Life Stories #83: Val Wang

In her memoir, Beijing Bastard, Val Wang writes about growing up as a Chinese-American and then moving to Beijing in the late 1990s: “I think a lot of people think I was looking for my roots; that’s a popular storyline for a Chinese-American. But it was really the opposite for me. I was really rebelling from my roots and looking for myself. That very American kind of journey abroad to find yourself is what I thought I was there for.”

Beijing Bastard (the title comes from one of her favorite Chinese movies) is the story of how she delved into the culture, including how she abandoned the expensive housing that was designated for foreigners to find an apartment in a neighborhood so far on the outskirts that the roads eventually ran out of pavement. In our conversation, which was recorded back in 2014, she talks about how moving to China initially made her feel more American, as she began to notice “ways of thinking, ways of walking, ways of talking, ways of gesticulating” in her behavior that helped her understand she wasn’t “coming back” to China; for her, even though she’d grown up hearing about China from her family, it was all new for her. We also discuss how, when she came back to the United States, how she pursued her career as a documentary filmmaker… and why it took twelve years for her to be able to write the story of her time in Beijing the way it needed to be told.

Listen to Life Stories #83: Val Wang (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

photo: Kelly Creedon

12 July 2016 | life stories |

Life Stories #82: Maria Venegas

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photo: Ricco Long

In this episode of Life Stories, the podcast where I talk to memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, Maria Venegas talks about Bulletproof Vest. It’s the story of her father, who brought his family to Chicago from Mexico, but then abandoned them to avoid being arrested for killing one of their neighbors. But Venegas doesn’t just recount this and other violent episodes from his life; she also writes about the abandonment (and the eventual reconciliation) from her perspective, coming to terms with the ways her father’s past shaped her own emotional development.

During the interview, we talked about how she’d originally intended to write Bulletproof Vest as fiction, and why it ended up becoming a memoir—and about how she came to writing through acting first. It was acting, she says, that first enabled her to deal with the emotions she’d been suppressing for much of her life, but then writing enabled her to grapple with the actual sources of those emotions. And she’d only hit upon acting, she revealed, because of an elective course her last year of college, after she’d already met the requirements for her economics major. She described the impact that a class she’d only signed up for because she thought it would be fun:

“It was really exciting when I realized I could access these emotions and express myself through acting in a way that I’d never known to be possible. But, you know, with acting it’s also… you’re using your own well of emotions to fuel this other character, so you’re still slightly removed from it, whereas with writing I feel, you know, that’s me on the page, and it feels a lot more vulnerable in a way.

Listen to Life Stories #82: Maria Venegas (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (And if you are an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)

16 August 2014 | life stories |