It’s OK If Your Writing Isn’t for Everyone
As a debut author, I’ve had to get used to answering the question: What is your book about? The shortest answer: It’s a memoir about language, loss, and living far away from my family in Taiwan. If the person asking is genuinely curious and not just being polite, I’ll give a longer answer: In my early childhood, I was a Taiwanese person living in America. When we moved abroad, I was an American in Hong Kong, and when we visited Taiwan, I was an American or an Overseas Taiwanese. Then when I settled in California during adulthood, I became a hyphenated American again.
The Translator’s Daughter is about the multiple places I come from and how my family’s movement over the years led to a shifting sense of self. It’s also about being constantly in dialogue with loss, with not-knowing. My brother, mother, and father all died within a few years of each other. My grief is not only for my parents as people, but for the time I didn’t get to spend with them, the language I’ve lost and the knowledge I missed out on, the traditions and rootedness I always craved, and the certainty of a kind of effortless belonging I’ve never experienced.
If I’ve managed to say all that, this is where I’ll pause and wait for a reaction. More likely than not I will be folding in on myself, afraid that I’ve said too much. I am constantly fighting a kind of impostor syndrome, a feeling that diaspora stories like mine will be dismissed as marginal, not mainstream, not literary enough, or too basic–a freshman effort whose primary value is as a stepping stone to something more mature. The unspoken assumption is that true literary craft should be divorced from questions of identity and marginalization; that art has authority when it is recognized by the widest possible audience without the need to explain itself. The problem with that is it means only white cishet men (and to some extent, white cishet women) enjoy the freedom to create and be read unburdened by identity markers. When we claim our intersectionality, it brings us closer to a certain like-minded audience while simultaneously enacting multiple degrees of separation from an imagined standard. What is at stake when we choose to celebrate and write about our distinct identities? Are we needlessly limiting our audience?
Many of my beliefs about what writing should be — what writing can be — go back to my independent study when I was doing my MFA at Mills College. I selected my own reading list to study immigrant and diasporic literature; keep in mind this was in the early 2000’s when you could count the number of well-known Asian American writers on two hands (and most people could only name two: Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan). One book that I’d encountered a few times and was fascinated by was Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée. I was irresistibly drawn to it even though I didn’t quite understand it. The book spoke to me in ways I couldn’t articulate until I discovered the 1994 academic book Writing Self, Writing Nation: A Collection of Essays on Dictée by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Authored by five Asian American women writers and scholars, Writing Self, Writing Nation unlocked my understanding of Dictée and more importantly, helped open up a space in which an unusual, nonconforming story like mine could live and breathe.
I was born in Taiwan and my family moved to New Jersey when I was two years old. My earliest memories are of the block where we lived in the last apartment in a row of modest redbrick units, situated across from an identical row with a shared grassy lawn in between. I had no memories of my birthplace; Taiwan was no more than an idea to me. When I was nine years old, my dad’s job transferred him to Hong Kong and we moved from American suburbia to a teeming city of unimaginable density, where everyone looked like me but spoke a language that none of us knew. My brother and I enrolled at an American school and continued our education in English; outside of school we mostly socialized with other foreigners and lived comfortably inside an expat bubble.
To say that I did not have any models for my complicated identity would be an understatement. No matter where I went, I did not fit in; I felt like an orphaned puzzle piece, a fragment in search of the whole. This passage by Shelley Sunn Wong, author of the essay “Unnaming the Same: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée” which appears in Writing Self, Writing Nation, captures a similar sentiment:
In the colonial calculus that identifies Korean with Japanese, the “Korean” is surplus; in the racial calculus that identifies American as white, the “Korean” is surplus; in the patriarchal calculus that identifies Korean as male, the “Korean female” is surplus; and in the formal calculus that identifies a literary work with a discrete genre, Dictée is surplus. In Dictée’s economy of translation, the Korean American feminine is invariably rendered as surplus, as that which goes unaccounted for. (p. 122)
Likewise, my memoir The Translator’s Daughter is a series of negotiations with various identities, an endless and ongoing wrestling with in-betweenness and degrees of belonging:
How can I be Taiwanese when I don’t speak the language?
How can I be American if I don’t feel rooted here?
How can I be Taiwanese American if I spent most of my childhood in a third country?
How can I miss a place when I’ve never really lived there?
How can I be an immigrant if I don’t have any family or community here?
How can I be a daughter if I don’t live close enough to help my parents?
How can I be the daughter of a translator if I am not bilingual?
How can I be a memoirist if my story doesn’t follow a conventional arc?
It’s taken me 20 years to be comfortable with these contradictions and to cohere these ideas into a book. While I’ve often lamented how long it took me to write my memoir, the truth is I needed all of this time to arrive at this conviction: Resisting the definitions that confine and constrain us is a constant source of labor and requires clear intention and effort. It requires an absolute degree of commitment to existing in the “third space,” a refusal to be swept into easy categories in service of accessibility to a mainstream audience that might not be willing to do the work to understand my work on its own terms.
A few years ago I started to recognize a persistent, troubling flaw in my writing: I was over-explaining myself. There are numerous articles and studies that show that women in the business world have a habit of using language to soften their opinions or requests, like when they say “I think” or “does that make sense?” It occurred to me that my tendency to over-explain in long expository passages comes from the same place — it’s a way of trying to justify my presence instead of exhibiting confidence in my authority and expertise. I feel like I have to be constantly educating the reader, assuming they don’t know anything about Taiwan or its history (I used to joke with my Taiwanese American friends: “It would be great if I could write an essay without mentioning Chiang Kai-shek!”) Seen another way, it’s my way of spoon-feeding a lazy reader who I am assuming is different from me, rather than rewarding a curious reader and trusting them to fill in the gaps or look up anything they don’t automatically know.
You know when you go to a Thai restaurant and there’s a long disclaimer about spice levels and you roll your eyes at how stupid it is to dumb down the menu for non-Asians? Basically I was doing that in my writing — I was assuming an unaccustomed reader who would struggle to get through the narrative without frequent and obvious guideposts. Once I realized this, I had to consciously push back against this impulse. I would write the long expository passage and then later see it for what it was, and either shorten or delete it. I had unconsciously internalized the indifferent reader — the person who could not be bothered to make any effort to know me better. And that was a disservice to what I finally realized and embraced as my primary audience — the reader who is curious, who is invested in me and my story and wants to know more.
Here’s an example: In my last chapter “One Day You’ll Need This,” I wrote a letter to my son guiding him through important sentimental landmarks in Taiwan for when he visits after I’m gone. There’s a section on Zhongshan Presbyterian Church where my parents met and where we held both of their memorial services. What got cut from the final draft was the context about the historical alignment of the Taiwanese Presbyterian church with the Taiwan independence movement. This was an interesting detail, for sure, but it broke up the flow of this compact flash nonfiction piece. However, knowledgeable readers will recognize the significance without my having to say it; rather than thinking of them as hurdles for the unfamiliar reader, unexplained or untranslated concepts can be seen as a gift to the people who understand them–to your best and most ardent audience.
What I’ve learned is that it almost always backfires when you try to write to the mainstream and reach “everyone.” It’s okay if your writing isn’t for everyone. Let me say that again: It’s okay if your writing isn’t for everyone. It’s not your job to make yourself acceptable to people who don’t want to learn. Instead, focus on the people who need your story, who have been longing to see themselves reflected in books, who have waited their whole lives for someone to articulate something that approaches their experience.
Remember some of the outcry over responses to recent movies? Fire Island, a movie about gay men, was criticized for not including enough lesbians. Turning Red, a wonderful animated film about Chinese American heritage and adolescence, was famously panned by a white male movie critic who said it wasn’t relatable. Everything Everywhere All at Once went from a sleeper hit to a massive Oscar-winning phenomenon, but many still grumbled about “not getting it.” Even a blockbuster like Barbie isn’t immune to complaints that men aren’t centered (yes, someone actually said that). Which brings me back to my point: It’s okay if a story exists primarily and joyfully for a certain audience, and more often than not, that’s precisely the reason it does well.
My dad was a translator of Bibles–a treasured and timeless work of literature designed to reach the masses, a shared story in which he claimed no ownership. My book sits at the opposite end of the spectrum; what I am “translating” is nothing more than my own experience and subjectivity. If you’re struggling to write your memoir, this is my advice: Stop trying to appeal to everyone. Ultimately, as a memoirist you can only be successful by being absolutely, unapologetically yourself. You have to write the story that only you can write. Invest your energy in reaching the people who are already on your side, who are rooting for you and want you to succeed. By leaning into that, by owning your space and your voice and your identity, you give permission to others to do the same–and this, in the end, is what will make your story universal.
