The editors of Eucalyptus Lit recently had the privilege and opportunity to speak with Fiona Jin, prose runner-up of Eucalyptus Lit's inaugural summer contest. Her work “免兔” features in Issue 5, Bequest.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

 

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How did you start writing?​

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I’ve always been fascinated by narrative: how sound becomes word becomes sentence becomes story. I still have a miniature spiral notebook from elementary school of various plots, characters, and settings. Maybe because so little of my physical world stayed the same—I moved very often for reasons that as a little kid I couldn’t quite understand—I thought a lot about the difference between society’s expectations for how people “should” live versus how I actually experienced the world. I remember back in third grade, in Beijing, fuming about getting a relatively low grade on an essay that was supposed to describe a hometown (“老家”) dish because I hadn’t written about my 老家 following the strict structure the teacher expected. I’d wondered what was the point of writing these essays at all if there was a “right” answer. Back then, I think I was more annoyed by the pure tediousness of producing a manufactured response, but in retrospect, there are so many implications of these expectations on how we talk about complex issues like culture, personal history, and individual perspective.

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I really returned to that question in high school, when I first started seriously reading and writing poetry and fully realized the power of telling your truth—because what even is “the” truth?—in generating greater nuance within complex, abstract issues that extended beyond one person’s experience. Finding universality in specificity and all that. So yeah, I started with fiction, fell in love with poetry, and have honestly been falling in love with every other form of storytelling ever since: from spoken word to journalism to creative nonfiction and now back to fiction. 

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Why do you write? What do you see as your goal in writing, and how do you hope others interact with your work?

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I write so I can tell more truths. There are only so many words in the English language; there are only so many thoughts that have been said. But there’s an infinite amount of lived experience between all of us. Writing is my way of thinking critically about the world around me, and I would be so touched if I’ve made even one other person feel less alone in experiencing previously undefined experiences. The most powerful pieces of writing I’ve read are ones that feel like they’re defining a previously unnamed feeling, circumstance, or idea that nevertheless had always carried so much tangible weight in our lives. I aspire towards that. 

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How do you get your inspiration? What is your creative process?

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Usually, a lot of small things in my life really, really build up over time: images, thematic ideas, et cetera swirl around in my head until the piece almost feels like it’s always been there. For 免兔, I’d had the idea for the core plot and character for over a year before I wrote the first draft. I was thinking about the liminality of washing machines, the twitch of a rabbit’s head, how the heat makes even the most seemingly boring suburb go a little crazy. Slowly, 免兔 was born. But those “a lot of small things” can be almost anything. I’ve written poems inspired by an FRQ on the AP Calculus BC exam. 

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When I write, I sit with my laptop for hours and hours to get a first draft out in one take as much as I can—to capture the original inspiration in its entirety. Each one of my pieces has such a specific energy—like I said, I aspire towards definition—that I really sit with whatever feelings or circumstances that propelled me towards writing what I’m writing. 

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Then I edit. I don’t really have a uniform process for editing, but I can generally tell when a piece feels finished. 

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Can you tell us a little bit more about 免兔? 

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免兔, to me, is ultimately about how what we don’t know or understand—about the world, about each other, about ourselves—can take over our lives. 

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You can think about writing as a fundamental act of agency: especially in fiction, you can literally make up whatever you want. But I wanted to portray the intensity of the basic human feeling of lacking agency, and how quickly that can spiral out of control. This story is written in first person, but the narrator doesn’t understand, say, why the garage door suddenly opens, why she can predict the rabbits, why her father does what he does—what she does understand is the immediacy of animal tendons in her washing machine, of the unrelenting ticking of the living room clock “like a cardiac monitor,” of the implacable, interminable heat. 

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How do you subvert and redefine the intersection of culture and family through your writing? How do you navigate portraying nuance in these topics?

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免兔 is written from the perspective of the daughter in English, in a language that to her parents will only be ever a language of necessity. All of these deeply emotionally fraught moments for the narrator as she makes decisions about who she wants to be and what she wants to believe will inherently never truly reach her parents. Xin Yue herself doesn’t really know what to do with her feelings; in America, we’re constantly fed this story of the “American Dream” that drastically glosses over the complex struggles of what it’s really like to be an immigrant. All that Xin Yue—isolated in her Des Moines suburb—knows about her experiences are her experiences, if that makes sense. This story, to me, was always about how language—as well as rational thinking, and generally, systems of order we’ve defined for ourselves—falls apart under the weight of undefined, uncommunicated lived experience through multiple generations. 

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There’s one particular line in the story I’ve been thinking a lot about: “I thought about… whether the rabbits making a home of our house were a family, or just tolerated each other’s damage.” For a story “about rabbits,” I wanted to make all the characters in this family so terribly human. I wanted to make them human before I made them family members. I wanted to see how they would test their humanity—as they continued to tolerate and tolerate—in ways that challenged the very definition of family. 

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Do you have any advice for young writers?

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Always speak your truth. Someone out there will feel seen and heard by you and your words, and that can make all the difference. And most importantly, be so kind to yourself. You deserve it.