The Interview with E. M. Tran

Author of Daughters of the New Year

Greetings to new subscribers and welcome to Sitting in Silence, an inspirational newsletter and podcast for writers, readers, and thinkers. The interview is a popular ongoing feature of the newsletter. I love talking to writers about inspiration, craft, and life. They never disappoint. So, from time to time, you’ll find these intimate and enlightening conversations in this space. Today’s conversation with Author E. M. “Lizzie” Tran.

Lizzie is the author of the wonderful novel Daughters of the New Year. She is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Mississippi and has a PhD in creative writing from Ohio University. Hosting Lizzie’s book release in November 2023 was a lot of fun and an honor. It was awesome to see such a cross section of New Orleans turn out to honor one of the first contemporary novels by a local from the Vietnamese/Vietnamese American community. We talk a bit about the joy and burdens of representation as well as navigating family as character in fiction. I hope you enjoy our discussion.

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Maurice: What are your earliest memories of reading or writing stories?

Lizzie: I'm not even sure if this particular memory counts as an accurate answer to your question because it's one in which I am neither reading nor writing.... I was quite young and pretending to read a picture book. My recollection tells me it was Little Red Riding Hood, but who knows if that is real or imagined. However, I have the explicit memory of looking at the words on the page, which at this point were mysterious symbols to me, and re-imagining what the story was. While I wasn't reading or writing in the way we traditionally define reading or writing, I think this memory for me points to the fact that I was always trying to tell a story, even when I didn't know how. Or maybe the answer is the other way around -- as kids, we already know how to tell stories, just not in the way or in the language the world expects. I am always trying to hold onto that childlike relationship with storytelling because it is pure and unadulterated by expectation.

Maurice: I agree that the childlike relationship is so important to writing well. When children get going, the stories just flow out of them. I try to have the same approach when at work. By the way, were you encouraged to write when you were young? Did you keep a journal?

Lizzie: My parents were classic immigrant parents, in that they didn't necessarily encourage me to do specific hobbies or to pursue interests, but instead they expected me to work hard, get good grades, and play a classical instrument--in my case, the piano. There was a lot of pressure on me and my sisters to achieve. Perhaps marginally less so on myself because I was the youngest and my parents were tired. We were supposed to be doctors, lawyers, or engineers. I don't think I ever seriously pursued writing as a kid or teenager despite English being my best subject because I assumed my parents thought it wasn't a serious thing to do. I mean, they bought me lots of books and were proud I was a voracious reader, but I was always under the impression the arts were not the preferred career route--this ended up being a misguided assumption and just goes to show you should ask your parents more questions.

As for journaling, I had a Little Mermaid diary that I wrote in when I was around seven, and I mostly used that journal to painstakingly document what everyone in my family was doing at the moment. I came of age in the era of personal blogging with platforms like Xanga and Livejournal. My most consistent blog was on Myspace, and I wrote very regularly in a comedic voice complaining about things like slow left-lane drivers and Hurricane Katrina. Those Myspace entries were lost to the internet abyss, something I sincerely regret not preserving. I also wrote an extremely cringe Harry Potter fanfiction that I hope no one ever finds. But, because I never considered writing a serious endeavor for myself, I don't think I realized I was good at it until I went to college and had the space to explore, discover, and compare.

Maurice: I can relate. I had generally supportive parents, but they didn't know any writers either, so how could they have expected me to be one? I was always writing in sort-of secret, too. What was it that pushed you to start writing for yourself after you knew you could write?

Lizzie: Well, the way I started writing more seriously was a bit of an accident. Looking back, it feels like the universe was shuffling me towards it in ways that, at the time, felt like a series of failures. When I got to LSU, I had to declare a major. And of course, I had those preconceptions about what my parents would deem acceptable. I ended up being a Business major, thinking it had the vague air of utility. The only problem was that I had to enroll in actual business courses, which, as it turns out, were really difficult. I failed a class for the first time and got Cs and Ds in the rest of them, something that sent me into an existential tailspin. A combination of underestimating the difficulty of the courses and struggling with being on my own for the first time. It's not that I hadn't had responsibility before--as the kid of immigrants, I often did things for my parents, spoke in English for them and completed adult tasks so they could avoid people's assumptions (due to their accents) that they were stupid or incompetent. I think I had never tasted freedom like the first semester of college before. Well, that freedom almost made me fail out! I was sent to the academic counselor, who asked me very plainly what subject I enjoyed, and I said, easily, English. She offered me two tracks: literature or creative writing. I picked creative writing on a whim, under pressure, and just went with my gut. Doing that was my first introduction to real writing workshops, to a literary community, and to an environment where writing was taken as a serious aspiration. It was in a writing workshop that a professor asked if he could submit one of my stories to a contest, and I realized that my writing didn't have to be for just me and that other people, shockingly, wanted to read what I had to say--thought that it was even good enough to submit to a contest. After that point, my relationship to writing changed dramatically.

Maurice: Ain't it funny how the world can tell us who we are? What was the journey like from being in that first workshop to publishing your excellent and acclaimed first novel, Daughters of the New Year?

Lizzie: The journey has required a lot of inner growth. In many ways the actual act of publishing is disconnected from the act of writing. Publishing is a very outward-facing thing that allows people to perceive your work and a version of who you are as a person, sometimes that perception not lining up with the truth. But the act of writing itself is very solitary and inward. Oftentimes the barriers to completing writing are interior. Who I was in my first workshop was a person both much freer and also more constrained. Freer in the sense that, I didn't have any preconceived notions about what "good" writing was, and I wasn't yet burdened with the expectations of the literary sphere of influence often entrenched in academic circles. I didn't know what the expectations were and so, I was free from them. But, I was constrained in a different way by a lifetime of racial self-hatred, cultivated by a society hostile to my identity. I had this insecurity about writing about Vietnamese immigrant life--that, if people read my work and saw it was about that and then saw who I was, they would say, Of course she is writing about this. Of course she has to write from her life experience, because she's unoriginal. Or, that I might be categorized as an ethnic writer, that my writing wouldn't be compared to or talked about in the same category of other books that are never defined by race. I also worried that, if I wrote about Vietnamese American life, people would say my writing was good purely because I was writing about something they felt I was an "expert" on purely because I was Vietnamese. It was a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation in my mind, and I was envious of white writers because they had the luxury of never considering this conundrum in their writing. So I often wrote supposedly race-less stories and was constantly contending with that choice to do so. As I sat in more workshops, through undergraduate, MFA, my PhD, and writers' conferences--more than a decade's worth of workshops during the bulk of my very tender 20s, I got older and more confident in what I wanted to write. I wanted to write about the people I knew and about the specific identity and place-based experiences I had rarely, if ever, seen reflected in the writing I read growing up. Once I admitted this (and that interior reckoning took a lot of self-examination) and started writing about these things without consideration to outside perception, my writing felt more genuine and more empathetic. My voice as a writer was more confident and unique to who I was. This is just a long way of saying that I stopped caring what other people thought, as much, and I really believe that made my novel more visible to those who wanted to publish it.

Maurice: As Morrison said, to paraphrase, the job of racism is to keep us distracted. It really is a puzzle with no clear solution other than self-confidence, which I believe comes from obsession with the story and a mission that powers you. Speaking of which, I was moved by the exhibit I stumbled onto at the Historic New Orleans Collection in the French Quarter. There was a sweeping history of the large Vietnamese diaspora in New Orleans and transcripts of interviews. The whole thing moved forward in time from the mid-20th century to the present. I turned a corner into the present and there was a copy of your book and a trophy that your mother won back in the day. I have so many questions and wonder how you feel about the exhibit. It's so beautiful, but I think about what you were saying about essentialization. That you once felt compelled to make certain moves in your work. Are you comfortable with having so much of yourself on a literal pedestal?

Lizzie: I'm so happy you went to the exhibit! The curator approached me more than two years ago after reading my book and an essay I had written about my mom, and he inquired after my mother's pageant trophy, which is very real and has been in our house in New Orleans for as long as I have memories. Putting the trophy in the exhibit and participating in the oral history was an interesting experience because it really is much different than writing about yourself, in fiction or nonfiction. Even when I'm writing personal essays about my family and my life, there is a persona or a specific kind of narrator I'm projecting onto the page. I'm controlling the narrative in a way I couldn't when objects from my life, recordings of my voice, are used and framed by someone else in a public-facing display consumed by an audience very differently than how written work is consumed by an audience. In some ways, it was freeing to have someone other than myself else mediate the story, especially because I trusted the curator to do it well--I can imagine the process would've been much more fraught had I felt my family's story was being mishandled or grossly misrepresented. I don't think I'll ever be comfortable being "on display" in a museum like that because I don't really believe I or my family is special or unique. But actually, I believe that is why having stories of ordinary people put on a pedestal, as you say, in a museum is so important. Those are the stories most likely to be erased or forgotten. My mother's trophy is not in the exhibit because it should be elevated above other things, but because it's part of a giant tapestry of Vietnamese immigrant experiences, of a whole community here that people might otherwise easily ignore. I view my book in the same way--sure, it's about a specific family, of a collection of individuals, and drawn from my personal experiences in many ways, but also, it's about a community, a place, a cultural identity. I don't mean for the family I'm writing to stand in for the whole community, but rather, to add to a conversation about that community, a conversation people might not even know is happening or should be happening.

Maurice: I enjoyed the reality TV component of Daughters of the New Year. Are you a big fan of that genre and, if so, what brings you joy other than reality TV?

Lizzie: I love reality television! A lot of people consider reality tv in the "brain rot" category, but I just feel like you're not watching it that closely if you think that. The entire time I'm watching any reality show, I can't help but be consumed by questions about gender performance, perspective, capitalism, surveillance... the psychology that goes into making these shows alone is enough to send me into a tailspin. The fact that anyone voluntarily signs up to be on one of these shows is itself an interesting character question--who are you and how did you get to this point in your life? What drives you? I feel like a lot of the time the answer isn't actually money, but attention. I love movies and television in general, not just reality tv, and my only complaint is that there is too much content and not enough time! Other than staring at screens, I love to cook as well and find a lot of joy from trying new recipes, reconnecting with dishes that my mother made when I was a kid, and sharing something delicious with people I love. Taking the time and effort to cook something and then seeing my family or friends enjoy the dish is a top tier feeling.