Anna Qu is a Chinese American writer and the author of the memoir Made in China: A Memoir of Love & Labor. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College, and her essays about identity and growing up in New York as an immigrant have been published in Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and Jezebel, among others. Qu is the Nonfiction Editor at Kweli Journal, and she teaches at Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop and Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their cat, Montague (Momo for short).

EB: Thank you so much for talking to me, Anna! I am so excited about your memoir Made in China.

AQ: Sorry if I am a little fuzzy! My partner and I both had our second COVID shot yesterday, and we couldn’t sleep through the night. We were both feverish. He was too hot and I was too cold. It was a whole thing.

EB: Well, an extra thank you for taking the time to chat even when you feel like garbage! So, first, I’d love to know: how did you get into writing in general and writing nonfiction specifically? 

AQ: I’ve been fascinated with nonfiction for a long time—I was always a journaler. As a kid, it was my way of venting, getting to know my own emotions, and making sense of the world around me. I still have the journal I kept when my mother sent me to live in Xi’An—which I write about in the book—and I was expected to assimilate into an 8^th-grade boarding school having never gone to school in China. At that point, I felt more American than Chinese, so that journal, and the few novels I found at a bookstore, were my only connections to home, to English, to America, to myself. I’ve held on to writing ever since.

EB: Howdid your book Made in China come about? 

AQ: It started as an essay from my thesis in grad school. Made in China began as a personal essay in a collection, and I kept coming back to it and expanding… it just took me about ten years to get it right!

EB: Ten years feels right. I am on nine years for my own book right now! I imagine part of what took so long was all the research? I loved the moments where you used your story to teach the reader something about history or Chinese culture—how and why did you work to incorporate those moments?

AQ: I started writing the book because I wanted to be heard, but after a few years there was a shift. I realized I wanted this story to have a bigger impact—I wanted my story in a larger context. I teach a class at Catapult called Beyond the “Me” in Memoir, where we focus on the larger cultural, societal, historical and theological context of memoir. In my opinion, it’s where memoir is headed. A lot of people pick up a memoir wanting a voyeuristic experience, but it’s also an opportunity to understand a different history, a new culture, a perspective on art and life. My memoir isn’t a typical story about an abusive childhood, it’s about transgenerational trauma, the cost of immigration and assimilation, and a family struggling to do the best they can. I also wanted to make my mother a complex but accessible character, and to do that I need to provide the cultural and historical context of China and the difficulties of being an immigrant in New York in the 1980s. These sweatshops, this labor, is still happening. I wanted to desensitize and normalize this type of immigrant narrative, while making it accessible to readers of color.

EB: Well, you were definitely successful. I learned so much reading Made in China. I had no idea there were sweatshops like this—that there still are sweatshops like this—in New York. When writing these more educational moments, what research did you do? Similarly what personal research—I think I heard Alexander Chee call it “me-search”—did you do?

AQ: The New York Public Library has a room devoted to local history in New York. I spent a lot time there right before the pandemic. I researched the history of Chinese migration in New York, the types of opportunities available, and how sweatshops began to litter this city, especially in Queens and Brooklyn. I also wanted to understand how that history affects first- and second-generation immigrants to better understand what communities faced then and now.

EB: The context is so important. I think a good memoir has both a strong Then You perspective and a Now You perspective. And you totally pulled that off. You showed your anger and fear and frustration with your mother when you were younger, but you also wove in an extremely empathetic adult perspective, too. How did you manage to balance that?

AQ: Children don’t see the larger context, they just feel the panic, shame and fear. But as an adult, you have a larger perspective, and that larger context is what made it possible. My mother is a woman who left her child in China for five years while she worked in sweatshops in New York. Then she married the owner of a sweatshop and had two kids before she came for me. She didn’t have many options. It’s almost impossible to understand the decisions my mother made then without that larger context of class, race, and community.

And the second half of the book was written after 2015 when I wrote to the Office of Child and Family Services for my records. The book took shape and wrote itself after that.

EB: I was interested in how some of the poor immigrant perspective is cross-cultural. Like, I feel like there are two perspectives—either, I went through this awful thing and I never want anyone else to have to go through it, too, or I went through this awful thing and survived so other people should be able to take care of themselves, too. My grandmother, who grew up very poor in an Italian family outside Boston, has sort of the same perspective as your mom—like, why do I need to help others? Because no one helped me. I figured it out myself, so they should figure it out themselves.

AQ: That’s so prevalent still, with my mother but also in certain industries. For example, when I worked in publishing there were older women making younger women jump through unnecessary hoops because they had it hard themselves. Instead of helping the next generation, they’re perpetuating this cycle. Fortunately, I think it’s changing slowly.

EB: I’m so glad you brought up the culture of publishing, because my personal feeling is a rising tide lifts all ships. If I read and promote your book, you can read and promote mine, and we can make room for everybody. Which ties to my next question: who makes up your writing community? At least for me, writing can be pretty lonely. Who do you turn to for support?

AQ: Yes, absolutely!I’m very dependent on my friends for emotional support, especially when it comes to writing. I can talk for hours on the phone with writer friends about process. Many of my closest writer friends are from my grad school, but I have friends from all walks—or jobs—of life. My first reader is a screenplay writer and my secondary readers are often fiction writers or poets. Genre, or whether a reader is a writer, doesn’t matter as much as understanding complicated family dynamics and cultural implications of my work. Right now, I’m growing my community with new virtual writer friends, like you and Forsyth Harmon.

EB: I am so honored! I feel like Forsyth is really good at making friends with writers through Instagram, and she is such a champion of other people’s work.

AQ: Yes! I have been trying to make writer friends through social media during the pandemic and commenting on people’s posts. I’m getting more comfortable with reaching out or celebrating writers who are in a similar place and promoting their book. But I’m looking forward to post-vaccine life, and meeting writers in person again. Publishing a memoir can be traumatic and overwhelming, and it’s such a long, lonely journey. It’s worth celebrating with other people.

EB: It just helps so much to talk about things with other writers.

AQ: Definitely. One of my professors in my MFA program, Jo Ann Beard gave me the best advice—

EB: Oh my god, I love her.

AQ: She said that when something isn’t working, start over. If there are problems you can’t fix in a piece, rewrite it. I think that’s a really good perspective to have. I think we often get attached to a piece of writing that we forget to trust ourselves. You have to trust that your writing will continue to grow.

EB: Yes! That is why I always need other people to read my work. So you’ve already mentioned a couple things that are hard, but what do you think is the most challenging part of writing nonfiction? 

AQ: What I’m learning about challenges is that it’s an endless cycle, and that, in retrospect, they are a lot less intimidating than in the moment. It’s a hard truth to remember, but I try to keep it in mind. Recently, I found the turnaround for edits when it’s crunch time is only a few months. That can be overwhelming and intimidating, especially compared the 10 years I spent getting it to where it is today. And it was my first time working on a book project, so I didn’t know when and how much to push back on certain edits. I eventually figured it out and now that the book is done, it seems a lot less traumatic and dramatic. Don’t get me wrong, my editor is great—it would have happened with any editor. It’s a challenge every writer must face at some point in their career but it can feel like a lot of pressure.

EB: Yeah, there are a lot of things that I just had no idea about when it came to the whole process of publishing a book, which is very different than writing a book. Working with agents and editors, the timeline of the whole process… Did you read Before and After the Book Deal by Courtney Maum?

AQ: I actually got my copy when I met with my editor! I saw it on the rack at the Catapult office and asked for a copy. I was like that is exactly what I need. It was so, so helpful. But also, reading about it is different than actually going through the process.

EB: Very true. And what do you find most rewarding about writing nonfiction?

AQ: It depends on the day. Today it’s when someone reads the book and is able to verbalize what resonated with them. I worked on it alone for so many years and now it’s so rewarding engaging with someone who has read it! I love hearing what they walked away with, what they found compelling, and what struck them most. Obviously that connection is skewed; I am not the person they’re connecting to and whatever they know about me has been carefully crafted, but it still feels pretty great to be understood.  

EB: I also wanted to ask: how do you handle writing about your family? This is something my memoir students are always worrying about. Is it easier if you are estranged from them?

AQ: I think it’s a big deal for everyone, no matter what the relationship is like. My situation is a bit more extreme than most. I haven’t seen my mother in person for eight or nine years. Most of my family, along with our community of kin, are private people, and they feel like I am airing dirty laundry. My mother thinks I wrote this book to get back at her, and there’s nothing I can really say to change her opinion. But I don’t think that my relationship with her would be better if I didn’t write this book. This is my truth, and I had to write it. In my own way, this book is about voicing against that kind of silencing. For me, this book couldn’t have been a work of fiction; it needed to be nonfiction.

EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow “non-man” writer?

AQ: I’m currently reading Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings and I love this passage that mirrors some of my own thoughts recently:

Watching Pryor, I realized that I was still writing to that institution. It’s a hard habit to kick. I’ve been raised and educated to please white people and this desire to please has been ingrained into my consciousness. Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people.

We’re often writing a whitewashed version of how we experience things, because most of the literature that we were raised on was white literature. I’ve been recently studying how storytelling is different in Chinese culture, and it’s really interesting.

EB: Thank you again, Anna! Feel better. I’m actually off to get my second COVID shot this afternoon.

AQ: Good luck! You’ll be fine after a day or so.