Labor of Love and Distance,

An Interview with Anna Qu

Barely South Review: You were 2024’s Edith and Forrest P. White Writer in Residence. How was your experience attending ODU’s 47th Annual Literary Festival?

Anna Qu: It’s been really fun. The people that you’re bringing in are spectacular. I love how diverse the list is both in terms of genre and themes but also identity. There’s a lot of diversity. I’ve enjoyed my time here, I even got some time to write in the mornings which was sort of my personal goal.

You also judged BSR’s nonfiction contest. How was that?

I was delighted by it. I’ve judged for other competitions and other literary journals before. However, I was impressed by the caliber of the submissions that we received. I got a packet of eight essays. They were all great, but when I saw Rhonda’s piece, I knew for sure that it was the piece that should win the contest.

What was it about Rhonda’s essay, “I Forgot Running”, that made it a clear winner? 

The piece knew exactly where it was going to go, and it took us on such an intense journey by the end of it I had goosebumps. Those goosebumps told me that her piece was hitting home in a way that some of the other pieces weren’t. On a craft level, I think the structure was conducive to the piece, and I could tell that she had worked on it for a long time. It was incredibly insightful, and I think that was the other thing–there was a narrative distance and insight. 

Are there any other things that you look out for when you’re reading for a contest?

On a macro level, I’m looking for structure in a standalone piece. I am also looking for the narrator’s world. For me, a memoir is about your life, but it’s also about the world that is bigger than the narrator. You should only be a character in your memoir, the world you’re creating is the environment you grew up in, the institutions and biases you faced, etc. In that sense, we’re looking to see how this world functions and how the character functions in that world. That narrative distance takes a long time to achieve, because you’re taking some of the sentimentality out of it, and you’re able to see, not only what happened to you, but how to make sense of it. Rhonda did an incredible job with that. And without that narrative distance, you can’t gain the kind of insight that you need to write a piece like the one that she did.

I understand that you worked with Rhonda on some revisions, what do you think about when you approach revising someone else’s work? 

When I talked to her, I was not at all surprised that she has a book coming out this year, because the piece held a lot of that. It showed up in a way she had wrestled with her demons and had wrestled down a book. The piece also gave us a glimpse into what that entire book is about, and the deeper story is something I felt on the page. I knew there was more to the story even though it was a standalone. Most of what I worked with her on was pacing at the end of the piece. 

I think that may be a good segue into my next question. Your book is divided into sections which, I feel, can stand alone. How did you think about Made in China: Memoir of Love and Labor while you were writing it? 

I had a collection of essays after my MFA program. I took one of those essays and turned it into Made in China. I sort of blew it out, I would say, and that was a very long process. I spent about 10 years on the whole book, and the hardest thing for me was the structure. I think structure is hard for many writers. Part of finding the structure is seeing the whole book as a single project and being able to have that narrative distance. I think for writers, sometimes, we have a hard time seeing the structure, and we can’t come to it until we come to it.

You mentioned that it took you 10 years to write Made in China. Besides structure, why did you work on it for so long? 

I think my relationship with my mother was really painful to capture on the page. After I captured it, I needed time and distance to be fair to her on the page, as a character. For the integrity of the book, I couldn’t just exist as a character, I was also the writer. I had to do her character justice. That took a long time to wrap my head around, because I had a lot of grievances. I had to work through a lot of those grievances to get to the larger story. And that larger story was that she had a difficult life, and she has the education of probably a sixth grader. When she was born, it was right after the Great Famine and she was starving for the first few years of her life. All of those things affected her psychologically and as her daughter, I was on the receiving end of her trauma. You know, most immigrants don’t come to this country without baggage. There are a lot of immigrants who don’t have time to sit around and therapize their lives. They hand it down to their children. That took a lot of time for me to acknowledge and that became part of my process. I had to see her as a character instead of my mother.

I noticed that you didn’t write about your publication history in your book. Is there a reason why you chose not to write about that experience?

That’s a great question. Yes, there is a reason I didn’t write about publishing, and I did write about the startup. The book is called Made in China: Memoir of Love and Labor and the labor part was something I worked hard on with my editor. The startup ended up making it into the book, because I was looking at what the book needed. We moved towards the startup because there was so much of the family dynamic I could link to the cycle of trauma that continues into work and labor. I started working at a very young age, and I’ve had a lot more jobs than what appears in the book, but I felt the book needed a specific labor link.  

In the memoir, you talk about how hard it was to open up with friends about your experiences growing up. Did that change for you later in life?

No, it got harder, actually. I think one of the things about assimilation is that you begin to erase your past because you are assimilating so hard. I remember wanting to talk about a lot of this stuff in college, but I recognized pretty early on that nobody wanted to hear what I had to say, so I stopped saying it. This book came as a surprise for a lot of people. Even close friends didn’t know about most of the things that happened in this book, and it wasn’t that I wanted to keep it from them, it was that I had been socialized to not talk about it.

How did you maintain your mental well-being while writing? 

That’s a great question! I talk a lot about self-care as a mentor and educator, because I do think bringing a book into this world is very depleting. We’re giving. We’re creating. That’s very extroverted. Even in graduate school, I intuitively knew this. I started painting and that was my outlet for a long time. 

Now, I do pottery. I love it. I hand build, and I throw, and it’s super gratifying. It’s tactile. And once you’re done with a piece, you have it in front of you. That immediate gratification is something that I struggle with when it comes to my writing. I often rewrite things. I may write 10 pages, but I could cut it all out the next day. There’s no linear sense of progress with writing and other forms of art balance the work for me. I also go to museums,  I walk. You need to figure out ways to heal and to give back to yourself, especially when you’re writing about trauma. You have to take care of yourself. Treat yourself as a friend.  

I understand keeping the privacy of other people, but what about privacy for yourself? What happens when you don’t want to share something? How do you manage that? 

Writing nonfiction can be very uncomfortable. It’s not for everyone. You have to be okay with being uncomfortable. You’re going to be saying things you’re uncomfortable saying, and you’re going to be exposing other people’s secrets that will make them uncomfortable—but that is part of the game. I think about the integrity of nonfiction, why we’re writing nonfiction. It takes a lot of bravery, but if you’re going to write nonfiction, you have to write all the way. You know, I don’t think you have to write about anything you don’t want to write about, but if you’re going to dig into a subject, whatever that subject is, you have to do as well as you can.