Chapbook Interview with Samantha Fu

Addy Perlman: Your chapbook 国家 discusses family, ancestry, culture, and how they impact your experience. You explore vulnerability and strength in your depiction of these themes. How did it feel to write about these themes? What was your experience telling your story?

Samantha Fu: In a way, this is all I ever want to write about. It’s my obsession. This and ballet. I think it’s just something that comes up for anyone who is raised in an Asian family because Asian culture is so concerned with exactly those things. It’s even more prevalent when your parents are immigrants, and they’re always telling you how much they sacrificed to give you the life you have. But they bring so much of their culture to America and raise you with it, but you also grow up in America and those things don’t mesh well together and then you get things like the subtle asian traits facebook group. Yay diaspora.

On a more serious note, it’s not just my story—it’s mine and my parents' and anyone else who relates. That’s something that was important to me: picking up both the micro and the macro, the small, individual moments but also the bigger picture systematic influences at play, and how these things influence each other.

AP: In your chapbook, you talk about language and what it means for you and your family. You also use both English and Mandarin in your text. What was it like to explore language through poetry? How did this change your perspective if it did?

SF: I think it was absolutely necessary, because such a cornerstone of the Asian American diaspora experience is both a connection and disconnection to your culture and language. My conversations with my parents happen in 2 languages—they speak Mandarin to me and I reply in English, because my spoken & written Mandarin is terrible. And poetry, with its concern for the intricacies of language, feels like the perfect medium to explore what is a failure of language for me. It’s important for me to be able to write across languages because that is what my experience is like—straddling two cultures, two identities.

One of the things it made my most aware of was how bad my Mandarin actually is; it’s never bothered me terribly much before because, well, I live in the US, but the truth of the matter is that I chose to abandon it. Sure, pressure & racism & blah blah blah trying to fit in with white people were all factors, but I did make the choice to distance myself from it, to quit Chinese school. I’m sadder about it now. There was a moment in workshop when someone suggested that I incorporate Mandarin into a line that was talking about language, the way some of my other poems do, and I thought, yes that is a good suggestion. Unfortunately, my Chinese was too bad to actually do it and I couldn’t ask my mom because the line was about her.

AP: Were there any poems you were nervous about putting in the collection - meaning were there any poems you were nervous for the world to see? How did you deal with this? What advice would you give other writers struggling with this?

SF: Thinking back on it, probably “a love letter to my mother will never be about love” and “Mother’s Land,” but I also knew that I wanted them in the collection no matter what, because I felt as though it was necessary. I also don’t necessarily think it was nervousness but rather vulnerability—I could honestly care less what the world thinks of those poems because I wrote them for me and me alone, but I wanted them in the larger arc of the chapbook to stay honest to myself and that was what was scary. Anyways, one thing in general that I always keep in mind is the separation of author from speaker. My poems are never pure truth—yes, they’re inspired by experiences or events, but that inspiration gives me the general shape of the thing, and I fill in the details around it with what I think is appropriate. I’ve never been to Shanghai, for instance, or eaten dandelions. Those details help me with the separation, and to remember that not everything has to be purely confessional.

AP: Your chapbook is filled with beautiful illustrations. What was it like to be the artist as well? What would you tell other writers about complementing collections with illustrations?

SF: It was really interesting to think of my writing from a different perspective—to tease out what parts of the poetry felt appropriate to illustration and vice versa, to think about the possible integration of text with image. I keep talking about thinking, but I also think that I spent too much time thinking about it—I do firmly believe that a lot of art is just trying things out and throwing them on the page, so I wish I’d done more of that. More drafting, more thumbnails. One of the things that I kept in mind as I was thinking about my illustrations was also the fact that I didn’t want them to be so literal, to the point where I dived off the deep end such that they’re divorced from the poems and instead telling a different story. This was where I chose to go with the illustrations, but some good old fashioned referential illustration work would have been just as valid in all honesty, and I do want to consider that in the future, as I really want to rework the illustrations I have.

AP: Throughout this process, I have been excited to see new drafts, edits, and all of your ideas coming together to create this wonderful collection. What was the most difficult part for you? What were some challenges you faced? What was different from your expectations?

SF: In all honesty, I hate revisions. This is probably not something that I should be admitting, but it’s partially because I edit as I go. It’s hard for me to just write something and leave it alone; I have to pick at it before I feel satisfied enough to move on, so revisiting a lot of the stuff I wrote was a bit of an effort (also like a brick to the face, because some of the stuff I dug up was real old). I also had a bit of a time choosing what poems to keep & what to discard because I am usually a chronic hoarder, but this time I really wanted to go minimalist. In the end, I kept it to 18 because it was a nice round, divisible number such that I could break it into distinct parts. Ordering within that was a challenge too—there were certain pairings and break points I wanted to preserve and working around that was difficult. It always came down to 1 or 2 poems I didn’t know where to slot.

AP: I hope your brilliant collection is published one day. Do you have any plans for it post our class? What are your other future writing plans?

SF: I do! I thought I’d submit to some presses just for the heck of it, even though I probably won’t ever be accepted but YOLO. As for future writing plans, I don’t really know. I’m selling my soul to the devil that is the tech industry come this June, but I hope that I’ll continue writing. Can’t say for sure. I’m really bad without external motivations i.e. deadlines. I’ve always wanted to publish a novel one day though, so maybe I’ll be working towards that.

---

Samantha Fu is the author of the chapbook 国家. They attended Johns Hopkins University and received their Bachelor of the Arts in Computer Science and Writing Seminars in 2021. They are an incoming Software Engineer at Bloomberg.

Addy Perlman is the author of the chapbook Toeing the Line. From South Georgia, Addy is graduating from Johns Hopkins in May 2021. She majored in Writing Seminars and Medicine, Science, & the Humanities. Her next stop is Los Angeles, and hopefully, there is more writing in her future.