Research and Inspiration: Writing Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories

By May-lee Chai

While I wrote the stories in Tomorrow in Shanghai over the course of ten-plus years, the majority were written during the last six years, so either under the Trump administration or during the pandemic.  While none of the stories is set in the present day, I feel that every one of them is a reflection of the traumas and dramas of the present. The stories represent various kinds of violence, from capitalism and the burdens of trying to support a family to the difficulty of surviving various kinds of anti-Asian violence or xenophobic bigotry or homophobia. It was important to me to show that the violence of the present is related to the violence of the past.

My writing process varied with each story. For example, with Hong’s Mother, I wanted to see if I could bring together a white mother and biracial daughter who’ve felt alienated from each other because their experience of racism was different. The daughter feels betrayed because the mother could not speak up about the racism the family experienced in a small town, and the mother doesn’t know how to reach out to her daughter, whom she doesn’t understand. It seemed like it would take a miracle to bring them together, so I have the characters go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes, France, where the holy water is believed to cause miracles. 

In fact, my mother and I did visit Lourdes together when I was a teenager although our experiences were quite different from that of the mother and daughter in the story. However, I was able to use my real-life experience traveling to Lourdes as the basic research for the story, and then I had to supplement that with more research, including reading up on the background of city, the apparition of the Virgin Mary that was supposed to have occurred there, and the industry of religious tourism that has been part of the town since the late 1800s.

As for the title story, “Tomorrow in Shanghai,” I had traveled throughout Henan province in China when I was a student and was deeply impressed by the natural beauty and Buddhist art in the mountains and villages there. I was later shocked to discover that this beautiful province had become the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in China due to mobile blood buyers who’d unwittingly infected up to a million people with HIV. The blood merchants were at first fully authorized by government-run hospitals who needed to expand the plasma supply available to patients and so sent these men with trucks to the countryside to offer to buy farmers’ blood. However, they weren’t able to properly sterilize their equipment on the road and furthermore began re-injecting blood back into the farmers after the plasma was spun out in the mistaken belief that this would allow the farmers to avoid anemia. When the central government in Beijing figured out what was going on, mobile blood merchants were blamed for the spread of AIDS and executed. 

Although the blood merchants were reviled in the Chinese press, I began to think about what might draw someone into that line of work, what kind of limited training they would have received, the lack of access to information about AIDS and HIV they would have had, etc. When I read Congressional testimony of doctors who’d been hired to extract organs of executed prisoners, the idea for the story was born. This story probably took the longest to write, as I worked on the research for many years before I even began writing.

My story,“The Nanny,” takes place 100 years in the future on a Chinese colony on Mars. I’ve been very interested in the Chinese space program. I watched live on Twitter the landing of the lunar rover Yutu-2, which is named after the Jade Rabbit that supposedly lived with the Goddess of the Moon according to Chinese folklore. 

But it wasn’t until the three non-Chinese billionaires–Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson—all blasted into the upper atmosphere in their rockets that I thought of the idea for the story. With these billionaires interested in space, I imagined space travel as potentially being more about exploitation than Star Trek-like exploration. I could imagine people going to work on space colonies for capitalists at home, like a giant Amazon warehouse. I tried to imagine how that might unfold in a Chinese context and my story “The Nanny” was born. 

However, I didn’t want the story to be hopeless, so my goal was to try to think of ways the eponymous protagonist, an older Chinese woman working as an Ayi, or Nanny, in the New Shanghai Colony might think of ways to outwit her mysterious capitalist employer. As someone who grew up watching the great dystopian sci-fi films of the 1970s, I love how the genre can explore issues of social justice, from gender inequity and misogyny to labor exploitation to the ravages of environmental destruction like climate change.

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May-lee Chai is the author of the American Book Award–winning story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants and ten other books. Her prize-winning short prose has been published widely, including in the New England Review, Missouri Review, Seventeen, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The recipient of an NEA fellowship in prose, Chai is an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.

TOMORROW IN SHANGHAI

A short story collection exploring cultural complexities in China, the Chinese diaspora in America, and the world at large.

In a vibrant and illuminating follow-up to her award-winning story collection, Useful Phrases for Immigrants, May-lee Chai’s latest collection Tomorrow in Shanghai explores multicultural complexities through lenses of class, wealth, age, gender, and sexuality—always tracking the nuanced, knotty, and intricate exchanges of interpersonal and institutional power.

These stories transport the reader, variously: to rural China, where a city doctor harvests organs to fund a wedding and a future for his family; on a vacation to France, where a white mother and her biracial daughter cannot escape their fraught relationship; inside the unexpected romance of two Chinese-American women living abroad in China; and finally, to a future Chinese colony on Mars, where an aging working-class woman lands a job as a nanny. Chai’s stories are essential reading for an increasingly globalized world.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing