- Lindsey Anderson
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
An Interview with Cleo Qian
Li Zhuang
The electric, unsettling, and often surreal stories in Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go explore the alienated, technology-mediated lives of restless Asian and Asian American women today. A woman escapes into dating simulations to forget her best friend’s abandonment; a teenager begins to see menacing omens on others’ bodies after her double eyelid surgery; reunited schoolmates are drawn into the Japanese mountains to participate in an uncanny social experiment; a supernatural karaoke machine becomes a K-pop star’s channel for redemption. In every story, characters refuse dutiful, docile stereotypes. They are ready to explode, to question conventions. Their compulsions tangle with unrequited longing and queer desire in their search for something ineffable across cities, countries, and virtual worlds.
With precision and provocation, Cleo Qian’s immersive debut jolts us into the reality of lives fragmented by screens, relentless consumer culture, and the flattening pressures of modern society—and asks how we might hold on to tenderness against the impulses within us.
— Tin House
Li Zhuang: Congratulations on winning the 2024 Housatonic Book Award for Let’s Go Let’s Go, Let’s Go! In many of your stories, characters navigate between digital and physical spaces, often crossing borders. In “Monitor World,” characters exist as avatars in online dating apps until they meet in person. “Zeros: Ones” follows an American Chinese writing tutor adjusting to life and dating in Suzhou, China. How has your experience living and working in both the U.S. and Asia (including Japan and China) shaped your storytelling?
Cleo Qian: Thank you. Looking back, I think many of the characters in Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go feel a sense of dislocation and alienation, like they don’t really belong to the places they are in. The narrator of “Monitor World” is living quite aimlessly, having moved back home to save money and working a job she thinks of as temporary. The narrator of “Seagull Village” is also only passing through the village she stops at.
Certainly, I think my own experiences of moving around a lot and never having really found a place I could call “home” for the long haul has really influenced these stories. There’s a sense of constantly searching and being in transit. Many of the stories place a lot of emphasis on describing the setting and landscape, like the description of Suzhou in “Zeroes: Ones.” I think perhaps moving around a lot made me more sensitive to rendering the different atmospheres of the neighborhoods, cities, and countries I was in.
Certainly, I think my own experiences of moving around a lot and never having really found a place I could call “home” for the long haul has really influenced these stories. There’s a sense of constantly searching and being in transit.
LZ: I was particularly struck by the speculative elements in your stories, like the power to see people’s secrets after Xiaoyun’s double eyelid surgery in “The Girl with the Double Eyelids,” and the supernatural karaoke machine linking a K-pop star with Jinyi, a Chinese girl working in a small radio station in “Wing and Radio.” In a past interview, you spoke about the unfair burden on minority writers: “if you’re a Chinese American writer, you ought to write about what it’s like to be Chinese American.” Do you see your use of speculative elements as a way to challenge this expectation and broaden narrative possibilities?
CQ: When I was starting out as a writer, I really struggled to write realism, which was what I was often taught in the workshops and classes I was in. It felt too difficult for me to render my experiences and life that way. For example, “Messages on Earth,” one of the last stories in the book, is realist—and it was extremely difficult to write. I probably went through something like thirteen drafts over five years. I almost didn’t include it in the book at all.
Sara Majka’s story “Saint Andrews Hotel” had a definitive impact on me early on. It’s a piece in which an island where a young man was born disappears while he’s in a hospital, and he is stranded on the mainland. She uses this speculative conceit very lightly to capture this feeling of wrongness, being out of place in life. It was an early example to me of how using non-realist elements can help you expand a story’s emotional geography. I think non-realist elements can capture how something feels more accurately sometimes. When you’re deep in depression, for example, you experience the world in a surreal way. The depression isn’t necessarily tied to objective facts or concrete things.
I also think that contemporary life is so convoluted and strange that many writers are using more and more speculative and surreal elements to express it—for example, Ling Ma’s short story collection Bliss Montage, or Naomi Klein’s nonfiction book Doppelganger, which uses extended metaphors of the “mirror world” and “shadow lands” to describe the realities alt-right conspiracy theorists live in.
I think non-realist elements can capture how something feels more accurately sometimes. When you’re deep in depression, for example, you experience the world in a surreal way. The depression isn’t necessarily tied to objective facts or concrete things.
LZ: In Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go, queer longing appears as an undertone for several stories. In “Power and Control,” you depict an emotionally abusive queer relationship unfolding during COVID, with societal tensions like anti-Asian racism seeping into the intimate relationship between the characters. How did you approach exploring the intersections of personal and societal pressures, especially for an Asian American woman navigating feelings of safety and vulnerability within a queer relationship?
CQ: I didn’t write the story “Power and Control” consciously thinking that I was going to be exploring these intersections. As Carmen Maria Machado wrote in In the Dream House, it’s very hard to find depictions of abusive lesbian relationships—but they certainly exist, and I have seen them and been in them. In the Dream House was a relief for me because of how clarifying it was. So, in an early revision of “Power and Control,” I chose to depict an abusive queer relationship in the hopes it might be clarifying to readers who have been through similar relationships themselves. Through the period I was revising, I had been living through the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in New York post-COVID lockdowns, and had also been attacked myself, so that was on my mind.
I added the sociopolitical context to the story to increase the sense of threat and paranoia. There are some circumstances in which people become more vulnerable to being controlled and manipulated. Keychain, the (non-abusive) girlfriend in the story, has just moved to New York at a time of anti-Asian violence. She’s introduced to Greta, and at first, Greta seems like she’ll be safe. Of course, when you’re being attacked for your race, it feels safer to stick with people who you know won’t target you because they’re your race, too. During times of crisis, communities are told to stick together. There’s an instinct—you’re both Asian, you’re both queer, you’re both women—that you’ll understand each other, protect one another. But in this story, their shared identity in this high-urgency time made Keychain more vulnerable to Greta.
After I wrote this story, there were people in my life who told me, “I didn’t understand what it was like for you, to be in that abusive relationship. But now I do.” One person told me that reading how Greta used magical devices to track and influence her girlfriend made her finally understand how creepy it was to be with someone who wants to dominate you, exert control over you. And that is another example of how speculative elements can help provide emotional clarity, I think.
LZ: You have mentioned your love for writers like Han Kang, who just won the Nobel Prize, Mariana Enriquez, and Yoko Ogawa. You have read many translated works by international authors. How has reading non-Western-centric writers influenced your own writing?
CQ: It’s been hugely influential. These writers all have such different styles, which introduced me to many different possibilities in form and content. I certainly don’t think I would be able to feel the necessary sense of possibility to write my own stories without reading non-Western writers.
LZ: As you curate The Common China Folio featuring younger writers from Mainland China, how do you think it will challenge the Western understandings of contemporary Chinese literature and culture? During the selection and editing process, what were your initial expectations, and were there standout works or themes that surprised you?
CQ: When I was living in New York, I got to know several writers and artists from China in this creative community who talked about how hard it was to put out work that didn’t conform to this stereotypical view of China. For Chinese literature in America, for example, the big names are often older male writers—like Liu Xiaobo, Yan Lianke, Liu Cixin—and a lot of the movies and literature are about the Cultural Revolution, industrialization, and censorship.
Meanwhile, I was meeting young writers and artists who were very fluid, queer, globalized, experimental, interdisciplinary, interested in technology, modernity, and living very rich digital lives. I wanted to give them a chance to show their range of creativity and subject matter because I knew many non-Chinese editors in America might not really know how to approach their work. I hope that it will open the minds of readers of the folio who might only have this view of China, that’s written from the perspective of those born in the 1950s and 1960s.
I wanted to give them a chance to show their range of creativity and subject matter because I knew many non-Chinese editors in America might not really know how to approach their work.
LZ: The China Folio demonstrates an impressive range of genres, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translation, and visual installation. How did you approach curating such a broad selection of work, and what do you think each genre contributes to the exploration of Chinese youth culture?
CQ: When I was curating the folio, I wanted to show both aesthetic and subject matter diversity. As I said before, I’m really impressed by the willingness of the young Chinese writers and artists I’ve met to work across genres, experiment, and infuse their works with a lot of hybridity.
I think each genre has different strengths. For example, there’s a lot of experimentation in the poetry and translations. Several of the pieces published, like the poem “qiào bā” or the hard-to-classify prose poem hybrid “Der Knall,” were results of experimentations across two or three languages that the writers knew. I was also struck by how some writers are remixing and updating more traditional work in experimental ways, like Shangyang Fang’s interpretations of Song Dynasty Ci poetry, which are sometimes not literal or add lines which aren’t in the original.
The prose pieces cover a lot of ground in subject matter. For example, there’s the blog-like essay “Memories of the Rise and Fall of Vice China,” which I thought was also a perfect fit for showing readers a snapshot of youth culture, or the story “The American Scholar,” which is about a White scholar being introduced to the sex and kink scene in China. I also did really want to showcase queer voices, leading me to select pieces like Yunhan Fang’s story “Paper Summer” and your poem, “Fan Fiction.”
I was also struck by how some writers are remixing and updating more traditional work in experimental ways, like Shangyang Fang’s interpretations of Song Dynasty Ci poetry, which are sometimes not literal or add lines which aren’t in the original.
LZ: Congratulations on being a 2024 National Poetry Series finalist! Could you share more about your upcoming poetry collection,Vinegar Ceremony?
CQ: The poetry collection is something like a coming-of-age. Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go was also a coming-of-age for many of the characters, but the stories were very much fiction, whereas this poetry collection is more autobiographical, a coming-of-age for myself. When writing, I found it easier to reach my own life in poems, rather than in fiction. The poems are about family ruptures, queerness, abuse, violence, and grief that I’ve experienced; there’s also a strong vein of the landscape of California. I found myself very moved when thinking of the hugeness of the California landscape and how small my own life was in comparison. Like the folio published in The Common, the book is eclectic and crosses genres—the poems are sometimes lyric, sometimes more experimental, and I also put in a hybrid essay.
CLEO QIAN is a queer fiction writer and poet. She is the author of the short story collection Let’s Go Let’s Go Let’s Go (Tin House, 2023), which was a finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and a TIME Magazine Best Book of 2023. Her writing has appeared in nearly thirty outlets including ZYZZYVA, The Sun, and The Massachusetts Review. She is a National Poetry Series finalist and has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell Foundation, Casa Snowapple, and the Sundress Academy for the Arts.
LI ZHUANG is a Chinese writer pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University. In 2019, Li graduated with an MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her works have been featured in The Common, Denver Quarterly, Madison Review, Southeast Review, Worcester Review, the Collapsar, and others. Drawing from her extensive work experience in the Chinese entertainment industry, Li is working on her debut novel about queer Chinese and Chinese American C-pop dancers navigating romance and competition in a cutthroat C-pop idol-making reality show.