Incongruent Hauntings: An Interview with Su Chang
February 17, 2025
“It was only after I immigrated to North America as an adult that I began to have access to the tabooed past of my birth country, to start making sense of the incongruency that had haunted my life.”
Vinh Nguyen interviews Su Chang about her debut novel, The immortal woman.
Su Chang is a Chinese Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a reluctant Red Guard leader during the Cultural Revolution. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors Association National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, and the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest, among others. More essays and fiction are forthcoming in the Toronto Star, Electric Literature, Ex-Puritan, Open-Book, 49th Shelf, etc. The Immortal Woman is her debut novel. Publishers' Weekly called it "unflinching…powered by raw emotion…a cathartic account of a family buffeted by the winds of modern Chinese history." Su is a graduate from the Humber School for Writers, a member of Writers' Union of Canada and Canadian Authors Association. Connect with her at https://www.instagram.com/suchangwrites/.
From the publisher:
A sweeping generational story of heartbreak, resilience, and yearning, revealing an insider’s view of the fractured lives of Chinese immigrants and those they leave behind.
Lemei, once a student Red Guard leader in 1960s Shanghai and a journalist at a state newspaper, was involved in a brutal act of violence during the Tiananmen Square protests and lost all hope for her country. Her daughter, Lin, is a student at an American university on a mission to become a true Westerner. She tirelessly erases her birth identity, abandons her Chinese suitor, and pursues a white lover, all the while haunted by the scars of her upbringing. Following China’s meteoric rise, Lemei is slowly dragged into a nationalistic perspective that stuns Lin. Their final confrontation results in tragic consequences, but ultimately, offers hope for a better future. By turns wry and lyrical, The Immortal Woman reminds us to hold tight to our humanity at any cost.
Vinh Nguyen: What is the inspiration behind this novel?
Su Chang: When I was growing up in China during the 80s and 90s, I was perpetually puzzled by the adults around me, whose daily arguments unveiled their hidden ire and pain, old grudges from a tumultuous time. But I could hardly trace that chaotic time in my history books, and gradually, I came to see myself as belonging to a generation with no history. It was only after I immigrated to North America as an adult that I began to have access to the tabooed past of my birth country, to start making sense of the incongruency that had haunted my life. Over the years, as I labored to find my footing in my adopted country, I also spent my evenings and spare time researching – from books, documentaries, lectures – the modern and contemporary history that was missing from my childhood textbooks. Part of this novel was inspired by the experiences of my parent who was a reluctant student Red Guard leader during the Cultural Revolution, part of it was constructed from narratives, oral histories, and witness accounts uncovered during my research, and part of it was based on my lived experiences and observations as an adult immigrant in North America.
VN: Please tell us about your writing journey. What made you want to write and publish?
SC: I was an avid reader growing up in China. I wrote and published my first fiction in a national youth magazine in grade four. But after immigrating to North America in my 20s, I didn’t have the courage to write fiction in English for more than a decade. I reached a point where I felt I had so much to say that I’d explode, so I tried my hands in writing again. To learn the craft, I read a lot and took many creative writing courses. After completing the first draft of this novel, I also enrolled in the Humber School for Writers correspondence program to revise and refine my manuscript. My singular goal wasn’t so much to publish (I understood how competitive publishing is), but to do this story justice and to make myself proud. Along the way, I met generous and encouraging mentors who urged me to seek publication. I went through at least twenty drafts before a literary agent said yes. So many words and subplots were left on the cutting floor, but that was an invaluable learning process.
VN: The novel is very much about the desire to read and write, and to pursue literature. Could you speak to the role that literature plays for the different characters?
SC: You are correct, the right to read and write on one hand feels like a basic human right, and on the other a special privilege. In her youth, Lemei (the mother character) craved both the Chinese classics and the works from the Western masters. She had to steal those banned books from vandalized libraries. Such defiant acts were considered criminal and could potentially land her in jail, but her desire to read beyond ideological control was so strong that she was willing to risk it all. She became a critical thinker because of her reading consumption, which didn’t make her life easier. Yet, for a dreamer like her, to fulfill the innate truth-seeking desire trumps other needs such as safety. For Lin (the daughter character), her passion for reading first came from her mother’s encouragement in her childhood, and was then stifled by the same parent when the weight of historical trauma crashed on the mother-daughter pair. In Lin’s adulthood and away from her controlling mother, she reclaimed her right to read and write, to unearth and understand her tabooed past, to make sense of her origin and identity, and also, in many ways, to fulfill her mother’s buried dreams and aspirations.
VN: What is your process for creating temporal movement and the timeline for your narrative? The novel moves through a large timespan and deals with several key moments in Chinese history. How did you determine the pace of the story?
SC: This was a technical challenge for me. In my early drafts, I started this story with the daughter character in the present day, followed by a fully braided structure between the voices of the mother and daughter. On the surface that was a good (if not conventional) idea – a Chinese immigrant woman slowly discovering her family’s history. If I were to write about a historical period well-known to the Western audience, I’d likely have stuck to that initial structure. But over the first few drafts, I realized that the history I was narrating was too complex and likely unfamiliar to most of my readers, and the back-and-forth timeline compounded that complexity and potentially made the story extra difficult to follow. I then tried various ways to rearrange the structure and eventually landed on the current five-part form. Part 1 is a deep dive into the mother character’s formative years during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution. Part 2 is devoted to introducing the daughter character in the present day. Part 3 is a kind of “hinge” of the book where an inciting event occurs that fundamentally changes the mother’s beliefs and the ensuing lives of the mother-daughter pair. Then in Part 4 and 5, having properly introduced the two heroines and their history, I use the braided structure to narrate the trajectory of their present-day relationship, as well as their intertwining reckoning with the past. There has been a lot of trial and error. I think the current structure does justice to the complicated history I want to tell, but I am also aware that certain sacrifice has been made. By using this comparatively linear timeline, my initial intention for a daughter’s truth-seeking journey may be less evident at the beginning of the book, but as a trade-off, readers, without having to acquire prior knowledge of the intricate Chinese history, can still enjoy a smooth and clarifying reading experience. Another bonus is that the mother character becomes a main heroine on equal footing with the daughter character. It is a case where a character keeps demanding the attention she deserves, and the only right thing for the writer to do is follow her character’s lead.
VN: A central issue that the novel tackles is internalized racism or the “colonial mentality.” Could you speak to this mentality and how it shapes the characters?
SC: Colonial mentality is an internalized attitude of cultural and/or ethnic inferiority as a result of colonization. I was first introduced to the concept through reading Frantz Fanon’s books (The Wretched of the Earth, Black Skin White Masks). I then devoured books and papers from EJR David and Sumie Okazaki, the leading researchers who conceived the groundbreaking “Colonial Mentality Scale.” To be clear, China as a whole was never formally colonized by foreign powers, even during its “Century of Shame.” Rather, many Western countries carved their “spheres of influence” in different parts of China in the late Qing Dynasty. But what this novel focuses on is a later time period, after the Maoist revolution that lasted until the 70s, when a kind of ready mindset to admire, even worship, the West was observed. I hope to probe a unique and underexplored source of colonial mentality and internalized racism, one without the physical occupation by the Western power and yet equally powerful and persuasive. As Chinese lives became physically and mentally eviscerated by decades of political trauma and as more and more were disillusioned by the official ideology in the 80s and 90s, their first instinct was to reckon with the trauma and attempt to heal. But the ongoing oppression that demanded “collective amnesia” made healing impossible. In their desperation, many educated urban Chinese came to believe that the Western culture (including but not limited to its political system) was superior to their own. We see an extreme case in Lemei who abandons all pride in her culture and pushes her daughter to become a “true Westerner.” The obsession with the white Western culture becomes its own destructive force that breeds self-hatred and eventually leads to her daughter’s psychotic breakdown.
VN: This is a book about home and away, and of finding firm ground for oneself. What constitutes home for you?
SC: I don’t have an easy answer to this question. The concept of “home” remains fractured for me, and there are still moments when I feel rootless and unmoored. The childhood home I left behind would forever be a version of my home, despite my physical and psychological distance from it. It comes to me in my dreams, and in those meditative moments where my brain can easily conjure up the sights, sounds, smells from that other life and the warm touches from my departed loved ones. Today, my more tangible home comprises a small but life-giving circle of family and friends, a reading and writing practice, and an increasingly self-accepting mind.
Vinh Nguyen is a writer and educator whose work has appeared in Brick, Literary Hub, The Malahat Review, PRISM international, Grain, Queen’s Quarterly, The Criterion Collection’s Current, and MUBI’s Notebook. He is a nonfiction editor at The New Quarterly, where he curates an ongoing series on refugee, migrant, and diasporic writing. He is the author of the speculative memoir The Migrant Rain Falls in Reverse. His writing has been short-listed for a National Magazine Award and has received the John Charles Polanyi Prize in Literature. In 2022, he was a Lambda Literary Fellow in Nonfiction for emerging LGBTQ writers.