INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

(1) What diasporas do you write into, and what diasporas do you write to create?

I write into the diaspora that is mental illness. Recently, it’s unsurprisingly become the diaspora of disability. I’m still figuring out the diaspora that is queerness. There’s also the element of Vietnamese diaspora squared because when you go back you realize you’re also inconceivable there. I’ve not yet attempted to write about the diaspora that is being Not East Asian. I do love writing into places I’m not supposed to look, saying things I’m not supposed to say. What else is one to do when you’re already where you’re not supposed to be?

This is a terrifying goal, one I’m not even sure I have the talent for, but I’d like to write in a way that helps expand the diaspora of Asian Americans who are meaningfully in community with Black Americans. I tire of the exploitative, tense, or pitted-against ways we’ve been shown. Even now, I’m not sure how to describe the painful incompatibility I feel when meeting other Asian Americans and realizing we have fundamentally different worldviews because of who we did or didn’t grow up around. Call it third culture or cross culture or something else, but I’m forever altered by the elders, peers, and professionals I knew growing up. I can’t stop seeing this specific lack of love everywhere. Can’t stop feeling an immense loneliness wherever Black communities are absent.

(2) Where does this piece land within the greater history, body, and/or evolution of your work?

Historically, I’ve been a pragmatic writer (scarcity, urgency, eldest child, etc.) but I’ve noticed when that tendency gets dropped, a much stranger style emerges. You can almost see the major signs in my birth chart battling it out between pieces. With this poem, I leaned into the fun and absurdity despite the piece’s darker seed. I also got to utilize voice in a more effortless way than before because of the form, themes, and narrative involved.

Overall, this poem is both a relief and exciting to me because it was a way of showing/reminding myself what’s possible when I lean into my instincts and think a little less. I’m also realizing how much I’ve missed improv (and play)!!

If I keep this up, stay alive and stay brave, hopefully we’ll get to see how much weirder my work becomes.

(3) How do "xenolithic edges” show up in your piece?

Who's to say the pieces of fruit inside one of those not-too-sweet cakes my mom likes isn't a xenolith? The layers, the buttercream? If a xenolith is a piece of rock enveloped in a larger rock, then the audience (and the speaker) certainly becomes enveloped in ~something~ while reading this piece. Once sliced, cakes are full of edges that weren't there before. Once sliced, a cake is revealed in several ways. Embracing the strange or foreign and carrying it around inside one's self is essential to baking, living, loving, and writing.