Interview #205 — Shelley Parker-Chan

by Annie Zhang

Shelley Parker-Chan is an Asian-Australian former diplomat who worked on human rights, gender equality and LGBT rights in Southeast Asia. Their debut historical fantasy novel She Who Became the Sun won the Astounding Award, and was a finalist for the Lambda, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, British Fantasy, and British Book Awards. They live in Melbourne, Australia.

Shelley spoke to Annie about the freedom of online spaces, representing ambivalence, and finding catharsis in fantasy.

Congratulations on your Hugo nomination. How do you feel about being the first Australian nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel?
I'm surprised and also thrilled. Science fiction and fantasy was how I got into reading in the first place, when I was tiny. To have it be an Asian-Australian book feels special as well—we're on the world stage, finally. Hopefully it's just the start of many wonderful things.

What have your experiences been like with the science fiction and fantasy community in Australia?
That is an interesting question because I didn't come out of a science fiction fantasy community in Australia. I wasn't in Australia when I wrote most of this book. I came out of online spaces, like the fanfiction world. I spent a lot of time writing romance fanfiction and I thought of myself as a romance writer. For a long time, that was something you were supposed to be ashamed of, but it's a wonderful form of fiction in its own right. You're in conversation with many texts and it's a fantastic community. That was where I found all my fellow writers. We were writing fanfiction with science fiction and fantasy properties, but often the stories were contemporary romances, so I never thought of myself as a science fiction or fantasy writer.

And then I just happened to write a book which contained all the things I wanted, and it turned out to be an epic fantasy. I had drifted away from epic fantasy in adulthood, because it didn't have what I was looking for—queerness, or the big, character-driven emotional arcs that you find in romance. So I decided to write my own thing, and it turned out to be an epic fantasy.

Only after publishing it did I start getting in contact with fantasy authors in Australia. There are some, but it's hard to have a community if there's no market. You get the feeling that Australian publishers have yet to realise the potential of adult fantasy and science fiction. There aren’t many imprints that specialise in adult SFF as opposed to the YA market. Without that local market, it's hard for a community to build up. We all have our eyes overseas on foreign publishers and foreign agents, which is a shame.

I think that's really true from having worked in the industry here. They don’t directly publish much science fiction and fantasy for the adult market.
It feels like an afterthought here. You're distributed from the UK or the US so [even though] your books come out here and they’re on the shelves, you don't have much of a native push [in terms of local book launches]. Most people don't know that we're Australian [either]; I’m thinking of authors such as Garth Nix [and] James Islington. These are big names in the science fiction and fantasy community, [but] I didn’t know they are Australian. Some of them live in Melbourne! We just we don't have that community yet.

What led you to write She Who Became the Sun?
I had some friends who had also written fanfiction, and we could not find traditionally published books that contained what we wanted to read. We were looking for hyper-emotional stories with high stakes, juicy character-driven arcs, that cathartic fantasy feel, and queerness. Somehow, we couldn't find that exact combination. The fantasy genre was going through a grimdark phase; queerness was not widely current and medieval European-based fantasy was dominant at the time. Meanwhile, fantasy romance books were often more paranormal and heterosexual. So we were like, ‘Fuck it. We're going to write our own books. Make a list of everything you love, cram it into a single book and see what happens.’ It was the kitchen sink approach to innovation.

She Who Became the Sun came out of that freedom. We didn't know anything about publishing, we didn't know what would sell. I just wanted to write for me, and I wanted it to please me exactly. Which is ironic, because what came out was not necessarily something I would have imagined—as I mentioned, I don't read epic fantasy and somehow it became one. But I wanted something big and tragic, something with high stakes. Chinese drama and tragic romance go together really well, like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I wanted that—Chinese drama, but in a book form.

Some of the struggles in the book—family, shame, ambition—might resonate particularly for some Asian readers. Did your own relationship with Chinese culture inform these emotional themes?
For sure. I grew up in a very Asian way, even though I have the blessing-slash-curse of passing. No one actually knows that I'm Asian most of the time, even though I'm half Chinese. But I was raised very much by a tiger parent in a part of Adelaide with a large Chinese, Malaysian and Southeast Asian Chinese population. I was a scholarship kid and I went to a posh private school where my peers were all the offspring of doctors and lawyers, and I was pushed to also become a doctor or lawyer and achieve high results. So I feel I grew up in a very classically second- generation middle-class Asian way, but I was definitely not perceived as Asian.

A large part of the engine of my story came from that feeling of being an outsider in many ways, of having something within me that the world doesn’t necessarily see—my Chineseness, or queerness, or genderqueerness. That also makes this book an Asian-Australian book specifically, as opposed to a mainland Chinese story, as it pushes back against a majority perspective. A lot of my characters are reacting to a society which doesn’t recognise who they really are and doesn’t see the truth within them.

And then there’s shame. There are definitely some Chinese families—not all—who really emphasise doing the family proud, who think that your status as a child reflects the status of the family. Maybe this unhealthy competitive attitude springs from the immigrant experience of needing to succeed in a discriminatory white society. I can see why it might come about, but it can lead the second generation to internalise shame. It’s something I’m ambivalent about. There’s often pressure from publishing to tell a particular kind of Asian or immigrant story, but I wanted to show an ambivalence to the specific culture I came out of. In some respects I'm proud of it, and in others, it stifled who I actually was. How do we sit with that?

The book explores very nuanced experiences of identity and gender. Over the course of the story, your characters steal it, fight it, claim it, transform it. How did you go about constructing characters who break open these possibilities?
I started with archetypes. I picked characters who appealed to me from pop culture. There's the warrior, the scholar and the trickster prince—they all have long antecedents in fantasy fiction and manga. One particular trickster I had in mind when developing a protagonist was the anime character Rurouni Kenshin, who’s this samurai assassin who has fled his past and presents as a humble wanderer. In that vein, I made my protagonist a wandering monk who has a core of absolute badassery. I was also inspired by fantasy books in which tricksters hide who they are. There have also been a few tortured eunuchs in the media in the past. I threw these characters into my pre-existing story framework and tried to make them real people.

I like having multiple characters who reflect different elements of the same identity. With my genderqueer characters, their circumstances and personalities made them react in very individual ways to that part of themselves, which created an interesting and dynamic tension. Whilst superficially very similar, they diverged on their own paths.

Something that struck me personally about the book was how your main characters Zhu and Ouyang are haunted by ghosts. I love ghosts, especially Chinese ones. What was your approach to the supernatural elements of your book?
My answer is completely disappointing in that I didn't have ghosts in the book originally. I wrote a book that was basically a Chinese historical TV drama in book form. It didn't have any magic, but it was told in this cathartic fantasy voice with archetypal fantasy characters and a clear rise to power narrative. That all reads as very fantasy. But when I submitted this book to publishers, they were confused. It was set in a real historical time and space, but it wasn’t quite historical fiction, and it wasn’t fantasy either. They asked me to either make it a secondary world or add magic.

I couldn’t make it a secondary world because I needed that tension with actual history. I wanted to twist the idea of cis straight men writing their own histories in particular ways, which relied on the real history existing.

So I added magic. My approach ultimately involved bringing traditional beliefs to the surface. Back in the fourteenth century, people believed very strongly in forces outside of themselves. Fate was very, very real. Your ancestors were really watching you and they would be disappointed if you fucked up. So I brought all that up to the surface. Chinese ghosts are very creepy, and they were quite fun to evoke.

There is a brilliant Tor.com review that interprets She Who Became the Sun as a book written for bilingual readers. What were your intentions when formulating your language and prose?
That was a very generous review, and it made me sound much smarter and more intentional than I actually was! I don't speak Chinese. Growing up, I went to Chinese school in a very resentful way. It was useful in the sense of forging an Asian Australian identity because all the other Asian kids would go, and it gave me a thousand characters I never quite forgot. But they were teaching Mandarin and my family is Cantonese, so I didn’t understand the point of it at the time. I wasn’t thinking about the future.

I obviously regretted things later in life, but it was the 80s—we weren't raised bilingual. There was this mistaken belief that if you raised a kid fully bilingual, they would not master either language. I feel very sad that I missed the opportunity to learn Cantonese young.

But when I was in Asia in my 20s and 30s, I got really obsessed with reading Chinese web novels. They were often translated informally by fans in this hilarious literal way, which really grew on me as a language nerd. I love being able to see the bones of Chinese grammar and structure in the way people write subtitles and translate web novels. And I love all the hilarious insults and wordplays in the Chinese language. I wanted to evoke that flavour in some of the dialogue insofar as I could without actually being able to speak Chinese. It’s not like I wrote this book in Chinese and translated it back to English, but I wanted to give the sense that maybe it could have been, and that maybe all the characters are speaking middle Chinese of the fourteenth century.

She Who Became the Sun breaks conventions on many levels. As traditional publishing can sometimes be hostile to challenging work, did you have any worries or difficulties about bringing your book to the industry?
I came along at the right time and right space to get publisher support. There were some forerunners in Asian YA, romance and fantasy who did so much heavy lifting to prepare the way. The Poppy War was the big one that broke a lot of ground. I remember the day that acquisition was announced, I just started crying—like, oh my God, there can only be one and the one has already been done.

I remember that announcement too! I felt the same thing.
It's okay, as I have discovered there is room for many. Now that the door has been opened, there are so many Asian fantasies. Because The Poppy War did so well, there were comparison titles, so my publisher could feel confident that there was an audience.

But to be the first is really hard. When I first started this book, there was very little in the way of Asian-authored Asian fantasy. There was Ken Liu and Zen Cho. In romance, there was Courtney Milan. Cindy Pon was one of the first to write Asian YA fantasy and she had such a hard time—she got whitewashed covers, the publisher didn't believe in her and was constantly trying to correct her language, and they didn't know how to copyedit or style-set Asian names. I owe those people a lot for having done that work, for training publishers to understand that there is an audience and a market, and that you have to engage with these stories respectfully and develop suitable editorial approaches.

You worked as a diplomat and international development adviser in Southeast Asia for many years. Has that career informed your writing?
What politics did teach me … [is] that rebellion is really slow and messy. History takes decades and it's incredibly unsatisfying. I did not want to write a book that was hyper-realistic—I wanted catharsis, I wanted fun, I wanted escapism and adventure. I know too well how shitty actual history is. I worked in Timor-Leste where they gained independence after a rebellion, and I saw how that country was going ten years after the fact. It sucked. No one wants to write a cathartic, hilarious fun fantasy set in that kind of milieu.

So I deliberately chose to wrote a very unrealistic rise to power fantasy. The actual period of history took 30 years, which is too long for romance and explorations of personal identity. That’s not to say it isn’t possible—you could write Wolf Hall in three massive volumes, though you’d have to be Hilary Mantel to do it. But my book was more concerned with pushing away real-life history than embracing it. I also wanted to convey the sense of a real world with its own specific cultures and people who think very differently. I've had enough of Asian fantasies that are only about the aesthetic.

Did writing this book teach you anything? How has it changed you?
I always wanted to write a book that felt very emotional and id-powered. I wanted to splash a feeling onto the page without thinking too hard. But when you do that, you discover a lot of truths about yourself. My book is very much about gender, and a question for myself was ‘why am I writing so repetitively about gender in this particular way?’ Many people in the fanfiction world were writing male/male romances, and the accusation was that all these straight white women were appropriating the gay male experience. But then 15 years later, pretty much everyone I know has come out as queer or not cisgender. So okay, why were you attracted to those kinds of stories? Why are you writing them over and over? Maybe it's saying something about yourself.

I was writing a story about a eunuch who looks like a woman but is actually a man inside. What was that saying about myself? And then genderqueer and non-binary people started becoming more visible. Society was changing, I was changing, and all those intricacies came out in my writing like a very slow form of therapy.

What are your hopes for the future of science fiction and fantasy?
There were once so few Asian-authored Asian fantasies, and now there are so many of them … so I really feel like that job has been done now. I'm glad I contributed and now many others have taken up the baton. The joy of having so many Asian stories is that no one has to singlehandedly bear that burden of representation. I get angry people on the internet saying, ‘you didn't represent Asianness in a way that is exactly specific to me.’ No one book can ever do that, which is why it’s great that we now we have twenty books. And within that spectrum, we get to see that Asian identity is not homogenous—there are so many different ways of being Asian. So I hope the stories keep being told. There's a lot of murmuring about the Asian fantasy trend burning itself out, but I don't think that's true.

I'd also love to see more cultures represented, and I’d love to see authors feel free to represent ambivalence about their culture, and not feel beholden to being perfectly authentic. Xiran Jay Zhao wrote the smashing YA book Iron Widow featuring mechas, the empress Wu Zetian, and foot binding. People were like, ‘foot binding did not exist in the Tang dynasty’, but there are giant mechas in space! We’re having fun. Why don't we get to have fun? Why do we always have to represent and educate people? I want to see diverse authors getting to have fun in the way that white people always got to have fun in fantasy. I was so afraid while writing this book that everyone would come for me—about getting history wrong, doing names incorrectly, not doing enough, pandering to white people. But it should be fun. Why don't we get to have a good time?

Do you have any advice for emerging fantasy writers?
This has been said before, but write the book that only you can write. For a long time, I thought that I should write something literary, something that was considered proper writing. But there are plenty of people who can do that fancy literary stuff, so I’m going to write the kind of book that only I can write. And maybe it’s a trashy, escapist, historical fantasy adventure. I think everyone should let go of the expectations of others and write what they want to write.

Who are you inspired by?
Visual arts actually. I don’t know much about it but I do find it very inspiring. I went to the NGV recently and saw this amazing piece called Still Lives, where they took actual AFL players and knotted them up [like it was] shibari. They were suspended from the ceiling like a still life arrangement, and the men were forced to touch each other in the way that you do on the sporting field, but never actually in society. So it was a really interesting commentary on homophobia in sports and masculinity. It was like, we’re bringing this kinky erotic practice but making it totally family-friendly and publicly funded.

What are you listening to?
I just came across this piece by Alexander Mackenzie. It's part of a film called Unspoken. It was a pandemic project about the experience of people whose loved ones died during COVID and they didn't get to say goodbye, because of that period when you weren’t allowed to be in the hospital. It's very much about grief and using the absence of a loved one to create something new and beautiful.

What are you reading?
I got an ARC of this book by Emma Mieko Candon called Ronin. It feels like a very Star Wars kind of world. It's a science fiction world in which AI controls cities, but the AI were all either killed or went mad. When they died, the archivist priests connected to them went mad as well, which caused some to die but there were others who ended up being scattered, one of them being an ex-priest who is summoned for one final mysterious mission to battle the Empire that has taken over the AI city. There are mechas and AI and empire and a lot of big Star Wars-type machinery and mysterious men with pasts and queer romance and everything fun jumbled together. It’s hard to find something super fresh that also feels familiar. [Anyway, this is the] worst summary. You should look it up.

How do you practice self care?
Not so much at the moment. During the pandemic, I took a lot of long baths I can highly recommend as a process. My winter office is the bathtub. I would answer all my emails in the bathtub.

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?
For a long time, I feel it meant defining yourself against whiteness. But I think it's time to move out of that reactive mode of defining yourself against something, and acknowledge that we have a very vibrant community that is not homogenous and is extremely diverse—racially, culturally and economically. I want to see a sense of Asian solidarity develop in Australia, and see what we can make of that.