Celeste Ng on Race, Empathy, & Writing
Race was a major theme during the May 30th WBUR Festival interview with Celeste Ng, the author of Everything I Never Told You, Little Fires Everywhere, and Our Missing Hearts.
Born in Pittsburgh to parents from Hong Kong, she recounted spending many of her school-age years in Shaker Heights, Ohio, where her school had one Jewish kid, one Black kid, and one Asian kid—her. Everyone else was White.
Little Fires Everywhere is set in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and the main family in that story is White, although it’s never stated, which raises a lot of questions for some people. Ng said that people tell her, “If you’re Asian, where are all the Asian people [in your stories]?”
For that novel, Ng said she didn’t feel comfortable writing the experience of a Black or Latino mother, but did feel comfortable writing about a poor White mother, as she’d spent lots of time around White mothers in Ohio.
“I have to understand [my characters] well enough so I can portray them fully, or fairly,” she said.
Writing ‘off the page’
To help facilitate that, she does a lot of writing “off the page.” These are character-building exercises that help writers flesh out a character’s background, behaviors, and quirks. Often these consist of authors interviewing their characters to get to know them better. While the vast, vast majority of this content never makes it into the story, it helps crystalize the character in the author’s mind.
Ng has previously said, “Writing is empathy.” And throughout the interview, you could really understand the care and consideration she brings to her writing, including blending her own experiences and feelings with characters who have different experiences than she does.
That resonated with me, as the cast of characters in my dystopian sci-fi trilogy, which is mostly set in Asia, is largely non-White. My novel wouldn’t make any sense if it was full of White characters like me, so I appreciate writers who refuse to be put in a box based on their own race.
Honestly, telling people they can only write about characters who are the same race as them seems kind of racist. That’s an overly narrow interpretation of the “Write what you know” advice. And, as Ng points out, it denies people the opportunity to be more empathetic by putting themselves in other people’s shoes. And the world sorely needs more empathy.
That said, race is a small part of my novel’s world, which is divided into two global superpowers and is much more stratified by social class. But when I do have racial elements, I try to do my homework and act from a position of curiosity.
Related posts:
‘Write what you know’ is too limiting
When world powers start aligning to match your novel’s dystopian vision
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