‘A book is a living thing’: Alice Evelyn Yang on writing her debut novel

Alice Evelyn Yang’s debut novel A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing is a dark, magical realist family saga that moves through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria and the Cultural Revolution to the present day, exploring intergenerational trauma, the legacy of colonialism and the inescapability of fate in stunningly rendered folklore. In this blog post, Yang discusses the unexpectedly ‘messy, sprawling process’ of writing a novel.
 

By the time a reader takes the book off the shelf, it is neat and contained, wrapped up prim and proper in its jacket. Like most writers, I was a reader before I became a writer. I only interacted with books in this final form, and this gave me the illusion that writing a book would be neat and contained. In writing my first novel, A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing, I quickly discovered that it is a messy, sprawling process. A book is a living thing. I think of the macabre displays in the Body Worlds exhibit: the human body spliced apart, the overlapping systems dissected and separated. With the novel, I found myself initially developing the different systems of the book individually: characters, plot, historical research, symbolism, themes, craft, voice. Through the years of drafting and editing, I overlaid these on top of one another and tried to hide the seams. But, in the beginning, I had only the seeds of an idea. I knew I wanted to write a family saga, in part because two of my favorite books were Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and East of Eden by John Steinbeck. I knew that I wanted to write about the history of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and the atrocities committed by the Kwantung Army, as I wanted to highlight this lesser-known history that I’d never been taught about in my formal education. And I knew I wanted to write something uncanny, like the early magical realism novels of Latin America; I would be working with difficult subject matters, and I liked the distance from reality that had made novels like The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier and Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo such unsettling and interesting reads.

I began the book like a detective: with a wall of ideas that – forgive the pun – became its own beast. I’m proud to admit that I did not buy red string, but only because there was no thread to follow. I wrote notecards and Post-its and put them up indiscriminately. Historical timelines of major events in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Chinese numerology perspectives on the number seven. Scene breakdowns from media I enjoyed that dealt with multiple perspectives and timelines (the primary ones being season one of HBO’s Watchmen series and Everything Under by Daisy Johnson). Old Chinese omens. Notes on studies analyzing how intergenerational trauma can be woven into one’s DNA. Postcards from the Whitney’s exhibit of Julie Mehretu’s maps. Whatever felt interesting and pertinent went up. My roommate at the time called it my ‘Beautiful Mind wall’.

I admit now that when I recall the years of drafting and revising the book, my mind flattens those long hours. I see them as a still image of me at my little roll-top writing desk – bought from Facebook Marketplace for a song – laboring and languishing over my sentences, over the scenes that I often didn’t know how to approach. Part of me thinks this is my mind protecting itself. If I remembered how hard it had been, I might not attempt another one. But I remember that I formally began A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing in 1924 with the birth of Ming.

Though the novel is written in a third person, it is often a close third-person, and it follows three generations in one family: Ming, her son Weihong, and his daughter Qianze. The frame tale follows the estranged father-daughter pair, Weihong and Qianze, in present day as they are unexpectedly reunited, and Weihong, wrestling with memory loss and alcoholism, spurts out tales from his childhood and adolescence. Eventually the reader is taken further back to his mother’s history. This is where I began. I was interested in writing around intergenerational trauma: how it is passed down, how it presents, how we reckon with it when we aren’t aware of its context. I imagined the three generations as Russian nesting dolls: each subsequent generation carrying the one before and all the history and trauma of its past. To do this, I had to start with Ming. I had to understand what she would be passing down: how her decisions as a girl influenced her decisions as a mother. How her mothering shaped Weihong and what kind of father he would become. How his decisions as a father and eventual abandonment of his family affected Qianze, who had to grow up quickly in his absence. And throughout all three generations, how the effects of history are warped and filtered through each character’s perspective.

Despite all the chaos of my Beautiful Mind wall, I learned more about my characters through writing. As they developed and grew, I found my characters would make different decisions than I’d initially intended for them. Those seeds of people rooted, bloomed in different directions, grew unruly or thorny in places where I had not expected them to be unruly or thorny. I honed the voices that followed them. I let myself play, especially with Weihong’s voice. I wanted form to reflect the content, and so I let myself experiment. In places where he deals with alcoholism and memory loss, I turned to the piecemeal lines of poetry. In places where he is swallowed by the groupthink of the Cultural Revolution, I looked towards the third person plural.

After each character’s sections were written, I saw which scenes were in conversation with another across the generations. I saw where the connective tissue lay. I stitched things together, then ripped the seams. I took stock of what needed to be written and what needed to be deleted. I wrote many superfluous words that will never see the light of day. After all this, I had a rough draft – a far cry from the packaged book that will be on shelves. It was messy and mine, but also not-mine. It had developed a life of its own. It belonged to the characters, to that strange and complicated family that felt as real as my own – like I could sit at the kitchen table with them and bask in their presence.

A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang is published by Dead Ink Books, priced £11.99. Find out more here.