Dubai: Juli Min, the Korean-American author of the captivating novel ‘Shanghailanders,’ was among the many prominent authors who were in Dubai this weekend, for the Emirates LitFest at held at the InterContinental Hotel in Dubai Festival City.
During an interview with Gulf Korean Times, Min spoke about how she explored the intricate tapestry of identity, belonging, and displacement through the lives of a multi-generational family in Shanghai.
Her novel, which was published in 2024, is a sweeping saga that spans decades, and delves into the secrets and hidden histories that shape not only individuals but also the very fabric of a city undergoing constant transformation.
Min, who currently resides in Shanghai, brings a unique perspective to her storytelling, weaving together her own experiences as an expatriate with a deep understanding of the city's complex past. She shared insights into her writing process and the inspiration behind ‘Shanghailanders’.
1. Shanghailanders explores a fascinating intersection of cultures and histories. Could you talk about what inspired you to tell this particular story and what drew you to the Shanghailanders specifically?
I've been in Shanghai for nine years. My husband is Shanghainese. We lived in New York for several years and decided to spend some time with his family. My initial relationship with the city was rooted in family and local life. As a foreigner living in Shanghai, I felt I had a really unique access. I got married into a local Shanghainese family, so I got to know a lot more local Chinese and Shanghainese people compared to other foreigners there. But of course, I was always a Korean-American foreigner. Having an Asian face, people assumed I was Chinese, so it often came as a surprise that I was not Chinese and did not speak Shanghainese.
Just having that foreign but local experience was rich. Shanghai has always had a relationship with foreigners and foreignness, being a semi-colonial city and having had relationships with Japan, France, and the UK, with parts of the city sectioned off for those countries. There was always a foreign influence. I wanted to write a story that highlighted that relationship with foreignness. I didn't want to write a narrative about just my foreign experience. I felt that, in order to represent the city, I needed to capture the image of contemporary Shanghai, which I feel is not often portrayed in Western literature.
2. You're Korean-American, based in Shanghai, writing about a community of Shanghailanders. How did your own multi-cultural background and experience living in Shanghai influence your approach to this story and its characters?
Personally, I’ve always had a kind of divided identity. I was born in Seoul and moved to America when I was two. I did spend some time back in Seoul during primary school, but I moved back to the States and finished the rest of my schooling there. After college, I moved back to Korea and then decided I wanted to go back to graduate school. So, I’ve always been moving between Asia and America. My identity is in a way bifurcated.
Now, having moved to Shanghai and been there for so long, I definitely feel comfortable being in a new Asian city. New York and Seoul are great, dynamic cities, full of people and energy, and Shanghai has that kind of energy but also its own flavor.
Now that I have children – two children, half Korean, half Chinese, who speak Chinese fluently – they have a different experience growing up. It’s interesting to see the impact on their personalities, sense of identity, and belonging in a homogenous country. I’m often always thinking about the dynamics between parts of an identity, between languages – for people who might speak multiple languages, which one is the dominant language, which one should we support? It is a tricky question. I always spoke English at home.
3. The novel spans several generations. What were the challenges and rewards of weaving together these different timelines and perspectives? How did you research and ensure the historical accuracy of each period?
The reason for multiple generations is that the novel is about change, or lack thereof. I was very much interested in what changes for a city, where so much has changed. Shanghai and China went through so much in the second half of the 20th century: cultural evolution, development, capitalist growth. So much changed within a generation. And then, what are the implications for the next generation and the generation after that? And what is inherited through that? For example, one of the characters deals with anxiety – is it something that was inherited or stemming from the whiplash from so much change?
There are ways in which we are psychologically inheriting trauma. And what things are also lost. So, from, say, grandparents, there are so many things they went through that a grandchild won’t be able to access, and so many things that they try to tell us that we don’t listen to, or they become fictionalized, a sort of narrative that becomes almost like mythology. So, there are so many ways the past is carried forward, or is buried, or is lost. I wanted that to be a major theme in the book.
Wealth and the changing wealth of a country are integral to Shanghai. By showing this family that amassed so much wealth in such a short period of time, I wanted to explore the impact of that new money on the children, on each generation, how that impacts the way that, generation by generation, people see the world and have access to the world.
I did quite a lot of historical research about Shanghai when I first arrived. I never studied China; I just ended up falling in love with it. When I got here, I tried to study the language, and even tried to write historical fiction set in early 20th-century Shanghai.
4. Family secrets and hidden histories play a crucial role in Shanghailanders. What draws you to exploring these themes in your writing, and what do you hope readers take away from the characters' journeys of uncovering their past?
Everyone has secrets, and I believe that it’s impossible to truly know another person. I think that the individual is so complex and so infinite and so ever-changing that it’s really hard to truly know everything about another human being. One project of the book was to look at a family that has been together for so long, and then, by moving backward in time, peeling away the layers of relationships, try to ask the question: who are these people as individuals, outside of relationships, outside of family dynamics, outside of years of resentment or conflict?
At one point, one of the characters sort of thinks that only a mother can truly know the core of a person because she has seen the child and the pure essence of that child. But even that is probably misguided, as people change.
I wrote this book when I had become a mother for just a few years, and I was thinking so much about the complexity of motherhood and the ways in which I knew or didn't know my own mother. And I was thinking about the things that she probably went through as a mother that I never thought about as a child. I think becoming a mother makes you reflect on all those things. Like that question of whether you truly know a person and what they went through, what they were feeling, and all of that. I think in general I was very interested in the things we don’t say and we cannot know about people, even the ones who are so close to us. Like a family, which is a group of people who are put together forever; they don't choose each other, but they are stuck together. They can be so different too, like the sisters in the novel; they look kind of similar, but they are all so different.
When I had children, I realized they just come out with so much personality. I'm not really shaping them; I am maybe guiding them, supporting them. They are really born with personalities. What I could grow to know… the way that we are born into the world as potentially fully formed humans, but then we change…
5. Shanghailanders deals with themes of identity, belonging, and displacement. Can you discuss how these themes resonate with you personally, and how you explored them through the experiences of your characters?
Recently, I've been asking myself where I consider my home to be. There are so many places I could name: New York, New Jersey, Seoul as my homeland, Shanghai, where I have made a home. But, I don’t know if I really have a solid sense of place, where I feel I wholly belong. I think it’s a part of my childhood and the way I grew up. But I also find it to be a privilege – I speak multiple languages, I feel comfortable moving around the world and confident interacting with many types of people. I think that’s a beautiful thing. It’s enlarged my world, to not have roots. But places are always changing.
A city like Shanghai is always changing what it means to be from Shanghai and what the Shanghai experience is. Some of the roots are being erased, like old apartment buildings. The experience of displacement is individual as a result of where you go and how you feel in different places.
Comments