What Does It Mean To Share A Life Together?
Interview with author Lana Lin, The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao
by Julie Ae Kim
Over dinner at Dawa’s in Sunnyside, my friend Ruth tells me about a hybrid memoir that I must read. It is The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao by Taiwanese-American writer and artist Lana Lin, which is a retelling of Gertrude Stein’s 1933 book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. It tells the story of Lana’s partnership with her lover, H. Lan Thao, from the latter’s point of view and spans their relationship, personal history, feminist and queer theory, and Asian American politics.
I had the opportunity to chat with Lana over Zoom. She tells me that this book is ultimately about the question,What does it mean to share a life together? It’s an utterly romantic question but not in the way of rose colored glasses. This question is explored through the ups and downs of life. Lana and her partner’s commitment to do it together is what ultimately compels me. As two queer artists who have collaborated on projects and are also life partners, I am left inspired by the amount of trust, commitment and love that binds the two of them.
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Julie Ae Kim: You had the idea for this book over 20 years ago. In the book you state, A different kind of love arises when merging another’s story with one’s own (215). What was the process of writing the book like once you started, especially writing from your partner’s point of view?
Lana Lin: Perhaps because I had sat on the idea for so long and had a strong commitment to the book’s form, which is modeled on Stein’s, it was a strangely natural process. I discovered I enjoy writing about myself in the first person. The distance it creates was useful in probing my own interiority. I have referred to this as a kind of self-analysis. (Also here.) Like many Asian females I have been trained to feel shame or at least hesitation about speaking about myself, especially regarding personal, intimate details. Writing in the third person helped me to overcome that.
It was more challenging to write from Lan Thao’s point of view about events I never experienced. We had long interviews but still I needed to imagine and invent. How could I really know how they felt? From the outset I expressed anxiety about the fictive aspect of the biographical and autobiographical. This is how I came to the term “autobiomythography,” after Audre Lorde’s biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. There’s always a degree of myth making when we tell our own stories or those of anyone else’s.
JAK: Why was it important for you to write a retelling of “Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas”?
LL: I love Stein’s conceit because it immediately problematizes the authority of the author and of autobiography – who is telling whose story – but also because it asks how we decide where one life begins and another ends. Stein and Toklas were individuals but they built a collaborative life together. Lan Thao and I are separate individuals but we collaborate on a life together. I’m interested in the plurality of subjectivities, how they can be entangled, for better or worse.
While I gravitate toward Gertrude and Alice because they are iconic lesbians, I also wanted to speak back to what is missing from their world vision, at least what made it to the page. Asians appear peripherally at best in both their published works. As I say in my book, I wanted to bring the Asian understory to the surface. I wanted to insert Lan Thao and myself into the unwritten history that Stein’s stature within the modernist canon represents. I expand on this impulse in a LitHub essay reflecting on the book and its cover image, which replicates Man Ray’s photograph for the first edition of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
JAK: Reading this book can also be thought of as a love letter to both H. Lan Thao but also to the city where you both made your lives together. There are so many quintessential New York City institutions mentioned such as Veselka, Pearl River Mart but also events like the murder of Amadou Diallo, 9/1, and recent anti-Asian violence incidents that happened since the pandemic hit. I found reading the book, as a New Yorker, moving as it both queers and racializes the city. How do you feel like the city has changed through the years?
LL: It’s difficult for me to separate how the city has changed from how I have changed because, as I narrate in the book, I ‘came of age’ in New York City, so I can only see it through the lens of my own becoming. From that perspective, NYC was grittier and less expensive in the late 80s and 90s. Although young and not necessarily wealthy folks do seem to manage to live in NYC or its outskirts, now it feels like a city for the rich. Hopefully with Mamdani there may be a shift. But even as Mamdani attempts to bring more attention to immigrant and economically challenged populations, there are innumerable counterforces on a national level. Though I might like to consider the city a sovereign entity, it can’t but be affected by the changes across the U.S. and the changing position of the U.S. in the world.
For me 9/11 and COVID marked some of the biggest changes, at least that is what I highlighted in the book. After 9/11 there was an oppressive curtailing of individual freedoms in the name of security and anti-terrorism. I felt a keener sense of racism and the vulnerability of Muslims, and by association people of color in general. COVID came with similar but different effects. Again, heightened but misguided security in the name of safety. This is too much to cover, but in terms of how the city felt pre- and post-COVID, for me it is notably more atomized. I used to attend screenings and events with much greater frequency; again, maybe this is simply the effect of aging. But having suffered collective lockdown, now I voluntarily isolate myself and often have to prod myself to interact socially. I think others have confessed similar feelings – how being in person feels fraught, and not because of fear of viral contagion. Perhaps COVID fears revealed the social anxieties some of us scarcely contain beneath thin skin. And now technology allows us to interact remotely. I have colleagues I have never met in person, which strikes me as kind of sad, but then again, I have friends I have never met in person and probably never would have, so it’s a mixed bag.
JAK: The food writing is exquisite. It serves multiple functions - descriptor, erotics, relation to the world. What is the role of food to you in writing? In your life?
LL: Food writing had become its own genre well before I even really noticed it. And I didn’t set out to focus on food. Yet when I started to write I realized how central food was to Lan Thao and to me and to our life together. When I was a kid, I felt like I was supposed to think of food as the necessary material substance I needed to ingest to stay alive, secondary to important concerns. It was partly because we didn’t have much money, but I also think that my Taiwanese parents promoted a kind of Protestant ethic. Eating for the sensuous enjoyment of it or for the pleasure of sharing a memorable experience with someone were frowned upon as wasteful luxuries. It wasn’t until I met Lan Thao that I admitted how much food means to me, and we revel in sharing food together.
It’s obviously important to most if not all cultures, but there definitely seems to be a subgenre of Asian food writing, aside from cook books. Grace M. Cho’s Tastes Like War, Monique Truong’s Book of Salt and Bitter in the Mouth, Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart immediately come to mind. There are probably so many more than I’m not thinking of …
JAK: Tell us a bit about your politicization process. With Lan Thao’s background as a Vietnamese immigrant and yours as a Taiwanese American, how do you feel about Asian American identity? Additionally, speaking as the co-founder of the Asian American Feminist Collective, I am curious about your thoughts on Asian American feminism.
LL: I think that the sole unifying characteristic of Asian American identities is conflict, anxiety, and confusion about the very term “Asian American.” What qualifies as Asian American is so debatable and subjective. I am definitive that I identify as Asian American, but what does that really mean? Despite this ambiguity, one can point to a distinct Asian American feeling, which may be to say that despite their range of experiences, Asian Americans share the sense of feeling minor, to invoke Cathy Park Hong.
It’s been interesting to try to analyze the reception of this book in terms of Asian or Asian American solidarities. Vietnamese and Koreans (and Vietnamese American and Korean Americans) have largely been supportive of my collaborations with Lan Thao and of this book. I haven’t felt that same kind of support from a Taiwanese or Taiwanese American community to any extent. Gradually over decades my films may have reached a niche group of Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans who appreciate experimental film and art. But I haven’t perceived a Taiwanese or Taiwanese American contingent who has expressed interest in my book. We weren’t able to locate a writer with a Taiwanese background to be an interlocutor, for example, and haven’t found a publisher in Taiwan. You would think that Taiwan with its more progressive attitude toward genderqueers would be more welcoming than China. A small publisher in Shanghai was interested, but needed to make a few changes to accommodate Chinese censors. Although the changes were minor, I declined largely because they could not acknowledge Taiwan. Ironically, I myself don’t feel acknowledged as Taiwanese. As I say in my book, I feel I have no people because I am not “authentically American” nor am I “authentically Taiwanese.”
I was happily surprised to discover the Asian American Feminist Collective. Asian American feminism is being forged by a younger generation, as far as I can tell. I identify as Asian American and feminist, amongst other identifiers, but I wasn’t aware of solidarities specifically joining those commitments. Activists such as Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs were doing feminist and political work in alliance with Black liberation movements. I think it took another generation to made demands and claims specifically in the name of and on behalf of Asian Americans. I had a published conversation with Summer Kim Lee about the generational difference in attitudes toward the category of “Asian American”. Lee speaks from a millennial perspective that contributes to Asian American feminism. To shorthand her book, she discusses artworks that aggressively reject the passive premise of the model minority myth and act out politics of hostility and resistance. I’m all for this. I wish I had had the words to name myself in this way. I couldn’t put the words “Asian American” and “feminist” together, and so I didn’t have the capacity to advocate for them or to imagine the potential of what they could do in tandem. I guess that’s why it took me 20 years to write The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao, which doesn’t even fully catch up to my present political positions!
JAK: The performance of gender and how we are perceived in the world is explored in the book: Red Glasses! Too small leather jacket! Short hair! How has your concept of gender and performance changed over the years?
LL: It’s grown with the broader culture and with Lan Thao. I’m fortunate to teach in a university where I can interact with or simply witness inspiring gender creativity. I mention in the book how Lan Thao is moved by their student’s transition. It’s not something they felt permission to imagine. There’s a similarity to how I was trying to discuss being a feminist Asian American as a more radicalized political project. Unlike Lan Thao, I didn’t wish myself or see myself as a boy or man, but I didn’t feel comfortable as a woman, or what society seemed to dictate a woman was. But I couldn’t conceive of alternatives, and I figured that I didn’t fit most things I was meant to–clothes, airline seats, even answering machines couldn’t “hear” me–so why should I expect to fit any given gender? I accepted and resigned myself to being a misfit.
When I first met Lan Thao, I identified myself as bisexual because I thought I had to since my most serious relationships had been with men. Then I gave myself permission to call myself a lesbian but am more comfortable with the capaciousness of “queer”. I still stand by “lesbian” because it seems to be an endangered species. Younger folks seem to lean toward trans or nonbinary or queer. To paraphrase a friend, I’ll stop calling myself a lesbian when patriarchy is dead.
JAK: Lastly, I can’t not mention the romance that is in this book. I was swooning at the oft honest and tender portrayals of queer love and romance between Lana and Lan Thao. Can you share with us what it is like to collaborate artistically with your life partner and how that affects the love that you share with each other?
LL: The art collaboration is challenging but art making is always challenging, as it should be. We also view our lives and our love as a collaboration. That, too, is challenging but rewarding. I think what helps make both strands of collaboration work is to distinguish them, to regard them as separate channels of energy. It’s not productive to mix artistic collaboration with our daily lives, though inevitably they may bleed into each other.