Question: Last year you published Shanghailanders your debut novel, how have you felt making the transition from editor to author?

Answer: “Being a debut author is just absolutely thrilling because it’s been my lifelong dream to be a writer and to be a published author. It’s taken a while, I’ve had setbacks and failures, but it just makes this moment, I guess, that much more sweet.

“I think also, being a debut author, you come in with a lot of expectations or hopes or misconceptions about the publishing industry but when you actually step foot in it and are encountered with different realities of  publishing and marketing and selling a book and everything it’s a very educational experience as well. There are even so many jobs involved in publishing a book that I didn’t even know existed. So, yeah, it’s been really eye opening.”

Q: How have you felt about the response to your book?

A: “Yeah I have been really happy with the critical reception and its really lovely to hear from readers, it’s been really funny also because the family of the novel is a really particular family, they are French, Japanese, Chinese, multi-lingual and the girls go to boarding school and then college in the US and I remember on book tour I met someone who basically confessed to me ‘Hey Juli, this family is basically me, I’m French and Chinese and I went to this boarding school and I speak this language. So, even though I felt like I was writing this very unique and strange family chemistry, this mixture of elements, that actually it does exist in real life which was so uncanny to me.”

Q: In terms of the family, what were your inspirations for writing their character?

A: “The original concept, the seed of the book was that I wanted to capture some elements of Shanghai, I wanted to capture some things that I felt were true about contemporary Shanghai. So, I wanted to capture the speed at which the city changes and the pace at which the people move, and the generations change – how history changes in that city – so I know that I wanted there to be a chapter or a scene of something going very fast.

“Then with Kiko, for example, I wanted to also capture the incredible sexiness and seductive quality of Shanghai, the way that East meets West in terms of influences and the way that sex sells, and Shanghai is an incredibly commercial city as well so, Kiko finds herself in these interesting situations where she’s dealing with the forces of capitalism and sex and influence and also wanting to stand out in a crowd. I feel like those are also very Shanghai elements that I wanted to capture.

“Shanghai also has a very long history with foreigners and foreign powers, and foreign relationships, so creating a mixed family in Shanghai that also captures those different elements. France and Japan were countries that had colonial presences in Shanghai historically, and so creating those different power dynamics between the family and their different uses of language even was something I wanted to map onto the city in that way, in the way that history is also mapped onto the city.”

Q: Your book contains some really strong female characters who are also realistically flawed. Do you feel your books accurately paints a picture of the female experience and of human nature in general?

A: “What I was really interested in was the idea of change, what changes over time? What changes for women over time? What’s changed for the women in this generation, like the three generations of these women who have difficult, interesting and complex relationships with men, with beauty, with their own sense of agency. I think that in some ways in a lot has changed for women and nothing has changed for women.

“Some people ask me ‘Why did you set a book in the future, but it’s not that different?’ I think one thing that I wanted to capture with the book in terms of the future but also in terms of exploring women through generations is the notion that things change drastically and super-fast but also they sometimes they don’t change and sometimes change is very subtle and takes generations and so there is a way in which our exception of change and of what the future will look like sometimes has to be confronted with reality and it’s sometimes not as flashy or beautiful as we expect it to be.

“I think that the women in the book, they have different degrees of loudness, there’s some quiet women, more passive women, more aggressive women and I think that I wanted to show the varieties of inheritance and influence as well. Like what does Eko gain from her mother? What do the girls gain from their grandmother? How can you see different versions of themselves in their ancestry but also people are just different, you cannot be the same as your mother or your grandmother. Even in one family three sisters can just be so different and I think that is just true of genetics and people. So sometimes you can trace things back and sometimes people are just born their spectacular singular selves.”

Q: Have you ever taken inspiration from your own family and incorporated it into the book?

A: “Yeah, I have a sister. I don’t have two sisters, but I have one sister, and I know how deep the relationship is when you have two girls who are constantly together, constantly talking, constantly compared and who go through life as a team, it’s a beautiful relationship, but it can also be very complicated, you know, sisters fight.

“There are all kinds of pressures of being a woman and coming into young adulthood and becoming your own self and finding your own sense of beauty and worth and differentiating yourself between sisters. I think all of that stuff is stuff that I experienced and of course a lot of it is very traumatic and fictional so I can’t relate to everything, but I have known some complicated men and had some difficult men in my life for sure.

“So, yeah, I think there are some people that probably have influenced the book, but I can also say that there’s a little bit of me in each of the characters, I think that is probably more true than the reverse. I think I have some of Leo’s anxieties about the future and I think I have Kiko’s love of performing arts, I love the theatre and performing (not necessarily myself but I appreciate that world) and in some ways I am a very quiet person and so I think that I can see different elements of myself in every character.”

Q: What would your advice be to young women who are also going through the challenges of growing up and exploring their sexualities and identities, falling in love and navigating through life

A: “I think on one hand, maybe like Echo there is nothing to say, everyone has to go through it. Everyone has to go through heartbreak, everyone has to go through difficulty, everyone makes mistakes.

“I’d say be safe, take care of yourself. Even as a mother, I have one daughter and one son, there is nothing in the world that I would want more than to keep my daughter safe and healthy and to make sure she doesn’t make any disastrous mistakes, but I think one thing that you learn, especially as a mother is that you can’t keep them. You can’t protect them, they have to live their own life, make their own choices and make their mistakes.

“If there’s a lesson that could be taken away from the novel it’s probably to communicate more, just try to be honest and open and talk about your experiences with your daughters, talk about your expectations with your partners, communication is key.

“Especially being open and honest about what it means to be a woman, what it means to go through things like heartbreak, loss, miscarriage and abortion, things that are so common, I think it is so important for young women to know that everyone goes through it too and that they are not alone.”

Q: Is that something you were intending to do, to break through societal taboos and stigmas?

A: “It definitely wasn’t something that I was intending to do, I don’t have those grand plans when writing but I think that when you write about young women, who are on the precipice of adulthood and who are exploring sexuality and themselves as women, and when you want to write about generational themes and relationships, I think that it can be very natural to talk about those things.

“The book is very much about secrets and miscommunications so I think a lot of those things can be things that people hold close.”

Q: What is your advice to aspiring authors and editors who wish to break into the publishing sphere?

A: “I would say that it is important to find the right partners so even once you write something that you feel happy with and you feel proud of, making sure that you take the time to make sure you find the right literary agent to help represent you and stand up for you in the face of different demands and to not rush into things.

“In my career, because I have been writing for a long time, I have switched agents and experienced different forms of representation and different relationships, and I do think that it is really important to put yourself forward and want to move forward but also to hold yourself in esteem and to make sure that you make the right choice for you and not rush into anything just because it is there.

“Like any relationship really, just don’t settle. Know your worth, know what you need and also just keep at it, I know it is so tough but keep writing and keep putting in the hours and don’t give up.”

Q: Circling back to your writer’s journey, what brought you to this point, as you have a long history in the industry?

A: “I wrote a book when I was 25 and I had an agent and I tried to sell it, but it didn’t sell, no one picked it up and so there was that early disappointment.

“Also, It was book of non-fiction and at 25 you think you are hot stuff, and you think if you sign with an agent everything is going to be great but for a few years after that I tried to figure out what I wanted and had to self-reflect and think  ‘oh, how can I grow and be better and write the best that I can?’ So, after that disappointment I decided to do an MFA programme in creative writing and fiction and that was a great experience, just taking a few years to study a craft and explore my own voice and think about different styles. So, that was incredibly helpful and then it was coming out of the MFA programme that I wrote and finished this book. I wrote maybe half of it during the programme and then I finished it, and I found a new agent and then basically found my publishers after that.

Q: Would you say that you learnt a lot from your first experience with publishing?

A: “Yeah, I think it was incredibly validating because my whole life I wanted to write and coming out of college I was working a job, writing on the side, not knowing if I could ever get anyone’s attention with writing, so the fact that I could find someone who believed in me was a really validating and essential first step for me to find out I could potentially be a writer one day.

“Of course, it didn’t work out so that’s another blow, another small step back but I think when you have that kind of disappointment you can either give up or try harder and that sort of depends on how delusional you are and how much you really want it. So I just tried harder, and I tried to be honest with myself and think about where I needed to grow and just learn. So I tried to take a step back and take a more educational approach to my writing and to not to think of it as this calling or this thing that I can sit down and do and be good at. It’s a craft and I want to study it more and learn from mentors and systematically get better. I think it can be done and it was really helpful to me.”

Q: What was your first book about?

“That book was actually a memoir. I spent a year living in Seoul training to be a K Pop singer and so it was basically a memoir about that year, my experience being a trainee and an inside look into that world, what it meant and what it did to me. So yeah, it was basically about that but when publishers looked at it, I think they saw someone who wasn’t famous, and it was around that time that BTS had not come out, so they were kind of like ‘what is K Pop? It’s gone’. So that’s what it was about.

Q: Would you say that your experience with K Pop also inspired Kiko’s character?

A: “Yeah! For sure! Yeah, so you connected the dots. Yeah, I mean, I actually fell into it, it was not something that I wanted to do I just happened to meet someone. I always loved to sing, and I sang jazz acapella in college, so I was musician for sure, but I wasn’t interested in becoming a pop performer but seeing that world and how there are still incredible pressures on women to be open to being manipulated in certain ways by those higher up. You know, there was one point where I was taken, not against my will but I had no idea where we were going, and then we ended up at a plastic surgery clinic where they basically had a consultation about what I would need to change before debuting it never got that far but you know basically I was just this product to them, they weren’t like: ‘hey Juli, do you wanna go for a ride to the clinic and get a consultation?’ They were like: ‘Get in the car, it’s time to go somewhere,’ and they just kind of talk about you. So, it’s this experience of being seen as not really a person, just a product, and so definitely knowing some of those things about the entertainment industry and some of those realities and talking to other people who really wanted that so badly in that one year I was doing probably informed Kiko.”

Q: So you wrote the book back to front in terms of the timeline, which I thought was really original, what was your deciding factor for that? Why did you decide to give the characters a beginning instead of an ending?

A: “There were a few reasons. One was I wanted the reader to constantly be surprised by the characters and when there’s this slow dissolution of a family but there’s not really like major breaks, you know, there’s not say Leo cheated on Eko with his secretary and then she was like ‘No. No more,’ and then there’s this big drama. It’s kind of this slow process of a marriage potentially just changing and things changing but I didn’t want to create a break, I wanted them to still be trying. So, I think with this kind of story where there isn’t this dramatic break, the story becomes about why and how and who they are. So I think that [allows the readers to] peel back the layers and also, I think because when a family is together for so long, you know for 20, 30 years, when you’re with someone you change as an organism. So for me what was interesting was to find out who they were as individuals outside of that. Taking them away from those years and years of relationships and influence and figuring out who were they before everything and I think it’s complicated because it’s hard to know anyone and everyone is so complicated there’s not really straight lines that tell you you are this way because of this thing. I don’t believe that but yeah, I wanted to slowly peel them away from their family and figure out who they were.

“I think also ending it on their wedding day preserves a little sense of hope for them as a couple because I think that those moments of hope and love still, despite what happens in a long relationship of decades, I think those moments can still feel as relevant and as present as everyday life, they can shine through and sort of pull characters together into the future. Even though it is a little bit ambivalent I still wanted the beauty of a wedding day to be a lasting note for the reader as well as for the couple.”

“I think sometimes you don’t really know what brings two people together, it’s kind of like what do they need from each other? What did they need from each other in the beginning and how did that change but also kind of still remain elementally the same. Why are you attracted to this kind of person? And they are kind of hot. I think they are hot people. I think someone said to me ‘Juli why are all your character’s hot? Even the driver’s hot.’ I was like ‘Yeah, maybe that is a crutch that I was leaning on’, I don’t know. I am very interested in beauty and power, so, beauty is a kind of power, it’s a kind of charm, it’s a kind of attraction that a person can have to another person or in a group and so I was interested in that in general thematically but yeah, it’s a very pretty cast.”

Q: I saw in a previous interview that you mentioned you were going to write in a character who was originally the keeper of cats in Shanghai, could you tell me more about that?

A: “So I had a character who was actually kicked out of his house, and he had some issues, but he saw himself as the protecter and the caretaker of Shanghai’s homeless cats, you know the stray cats, and so there are so many, and I don’t know if it’s a problem, but they’re everywhere and there are some people who do take care of them. You know, I was very much interested in people who are outside a sense of home, like the word Shanghailander is historically a term for a British foreigner who has lived in Shanghai for one year, one month, one day, one hour, one second, so that’s when you’re a Shanghailander. So all the characters are in a way homeless or without some sense of roots and so when I was writing different characters and trying them out and trying to figure out their relationships he was one character that was a very obvious metaphor for this. But I didn’t want to write a book that was just about the crazy rich Shanghainese because it’s not that I could capture every single point on the social stratus, but I did want to make sure that within a family that is so privileged we could also see the support system and that support system is not only the nanny and the driver and the grandma sometimes but even the guy in the park keeping things clean with the cats. So there was that character initially, but his story goes a bit off the rails, so a lot of people were like ‘yeah, better to take this out.’”

Q: With Shanghailanders as the title, obviously, as you have said, there is this overarching theme of homelessness and a lack of roots, as the characters are kind of living everywhere so it showcases the expat experience. I.e., even though they were born and raised in Shanghai the Yangs have so many different identities and even the driver’s character just doesn’t feel at home anywhere except in the car and his house is being destroyed. He also doesn’t like living with his girlfriend, he has this need to leave so he is constantly in the car which is probably the only home he identifies with. So, I think this theme of being in transit and between places shines through as you have said you wanted to capture the speed of Shanghai but how would you say this is based off your own experiences as you went to school in Boston as well and are living in Shanghai as well currently, so how would you say your experiences went into that transitory, half-and-half experience of these characters and why did you choose it as one of the key themes?

A: “Yeah, you know, I think this is a theme that I am interested in and one of the only experiences that I can truly know because I was born in Korea and then I grew up in the US and even within the US I went to a different elementary school, then I switched to a different middle school and then was at a boarding school and so I was always moving around even when I was in the US and then I spent some time in Korea and went back and forth a couple times in primary school and so there was a way in which I was always ping-ponging between the East and the West and of course even being Korean-American your identity is hyphenated and you are two things at once. So, I guess personally I just know that experience, even though I am not these girls, and I don’t have their experience, I do have the experience of being between places and between identities. Then I married a Shanghainese man, and our kids are half Chinese, half Korean living in Shanghai, and I see the way that they, I mean they’re little kids, but I see the way in which for them they’re Asian, growing up in Asia, identity is not this complex thing as it was for me growing up and being a minority in America. So, even though they are of mixed identity and place, they have a different and potentially simpler sense of self and so I’ve seen with different friends and different people there are so many different variations of identity, there are different ways in which you can have a relationship with who you are based on where you grew up and the people you see around you and the amount of money that you have and all those things impact your level of self-confidence and whether you feel you belong or not.

“Someone once asked me what’s the benefit of raising your kids like this [abroad] and I think one of the benefits is actually just feeling very comfortable in many different places and also just having more options for home or even just having more options for a partner. If you live in a place for a long time, if you grow up in one place you have the values and aesthetic tastes or even the romantic tastes of that place and then you go to another place and you’re like ‘Oh! Southeast Asian men can be beautiful.’ Or Middle Eastern men or whatever and so there are all these ways in which being in a place changes you and your sensibilities and enlarges your possibilities but yeah it kind of leaves you a little bit confused too.”

Q:  In terms of your experience studying in the US, do you feel you had a similar experience to Yumi or Yoko in terms of the relationships with people? Even Yoko felt quite alienated at times in the book, so I was wondering if you experienced that?

A: “I don’t think I felt that in that way. I always felt primarily American culturally so going to high school and college in the US felt very natural and I don’t think I had the sense of superiority that the girls have being from Asia and seeing Asian-Americans and how they talk or what people think about Asia and feeling like they are kind of authorities in a sense. I never felt that way. I mean the girls are kind of brats so hopefully I wasn’t like that.”

Q: Even though you wrote characters that are quite rare, I still think a lot of people can find themselves in your book, so I think you have made something really special. How does it feel to give people that?

A: “That’s the best feeling. I mean when someone reads your book, when you have a smart reader who understands your intention and can tell you about your book and what it means in articulate and insightful ways, that is the absolute dream. To have readers who understand the project. It’s a beautiful thing to give people a story and it’s so rewarding to feel understood sometimes and so I’ve been really lucky in that sense. Of course there are people who don’t get it but that’s fine, everyone is different.”

Q: Do you, as the author, feel seen when people have read your book and understood it?

A: “I think yeah, and I think that happens a lot with writers and especially writers who write characters with backgrounds that are similar to them. I mean if I wrote a book that was completely from Leo’s perspective people probably would not see me or ask me the questions of ‘Where are you in the book? What from your life did you take for the book?’ But yeah, that’s like part and parcel of being an author in the world and I’m cool with it, you know because I think readers have the right and the freedom to think whatever they want to think about the book and use their imaginations to wonder about me or see me. I think that is totally fine and I do that too as a reader.

“I had this thought recently, I was on a panel about motherhood in another literary festival last year and I was really grappling with the question of could I have written this book, which is in so many ways about motherhood without having become a mother? I think I probably would have written a different book. I don’t think I would have had the same ideas, thoughts and feelings about motherhood without having been a mother and so that really became an existential question for me as a writer. I have always believed that a writer can imagine their way through any experience, through any gender. As a fiction writer I have the right to and ability to do that but really thinking about motherhood on this panel I was moderating and thinking about my experience writing a book which is in so many ways about motherhood I took a step back and really really tried to do this thought experiment, like could I have written this book? That was really startling for me to think that wow I probably couldn’t have produced this book which kind of rocked my world. That’s not to say I still won’t write a male character, I still will. It’s just everything is so different, every human experience is so hard to know and it’s just a fascinating thing to try to do, to write fiction, it’s a challenge and I think there is a reason why writers take from their lives often and I certainly have.”

Q: How would you say your experience with motherhood has also influenced your novel?

A: “I would say that being a mother and then being a mother to children who have a grandmother has really made me think in new ways about motherhood and has even made me think about my own childhood and been like ‘Oh yeah, that’s why my own mother was doing that.’ Or ‘That’s what it meant for her,’ or ‘That’s why she needed a break.’ I kind of understand these things and see my life and my childhood in a new light and I think that motherhood is incredibly hard and complicated and everything that comes with it. I also have to say I feel very lucky to be a mother in Shanghai where we live with my mother-in-law who helps a lot and who is lovely, and we have affordable help. There’s a way in which in China there is a village mentality to raising children which I think is basically gone and doesn’t exist in the West where there is this nuclear family which basically means mom does everything. So, I mean, really that’s the only reason why I was able to keep writing and to be able to finish the book in two and a half years while raising young kids. It’s because of the village. So, I feel in every culture and every place, the experience of motherhood is also different, and I feel very lucky to be raising young children in Shanghai.”

Q: Do you love it in Shanghai?

A: “I do love it, yeah. I feel I have had so many different experiences in Shanghai. My husband and I we partied a lot when we first got there, we had a great time, and we were exploring all the time. It was just the two of us. Then of course you have kids, and you start to do the whole school hunt. There’s all these different lives I feel like I’ve lead in Shanghai, which maybe leads to the schizophrenic nature of the book. Yeah, I feel like I have really experienced a lot of Shanghai and the different kinds of expats. You know, when you’re young and kind of hanging out with the English teachers and there’s the different kind of expat crowd and then as you get older there’s another kind of expat crowd, its interesting.”

Q: In terms of writing plans in the future, what are your plans? Do you have anything else you are currently working on?

A: “Yeah. I am in the middle of drafting my next novel which is set in New York Cities in the early aughts. The main character is a theatre actress, and I guess I can say it’s about the mythologies of New York and also the challenges of being a young twenty-something trying to make it in that nightmare of a city, which is also such a beautiful place, and I love it and I miss it.

“I grew up right across the river from New York, so I was always going into New York as a kid but yeah it’s a wonderful place but it’s also a hard place to live and it’s a hard place to be young and striving.”