By Thu Anh Nguyen
Blob by Maggie Su is subtitled A Love Story, but it’s unlike any other love story I’ve ever read. The main male character is a creature molded by Vi, a lonely college dropout who finds a blob outside a bar one night and takes it home. It might sound like a dream to be able to create the love of your life, but almost from the very beginning, Vi learns that she does not actually have control over the being she’s created.
The fairytale soon becomes the stuff of nightmares. Maybe that’s why, immediately after I read Blob, I uncharacteristically had a vivid dream: I was adopted by a family of Florida cougars. Yes, the animals, and not the older women who prey on young men. I loved these cougars and they loved me. They sheltered me. I became particularly close to one cougar. He was the son of the den mother cougar, and he bore me on his back like a little package. When the white men came to rescue me–because they always come–I did not want to leave. (If this sounds like the plot of Disney’s very problematically romantic Pocahontas, you are correct.) My cougar knew what was best for me and broke his own heart as he told me to leave with the white men. “They are your people,” he argued. This is where I broke down into tears because I felt like the cougars were more my people than the white people. “I’m Asian,” I argued. “But they are human,” my cougar father/protector/soulmate answered.
The concept of Bob in Blob is so wild that I like to think it gave me a wild dream as a parting gift. The questions of what is human and what is Asian were so present in Blob, and asked so earnestly, and often hilariously, that of course they bled into my dreams. They are also questions I wondered about personally being Vietnamese and growing up in a white town in Florida.
When I awoke from my dream, I was bereft. I kept playing the dream over and over again in my mind, trying to force myself to go back into it. I couldn’t let it go, so I reached out to Maggie, and luckily for me, my retelling of my dream amused her enough that she agreed to be interviewed by me. We talked about what resonated in my dream and her book: what it means to be Asian and othered, what it means to be loved, and if it’s even possible for a person to truly know another person.
Thu Anh Nguyen: I was really interested in the ways you talk about Asianness, Americanness, and whiteness in this book, especially since, as you know, there are so many different ways to be Asian. Could you talk a little bit about what you were thinking when you were writing Vi, whose mother is white and father is Taiwanese?
Maggie Su: I’m half Taiwanese, half white, and [grew] up in the Midwest. I was immersed in just the white literary history, so I was reading Irish myth and whatever in undergrad. There wasn’t really–or at least I wasn’t seeking out–Asian American authors. Then I went to graduate school, and I really saw that Asian American literary history exists. Obviously it was really inspiring and amazing, but I was struck by the fact that there wasn’t that much written about Asian Americans in the Midwest. There’s just not that many of us, and especially not with that experience of being half, of feeling not white enough, not Asian enough, and not really knowing anyone else who was Taiwanese in my college town. I had all of these identity questions, so I was thinking about a book that–especially for my first book–represented my feelings of otherness and difference, and maybe less of having those tropes of the immigration narrative of the mother/daughter conflict, which I feel like have become maybe singular stories of Asian American literature. How can we make room for different types of dynamics?
So I was thinking about that a lot as I was writing, and there are amazing Midwestern Asian American writers like my friend, Marianne Chan. She’s a poet and she writes a lot about Michigan. There’s a lot happening with Asian American communities in the Midwest, but I was inspired to think about how my experience felt pretty specific. And so that was something I was worried about…if I put out this book that isn’t necessarily grappling with race in the same way as I’ve seen other Asian American authors grapple with, is it gonna be too niche for folks? So it was cool to see people connecting with it.
Nguyen: Actually, this leads into my next question! You mentioned not wanting to necessarily write into tropes, and one of the tropes you mentioned was the difficult mother/daughter relationship in immigrant families. I found–even though parts of this book were very much about romantic relationships–the parental relationships are really just as sweet, even in their difficulty. I was wondering what you were thinking as you were writing about Vi’s relationship with her parents.
Su: I think Vi feels misunderstood by her parents, and yet she sees and she feels their love. She feels that they have all this good will for her and want what’s best for her, but they aren’t necessarily tuned in, and there’s also some color blindness. There are ways of assimilating or of being a family in the Midwest that have in some ways sidelined her experiences. Yet I think there’s still love there, so I really wanted to try to capture that.
And I think her relationship with the blob is also like you mentioned in your original [email]: the blob is a romantic partner, and also like a pet, a child. There’s all these different layers to who he is, and I really wanted it to be ambiguous because [Vi] feels like she can’t take care of anything. She can’t fully know a person, and that’s something that she struggles with. She wants to be known and seen, both by her family and by a romantic partner.
And I think [because] of her desire to be validated by the people around her, she comes up against this sense that you can’t ever really fully be known or fully know another person.
Vi feels at the beginning it’s almost easier because Bob is this sentient blob. He’s able to be molded, able to be very compliant, and then when he grows up, she’s shocked that she can’t fully control [him], can’t fully understand [him].
Nguyen: I just found that so beautiful because Vi at the end of the novel says that Bob wasn’t anything before her, but she’s still able to somehow release him, like a parent would. It reminded me less of romantic love and more of the way that Vi’s able to look at her family and see that there’s love there even though they aren’t going to fully know each other. Have your parents read your book?
Su: They have, yes. I was really nervous. I sent them an early draft and said if anything is too close, we can take it out, and I always knew they were never going to say anything. I have two brothers, so I sent them the drafts as well. I feel like with the first book–I feel like a lot of people say this–it’s the one that’s been living in you for such a long time, so it felt like they should have some sort of say over it. They were very supportive and I feel like especially once it got some good reviews, they were like, oh, okay. The New York Times, okay.
Nguyen: Did you trust in this idea from the very beginning because it is really realistic in parts like the hotel where Vi worked, and her basement apartment, while at the same time, she’s calling up a guy she just met telling him you know that blob we saw, like I took it home and now it’s doing things. It’s all taken so seriously in the book, so did you always have support for this idea? Did you support yourself in the idea? Did you always take it seriously?
Su: I think I had a lot of doubts. I took a year off of the original idea. And there’s a really dramatic Snapchat of me burning the pages because I was like, this is garbage. I had a lot of self-doubt, a lot of wondering. There was something about writing it in the pandemic–it was a really hard time, but it also shut out some of the voices [of doubt] that I had. I had to sit with myself and with this work that I was looking at, and I forced myself not to read the pages I had written the day before.
I really recognized through the process of writing Blob how hard I had been on myself, and so in certain ways, it was like a journey of believing in myself, as corny as that sounds, and saying, yeah, she’s gonna find a blob and it’s gonna change her life and that’s how I’m gonna pitch it, and we’ll see what happens from there. Yeah, it was scary for sure.
Nguyen: I love that you said that, because I read another interview with you where you talked about Vi also learning more about herself and coming into herself, and you were doing that for yourself as you wrote.
Su: Yeah, and it’s something I’m struggling with now with novel two. You’re like, oh, it’s going to get easier. You have another novel published, and you know, I’ve had all this really wonderful feedback. It’s been so nice to me. I’m like, is every day my birthday, like, this is amazing? But then you go back to the blank page and you still feel like you have something to prove, so it’s been challenging in a different way, and also exciting.
Nguyen: Well, some of my favorite funny moments in the book, because there are so many of them, were around all of the different pop cultural references like the TV shows and romance novels. I was wondering how you chose which to include. Are those things that you love as well? What about those things would make Vi want to say to Bob the blob, here, watch these. And this is how you learn to be a person.
Su: It was, again, during the pandemic, so I was getting back into a lot of these reality shows that I had watched as a kid, like Project Runway and even Jeopardy. I found myself comforted by that structure of the show and how every episode follows certain guidelines and certain challenges. And so I was thinking Vi also finds those shows comforting, especially when she’s not feeling good, when she’s isolated and depressed.
I also love romance novels. I have a soft spot for them and always will. I read them when I was too young, and I think they made me develop an idea of romantic love that was not necessarily accurate. So I like Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series, Lisa Kleypas. I read Nora Roberts, like the Irish Romance. I really have this idea of Ireland as being this magical place where, you know, white, green-eyed men would ravish you. So, I really liked using that as a backstory for thinking about why Vi has this romanticized ideal.
Nguyen: You talked a little bit about working on your second book. How far along are you?
Su: I’m on chapter eight. I think it’s about a hundred pages in, and I’ve had that impulse to light it all on fire, but I haven’t. You know, I’m in my 30s now, I don’t have to be that dramatic. I feel stuck some days, but I love your dream that you emailed me. I was like, oh, this is kind of like when we were in Georgia for two years and we took care of these feral cats, and at the same time I was watching a lot of horror movies. I was thinking about wildness and horror and what Jordan Peele is doing with the horror genre, and what a lot of writers of color are playing with in terms of using horror to think about otherness and race. So I was really inspired by that. We’ll see if it comes together.
Nguyen: Oh, I love these horror cats.
Su: Yes, exactly.
***
Our conversation began over email about cougars, and ended with horror cats, of course. That’s what I love about Maggie’s writing: you never know where it will lead you, and if there’s anyone who can write about horror cats–whatever they are–it’s Maggie Su.
Thu Anh Nguyen is a poet whose poetry has been featured in the Southern Humanities Review, Cider Press Review, NPR’s “Social Distance” poem for the community, The Crab Orchard Review, The Salt River Review, 3Elements, Connections, and RapGenius. She also writes about equity, justice, and community through literacy. Her essays on the importance of reading diverse literature have been featured in Literacy Today.