This Zoom interview was recorded on February 1st, 2025. The questions and responses are a combination of Zoom interview content and email correspondence.
Sarah Marie: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. I appreciate you sending me a copy of your book! When did you start working on The Immortal Woman?
Su Chang: Some version of this story has been in my mind for more than a decade, but I kept changing the structure and the detailed plot of the story. I am not a pantser. I don’t have the courage to sit down and start a big novel until I have it mostly mapped out, and that took many years of reading, researching, and thinking, plus I was really busy making a living. I started working on the book in earnest in 2020 around the time of the first Covid lockdown.
What was it like working with House of Anansi Press?
Wonderful! I have lots of respect for my editor Shirarose Wilensky. I was so happy to have those back and forth with her during the editorial process. Writing is so solitary, and in that editorial stage, I finally felt like I was in a collaborative project and I enjoyed that feeling very much. The rest of the Anansi team are always very kind and supportive. That book cover by Alysia, I mean, it took my breath away. The marketing team led by Melissa Shirley is also superb. I consider myself a very lucky girl.
I am not a journalist or a writer, my thing is social media. I am just a person who reads a lot of books, who sort of fumbled their way into this situation where writers will talk to me, and I am very fortunate to be here talking to you about your book because of that. So, if it’s ok with you, I would like to talk a little bit about the social media presence for this book.
Sure. I have an Instagram page for this book. I’ve never been someone who can or wants to build a brand around myself. I’m an adult immigrant; when I came to North America I didn’t know anybody. There was no natural audience for my “content”. My family members are not here. My friends from childhood can’t even access Western social media. So I never had much practice with social media. Now as an author, my natural instinct is to have the book speak for itself. But I understand in today’s competitive publishing landscape, it’s expected, if not imperative, for authors to have some social media presence. I do my best, even though I’m not so good at it. I don’t know if that answers your question?
It does! I mean, I am kind of observing this thing where writers have to market themselves and not just their book. I don’t know if there was a time when writers maybe didn’t have to do that. But, social media is where I come into new books, and my social media presence got me put on these “influencer” email lists for new books like yours, particularly through The Miramichi Reader. So this arrangement is great for me, but I wonder sometimes what it’s like for writers to have to engage someone like me, particularly when, like you said, they wouldn’t normally use social media more generally.
Yeah. I think everyone has their own personality and preference. I know that some people are on social media to keep in touch with their family and friends who have moved away. And some make real close friends through social media. And you find good books on social media! There is no judgment on my part regarding how much or how little anyone wants to invest in their online world.
Right, right. Do you feel like there has been a lot of community engagement with your book?
I am not from a degree-granting creative writing program,but I’ve met a small group of wonderful writers during the process of writing and publishing. Some of them read the early drafts of the book, and some read the near- finished draft as they considered blurbing.
You didn’t participate in a writing program?
I didn’t do a BFA or MFA in creative writing. I did take quite a few standalone creative writing classes over the years. I met some wonderful mentors along the way. I couldn’t have been here without them.
I see. Have there been any stand out reviews so far?
I did get quite a few very kind reviews/blurbs from authors I admire tremendously. Some spoke to the heightened drama between the Chinese mother and daughter in the novel, some spoke to the fraught history the characters live through, some called the book a page-turner, some called it fierce and intelligent and full of emotional truths, some praised the writing style as immersive and dreamlike. And I was very happy to receive a review from Publisher’s Weekly. It called the book “unflinching, powered by raw emotion, and a cathartic account of a family buffeted by the winds of modern Chinese history.” I’m truly grateful for all the early buzz around this book, and really curious to see readers’ reactions once it’s out in bookstores and libraries.
You have been receiving some feedback using words like raw, particularly to describe some of the relationships in the book. They’re using words like emotionally raw, vivid. This kind of language. I would not have used that. I would have gone in the complete opposite direction with that. How do you feel about how people are describing the story?
You’re saying when you read this book, you wouldn’t use the word raw to describe it?
No! I think each character has found a way to talk about the other characters with compassion. I don’t know if I would be a big enough person if I was in any of those situations, to have that kind of empathy. In that way I guess I think it was very gentle.
Yeah, yeah.
Is, my reading of that like, a strange interpretation?
No, not at all, I find both readings very interesting. When people use the word “raw”, or “cathartic”, they speak to some truth in the sense that the characters are really harsh on themselves. When they are experiencing emotional turmoil, their first instinct is to blame themselves. This is particularly true for the two main characters, the mother and daughter. Whereas what you’re saying about compassion, I appreciate it too. It’s perhaps the authorial voice seeping into the narrative, and that voice is indeed centred on compassion. I have compassion for every character I write, even the villains. That’s always been my point of departure. There’s no point in writing a character without compassion, because there won’t be any depth and that character would quickly devolve into a two-dimensional caricature. So both interpretations from you and the early reviewers make sense to me.
Right. That makes so much sense.
So, in the last section of the book, it feels like it’s jumping really far into the future, but it really isn’t. I felt like this ending almost was like letting the main character, who is a playwright, push back against a typical ending. It started to get a bit meta for me because I was wondering how much of that is like, the actual writer deliberately writing an ending that pushes back against something more typical, and how much of it was the natural flow for the character. It’s not that it feels out of place. It feels unexpected. Did I over read the intention of that section?
No, no. I very much appreciate this reading and feedback. In fact, I had a completely different, almost opposite, ending in my first 10 drafts. I’ve probably written 20 to 30 drafts for this book over the years. At about halfway, I changed the ending entirely. The original ending was sadder – the daughter character remained in North America, with more self-awareness and understanding of her history, but still without a clear path forward. Then I thought, I’ve already put those characters through the wringer, let’s end it on a note of hope. So I decided to write a new ending, in my mind, the current ending is a kind of fairytale ending for the mother and daughter.
Okay, yeah, okay, yeah. So there’s so much going on here! Okay, so throughout the book, the themes are like, the pressures to assimilate, the pressure to conform, or to have this national pride. Everyone is in this state of tension. and for her ending I couldn’t have been happier with her finding something that wasn’t either of those. It felt really like its own separate thing, and it was really special.
Right, right.
But I hadn’t considered the possibility of it being a fairy tale, because in my imagination, fairy tales are always like, a big wedding and a lot of money and overcoming all obstacles. There’s really none of that in this case. It’s just this being in this very community minded space that ends up being the best possible outcome.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I use the word “fairytale” in the loosest fashion. For Lin, having lived as an immigrant, an “alien”, on a continent that doesn’t necessarily welcome her, to then be able to find that sense of comfort and security in her own skin, and to be surrounded by a true community, is perhaps her deepest desire and wildest dream, more than the riches, the fame, and all those common markers for success. That’s what I meant by “fairytale” — for adult immigrants, that genuine sense of belonging is so elusive — almost impossible — that it’s closest to a fairytale than anything else.
I mean, what is a good life or a happy outcome? Like, I think sometimes our stories about our best moments can kind of confuse what we would be willing to count as like, proof of having a really good life.
Yeah. But I do have to point out, in the last paragraph of the book, there’s a sinister note lurking in the background. Lin is returning to a place that’s still devoid of liberty and freedom of speech. So she’s aware that she’s living in this imagined bubble, which can burst anytime, but she just has to hold onto that sense of belonging for a precious moment. I hope that sense of danger and brittleness is clear, because ultimately, I’m not writing a fairytale. Let’s not be naïve or lose sight.
I feel like you are probably going to get asked a lot about the Dali character because he seems so common. My interest in him is more generally is his romantic pursuit of one of the main characters, Lin, and comparing that dynamic against the one with her actual love interest, Sasha. I feel like, there are people who see themselves as this great person, and they feel very entitled to someone’s time, in the way that Dali feels about Lin. And then there are these people, like Sasha, that we’ve maybe over invested in, who probably didn’t deserve our time, but we gave it to them. But, I know I don’t always properly consider how racism would shape the way we would see these two types of people, and calling attention to that really complicated everything for me.
Hmm, interesting. Sasha is a physical embodiment of all that American propaganda that was fed to Lin during her formative years. She almost couldn’t tell the difference between mythology and reality when she met Sasha, and inevitably she thought she was falling in love. This was a person from her mother’s American posters, it’s like falling in love with a celebrity who is right in front of you and being super nice to you. Obviously, that has a lot to do with her colonial mentality, and her internalized racism.
I think of Dali as a tragic character. I know there were early readers who thought I was too soft on Dali in my writing. Dali is someone from rural China, who already has a precarious social footing when he moves to a big city like Shanghai. He experiences hardship and discrimination even within the border of his own country. Folks here probably don’t think about that sort of tension within a country, but that definitely exists. It’s a de facto class-based system. So later on, when he takes the big step to immigrate to North America, the psychological distance for him to travel is even longer than someone from a metropolitan city. As a result, he has a much harder time in America, and builds up intense resentment because he can’t belong. Eventually he turns to nationalism for solace, and perhaps even for survival.
It is challenging sometimes for me to go back and like, see how this personality developed in someone like him, but when I do, it almost always started with somebody who felt like they didn’t belong. They couldn’t fit in, they were never going to be accepted. You know, they get a bug in their ear about how they can fix everything, and what the real issue is, and then they just become a nightmare.
Right, right.
Who is the audience for your books? I’m gonna tell everybody to read it. I loved it so much.
Oh, thank you!
Some writers have maybe a sense of who they were hoping to engage when they were writing. Other writers are like, this is the story I wanted to tell, and I’d like everybody to have it. Do you feel like you’re writing to engage a specific audience?
Yeah, it’s so hard for me to answer that question. When I started writing this novel, I didn’t think much about publication. I didn’t know who the ideal reader would be. I just thought these stories hadn’t been told and I’d like to tell them. I did think about the authors I love, and subconsciously I must be writing to be in conversation with them. For instance, I was very fascinated by Ayad Akhtar, who’s a Pakistani American playwright and novelist. Especially after 9/11, he felt he could no longer be in his own skin, as the world no longer saw him as a true American, even though he was born and raised there. Instead, he was just another dangerous Muslim man. He wrote many plays and then a novel, Homeland Elegies. Of course, my background is very different from his, but we are living in this Cold-War-esque era — if we listen to the politicians and media — I understand what it means to live in the West as someone who comes from an “enemy state”. So I could find a lot of parallel between his story and my own journey. That’s one example. When I’m writing, I think about writers and books like that.
Oh, wow! I like that. Oh, I love thinking about that so much! Are you reading any Canadian books now that you’d like to recommend?
I have indeed been reading a lot of Canadian books. In fact, I just finished an essay for 49th Shelf to recommend a list of feminist books written by Canadian authors. Please check out my essay there when it comes out.
I will read it!
There are three more books I recently read that resonated with me. The first two – Anna Julia Stainsby’s The Afterpain and Kerry Clare’s Asking for a Friend, have some thematic similarities, both dealing with difficult subjects like the loss of a child, and the mother’s long-lingering pain and/or guilt. Stainsby’s tale is also an immigrant story, which I could instantly relate to, her characters’ sense of loneliness and isolation, of straddling between cultures and heritage and having nowhere to truly call home. For a debut, the writing is so mature that you feel you are in the hands of a young master. Clare’s book is fascinating to me in other ways. Because I left home and immigrated as an adult on my own, I’ve struggled to make and keep friends, and to build up some sort of meaningful history with people I connect with as adults. I always thought this kind of hardship is immigrants’ territory, and reading Clare’s book I was reminded of the innately intricate and complex ups and downs of ANY friendship, perhaps especially female friendships. And as we enter deeper and deeper into our adulthood, our priorities shift, our plates get filled all the time even as we run on dry fuel, how do we keep those female friendships alive and well, because those relationships can sometimes be life-saving. Some of the conflicts explored in the book felt so real because we all had those life moments. I found the book strangely comforting; it offered me much-needed perspectives on friendships. And lastly, I want to give a shoutout to Jean Marc Ah-sen’s new novel Killworthy Tanner. I actually devoured that book over one weekend when barricading myself in my kid’s bedroom ignoring their shouting matches outside. That’s how engrossed I was in the book. Jean is known in Canlit as an “underground master stylist”. He has such an incredibly unique voice, a mix of cultural critic’s sophistication, slangy, twisted humor, and raunchy sarcasm. The book is ostensibly about the literary scene in Canada, and the events depicted are wicked, brutal, outrageous, often absurd, and highly entertaining. Also, I sincerely hope none of that was based on a shred of truth.
Do you enjoy reviewing others’ work?
I do. Like I said earlier, self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to me. I feel more at ease reading and talking about other people’s work. I suppose that’s also my way of giving back to the community.
Yeah, it really seems like everybody wants everyone else to do well! I think that that’s such a nice thing to see. Like, the thing that connects all of you is writing, but what makes you all so interesting to observe is like how you all show up for each other. I really like that.
Yes, we are all in this tough business together.
Thanks again for taking the time to talk to me! I am looking forward to reading all of the reviews and everything for your book!
Thank you so much for doing this! I really enjoyed our conversation.
SU CHANG is a Chinese Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, and the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest, among others.
Publisher: House of Anansi Press (March 4, 2025)
Paperback 5.25″ x 8″ | 384 pages
ISBN: 9781487013172
Sarah Marie is a perfectly unqualified, no-talent, lit/poetry enthusiast.A~literal nobody~ on social media, you may recognize her from commenting on your posts as if you sent them to her personally. She isvery impressedby your dedication to your work and to each other, and she believes in you.
- Sarah Mariehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-marie/
- Sarah Mariehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-marie/
- Sarah Mariehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-marie/
- Sarah Mariehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-marie/
- Sarah Mariehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-marie/
- Sarah Mariehttps://miramichireader.ca/author/sarah-marie/
