Jenny Zhang: Asian American success is often presented as something of...

Shanghai, the city where I was born and spent my first four and a half years. It's not necessarily the most pleasant or most comforting place, but I have blood memory there, my core was formed there, so I need to go back often, or else I become empty, lost, without meaning.

Jenny Zhang

city memory place born

Mothers have always held such symbolic weight in determining a person's worth. Your mother tongue, your motherland, your mother's values - these things can qualify or disqualify you from attaining myriad American dreams: love, fluency, citizenship, legitimacy, acceptance, success, freedom.

Jenny Zhang

dreams freedom success love

The year my mom worked as a secretary at an apparel company in midtown, she would often come home in tears because she had mistakenly called her boss by another coworker's name. 'You know how it is,' my father said, 'they all look the same. It's not your mom's fault. There's just no telling them apart. Same high nose and deep-set eyes.'

Jenny Zhang

eyes you home father

'Sour Heart' is a collection of seven linked short stories narrated by young Chinese-American girls living in New York City in the '90s. It's exceptionally hard to describe what I've written without sounding delusional or boring, so I'll just say they are stories about growing up and the pleasures and agonies of having a family, a body, and a home.

Jenny Zhang

city family home heart

I lived so completely in my mind - a place of unchecked delusion and complete fantasy!

Jenny Zhang

place delusion fantasy mind

Growing up in America, I experienced two puberties. The first opened me up to the possibilities of adulthood. The second reinforced that for someone like me - an immigrant, a minority, an Asian-American - there were limits.

Jenny Zhang

someone me growing-up limits

As you get older, you realize you're only the protagonist in your own story and a blip in someone else's life.

Jenny Zhang

story someone you life

When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature.

Jenny Zhang

never me classmates white

Even when I speak English to my parents, I'll say an English word differently to my Chinese parents and friends than I do to my English-speaking friends - you know, I'll pronounce 'McDonald's' differently, because it feels right, and that's what I'm used to.

Jenny Zhang

parents you friends speak

In my mind, scatological writing is a core of the English canon.

Jenny Zhang

english core mind writing

When I was writing stories about Chinese American characters in my fiction classes, I'd get comments like, 'You should consider writing more universal stories.' But anything can happen to a Chinese American girl - just as much of the canon of English literature involves white men or women.

Jenny Zhang

you women girl men

When I first moved from Shanghai when I was five, I just thought of myself as Chinese.

Jenny Zhang

first just thought myself

I grew up in a Chinese American enclave where the person who lived down the street had literally lived down the street from my mother in Shanghai.

Jenny Zhang

street person down mother

As I got older, I realised that people saw me as other things - sometimes Korean, sometimes Japanese, sometimes just Asian. When my family moved to a more affluent white neighbourhood, I started to see myself as 'other', this amorphous category. I didn't even know what 'not other' was, but I knew I wasn't it; I wasn't what was normal.

Jenny Zhang

myself me family people

'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to wonder.

Jenny Zhang

text late poet wonder

I'd behave savagely if I had access to Bjoerk's closet.

Jenny Zhang

closet had access behave

Growing up, I had to cobble together a scarecrow of things I loved from various different writers.

Jenny Zhang

loved things growing-up together

I think Lena Dunham, the public figure, is - I hate the word 'brand,' but I'm going to use it - it's such a brand that is so tethered to her public persona and to 'Girls', but also this progressive politics that she's been more vocal about.

Jenny Zhang

brand think politics hate

Of course I want the things I write to reflect well on me or anyone who might feel represented by me, but also, I'm not writing a guidebook on how to be or how my people should be seen. I'm telling very specific stories.

Jenny Zhang

feel me writing people

I seem to be drawn to these smaller forms, and I seem to be drawn to things that can be written and also read in one sitting.

Jenny Zhang

read seem things sitting

Asian American success is often presented as something of a horror - robotic, unfeeling machines psychotically hellbent on excelling, products of abusive tiger parenting who care only about test scores and perfection, driven to succeed without even knowing why.