October 25, 2023
English professor’s novel takes on Chinese immigrant experience in the American West
By Christopher Machado
Chun Ye, Ph.D., an associate professor of English at Providence College, is a prolific and celebrated poet and fiction author whose work has earned her prestigious Pushcart Prizes and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, among many honors.
Her new book, Straw Dogs of the Universe, has received praise for infusing “hope and resilience across decades of an intergenerational family saga against an abhorrent backdrop of American history” and for being “hauntingly beautiful and exquisitely written.” Research for the novel was supported by a grant from PC’s Committee on Aid to Faculty Research.
Ye discussed why she wanted to focus on the subject, her writing process, and the pleasure she gets from fiction writing.
In the description, this book is called a “sweeping historical novel of the American West from the little-seen perspective of those who helped to build it.” Why did you want to write this book?
I co-taught a colloquium with Dr. Colin Jaundrill (associate professor of history) in 2018 called Understanding East and West. A part of that course was about Asian immigrants in America and the systemic racism against them. I was struck by how much I had not known about this history, such as the fact that 90 percent of the Central Pacific Railroad workers were Chinese — without whom the transcontinental railroad could not have been built. And, that the first US immigration law was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which explicitly targeted Chinese and Chinese Americans. I figured there were two main reasons for my ignorance. First, my American education had been centered around the white experience. Second, the Asian American experience had been largely excluded from public discourse. So, after finishing my previous book, Hao, I began learning about this history more in-depth, and the best way for me to learn was to write about it.
In addition, I have an ancestor — my father’s great-grandfather — who came here to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and stayed for 20 years before returning to China. There is that personal connection, as well.
Once you realized you had the topical idea for the book, how did it take shape?
I spent the summer of 2019 reading books on Chinese immigrants in 19th century America. When I began writing, I had to trust that my mind could synthesize all the information I’d gathered and integrate it into a coherent narrative. My early stage of writing was mostly free writing, which I think of as wuwei writing – I just sat down and typed whatever came to mind. By the end of that fall, I had a very rough draft. Then I began to work on the detail. I did more research, including a road trip to San Francisco and Truckee and a train ride across the Sierras, thanks to a grant from our college. I wanted the writing to be true to both history and the landscape.
You’re an accomplished author/writer/poet. What are the differences — for you — between writing books of fiction versus poetry?
For years, fiction has been my main writing genre. The choice comes from my need to write about subject matters expansively rather than elliptically, and the subject matters I’ve been interested in are more effectively probed through narratives and world-building than lyricism. I find the process of building a fictional world most enjoyable when the personal merges with the collective. Poetry can certainly do that too, but fiction keeps me in that mental state longer.
After completing the last two fiction books, however, I’ve been writing some poems again. Poetry helps me stay present and connect directly with my own experience.
What do you hope readers take away from this book?
By writing this book, I hope to give voice to the early Chinese immigrants who have been largely erased from history and to expand the existent narratives on the American West. I also want to show how history echoes back into the present. We saw this quite literally in the recent years. For example, the racist refrain back in the 19th century was “the Chinese must go” and during the pandemic, it was “Go back to China.” But above all, I hope the reader would find the characters in the book memorable and resonate with them in some way.
