Michael X. Wang’s story, “The Gatekeepers,” appears in the autumn 2023 issue of The Southern Review. Here he discusses his inspiration for the piece, the challenges of setting a story over such a long period of time, and how easy it is not to realize that we’re living through history.
Emilie Rodriguez, Editorial Assistant: What drew you to write a multi-generational story across these three specific time periods? Why structure it that way?
Michael X. Wang: The story is based on a quick, offhand remark that my mother told me. We were in her hometown, this small Chinese city called Fenyang (population ~400,000), where I was also born. We were with my grandmother at the time, and there was this security guard outside of a school that was flirting with my grandmother. My Chinese isn’t all that good, but I still picked up on the innuendos. So, I was like, “Grandma, I think that guy is interested in you,” and she said, “Oh, yes, he’s been interested in me for fifty years. His son was interested in your mother, too.” We never talked about that event again, but that was the inspiration for the story.
ER: As I read your story, I was struck by the missed romance connection that repeated between the Qiong men and Meiyun’s descendants, amid all of the political and social upheaval. Why focus on romance?
MW: I think it’s often forgotten that despite social and political upheaval, despite cataclysmic events surrounding history, people still did everything else we do today: we eat, we sleep, we feel sad, even lonely, we fall in love. Most of the time, even during highly political periods, most people don’t think about politics. They don’t realize they’re living through history.
ER: When Meiyun gives Tianshui her clothing, it’s such a tender moment between them, especially in contrast to how we see Meiyun and Lingling. Why create this difference between the mother/daughter and then the grandmother-granddaughter relationship?
MW: Such a great question! This is something I notice about Chinese parents: they treat their children sternly, giving few complements, yet they spoil their grandkids to exhaustion. I have personally heard no less than four grandparents tell me: “We will just love our grandkids. It’s their parents’ job to make sure they become good adults.”
ER: Meiyun and Qiong start the story at different class/economic levels and in the second part, in 1972, they’re more or less of equal status. In fact, the only reason her father was kept safe was because of Qiong’s intervention. What are we as readers to make of this slight reversal in Meiyun and Qiong’s statuses?
MW: Yes, absolutely! So glad you noticed. In fact, Qiong was of a higher social status since his family was much poorer before the revolution. This was very prevalent during that period, and it was difficult for many upper-class people to accept. They still had this superiority complex because their family had owned land, but all around them factory workers, truck drivers, and soldiers were given privileged positions. Of course, once the Cultural Revolution was over, things started reversing once again. Education became ever more important, and China today in many ways is a lot like prerevolutionary China.
ER: The story is titled “The Gatekeepers” even though it closely follows Meiyun instead of Qiong and his family. Why choose to title it that way?
MW: Qiong and his family are the physical gatekeepers, but Meiyun and her family are the gatekeepers to romance. I was trying to play that up with the title.
ER: You cover a wide swath of decades in this story, and you move deftly between them. Can we expect to see more of Meiyun or of Qiong in other works?
MW: Maybe—maybe not. I am undecided! I am in the process of writing another collection of short stories, and perhaps some version of their character might show up with other names.
ER: Meiyun wonders “why there were so many people that mattered so little to her” at the end of the story. Do you think that that’s actually true of her evolution, or is it what she perceives to be true of herself?
MW: Again, to me, this is speaking about the “gatekeeping” aspect that the world has on us, pushing us to have relationships with some while preventing us from developing relationships with others. The real questions are: Was it because of Meiyun that Qiong and his family never mattered that much to her, or was it because of the political and social circumstances in China? In what ways was she in control of her life? In what ways are any of us in control of ours?
ER: Meiyun calls herself “foolish and sentimental” for reminiscing and being a little melancholy. What role do you think sentimentality places in this story?
MW: In all my work, I always try to push against sentimentality—maybe too much. It’s possible this story could have used a little more melancholy or sentimentality. Maybe writers should not push away feelings on the page but try to develop those stories so that the feelings are more earned. I will think about this for a long time.
ER: Your debut novel Lost in the Long March follows characters in 1930s China during the Long March. What were some of the challenges of writing about this time period in this long form versus the short form that we see in “The Gatekeepers”?
MW: It was dramatically more difficult to write about this period in the novel form. You just have to know so much about the history if you
were writing a book because, well, you need to fill up more pages. More questions come to mind that need to be answered: For example, do rural folks in 1930s China know that airplanes exist? What kind of reactions do they have when they see an airplane? In contrast, writing this story was much easier. It focuses on the characters, and the setting is a familiar one, too.
ER: What projects do you have coming up?
MW:I am at work on two novels! One is almost done. It’s called (tentatively) The Red Synthetic Utopia of the Mind. It’s quite a departure from my previous work, though it still features a character from rural China from the city of Fenyang. Harriet Chu is the main character, and she’s this video game prodigy that comes to the U.S. to merge minds with a supercomputer. The novel is about content-creation culture, immigration, and the origins of consciousness.
Michael X. Wang is the author of the story collection Further News of Defeat, which won the PEN/Bingham Prize, and the novel Lost in the Long March. He is an assistant professor of creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi.