Peter Ho Davies

Interview by Christine Lee Zilka

I’ve always admired Peter Ho Davies work—he is one of the best writers out there; his work is so very quiet and thoughtful, but in a way that I find myself reflecting on his characters and words weeks after having finished his stories.

In person he is the humble gentleman, agreeing to an interview with Kartika Review, ever so approachable and supportive of us (We were ecstatic when he said yes!). Many of his students agree, exclaiming, “He is such a DARLING!” when I mention him, adding that he is the utmost conscientious teacher.

Peter Ho Davies is a writer whose work contains voices and settings so varied that it becomes nearly impossible to pigeonhole the creator of worlds situated in San Francisco Chinatown, Malaysia, Wales, and New England for starters. In fact, I didn’t know for years that he was of Asian ancestry—his writing is just as he advises new writers: to simply write and “let others worry about classifying us.”

At Kartika, we aim to publish works that do just that—work by and/or about Asian America that illustrates the complexity of what it means to be Asian American. And we’re proud to share our interview with Peter Ho Davies and his thoughts on writing to you, dear readers.

Peter Ho Davies was born to Welsh and Chinese parents. He has degrees in Physics from Manchester University and English at Cambridge University, and earned an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University.

His first published collection of short stories was The Ugliest House in the World (1998), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. His second collection, Equal Love, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, was published in 2000. His first novel, The Welsh Girl (2007), set in a Welsh village during World War II, was longlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize.

Peter Ho Davies teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. In 2003, he was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty “Best of Young British Novelists” and in 2008 he was a recipient of the PEN/Malamud award for short fiction.

ON INSPIRATION

CHRISTINE LEE ZILKA: You have a degree, as I understand it, in physics and the history and philosophy of science. What determined you to become a writer? And in what ways do your seemingly unrelated undergraduate studies in science inform your writing?

PETER HO DAVIES: Oddly enough, fiction in a sense, lead me to physics since it was probably my love of science fiction in my teens (both as a reader and a writer of my own bad knock-offs of my favorites) that inspired my interest in science. What turned me away from it and (back) to writing was partly an understanding of the limits of my talents for science (I was mostly good at the math, less able to handle the conceptual under-pinnings of the subject, though that's somewhat in the nature of modern physics) and partly the discovery of what writing could really mean to me. I'd stopped writing my bad imitative SF the summer I went to college to write a story - a pretty autobiographical one - about my family's experience of my grandmother's descent into Alzheimer’s, and in doing so I'd discovered an (albeit crude and probably mawkish) emotional power in my work I'd never explored before.

As to how science informs my writing, there are a number of ways. Probably I bring something of a problem-solving mind-set to the process - to revision especially. Certain concepts from my physics training have also been helpful in my writing. The idea of wave-particle duality, the notion that we might need two apparently mutually exclusive concepts to understand individual phenomena like light or matter, probably informs my sense of character, or at least of the characters I'm interested in who often seem to be two (or more) contradictory things at once.

ZILKA: You have said that you do not have a particular writing discipline…is there anything you do find necessary to write?

DAVIES: There are plenty of things I like to have when I'm writing - a big desk or table to spread out on, a window to look out of (both antidotes to a feeling of being trapped at the desk sometimes, I suspect) - but I'm not sure they're necessary (my first desk in grad school was a plank resting on empty boxes of copier paper, for instance). Time, I suppose, is the obvious necessity, and while it's a truism to say so, I guess I'd qualify the idea of "time to write" by adding that what I mean by that is an excess of time, time to write badly, to fail, to goof around. Time, even, to be bored. And certainly time to read, which for me is often a meditative process during which my mind will turn over ideas about my own work. There's such a pressure on us now to be productive in all aspects of life - multi-tasking etc., etc. - that this kind of time can seem in short supply, which is bad news for writers (and also readers, books being a slow pleasure compared to movies, or TV, or video games).

ON SHORT STORIES AND NOVELS

ZILKA: How do you transition between stories and novel writing? Do you find you can work on them in parallel, or like Murakami, can you only write them exclusive of each other?

DAVIES: Since it took me seven years to write my first novel, after two collections of stories, the short answer to your question would be "badly." I did work on a couple of stories during the course of the novel, only short-shorts though, which felt like blessed and brief escapes from the longer work. I'm working on longer stories again now before starting my next novel, but I'm not sure I can easily combine the two since even my stories can take months if not years. Still, I have had luck combining the revision of older work, with the composition of first drafts - the former often gives me hope for the latter - so perhaps that'll also apply to work on novels and stories in future.

ZILKA: What are some differences between writing short stories and a novel?

DAVIES: The simplest, for me at least, is that I can work on the former in short and often discontinuous bursts, hashing out a first draft in a few days, and then often putting it aside (frequently in despair or disgust) for weeks or longer. In the case of a novel I find I need to work on it daily, though "work" might be interpreted loosely. On days when I had only 30 minutes or so I still found it profitable to 'touch' the book, reread a little of what I'd already written, sometimes choosing the pages at random, just to keep the whole in my mind/memory.

There are, of course, many differences in the way we, as readers, respond to stories and novels that also effect the way I think about them as I write. One example I cite is of a review of well-known novel which described it - sincerely - as basically the best thing since sliced bread, and yet concluded "but it falls apart at the end." It stuck with me because it seemed true of several novels I'd read (and admired), and yet could never be said of a story (which often live or die by the success of their endings). I suppose the observation about novels ending poorly makes sense if you think that a fundamental novelistic skill (shared by everyone from Austen to Grisham) is to keep us reading on. Perhaps, given that skill, it's not surprising that novelists aren't always so good at stopping us reading, whereas storywriters somehow need to be expert at it.

ZILKA: How do you find the ending of a short story? You say you started The Welsh Girl without knowing its ending—but with stories, do you write with an ending in mind? Or perhaps, does the ending magically appear?

DAVIES: In a sense I'd say that we write the whole story to find the ending, though it rarely appears as easily as "magically" might suggest. If only! My own practice usually involves having some idea of where the story is going, but this isn't much more than a hypothesis, to be revised or rejected as the story evolves (though often it's hard to let go of these imagined destinations). The trick for me is frequently at the close to listen my hardest to the characters. I - theoretically at least - know them best by the end of the story and that seems a place where they should declare themselves, sometimes in ways that surprise me.

ZILKA: How do you begin writing a novel? How did The Welsh Girl begin?

DAVIES: The first chapter of The Welsh Girl, though not the prologue, was the first thing I wrote. It takes place in a pub and introduces the title character in the context of her community - the local Welsh, the British soldiers stationed in the area, and even various refugees from the Blitz - and while I wasn't fully conscious of it at the time I was probably trying to fill the pages with more characters than I would typically put into a story from the start.

ON THE WELSH GIRL

ZILKA: You say, in a previous interview, you finished your novel without the safety net of knowing exactly how it would end because uncertainty is always an important experience for you during composition, and especially over the large expanse of a novel. When did you know how it would end?

DAVIES: I had a hypothesis of how it would end, or rather what it was building to - the encounter between my lovers, Esther, the Welsh girl of the title, and Karsten, the German POW - but rather like D-Day which opens the book that was really only the beginning of the end, or the end of the beginning. How their liaison evolved took a lot of time to work out, and involved writing at least one wrong ending (an early MS was 200 pages longer than the final version, for instance). When I was finishing, it actually felt as if I had several endings to discover, Esther's, Karsten's, Rotheram's (and the latter provided an important point of view from which to approach the ends of the other two figures). Rotheram's final section, which ties up his story and the other two, was the last added to the book.

ZILKA: Who is your favorite character in The Welsh Girl? I find myself torn between Karsten and Rotheram, and wished I could follow them into their future lives; I was so in love with them as characters.

DAVIES: It's hard to pick favorites, but Rotheram is perhaps the closest to me - not that I share his German-Jewish heritage, but that I feel his divided loyalties and uncertain sense of identity most personally.

ZILKA: What happened to Karsten?! I so want to know. If you could envision his life beyond The Welsh Girl, how do you see his continued life? Or of course—I should precede this question with, “Do you think of your characters again once you finish a story or novel?”

DAVIES: I have once or twice tried to write 'sequels' of sorts to stories but without much success, which I'd like to hope says something about the initial stories, that they're somehow complete unto themselves (but might equally speak to the failures of my imagination). Still, I don't often think of the characters once I'm done. In Karsten's case I feel I have a pretty clear idea of his fate - a common fate for German POWs returned to areas of Soviet control - and it's not a good one. Of course, along the way in writing the novel I did think of other futures - one in which Karsten stays in Wales lead up to a scene in the early 1980s when sheep farming in the area was threatened by radioactive contamination from Chernobyl, another in which a group of POWs meet again as old men in Germany at the wedding of one of their daughters...

The Welsh Girl, I guess, comes from my thinking less of characters from earlier work, than about a recurring location - one that exists, of course, but also one I'd touched on in an early novella, called "A Union." The fictional village in that story set in 1900 is a basis for Esther's village in 1944.

ON HISTORICAL FICTION

ZILKA: One of the things I love about your stories is how they are not limited to one place/time. With regards to how the stories are not limited to a place/time, I admire your ability to play in different historical periods. Do you feel a temptation to muss up history’s hair? How do you know when to stop/start? Is there a particular historical period that you are fonder of than others, as a writer? … From where do you find inspiration?

DAVIES: I generally enjoy the freedom of stories, that ability story by story to work in very different settings (time and place) and styles. My interest in historical short fiction came from that pleasure in variation, but I must confess I'm not a serious student of history. I was first attracted to remote pockets of history, little know events that often had a quasi-mythic quality (I've an early piece about the encounter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with a Welsh community in Patagonia, say), and I have also occasionally ducked strict historical accuracy via style (there are magical realist touches in my novella "A Union" which create some breathing space between fiction and history). Those were playful flirtations with historical fiction, you might say, and I'm still interested in them (in a new story I'm toying with the genre of alternate history).

The Welsh Girl, however, was a more serious effort at historical fiction - more serious because the events of WW2 are of course better known and closer to us in time, but also because there are serious moral and ethical issues associated with the fictionalization of the holocaust and Nazi figures. The novel in those regards feels very different to my other historical work, and, while I can't claim my research on it to be comprehensive (new books about WW2 appear every week), it was much more thorough than for my historical short fiction.

As to periods I'm fonder of, most of my work in this vein falls between the late nineteenth century and the middle of twentieth, and I confess to a hesitation in setting anything much earlier than that. Those periods that I've written of just seem more imaginable to me, perhaps because I have faith that the people of those eras might resemble us psychologically (I tend to build my faith in these fictions from the characters on up). The further back one goes the less certain I am of that.

ZILKA: Vyvyanne Loh said, at this year’s (2009) AWP conference, “All history is fiction.” What do you think of that, especially with regards to how you approach your own historical fiction?

DAVIES: I'd probably say that "Much history is fiction," and indeed perhaps the most exciting parts - the parts where we try to understand why factual events occurred. Still much of history, of course, is also fact, the most inconvenient part, as many historical novelists would confess!

IDENTITY AND WRITING

ZILKA: Regarding identity—it seems every single one of your interviews touches upon your heritage—whether as being Chinese, Malaysian, Welsh, British, American, or “Sino-Celtic” (your mother being Chinese, having grown up in Malaysia, your father being Welsh, and your growing up in Britain and now living in the U.S.) on the basis of citizenship, residence, ancestry, or language.

It’s hard to pigeonhole you, and I hesitate to do so, even as we’re interviewing you for an Asian American literary magazine (my approach being that “Asian American literature” is defined as works highlighting Asians or written by an Asian American, so diverse is our populace these days). I myself did NOT realize you were Asian having totally disregarding “Ho” and focusing on the content of your work. And Yiyun Li at a Winter 2009 New York Asia Society meeting said, “We can't judge based on ethnicity, please, but on our literary influences,” citing Russian literature’s influence on Ha Jin and seeing him more as a Russian writer, and William Trevor’s influence on her writing. She continued to say that the ultimate compliment was one paid James McPherson who being African American and having an Irish surname was told by his reader, “I thought you were Jewish.”

While reading The Welsh Girl, I was very aware of one of the themes of the book, how the characters find allegiance to a country difficult (Esther), how characters could speak more than one language (Karsten, Rotheram), how characters are products of mixed marriages (Rotheram being half German and half Jewish), and how some characters so exiled have no country to call their own (Rotheram), thus changing their relationship to others and nationalities. I could not help but think of your unique position.

Do you feel your unique position and multiple access points to identity liberate you as a writer? Many writers are afraid to write characters outside of their own race, but oftentimes this implies a strict allegiance/identification to one race. If this liberates you, how so? If it does not liberate you, how so?

DAVIES: Probably first I should downplay my uniqueness. While my background is unusual, and I have at times "felt" unique (at times as a curse, at others as a blessing), one of the pleasures of publishing my work, giving readings etc has been meeting and hearing from many others who find themselves in similar situations - not necessarily folks with Welsh and Chinese heritage but many people with equally (if such things can be compared!) odd combinations of ancestry (I just met the wonderful writer Mary Yukari Waters, for instance, who comes from Irish and Japanese stock). And indeed I hope and trust the frequency with which I meet such people is an indication that there are more of us than in the past, and that we're more comfortable identifying ourselves as such.

To get back to your question, though, whether my identity liberates or limits me as a writer, I'd probably have to say that I've felt both ways. I've certainly at times envied writers who seemed to have more claim to a literary tradition. When I lived in Atlanta for a spell, for example, I felt something of that envy towards Southern writers, who had such a rich heritage to serve as a guide of sorts (which is not to say they simply followed in the footsteps of their precursors; a tradition also grants something to argue with, struggle against). By comparison, I've felt a lack of such a natural or given tradition, but over time that very limitation has suggested means of over-coming it. I find myself free to pick traditions that I feel an allegiance to, indeed to pick many such traditions. And that has probably played a part in encouraging me to write across lines of ethnic identity and gender and time. That said I'd have to confess that while I've written from the point of view of African American characters, or Jewish ones, it was initially just as hard, if not harder, for me to write Asian characters or Welsh ones (I know those identities better, at first glance, but my anxieties about owning them initially were complicated by my partial sense of my own Chineseness, my own Welshness).

ON READING

ZILKA: You have expressed love for works like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which has its theme of East and West, the rational and the romantic) and Vonnegut--but these works are, at least to me, different in style from your writing. What do you get from these works that do/don't translate into your own work?

DAVIES: Those are both early influences - Vonnegut from my teens and Pirsig's book from college - but they are significant. Vonnegut taught me, at a craft level, about the paragraph, the quantum of work each one needs to do (typically in his case the work is comic, individual paragraphs serving as jokes). More broadly, his humanistic outlook certainly shaped me as a person (and thus one trusts as a writer, too). Pirsig's book remains a touchstone in its synthesis of thought and feeling. I have struggled myself at times with the issue of where my writing comes from - the head or the heart - but Pirsig's work, and that of others (Philip Roth, say), breaks down the dichotomy. Their work is so passionately intellectual, so thoughtfully emotional.

ZILKA: What are you reading these days?

DAVIES: Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomics" for a class on short story collections I'm teaching. My copy is twenty years old, and I don't think I've read it since I was an undergrad, though I recall it fondly, and it's proving to be a thrilling revelation, even better than I recall, which I guess is what we'd all hope for our work.

ADVICE AND CURRENT WORK

ZILKA: What words of advice do you have for Asian American writers?

DAVIES: To think of themselves as writers, period. Let others worry about classifying us.

ZILKA: Can you give us an example of what you’re working on next?

DAVIES: I wanted to return to stories after the long slog of the novel, and so am about half or two-thirds of the way into a new collection. At the same time I'm preparing work on a new novel, which I hope to turn to in earnest in the next few months.