What makes us American? A UC Davis student tackles identity and violence in new book

What makes an American? Is it the soil you were born on, or is it the land and culture you were raised in?

That’s just one of the questions that Tom Lin tackles in his first novel, “The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu,” which will be released June 1. It’s a Western tale in the tradition of finding redemption through violence — except this one stars a Chinese American.

“ I realized Westerns have gone to space before they featured a Chinese American protagonist, and I just thought that was so unbelievable,” Lin said.

Lin’s novel follows the story of Ming Tsu, the son of Chinese immigrants. Orphaned as a baby, Ming is raised by a notorious California crime boss who trains him to be a hitman.

When Ming falls in love with a woman named Ada, the two attempt to elope and build a new life, only for Ada to be kidnapped and Ming forced into labor on the Transcontinental Railroad. After teaming up with a blind prophet and a crew of traveling performers, Ming sets out on a journey to get revenge on the men who destroyed his life.

In centering the Western fable on a Chinese American hero, Lin’s story challenges popular myths of the West as a creation of white men both in its fictional story and in the very real history of Chinese American labor and exploitation the story is grounded in.

“One thing that bothered me is that violence in these kinds of canonical Western stories … you’re always beating up a person, and that person is usually non-white. And it’s that kind of violence that I wanted to turn on its head,” Lin said. “I wanted to write a character who could ... use that violence in a way that spoke for his identity and put him back there, more so than it erased (him).”

Though his character isn’t defined by his Chinese ethnicity, Ming is repeatedly forced to wrestle with outside perceptions of him as an outsider — both to his American counterparts and to other Chinese people. It’s a tension many Asian Americans are familiar with, and something that Lin himself has been trying to untangle all his life.

Born in Beijing, Lin, 25, moved to New York City when he was 4. Though his parents wanted him to be a surgeon growing up, Lin was always drawn to books and eventually decided to pursue literary criticism when novel writing, ironically, seemed like an impossible dream. He’s now a second-year Ph.D. student in English at University of California, Davis.

To hear him tell it, writing is an agonizingly slow process for Lin. But you wouldn’t know it from the way his novel flows, whipping through brutal American West landscapes and breathless battles as we follow Ming on his cinematic quest for justice.

Here, Lin talks about writing, his research process, embarrassing first novel attempts and reclaiming Chinese Californian historical narratives.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What drove you to want to center a Western on a Chinese American protagonist?

I wanted something that positioned Chinese Americans — and Asian Americans, more broadly speaking — in their place as the people who made the West what it is today. After the railroads finished, all those laborers ... set up the whole Central Valley to have the most productive agriculture anywhere in the States. And all that labor is is so easily forgotten.

And so I wanted to kind of rehabilitate that labor, because it seemed wild to me that they were so often left out.

How long did making the book take?

The research took about two years, probably two and a half, and most of that was because writing is so unpleasant for me. It really is just an excruciating process, and it takes me so long to write a page. I think there were times that it took me like a day to do two paragraphs, it was just a crawl.

Is this the first time that you’ve written something of this length?

This is the third book length project that I have finished. The first one I actually finished right out of high school. It is terrible. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to read it. And yet I can’t bring myself to throw it out or completely the delete the file.

Those first two will never see the light of day. They’ll probably see the inside of a fire, if I have my way.

The book’s Western locales are described in such vivid detail that it seems impossible to have written them without seeing them yourself. Did you travel to every location in the book?

I went to every place. ... (I went) in the middle of summer, and I’m there trying to get a sense of how Ming would have felt, and I’m in this car and have the AC on full blast. And I step out of the car and the heat just blasts me continuously the whole time.

I remember feeling a kind of obligation to be in that place until I felt uncomfortable, before I let myself get back in the car, because one thing that really struck me about the West and the landscape is that it makes the body feel a certain kind of way.

That’s the kind of thing that I was trying to reproduce — what does it feel like to be here?

How much of a role did you want Ming’s identity as a Chinese American to play in his story?

The book is my love letter to the West and the Western genre, but it’s also my way of thinking through these questions about identity. And I think one of the key tensions is the question of, where does it come from? Is it from the inside, pushing out, or is it kind of prescribed from the outside? I think that’s also kind of complicated by how racism influences the way that identities are either produced or applied to people.

Ming is a Chinese American … but he doesn’t speak Chinese. And he has to operate in a way in this book that constantly reminds him that he is ‘other.’

It was a pretty central thing for me to consider as I was writing the book because, in a way, (I also had) this belief that if I could write the best version of this book, I would be able to answer this question for myself.

I don’t know if I’ve succeeded because I think I’m too close to it now, but I think there is this question — is identity something that you produce for yourself and then tell the world about, or is identity something that society puts on you, that you then have to deal with?

There’s a scene in the book when the magic show performs for a Chinese audience, and Ming gets angry when the ringmaster repeatedly calls them Ming’s “countrymen.” “Don’t you ever call them Chinese my countrymen again,” Ming says to the ringmaster.

I felt like Ming’s efforts to push his feelings down mirrored a lot of the identity confusion many Asian Americans, including myself, sometimes struggle with. What made you include that scene?

I think I wrote that scene because I wanted to see Ming struggle with the Chinese part of Chinese American. I think that one of the kinds of responses that systemic racism engenders is a kind of rejection of alterity.

I remember like there were times when I was growing up, and I desperately wanted not to be Chinese. Not because I didn’t like being Chinese, but because I so badly wanted to be American, and it seemed that the thing that was preventing me from doing that was that I was Chinese.

And so I wanted to have Ming kind of struggle with that as well, this kind of reflex of rejecting a diasporic kind of experience, rejecting a unified identity, out of desperation and out of fear. I think that’s one of the distributed effects of being “other” in a society that you want to belong to. It instills in you a kind of terror of possibly being misread as the other.

What advice would you give to writers trying to get started, especially Asian American writers?

In some ways I don’t feel qualified to give advice, but you know, I guess I did manage to get a book published. (laughs)

I think the advice that I would give, especially to young Asian writers, is write about yourself. I remember I wrote so many stories as a kid, and even in high school, where the main character was white. You begin to believe that that’s what stories are about — white people talking to white people and, like, going through a divorce or something. And that totally neutered any ability I had to tell an interesting story because I was trying to operate with things that were useless to me.

(And) read as much as you can, write as much as you can.

So what’s next for you?

I’m beginning the long research process that precedes any writing that I do. And I’m working on a new project. I don’t know when that’ll be ready, but it is exciting. It’s going to be pretty different from this.

Anything else you want to add?

I should probably shout out my parents, my mom and my dad for supporting me, however reluctantly, to do the literary thing.

I grew up watching my parents work unbelievable hours for poverty wages. They did that so that I could have the ability to do something that I enjoyed. That’s what they always have told me, that they work hard so that I don’t need to. For that, I feel unending gratitude.

As someone whose parents told me the same thing growing up, I feel like it’s also something that can come with both gratitude and a small measure of guilt.

Oh, certainly, yeah, yeah.

How do you feel about your first book publishing imminently?

I feel absolutely stunned. Writing is such an intensely private endeavor. So to hear all this feedback and reviews, people across the country are reaching out, it feels totally wild.

“The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu” is out in bookstores everywhere June 1.