A Conversation with ‘Best Debut Short Stories 2021’ Author Qianze Zhang

Best Debut Short Stories 2021: The PEN America Dau Prize is the fifth edition of an anthology celebrating outstanding new fiction writers published by literary magazines around the world. In the upcoming weeks, we’ll feature Q&As with the contributors, whose stories were selected for PEN’s Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and for the anthology by judges Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, and Beth Piatote. Submissions for the 2022 awards are open now.

Qianze Zhang is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, writing, and digital media. She studied computer science and fine arts at the University of Southern California. She is a child of Chinese immigrants and lives in Washington State. Currently, she’s interested in how the information age uniquely mutates memory and complicates coming-of-age narratives.

“Mandy’s Mary Sue” was originally published in sinθ magazine. Find a brief excerpt below:

Mandy Dong was only nine years old when she got her first period. By that time, she was also two years ahead of her class in math and had already been watching pornography for three months. Mandy watched porn on her family’s only desktop monitor, in a room that most white families would call a “study” but her family called “the computer room.” She preferred videos that showed women without men, because the sight of an erect penis horrified and confused her. When she browsed the thumbnails, she averted her eyes from the smooth rods of flesh disappearing halfway into another body. As she watched the beautiful women, she would passionately kiss the back of her hand, focusing first on the pressure felt on her lips, then on the softness felt on her hand, trying to understand what it was like to both give and receive. Each time she finished, she closed the browser tab, then erased the history, cookies, and cache from the past day. When she wasn’t careful and the porn websites installed malware on her family’s computer, she knew how to move the appropriate files to the trash and empty the bin, the resulting sound effect of rustling paper calming her small, hot core of anxiety.

Where did you find the idea for this story?

Growing up, I was obsessed with coming-of-age stories. I don’t think that’s uncommon. I’m taken by stories that zoom into typical adolescent experiences and expand them with intense emotional realism that is clarified, but not diminished, with an adult perspective. Often, the challenges the child protagonists face are complicated by environmental forces: the expectation of marriage, a difficult family life, war, et cetera. In my generation’s case, we have the internet serving as a massive, unprecedented, and nearly inescapable environmental feature. I wanted to refract the coming-of-age narrative through the lens of the internet, and that started me at a loose premise.

This premise could be taken in so many different directions, but to find an angle that was compelling to me, I went almost entirely off of what I could comb from my memory and what I’ve been able to corroborate from talking to my close friends. We weren’t there for the birth of the World Wide Web, but we were very much there for its “teenage years,” the mid- to late-2000s. This was before the absolute tyranny of Facebook and Instagram, when there were yet countless other platforms centered around the personal profile. Their existence relied on users’ desire to curate their personal image and appraise others.’ Online platforms that obscured the true identities of their users behind avatars, like roleplaying games, unlocked new possibilities for image-curation. The content on online forums was even more wildly unregulated than it is today. People would say things that were so disgusting I felt ashamed to read them. I probably suffered some trauma from reading hateful and abusive speech from strangers online, even when it wasn’t directed at me. There wasn't nearly as much thinking and writing being done critiquing these environments—it was all so new. So children surfing the web were exposed to a lot of ideas quickly—more quickly than they could be expected to healthily process them—and especially for young girls, a lot of these ideas concerned beauty and sexuality. Their world is expanded, but it comes at a cost. In “Mandy’s Mary Sue,” I wanted to explore the inner thoughts of an individualistic child who lives under the influence of these cultural currents, but has limited awareness of their power over her.

What was your writing process like for this story?

I wrote most of this story in a word processor in my web browser with a bunch of distractions filtering in and out of my open tabs. I don’t know if I can recommend this generally—it seems too chaotic and undisciplined. But maybe it worked for this specific story because Mandy is a child of the internet. Maybe being in a disorganized, overstimulated state of mind helped me evoke the anxiety of being on the internet while undergoing a process of ruthless self-evaluation. And to be fair, some of these distractions were research. I actually browsed baby name websites and had a lot of fun reading about the names’ meanings. I searched Deviantart and found illustrations posted a decade ago that were most likely a tween’s self-insert character. And I watched anime, but that’s been pretty much a lifelong project.

The idea of hiding is prevalent throughout the story. Mandy hides her porn-watching habits and, later, her period. By the end of the story, she has started to resemble a character she created, Momoko. What is the significance of this transformation, and how is her self-invention impacted by how she thinks she should be seen or wants (or doesn't want) to be seen? Is she coming into her own and out of hiding, or conforming to societal standards? Both?

Mandy is precocious. I wouldn’t blame anyone for finding her obnoxious. While writing the story, I questioned, is she too precocious, or too clever? But her precocity doesn’t free her from the systems she lives under, the systems she’s trying to self-actualize under. I don’t think there’s much freedom in basing your conception of an ideal woman primarily on her differences from other women, even if they’re just tired tropes of women seen in cartoons. Mandy’s “redefinitions” of the ideal woman via her Mary Sue may seem freeing at first. However, they reflect a capitalist variety of feminism that constantly mutates its standards for women in a way that offers the illusion of progress, but actually upholds the importance of the patriarchy’s comfort. Jia Tolentino articulates this point well in her essay, “Always be Optimizing.” Take how Momoko is conventionally attractive with a unique outfit, probably heterosexual, and only loves one man. She can defend herself in battle, but she doesn’t get a period.

Still, I think Mandy displays a lot of courage in the face of these systems. Hiding her porn-watching habits and period demonstrates that she feels shame, and adolescent shame can be so painful and lonely. She whips out these drawings in front of her schoolmates, which takes emotional vulnerability. The Mary Sue she creates is essentially a self-insert character, so she’s laying bare her desires and aspirations, though they're abstracted into a drawing of a woman. It’s all imperfect—there’s also the internalized racism she holds towards her Chinese name and her family. Mandy has a lot to learn about how her values are formed, but even when she better understands how she is influenced, I’m not sure if she’ll be able to take control of the process. It’s something I think most adults struggle with far past adolescence.

How has the Robert J. Dau Prize affected you?

It’s given me an extra boost of confidence that there is an audience for the stories I want to tell, however strange, overtly contemporary, or specific they may be. There was certainly encouragement on the way to the prize. I’m extremely thankful to Jiaqi Kang and sinθ magazine for forwarding my piece to K-Ming Chang during the magazine’s summer writing contest, and to K-Ming for giving me such thoughtful feedback. During the editing process with Catapult, Yuka Igarashi mentioned that she personally related to some small details in the piece—that felt precious to know. One of my friends told me she’d genuinely never before read a story about a Sino girl in Mandy’s situation. I can say the same about the other eleven authors I’ve been anthologized with— every piece is so innovative, every piece makes me think “I’ve never read something like this before,” and that’s so exciting.

What’s the best or worst writing advice you’ve ever received and why?

The best would be how Matthew Salesses defines craft in his book Craft in the Real World. “Craft is culture,” “craft is a set of expectations.” I’ll attempt to elaborate on these statements here, but I can’t say it as well as Salesses himself, so I would encourage any interested parties to go check out the book, which is also published by Catapult! The basic idea is that any inclinations one has regarding a piece of writing are deeply influenced by one’s experience of culture. Therefore, it’s precarious and probably prejudiced to claim that one set of expectations is better than another and enforce that in a diverse workshop space. Phrases like “you have to learn the rules in order to break them,” which I unfortunately heard frequently throughout my painting education, are a whole lot of mumbo jumbo. I feel lucky that I read this advice early in my career, because I’m now not afraid of anything white MFA bros have to say about my work. I think understanding this not only helped me become a more confident writer, but a more empathetic and open-minded reader. I try to interrogate where my feedback is coming from before I give it.

What are you currently working on?

I’m continuing to write short stories as a way to process the social and cultural currents I’ve rode so far in life, maybe in hopes of limiting the power they have over me. I also feel anxious that I’m running out of time to access a lot of memories from my childhood, which is probably untrue, but I feel it anyway. So I’m still focused on exploring coming-of-age narratives through the lens of the internet, or at least specifically relevant to my generation. I’m not going to feel done with that after just a few stories. I’m also trying to find the courage to coax more family stories out of my parents; I feel a desperation to record some of my family history, because as far as I know, none of my relatives have intentionally done so yet.

Finally, where do you go to discover new writing?

Recommendations from my friends and colleagues and people I don’t know but do admire. I love hearing emotional feedback from my friends on how a certain piece of writing made them feel. Our reading habits often overlap so we can give each other suggestions with personalized context: “This book is like this other one we both read, but it takes angle X instead of angle Y, or supplements with perspective Z.” It makes me feel more connected to them. I also follow a lot of writers and literary publications on Twitter.

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