A Writer’s Insight: Victor Wei Ke Yang

Victor Wei Ke Yang’s story, “Chicken,” appears in the winter 2024 issue of The Southern Review. Here, he discusses, the process of writing a story about codependent addictions, revision, and balancing complex narrative tensions.


This story has a lot of ambitious threads in it that I found were weaved wonderfully throughout: the gambling addiction, the codependent and almost abusive relationship, the immigrant parents who don’t quite understand, the loss of identity (whether through Danny’s life being adopted or the narrator’s return home to Kentucky). What was it like writing these into the story without letting one get lost?

That’s too kind. Thank you, Emilie. I think I have the awful tendency of wanting to create a world fit for a novel within the container of a short story . . . hence all the threads. I feel like I should tell you some very fancy answer where I posted all the throughlines onto different colored post-it notes, and then counted how many of each color I had, and then rearrange all the pieces so that I was clear where and when to focus on what, with whatever tool people use these days (Scrivener, Excel formulas, ChatGPT, who knows) . . .

I wrote and rewrote this story a lot. I wrote the first draft in my MFA workshop at the start of the pandemic, in 2020. I had the privilege of having a lot of really smart teachers and fellow readers lend me their thoughts. And then I wrote it again. And again. I wish short stories didn’t take me this much work. Or maybe I do. It is pain and pleasure all at once, the process of revision. 

Danny’s gambling addiction causes a lot of strife between him and the narrator, and yet I never feel like either one of them is the “bad guy” in the relationship. What was it like balancing how much they loved each other while also showing us their complicated issues?

Gosh. This was really hard. I remember three springs ago, during the pandemic, I was in a fiction class on Zoom led by the brilliant Jenny Zhang, and in workshop, one of my classmates asked, Who’s the addict in this story?

Danny, of course. Or that was what I thought. Then the discussion turned. The narrator, someone offered.

This was their logic: He’s obsessed with taking care of Danny. Exerting control over Danny. Being addicted to the addict is another kind of addiction.

This really helped me think about the story in a new light. I wanted the reader to root for these two guys. I wanted there to be sweetness and happiness and tender moments. I tried to capture that in the voice of the narrator, the way that he so clearly loves Danny. And yet—I hope that the prose is able to show the unreliability of this narrator, that there are, as you have said, much darker undercurrents to their love. The narrator, in some way, is wedded to the status quo of the dysfunction of Danny, and the dysfunction of their relationship—and when it seems like Danny is finally getting better, I think, is where we get to the ending.

 

How did you construct the sense of fear and adrenaline in the last scene of the story in the car?

 

Ah—I think this question ties in nicely with the last one. I wrote so many endings when revising this piece, and for the first few years, the story concluded with another iteration of Danny’s freakout, the narrator reassuring him, etc etc. The usual stuff. But it never quite felt right. Then I showed up to one of my classmates from my MFA program, Jennani Durai. She was the one who suggested the ending in this version. Thank you, Jennani!

 

Ultimately, it harkens back to some lines on the first page, namely: “[Danny] had this miraculous ability to collect himself when I most needed it. I joked that this was the secret to love: only one of us was allowed to be crazy at any given time.”

 

What projects are you working on now?

 

I’m in (what I hope are) the last stages of revising a novel with my agent. In short it follows a Black-Asian gay couple as they are at the cusp of adopting a baby. The plot has changed quite a bit, but I think the overall thrust is still the same—I’m curious about exploring what it means to love someone who turns out not to be the person you thought they were. That, and how to overcome the baggage of our families and our past when trying to create a future. I’m also working on a memoir, keeping up the stamina to write, and figuring out if it is possible ever to be kinder to ourselves. That last thing is not a big project at all . . .


Victor Wei Ke Yang has published in The Rumpus, Best Small Fictions 2021, and the Chicago Tribune. He was a writer-in-residence for the City of Boston and works to support Asian American grassroots organizing.

Emilie Rodriguez is a Latinx writer from San Diego and holds an MFA from Louisiana State University. She is the editorial assistant for The Southern Review and the former editor-in-chief of the New Delta Review. Her work has been supported by the Sundress Academy of the Arts Residency. Rodriguez won the 2023 Patty Friedman Writing Competition in the short story category. Her work is forthcoming in the Peauxdunque Review.

 

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