An interview with JY Yang
Last April, I picked up a story that began with the two-word declaration “Singapore stank.” I had to keep reading. And reading – more or less inhaling the whole oeuvre of the person who wrote it.
That person is the sci-fi & fantasy (SFF) writer JY Yang. They’ve written short stories about every strange thing a girl could want to rub her brain up against: melancholy cannibal aliens, android Lee Kuan Yews, a digitally-sentient National Archive building that could have come straight out of Night Vale.
Last September, J released the first two books in a range of new novellas, entitled the Tensorate series. The series published by Tor and quote-unquote ‘Silkpunk’— steampunk infused with East Asian antiquity. What's more, it's just been nominated as a finalist for the biggest prize in the SFF world, the 2017 Nebula Award. Last year, before all this excitement unfolded, I spoke to J about their new series in a kind of queue-jump frenzy-- and more generally, about their experiences writing SFF in Singapore. I was VERY excited to get these replies.
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SH: How did you start writing SFF? Did you have a big, neon-lit “aha” moment?
JY: Actually, no leh, I don't think I had this single "aha" moment where I knew I was going to be an author.
I wrote stories as a tiny child, on scraps of paper and those tiny scented notepads you could buy from the school bookshop, and then later when I was older and the Internet had been invented, I wrote fanfiction. I also hung out with other writers but mostly only dabbled in writing original fiction. It wasn't till I attended Clarion West in 2013 that I realised that I could actually do this for real.
SH: As a fellow Singaporean, I get the sense that your stories are shaped by a particularly… familiar… experience of hierarchy & power...
JY: Hah! Here's a funny thing. I did my MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. When I was doing the admissions interview, there were 3 Singaporean writers doing the course: Dave Chua, Ng Yi-Sheng, and Stephanie Ye.
The course administrators, who were doing the interview, said, "It's an interesting thing, but you write speculative fiction, and all our Singaporean writers this year are also writing speculative fiction. Why do you think that is?" I actually replied: "It's because Singapore is a technological SF dystopia." And I was joking, but I was also deadly serious.
I'm a queer person from a working class family background, I've been in so-called ***elite*** local schools and programs, and I also worked as a reporter for three and a half years. I've had a lot of experience being mashed up against the walls of the country's authoritarian constructs. I don't think it's possible for me dream up a society that doesn't have power corrupting everything it touches, because that's been my overwhelming experience of life as a human person.
SH: And how do your stories grapple with physical identity & politics? Can sci-fi create new ways of imagining the body in Singapore?
JY: Other people have also pointed out the body as motif in my work, which was something that surprised me as I did not consciously set out to write body-horror stories!
I think part of it might stem from growing up femme in a country like Singapore, where our bodies are so heavily policed; I've definitely had my fair share of body image issues and I think that's worked its way into my fiction. ‘Secondhand Bodies’ was definitely about the intersection of classism and racism with the way femme/female bodies are regarded in Singapore.
Sadly I don't really think local writers have the power to change this, because it's like shouting into a storm-- you'll be washed away by the howling torrents of advertising and movies and tutting relatives at the meal table.
SH: Does your personal identity influence how you navigate the sci-fi scene? Especially as it becomes more polarised re: diversity?
JY: I don't know if I'd characterise the genre as becoming "more polarised". I think conversations are happening that previously weren't, and it's a good thing that these conversations (about the inequalities and injustices of representation wrt race, gender, sexual orientation in the publishing industry) are happening. This is happening in part because people with marginalised identities have more of a voice in the community now.
The reactive parts of it-- the sad puppies, the old geezers still clinging to the ways of golden-age sci-fi where the men were manly and the aliens were green-skinned women with giant tits-- frankly that part's always been there. So if the polarisation is happening because there's a wider range of stories being told and a wider range of ideas being thought about and talked about, I don't see it as a bad thing.
I'm very glad that I've come into the SFF writing scene at a time where I feel okay writing stories that are as queer and non-Western as I can make them, knowing that there are editors who will buy such things, and an audience that is more than happy to read such things.
Of course, the genre publishing industry is still very much Western Anglophone dominated. A very large part of it is American, a significant minority of it is British, and then there's a bit of Australia, a bit of Canada, and then there's a tiny slice that's the rest of us, basically. It's difficult, because on one hand I'm glad to be repping Singapore in the game, but on the other I constantly question myself for being part of what is essentially a giant machine of cultural imperialism...
SH: Ok, so how do you see your Silkpunk novellas figuring in this Western Anglophone-dominated world? Are you fighting off the genre’s old-school exoticising tendencies?
JY: Oh! Here's the part where I point out that the "silkpunk" label wasn't something I picked out for my novellas-- it came from the Tor folks so that they could market the series to people who like Ken Liu's books.
For them I think it was the epic fantasy + Asian-influenced tech/magic combination. But that's how marketing works in a lot of ways, they want to reduce everything down to a pithy one-liner. "It's like X meets Y!" I don't know if I'd classify it as silkpunk myself, I feel like it doesn't have enough of a -punk element to it.
The interesting thing is that I feel like a pretender most of the time, even though I'm supposedly writing about my ***ancestral culture*** and all that. Growing up, I was the most jiak kentang of potato-eaters who only gobbled up media from the UK and the US, because duh, that's where all the sci-fi and fantasy is from! And yet I'm now writing the most Cina of all narratives and getting them published? I feel like such a fraud! Especially since I know there's so much I don't know about my own culture because I spent years rejecting it.
I thought a lot about why I was doing this, why I was so drawn to these stories in the style of things which I did not care for as a kid. Am I exotifying myself for a Western market? The more I thought about it, though, I realised that this is part of a process of clumsy decolonialisation. I try to write stories that deliberately avoid Western influence, like I want to write stories in worlds where there are no white people.
But because of how overwhelming said Western influence is, when I try to say, build a secondary world without said influence, I end up going all the way on the other end. I end up with stuff that draws very heavily on classical Chinese culture, which I actually know very little about. I'm pretty sure that at some point I will move away from this at present, and find a happy middle ground.
For what it's worth, I hope that Singaporeans DO have a different response to the books than the US market, even if all they do is get a kick out of my protagonist saying "Cheebye" about a hundred times in the first chapter of Red Threads.
SH: And that leads on nicely to your Tensorate series with Tor.com! Give us a primer?
JY: Oops! I jumped the gun on the question, didn't I? Well, all right, the novellas. They are secondary-world Asian fantasy, and the world of these novellas is full of everything I wanted to see in epic fantasy: Adventure, romance, martial magic, megafauna.
The two books revolve around the lives of the identical twins Sanao Akeha and Sanao Mokoya: the youngest children of the Protector, the ruthless supreme ruler of the land. Their lives are upended when Mokoya develops prophetic powers as a child.
The Black Tides of Heaven is Akeha's coming-of-age story. He's the twin that didn't develop prophetic powers, and as you can imagine, that causes some difficulties for him. Struggling to find his place in the world, Akeha runs away from home and becomes an outlaw. He ends up joining the Machinist movement which opposes his mother’s rule, and has to make some difficult choices between his family and the growing rebellion. There’s a bunch of explosions, messing with gender, and also boys kissing.
The Red Threads of Fortune takes place after the events in Black Tides, and catches up with Mokoya years after a terrible accident that killed her young daughter and destroyed her powers of prophecy. We find Mokoya scarred and unable to cope with daily life, hunting down giant, winged naga with a bunch of raptors. At the start of the book she’s tracking down one of these creatures that’s suspected to have been sent from the capital to destroy a city that’s become a Machinist base. She meets a mysterious, alluring outsider named Rider and finds out that things are not as they seem.
Anyway, the books are queer as fuck and full of elemental magic, raptors, and giant winged beasts. If that is your sort of thing!
SH: Last Q, how can the reading peoples of Hinterland zine stay in touch with you?
JY: Twitter is my poison of choice, find me at @halleluyang. But if the stream of information there is too much, I also have a newsletter which I periodically send out with all my major news collated (preorders, giveaways, new publications etc).
And of course there's my website, jyyang.com, where I blog v occasionally, and also have a list of all the short fiction I've had published.
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The first two books of JY Yang’s Tensorate series, The Red Threads of Fortune and The Black Tides of Heaven, have been released -- as we mentioned, they are incre-di-ble. Read another glowing review, or just go buy them already la (here, or anywhere else where good books lurk).