Published earlier this year, Elaine Hsieh Chou’s second book, Where Are You Really From, is a stunning short story collection that keeps the reader on the edge of their seat. From a world in which men can purchase mail order brides to a deceptively playful story about a dollhouse, this book demonstrates Chou’s ability to explore themes of violence and desire, representation and family bonds, and the intersection of art, sexuality, and identity.
Today, I’m honored to speak with Chou about Where Are You Really From, her preoccupation with the body, and her identity as a Taiwanese American writer.
Esther: Thank you so much for speaking with me. You are one of my favorite writers, and I enjoyed your collection so much. I am curious, why did you decide to write short stories?
Elaine: Thank you for speaking with me! I wrote Disorientation and a majority of the stories at the same time, so in many ways, they were in conversation with each other. I think good short stories are just as or even more difficult to write than novels because you have to excavate the world building, the characters, and the relationships just as deeply in less pages. But there is something liberating in that tight limitation. You have to arrive at the heart of the story or “the punch” a lot sooner.
Esther: And all your stories definitely packed a punch. Do you have a favorite story from the collection?
Elaine: I wouldn’t say favorite, but I’m proud to have written some that were quite difficult. For example, “Featured Background” was one of the first times I wrote a story from a point of view that was so different from my own. Normally, I would write it from the daughter Athena’s perspective but I found that wasn’t really interesting because I knew how the story would play out. And ultimately, as a writer, you want to surprise yourself and you want to challenge yourself, so I decided to write from Gene’s (Athena’s father) point of view.
Esther: In “You Put a Rabbit on Me,” the main character is also named Elaine. Why did you choose to give this character your name?
Elaine: I was very fascinated by the concept of autofiction and I wanted to try it, so I named the main character after myself, hoping that would put me in an autofiction frame of mind. But very quickly, I discovered that I don’t have the sensibility for it. From the beginning, I felt the impulse to lie, to make things up. Maybe that’s why fiction writers gravitate towards fiction versus nonfiction. There’s an anonymous kind of freedom to it, even though, no matter what genre you’re writing in, writers are revealing something of themselves. But I need to feel like there are no constraints in my storytelling.
Esther: All your stories have this surreal quality to them. How do you come up with your ideas?
Elaine: A lot of times I can’t help injecting an element of surrealism. It’s almost like a compulsion, right? For some of the stories, like “Mail Order Love,” the initial concept—of a mail order bride who’s physically shipped in a box—was surreal. So with those stories, I begin with a surreal element in mind, but other times, it just creeps up like in “Carrot Legs.” That ending was very unexpected.
Esther: In your writing, you often give life to inhuman objects but dehumanize the body, such as when you compare parts to food or when you create stories in which women are like imported goods or dolls. Is that like a conscious decision on your part?
Elaine: That’s an incredible observation. It wasn’t conscious. Writers all have obsessions, right? Compulsions that you’re not fully aware of because they’re so subconscious. So I think some kind of subliminal drive is at work. But you’re right that it is something that comes up a lot in my writing.
Esther: Is this consciousness of the body something you’ve always had? Have you always been very aware that you’re navigating life in a Taiwanese female body?
Elaine: I would say it came about a little later, but still while I was quite young. I had an intense, toxic relationship when I was seventeen with a white man who was twenty-two. He had an Asian fetish and it was really destabilizing and dehumanizing. Like, “what’s the difference between me and every other Asian girl?” You start to lose any sense of your individuality.
I started college in 2005. At that time, everyone talked very openly about “yellow fever” and thankfully our understanding of race has changed a lot since then. People would say things like “This guy has yellow fever, how lucky for you!” Fetishization was celebrated because the implication was that you’d actually have a chance since attraction to Asians wasn’t seen as “normal.” But for a lot of these guys, the thinking was that college is where you can mess around. They didn’t want to take an Asian girl home to meet their parents. Essentially, we were just for sex.
Then, when I was living in France, I started reading about critical race theory and fetishization. I learned about military bases in Asia, Madame Butterfly/Miss Saigon, and how Asian fetishization has been around for centuries. This is not just a porn category or a dating app preference. In fact, there’s a lot of inherent violence and danger in it. There are men with a fetish who go to Asia specifically looking for Asian women to prey on. And there are incidents where they kill them. Or here in the U.S., as we saw with the Atlanta spa shootings. In those instances, we aren’t seen as human from the very beginning but as interchangeable, replaceable. I believe we need to treat fetishization with deadly seriousness.
Esther: I see this seriousness and thoughtfulness in all of your works. Another throughline is this idea of fractured identities. How do you think growing up Taiwanese American affected your approach to this theme?
Elaine: Fractured is a good way to put it in that you have to construct your own identity. When you’re second generation, you’re always trying to cobble together an identity for yourself. For me, growing up, I didn’t know what an Asian American identity was. I didn’t know the history of it. I was in my 30s when I learned about Asian American activism and trailblazers like Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs. And I learned this on my own, not at school.
Esther: I can relate to having to construct your own identity. So then what does being a Taiwanese American writer mean to you personally?
Elaine: I write about Taiwanese politics because it’s important to me. A big part of being Taiwanese is the threat of the CCP and the goal of independence. I don’t know if a resolution is in sight, but I believe in defending Taiwan’s right to exist as its own free country. I believe in protecting its democracy. I think it’s shameful the UN refuses to recognize Taiwan as its own country. And with America, there’s a de facto agreement of “we’ll protect you if you’re invaded” but I doubt that will be the case with the current government and we shouldn’t have to rely on another country for protection. I’m not saying all Taiwanese American writers have to speak about these issues, but for me, it’s important to be vocal.
Esther: Thank you for talking with me today. Is there anything else about Where Are You Really From that you wish more people knew?
Elaine: I’d love to talk about some of the themes in the novella, “Casualties of Art.” The narrator David has this belief that white women are the “ultimate prize” when it comes to dating (and this kind of thinking is fairly common among men of color). But when an Asian woman dates anyone who’s not Asian, she’s called a “race traitor.” The hatred towards these women is so intense, but we should be locking arms if we want to end white supremacy, not pitting ourselves against each other. And for David, he has this mentally that he can’t hurt other people if he’s the victim. But he’s terrorizing Asian women because he has all this anger and resentment towards them, and at the same time, he still also wants to be loved by them. I hope the story explores some of these complex issues and opens up the door for honest conversation.
About:
Esther Fung is a professional bookworm committed to making reading more accessible. As the Director of Marketing for PangoBooks, she promotes a sustainable book buying marketplace in which readers across the country buy books used from each other’s shelves. She also is the bookstagrammer behind @estherfungreads. Her bookstagram has been featured on both Oprah Daily and Buzzfeed, and she was a speaker at The London Book Fair in 2024.
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