Conversation: Zen Cho
By Jessica Ho
This interview was originally published in Issue #6 “CLEAR (清)”. Order a copy now on BLURB.
Jessica Ho: What got you into writing? I heard that you started different stories and got into fanfiction as a teen, but what was the initial inspiration to start writing fiction regularly?
Zen Cho: I was writing bits and pieces of stories from a very young age of 6–8 years old, so I had an impulse to create. In terms of starting to write regularly, that was when I was a teenager because I started reading fanfiction and I had all this online free reading material. I think once you start writing, you share it with other people, and that’s a bit more pressure to actually finish your stories. Just having that community around fanfiction that talks about story ideas and pings off each other was what really got me to start writing more consistently.
JH: Something unique that your British Fantasy Award-winning historical fantasy novel Sorcerer to the Crown offers is its point of view from characters that are marginalized individuals, especially in 19th century England. Do you find this element to be important in your narratives?
ZC: I suppose that’s the case. Sorcerer to the Crown is actually a bit different from what I had been writing before. I first published a collection of short stories called Spirits Abroad, and almost all the characters in that are Malaysian. Sorcerer is obviously a bit of a departure from that; it takes place in Regency England.
What I would say is that I don’t so much focus on writing marginalized characters. I grew up reading British and American writers, and they mostly wrote Western, white characters, and they were quite divorced from my life and the people that I grew up with in Malaysia. My writing in a way has been like a project to reconcile the books I read and really enjoyed, and the people I knew who I never really saw in a book. In that sense, what I’m trying to do is represent something that feels really true to me. Whether that’s through the story of a black man in Regency England or a story of somebody who is easier to identify with myself in terms of my identity and background, that’s what I’m aiming for: something that feels true.
JH: As a writer of speculative fiction and particularly fantasy, what is your creative process when world-building?
ZC: It differs with every project. For me, the entry point is often the voice of a story, and that means how the story is written in terms of the sentences. I think how you think and how you talk really shapes how you see things, or at least it has the flavor of how you see things. I think once you establish the mindset of the viewpoint characters, you can then persuade the readers of the world that they live in. It should be something that’s really organic. I’m not the sort of person who sits down and writes the whole system and works out the currency and stuff. You just get into the characters and ask, “What would
they believe? What society created them?”
JH: So you start writing from a character development perspective?
ZC: A little bit. The influences will come from different directions. The inspiration for Sorcerer to the Crown was the fact that all these books I was reading growing up by Enid Blyton, and all these old-timey works would refer to characters being dark. That really puzzled me as a kid, because I knew everyone in the book was white and I was like, “Oh, they couldn’t be dark skinned, and it can’t be dark because white people are pale.”
What I worked out later on was that what they meant was dark-haired. Everyone was white but when they said someone was dark they didn’t mean dark skinned, whereas in Malaysia when you say someone’s dark you mean dark-skinned. That’s actually where the seed of Sorcerer came from, because I thought it would be interesting to have the main character be dark but actually dark-skinned. I wanted a main character around whom I started building the world. I also knew I wanted magic, and so I thought, “How did he get to that place? How would magic operate in that world? How would it affect him?”
JH: Moving on from Sorcerer to your other works, some of your writing mixes Hokkien in with English. What do you consider your personal connection or relationship to the Hokkien language to be? Are you concerned by the overwhelming and growing omnipresence of standard Mandarin within the family of Chinese languages?
ZC: So, I’m a “banana,” right? I know a bit of Mandarin and I roughly understand Hokkien, but I’m not fluent in either language. Any sadness I would have is a theoretical sadness, because it’s not my own language. In terms of my relationship with the language, I just think Hokkien is very cute. It’s the language that the maternal side of my family speaks, and the language that my parents speak to each other — really, mixed Hokkien with English, Malay, and so on. That’s the dialect that shows up most in my stories, and I tried to use that especially because I think there is a tendency when “bananas” like me write stories about Chinese culture, we tend to default to Mandarin because that’s what people learn, and that’s what’s represented by what’s Chinese, right? But you’re right — that’s not necessarily the only Chinese.
It is a shame to lose the dialect. Mandarin that is spoken in Malaysia is different from Mandarin that is spoken elsewhere. They have a specific accent and specific slang, and I think there’s a bit of a tendency in Malaysia to feel embarrassed about our accents because they’re not the standard kind. There’s always this impulse to use the global, prestige version of the language and that’s a bit of a shame to give in to that pressure.
At the same time, speaking the prestige version of any language is actually quite useful and I work in careers (law and writing) where frankly, I need
to be fluent in the prestige version of English, or I would never get anywhere.
JH: I read in your blog post “Never enough for both” that your father said, “Living in Malaysia is like renting a house.” Do you think the sense of impermanence in his metaphor can ever be reconciled? How do you feel about the ever changing concept of “home” in this increasingly globalized, interracial, and migrant world?
ZC: That really depends on the environment around you. My dad says that because even though the Chinese Malaysian community is so rooted and quite an established community, there are still elements in the politics of the country where whether you really belong there is kind of up for grabs, it has always been challenged.
I think that’s something that a lot of Chinese communities in Southeast
Asia tend to face. Where you find home is connected to the kind of other people who are there, whether you are accepted and you feel that you’re accepted, and so on. Brexit, for example, clearly made a lot of people feel less at home and less accepted. I think that you can still find your home anywhere in a way. It’s not a straightforward concept for any kind of migrant and there’s not one place where you can put your flag down and nobody can challenge that.
I’m not fluent in either language. Any sadness I would have is a theoretical sadness, because it’s not my own language.
JH: When I was reading your short story “The Four Generations of Chang E”, it reminded me of something my mom said when she went back to China; she said something along the lines of, “I can go back to the dirt of the home I grew up in, but that’s just a house — that’s not home anymore.” Would you say home is where you are rather than just a solitary location?
ZC: Well, home can mean any number of things, right? I had a real
moment of angst the first time I was in Malaysia and I said “Oh, I’m going to go home,” and I meant the UK. I had this real kind of spiritual crisis. But you know, it’s inevitable and when I’m here, I definitely say “I’m going back home”
to Malaysia, but, at the same time, that’s not where I live, at least not for tax purposes. I don’t really know how things work there because I’ve lived my entire adult life in the UK. I think you can have more than one home and the idea of home can serve different purposes at different times. You’re right — it’s not necessarily something that is locked to a piece of land unless you want it to be.
JH: As someone who grew up in the States, I hadn’t expected the Malaysian stories in Spirits Abroad to be so relatable to the point where I would audibly scream alone in my room. What does this border-transcending relatability to your international readers mean to you?
ZC: It means a lot! I definitely had this feeling when I was writing these that they would be so niche and not broadly relatable, so it means a huge amount to me when I hear that other members of the diaspora, even if they aren’t from the exact same background as me, identify with it. That’s something that is very moving to me.
As long as you’re sincerely trying to tell a true story without necessarily saying it’s going to be the true story, hopefully there will be something there that lots of different people can identify with. When you really draw on the specificity of the experience, that’s what makes something universal, and actually where I learned that was from all the Victorian novels and Georgian novels I
was reading growing up.
Jane Austen, for example: she was writing for an audience of people in the UK who were living in the same time as her, who would have had the same cultural reference. She was not writing for an audience who had no idea what she was talking about, but she’s still being read by people a couple centuries later who aren’t super familiar with the social norms, and it still works because if you get close enough to what’s actually true about human experience, you can be extremely specific, but also universal. That’s something I really passionately believe in.
I had a real moment of angst the first time I was in Malaysia and I said, “I’m going to go home,” and I meant the UK.
JH: China. Malaysia. England. What do each of these places respectively mean to you?
ZC: Malaysia is where I grew up and that’s where I feel my heart belongs. I would say that I don’t even really know what China is; I’ve been a couple times, but it’s frankly quite perplexing to me. I do feel fairly distant from it. I speak some Chinese, but not much. Culturally, there are similarities, but China is so huge; if I talked to someone of northern Chinese heritage, even the food they eat and what they call their relatives is a bit different. It’s such a big country that it’s almost useless to just call yourself Chinese. But at the same time, to be Chinese does mean something and there is a sort of commonality.
I guess it’s kind of a foreign country to which I have a mysterious connection. And then England is where I live. Also, England and Britain have a really strong hold on my imagination and the imaginations of many Malaysians and many people from Common wealth countries because of that kind of lasting heritage of British imperialism, and that’s something I find really interesting. It drives quite a lot of my work and it resides there.
JH: It seems that your experience moving between countries and operating between cultures can be seen in your work. For aspiring creators out there, how would you advise them to allow their diasporic experience to enrich and inform their identity rather than fragment it?
ZC: That’s really a lifelong process: working out how to integrate all the
different parts that you experience, and then express that in your work. That’s actually something any creator has to do, not just creators from marginalized or diasporic backgrounds. The difficulty when you have different cultural influences is that it might be more difficult to find where you actually fit and find your audience. And maybe you have pressure from a dominant culture — you look at a dominant culture and you see that the movies and books are so homogenous, and you feel like there’s just one way to tell a story or one kind of hero, and if you write about somebody who is different from that, that’s unacceptable, and nobody will ever be interested. I think that’s one of the biggest obstacles, working through that. It’s something every writer and every
creator has to work out for themselves, but it’s okay if it takes a long time. It’s an important part of your job as a creator, working out: “What is the story I have to tell?” It might take you a while to get there, and that’s fine! It’s not meant to be something that’s easy because it’s worthwhile, right? You’re creating art and you’re creating art that nobody else can create.
JH: I heard you practice law as a day job. What made you decide to pursue law?
ZC: Well, there’s a very straightforward answer for this, which is that my parents told me to. I didn’t have the moral courage to say no. I had the very stereotypical, middle class, upwardly mobile Asian experience where my parents had certain careers that they thought were suitable for me. I wasn’t great at maths so engineering and accountancy were out for me. Since I was good at English, they thought law would be a good career for me.
Basically, I agreed and went along with it. I didn’t enjoy studying law at all, but I do enjoy practicing it. You kind of work out what is the kind of right life for you over time. I have to say, [being a lawyer] does let you exercise lots of skills and parts of your character that you don’t get to exercise as a writer, so it’s kind of nice to have that.
It’s not meant to be something that’s easy because it’s worthwhile, right? You’re creating art and you’re creating art that nobody else can create.
JH: What can we hear about the follow-up to Sorcerer to the Crown?
ZC: I can’t say very much about it. I have been working on it for a while, and it’s gone through so many alterations that I’m very reluctant to say anything. If I say anything about it now, it’ll probably be different by the time it’s out. But it’s in progress, and I’m hoping it will be done and it will be published. It is set in the same world and it’s not about Zacharias and Prunella; they do appear, but it’s about different main characters. You hopefully find out a bit more about the world outside England. That’s all I can say.
Original interview by Jessica Ho. Illustration and Print Design by Elisabeth Siegel. Banner by Jessica Peng. Medium article re-uploaded by Natalie Cheung.
Sine Theta is a creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.
WEB: sinetheta.net
BLOG: sinethetamagazine.tumblr.com
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/sinethetamagazine
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/sinethetamag
BLURB: blurb.com/user/sinethetamag
REDBUBBLE: redbubble.com/people/sinethetamag
PINTEREST: pinterest.com/sinethetamag
DONATE: paypal.me/jiaqikang
