Words Matter

Russell Leong: Interview by Robert B. Ito

Russell Leong was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1950. He began his writing career with “Threads,” in Kai-yu Hsu’s Asian-American Authors (1972), and “Rough Notes for Mantos,” in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974). Since then, his criticism, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the Seattle Review, The Open Boat, Zyzzyva, the New England Review, the Los Angeles Times, Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction, and Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique. Leong has been the editor of UCLA’s Amerasia Journal since 1977, and he has also edited Asian American Sexualities (1996). His first collection of poems, The Country of Dreams and Dust (1993), received the 1994 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literature Award. His first collection of short fiction, Phoenix Eyes and Other Stories, is forthcoming from University of Washington Press. Although I have known Leong for three years, I was initially unsure about how an interview with him would go on 13 Russell Leong Interview by R O B E R T B . I T O account of his cutting wit, particularly in group settings (two days after the interview, he amused a group of students with an extended run about how certain Asian American authors could market their own lines of underwear). I was also aware of his “life is war” philosophy as well as his disdain for academics (Leong considers himself a cultural worker rather than an academician). Before the interview, Leong lent me his short story “The Painted Branch,” which had recently been published in an issue of the New England Review entitled “Questions of Identity: Ethnicity, Apprenticeship, and the New American Writer.” R B I Here’s that journal you lent me. I think I’ll get a copy. R L You should because there are other things in there. Other “apprentices.” R B I Yeah, what’s that about? You’ve been publishing for about twenty years. How does it feel to have the New England Review call you a “new writer” or an “apprentice”? R L Well, that’s their point of view. Writers of color in America help validate American writing. Actually, the editors are the apprentices because they’re learning from us. R B I How are they using the term? R L Oh, probably in the academic way, like we are traveling beyond our ethnicity and learning English, or learning how to write, and not relying on our politics or ethnicity. That’s probably the implication, that real writing is “universal” and can get beyond the barrio and the ghetto. Very patronizing, but not unexpected. R B I I thought there was an interesting parallel between that whole apprenticeship idea and the other article you lent me, “Litany” (republished as “Paper Houses”), where the white woman covets your friend’s Thai pillow and says something 234 Words Matter like, “This would look good on my patio.” After getting published in journals like the New England Review, do you ever worry about your work becoming commodified, becoming a kind of “Thai pillow”? R L The Filipino writer N. V. M. Gonzalez put it well: For too long, Third World writers, and Third World people, have been furniture in the colonialist’s house in the sense of being domestic servants—minor characters; if not furniture, then people who dust and move furniture around rather than the subjects or owners of the houses. So, while things have changed, many times we have been relegated to the furniture of literature. R B I Why the pseudonym Wallace Lin in “Rough Notes for Mantos” in Aiiieeeee!? R L Wallace Lin was a pseudonym based on Wallace Stevens, who was one of my writing icons. Lin was a Chinese surname. So I combined the two. The bio, I think, was written by Shawn Wong. Nothing is true. The reason I used the pseudonym was that the story dealt with some sensitive subjects, such as father and son relationships. Part of it was this diatribe against my father or against his questioning of a relationship, and I didn’t want my father to read it. He read it anyway. R B I Knowing that you wrote it. R L I think so. The details were accurate: the steel cleaver, vegetables, mixed emotions between father and son. He probably recognized himself. R B I...