Bonnie Tsui was born in Queens, New York, and raised on Long Island. She is the author of American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, winner of the 2009-2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection, and Why We Swim, one of TIME magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020. Her first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about big-wave women surfers, was just published by Henry Holt Books for Young Readers/Macmillan in May 2021. Tsui lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

BT: I hope you don’t mind—I am taking a walk while we talk.

EB: Of course, that’s fine!

BT: I’m slowly recovering from two broken ribs. These walks are warming my body up from being broken.

EB: Oh, no! Are you able to swim?

BT: Not yet. That I’m able to walk around at all is a minor miracle. And it’s one of those things where you can’t really do anything to fix it, you just have to wait.

EB: I imagine that’s really hard for you. When I read Why We Swim, I thought, “Oh my gosh, she’s the most active person I’ve ever read about.”

BT: [laughter]

EB: I loved reading your book so much. But before we get into Why We Swim, what is your nonfiction origin story? What brought you to the genre?

BT: I always loved reading and writing when I was growing up, and in college, while I loved reading fiction, I knew I wasn’t a fiction writer. I also loved reading magazines, so I began to think about journalism, even though my school didn’t have that as major—I studied English literature. But they offered this class on creative nonfiction—an “art of the personal essay”-type class—and that really changed my understanding of the genre. I realized that nonfiction could have those animating elements of fiction and feel as vital and alive and intuitive as a fiction. You could have nonfiction that wasn’t a straight news story, and the writer could be acknowledged as part of the telling—the writer as a human that was part of the whole tapestry of the story. I mean, I think it’s kind of disingenuous to impose some kind of superficial objectivity that’s never quite authentic, because we’re all subjective, you know?

EB: I completely agree. I don’t think there is anything that is actually truly objective when it comes to writing. Which is part of what I just loved so much about Why We Swim—you are just there as the narrator, moving back and forth between the personal and the researched, recognizing why you love and care about this topic so much and what drew you to writing about it. And it never felt jarring when you switched from the memoir-y parts to the journalistic parts. How did you pull that off?

BT: I have to say that so gratifying to hear you say that, because [that moving back and forth] was something I thought about a lot. I knew that I wanted to do something that felt intimate. I used myself as the narrator to provide the framework, acting as the liaison between someone who might not be as familiar with this world as I am. I wanted the book to be accessible not only to diehard swimmers, but also welcoming to people who don’t necessarily think of themselves as swimmers, but could still see something of themselves reflected in the book. Because that is the whole point—that we humans as a species have a very strange relationship with water. We have to be taught how to swim; we are not born knowing how to do it. So that knowledge or desire to learn how to be in the water safely is pretty universal, whether or not you are afraid of it or embrace it fully. And I was hoping I could figure out a way how to move back and forth without jarring transitions. I was trying to really honestly channel the fluidity of this subject.

EB: Fluidity! I feel like after reading your book I am a lot more aware of water language.

BT: Oh, my gosh, I know.

EB: But how did you pull of that, well, fluidity? I’ve read other books that have a much starker divide between the personal and the reported—like this is a memoir chapter, now this is a journalist chapter—but how did you work to make the transitions feel so natural? Just rework them forever?

BT: I had worked on the first two sections of the book first, and I got them to a point where I liked the way they felt. So I used them as a reference point as I was writing the rest of the book—you have to keep going through the chapters over and over to keep your voice consistent. As I wrote each additional section, I’d get to the end and realize it felt totally different from the beginning and I’d have to go through it and make it match up. You don’t want the reader to reach the end and feel like they lost a friend.

EB: Yeah, I feel like no one warns you when you set out to write a book how many times you will have to read each chapter. I’m at a point with my manuscript now where I’ve read it so many times, I feel like I don’t even know what’s interesting anymore, you know?

BT: You need some time away to do some other stuff!

EB: Ha, yes. I also wanted to say another reason why I loved having you as a guide was because you were explaining these technical swimming things in lay person terms. Sometimes I worry I don’t have a PhD in the subject I am writing about, but I also think it is often an author’s strength that they are not an expert in it—that they are more the person guiding the reader to the experts.

BT: Right. You don’t want readers getting turned off by the fact that you don’t know what they might want you to know. But I think if you’re honest with them, that makes it okay.

EB: So, you mentioned the different parts of the books. I really loved the thematic organization of the different sections: survival, well-being, community, competition, and flow. How did you come up with that structure?

BT: It took a while to get there. I played around with writing little bits and pieces over the years, and when I felt like I had amassed enough material where I realized I wanted to write a whole book about it, I still was trying to figure out what would make it into a book and not just a collection of weird and interesting stories. When you start a book, there’s some mutual understanding with the reader about where you’re coming from, so I think that having a clear, simple question to address helps. And I was really struggling with that. I’d had all these poetic, cool, opaque title ideas before, and then I was talking to a really smart editor friend of mine who said, “Why don’t you call it something really simple like why we swim. That way everyone knows what you’re talking about.” And that one comment clarified everything for me. I took everything I had written and sorted it into those five categories—words I had been thinking about all along as guiding principles—and it just felt right.

EB: I love that. It’s such a simple solution. I always overcomplicate things, too, and sometimes the most direct thing makes the most sense.

BT: It’s really fun come up with these flowery titles and hide little Easter eggs everywhere, but generally speaking, it’s the right thing to be as simple and clear and direct as possible.

EB: In terms of being simple and clear and direct, how did you keep all of your research so well-organized and cleanly presented? I’d love to hear if you have any advice on how to manage research. I know some writers prefer to do all of their research first and write after. Is that what you do? Or do you move back and forth?

BT: I would have all of these free-ranging conversations with people—really long, really fascinating—and then maybe, oh, two or three sentences of it would make it into the book. Or maybe even none of it at all. But there was no way I could hold all that stuff in my head at the same time. I had to move back and forth between writing and research.

I also think having a good organizing system for the stuff that you’re collecting is super important, like Scrivener. Scrivener solved my problems of keeping the reference materials in one place. No matter what media it is: photos or website links or journal articles or videos, you can put it all right there, and have the writing also in the same place. I also like that you can move it around without having to have commit yourself to it—you can just read it in a new order to see if it worked without actually having made that change.

EB: Yes! Before Scrivener my strategy was just to have fifty Word Documents open at once.

BT: And also tabs! So many tabs! Scrivener has helped me a lot.

EB: I would love to hear more about your writing process, especially how it changed or didn’t change between writing American Chinatown and Why We Swim. [EDITOR’S NOTE: At the time of the interview, E.B. had not yet read American Chinatown, but now she has and can confirm it is also great.]

BT: Largely, I knew how much time and effort would go into writing another book. I spent a long time thinking about if there was a topic I wanted to spend the next few years thinking about and researching, and then spending another two years talking about. And I kept writing about swimming, and kicking around that idea, and when I realized I was still thinking about it and curious about in my off hours I was like, okay, I like that. That’s a pretty good indication that you really do want to pursue that book. If you find yourself thinking about multiple aspects of something all the time, then you can write a book about it.

EB: That so funny, because I just tweeted the other day that if you write a book you better like the topic because you’re going to be reading that one book over and over again. And talking about it over and over, too!

BT: We all get tired of things at some point, but if you keep coming back after a little downtime, that’s a good sign.

EB: You actually keep coming back to swimming so much you just wrote a picture book about it, right? Sarah and the Big Wave, about surfer Sarah Gerhardt.

BT: That book actually happened because I wrote a grown-up story about female big-wave surfers preparing to surf Mavericks. And a children’s book editor in New York read the story and called me and asked if I had ever thought about writing for kids. So, I thought about it, and decided to try out a story about the day that Sarah met her first big wave, with the backstory of her journey growing up as a kid in California and Hawaii, where all the surfing stuff was for boys and men, how nothing ever fit her right, how she had to fight all these obstacles to get to this one day.

I had already done all the research, and at that time, my kids were five and eight. We spent a lot of time reading books together, and I began to pay attention to what we loved about the books we loved and what didn’t work about the books that we hated, books that my husband and I would actively disappear.

EB: [laughter]

BT: I was immersed in a life course on picture books. I realized that all the books we didn’t like were plot summary books—no matter how inspiring a person is in real life, you cannot tell a story to a kid at that age that is compelling if you tell them the entire chronological life story.

So then I finally sat down and wrote it, and my kids came home from school and pulled up the book on my phone—because I had written the whole thing on my phone—and I read it out loud to them. There were no pictures, nothing, and they were really into it. So I thought, okay, if I can hold their attention for the completion of this, then there’s something there.

EB: Amazing! That’s great you had your own test subjects right in your house.

BT: Yeah, and they’re not going to lie to me and say it was good when it was bad. Kids will tell you when something is boring. They’ll just walk away.

EB: Very true. In addition to your kids, who else helps you with your writing? Who makes up your writing community?

BT: For the past years I’ve been part of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. It’s a twenty-five-year-old writers’ collective, and I’ve had an office there. Of course, because of COVID, we had to give up the space and things are in hibernation right now, but it’sso essential to have a physical space, even if it’s just where you go to hang around people that you love and admire. Like you walk into the kitchen, and you run into someone and you’re not necessarily talking about what you’re working on, but whatever you talk about allows you to go back to the work that you’ve been struggling with. That human contact is really important. I would not be a writer today without that community, and I am so grateful for this past year, even if it’s been a lot more about phone calls or long, socially-distanced walks. We’re supporting each other through it.

EB: I totally agree. I would not be where I am without my writer friends. One of them was the one who told me to read your book! It’s so helpful to talk to other people about writing and books and research and problems.

BT: Even if you’re just circling around the things you’re thinking about—that is so useful.

EB: Definitely.

BT: Another one of the things I love doing, that I’ve been able to allow myself to do more and more, is when I feel stuck, I give myself permission to stop worrying about it and read something that I wanted to read instead.

EB: Yes! Reading other people’s essays and novels can be the best cure to figure out a problem. It just shakes something loose in my brain. Or also just going for a walk.

BT: Or a swim!

EB: What other writers do you admire or turn to for inspiration or you have feel influenced by? Any particular books or authors who you feel shape your approach to writing Why We Swim?

BT: Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns just blows my mind with the scenic detail, how even the smallest passages have so much depth of research in them. Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who makes every topic lively. Susan Orlean, who is a keen observer of the action but feels like a character, too. Katherine Boo, who writes so novelistically. Christopher McDougall, with Born to Run—he made me want to write that kind of a book for swimmers. All of these writers do different things with their nonfiction, but all are beautifully immersive storytellers.

EB: You’ve already touched on this a little bit, but, over all, what do you find most challenging about writing nonfiction? 

BT: When I am looking for a new project, and figuring out what it could be. Not even at the topic level—when it’s just a word that I’m chasing that feels kind of like something. Like I was thinking a lot about the word “reentry” some months ago, and how we will have to reenter society after COVID ends, and how people are both so desperate to do it but also have a growing feeling of anxiety about the cascade of responsibilities and obligations that are going to come at us again. I kept talking about this idea to people, and thinking about it, and I knew there was something I wanted to write, but I wasn’t sure what it was yet. That’s the hardest part, because it takes time to tease that thing into existence. But I eventually did it, and it was a really fun story to work on. I talked to psychologists about people who return from humanitarian missions or working abroad or an explorer expedition or scientists who have been in isolation. It ended up running in The New York Times.

EB: And what’s the most rewarding part?

BT: That feeling when you know you’re getting closer and closer to it. When it’s becoming what it wants to be. That’s very satisfying. It’s like you’re chipping away at this block of marble, and suddenly you see the shoulder. You start to recognize it as something that you want it to be. Is that a weird metaphor?

EB: No! I love that! I had a professor in grad school who said something like writing fiction was starting with a blank canvas and writing nonfiction is starting with a busy, full page and removing things one by one.

BT: The material is all there; you just have to get to the essence of the thing. You have to choose what’s essential and leave the rest.

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

BT: Nicole Chung is always brilliant, and eloquent in talking about the hard things. Here she is in TIME magazine, with a piece called “I’m Tired of Trying to Educate White People About Anti-Asian Racism:”

I am ready to stop chasing after those who need to see your deepest wounds on display before they will even contemplate believing your words. I’ve lost the energy or desire to educate or provide reasoned, patient answers to anyone who still needs to be convinced that Asian people face discrimination and violence in this country. Even the week of the Atlanta-area spa shootings that left eight people–six of them Asian women–dead, I received many versions of the question: What would you say to white people in this moment, to help them understand how serious this is?…

… the truth is that I am tired of being asked to think about racism from the perspective of those least impacted by it.

EB: Thank you again for taking the time to speak with me, Bonnie! Especially when you are not feeling 100%. I hope you are back to swimming again soon.