The Assay Interview Project: Wei Tchou
October 22, 2024

Wei Tchou's essays and reporting can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and The Oxford American among other publications. She likes to write about food, nature, and the complications of identity. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and has an MFA from Hunter College. She lives in New York City with her family.
About Little Seed: Little Seed is an experimental memoir that braids together the narrative of the author's relationship with her brother and family with a deeply personal field guide to ferns. The chapters move associatively, commenting on each other indirectly and drawing out questions of assimilation, race, class, gender, nature and the general problem of being and knowing. When the author's brother has a psychotic break, the rigid structure of the book itself breaks apart and the protagonist adventures to the cloud forest of Oaxaca in order to truly live: to know the world by experiencing it rather than reading about it or following the direction of others. Some persistent themes throughout the book: What does it mean to be Chinese? What is love and how best to love? What really is a fern?
Molly Tompkins: Wei Tchou, congratulations on Little Seed! The book traces your journey of transformation. We witness you move from external stories about your identity to narrative control over your own life story. Throughout the book, we see you ask yourself who to be: Chinese, a Delta Blonde, a little sister, a successful journalist, a girlfriend, a fern lover. Perhaps most surprisingly, you filter all of these questions of identity through botanical vignettes. Ferns anchor the narrative. You weave the reconciliation with your own identity together with a meditation on ferns—questioning at first a sense of envy and desire for mastery over these plants, and then ultimately establishing a peace both with them and yourself.

Your memoir examines your struggle with a sense of imprisonment by other people’s stories. You write, for example, of how your father Baba’s stories of China filled you with a sense of identity. You tell how your body became a story for a romantically interested university professor (the Spider, as he is called) to manipulate and starve. Out of a desire to be loved by your brother, you considered succumbing to your brother's delusions after his psychotic break. Eventually, though, we witness you learn to live within each moment, untethered to someone else’s plotline. Can you talk about your experience of writing a story of resisting stories? Where did that resistance to others’ narrative maps lead you?

Wei Tchou: This is such a lucid description of my book!! Thank you for writing it; it’s very clarifying to read. To be honest, I didn’t really set out to write a story about “resisting stories” – it just happened. I think that the vignettes I was interested in exploring at the time all had to do with this one problem (of imprisonment in others’ stories) that I kept experiencing over and over in my real life, but that I didn’t have any perspective on. I could feel this issue coming up in my life and then “failing,” as I write in my book, but I couldn’t quite identify the problem as directly as you have above. (Maybe it would have saved me a lot of time and money in therapist bills had I been able to!). When I was sequencing the memoir, the section about the abusive relationship with the college professor got thrown in at the last minute. I didn’t really know why and was afraid it was quite random. Of course, now that the book is out, it all seems like a piece of the same puzzle.

As for your second question, I think writing the book and slipping into someone else’s story has improved my life in a lot of ways. I’m a lot less codependent, and I don’t personalize relationship challenges as much as I used to. That said, an awareness of my issues hasn’t made them go away, really, and when I feel the impulse to mesh into someone else’s reality or when I’m aware that I’m doing so, I tend to beat myself up over it. I should be kinder to myself.

Yes, you deserve kindness from yourself!

Your book takes the form of a field guide to ferns. You narrate your experience of the natural world intimately, and in the first person. You explore your own historical, mythological, and biological inheritances alongside those of ferns, all the while maintaining (if also questioning) the distance between the two. In Chapter 14, you write, “I'm trespassing over the boundary of observation—allowing what is inside of me to leak out into the external world, to demand answers of life that I’m not a part of.” If one of the writer’s many tasks is to interpret the external world by filtering it through ourselves, then how should we regard the boundary of observation?

Hmm, I think I’m especially interested in this boundary – like what part of observation is me and what is you, what is shared, and what conflicts? – because I sense that my own slipperiness with these distinctions is harmful both to myself and others. I think a lot of the abuses of power and authority that I grew up with and that I write about are also (very sadly) habits that I struggle not to give into as well. The worst feeling I’ve ever experienced is the realization that I’ve hurt someone I love without meaning to (who ever means to?), and so my fixation on picking apart the threads between me and the outside world, me and others, is my irrational/impossible desire to control this territory and attempt not to hurt people or get hurt.

But truthfully, I don’t think people at large (including myself) need to be so worried about the boundary of observation, and in fact I think some of the best art, interactions, gossip, and connections I ever experience have to do with people mixing up their own perspective on something with what can’t be known about a person, a situation, or anything else in the world. I write about how much I love field guides for this reason – you have people trying to organize the universe of birds, or trees, or whatever, and then when you read the guides, you see that they’re clearly just about the authors and their own brains. Humans are self-centered by nature, and I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing.

In the book, your relationship to ferns mirrors your relationships with the people who offer you a sense of identity. You even ask the ferns to tell portions of your story in the book’s early chapters and to make sense of your complicated childhood. How has your relationship to ferns changed since leaving Oaxaca?

I’m completely lukewarm on ferns now! I think I stopped being so interested in them after that trip! I had learned so much, and I felt like getting to see these tree ferns and meet all these people – that was Everest for me and for my fern obsession. Then, I moved on to other things. Which made it strange on my book tour, having to answer questions about ferns – I had to rifle through the filing cabinet of my brain and was surprised that all the technical information was still kicking around, even though I hadn’t thought about any of it in at least a few years. My primary fixations at the moment are my patio tomato plants (my first year growing them), my little lemon tree (a fussy baby), and my actual baby, who I had a few weeks ago. I love him so much, there’s always something to observe and learn.

Wow, it sounds like you have your hands full. I am amazed by the way you approach life—from ferns to children—with a spirit of observation.

I admire how you navigate between first- and third-person narration. While reading the third-person sections about Little Seed (that is, the character who represents you in the text), I felt terrified for the girl and young woman who found herself at the mercy of others to tell her story. When the narrative shifted to the first person, however, I felt reassured. I could see a plan for the unfolding of the story. How did it feel to write about yourself in the third person? Was it easier to access certain details from the third-person perspective? How did you decide which perspective to employ?

That’s so great to hear about your feeling reading first versus third person; that’s a great effect that I didn’t at all consider. The memoir sections of the book actually all started in the first person, but I couldn’t quite get at a version of events that felt “true,” in part I think because the material was so traumatic to revisit and all the people in the text felt like they had some power over me at the time – I was constantly protecting them or unable to directly say what I thought about them in the first person. I switched to the third person on a whim a few years into working on the manuscript, and it opened up this entire world of imagination for me – originally, those sections had more of a magical realism feel, maybe a way of tricking myself into being more honest through fantasy. But eventually, this character Little Seed became clearer for me, and it was easier to write these fictionalized/composite scenes of my childhood through her.

It was also clear that all of those memories and emotions were a fable, as all of our childhood stories are, and, so, the question became: well, what is the truth, or at least what is true for me? I always planned on having a “breakdown” section of the book where I (as the narrator of the book) got to yell at the reader, at the world at large – I think it’s actually one of the earliest things that got written, that very angry section that shifts into the first person. And it just made sense for the POV shift to happen at the same time, to clear the air for the final adventure section in Mexico. I was lucky that the craft element of POV really aligned with the narrative in the book.

You open the book with a meeting of the New York Fern Society, but your peaceful cohabitation with ferns doesn’t occur until much later in the story. Talk about the origin of this memoir. Where did it begin? Was it at that meeting with the blooming of the resurrection fern? Or elsewhere?

The fern thread of the story really began with the dying fern that I describe in the book – I was googling around, trying to figure out how to save it and a friend of mine looked at it and told me it was a fern. I found that to be really engaging and curious – that it wasn’t a plant but a fern. I remember finding that idea to be very confusing, and then becoming completely consumed bytrying to understand the difference. As a result, I located this entire universe of fascinating botany. Those fern-interested years overlapped with the inflection point of my brother’s psychotic break, so, eventually, my writing partner Rainer suggested I try throwing all the writing I was doing about both into a manuscript together.

Reading the book, I would not have guessed that the biographical and fern sections weren’t initially meant to comment on one another—they overlapped so naturally.

Many of your passages refer to the biology, folklore, or history of ferns. You use a light hand here and trust the reader to see the connections between the character Little Seed and the complexities of ferns. Can you talk about your relationship to your reader, your trust, and your hopes for your work when it lands on someone’s desk or bedside table?

Oh my god – I wish I were that intentional! I think, at best, I cobble things together in a way that feel good to me and send them to my agent or editor and hope they don’t notice! Writing for me has become a process of making decisions intuitively and trusting myself to just go with it – sometimes I hear that good writing, maybe good nonfiction, is often a map of people’s brains. I think the distractable, enthusiastic, pinging around nature of the book reveals something about my personality and the way I like to think and live and have conversations. I’ve been hugely flattered and surprised that the book has resonated with people, but mostly relieved that it seems like a lot, if not most, readers of the book are patient and willing to believe in the connections and shifts between threads.

Finally, let’s talk about invisibility and muteness. On the one hand, we see you assimilate to the rituals and stories of your family and heritage. You disappear into the context around you but nevertheless yearn to be seen. Later, you find yourself mute, silenced by an inability to speak Spanish. You write, “I stopped caring so much about how others might perceive me. It was obvious, for one, that I was out of place—I was the only Asian, the only American, the only one who couldn’t speak any Spanish…It was as if I’d excused myself from language completely, happy to not be known or to know.” How did muteness help you overcome invisibility? And once you regained the language of your childhood, Shanghainese, how did you reorient yourself within it?

Language forms so much of our reality – our ability to tell a story about things, to convince ourselves and others of our perspective or how we want things to go. I’ve always been a good talker, and I think I used that for a long time as a coping mechanism – if I could be liked or make someone laugh or feel powerful through talking to them, then I didn’t really have to consider the facts of myself – my body, my identity, my spiritual state. Losing language in Mexico was the first time I think I had a long stretch of having to think about all that – that I am a person in a body connected to other people moving through all the complex, difficult, and beautiful stages of life, rather than a hammer constantly looking for a nail. So, that’s what started this big journey of being visible to myself.

As for Shanghainese, I don’t know that I have reoriented myself inside of it so much as I’ve accepted that the language is a place of intense vulnerability for me. I can choose to spend time within it or not, or sometimes, say, during holidays, I don’t necessarily have a choice and it can be pretty terrible, but at least I’m more aware of this. My brother and I speak exclusively in English now, which I think is healing. It makes us both feel safe as we continue exploring our relationship.

I’m glad that you found the words to write Little Seed. Thank you for inviting us on your journey of becoming visible. It’s been wonderful to hear more of your voice through this interview.
Molly Tompkins’ fiction and nonfiction appear in Hothouse Literary Journal and Terrain. She is a Creative Writing and English student at the University of Texas at Austin.

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