{"id":20152,"date":"2013-02-20T09:20:28","date_gmt":"2013-02-20T13:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookdragon.si.edu\/?p=20152"},"modified":"2015-08-17T09:55:29","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T13:55:29","slug":"author-interview-pauline-a-chen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/apa.si.edu\/bookdragon\/author-interview-pauline-a-chen\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Interview: Pauline A. Chen [in Bloom]"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Pauline<\/a>A couple of days after filing my feature<\/a> on Pauline A. Chen<\/a>, I got on the phone to ask her all the questions I couldn\u2019t find answers to out there in the virtual world of google-ing.<\/p>\n

True confession moment: I admit I was a wee bit intimidated as the land lines connected us between DC and Cleveland \u2013 just what sort of person takes on the most canonical text in Chinese literary history (The Dream of the Red Chamber<\/em>) and makes it her own (The Red Chamber<\/em><\/a>)? I actually expected a Glenn Close\/Cruella de Vil sort of megalomaniacal voice to pick up. Lucky for me, I could put that overactive imagination away, because really, as gutsy as her literary move has been, she\u2019s not at all the hardened character I had dreamt up. Always good to start an interview with a sigh of relief.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s begin with the basics: I understand you spoke rudimentary Chinese as a child because your parents didn\u2019t want their native language to impede their children\u2019s English proficiency. So when and how did you learn Chinese? Which dialect? And are you fluent now?<\/strong>
\nI took beginning Mandarin in college [Harvard], but the Chinese language program was just getting started at the time, so the classes were not terribly challenging. After I graduated, I spent a year in Taiwan teaching English and that\u2019s when my proficiency really improved, just because I was living in a Chinese-speaking environment. One of my English students in Taiwan introduced me to 9th-century Tang poetry, which I fell in love with \u2013 until then I had never imagined that such a developed and sophisticated literary tradition even existed in China.<\/p>\n

I came back to the U.S. and went straight to law school, but on the side, I took classes in classical Chinese language and literature. By the time I finished law school, I had realized working over the summers at law firms that I did not want to be an attorney. I went straight into a PhD program in East Asian Studies, and that\u2019s when I began to study Chinese literature in earnest.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m pretty fluent in Mandarin, but my training in graduate school focused on reading pre-modern texts \u2013 mostly poetry from the fourth century to the ninth century \u2013 so I would say I\u2019m stronger in classical Chinese. I can understand quite a bit of Taiwanese, but my attempts to speak it are usually treated with frank derision by native speakers.<\/p>\n

You were so certain going into college that you wanted to be a writer. Where did that determination come from? <\/strong>
\nFor as long as I can remember, I liked to write; I had an impulse to make up stories. And reading always gave me such tremendous pleasure. But really, I had no idea what it meant to be writer. Growing up, I never revised anything I wrote, or asked another person for feedback. I just had this dream as a child, but had no comprehension that this was something I had to work towards.<\/p>\n

And then during your four years at college, your writerly ambitions just disappeared. How? Why?<\/strong>
\nThe first reason was that at Harvard, students have to apply to get into creative writing courses, and I got into poetry, not fiction. I struggled in the poetry because then, as now, I was fascinated by poetry in other languages \u2013 I studied Latin poetry back then \u2013 but really didn\u2019t know the English poetic tradition very well. The deeper reason was that I just didn\u2019t know how or what to write. As a teenager I had loved Jane Austen, but at college I started to realize that emulating her style and subject matter would have been faintly ridiculous, and that I needed to find a way to incorporate my own perspective and experience into what I wrote. Years later, when I read V. S. Naipaul\u2019s The Enigma of Arrival<\/em>, I understood that this was what he had experienced when he tried to write like a worldly, Evelyn Waugh-like sophisticate, while trying to suppress his own experience in a peasant family on colonial Trinidad. I also was too undeveloped, too uncomfortable with my own background to use it as a platform from which to write.[… click here for more<\/a>]\n

Author interview<\/strong>: “Q&A with Pauline A. Chen,” Bloom<\/em>, February 20, 2013<\/a><\/p>\n

Readers<\/strong>: Middle Grade, Adult<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of days after filing my feature on Pauline A. Chen, I got on the phone to ask her all the questions I couldn\u2019t find answers to out there in the virtual world of google-ing. 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