Dear Chrysanthemums is a haunting debut novel by celebrated poet and translator, Fiona Sze-Lorrain. Covering an interconnected web of women, the novel begins during the tumult of early twentieth-century China and spans decades of displacement and exile across the world. At once brutal and tender, this novel of women’s lives has the power to move and complicate our understanding of the long shadow cast by revolution as well as the inextinguishable longing every person has for beauty, love, art, and selfhood. This spring, I had the opportunity to interview Sze-Lorrain about her powerful novel.
Tsering Yangzom Lama (TYL): There’s a dark irony and melancholy to your work. Symbols of beauty and luck frame stories of profound ugliness and misfortune. For instance, the title of your novel references a celebrated flower in China, but one of your characters, Mei, is tasked with picking chrysanthemums for Mao Zedong as part of her reform labor. Tell us about the juxtaposition between such auspicious symbols and the unsettled lives of the women in your novel.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain (FSL): I don’t believe in absolutes or polarities. There is no joy without sadness and vice versa. Spanish poet Miguel Hernandez: “I live in shadow, filled with light.” Chrysanthemums are symbolic flowers in Asia. I view them as both auspicious and ominous. A florist friend in Hong Kong once told me how she saved her freshest pink, white, and yellow chrysanthemums for a funeral wreath every other day.
In Chinese traditional ink wash, chrysanthemums are one of the “four noble gentlemen.” I’ve been painting chrysanthemums since I was a student yet find them the most elusive. How to make these flowers less figurative? That’s the question. At the same time they seem so perfect and delicious in each detail . . . If only they could speak.
I grow, cook, read chrysanthemums. I think of their psychic wholes. I too live with orchids and floral essences. Years ago, I came across a witchy chrysanthemum in a mokuhanga art by an old woman artist from northern Japan. I asked her how this larger-than-usual chrysanthemum might taste in a medicinal soup. She shook her head. The creature-like image followed me home. Those petals resembled fingers and squid tentacles. So erotic. How knotty. They pulled me in, then disquieted me. That distance—the vulnerability to the plant rendered its inner strength even more unyielding. This tension conjured in itself a story of survival. When I began to work on the heroines in my novel, I pictured them allegorically as chrysanthemums, each of a kind and from different seasons. And how they heal, apologize, or make amends when something goes wrong in life.
TYL: I’m interested in how you as a poet and translator approached the novel form. This novel is both expansive and fractured. Its form creates silences that I associate with poetry. How did you find the structure we see today? Did you begin with one character and her story, and build out—or did you have the whole form in mind as you began composing?
FSL: I’m attracted to novels that create lucid silence: silences to generate [a] voice[s] and become the plot, the narrative. Is silence the song or story, or both, and/or neither?
I write longhand. I subtract instead of add. When I write, I listen. I can be skeptical of punctuation. I wrote my earliest chapter more than twelve years ago. Since, I hadn’t stopped working on it. I began with one woman character in mind, then the next . . . I wanted to keep them alive and close to heart as long as possible. There is always room for improvement in each section, I find, even now in its published form. I can’t imagine how it’d be possible to avoid the struggle in writing, be it a story, poem, or essay. “Don’t go easy on yourself,” Suzuki actress Ellen Lauren used to say. “Work through the struggle or mistake onstage. The audience wants to see it.” I learned elegance from the late American poet Mark Strand: grace is a craft. It’s about making a problem seem easy when it isn’t, not hiding it but pulling it off such that its difficulty is almost invisible, and to never seek credit for the effort.
I prefer “arc” to “structure”—it was one of the last puzzles pieced together when I decided that Ling, one of my tragic characters, must begin and end this novel in stories. A return to zero, back to the start. Life is about going home or where the road begins. I still have a long way to go.
TYL: Relatedly, how does the structure of the novel reflect or interplay with your understanding of exile and displacement?
FSL: I might have just answered the question. I prefer to define exile as an invisible world, life, map.
TYL: We often think of historical figures as distant and belonging to the genre of nonfiction works. But I was awed by how you punctured that seal and placed your characters, often from lower social or class standing, in close proximity to famous figures in modern Chinese history. It seemed like you were having fun with this! Tell us about this decision and more broadly, how you navigated bringing historical figures into fiction.
FSL: Yes, I had fun “making” my characters cross paths with historical figures. I played with ways to unmask the latter’s public personae and to up their emotional ante in pseudo-auto-fictional settings. But I wouldn’t do so recklessly—or so I believe. I love humor and a healthy dose of sarcasm. I wish I’d poked more fun at them or created more comedies. Nowadays, people function at the erasure of tweets and retweets: what/where/when/how’s the past? They legitimize ways to confuse fame or celebrity with influence and the ability to sustain history. This might sound odd coming from a storyteller: I believe in facts, not truths. Dear Chrysanthemums is a work of fiction.
TYL: Temporality seems to bear great meaning in your novel. Your novel spans nearly a century but focuses on specific moments—each in a year ending with the number six. Why did you want to cover both the span and these dates in particular?
FSL: Symbolism appeals to me more than utilitarianism. I’m interested in numerology. Fate is about being at a specific place at a precise moment. I was hoping to explore timelessness and the mysteries of time in a story. I think it more invigorating to make a character or guest out of time than to operate on time as a narrative device. Here, time functions as the circular architecture of my novel.
TYL: This last one is of personal curiosity to me: What is your relationship with China and/or Chinese literature (however one might define that) today?
FSL: This sounds more political than personal to me. (Laughs)
I’m French, born in Singapore, a former British colony, to a diasporic Shanghainese family. Singapore is not China. I was brought up in a bilingual environment, both English- and Mandarin-speaking. I was schooled in French at age twelve. When I moved to New York in the late nineties, I started to read East Asian literature in translation.
I disdain any form of tyranny, including the emotional. I don’t believe in Confucian values but have a certain affinity for Taoism. I can be better at doing nothing. The phrase I know is an illusion to me.
More recently, I’m saddened, though not surprised, to learn how ideologically “correct” or compromising some high-profile Chinese intellectuals and artists have become under sociopolitical pressure. But opportunism applies to expatriates who want to make money, enjoy success—whatever “success” means—in the “second superpower.” Firewalls abound. Still, the immediacy of grassroot communities in China, elsewhere in Asia too, is a force not to be underestimated. That collective spirit is ever-evolving and most humbling.
I never cease to marvel at the profundity of Chinese classical culture and landscapes. But I’m not fascinated at first degree, don’t participate in tourism. I read more Asian-American literature than Chinese and Taiwanese writings, the latter sometimes in English or French translation. I don’t read enough of Chinese poetry for pleasure. Age catches up with my fingers, so I no longer work every day on my zheng harp. I practice breath work through Japanese and Chinese calligraphy. Outside the literary, I hunt for antique manuals on Chinese herbology and martial arts. I can hardly read the texts, to tell the truth. But I stare at their illustrations, intrigued, in awe.
Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a fiction writer, poet, translator, editor, and zheng harpist. She writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese. Her work includes five poetry collections—most recently Rain in Plural (2020) and The Ruined Elegance (2016)—and fifteen translations. Her novel Dear Chrysanthemums is just out from Scribner. She lives in Paris.
Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, We Measure the Earth with our Bodies, won the 2023 GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction, was a finalist for the Giller Prize, and longlisted for the Carol Shields Prize, Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and the Toronto Book Awards. She splits her time between Vancouver, Canada, and Sweden.
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