How is this possible?” That really struck me. At one point, in response to their treatment from the community, one of the characters remarks “It is 1981. The move from urban coasts to the suburban Midwest functions as a catalyst for racial violence and othering which the characters hadn’t experienced, at least not to such an extreme degree, when they’d lived in bigger cities. A couple of the stories follow a mixed-race couple (a white mom and a Chinese dad) moving to the Midwest. Rumpus: I’m glad you bring up the book’s relationship to time. I mean, these xenophobic tendencies that are exacerbated by capitalism and the anti-Chinese rhetoric of the present can be traced to other moments. I was trying to show how the violence of the present is rooted in other moments in time. None of the stories are set in the present, and that was by design.
Tomorrow in Shanghai is definitely bathed in and soaking in the xenophobia and the violence that followed. It was kind of a reaction to his xenophobia. The stories in Useful Phrases for Immigrants were all written before Trump, but I put it together during the rise of Trump when he was on the campaign trail. I’ve been working on most of these stories either since Donald Trump was elected or since the pandemic started. May-lee Chai: Well, it’s been four years, so I’m not super fast, but it hasn’t taken that long. How did this collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai, come to be? I was so in love with your last collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, which came out a couple of years ago, so I was excited I didn’t have to wait terribly long for another one from you. The Rumpus: I think of you as such a prolific writer. I was lucky enough to meet with Chai via Zoom to discuss her new collection Tomorrow in Shanghai, making your characters suffer, and the importance or writing the personal. May-lee Chai is the author of eleven books, including My Lucky Face, Dragon Chica, Tiger Girl, The Girl from Purple Mountain(co-authored with her father, Winberg Chai), Hapa Girl: A Memoir, the American Book Award–winning short story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants, and others. She is that rare type of writer who has ability to write the political without ever losing sight of the personal.
The rumpus full#
Chai’s ability to depict the vast range of human experiences and emotions is on full display in this collection, and while there is no shortage of suffering for her characters, they also feel love and longing and hope. Young mixed-race children are ostracized by their white midwestern community, a Chinese father is the punchline to racist jokes at a dinner party, a white mother doesn’t correct her friends when they assume her half-Chinese daughter is an adoptee. The collection follows various characters from the Chinese diaspora living in America as they encounter situations that, while not physically violent, result in long-lasting harm. Set predominantly in the 1980s, Tomorrow in Shanghai is full of stories that look at a particular type of violence that isn’t always easy to name. Her newest collection of short stories, Tomorrow in Shanghai (Blair, 2022), is an important book for our times that dismantles the myth of American racial progress. In less than an hour of speaking with Chai, I was reminded of why writing is meaningful-necessary even-and I continue to be astounded by her perspective on writing and the world. In fact, on the day I met with Chai over Zoom to conduct this interview, I’d been despairing over the purpose of writing, asking myself why it even mattered amidst such harrowing contemporary conditions. As a professor, and as a writer, she is both generous and inspiring. She is the type of professor one feels incredibly lucky to encounter. I met May-lee Chai while attending San Francisco State University for my MFA.
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