重音五问 I Five Questions with Angela F. Qian
大家好，我们是重音社。
“Five Questions with Friends”是我们新开设的灵魂拷问系列，在这里，我们将邀请我们认识的海外亚裔写作者们来讨（吐）论（槽）跨语言写作这个事情。这个名单越来越长啦，敬请期待，漏网之鱼也欢迎在后台和我们取得联系！
Five Questions with Angela F. Qian
Accent Society: Why do you write in English?
Qian: Not good enough to write in any other languages.
A: What did you get from your MFA, anything good, awful, or meaningful?
Q: Good: I found even the most genius minds are ordinary people and great writers are not gods. It made me think I am not worse than them (lol).
Awful: The class divide is greater than you could ever imagine. We had students whose parents worked high-up in the government economy, living in beautiful apartments alone while pretending they had to work. And we had students who used to be homeless and still walked dogs to make money. The haves keep on having, and the have-nots continue to struggle.
Meaningful: I found many friends who continue to inspire me with their hard work, creativity, and flexibility in life. If we are competitive with each other, our relationships with other creatives just push us to create more interesting things.
A: What creative medium do you work in to take a break from your writing?
Q: I make videos and sew clothes. I like to cobble things together out of scavenged and old items, “Frankenstein” dresses and video collages. Sometimes I edit my photographs to add fake movie subtitles, narrating my life. Like Borges, I like to write about creative works that I imagine, but do not have to actually execute.
A: Tell us a book/movie/play/artwork… that you have recently enjoyed.
Q: Recently I’ve enjoyed Korean writing, the short stories of Ha Seong-Nan, especially the urban decay and tense stagnation in Flowers of Mold, and the fractured novels of Han Kang, her list-like structure in The White Book.
I have been watching the 1998 anime Serial Experiments Lain thinking about what they thought the future of an Internet society would look like 20 years ago. It’s scary and more than accurate.
I’ve also been researching the career of Rei Kawakubo and her beautiful designs.
A: Share with us some gossip about your writing community.
Q: The American literary market is maybe the most conservative in the world. They are desperate for readers and want a hook from genre, identity, or preferably both. Politics sell, and doesn’t that say something about our capitalist market society? The final product to be sold is the person themselves, i.e. the artist-as-object. Still, even if you have no success right now, your whole life can change in a year if it happens for you.
INTERVIEWEE BIO
Angela F. Qian is a cross-genre writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Witness, The Common, Lit Hub, Gay, Wax Nine, Asymptote, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Hyphen, and other outlets. She is interested in exploring Internet culture, the pressures of female adolescence and beauty standards, digital intimacy and connection, and escapist fantasies. She tweets @anqchan and her website can be found at angelafqian.com. She is at work on a short story collection and a novel.
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