Author interviews

Vanessa Len discusses growing up mixed race, the importance of representation, and her debut novel, Only A Monster. 1 February 2022   M: Can you give us a quick overview of the book? V: Yep, so Only A Monster is my first novel. It’s a YA fantasy about a monster girl whose summer is absolutely ruined when she finds out that the guy she likes at work is a monster slayer. It’s got time travel, it’s got I guess like a Captain-America-like heroic antagonist, it’s got a monster point of view, monster families with powers. I think if you like Doctor Who, if you like Cassandra Clare, if you like Holly Black, you might like Only A Monster.   M: So, a big part of the story is that Joan (the main character) is half-monster half-human, and we know that you’re also mixed yourself. How would you say that your background informed where you went with that?  V: It was really important to me to explicitly include some kind of rep. When I was growing up, I didn’t often see people who looked like me – not only as the main character in narratives but even as side characters. So, I definitely wanted to include Joan having I guess a similar background to me as well (my dad is Chinese Malaysian, her dad is also Chinese Malaysian). I think I’m just drawn to characters who live in multiple worlds within multiple cultures, so it felt natural to also make her mixed human and monster – although I feel like that metaphor doesn’t go too far *laughs* just because she’s a monster. But yeah, I feel like my background informed my choice of identity for my main character.   X: Where did you start when building your main character? Did you start with her wanting to be mixed race and then move into ‘Oh, it’ll be fantasy, a monster’ or did you start in fantasy and move into her being mixed race? V: Good question! I’m really trying to think about that. To start the whole thing, I initially just made a big list of things that I liked the most. So that included time travel and enemies to lovers, and out of that list I made this world. I think I had always wanted to write a really fun fast-paced story with some representation similar to my own background, so I feel like it all came together kind of at the same time. I knew that I wanted to tell the kind of story that I would like to read and I would like to include a main character that – I’m not a monster *laughs* - but someone like me. M: You’ve done a really good job of including both sides of her family … There’s a scene early on where she Facetimes her dad who’s having a bit of kaya toast with some half boiled eggs. I had a good little giggle when I read this part where Joan says she can see her dad is having “coffee that tastes more like flavoured sugar”. It’s not necessarily an important part of the story, but it’s still such a nice element to see and it’s the kind of thing that you really won’t get anywhere else. V: I guess that’s true, I guess that’s part of when you include some rep, you do get some familiar backgrounds. I definitely wanted, on purpose, to make that Chinese Malaysian background the nostalgic background; the place she wishes she was, the home she wishes she was at when things start to go terribly terribly wrong in the monster world. I wanted to create the feeling that I have towards my own family, of that very loving, safe harbour feeling on that Asian side. I feel like both sides are very loving, but when things go terribly wrong for her, I think that’s where she yearns for   M: I’m really interested in how you landed on using monsters instead of another fantasy element that you maybe see more. I don’t think I’ve seen monsters in, well, anything really? V: Yeah, I guess they’re like an original monster *laughs*. The idea for that came out of – I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences when you’re watching a movie or a TV show and it’s so rare (I guess in Western ones at least, the ones that I watched growing up at least) – it’s so rare that the heroes look like me or you. Usually they don’t. Sometimes I would notice when I was growing up that the bad guys were the ones who would look like me – there’d be no Asians at all until a fight scene and then suddenly there would be a couple. And in the fight scene, they wouldn’t say anything, they’d just die. I’ve got this line in the book about how in movies when the bad guys get killed, the camera moves away from them and follows the hero. But I know that in my own viewing experience, I can just sometimes find myself where if the few people on screen who look like me – which sometimes means being aware of these people lying dead on the ground and the camera’s panning away from them – I thought it might be interesting to write a story about – what would it be like if those good, decent heroes from the narratives that I like, what if one of those heroes was fighting against you instead of for you? M: How have you found the publishing process as a debut author and one who, maybeeeee with magic very relevant to being biracial, would sometimes otherwise be completely ignored? V: It was a definitely a choice I made very early on. I didn’t know if this was going to limit my ability to publish traditionally or not, but I thought why else am I writing this if not to put some rep in it? But in the end, I think it worked out really well. In fact, right now seems to be a real golden age of Asian fantasy (YA and adult) so I guess we all had the same thought at the same time that we’d like to see ourselves in stories. I think this is an exciting time and hopefully there’ll be more exciting times to come as more people see themselves in books and maybe want to write their own stories as well.   M: You’ve talked a lot about how it’s always been hard to find any [representation], but as you said it’s also been a good time in recent years to finally try and find something that you can actually see yourself in. So, do you have anything where you’ve felt represented? V: Yeah definitely, look at my shelf back here! Zen Cho, Shelley Parker-Chan who’s one of my critique partners, Kylie Lee Baker, June Tan who wrote Jade Fire Gold. So yeah, I feel like I’m finding new inspiration in all these new writers, and of course existing inspiration in people like Natasha Ngan… Oh, so many. Marie Lu, Cindy Lu who kindly blurbed me. I feel like there’s people who went slightly before me and sort of opened up that space and there’s all these people who are making that space bigger and making that home in publishing I feel great about all the people that came before, because I know that when I started writing I could not have imagined being able to sell a book with a protagonist who had any kind of background similar to mine and then books started to come out and you think, ‘Oh, I could write a book too!’   X: Do you have any extra things you want to say about your book? V: The only other thing that might be interesting to your readers, is that I was really interested in writing that diaspora experience, where in coming from culture or cultures that have been slightly removed from their original context. My dad immigrated here when he was very young and I feel like even he doesn’t always fully understand everything about the culture that he came from, and then when he imparted it to me, sometimes it was very removed from its context. Those are the things that I tried to also put in the book. Like, when Joan enters the monster world, she eats this food that tastes like her grandmother’s food and she says to her frenemy Aaron, ‘I thought this was just something my family cooked.’ And he’s like, ‘No, this is monster food.’ And I feel like I’ve definitely had that experience before, where I was like, ‘Oh I thought this was just something our family did.’ And then you realise no, this is a giant cultural thing, half the people around the world does this. But I guess because you’ve been removed from that original context, you don’t always know what’s cultural, what’s personality, what’s your family. So that’s another thing I really wanted to portray in the book. Vanessa Len is an Australian author of Chinese-Malaysian and Maltese heritage. An educational editor, she has worked on everything from language learning programs to STEM resources, to professional learning for teachers. Vanessa is a graduate of the Clarion Workshop in San Diego, and she lives in Melbourne

Daisy & Woolf rewrites the story of Daisy Simmons, an Anglo-Indian side character in Mrs Dalloway. In doing so, Cahill deftly explores the intersections of gender, race, class, and literature, and how the literary canon has kept People of Colour in the margins.30 May 20221. How and when  did your fascination with Daisy start?It began with re reading Mrs Dalloway as an adult and for the first time discovering Daisy. She is encountered by the reader in brackets (‘she had no sense of discretion’), she is described as an ‘adorable’ amorous object without her community. We don’t know where she lives, what city for example. She is purposely described as ‘vain’, ‘dark’ and lacking a moral compass, suggesting promiscuity. I have only found one critic who takes notice of Daisy describing her as English though Woolf always describes her, through the eyes of Peter Walsh, as ‘dark’.At the time, I was also reading the Letters of Jean Rhys edited by Francis Wyndham and Diana Melly. They provide insights into Rhys’ creative process and her personal struggles. In one of the letters dated April 14, 1964, she wrote about the Brontë sisters, then  went on to write about Jane Eyre, saying that she was often vexed at the ‘portrait of the ‘paper tiger’ lunatic; the all wrong Creole scenes, and above all by the real cruelty of Mr Rochester….’ Rhys imagined there were several Antoinettes and Mrs Rochesters. I realised that my Daisy was altogether different to Virginia Woolf’s. In my novel, India is not a referential colonial subject for society table-talk, but India has its own hub of intellectuals; freedom fighters, entrepreneurs, activists and strong women such as Daisy. I needed to give Daisy a vibrant inner life: a body, a mind, and a voice in my novel.2. Both you and Daisy are Anglo-Indian. Did your experience as an Anglo-Indian and mixed-race person help shape the way you saw and wrote Daisy? I think so. The experience of being Anglo-Indian has been one of self-erasure and a particular kind of concealment since you are always between cultures and homelands: India and England, (as well as Australia) neither country which you can properly claim. Anglo-Indians are a heterogenous community so an ethnic description, even a single descriptive label is inadequate and there have been many terms used ambivalently over the decades, and centuries. ‘Anglo-Indian’ was first used in the 1911 census but before that it was ‘half caste’ and ‘country born,’ and even ‘Indo-Briton’. The imposed definition of the British Nationality Act required a British-born paternal ancestry, shaping an idea of nationality which is based on whiteness. Through intergenerational displacements mixed ancestry people become impoverished and homeless.(Just think of the sad life of Jean Rhys.) I don’t claim to be a victim of these dynamics, but writing can be an act of reparation. About 4% of Australian Indians identify as Anglo-Indian. On migrating to Australia, I found that I could be judged by different communities to whom I bear a resemblance: not being white, not being a Hindu nor a Moslem Indian; and not quite Australian. (Of course, there are other Indian minorities: Parsees, Jews, Jains. They, like Christian are outside the official and dominant caste system.) In the Calcutta chapters of Daisy and Woolf, I dramatise these different social, cultural tensions as they were during the early 1920’s when anti-British riots and race riots take place, and the city is divided by zones. 3. You mention Woolf's racism several times in the novel, could you expand on this for our audience who have yet to read the book but are interested in this?Well, there are repeated undertones of the racist ideology that Woolf inherited in most of her references to India in the novel, Mrs Dalloway. Specifically, Daisy is described as ‘vain’ and ‘very dark’ but also as she is sexually objectified as ‘adorable’ and ‘charming’. Through Peter Walsh’s eyes we are provided with a depiction of India that is backward, tedious and disorderly; the women are far less attractive than British women, which appears to excuse Peter from stalking a young woman near Regent’s Park. Through the eyes of Clarissa’s circle, India is chaotic, and on the verge of uprising. It is a place where the coolies beat their wives. This kind of reduction was fairly stereotypical of the Raj era.Woolf’s Orientalism manifests more generally in many of her novels. The painter, Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse is described as having “Chinese eyes” yet this racial sign doesn’t shape her personality or her development as a character or an artist. The Chinese reference instead is unknowable, creating a cool distance rather than cultural warmth or connection. And even in Mrs Dalloway there is a certain aesthetic passiveness associated with Chinese objects while Elizabeth Dalloway, Clarissa’s daughter, who is quite unlike her elitist mother, is described elusively as having ’Chinese eyes’:‘She had no preferences. Of course, she would not push her way. She inclined to be passive, it was an expression she needed, but her eyes were fine, Chinese, oriental, and as her mother said, with such nice shoulders and holding herself so straight, she was always charming to look at.’ (149)                               Woolf did blackface. She took part in the infamous Dreadnought Hoax of 1911, dressing up as an African prince with friends, other disguised Bloomsburians. They boarded a battleship, the HMS Dreadnought wearing turbans, robes and blackface, pretending to be Abyssinian royalty. Although Woolf didn’t mimic Swahili one of the instigators had the caucasity to do so. Nonetheless, Virginia Woolf seemed not to be aware that to parody brown people is a form of control over them. She extolled the prank in a lecture written for the Memoir club some years later. To this day, I find it alarming that some Instagrammers have posted these photographs without referencing how inappropriate that behaviour was to people of colour .Virginia Woolf sits on the left hand side of the photograph.Having read some of the letters and diaries, it is apparent that racist assumptions are evident in many of the Bloomsbury correspondences.  In Daisy and Woolf, I reference some of these incidents, for instance, on how Julian Bell wrote letters to his friend, Eddie Playford, about his affair with Shuhua Ling revealing racist stereotypes about the Chinese and even worse ones about Indians also. 4. This novel also touches on the racism faced by Authors of Colour in the publishing industry, an issue that is very close to us. Could you give us an insight into your experience getting published as a Person of Colour? Did you face any backlash or questions on why you picked Daisy when there are many other (read: white) characters from Woolf's? It can be retraumatising to discuss these issues; so, I will make my remarks brief. I am always speaking through trauma, something that white people don’t readily appreciate. Although I’ve been an author and poet, an independent literary editor, and know something about publishing and the dynamics that privilege white writers in this country as well as in the canon, during the writing of the novel I came to realise that I had only glimpsed a small part of the obstacles facing minority writers. The playing field remains very uneven, the opportunities available to POC writers are undoubtedly restricted. What needs to happen is a more open discussion with white mainstream culture about the structural issues and more sensitive readings of minority storytelling.My publisher, Hachette, recognised that Daisy and Woolf is a story that needs to be published and reach readers because it’s a transformational novel. It revives and restores the ghost of a shadow character and gives her centre stage. It’s true there is little encouragement to research minority characters in academia, and there is a veritable tsunami of microaggressions that you have to survive just to get a novel like this one ready for publishing. The risk is that you are seen to be mirroring a text located in the canon, rather than creating a precedent. But it is actually hard work because you are excavating on the one hand, but also contributing by adding something entirely original.Metafictional and experimental fiction are less mainstream genres for BIPOC writers. Our material existence places pressure on us to reform and resist history and there are many ways to do this. Perhaps it is literary criticism that should be held to account as much as the industry or the canon. After all criticism constructs the canon; threatening to overwrite fiction. At times in my novel, Mina performs as a critic, being critical of the industry and of Woolf’s Bloomsbury and the white establishment. But in that role of criticism, we always see through her eyes, her subjective position. She does not perform as an independent authority on Virginia Woolf or Leonard Woolf or Vanessa Bell. In her critical act she makes herself vulnerable by exposing her own contingency.During my research it alarmed me that the only substantial criticism that I’d read on the roles of India and Woolf in Mrs Dalloway, after a century of scholarly industry, was an essay that described Daisy as a British woman. How could this be? It points to the selective filters in critical research and the strategic and investment directions of literature, whereby certain topics and subjects are effectively white-washed.The tide of all this structural racism as well as microaggressions kept surging and washing over me, yet I somehow survived and wrote the book,  5. And finally, is there a book (or books) that made you feel represented? As a writer, I feel represented by the books I’ve written: Letter to Pessoa, Vishvarupa, The Herring Lass. I’ve mentioned the influence of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea and in terms of my gender as a reader, Coetzee’s Foe has been an important text. Other books where I felt represented are Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Tsitsi Dangaremba’s Nervous Conditions, Melanie Cheng’s Australia Day, Maxine Beneba Clarke’s The Hate Race, S.L Lim’s Revenge and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji. Michelle Cahill is an author, essayist and poet. She also edits the online literary magazine Mascara and co-editor of the anthology Contemporary Asian Australian Poets. Her short story collection, Letter to Pessoa, won a 2017 Glenda Adams Award.Cover image credited to Nicola Bailey.