elaine hsieh chou

In Elaine Hsieh Chou's 2022 debut novel, Disorientation, a Taiwanese-American graduate student named Ingrid Yang discovers that the subject of her dissertation is a fraud: Xiao-Wen Chou is not a Chinese-American poet, but is in fact a white man who built his career on stereotypes and yellowface. This discovery launches her own awakening to the racism she has faced her entire life and the many ways she's built her identity around what white people expect of her. In our conversation, we talk about the real-life inspirations for Disorientation and the strangeness of the label "absurd" to describe a novel about these very real experiences. We also talk about the value of anger in writing and healing.