, or have it read out loud to me. There\u2019s this poet, Ana\u00efs Duplan, whose work I discovered at a reading. He read this poem called \u201cBlack \u2019n\u2019 Relaxed II\u201d and it was like listening to a song at times\u2014it had a rhythm that had meaning for me. Monica McClure was somebody that I really loved at readings. Leopoldine Core. It\u2019s like people who only like going to live shows and won\u2019t listen to records at home or something\u2014I\u2019m like that with poetry.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you feel your poems have a sense of humor?<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

I try to. Having a sense of humor is really important to me. I know that some people don\u2019t find me funny at all, and that sucks for them. Maybe that\u2019s wrong to say. I think I have to be on the same level as someone else for humor to happen between us, and I guess I always feel like there\u2019s a part of me that\u2019s like, Come, just come and be on my level. You\u2019ll find me funny if you can do that. But if you\u2019re looking up to me, or you\u2019re looking down on me, you\u2019re not going to find me funny\u2014you\u2019re going to find me annoying and gross and stupid and smug and shitty. I don\u2019t know how else to put it, but sometimes I\u2019m just like, come and be on my level. Let\u2019s laugh. I find a lot of things funny\u2014even terrible things that have happened to me\u2014and maybe that\u2019s a coping mechanism. I need to be able to see the absurdity of something terrible, and I need to also make fun of terrible things that have happened to me. I think that\u2019s always my impulse.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

But that exists alongside heavy themes in this collection, such as suicide, choosing to be alive\u2014being brought into the world and then having to reckon with where you\u2019ve ended up. I\u2019m curious if this ties somehow into the structure of four seasons in the book.<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

I was actually thinking about the first year of being alive on earth. I guess I did want to go through the seasons. But I didn\u2019t really think about it too much, to be honest. I mean, the collection is called My Baby First Birthday<\/em>, and I took that title from a Facebook comment that my mom made. My uncle had posted a photo of me on Facebook, sitting between him and my dad on my first birthday, and my mom had commented on Facebook underneath that photo \u201cmy baby first birthday.\u201d In one sense, it\u2019s a typo, it\u2019s a grammatical error, because maybe she meant \u201cmy baby\u2019s first birthday,\u201d but I also like this idea of, maybe it\u2019s her baby-first birthday. We have lots of baby-first birthdays in our lives, and there\u2019s lots of moments where we feel like it\u2019s our baby-first birthday, and it doesn\u2019t have to be so literal. I was thinking about the first year of being a mother, being a father, being a parent\u2014the first year of being alive, the first year of anything, of falling in love, of entering through whatever portals we enter through that take us to some other world\u2014that first year is so significant.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Both the title of this collection and of your first collection of poetry came from your mother. Something that your mother had written to you.<\/p>\n

ZHANG<\/p>\n

Yeah, Dear Jenny, We Are All Find<\/em>. I owe my mom a lot. That\u2019s something she would write in emails to me. When we were living in different cities and countries, she would write me a lot. Have you ever seen that movie by Chantal Akerman, News from Home<\/em>? It\u2019s mostly just footage of New York in the seventies, and she reads letters that her mom sends her from France. And she doesn\u2019t ever read the responses that Chantal writes back, so you get a sense of their relationship in this very one-sided way. The mom in that movie reminds me in some ways of my own relationship with my mom\u2014she\u2019s very warm and loving, and she always wants to hear from me, and she always wants to know what\u2019s going on. In News from Home<\/em>, when the mom is sending letters to Chantal and not really getting responses, she\u2019s warm and concerned at first, but then she gets increasingly agitated and worried, and at one point you hear one of the letters just like, How are you really doing? You never really tell me how you\u2019re doing. It really reminded me of times when I was abroad and alone in a country, and alienated, but also not wanting to send back bad news, and so I would just avoid writing until I felt better. And during those periods of time when I didn\u2019t want to write back, because I didn\u2019t want to bring back news of feeling like a failure and feeling isolated and depressed to my parents, I would get these emails from my mom that said, \u201cHow are you? What\u2019s going on? Don\u2019t worry about us, we are all find.\u201d And again, it was that thing of this grammatical error that set my imagination leaping. I liked this idea of being found and being find, rather than being fine, because in some ways I never feel fine. That\u2019s a very high bar to achieve.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lauren Kane is a writer who lives in New York. She is the assistant editor at\u00a0<\/i>The Paris Review.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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