Alexander Chee is living the answer to an American question that is as elusive as it is enduring: how do we integrate political consciousness into who we are?
Chee is the bestselling author of the novels Edinburgh and Queen of the Night, as well as the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. The recipient of many prestigious writing awards, he has served as a judge for some of the publishing industry’s most recognizable book prizes and teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College. Beyond this constellation of literary stunners, it is his advocacy and generosity of spirit that moved us to name him the honoree of Guernica‘s 2022 benefit.
Community has been central to Chee’s journey as an activist and author; it is a resource, he says, that the publishing industry is still learning about. When asked what it was like to be a gay writer in the ’90s, Chee explained how his community had rallied for him: “They throw you a parade before you get to the stadium and play the game.” As an emerging writer, Chee felt supported by queer publications and anthologies, and when his debut novel launched at an Asian American Writers’ Workshop event in New York City’s Koreatown, over 200 people attended — and his books sold out. Throughout his career, Chee has been committed to advocating for and mentoring writers from marginalized communities (especially queer and AAPI writers) as well as demystifying the writing process for underrepresented communities with limited access to traditional publishing. Literary community, he explained to me when we spoke on one of the waning days of August, is about more than simply having “connections.” Community is not about access to power; rather, it is something that is actively carved out.
Chee and I sat down to discuss who and what shaped him into someone who is more than a celebrated author: a person who dwells in the duality of creativity and resistance. As we spoke, it quickly became clear that tracing the origins of political activism is a compelling narrative of its own. Chee thoughtfully named the less-visible stars in his constellation — the impactful moments of teaching and being taught — while revealing a restless commitment to self-interrogation.
– Lisa Factora-Borchers for Guernica Magazine
Guernica: Do you see yourself as a political writer? Does that term resonate with you or does it feel too narrow to encompass the breadth of your work?
Chee: You know, it’s a very American question. We have this idea of the apolitical writer that comes from the mid-twentieth century, this idea that maybe you could be a writer and never write about politics.
I tried a writing prompt with students: I asked them to imagine the political lives of their characters. Do they vote, or do they not? What is their relationship to those decisions? What party affiliation, if any, do they have? If you read a story by Mavis Gallant, for example, the politics of her characters are just there throughout and it’s not controversial. I don’t know if anyone would have dared to ask her if she’s political.
When I go to international literary events, the other writers there are never asked these kinds of questions. I think there’s something very American about that. I think about my relationship to the term: it’s certainly not the case that I write about politics per se, as a subject. But I would say that I write about power, about social class, about belonging, nationality, ethnicity. In the sense that all those things are shaped by laws, I think I end up being categorized as a political writer in America.
I’m known for activism, but something that I learned from those first moments as an activist was how to think past something like a demonstration: How do you change minds? How do you reach people? How do you generate change?
Guernica: Looking back over your career, were there particular moments that pushed you to where you are today?
Chee: I feel like my politics have been, if not consistent over the years, at least comprehensible to myself. I have had to educate myself a great deal about things like abolition or mutual aid. I have had to ask, “What is decolonization of self and others?”
One of the most powerful moments was within the last decade, when I was moving into my husband’s apartment after leaving my job at Amherst College and leaving Massachusetts. I looked at my books and started to see what I did and didn’t have in my collection, and which kinds of writers I had the most books by. What were the gaps? What kinds of holes did I see? And so then I started addressing those. I thought, okay, why don’t I have more books by Muslim authors? Why do I not have any trans poets on my bookshelf? What was the reason that I have some particular Native American authors but not a wide breadth?
One of the most intense moments for me as an emerging writer was submitting my first novel. I became aware of how much of the process of submitting a book to an editor was about locating yourself in their imagination, in terms of what they thought the world was. They were sure of what the world was, and if you didn’t fit into it the assumption they had, it wasn’t that they were wrong, but that you possibly were too minor to matter.
Guernica: In the dedication to How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, you wrote, “To my mother and father who taught me how to fight.” How do you fight?
Chee: In my father’s case, it was literal. He got me a boxing bag. Boxing gloves. He set me up with karate and tae kwon do instruction. He made wooden swords and shields for my brother and me to play with in the backyard, and also just tried to teach me lessons about defending myself. Some of them were probably more useful for, like, surviving Korea after the war or after the truce.
With my mother, it was different. She and I would have arguments. My brothers and sister would not argue with her, but I would. I was the designated fighter for my siblings. It’s still kind of like that. But I would add, my mother was a dedicated activist and taught me about the importance of long-term community commitments and how to push people along. I remember working with her on the campaign for the first returnable bottle bill in Maine; it was a very conservative approach to the environment, giving a value to the bottle that you then redeem. She would send me into the parking lot with bumper stickers to put on people’s cars. The first time she gave me them I remember saying to her, “What if they don’t want it?” She said, “Just take it off.” A decade later, we actually call that stickering.
After the law passed, we would pick up bottles and cans at the beach and she would have us turn those in and we would take the money and buy candy with it. That was our incentive, and its own lesson in taking care of your community, taking care of the environment, and having a little fun in the process.
Guernica: Was there a lesson to be learned there about community, or did you ever struggle with the long game?
Chee: Community always has a certain amount of struggle, right? Whether you’re defining and redefining the terms that you use inside of it, or how you connect to each other. Also, are you choosing to participate [in that community], or are you just being grouped together under a term?
I think of people getting caught up with “Asian American” as a descriptor, for example, where they’re like, “It doesn’t define me.” I’m always thinking of this other community that I’m a part of, where the word “gay” is like that, too. I just, you know, I get it. It doesn’t define all of you. Sure. It’s just a corner. We are all a prism, I suppose. Understanding that is part of it. That struggle is part of community; it’s not just about your comfort or convenience. That, I think, is significant.
When I say long-term commitment, I also think of my mom’s struggle as a feminist to work on things like the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights. When Roe was overturned, I called her to check in on her and a lot of my friends and family who had worked on it, because that is part of the long-term commitment: to struggle. I think, too, of choosing to be out on your CV and resume — the decision I made in the ’80s and ’90s to do that, knowing that it meant some people would have a reason that they didn’t want me to work there.
Guernica: Do you agree that there’s an intimacy inside your work? Can intimacy be an artful strategy to access political consciousness?
Chee: I’ve had that described to me a lot. People will offhandedly remark how intimate or heartfelt — or however they end up expressing it — my work feels to them. What I’m trying to do all the time is give the reader a feeling of the boundary between the story and themselves, and that boundary slipping away so that they feel immersed by or inside of the story. Do I think that that can work to help people access political consciousness? Probably. You just don’t know what’s gonna happen when you give somebody something to read.
I remember a young man telling me he read my first novel aloud, while alone in a house. And then at the end of it, he felt like he was able to have a relationship.
Guernica: Wow.
Chee: It was so intense, and he hadn’t felt that before. I was signing books at the Strand and he tells me this, and there’s a line behind him. What an incredible compliment, but it’s so much bigger than a compliment, right? Is it political for him to be in a relationship? Maybe. Depending on the relationship he wants, and his relationship to the laws, his country.
But I think it’s more about the way I teach people to think about story in the classes I teach. It’s sort of an outgrowth of an exercise that I had as an undergraduate writer. I don’t think that Annie Dillard, when she gave us an exercise, thought that it was particularly political. She said, “If you’re going to write about your hometowns, you may as well know something about them.” She had us write down what we had at our fingertips about places we grew up, but also asked us questions like, “What was the major industry? When was it founded?” And so, over the years, I’ve added to it by asking things like, “What, if any, laws were in place that affected the shaping of your community? What policies and economic conditions?”
I’m thinking of something that David Foster Wallace said in the ’80s. In an essay of his, he wrote something like, “The only time I’ve seen a normal American family is on TV.”
I often see fiction writers generating fiction that is what they imagine a story should be, and not a story they want to tell. They’re creating this thing that’s populated, usually, with white characters who are not described as white specifically. No ethnicity is mentioned. Typically they’re in the suburbs. It’s sort of like a central-casting kind of cliche or arrangement of cliches. A lot of what I then have to do is get a writer to start giving up that sort of writing, to start thinking about what it would mean for them to write something that they actually wanted to describe.
Guernica: Telling a story to replicate what you think a story should be versus what it actually is you want to write — I see that a lot in nonfiction. There’s a similar emphasis on making sure that the narrative arc is there and “properly” filled in. I think satisfying endings are American, as if the closure of messiness is a closure at all.
Chee: While researching historical fiction, I came across a scholar, William Dean Howells, who was working to establish the idea that American realism was our national literary mode and to tie American realism to an idea of westward expansion. I had always been a little skeptical of America’s commitment to realism as a literary mode, given that so much of our politics doesn’t seem to be able to handle a real accounting.
Part of my frustration with American realism, by the time I was a writer in the 1990s, was the way, it seemed to me, that American realism functioned as a kind of PR for the status quo, a way of keeping you from the real instead of admitting it or encountering it. An explosion in the popularity of YA, of the graphic novel, comics, graphic memoir, seemed to be about the way readers felt like they were not getting what they wanted from realist literary fiction.
And then, with the rise of speculative fiction, and dystopian sci-fi in particular, that became a way of experiencing what people were feeling about America’s commitment to a fatal status quo, right? Which felt nihilistic. This idea that economic growth is more important than human life.
Guernica: You are the 2022 editor for Best American Essays. What do you understand about the American essay at this point in history?
Chee: If I see anything promising in the American essay at this point in history, I see writers moving to write about whatever they want — and not just about the circumstances of their identity, but also, at the same time, exploring what that means to them. I think people are doing a lot of really powerful writing right now. We’re having the appearance of a literature that is not like what we’ve had before, across genres. And that’s just really exciting to me.
Guernica: What drives you now as a teacher, mentor, and advocate?
Chee: I’m trying to teach less. [laughs] And to mentor myself more, or to seek out other mentors for myself, too.
Guernica: What does that mean, to mentor yourself?
Chee: I’ve been thinking about what it means, that someone can get stranded on a path that, from the outside, looks like everything is fine, everything’s all figured out — but on the inside, they feel stuck and without the resources, or just too embarrassed to even ask anybody for what they need.
I’m thinking about that as a part of the kinds of mentoring that I’m doing. Also, how do I invite mentorship at this point from the people that I still want to learn from? A friend reached out to me recently. She said, “I just wanted to know if Alex Chee has an Alex Chee and if not, I would like to be that person for you,” which was such a lovely invitation to connection and conversation. I hope to keep being open to that.
