We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, we spoke with Pulitzer Prize winning author Cristina Rivera Garza (Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Terrestrial) about the inspiring complexity and tragic murder of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Lambda Prize recipient R.O. Kwon (The Incendiaries, Exhibit) about the fantastic metaphors and wild career twists of Mavis Gallant.

Cristina Rivera Garza on Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

You were going to discuss another author then switched to Theresa Cha. Why did you decide on her?

She was an immigrant writer who posed issues of language and multilinguism as the heart of much of her work, so I think reading her was important for me during my early years in the U.S. I think I learned how to write as an immigrant with her help.

She was born in Korea and moved to the U.S. when she was about 12, and she spoke Korean, learned English, mastered English, and then French, and she made that connection between languages one of the major issues of her writing. If you read Dictee, which she published in 1982, what you'll find is a collection of fragments—some of them written in English, some in French, some in Chinese or Korean—and this is done without asking for any kind of permission. It's just how her mind and her body are connecting all those different pieces, and she's putting them together for you there in Dictee without any kind of information. We don't have footnotes, or contextual data that could make you make sense of that, because this is a challenge, I think, and this is precisely the journey that she's into. The disorientation, the obliqueness, the understanding of what you are getting into and what kind of conversation you are participating in.

And I think all of that speaks directly to the kind of migrant experience that I had in the ’80s. I arrived in the U.S. during the late ’80s. You may remember that in 1986 there was that huge immigration reform led by Ronald Reagan, one that involved what was called back then “amnesty,” that opened up a path for thousands and even millions of migrants, specifically from Mexico, into legal migration. So it was at the center of the discussion back then, as it is now. And one of the issues that was really repellent to me was that in this discussion, the identity of migrants was stereotypical. It was narrow. And it was allowed to exist within very strict confines. What Cha did for me was... this is a book that has been described as difficult and obscure, but for someone who's been through the process of migration, it somehow is so realistic. It's a path into the mind and the experience of someone who is trying to orient herself in a world that is changing drastically.

So instead of having to ascribe myself to this very strict sense of migrant identity as it was presented in the public discourse, Cha just did away with that, and was her own complete, complicated, multifaceted self. And so I guess when I say that she taught me how to write as a migrant writer, I guess that's what I mean: that I didn't have to constrain my writing to preconceived linear paths, the story of the so called happy migrant or the successful migrant in the U.S., which exists even today in many books described as memoirs. So what we have here in Cha is a highly personal book that is just not moving according to that narrative, and that is profoundly challenging and criticizing that narrative.

What do you think people should know about her horrific murder?

She was a victim of femicide—now we would say femicide—in 1982. She was killed precisely the year in which this book, Dictee, was published. I understand that readers, editors, and family members have been quite cautious about extending the conversation about her death, which is very understandable in a world in which these narratives about “passionate crimes” prevail, and these narratives usually blame the victim and exonerate the perpetrator. So I understand that there's been this caution about the discussion of her death.

I do think, though, that the situation in terms of our production of respectful, compassionate language to speak about femicide has changed, and I think there are ways now to talk about the horrific circumstances of her death, because they are very telling of her own circumstance, and of the kind of patriarchal societies in which we live, and in which women remain unprotected even to this day.

What do you think writers can learn from Cha’s work?

The very idea of what a book is made of and looks like—I think that's what Cha is constantly challenging. These days, we see a lot of books written in a fragmentary format. And back in the day, when Cha was publishing Dictee, I don't think it was as in vogue as now. Cha also incorporated elements of a range of cultures that she was exposed to or familiar with. And I'm not only talking about Korean—I'm also talking about her understanding of religious cultures, too, about different languages, as mentioned earlier. And just that generosity, that willingness to incorporate that complexity, I think is really important.

Another issue that has been really relevant for me is her usage of historical, archival materials: transcriptions of government documents, private letters, maps, objects, private objects as well. There is a tremendously flexible curiosity about the traces that people leave as they go on living their daily lives. She's rescuing these letters, these photographs, pieces of objects, maps, and even renditions of the body, of internal organs of the body—everything—just to be able to capture how complex voice is, or accent.

Dictee, in many ways, is speaking about the act of taking dictation. The act of taking dictation elicits or triggers questions about who dictates, the relationship between oral language and written language, that passage, and what the person who takes dictation is actually doing. Is this just a matter of obeying, submitting to the power of the person who dictates, or is the person who is taking dictation allowed room to actually change what he or she is receiving orally? All those questions are power‑related, and I think what Cha does in these fragmentary structures is to take each one of them very seriously, and with a language that is absolutely beautiful. It is not standard English, as you can imagine. It is an English that has been through Korean, through French, and through the disorientation between the two. And the beauty that comes out of that—those sentences and those very short sentences that create a syncopated rhythm in your reading process—I think is something that I've seldom seen achieved in such a magnificent way as Cha does. Those who are adventurous and want to read books that speak directly to migrant experiences in a complicated way—complex and complicated both—I think this book is for us now.

R.O. Kwon on Mavis Gallant

Why did you want to discuss Mavis Gallant?

She’s one of my touchstone writers. I reread this really beaten-up edition of Green Water, Green Sky all the time. I love to dip in. Her attention to language, the precision of her detail—it reminds me of something that Teju Cole said about how, when people talk about poetic prose, many often think that means flowery, ornate language. Instead, what he thinks of as poetic prose is precise prose, which I very much agree with.

And crucially, the particular reason I wanted to bring her up is because there are these journals of hers that the New Yorker excerpted maybe 15 years ago. There are supposed to be 50 years of notebooks, and the magazine’s introduction said something about how a book of the diaries will be published in 2013 or 2014. And, you know, it's now 2026, and the diaries have not appeared. So I just wanted to put that out there. Every time I've brought this up on social media, there's been a chorus of people saying, dear God, we are hungry for these diaries. I've heard that there's something going on with the estate (Gallant died in 2014), but, you know, I just... I just want to say that if there's anything we can do to encourage them, if they need someone to write an introduction, I'm here. Just please give us the diaries.

What do you hope to find in her diaries? More about her craft? Her life? Something else?

I think a combination thereof. She had this wild experience that’s covered in this selection of journals. She was living abroad, and she had just started working with some literary agent she didn't know much about. And she was destitute, because she had decided that she was going to try to make a life out of writing, period. And she just kept sending off these stories to the New Yorker and then hearing nothing. And she was hungry, she was short on food. At some point, finally, she saw that one of her stories was published in the magazine, and so she wrote to them, then the New Yorker wrote to her and said, “Dear Ms. Gallant, thank God you had occasion to write me, because you evidently have not been getting your mail from Mr. Chambrun, your supposed agent.” And so she hadn't been getting the acceptances. She hadn't been getting the checks. This fraudulent agent had been running off with her money. And as I think any writer reading this will know, just the discouragement she must have been feeling for God knows how long. And so the story—the bit of her story that we see in this diary—is utterly wild.

And then she went on to become one of the magazine’s most prolific contributors.

Exactly! I’m just glancing at this selection of her diaries, which the New Yorker titled as “The Hunger Diaries,” because they’re very literally very hungry. A line from the diary says, “Today I have no money and no food.” Can you imagine having all of this happen while there's significant money waiting for you that somebody else has taken?

What do you think writers should learn from her?

I just turned to a paragraph at random in Green Water, Green Sky, and there's this: “Flora wondered what it was like for a man to kiss her, and remembered words from men she had not loved. It was a narcissism so shameful that she opened her eyes and saw a Wishart. He was the insect enemy met in an underground tunnel, the small scratching watcher, the boneless witness of an insect universe, a tiny scuttling universe that contained her mother, the popeyed Corsican proprietor of this beach, the fleur et courants, her mother's procession, her very best, most intimate friends”—and the sentence goes on for a little bit.

There’s something that I say a lot when I'm teaching, and I think about it a lot with my own work, too. On the one hand, every story's been told, right? People fall in love, people die, we live our lives under the ongoing weight of knowing that we're going to lose everything and everyone we love. And there are the basic story structures—someone comes to town, someone leaves town, etc., people fall in love, whatever. I feel like there can often be a fear that everything's been said, and that a writer working on something has perhaps nothing to add. But it's also true—and I think you can see it in the few lines I read—that no one in the history of the world has ever looked at the world the way you have, or the way I have, or the way any individual writer has. And I think that's particularly apparent in Gallant's work. It’s evident on every single page. The more we can keep that in mind, each of us as writers, the more we can move toward what we, in particular, want to add to books and to letters and to language.

We can all stare at a pen, and we'll all see it differently. We'll all bring our very different lives to it. I was just reading this from Georgia O'Keeffe: “In a way, nobody sees a flower—really—it is so small—we haven't time—and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” We each bring our own point of view to the flower that we behold.