First things first, when did your love for writing begin? If I understood well, you mum was a great support?

I don’t think there was ever a distinct moment that I started to love writing; it seems like it’s always been there, a little flame inside me that has changes its medium but still remains. In elementary school I’d actually get in trouble for writing stories in compositions book during class, which is not the worst thing to get busted for. But I think my love for writing/semi-coherent storytelling really exploded when I was in fourth grade. I started writing longer and longer stories, and I filled up two and a half composition books with the story of “shadow walkers”; the basic premise was that there were four dimensions and certain people existed between them, and were able to slip between universes to combat the eternal, ambiguous Evil Beings that threatened the stability of the four worlds. Very YA urban fantasy. But it was the first thing I religiously worked on day and night—it was all I wanted to do, and I couldn’t rest until the thing was done. So I’ve been writing religiously ever since.

I’m tremendously lucky that my mom has been so supportive of my writing and has actively nurtured my literary interests since I was a kid—including Shadow Walkers and the weird, angsty shit I came up with. She helped me apply to the Alabama School of Fine Arts’ creative writing program when I was twelve and never doubted my abilities as a budding writer. I remember sitting in the car at the beginning of my college admissions process and telling her that I wanted to go to medical school, or become a biomedical engineer—I liked studying biology and thought this was the most lucrative path, and that there was no way I could be a professional poet. My mom was incredulous at the news, and told me frankly that I should forget about being a surgeon because my calling was as a writer—she thought I wouldn’t be truly happy unless I dedicated myself to writing. I was shocked; my mother, the fearsome Taiwanese math professor, wanted me to be a poet. She believes firmly in my potential, and continues to support me now from across the ocean. Her only request is that I write a New York Times bestseller and buy her a beach house.

What was the first thing you ever wrote?

A story about my hamster in second grade. It was called “Super Noelle”, the gripping adventures of a superpowered hamster’s plight to defeat my evil cat, Hank. It was bone-chilling.

What/who is your main inspiration?

Jenny Xie’s collection Eye Level has left a particular imprint on me, as well as Han Kang’s The White Book, Kaveh Akbar’s Calling A Wolf A Wolf, Don Mee Choi’s Hardly War, and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer. I’m also a big fan of Tracy K. Smith, Maggie Nelson, and Sappho. I think what binds these writers together in my mind is a certain meticulousness with which they’ve polished their craft, and the feeling that every word and phrase has been carefully selected and placed exactly where it needs to be. Found material is also really informative, and it makes up a large part of my current project—photojournalism, historical documents, film, art, stuff like that. The title of my collection, Displaced Object Bestial Machine, is taken directly from the International War Tribunal for the Far East, or the Tokyo Trials, in which the Japanese Imperial Army was tried for war crimes perpetuated across Asia and the Pacific from 1937-1945. The collection engages with these treaties and trials and primary sources, and responds to photos taken by Robert Capa documenting the early stages of the war in China. I’ve also talked a lot about Apocalypse Now and this bullshit quote by General Westmoreland that really grates on me, and those scenes and dialogues have been absorbed into my writing.

Tell us something about your diary that you always have with you?! Seems like a ‘collage of everything’?

I started keeping journals when I was sixteen or seventeen as a way of venting—mainly complaining, or externalizing my thoughts, and drafting poems or drawing in between. There’s something really satisfying and cathartic about it, scribbling angrily on a piece of paper until you wear yourself out and get it out of your system. At some point, maybe around twelfth grade, I started carrying my notebook with me wherever I went and would feel naked without it. When I came to England, I started picking up a lot of postcards from the cities I saw, and I’ve ended up with about a hundred cards that I’ve been glueing into the book. I started pasting parts of boarding passes and metro tickets onto the pages as well, and admission tickets to art museums or cathedrals, wherever I might’ve visited. It’s a better system than just throwing away the ticket stub, and it acts as a record of my travels. I also note where I am whenever I write, both in the entry itself and at the back of the book, so I know that it’s been to forty-four cities and thirteen countries since the 16th of December, 2018. My current notebook is a dark blue Moleskine I bought in Glasgow, and it’s so heavy with writing and found things that the entire front cover has peeled off—it’s clinging to the rest of the book by about an inch and a half of paper. Still, I’m determined to finish it and hold onto it until I hit the last page, or at least until I get back to the US in a few weeks.

How did you decide to continue studies in Europe?

Okay. So, I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama with a white father and a Taiwanese immigrant mother. Alabama is a complex, beautiful, but often frustrating place to grow up—I’ve felt a certain animosity towards my environment on the basis of being biracial/ethnically ambiguous, that I didn’t fit in, and that the overwhelming conservative politics of my surroundings invalidated what I was experiencing on a daily basis. It frustrated me deeply that the white Americans I met across the spectrum would thread their words with microaggressions and assume I held a poor command of English, that I was a foreigner, or would shrug off my identity altogether. (My mom and her parents are naturalized citizens, and my mom has been in the US for over forty years.) Of course, many of the people I’ve met in Alabama have been wonderful, and especially as you approach the city you’ll meet a lot of people who are aware that it isn’t acceptable to call someone an “Oriental” in 2019. But what I discovered was that people will say the ugliest things about you if they believe you don’t understand them, especially when you are an Asian woman working in the service industry—the way people will brush you off and infantilize you, or have the audacity to call you a “stupid bitch” because you “don’t speak the language.” So I wanted to book it out of there and go somewhere new; I knew I would experience the same microaggressions and harassment elsewhere, but it wasn’t the same as what I found in Alabama. If nothing else, I wouldn’t be living in a place that was competing to be the worst state in the Union.

So the combination of these things—wanting to see the world, getting fed up with Alabama, the politics of civility, and feeling stagnant—made me want to leave as soon as possible. I enrolled at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and pretty much as soon as I arrived I started looking for study abroad programs. UAB has actually been a really stellar experience for me, especially being in the University Honors Program and having a good relationship with the creative writing department—but I was still frustrated about being in Alabama. After rocking around a bit, I settled on a yearlong exchange program at the University of Nottingham in England, which has been one of the most informative, transformative experiences of my life thus far—I came to explore, and explore I have. So that’s a long way of saying that I came to Europe to understand more of the world than what I had seen in Alabama, in my little slice of the US in a little slice of the world.

You’ve visited many countries in Europe, what attracted you to come to Belgrade? Was it in search for inspiration?

I’d always been really interested in Eastern Europe and Russia, probably from the media I was consuming and the books I was reading, and I started learning Russian when I was about thirteen (which has been really useful vis-a-vis Cyrillic alphabet). Eastern Europe always fascinated me, mainly because it was so different from what I knew, and the history and culture of the Balkans is so rich and complex. I wanted to go somewhere that was off the beaten track, so to speak; I’ve traveled solo in about twelve countries in Western and Central Europe, but I wanted to push further and go somewhere new. As cool as those countries like France and Austria are, and as much as I loved them, I wanted to know what the other half of Europe was like. I think, in a way, it was a search for inspiration, but it was also to understand another culture and to learn from other people, which has in turn fueled my writing. Traveling has also given me a lot of wacky stories, especially in Scotland, which generates ideas and manifest as really weird images or thoughts in my work.

Did you find your favorite place to write in Belgrade? How do you feel about Belgrade?

Dorcol has a lot of really wonderful cafes to sit and people-watch in, and I’ve been hopping around different places in town. As you get further into downtown, past Republic Square, there’s a coffee shop called Aviator that I love—cappuccino freddo for days. Meduza by Kalemedgan Park is also a great space, and in that part of town there are a lot of good bar/coffee shops on shaded, quiet streets. Otherwise I’ll write in my journal and eat cevap or something, then go back to the studio, brew a cup of tea, and type up what I’ve written. As a whole I’ve been really fascinated by Belgrade—it’s a very lowkey, clean, walkable city, and the people are really nice. I think other residents have said this at well, but it’s like a considerably more relaxed Paris with 25% of the people and a smattering of backpackers. There’s room to breathe and time to look around, which is missing in a lot of cities in Western Europe; you don’t feel like someone is going to knock you down if you’re not power-walking to Shop & Go.

If you could give a piece of advice to young artists who wish to come to Belgrade, what would it be?

Hmm. I think everybody’s experience is going to be different, but I would encourage you to work at your own pace and don’t feel pressured to sprint. Especially if you’re here for a longer residency, it’s important to find a good rhythm, and don’t feel like you have to do everything you possibly can at all times and spend every waking hour ducked over a computer. If that’s how you work best, then that’s great and I’m jealous—but I’d encourage you to let your thoughts sit for a while. Take some time to explore the city, go out for a drink, and let yourself breathe. If you write a poem a day for three weeks, that’s great—you’ve got 21 poems now. If you write one essay and spend three weeks crafting it, that’s great too! Do what feels right to you. Eat breakfast, take a nap when you need one, take photos and send them to your mom. I would also encourage you to learn at least a little bit of Serbian and/or the Cyrillic alphabet—you’ll find it’s a lot easier to get around with some rudimentary phrases, or just being able to sound out the names of stores. Serbia is beautiful and Belgrade is a really dynamic city for artists, so I would just go for it. You won’t regret it.

What are you working on now?

The most defined project I’m working on is a collection of experimental poetry, fragment prose, and found material called Displaced Object Bestial Machine. It’s essentially an investigatory genealogical project, in line what Don Mee Choi calls “geopolitical poetics”; it chronicles war, displacement and migration, diaspora, identity, and imperialism, and the ways that these big concepts have torn apart families and disrupted the lives of individuals, and in turn fueled the creation of modern Taiwan and the rise of mainland China into the economic superpower we’re seeing now. Mentally, it’s hard for us to fathom things like twenty-two million civilian casualties or a three hundred thousand civilians murdered in six weeks—it’s inconceivable to the human mind. So I’m bringing those figures down to the experiences of the individual, of the family, and building outwards from there. In Displaced Object, I investigate my family’s involvement in the Chinese Civil War under the Kuomintang, how we were affected by the Japanese invasion, how we recuperated after the nationalist flight to Taiwan in the latter part of the 1940’s, as well as the tense political atmosphere within Taiwan that ultimately drove us to rural Alabama in the 1970’s. It’s an exciting project to work on, and something that my cousins are really curious about, since a lot of my relatives who were part of the retreat have passed away or were too young to remember anything; we’re also missing a lot of the concrete dates and documents that would tell us when something happened, so even before the project there’s been a great amount of conjecture. For instance, we aren’t sure when my grandfather was born—no one knew what day or the exact year he was born because those documents were left behind during the retreat, so there’s a two and a half year margin—but he had to have been born before spring of 1942, as that was the beginning of Operation Sei-go and the family had to have fled Jiangxi as the Chinese Expeditionary Army made their approach. It’s been a lot of investigatory work and connecting the dots between multiple fragmentary accounts, scouring historical documents, looking at family records, and distilling this information to the most logical series of events. It’s a process of constant revision; new details come to light, someone remembers or finds something, and we adjust.

I hope the collection will shed some light on the complexities of modern China, Taiwan, and the diaspora, and bring our voices back into focus—letting Asian Americans tell our stories. It’s an act of reclamation and dispelling our collective amnesia on the legacy of violence that has haunted the whole of Asia and Asian America, from Lebanon to India to South Korea to the Philippines—furthermore, how imperialism and colonialism have shaped the development of the continent, and subsequently our communities in the US. Discussing immigration and displacement right now, in 2019, is especially prescient.

Your next stop..?

Croatia! I’ll be taking a bus to Zagreb, then working my way down the coast to Dubrovnik. After that I’m back to Nottingham for a couple days, then heading back to Birmingham to start my junior year.