Jane Wong is a poet, memoirist, installation artist, and scholar of Asian American poetry and poetics. Her work—vibrant, tender, and funny—explores family, girlhood, and the joyfulness intertwined with heartbreak. In this interview, we discuss growing up in a restaurant, memoir as a mode of self-exploration and self-questioning, writing community, and the movement between poetry, memoir, and fiction.
Jane is the author of poetry collections How to Not Be Afraid of Everything and Overpour and the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City. Her work can be found in The New York Times, POETRY, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, andThe Georgia Review, among others. She has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa, and she teaches at Western Washington University. Her notable awards include the Pushcart Prize and numerous residences, among them Artist Trust, Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room, 4Culture, the Fine Arts Work Center, Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, Willapa Bay, the Jentel Foundation, Ucross, Mineral School, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and Loghaven. She grew up on the Jersey shore and current lives in Seattle, Washington.
Renée Flory (RF): Your earrings are actually the perfect example of my first question for you—I see across your poetry, your website, and wongmom.com this incredible attention to vibrancy. I was wondering if you could talk about color and vibrancy and how these ideas inform your writing.
Jane Wong (JW): I feel like growing up in a restaurant really impacted that sense of sensory overload or sensory obsession, mostly because the restaurant as a space is constantly full of color, smell, taste, touch, and the sounds of customers having fights, almost divorcing each other. It’s a funny space of intensity. As a child, I was always tuning into these moments of vibrant intensity. Sometimes that’s a color, sometimes that’s the taste of something—I’ll never forget the color of our spare ribs. It’s such a distinctive, shiny red, like a burnt red look. It’s so distinctive to me. For a long time, I’ve been obsessed with sensory detail, and I think that translates into imagery and metaphor. That’s always been my very favorite craft element across any genre, trying to get closer and closer to a very sensory-filled image. It’s almost like that idea in math—I can’t believe I’m talking about math!—but that asymptote where the curve almost touches the X-axis. That’s how it feels when I’m trying to describe something, like describing the feeling of that moment right after a breakup. I always want to get as close to that moment sensory-wise, vibrancy-wise, as possible, but it never meets, because it can’t actually be the experience. I think I’m kind of obsessed with bright, alive things.
RF: As someone who’s been reading a lot of your poetry this week and listening to you speak, that makes perfect sense to me—your work does feel very alive, you write living work. I had a question for you about a quote: “Being a wild girl is about resistance, about taking risks, about not being afraid of being too loud or too quiet.” I found that moment really moving, and I was wondering what the wild girl or wild poet girl means to you now.
JW: Oh my gosh. That quote is from the archives! From forever ago, but it still remains true to me. I think for so long, especially as a little kid, I was just wild. I was roaming around the restaurant. It was a time in the ’80s where nobody was watching their kids anyway—that’s a whole other sense of creating your own world and freedom. I meandered that strip mall and beyond for hours and hours, and there was such wildness in that, such wildness and imagination and my ability to go into all these doors and make friends with the shop owners and everything. Then that ended, with societal pressure and with school, and it was all these forces, including English—I always have complicated feelings about writing in English, because it’s not my first language, actually—as these structures of order and control and sense-making meant that some of that wildness left me. I think that returning to that sense of the ‘wild girl’ is what I’m always after. Especially as an Asian American woman, with these stereotypes of me supposedly being quiet and being reserved and not speaking my mind—not being as loud as I can. But also, in that quote that you read, not afraid of being too quiet, either: there are times in which silence is an order of protection too. I think about that also. At the end of the day, that’s about choice and making sure that it’s your choice, and oftentimes, your choice in protection and care and love for community. There’s a lot there, but I feel like you can’t be a wild girl without your wild beloveds around you. It’s not a lonely thing. You have to scream out together.
RF: Wild beloveds is a beautiful phrase, I love that! Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City plays with question and answer in deeply engaging ways. In the section titled “The Watcher” in particular, I saw so much questioning, and I wondered if writing this memoir helped you engage with some of your own questions, or maybe even answer some of your questions for yourself.
JW: That’s such a beautiful question. Since we’re talking about questions, I find that writing, and in particular writing memoir, was all about that—not really knowing what I was actually setting out to discover when I’m in the process of making it. With memoir in particular, you’re writing a scene. You’re writing a particular memory or experience. You’re trying to describe something, but you have no idea what that actually means. Why did you choose that memory over another? We have thousands of memories, and you have to trust that a memory is at the forefront of your thinking for a reason, even if you have no idea why. I think that in the process of essaying, you start to question and start to figure out what it is about a moment in time that gives you a stronger sense of who you are, not just today, but then and in the future. I’m always interested in the collapse or the messiness of time. I don’t necessarily believe that I get the answers or get any sort of clear knowledge from these questions, but I instead end up with a kind of reckoning, something that I have to keep thinking about. I think that maybe what you’re noticing on the page, in terms of that questioning being so raw or vulnerable, is that I’m not afraid of failing, or I’m not afraid of being a continual novice in life. I don’t know the answers. Sometimes my students will come to my office hours and be like, Can you give me this life advice, or What should I do? And I’m like, I don’t know! I’m trying to figure that out for myself, but I think that it’s important to listen to what questions you’re asking, and why they keep returning to you. I’m obsessed with obsession too, with the questions that don’t leave you.
RF: You mentioned writing poetry in the bathtub. I’m a writer who writes in a little dark room that has to be absolutely silent. I’m wondering if you can write anywhere, or if there are particular places where you feel most generative or inspired.
JW: I love that. Do you write in the complete dark?
RF: Yes! I like for most of my senses to be turned off, and then I feel most creative.
JW: I really love that. Okay, so you at least have the light of the computer screen—if you are actually writing in the dark in the notebook, that’s deeply metal. I think for me, in the ideal writing space, the number one thing that I really, really need are snacks. I usually have little small bowls filled with my favorite snacks, and I create what I call the half-moon around me, a little crescent shape, so that when I’m writing and I need a break, I know that I can reach out to snacks. For me, that’s sensory—it’s about intensity, since these are usually very salty snacks. I have to wake up in this moment of almost being exhausted by the act of writing. I tend to love writing in spaces that are also very quiet, like you. Sometimes I do play music, and I’ll play the same song over and over and over again, because it’s a song that is distinctly tied to a memory. It’s not that I’m writing about that memory, but I might be writing about that time in my life. I can’t listen to new music when I write, because I get too attached to learning and figuring out the lyrics. I do like to write alone. However, when I’m done writing, I like to immediately go find someone to talk with. Oftentimes I write in residencies, which is where I do the bulk of my writing—because I teach full time, and I love teaching, but it’s a lot to do both at the same time. Oftentimes I’ll get to have dinner or conversation with other artists and writers, and that space feels like an incubation period where we’re sharing ideas. That, to me, is the ideal writing space, because it can lead to radical revision and me basically changing everything that I just wrote before.
RF: Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of hearing your essay about mosquitos. From that piece—which is, of course, an essay about your brother and about family—I wondered what the work of reconstructing those memories in writing looks like for you. I imagine it’s very difficult to transport yourself back and then render the scene wholly.
JW: That’s always a challenge in memoir—we can’t actually know the exact dialogue from a memory in time. There’s cross-storytelling or fact checking, in my case talking to my brother about certain moments in time and trying to be accurate in terms of his memory as well, because I don’t want to leave that out. But it is hard to try to go into a kind of present tense state in trying to write a memory. In that particular chapter, “To Love a Mosquito,” my brother goes to my father’s house to try to watch these NBA games that he had taped on VHS, and my dad rejects him. I remember being very angry, and I assumed he was sad, I assumed he was deflated and really hurt. But when I talked to my brother, he told me No, I was angry too, and I was surprised by that. I actually had to write that into the scene, even though I didn’t know it before. I think that it’s always a challenge to get it right. I have no idea what my father was thinking, and I may never know what he was thinking, but all I can offer is the emotional truth of what I experienced, what my brother experienced. You have to make the decision as an essayist, as a memoirist, to keep it in the present. What do you know then versus what do you know now? There are times in which you want to give a little of the present tense in there too, looking back. But also, if you want to stay in the present, there are still ways for you to have a different sense of time, which is to stay in a speculative moment: then, I was probably wondering what I wished would happen. When my brother went up to the door, did I want him to be brought inside, and I would just wait in the car? You have to recreate that desire, the longing, inthe present moment. Looking back in terms of the present moment, these desires seem foolish, potentially—why did I hope for that in that moment? It’s a challenge to recreate memory. I try my hardest in terms of staying as sensory as I can and also trying to get at the emotional truth of that moment, versus me trying to romanticize it now.
RF: I know that you’re working on fiction now, and I’m wondering—do you find that you’re able to answer that question, What do I want to happen? What would I like the emotional truth of this moment be? Is it fun to be able to generate that truth without wondering too much about, Oh, what would my brother think of what actually happened here?
JW: You know, I’m trying to allow myself to have fun with it. I’m still very much in nonfiction land in my brain, since I’ve worked on this book for a chunk of time, where I almost feel a little nervous about making things happen that didn’t happen. Writing fiction now, I have to give myself the wild leap, to a degree where I have to be out of real-world time. I’m moving into spaces of fantasy or horror or something that’s on the edges of reality, but it’s still tied to reality, obviously. That allows me more of that fun, because to be honest, in nonfiction, it’s not hard with plot, because it’s literally your life. I don’t have to do that work! This time it’s a little more nerve-wracking, but it is fun. I just have to remind myself—I can allow myself to do that. I can’t fact check this story. That’s not the point. So I’m trying to get more comfortable with it, but it is fun to push the boundaries so far that something fantastical happens that I wish, like you said, could have happened in real life. I’m working on a story on revenge right now. It’s so weird to be able to have that much power in the story. That’s maybe what I’m not used to, having this much power. In poetry, I’m still a little confused by the end of the poem, but now in fiction, it feels like, Whoa, I can do things.
RF: Since you brought up poetry, on the Living Writers show with T Hetzel, you mentioned that you appreciate the sprawl that an essay allows—the overflow, the expansion. I thought those were beautiful words to describe that freedom, and was hoping you could speak a bit more about what that overflow provides you, especially as you’re moving into the fiction space.
JW: I think that in nonfiction that overflow was a space in which I could use multiple, many modes of spillage. That includes research, that includes interviews of sorts, conversations with my mom about certain memories. There are modes in which I can go into the high lyric and modes of reflection, or cultural criticism even. It’s a type of overflow that allows for different lyrical leaps, where in fiction, there’s more of overflow of attempts of what could possibly happen. When you write a story, it has a multiplicity of ending possibilities. To me, that feels like an overflow—again, back to this sense of control or power—like, How do I want this to go? For me, it’s an overflow of what the character wants and desires and can’t have, or is struggling with emotionally. It’s an overflow of emotionality. It does remind me a little bit of writing poetry in a different way. It all is connected, but I don’t know yet how. I’m just at the very beginning stages of tinkering, and who knows, maybe these are just prose poems! Right now I’m working on three short stories, but they might be interconnected. Who knows. It’s funny that I chose to do three at once instead of just working on one. Maybe it’s my poet brain.
RF: Speaking of prose poems, you were supposed to be writing a novel when you were on Fulbright, but you wrote prose poems instead. I really enjoyed reading “The Long Labors.” I was so fascinated by its interruption and fragment and the images separated by em dashes—but you also employ indentation as a visual space marker in that poem. I would love to hear more about your attention to how the visual reading experience informs the cerebral or internal reading experience.
JW: Thanks for those kind comments about that poem! I love that poem too. I remember writing that and being just exhausted—I think I wrote it in one day, and I was so tired after, which is the whole point. I think the labor to write that poem, speaking of form, needed to be exhausting and long and dense. Formally, I like to think of the shape of it as a gigantic block of tofu that you are pressing. For me, form is always something that is deeply tied to the emotional weight of a poem and what you’re trying to feel through or express, but that also can be translated multiple times. I redid “The Long Labors” as a performance video where I cut up the words from that poem into rice paper and folded them into a dumpling mix and ate my poem—because I needed the labor of hands, the labor of making all those dumplings over and over again. It felt almost like form can only take you so far on the page. In my current work with fiction, form can go down to the sentence level, the difference between a short staccato sentence versus something long and lingering. But if I’m going to do this fiction thing, I still have to play with visual elements. There may be hybrid poems in this book I’m creating, so I’m allowing myself to stay in the visual aspect of it, even in prose, because that is so true for me, at least to how we move through experiencing a piece of writing—what it physically looks like and feels like, the shape of things, that’s what I’m always intrigued by. Especially since this new project is about stuff and excess and hoarding—my family’s fear of scarcity and too-muchness, holding on to everything because of the fear of it going away—that has to be represented physically and visually. So “The Long Labors” also has that feeling of so-muchness. I’m a maximalist to my core! I want to express that visually, as well. It’s very hard for me to write a short poem, a very minimal poem. It’s a good challenge, though—I might go and try that after this, just to see if I can write a five-line poem.
RF: I would be delighted to see it.
JW: It might be like the most uncomfortable I’ll ever be!
RF: Relating to that, I like to ask every writer about their relationship between the written word and its visual appearance. In my own work, I find if I have a paragraph where one little word juts awkwardly onto the next line, I always revise the paragraph such that it doesn’t do that. Some writers would say that’s unethical, that it’s about the words—it’s not about the way the words look. I’m like, no, no, it’s about both! As a poet, I imagine you’re often thinking about how a poem looks visually, but as you moved into memoir, did you ever have that thought?
JW: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I’m so like you, it really bothers me when it breaks the shape of whatever poem or essay. It was hard to because there were some poetry things I had to let go of visually, but also copyediting wise—yay for copyediting! Obviously it’s a good thing, but sometimes the copyeditor would come back with some tactical changes for clarity that broke the rhythm. It broke the meter of the sentence. I remember feeling Oh, but when I read it out loud, it doesn’t sound the same. Still, I couldn’t sustain the visual obsession for the whole book. I had to make a compromise, saying Okay, this bothers me, but I have to let it go. There were other things to be concerned with, things that were maybe more pressing.
RF: I asked that last question to wongmom.com and she gave me the incredible advice “Get out of this dream and say it to my face,” which I was so pleased by as a response to my big, long question. I know these are things your mom has actually said, and I wondered if you could relay your memory of her saying that about dreams.
JW: That’s so, so funny. Wongmom.com is a creative character in the memoir, and she comes from my real mom. The things that wongmom.com says are either direct quotes or inspired by the things my mom has actually said, in memory or in my conversations with her as I was writing my memoir. That particular kind of quote, this feeling of “Say it to my face!” is more of the general vibe that my actual mom always had. This attitude, or this great age where she’s like Hey, don’t talk behind my back. Just say it to my face. Which is maybe a very Jersey way to go about things. I remember distinctly when my mom went back to China for the first time after she came to the US. I was 16 and it was my first time in China, and she was returning to her village where she grew up. All these people from her young life, or childhood or young adulthood, came out and greeted her. Then they started to whisper and gossip about her being divorced, and I could feel my mom’s deep sadness—but also her anger—at them having no idea what she went through. She’s like, Well, why are you even whispering it? Just say it. If you’re going to say something about how I look or about me divorcing my husband, say it to my face. She’s an amazing storyteller, if you can’t tell from the book, and she relayed that memory about the gossip to me. But I have to remind myself that, as all storytellers do, she adds a little extra sprinkle of imagination when she tells stories.
RF: Speaking of your mom, across the book and your poems and all of the conversations I’ve heard you having here in Ann Arbor the past two days, I’ve been so moved by your relationship with her. I wondered in what ways her support has allowed you to flourish as a writer, and then also the support that you feel all writers need. On a writer’s journey, what kinds of support from the people in their lives makes that journey possible?
JW: That’s such a tender question about support and about people who believe in you. I mean, ultimately and oftentimes, that’s not easily attained. There have been multiple times where I wanted to quit. All writers feel this deep insecurity, or this deep question of Wait, why am I doing this? Does this mean anything? Does this matter? A lot of writers have experienced a lot of rejection, not just in the publishing world but also in workshop, or maybe professors who were unkind. I have definitely had those experiences, but I have such wonderful writer friends, friends who I feel very akin to, that I know I can count on to support me. Community is so central to being a writer and finding those friends and readers that you can trust across decades. My mom is not a reader. I think my book is the first book she read. My mom is able—she loves to chat, she’s very, very fluent in English, but she has no interest in reading. When I recorded the audiobook, she was actually able to read my book, and that was really, really cool. The first time she’s read any of my work, really, though sometimes she’ll take a poem of mine to the Post Office where she works and ask her coworkers. It’s funny to imagine them all just trying to figure out one of my poems about her. She’s been supportive of me since I was a kid, and I think that she didn’t care what I did. It didn’t matter if I was a writer or if I working in the restaurant industry. She always said You know what, as long as you’re happy. She was always focused on that, the idea that if this makes you happy, then I’m happy. I never had pressure from her to do anything except to be happy, and that is actually hard! She asks me this question all the time—Are you happy? And I’m like, I don’t know! So she’ll ask me to give her a sense of where I’m at so she can help me be happy. She says that’s my job. Maybe I’m failing at my job! She’ll say, It’s okay to fail at your job, but you have to ask for help. That’s a roundabout way of saying that she’s always been supportive of my writing, but she also doesn’t necessarily know at all what I do. I have a lot of freedom from my family in that way, because they’re not asking what I’m writing about. They’re not nervous about whether I get something right or wrong, they’re just letting me do whatever I do, which is the best you can ask for. Not all families are like that. I think questions about permission and what you need to give permission to yourself to write are important, but don’t have clear answers.
RF: Poetry at the Post Office is a beautiful image! In the memoir, you draw upon quotes from a number of other poets, Langston Hughes, Victoria Chang—I was wondering how you picked these particular writers to engage with, if they were people who inspire you or people you had been reading recently. How did these writers come to live in the book with you?
JW: That’s a great question about writers, speaking of community—writers who are here in this world and writers who are gone now. Reading is at the center of why I write. The quotes that I chose for the memoir were quotes that stayed with me across time, work that I keep returning to. I chose particular quotes that really had a hold on me in terms of my questions, going to back to the point you were making earlier. Sometimes these lines of poetry felt like that, like a big open door that I was moving through. I could’ve probably chosen twenty others, that’s the thing—trying to allow myself the start of that inquiry, the opening of the portals. Like most writers, I have a bazillion notebooks, and it’s hard to go back through your notes to find those quotes you absolutely love, but some just stay with you across time. I think that’s ultimately why I chose those, but there’s always poets that I keep returning to. Lucille Clifton has been one of those poets—speaking of a poet who can write something so short and have it feel so exponentially vibrational. Maybe it’s just the nerd in me, but as long as I get to share some other people’s work, as an educator and as a writer, that makes me happy.
RF: I was happy to read some of those quotes for the first time, and it was great to see how you integrate writing community. I was wondering about your relationship to writers’ block—if you ever come across that block, and if there are particular writers who help dig you out of that hole.
JW: You know, a lot of people do talk to me about writer’s block. I understand the feeling of not knowing where to go or where to start, but that said, I don’t know if I truly believe in that block. I really think you can write about what’s right in front of you—like the red brick that I’m looking at behind you. That might send you to your grandma or something. I do think that anything around you that you start with can send you somewhere. That said, do I want to do it sometimes? Sometimes it’s so difficult, like pulling teeth, to get started. In those cases, I don’t write—I don’t want to force myself to do something I don’t want to do. I think I end up doing some other type of medium or art in order to get out of that stuckness. Even though I’m not writing, I’m doing something else. Sometimes I’ll read, and that’ll help me generate those juices and be in conversation with the writer that I’m reading, but that doesn’t have to be any sort of writing—I could read a cookbook and that could do something to me. Usually it’s another medium: that may mean going to the ceramic studio, or making handmade paper, or sometimes I make soup and that feels like an unblockage to me too. It’s oftentimes doing something else. Taking a walk! Doing experiential writing is really important to me, so oftentimes I write in the voice of my mother, in her persona, and I don’t just do that: I actually put on her clothes to feel like her, and smell her, and this is the stuff I do to get things going, to be hyper-present. I highly recommend doing something akin to that, because it does change the perspective that you’re looking from. It also loosens the pressure and stress of making something that is “a poem.” It’s not about that. Of course we all want to write a poem, but if you write three lines, that’s great, and if it came from you making a soup, that’s great too. We have to remind ourselves that it’s not about writing something legible at first draft. Get yourself going in any way you can.
RF: I’ve been wanting to ask about the dream daughter poems. I’m so interested in poets who take up mother and daughter and turn the dial just a bit—how do we rethink those relationships? Dream daughter was such an exciting take on that turning.
JW: I’ve taken a break from those poems, because they’re so emotionally intense for me now, in this current moment in my life. I just turned 40, and I’m grappling with the fact that I may never be a mother. It’s one of those things that hurts my heart, and my brother just had a baby, so I’m asking Does this baby look like me? It’s one of those moments where I’m so excited to be an aunt, but in the dream daughter poems, it’s exactly that—my dream of my child who may never be. In that space, I am a mother, and I’m still a daughter, and there’s this triple-generation that exists in those poems, but in a completely fantastical space. “Dream Daughter with Onions” is a space where, in the imagined future, people don’t cry anymore—which is such a funny thing to make up after you’ve cried for so long, and the puffiness of your eyes really hurts. What if we just didn’t cry? Imagining the space where there are no terrible men in the world… In those dream daughter poems, I was creating a utopia for this future child, for a collective dream of safety. The thing that makes me sad about it is that I’ve created this world, but will it ever exist? It was one of those things where I was like Okay, okay, big questions Jane—gotta take a break from this project. But I do want to return to it, and I want to return to it with even more vulnerability with what time has offered me in the years since I started that project. A lot has happened in my life that has changed my relationship with the dream daughter, but I am always obsessed with those mother-daughter relationships and wanted to expand it beyond what it means to be in love with and obsessed with my mother, and wondering what that would look like if I was to think about the next generation.
RF: Thank you for sharing that—I so appreciate your vulnerability! For a final question, you mentioned in your reading yesterday that you don’t want heartbreak to be the only thing we see in your memoir. You want joy to be present, also. I’d love to hear about your relationship to writing joy.
JW: I think it’s so much harder to do that in poems. I don’t know why, but the ode is such a hard form for me—maybe my poems are joyful, and I just can’t see that! With a poem, I enter such an intense space where I’m processing heartache and trauma and pain that hopefully still comes across as joyful. At least some of them are, like “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly,” but it took a lot to get there. When it comes to the prose, I think my joy is processed through humor that is deeply me. My type of humor is not the cool kind, not the sarcastic or witty humor, but goofy. I wanted to move into joyful spaces in the memoir through my goofy nature. I have a kind of stupid humor, like the title “Root Canal Street.” It’s about my mom going to Chinatown in New York City to fix her teeth, going to unlicensed dentists, and “Root Canal Street” is like Canal Street in New York City—it’s such a stupid title, but it made me laugh! If no one else laughs at it, that’s okay. Or when I was reading from To Love a Mosquito about where would a mosquito bite be the worst on your body, is it your butt or your eyeball, that’s so stupid—but I think it’s funny, and as long as that gives me joy and gives some readers joy also, it’s like cutting the fat of pain. We’ve all been there, where you’re processing something so painful and awful and then find yourself laughing uncontrollably to a degree where it’s absurd…that’s what I’m interested in, the absurdity of it all and the ridiculousness of it all. In prose I allow my goofy side to show up in that joyful way. In my poems, there isn’t necessarily that goofiness, but there’s joy in a different way. There are different stakes to joy in my poems. I’m so grateful that I wrote this memoir to discover a new part of my writer self. I had no idea I could be that silly on the page, but maybe it’s going to affect my poetry—maybe it’ll allow me to be funny in poems, though I don’t know how to do that quite yet, still figuring that out! But joy always, and there’s a lot of resistance in joy, in whatever form it shows up in.
