Liwen Xu’s story “In the End” was published in The Offing’s Fiction department. Fiction Editor Mary Pappalardo conducted the Q&A.
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Mary Pappalardo: I want to ask you about the conception of heaven in this story; the narrator mentions these assumed ideas about heaven, about “golden gates or a castle in the clouds,” but the heaven in this story seems neutral, like the absence of negatives, rather than the abundance of positives. Could you talk about that vision and its place in this story?
Liwen Xu: I went to church growing up, and I was always told that Heaven is the ultimate place you wanted to end up, to be reunited with the Christian God. In Greek mythology, there’s a similar idea with 3 afterlives— Elysium, Asphodel Meadows, and Tartarus. Elysium is paradise, while Asphodel Meadows is where most other mortals ended up. However, I wanted to explore the concept of “what really happens when you get to Heaven?” In theory, all earthly desires are supposed to be gone, as well as all woes. But a high school teacher once told me that, actually, as long as you end up in Elysium or Asphodel Meadows, you’ll just be aimlessly wandering.
In the version of Heaven that I explore, I wanted to get at that — that joy in Heaven isn’t necessarily felt the same way as on Earth, and those who enter Heaven wander in it rather than actively fulfill their joys. Even happiness and sadness is felt differently. I also wanted to explore the idea of people’s pain being taken away upon entering Heaven — that joy and pain may be intertwined, that what you may want to forget may be tied to what you want to remember.
MP: There’s such a strong current in this story of women navigating their embodied existence and how that relates to sexuality and also to faith and spirituality. It was one of the things that drew me most to the story, and I wondered if you could say more about those interconnected ideas?
LX: A lot of people see sexuality as the opposite of faith and spirituality. But in many ways, they’re like yin and yang — the body and the soul. The body can often be coded as seduction and sin while the soul is supposedly innocent and good and pure. I think that these concepts are actually more connected than many people would think.
I really wanted to focus on this idea of being raised Christian, with the ideals of wanting to be “pure,” but at the same time discovering your body in adolescence, your sexuality, and your desire. There’s sometimes a conflict here, where sexuality may feel taboo. But before this idea of what’s “allowed” and what’s “not allowed” as dictated by religion, there’s this curiosity that stems from childhood, of how “this is my body changing,” and “I’m seeing my body differently,” and “I have these desires.” That’s what I wanted to capture in the main character — this curiosity and exploration of the body, and balancing that with the faith that she still wrestles with, to fit into her ideals.
Long story short, because there’s oftentimes shame associated with sexuality in religious upbringings, I wanted to tell the story of a girl who was curious about her sexuality despite it.
MP: For how prevalent God (who is coded as masculine) is in the story as an actual character, it is striking to me how much of a female-dominated story this is; there’s almost a lack of male characters, except “off-screen” if you will. Was that a conscious choice, or was that something that shook out of exploring these topics within a mother-daughter relationship?
LX: I actually saw this story as one that centers the mother-daughter relationship rather than centering God. Despite God’s prevalence, this story was meant to focus on two women in his domain, with that relationship taking center stage.
Something that I found interesting was that in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, God in the end wasn’t necessarily deemed a white man, but could be anyone, in any body, including a black woman.
But in this story, I did make God out to be a man, because I wanted to explore a more traditional view, and to suggest that the Bible’s version of God and Heaven wasn’t necessarily all correct and perfect. To do so, I centered this relationship between a mother and daughter who had their own “sins,” how they navigated their relationship with their respective Gods, and how that surfaced in their afterlives. The lack of male characters was a result of that.
MP: Speaking of mothers and daughters, the push and pull between the narrator and her mother in this story is achingly written and felt. What drew you to writing about that kind of complex relationship?
LX: If you talk to me about my writing, or read some of my other work, you’ll quickly realize that I’m almost always writing about mothers and daughters. I’m fascinated by these relationships because of my own mother, and how complex mother-daughter relationships can be — mothers and daughters can hold so much love for each other and yet misunderstand each other completely. There could be generational and cultural divides that leave them estranged and unexpected moments bringing them together. These times of friction and glimpses of warmth, the push and pull of such relationships, is what draws me to write them over and over.
My own mother was an immigrant to America, and though the immigrant story is one heard often, digging into the details is what makes each story unique. I found that my mother’s witty responses came from her own mother as well as bartering at food stalls, and her love of riding bikes came from the years of riding her bike through the streets of Beijing. Her hands were weathered because of her early years supporting my father, washing dishes that piled higher with each hour at the small Hunan restaurant she worked at where they landed. I’ve had many disagreements with her because we just had such different life experiences, and different perspectives as a result. But when we came together was when we told each other our stories, and showed each other where we came from. Or even when she’d cook me a homemade meal as an apology. Moments like these are threaded through my stories, and to me, they are the gold thread glinting in my fiction. In some ways, I’m always writing for my parents, towards my mother.
MP: Moving into a more writing life question, I know you’re a fiction editor at The Rumpus and I wondered if you could talk about how your work as a writer and your work as an editor inform each other. Do you ever find yourself having to deliberately take off one hat and put on the other, or do the two coexist harmoniously?
LX: I love this question — when I first became an editor, I wanted to do it so that I could learn more about the editorial process at literary magazines and connect that process with the writers on the other side. For me, the two roles coexist harmoniously. This is because being an editor at an online literary magazine has taught me that stories that get published in literary magazines are oftentimes immediately engaging in some way, but by no means are the only kinds of stories worth publishing. And reading and editing others’ work has taught me how to identify and find ways to fill what’s missing in a story. It’s also helped me engage writers and editors more immediately, which can often be done by voice, premise, or any variety of ways.
In other words, you can write any kind of story that you want, and even if you don’t feel like it’s literary magazine material, there might be an editor who loves it and wants to see it published. Not everything you read from a literary magazine is indicative of what they’d publish — most magazines are actually looking for something they’ve never seen before.
MP: Finally, I always like to ask our authors what they’ve been reading lately that’s especially excited, challenged, thrilled, or otherwise delighted them!
LX: I recently read Night Parade by Jami Nakamura Lin, which is this incredibly intricate and emotionally fused speculative memoir. The stories entwine Lin’s memories and experiences with the legends of yōkai, Japanese demons and spirits. What I loved about this book is how her stories so closely encapsulate a bold, unapologetic girlhood, one where time bends and slows, where she felt the most alive in music, and where she yearned to escape her body, analogous to how certain yōkai appear to humans. How visceral this girlhood is — I felt that it could’ve been my own, despite our different experiences. And each story starts with a striking, haunting illustration of these yōkai by Lin’s sister, Cori.
I was especially touched by the bonding between doctor father and daughter with undiagnosed bipolar disorder. This telling lit up Lin’s experiences with her disorder, where she’s living in the very future she once imagined she couldn’t have—so many moments brought tears to my eyes. And the trajectory of illness and recovery was explored in a way that was incredibly unique, both narratively and genre-wise. Night Parade is such an endlessly creative book, where it’s easy to see folk tales in all the memories Lin brought forth.
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