Cultural Norms and ‘Good’ Fiction: An Interview with Jen Wei Ting

This post is a bookend to the post I did last month where I interviewed Damyanti Biswas. She discussed how she had to learn how to change her narrative approach from the one she learned reading and writing books in the predominant style of her homeland, India, and instead learn such “Western” techniques as three-act structure.

Like Damyanti, Jen Wei Ting was a student of mine several years ago in a Litreactor class, and she impressed me immediately with her command of craft and her insightful writing. But as Wei Ting discusses in an article she wrote for Catapult magazine titled, “Unlearning the Colonial Gaze in Southeastern Art,” her writing journey has taken somewhat of the reverse trajectory as Damyanti’s.

Wei Ting is a writer, novelist and screenwriter from Singapore who lives and thinks in multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese and Korean. Her work has been published and/or supported by The Economist, Time Magazine, Tin House, Bread Loaf, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, Singapore’s National Arts Council, South Korea’s Toji Cultural Foundation and more. Prior to attending the MFA program in fiction at Brooklyn College, where she is a Madelon Leventhal Rand ’64 Foundation Fellow and Brooklyn College Scholar, she worked across Asia as a portfolio manager. Her writing centres on women, language and contemporary Asia.

To learn more about Wei Ting and her writing, you can visit her website or follow her on Twitter/Instagram @intewig

In her Catapult article, Wei Ting discussed how she once thought ‘good’ literature was distinguished by what appeared on school syllabi, best seller lists, and glowing reviews—especially if the publication had New York, London, or Paris in the name.

“Growing up in Singapore in the 1990s under the instruction of British schoolteachers, I came to associate literary excellence with the psychological realism of Victorian novels and the minimalist prose of postmodern classics that defined my literary education. ‘Good’ literature seemed to be the exclusive preserve of Anglo-American authors, works woven with rich biblical imagery and themes. Someone like me, born into an ancestor-worshiping, proverb-spouting Chinese family, would always be an outsider to the literary establishment.

“When Tan Hwee Hwee became one of the first Singaporean writers to sign with a major publishing house in the UK, the Christian themes and Oxford jokes in her novel merely reinforced the impression that the only way for a Singaporean novelist to get published internationally was to mimic the colonizer’s ways.”

But something changed as Wei Ting began studying literature with the intention of writing her own stories:

“As a young literature student, I was drawn to Chinese, and later Japanese and Korean literature, whose stories felt closer to me, their characters’ dilemmas more resonant, especially in how they confronted western modernity and the perceived backwardness of their own culture. But as I began rethinking what I had previously thought of as ‘good’ storytelling or ‘good’ art, I began to see whiteness everywhere—not merely in terms of skin color or race, but as a kind of cultural imperialism, the dominance of one form of storytelling or art over all others.”

With all of that in mind, I invited Wei Ting to be interviewed for Writer Unboxed so we could discuss her ideas more fully with the specific intent of addressing how they relate to fiction.

In the process of this reorientation in what you considered ‘good’ fiction, what elements in your own writing struck you as in need of reconsideration? What did you give up, and what took its place?

I think, when we first begin to write, we start by copying, just like how children learn. I’ve never really tried to write in a ‘western’ or ‘Asian’ style—I’m a bit hesitant to use cultural explanations as you’ll probably see in the rest of my response, I prefer to look at what’s on the page—but if I think back to the first (and thankfully unpublished) stories, I was trying very hard to imitate Haruki Murakami. Strange characters that disappear in one place and appear in another, scenes that jump back and forth in time, a detached, almost insouciant narrative voice.

(To clarify: I think language is what’s on the page, and culture is what isn’t. Culture is what we bring to the book, as readers and writers, of our world and our lived experience; it’s what makes sense of what isn’t on the page.)

Now that I’m a closer reader, I’m no longer such a fan of Murakami. But if you’ve read a lot of him, you can see how his work has evolved over the years. You might also detect the heavy influence of modern American literature, in particular writers like Raymond Chandler, who inspired Murakami’s early novel A Wild Sheep Chase, and Raymond Carver, whom Murakami has also translated into Japanese. (It’s these influences that convinced his publisher, Kondansha, that he was ‘marketable’ in the US.) But where does the ‘American’ in his work end and the ‘Japanese’ begin? I think it’s a fascinating question, given that he writes only in Japanese about Japanese characters set in Japan, but in a narrative voice that can feel ‘American’ to some readers.

In the same way, rather than moving from ‘Western’ to ‘Asian’ influences, I think I have all along been interrogating the so-called Western influences in my “Asian” upbringing.

This might be a good place to consider what is meant by “Asian” literature, if the term really has any meaning at all, and if so what?

The Malaysian writer Tash Aw once said in an interview—and I’m paraphrasing here—that most of contemporary Asian literature is basically an interrogation of the clash of western modernity with ‘traditional’ Asian values. I want to caveat this again because if you’ve read my writing previously, you’ll know that I don’t even like the word ‘Asian’— it’s reductive, other-izing, and flattens the vast diversity of a huge continent.

With regards to this interview and my Catapult essay, when I say ‘Asian’ what I’m really referring to are countries where Confucian thought and values have been the dominant organizing principle of society for centuries, namely China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and countries in Southeast Asia with large Chinese populations, including Singapore, where I was born and raised.

So when I write, what I’m really trying to do is question these building blocks of society that can be so fundamental to your identity growing up in such a place. For me, that was being told—and I feel this was really something imparted more unconsciously, rather than overtly instructed—that the key to being a happy and fulfilled woman was to be a virtuous wife and a kind mother, even while graduating from an excellent university and holding a well-paying job.

Singapore is a very peculiar place in that respect—you’ll find that in news stories about women who are successful in their careers, there is an almost morbid curiosity about their marriages and family lives, as if the ideal of a successful woman is someone who is married, with three kids, and making lots of money on her own; otherwise the news story will append her marital status with something like ‘remains single’ or ‘unfortunately separated from her husband’—as if that is something so key to understanding her success in her career! I don’t think you’d ever see that in the New York Times.

In historically Confucian countries, society and family exert an influence over the individual that can result in outcomes and narratives—in my own limited experience—that often feel inexplicable and even unbelievable to a Western audience.

That isn’t to say stories in the ‘western’ tradition don’t talk about family and society, it’s probably a fundamental question in all stories, how we go about finding our place in the world.

I’ve heard you discuss the difference in how the individual is treated in Western literature as opposed to the literature from the countries you named that were influenced by the Confucian tradition. How so?

So much of western literature is about the triumph of the individual, à la Homer’s Odyssey. Or, as the founding documents of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop consecrate, “American values of freedom, of creative writing, and art in general as ‘the last refuge of the individual.’”

In much of East Asian literature—which is what I’m most familiar with—the emphasis isn’t so much on the individual breaking free or making some kind of statement, but on coming to a place of acceptance. It’s still a narrative about finding one’s place in the world, it’s just a world that looks very different—and for a western reader unfamiliar with Asia, can feel very hard to understand, even silly or ludicrous. That’s the tension I try to explore with my writing.

What advice would you give writers concerning how to recognize and address their own cultural assumptions about what makes for ‘good’ literature?

What exactly do we mean by good fiction? Good as in interesting, memorable, imparts the correct values, has a unique writing style, sells a million copies?

I think “good” is a really bad word to use to describe literature, in that it is vague and imprecise, but in the context of my essay, what I was really interested in exploring is the process of curation: how we go about selecting a body of works that are exemplary, worthy of recommending to others to read—and to young minds, worth emulating.

Fiction plays an undeniable role in shaping our view of the world, that’s what the ongoing battles over banned books in American schools and libraries are really about: a struggle for what people think America should look like, and everyone’s place in it.

I think we would all like to believe that ‘good’ fiction is universal, that there are certain qualities about certain stories that transcend countries, culture, even language. I do believe this is true to some extent, and it is fascinating to consider which books have this appeal, but I think you will also find that this often changes over time.

Take for example Uncle Tom’s Cabin and House on the Prairie, which I read as a child in Singapore in the 1990s and were my first introduction to America, and the controversy over their place in contemporary children’s literature now.

I personally have a very simple criteria for good writing. It should make you want to read more. The best writing, like the best films, should leave you with the feeling that you can’t stop reading.

Fiction is ultimately a kind of conversation with reality, with our real lives, which makes our enjoyment and experience of it thus also an extremely subjective one.

I hesitate to attribute this variability in our enjoyment of a text to culture, because it is about so much more than that. It is also about language, and our relationship to language, which makes us more predisposed to some books than others. I may be speaking to you in English here, but my understanding of English is more likely than not going to be quite different from yours.

We all read for different reasons—edification, entertainment, escape—but I think what we enjoy, and what passes as “canon” at any point in time, is revealing both of its times and the weight and momentum of cultural power.

I could enjoy Uncle Tom’s Cabin and House on the Prairie as a young child because I had not experienced any racial privilege or social injustice, growing up a member of the privileged race in Singapore (ethnic Chinese make up almost three quarters of the population). I just very naturally assumed the posture of Laura, observing and chronicling the suffering and oppression of others with great empathy, but without the mortal fear that this was something that could actually happen to me.

After I came to America for college, however, and came to understand its settler-colonial history and its very complicated relationship with race and white supremacy, I obviously came to a very different conclusion.

I think, if I were to be in a position to give any advice at all, it would be to cultivate a self-awareness that I think is critical not just for reading, but writing, and to apply that not just to literature, but to one’s own lived reality. What passes as ‘canon’ in your world, what kind of books do you find yourself drawn to, and why? How much of yourself do you see in that world? How is what you read, in conversation with, or in opposition to what you believe?

Any final thoughts you’d like to offer?

I wanted to end this with some thoughts from my MFA, where we recently read Virginia Woolf’s essay How Should One Read a Book. Woolf argues that we should try to restrain our urge to pass judgement and learn to read each book on its own terms, for what is not on the page, for “the visionary shape that returns to us” long after we have read it.

We’re also doing something very interesting in my MFA workshop, which builds on the work of Felicia Rose Chavez and Matthew Salesses (among others) on race and craft, and where we try to use ‘value-neutral’ observations and questions to critique a work rather than reverting to the default ‘I like, I hate, I love.’

It’s something that can be surprisingly difficult to do: resisting the impulse to judge, to criticize, after all we all have limited time and if you don’t enjoy something you just can’t. But I think if what really interests us is humanity, in people and their ideas, if what we really want is to gain, as Woolf says, ‘the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read,’ then we should also ask ourselves: what kind of reader am I? How can I become the most generous, empathetic reader? What is this urge or impulse I am having about this particular book, and what does that say about me, as both a reader and writer?

What questions or comments would you like to offer Wei Ting—about her education, her writing, the MFA program at Brooklyn College?

Have you questioned your own cultural assumptions with respect to your reading or writing? What did you discover—about yourself, about your writing, about what you want from literature?