In “Lulu,” your story in this week’s issue, a young Chinese man watches his twin sister become increasingly involved in dissident activism—her actions seem to leave him at a loss. Was there a specific idea behind the decision to narrate this story from the brother’s perspective?
There’s a certain duality of life in China (and in most places), in which you have very different realities that coexist. China is a place where people who are experiencing the worst of the state’s actions can live intimately alongside residents and visitors who are able to be much more apolitical, and who never really have to think about those on the other side. It’s a dichotomy that underpins so much of life there, one that’s hard to wrap your mind around. I wanted to write about this strangeness from the perspective of someone who would never think about the darker parts of society until a loved one forced him to.
How do you think that that strangeness, experienced through the brother’s distance from Lulu’s actions, conditions the way we read the story?
I wrote a lot of this story in the early mornings, and there was something kind of underwater and dreamlike about the process. Similarly, I wanted events to unfold in a way that was colored by the passivity of the unnamed brother, because it struck me as a more apt way to tell it, truer to the experience most of us have of trying to live our lives in a world that is so much larger than us, one that can be frightening. I wanted the tragedy of what happens to Lulu to be somewhat muted in its delivery. The story is about Lulu, of course. But it’s also about what it’s like to live an everyday, self-interested life, even as you are aware of terrible things around you—dimly at first, in the case of the brother, and then inescapably so.
“Achievement” is such a focus throughout, beginning with Lulu’s childhood brilliance. A reversal occurs, though: Lulu’s intensity is channelled into something that seems ultimately silenced or defeated, while the narrator becomes successful at something that’s perhaps unconventional (video games) but still a part of commerce’s fabric. How do these characters help us weigh the meanings of various ambitions, successes, and failures?
As I was writing, I didn’t know how the story would end. But early on I did have that image of the narrator onstage after winning a video-game competition in my head, of him standing victorious in a hail of confetti that resembles razor blades. The image really seized me, that feeling of success mingled with a sense of darkness. I’m not sure where exactly the menace comes from. I suppose for Lulu the vulnerability comes from being both ambitious and dedicated to the truth in a country that refuses to accept it; for her brother—and for most of us—it comes from living in a society where moral choices don’t always seem to matter.
The first title I had for this story was “Replay,” a reference to the brother’s video-game addiction. It’s something I kept thinking about while writing, how, unlike his sister, he could always start over again, and therefore his choices didn’t matter. That sense of both freedom and futility struck me as deeply sad.
The story begins with the complications of birth, and Lulu gives up a child for the sake of better family planning. Later on, the narrator asks Lulu if she’d still like to have a child, and she demurs. Does Lulu give up on motherhood and participation in the kind of “ordinary” family that raised her? If so, does that sacrifice have a particular relationship to her activism?
I think of Lulu as someone who loves abundantly but abstractly. For her, the idea of motherhood, something that would narrow her universe to the care of one small person, loses its allure because of who she is. She can’t separate herself from the more pressing human concerns across the country, even if they have little to do with her. I admire her for that. Most of us find it easier to love people more specifically, in relation to ourselves.
Something else that struck me is the critical role the Internet plays, from the reposting of censored videos to the narrator’s gaming life to his chats with his distant sister. The circulation of information and the role-playing fantasy seem to be almost in competition. Did you feel like you were working to bring these properties of the Internet, especially in China, more into focus in your story?
I think that’s right. Early on there’s a feeling of promise that’s represented in the father’s gift of identical laptops. But as the two siblings chart different courses through the Internet—one of entertainment and escape, the other of trying to better understand the world around her—in some ways their paths converge. They both know what it’s like to feel powerful online, and also, I suspect, that the experience is disposable.
At some point, Lulu’s father asks her if what she’s done is meaningful, and as I reread the story, the question doesn’t strike me as simply rhetorical. There’s a nihilism to the Internet that threatens to absorb anything it encounters, including the kinds of raw videos and photos of protests that Lulu circulates. Things have meaning but are swallowed up online, and not only in China.
You’re a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, and were formerly a China correspondent. Do you think that journalism has influenced your way of thinking about fiction, or of storytelling?
I think journalism and fiction are both ways of being differently attentive to what’s around you. They’ve always struck me as linked: there’s a desire to conjure up the world and its experiences, but it’s an impulse that gets worked out in different ways. Journalism is like writing in a bright, sunlit room—you’re acutely aware of your readers, of your editors, as you move things around on a page. Fiction is much more solitary, a kind of walking in the dark. To me, they work in rhythm with each other. Sometimes the mind wants both.
