A MELUS interview: Diana Chang.

Diana Chang is a native New Yorker, but she spent her early childhood in China, raised by her Eurasian mother and Chinese father. She returned to New York, where she attended high school and then Barnard College. After graduation, she worked full-time as an editor in book publishing. She lives presently in Manhattan and Water Mill, Long Island, New York.

Of herself Diana Chang says:

"I feel I'm an American writer whose background is Chinese. The

source of my first and fourth novels was Chinese but exoticism

can stand in the way of the universal that I strive for in my

themes. Therefore, since I write fiction in English and am living

my life in the United States of America, I've often subsumed

aspects of my background in the interest of other truths and

recognitions. I believe an abiding interest in character and

emotion informs all my work, not only because the relationships,

situations, and problems I write about arise out of the character

of my protagonists, out of their personalities, but also because I

seem preoccupied a lot with identity, with selfness."

In a poem called "Allegories," Diana Chang expresses one of the dominant themes in Asian American writing as well as in her own: the urge to relocate, to reshape the self. As a child, she says in the poem, she was translated from one culture to another, misplaced and found again. That re-discovery of the self is very important for Chinese-American writers, she believes. Reading through her work, one can see in Diana Chang an Americanization modified by memories of a distant but potent Chinese past. The tensions between these memories and her daily reality in a drastically different culture and language have created complex and rich fields of reference in Diana Chang, and perhaps have permitted her to transcend the limitations often associated with ethnic literature.

She is the author of six novels: The Frontiers of Love, (1956, 1994), A Woman of Thirty (1959), A Passion for Life (1961), The Only Game in Town (1963), Eye to Eye (1974), and A Perfect Love (1978). Her three volumes of poetry are The Horizon is Definitely Speaking (1982), What Matisse is After (1984), and Earth Water Light (1991).

The Frontiers of Love, originally published by Random House, was reissued in the spring of 1994 by the University of Washington Press in a softcover trade edition, with a new introduction by Shirley Geok-lin Lim.

Most of this interview was conducted before an audience at the Hatch-Billops Archive in the Soho district of New York City.

Interviewer: Let's begin, Diana, with a general question to establish some necessary distinctions. How is being Chinese-American any different from being African American or Spanish-American?

Diana Chang: From time to time I ponder that question. It's a little hard for me to answer because, obviously, I have never been Chicano or Latino. I don't know their culture, nor have I read much about it. However, I feel very close to African Americans, and I've read everybody from Toni Morrison to Ralph Ellison to John Williams to Wesley Brown John and Wesley are friends of mine). African Americans are Americans who seem to me have contributed so much to this culture, politically and artistically, in every sphere. They've exercised the Constitution for all of us. In fighting for their own rights, they have fought for everyone else's, including mine.

Being a Chinese-American woman is an elusive identity and a confusing one, even to myself. I feel that I am a minority person, but as a writer I know that sometimes I don't write "ethnic" work, that often my imagination takes me to other situations, themes and voices. My imagination frequently doesn't seem to belong to me. Rather, I belong to it and wherever it takes me, I go.

People tend to see "Chinese-American" as a single category, but of course, like everyone else, we are different from one another. There are many kinds of Chinese-Americans--first generation, naturalized ones like my father, eighth generation ones who have never been to China, Eurasians like my mother born in this country, etc., etc. You might say that I am second generation because my father was first. On the other hand, because my mother was brought up here, I'm really third generation. So I have this kind of lopsided identity.

Interviewer: I wouldn't have asked that question had I not come across a remark of yours in a short story called "Falling Free." The story is about an elderly Chinese-American woman whose husband leaves her in order to return to China for good. You write: "All of us are Chinese some of the time." When are you Chinese?

Diana Chang: I was trying to say that all of us are human and that we are each one another. That was a way of saying it. Sometimes one doesn't remember why one says such a thing. I have a similar line in one of my poems. But when am I Chinese? How am I Chinese? My problem is not that I feel inadequate as an American, but I often do feel inadequate as a Chinese. I've written a short story apropos of this published by Calyx Books in an anthology, The Forbidden Stitch. It's called "The Oriental Contingent" and is about two Chinese-American women who meet, each trying to hide from the other that she feels inadequate as a Chinese, not as an American. Now this is a problem which I think hasn't been written about at all so I undertook to explore it a bit in this story.

Interviewer: If all of us are Chinese some of the time, when is Jim Hatch [co-director of the Archive] Chinese?

Diana Chang: When he is charming and sweet, of course, which is all of the time! The world, I think, is slowly turning Chinese. The more crowded it gets, the more Chinese it will become. The Chinese know how to live among masses of people. They know how to give others privacy under these conditions. The Chinese also do the opposite. Every Chinese, in a sense, is a born concierge. But the Chinese have a certain courage. As Paul Tillich, the philosopher and theologian, has said, there are two kinds of courage in this world. One is the courage to be yourself, as an individual. The West has that, but there's the other kind of courage--the courage to be part of something larger. I think the Chinese have the courage to be part of a tradition. I'm saying this in an intuitive way. I'm not a scholar so I won't attempt to back up any of this.

Interviewer: Where does that courage come from?

Diana Chang: I suppose from the family structure. Throughout the centuries, China never had a central government. If you didn't stick to the family or the clan, you had no protection against the world, no security at all. China, as you know, is a country made up of clans--perhaps accounting for the fact that there are only about a hundred surnames in China, a fact that always surprises Westerners. If you look through a Shanghai phone book, you will see pages upon pages of Changs or Chens or Wangs. It is the given name that is distinctive.

Interviewer: When you started on your career, there was no existing tradition among Chinese-Americans of women writing. Did that absence make it easier or harder for you to explore the interface of your two cultures in your first novel, The Frontiers of Love?

Diana Chang: When I wrote it, I didn't realize that I was writing a Chinese-American novel. Gropingly, I was merely trying to write something that I hoped would turn out to be a novel. Not having precedents? Well, I felt that I had many precedents. There were novels all over the world. I wrote this novel because I was full of feeling striving to become form.

I knew nothing about form. I started the novel as a linear sort of thing--the identity problem of a young woman who happened to be Eurasian rather than, say, an American from Wyoming. However, I didn't want it to be the story of a single Eurasian woman. So I explored the Eurasian problem in and through three main characters in order to get a variety of Eurasian identities and responses. The novel is set in pre-Communist Shanghai, once a "Eurasian" city that had been parceled off in a way that humiliated China. There was an International Settlement, a French Concession, etc. It seemed to me that Shanghai was a perfect metaphor for the problems of the three Eurasians in my novel.

Let me tell you about these Eurasians. When Frontiers came out, it was picked up by the emerging ethnic movement as a book about ethnicity in this country. Of course, that was a total misrepresentation--it wasn't--it was about people of mixed blood living in China, with conflicts in culture, emotions, values and the rest of it because of their parents.

I am so happy that Shirley Lim's introduction to the University of Washington Press's reissue of The Frontiers of Love straightens out this misconception and, among other things, puts my novel in its historical context.

In the case of one of my characters, Feng, his mother is English, his father a Chinese who has left the family. Feng is emotionally very torn by his dependent, somewhat disturbed mother and, in his not knowing what he is, in his amorphousness, he decides to fling himself bodily into the Communist cause which is trickling down from the north. What he is doing, perhaps unconsciously at some levels, is searching for a way to become more Chinese, to be totally Chinese, to deny the English aspect of himself, and thereby to be less conflicted.

Another Eurasian is named Mimi Lambert. Her father was an Australian adventurer, and her mother Chinese, both of whom have died before the beginning of the book. Orphaned, Mimi is being raised by her Chinese aunt, an upper-class woman, very cosmopolitan in style, but whose spirit is Chinese. To simplify and not give away the story, when her Swiss lover refuses to marry her, rejecting her because she is Eurasian, Mimi rejects herself, throwing herself away after that.

The third Eurasian, Sylvia Chen, is possibly the main character of the story. Her father, Liyi, represents Chinese liberalism, inchoate and vulnerable. Sylvia has a love relationship with Feng, whose political activities result in the murder of her young idealistic cousin. Through this painful experience she realizes who she is--not American like her mother and not Chinese like her father. She has to grow up to be Sylvia Chen. She must possess her own unique self.

Interviewer: Let's move to your fifth novel, Eye to Eye, a first person narrative of a white male American visual artist who, though happily married, is obsessed to a disturbed degree with another woman. The burden of the novel is the psychoanalysis he undergoes to free himself. In this age of feminism, how should we interpret your choice of a white male voice to tell the story? Are you being ironic? What is behind your choice of narrator?

Diana Chang: Let me explain myself a little. I not only write, but I also paint. My work has been shown in galleries in the Hamptons, and I am presently in an exhibition in East Hampton. I made my very first collage for this show, and amazingly, it sold. When I wrote Eye to Eye, I was steeping myself in the contemporary American art scene, painting almost secretly, and at that time not to show. I also know something about the psychoanalytic process, having had some therapy myself.

One day it suddenly came to me that what in some cases an artist produces possibly reveals the artist's early emotional problems. I chose to tell this story through a man's point of view in the first person because I like to subsume myself and become my characters. In that sense, perhaps I should have been an actress, but given my face and body, I would be unconvincing as a cowboy or a guerrilla fighter in Uruguay. As a writer, I have more leeway--I can become anything, anyone. I decided that the book was going to be about creativity, about the act of seeing through art and seeing through psychoanalysis. I wanted my protagonist to be an artist but, at the same time, I wanted to make the protagonist Everyman in America. If I had made this artist Armenian...

Interviewer: (interrupting) That's what Kurt Vonnegut does in one of his novels.

Diana Chang: He does? I've got to read it then. Let's say I had made him a Lithuanian. It would have been the story of a Lithuanian artist in this country which would have brought other issues into the picture. If I had made the artist a woman, it would have been about what a woman artist has to struggle against. I decided to make him a WASP. I imagined the plot through the character of a WASP, thirty-six years old at the beginning and a year older by the end of the book.

In telling his own story in the first person, he reveals himself very gradually; he's full of defenses and subterfuges even with himself. I'll try to describe his work. He's not an assemblagist like Alfonso Ossorio, and he doesn't make accumulations the way Arman does. He makes scenes in the form of assemblages. And these scenes represent his early problems without his being aware of it. He has been forced to go into analysis because he's having emotional and physical difficulties--he's in love with a woman, an unattainable woman, who is not his wife. Despite the fact that the book is written in the first person and he is telling the story, the reader begins to realize his problem long before he does.

I didn't want his analyst to be a Viennese Jewish analyst. I wanted to get away from that cliche, so I made the analyst an American named Dr. Emerson. Emerson begins to see along with the reader. Part of the irony of the book is that Dr. Emerson recognizes about two-thirds through the novel that he should not have George Safford as his patient because of a relationship they have that he, the doctor, never suspected. He drops George like a hot potato. Having "transferred," George, of course, suffers intensely from a feeling of abandonment.

Interviewer: It is a very witty book. You wrote a piece for The American Pen in 1970 called "Wool Gathering, Ventriloquism, and the Double Life." What are you suggesting by that title? That an artist always conceals true identity behind a mask?

Diana Chang: When something bothers me, this botheration eventually results in a theme and gets written. That's the wool-gathering part of the title. As for ventriloquism? In Eye to Eye, until I heard George Safford's voice in the first person, I didn't have a way of saying what I was feeling. When his voice came to me, I knew that he should do the telling. I feel that he wrote the book. I mean that literally. That explains the ventriloquism. I wrote Eye to Eye in a great heat. It didn't take too long to write. The voice comes to one and takes over, and I feel that I have many, many voices.

As for the double life--when you have a novel inside you, it really feels like a double life. You are teaching or giving a party or you're at the dentist worrying about the pain he is going to cause you while this other thing is going on within you. Whenever I am preoccupied with writing a novel, I always keep scraps of paper with me. Once in a while I've even had to resort to my checkbook to jot down words or ideas for scenes or something or other that I knew belonged in the third part of the second chapter or wherever. Information surfaces and one lives in dread of forgetting it.

Now about the artist concealing true identity. In much minority literature, the authorial identity is the same as the protagonist's identity in the book. Like many of my poems and short stories, two of my novels have been written out of my Chinese-American background. But in my other novels, the identity of the characters is totally different from my own. In those cases, I don't think I am concealing anything--I am inventing something. I don't think invention is a form of dishonesty. Novels are imagined, invented lies which can be more truthful than actual life itself.

Interviewer: That was Oscar Wilde's contention. The art of lying. He said that the United States couldn't produce literature because it revered a man who boasted that he had never told a lie.

Diana Chang: He did say that? That's very interesting to me because so often I find people don't want to know that you've invented something. They keep saying, "Oh, isn't that based on your sister?" or something. It's as though they don't trust the imagination. So it turns out that's American. I'm glad that you said that just now.

Interviewer: To pursue this a bit further, your writing strikes me as almost anti-autobiographical. Do you think that term fits your work?

Diana Chang: I have not avoided using my own background as a source--two of my novels were informed by my own identity, as well as several of my short stories and many of my poems. It's true that some authors, take James T. Farrell, for instance, mine a single environment all their writing lives, and make it their own. But I am simply more restless and perhaps less self-referential. For example, as a painter, I've worked in oils, pastels, acrylics and more recently in watercolors; I've explored geometric paintings as well as representational ones and at this point find that semi-abstract landscapes come most naturally. I guess it's in my temperament to seek variety and change.

But as I've said, I follow my imagination, and how can I not relate to the humanity in themes, situations and characters whose orientation, so to speak, is not only Chinese or Chinese-American or Eurasian, female and 93 lbs fully dressed? I'm living my life among all kinds of people, and each one of them is an arena of possibilities, and almost each aspect of a single being can be the shard with which to construct a dinosaur.

When a critic or a friend's first and often last comment on something I've written is, "It's something that must have happened to you," it is the writer in me that feels up against it. I sense they are disappointed when it isn't autobiographical, though, if it is, then its achievement as a piece of writing seems discounted.

"But what about the writing!" one wants to cry out. All of us are born, experience joy or grief, love successfully or divorce painfully, so it must be in the writing that an experience is made moving or convincing.

I always told my students at Barnard, "Be loyal to the story, its requirements, its laws, its form--not to the memory. Total recall of the anthill you sat on at the picnic you are using in your story may or may not add to the tale you are weaving, though it really happened. Told poorly or out of place in the composition, the anthill episode will feel made-up and gratuitous. Effect is what you want, and not truthfulness to something that really happened; it's convincingness the writer is after."

I remember what Stella Adler, the actress and distinguished teacher of drama, said in an interview, and I'm paraphrasing hardly at all, "Don't remember, imagine!" Generations of students had been taught to remember how they felt when their grandmother died and apply the emotion to a scene of grief over the loss of a husband or a country. No, no, cut through that, she seemed to me to be saying, and imagine yourself bereft--in the skin of that particular character stricken by that particular tragedy in that particular scene of that particular play. One of her students, quoted in the same interview, said she learned more through that one instruction than she had been able to in three years of classes at another drama school.

Interviewer: Which writers have meant the most to you? From whom did you learn the most?

Diana Chang: I'll make a general statement first. I feel that I am influenced by everything. I'm influenced by Dr. Chen, who is sitting over there. I'm influenced by the way my friend Howard Sage [in the audience] is moving his hands right now. I'm influenced by the light in this room. I'm influenced by peoples' body language. They reveal themselves constantly. It's people that I'm most influenced by. My early interest in poetry was influenced by Emily Dickinson, among others. Her imagery is thrilling. More recently, I've been influenced by Theodore Roethke--by his closeness to nature and his lyricism. I've been told that my poetry has a "Zen" feeling. If it does, it is totally instinctive. I haven't studied Zen. I'm drawn to it and have read it in bits and pieces, but not systematically.

As for what I've learned about craft, let me say what I owe specifically to Ford Madox Ford's novel The Good Soldier for the way I wrote Eye to Eye. Ford's novel is narrated in the first person by one of its characters who tells the story of his relationship with his wife and another couple. He has been under the impression that they have had a glorious friendship--until he discovers that it has been a relationship full of deceit and betrayal. His wife has had an affair with the other man; the other man's wife has pimped for him. The narrator is a naive, affectless person who can't react emotionally to anything. He accepts the social aspects of what has gone on in their lives. They meet at various watering places; they go on vacations together. The book was an eye-opener. I remember reading it and absolutely having goose bumps and saying to myself that I love the use of the first person narrator where a kind of refraction takes place. You get nobody else's point of view, but through that limited point of view, the reader understands what the narrator himself is unaware that he is revealing.

I read people who are around today. I've mentioned some of the black authors whom I have read. I'm interested right now in following Asian American authors and filmmakers...for instance, director Wayne Wang who had done two very good films I'd seen a few years ago. One of them is called Chan is Missing. Through the characters in this film, Wang explores different kinds of Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Chinese, some from Taiwan, for instance. They are searching for somebody, if I remember correctly, who has absconded with their money and because of this they are in and out of Chinatown, in and out of other situations which are Asian American. In the end they never do find Chan. Then Wayne Wang produced a second film, Dim Sum. You know, little things to eat, dumplings. It's about a relationship between a mother, a daughter whom she dominates, and a third person, a man. His dramatic rendering of Amy Tan's bestseller, Joy Luck Club, has been a huge box office success. Another talented director is Ang Lee, who gave us the delightful The Wedding Banquet.

Peter (not Wayne) Wang directed A Great Wall--not the Great Wall of China, but "a great wall." The wall is the wall between Chinese-Americans and real Chinese. It is the story, very amusingly and movingly done, of a Chinese-American family that takes a trip to China. It's a first rate movie I have seen twice. Then more recently there is the play and movie M. Butterfly, by David Henry Hwang, a Chinese-American. I find him terrifically talented.

When David was only twenty-five or six, I invited him to speak at Barnard to my class in "Imagery and Form in the Arts." I don't remember how I got hold of him but he came. At that time he had had two plays produced by Joseph Papp. The first one was called F.O.B. (Fresh Off the Boat). I caught up with his career with his second play, The Dance and the Railroad, a poetic play for two characters. John Lone, the Chinese-American actor, played the lead role. Lone was brought up in Hong Kong, I believe, and studied Peking Opera there. An exquisite, handsome man, he played the Emperor in the Bertolucci movie, The Last Emperor, and co-stars with Jeremy Irons in M. Butterfly. I think there's much diversity developing among Chinese-American writers and artists, a very exciting trend.

Interviewer: The genre of Chinese-American fiction is a relatively new development in contemporary letters. In its first stages, it has been thoroughly dominated by women writers, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Fae Myenne Ng, Gish Jen, Sui Sin Far, and, of course, yourself. How do you account for this phenomenon? And what do you think of this "new wave"? How does the work of these writers differ from your own?

Diana Chang: I think it is generally accepted that women (and Chinese-American women are no exception) are more verbal than men, and more interested in exploring relationships and their dynamics on any level. A novel may be a higher form of gossiping, and gossip's function and pleasure is not mean-spirited but to help one feel in the know. A novel certainly satisfies that impulse, among others.

Sociologically-sound opinions don't come to me often, so whatever I say in answer to your question is not to be taken as gospel. (My characters have plenty of ready opinions, but I myself seem to be involved with the emotion of thought--a term of my own--that I would find hard to explain if forced to. Let's say that I believe that whatever thinking I do I do through form.)

To return to your question--we must generalize here, though it goes against my grain. Men have usually been pressured to establish themselves in professions or business or simply to hold down a job and become providers from an early age and to persevere at it until they are used up. Women, on their part, were totally submerged in homemaking, childrearing and the usually scut work of housekeeping.

However, once this condition for women was called into question and began to change, they quickly started to realize their potential and to express themselves. Also, I have observed that women, by and large, are less conformist, in some respects, than men. Having been relegated to the interstices of society for so long in almost every part of the world, they were able to be more individual as people and even, in a paradoxical way, somewhat freer.

If there is anything in what I've said, it doesn't surprise me that, as you put it, women have dominated the field of Chinese-American fiction. (But there are Steven C. Lo and David Wong Louie, too, let's not forget.) Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Fae Myenne Ng are all exceptionally talented writers with much to say each out of her own experience and in her own style of mind. Also, with ethnicity and feminism presently at large, Chinese-American women writers could come into their own with their stories of women oppressed either in China of yore, or here; of mother/daughter relationships, etc. That the time was right for their works in no way diminishes their talent or achievements.

To avoid categorizing, which makes me uncomfortable, I've mentioned two Chinese-American men who write fiction, and I want also to emphasize again the interesting (and, in some cases, experimental) work in films being directed and produced by Asian American men.

As for how the work of these novelists differs from mine, perhaps I should put it the other way--it is rather that The Frontiers of Love differs from their works that have become a genre established and awaited by editors and an American reading public. At the time that The Frontiers of Love was published, most of the very favorable reviews seemed to take it simply as a novel, a literary effort. Can it be said that there was some merit in that? I believe so at least part of the time.

I wasn't pigeonholed by the mainstream press. In fact, misunderstood in ethnic circles that both adopted and disapproved of it, it was a novel some of them tried to force into an ideological Procrustes bed, regarding it as a novel about minority characters living in this country. I was quite baffled, truth to tell. I knew the book is set entirely in Shanghai, China, and while it is about identity, it is not about ethnicity here. I hope everyone will read Shirley Lim's introduction I mentioned earlier.

My Chinese characters are not particularly exotic, and one can wonder why. Is it because their middle-crassness frees them from characteristics the average American reader looks for in Asians, traits that perhaps they find appealingly different from their own and foreign enough to escape the humdrum, and therefore are picturesque? Everyone is eager for a change of scene, after all.

A contemporary Chinese physician, professor or lawyer in Hong Kong, Beijing or Taipei is not so different in his values, outlook and goals for himself and his children from his counterpart in New York City or Minneapolis. He is not necessarily deeply steeped only in his own traditional customs and mores, folklore, superstitions, and mindset. (They're reading Kurt Vonnegut in Taipei.) In other words, the cultural differences that readers here find intriguing may be found not so much horizontally--across the Pacific Ocean--but in the verticality of social strata and its diversity.

My work is different for a second reason: while my novel The Only Game In Town, an East-West spoof, also draws on my Chinese-American background, my other four novels could have been written by anyone, say, a Diana Smith. It has perplexed and bothered me that this has breached, in some eyes, proscriptions I was unaware of at first.

As David Henry Hwang put it--and I remember what he said almost word for word: In this country today, only blacks can write about blacks, only women about women, only Asian Americans about Asian Americans, but white males can write about anyone.

An interesting observation from him, and he has many. I'm happy that David has written about the sexual ambivalence of a French diplomat in his remarkable play, M. Butterfly, now also a film, and that Kazuo Ishiguro, whose background is Japanese and who lives in London, explored in his brilliant novel, The Remains of the Day, the life, misapprehensions and inhibitions of an elderly English butler-- in the first person.

Supposing they had restricted themselves to Asian American themes and characters. . .what a loss it would have been. We all live in the world, an increasingly global village. Why not write about others? Why should anyone disfranchise him or herself from any human history or experience? Is anything human alien?

Interviewer: You write poetry as well as fiction. How do you decide whether your next gestating inspiration will take the form of poetry or fiction?

Diana Chang: No conscious decision seems to be involved. The theme or the idea may determine its form. I've just finished a poem titled "The Personality of Chairs." Obviously this subject would come out as a poem. (Incidentally, I find chairs haunting, not only because the Shakers hung them on their walls and the Chinese have ghost chairs set aside for their ancestors, but also because of their innate characteristic of waiting, waiting to be filled.) A painter friend, Jennett Lam, painted only chairs in the last period of her life. Her earlier ones were illumined with an impressionist's sensuous light; the later ones were stark geometric patterns in primary colors.

I've noticed that I've written very few narrative poems--which makes some sense, since I write fiction as well. I delegate my narrative impulse to prose.

In poetry I'm not dealing with the interactions of my characters nor with making the work (the construction that is a story or a novel) move in time. In poems, it may be myself I indulge; in fiction, it's the sensibilities of my characters I'm in the thrall of.

Interviewer: Did you find that your teaching influences your writing--or vice-versa, did your writing influence your teaching?

Diana Chang: I guess my writing influenced my teaching. Being an editor, I think, influenced my teaching just as much. When I was asked to teach in the English Department at Barnard, I shook in my knee socks because I had never taught before. The chairman said he was looking for a practitioner, somebody who had written novels and poetry and somebody who had an editorial point of view as well. What happened was that (and this was very flattering) Elizabeth Hardwick, the American writer and critic, wanted to take a year off to enjoy herself and lecture after the success of her novel, Sleepless Nights. They invited me to take her place for a year. I accepted and found out that I loved it. If I had known that I would like teaching so much, I might have gone in for it sooner. Elizabeth Hardwick came back the following year, but Barnard wanted to retain me, which was also very flattering. So I decided to stay on.

To get back to your question. I think teaching in the English department influenced my work in this sense: before I started teaching at Barnard, I wasn't particularly interested in writing short stories. I taught short story writing, not how to write novels. Undergraduates really can't cope with novels. Writing a novel is quite different from, say, writing music. There are prodigies in music, few and far between, of course, but Mozart wrote music when he was eleven. I think to be a writer, especially of a novel, you really have to have some lived experience. You really have to know about human nature. You have to know about human life. You can't know that at fifteen, you can't know that even as a senior at Barnard.

Interviewer: Were either of your parents interested in art or in writing?

Diana Chang: My father, an architect who got his degree at Columbia University's School of Architecture, was artistic, though he didn't paint or sculpt. Among his jobs after coming to this country in his fifties to escape Communism in China, and before finding work as an architect in New York City, was the curating of a collection of Chinese art at the University of Oklahoma. He also wrote some poetry--in English, interestingly enough. My mother was always taking piano lessons, and there was always classical Western music at home. And, incidentally, the first thing I wanted to be was a dancer--perhaps ballet was what I might have pursued. My father was a very good ballroom dancer. My parents went to tea dances in Peiping and Shanghai, an aspect of pre-Communist life of Western-educated or Western influenced Chinese very few people know about. They danced to Glenn Miller and Cole Porter, which I am belatedly doing here, happy that touch dancing is finally back.

Interviewer: One last question. What advice would you give a young Chinese-American who wants to be a writer or an artist? Diana, I pose that question because we need to take into account that very often ethnic parents pressure their children in the direction of the practical. There's a skeptical attitude about the arts.

Diana Chang: To a Chinese-American student who is talented and who wants to write, I have the same advice that I have for anybody else who wants to write. First of all, you cannot "decide" to become a serious writer. You can decide to be a copywriter, you can decide to be a public relations writer, you can decide to be a medical text writer, but with creative writing, with imaginative writing, you can't say, "I am going to be the next Toni Morrison." You can't. But you can write. If you have it in you to write, you will write and you will continue to write and send things out and eventually some will be taken. After your work starts to be published, other people will say to you, "You are a writer." You cannot put that mantle on yourself is what I am saying.

The other thing is that you must find a way to make a living while you write. I worked as an editor. I discovered, however, as even a young junior editor, that I didn't have time to write because during working hours in the office my time was taken up dealing with various people in various departments. You pore over other people's texts at home, at night, on weekends; I found it very hard to be an editor and write at the same time. In those days as a junior editor, I wasn't being paid very much either. So I quit. I quit with $200 in the bank. My friends thought I was foolhardy. I didn't feel foolhardy. I guess maybe I was blind. You have to have a blind need to write. I knew I was going to collect some unemployment and I eked out an existence.

My parents weren't able to help me. They had fled China which had turned Communist, and they were having a struggle here themselves. My father was just trying to get a foothold as an architect here in New York. In a minuscule way, I was helping out my parents financially. I had also helped to get them out of China. I was very young, doing this while attending Barnard as an undergraduate on a scholarship.

At one point when I was writing my second novel, I worked for a telephone answering service at night from 11 pm to 9 am, two nights a week. Though I am a night person I didn't feel too well at nine in the morning when I got on the bus to go home. Simultaneously, I did free-lance copy editing. I remember copy editing two of Samuel Beckett's novels, Molloy and Malone Dies, for Grove Press.

People who write don't write because they have the time. They write despite having no time. You have to have that drive. If you don't have that drive, that inner need, don't do it. Life is very rich; there are many other things to get involved with. That is what I would tell any student, Chinese-American, Caucasian, Irish Catholic, or whatever.