Author Kirstin Chen read from her most recent novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, and shared insight on how she navigated writing about an unfamiliar culture in the historical fiction genre.
As part of the weekly English Department Reading Series, BYU welcomed Kirstin Chen, author of Soy Sauce for Beginners and Bury What We Cannot Take (published respectively), to share insights into her writing process and read excerpts from her works.
Chen was born and raised in Singapore and then moved to the United States at age 15 in order to attend school. Her first novel, which is set in Singapore, draws upon her knowledge of the country and its culture. But the idea for her second novel took her into the somewhat unknown territory of early Maoist China circa 1957.
Before the reading took place, Chen sat down with creative writing students and faculty in a smaller setting to answer questions about Bury What We Cannot Take and discuss her unique writing process. Many of the questions posed during that time were in respect to the challenges of writing historical fiction based in a culture that she wasn’t entirely familiar with.
In order to accurately portray the culture in Bury What We Cannot Take, Chen took a deep dive into researching and discovering all she could about this era of Chinese history. She commented, “The research was extremely daunting, and I was plagued by insecurities because this isn’t a time period and a culture that I know firsthand . . . [but] I have a responsibility to not trivialize that history.”
The setting of the book, Gulangyu (or Drum Wave Islet), is Chen’s ancestral home, which she said “gave [her] a foothold into the book.” But even with her own personal connections to China and her hours of research, Chen came to a point where she realized she needed to draw a line and let herself invent the story in order to make it engaging for readers, rather than simply a history book.
Her knowledge of and connections to China at once emboldened and intimidated Chen, but the final product is focused less on the political environment and more on capturing the unique portrait of a family experiencing varying degrees of trauma.
When talking about the ending to her book, Chen noted that “this book, to me, was always about the resiliency of family, and how much trauma a family can bear.” Because her novel is written from the rotating perspectives of the family members, readers get to see the story from multiple points of view and understand how each person copes with the challenges they are experiencing.
At the end of her reading, Chen read an excerpt of the book that she is currently working on. Fans of her work can expect a unique novel about the world of counterfeit handbags within the next few years.
—Heather Bergeson (English, ’21)