Conversations Between Friends: Sienna Liu and Kit Lea Cheang
“In books you don’t usually get to know what the protagonists eat for each meal,” Sienna Liu’s narrator in Food Porn observes. “And because everything happens off-stage, whether those have been hot hearty meals or flimsy flippant meals is not all that clear.”
Liu fills this gap her narrator identifies. Where many novels are oriented around big dramatic events and overlook the everyday activities of being a person—eating, sleeping, texting, daydreaming, walking—Liu centers these happenings: they are the events. Her narrator is a college senior who is writing her undergraduate thesis on “food porn,” the voyeuristic, pleasure-based phenomenon of engaging with food visually, especially on social media. As she does, she moves from café to restaurant to dorm room to her advisor’s office, sipping on a coffee or eating a donut or, notably, not eating. She is often with Frankie, a friend and a foil who drops nervy one-liners like, “To fuck without love, you know, is a glorious thing that you should try sometimes.”
In that sense, Liu’s novel is infused with an egalitarian ethos. By describing actions that are often relegated to the offstage in novels, she guides the reader to notice everything: the “gloomy, silent parking lot where things squatted darkly at the corner”; the ginger latte that the narrator grabs after class (it tastes like medicine); the ordinary and profound text messages the narrator receives from her long-distance paramour. The reader is acquainted, especially, with the narrator’s gustatory life, how she subsists on yogurt, blueberries, and black coffee.
But the noticing that Liu invites is not just of the surfaces of objects and activities, but also of the attendant philosophical questions that these objects and activities pose. Liu writes:
I was chewing my donut, concentrating on that defining hole in the middle, the hole that makes the donut whole, while thinking about what this hole could mean. This core emptiness around which desire runs and runs until it exhausts itself.
Elsewhere, she writes:
At the end of one of those laughs we kissed. It was nice. The kiss began to wander. While it wandered I thought about the ultimate limit in the pleasure-seeking activity, and I suspected that you knew it too.
Liu’s braiding of description and philosophy underscores her mastery of writing interiority. Nothing is pure object; instead, Liu portrays the physical world as experienced and interpreted by her cerebral, observant narrator, so it is alive with thought. A donut heralds deeper truths about desire, just as a kiss portends questions about pleasure’s limits. The ultimate question animating the narrator’s inner world—the defining hole that makes her novel whole—is captured when the narrator wakes up, thinking, “It eats; I do not. What is it?”
This question is a nod to a moment earlier in the book, when the narrator—at a coffee shop watching customers styling their pies for their iPhone cameras—observes that the “camera eats first, no doubt.” That observation tallies with the notes the narrator writes in preparation for her thesis. There, she considers the eroticization of food imagery, and how food porn—like the donut and its defining hole—evokes the paradox of desire: food imagery promises pleasure but the object of desire (the food photographed) is lost to the viewer. Similarly, the narrator and Frankie often do not eat, and when the narrator does, she purges. Her actions represent that emptiness she identifies as essential to desire: the wish for, and the impossibility of achieving, fullness or satisfaction. By denying or interrupting her own satisfaction—through not eating, or through purging—the narrator remains in a constant state of desiring.
“It eats; I do not” also gestures to the seeming passivity with which the narrator moves through her world. In one scene, the narrator recalls being approached on the street by a white man with disheveled blond hair, who tells her he likes her very much. She sees that he is followed by a group, all chuckling lightly, giving away the truth-or-dare game or fraternity hazing task underway, “Even with that insight [the narrator] couldn’t think of anything to say.” In another scene, Liu’s narrator considers, “What are the things I really wanted to say but didn’t? Too many. All my/our sadness, frustration, envy, and self-doubt seemed to stem from this inability to speak.” The “it” that eats is also the “it” that speaks. And this “it”—the preeminent pronoun—might be a subject who is male and white, and who materializes in the dark to use the narrator for a joke for his boys. But it matters less what the “it” is, and more that “it” stands in opposition to the narrator who does not eat.
But—like the contradiction constitutive of desire—the narrator does eat. She concedes that “one eats all sorts of things, objects, people, situations, family dramas, political crises, personal rifts, literature, pages and pages.” The narrator’s apparent passivity belies a deeper autonomy, one that occurs at the level of observation, interpretation, and knowledge. And these pearls of insight are present in every sentence of Liu’s novel. Food Porn’s biggest pleasures, for me, were the quotidian yet extraordinary beauties Liu portrays as part of the everyday acts of eating, sleeping, texting, daydreaming, and walking. In one moment, Liu’s narrator imagines her long-distance lover as a “snowing person in the dark.” In another, her narrator feels how cigarette smoke “traveled through [her] entire body and knocked on doors to various organs and how the lobes, hearing that call, were jittering with buoyant merriment.” Just as Liu’s narrator notes that she is seduced by theory, art, politics, cinema, beautiful objects, and other people, Liu’s prose—like the perfect image of a decadent meal—beguiles and tempts one to eat.
I was thrilled to speak to Liu for CRAFT about her fascination with donuts, the true story behind the text messages her narrator exchanges with her long-distance lover, and writing about physical pain.
—Kit Lea Cheang
Kit Lea Cheang: You play with form in two refreshing ways in Food Porn. First, you weave in short excerpts from the narrator’s senior thesis on food porn. Second, you seamlessly integrate text messages between the narrator and her long-distance love interest. What inspired your choice to do this?
Sienna Liu: That’s a great question. I actually did write my senior thesis on food porn, so the excerpts you see in the book are from a real thing that has been lying in wait on my computer for years. It enables the story in a way, since it all began one night when I found that thesis again and started to recall the circumstances around its making, all the things you’d experience in a college life that undoubtedly shape you and whatever intellectual endeavors you pursue (friendship, love interests, fantasies, illnesses both physical and metaphysical, and sudden and specious revelations). Nothing exists in a vacuum, not even your philosophical musings.
As I began to write, I realized that the opposite is also true, that the story, in turn, is enabling the thesis. I found myself digging through that old paper for specific themes and paragraphs that match the experience of the narrator, to give her (a potentially disembodied) voice and (a potentially false) sense of authority as she moves through this labyrinth of meanings (or the lack thereof). At the same time, I felt the urge to reconstruct a somewhat fictional world that would give birth to this nonfictional academic paper—to breathe life into it, to breathe time into it (and I do think that to write—just like to love—is to create time. You breathe time into words and see them float).
As to the text messages, they were actually also quite literal transcriptions from messages I exchanged in college with a long-distance poetic lover/friend. At the time I thought they were lovely, and I still do. Those words, too, shaped the thesis in a way, and vice versa. Sometimes, an intellectual pursuit can feel like a love affair (whenever I come upon good writing I feel seduced). And a great friendship can also feel like a love affair. Full of conjectures and doubts and surprises. Full of jargons (or inner jokes) that presuppose a shared history.
In writing this story, I wanted to be as faithful as I could to those words (both from the thesis and the text messages), but be as unfaithful as I could to what actually happened in real life, which is a lot of fun. You could say that I was making a film using found footage.
KLC: How did you land on “food porn” as the organizing topic of your novel?
SL: The concept of “food porn” fascinated me when I was in college. You consume a thing that’s by definition an absence, a virtuality (“the hole that makes the donut whole”), while food in the flesh is so mundane and concrete. But a concrete, obtainable thing can also be, unfortunately, boring. (It thus parallels that mythical, long-distance love interest that I created for the narrator.) I thought it said a lot about the way we desire, and the way we sustain the desire. That which we desire is in the interim.
Last year, I finally read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where the narrator’s relationship with Albertine is kind of like that: he desired her most when she was absent, unattainable, when she was afar, asleep. He was at his most poetic and philosophical and happy and miserable when he couldn’t “get” her, in all senses of that word. The original title Proust gave the book was Intermittences of the Heart. How true. Our different hearts truly do not believe in one another. We only love intermittently.
KLC: Your sentences are bursting both with sensorial lushness and theoretical richness. For example: “I was chewing my donut, concentrating on that defining hole in the middle, the hole that makes the donut whole, while thinking about what this hole could mean. This core emptiness around which desire runs and runs until it exhausts itself.” What was it like integrating the physical with the philosophical in your novel?
SL: But is the physical really that divorced from the philosophical? I love the imagery of a donut. It just makes you think—what’s with the hole? Just like eating a banana with black coffee makes you think—why does it taste like ice cream? There are many ways of phrasing the question, of course. But I think the physical does always make you wonder, and theory begins with wonderment (or a sense of discomfort from not fully understanding). And when you continue to wonder, your thoughts take you to unexpected places.
KLC: Health and illness are themes in your novel, filtered through the lens of womanhood and eating. Could you speak more about these themes?
SL: I’ve always found it impossible to write about physical pain. There were two or three years in my life when I was struggling with an unnamable pain (unnamable, at least in the eyes of the many male doctors who saw me), and the terrifying part was that I could not even find the right words to describe it. Virginia Woolf too. The quote I obliquely mentioned in Food Porn was this: “The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain…and language at once runs dry.” There is something in pain seemingly antithetical to language, the parallel to the “something” seemingly antithetical to language in femininity and feminine desire, at least according to some psychoanalytical theorists.
So I wanted to see how many different ways I could come up with to describe a pain, and whether, through trying and failing and trying again and failing better, the narrator was on her way to overcoming that impossibility.
Food occupies a curious position in this struggle against impossibility. In the book, the narrator talks about the impossible demands traditions and society place on women when it comes to both food and desire: “You must starve, but you must desire [food]; you have to be chaste, but you have to, at the same time, be sexually desirable.” What I wanted to explore—through overtheorization of the narrator’s eating disorder that can sometimes strike one as absurd—was not how you would necessarily fall “ill” in a world like this, but how to exploit that pain for your own amusement (and whether that is in itself a form of submission or subversion).
KLC: Some of my favorite novelists are poets as well; many had their start in poetry. I’m thinking of Ben Lerner, Kaveh Akbar, Aria Aber. You, too, published a poetry collection, Square, before your debut novel. How is writing poetry different from writing fiction? Does your poetry practice inform how you write fiction?
SL: It’s interesting because I never really considered poetry and prose as two well-defined distinct things. Didn’t the original poets both sing and tell stories? I usually just start writing first and not think about what it should be called until much, much later. Square was like that—at first I wasn’t sure if it was to be an essay collection, a series of linked flash fiction, or prose poems. It so often happens that I don’t know which option to choose when I try to submit something (poetry or fiction or nonfiction: in my head it could be any one of them or any combination), which is why I really loved it when some journals would call for “genreless” or “hybrid” pieces. I know that doesn’t really answer your question, but I guess what I mean is perhaps some of us operate in this grey area that’s neither one nor the other, and I would call some of my favorite novelists poets.
KLC: I love campus novels: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Antonia Angress’s Sirens & Muses, Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile. For the last year I have been writing a campus novel, too, so I was especially thrilled to add your novel to my inventory of favorite campus novels. What is it about a campus, do you think, that inspires the literary imagination? What was it like revisiting a campus as the setting in your novel, years after you had left the campus?
SL: I love, love campus novels! I actually revisited the campus from Food Porn a few days ago—it’s surreal. What fascinates me about campus novels is first and foremost the campus’s limits. Especially when set in a relatively isolated place, or a “bubble,” the outer boundaries of a campus literally set the spatial limits. If the story follows the lives of one or more students, it also has a temporal limit. But limits are not limitations. Those years—especially college years—are sometimes the period of one’s life where one goes through radical, often irreversible, changes. I also like to think of the campus as a stage: the stage, the props, the settings are the same, but actors come and go and fufill more or less the same roles, sometimes even speaking the same lines—illustrating the same themes and tropes of youth—without knowing it. I just love the theatrics of it.
KLC: One aspect of Food Porn that spoke deeply to me was that the characters—the narrator, her friend Frankie, and the narrator’s long-distance love interest—were foreigners. I’ve lived in the United States for seven years now, but still often grapple with what it means to be away from home, what it means to be foreign, what home is anyway. Could you speak more about the themes of foreignness, belonging, and cultural identity in your novel? How does foreignness relate to knowledge: the intimacy that comes from a shared cultural history, versus the epistemic gap between people of different cultures? And as a translator, you do some work in bridging that gap, I imagine.
SL: It’s interesting that you mentioned translation because I’d always thought being foreign means, in a certain way, that you always have to translate yourself, and I don’t mean that you have to translate your thoughts into a different language when you talk to people—I mean you have to literally translate your entire being so as to be recognized, understood, loved. We are different people on different soils.
You could also feel a foreignness about your own “home,” too, especially one from which you’ve been estranged, which has always been my feeling. In Food Porn, the concept of “home” comes with a certain unease, a certain doubt: the narrator is neither here nor there. Recently, someone pointed out to me that the narrator and her friend Frankie were never that explicit about their Chineseness—in fact, she didn’t realize Frankie was Chinese until much later in the novel. I think that has to do with this “in-between” state I wanted to portray. When the narrator finally met her love interest who was from the same town, she was also confronted with that disquieting feeling that they are not, in fact, compatriots. And when that happens, it’s the eeriest and most interesting thing. What are our hopes for and projections onto “home,” and why is it never fully attainable?
KLC: I have been trying to read more books from indie presses, as lots of interesting, experimental, norm-pushing work is happening in that space. I recently read New Mistakes by Clement Goldberg, published by author Michelle Tea’s indie press Dopamine Books. Like your book, it was unlike anything I had read before—so different from the books that tend to be spotlit at the front of major bookstores. I loved it. What led you to placing your novel with an indie press, specifically, Game Over Books? Do you have any indie presses whose work you enjoy and would recommend?
SL: Indie presses need more love! Like you said, I think indie presses (being less profit-driven) have been championing unique voices and stories in a way mainstream publishing has not. I found Game Over Books when I was living in Boston: I thought their poetry books so daring and refreshing. So when I saw that they were reading prose, I went ahead and submitted. Publishing with GOB has also been a dream—these are people who care deeply about your work and are doing it out of love. They also really seem to “get” it, and always respect your (sometimes outlandish) artistic choices. My next book, Specimen, is also coming out in July with an indie press: Split/Lip Press. They too have a wonderful catalogue, so check it out! Some of my other favorites (omitting the really big ones) include Noemi Press, Autofocus Books, FC2, Futurepoem, Transit Books. In the United Kingdom I love Fitzcarraldo Editions, Penned in the Margins, The Prototype Press, Boiler House Press, Fum d’Estampa Press, just to name a few!
SIENNA LIU is a writer and literary translator living in New York City. She is also the author of Specimen (Split/Lip Press, forthcoming in July 2025) and Square (Black Sunflowers Poetry Press, 2022). Her English-to-Chinese translations include Rachel Cusk’s Second Place (Gaungxi Normal University Press, 2023), Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19(forthcoming), Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (forthcoming), and a new translation of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway(forthcoming). Find her on Instagram @sienna.x.liu.
KIT LEA CHEANG is a fiction writer from Singapore based in New York City. Her writing won the Pigeon Pages Fiction Contest and was awarded an honorable mention for the CRAFT 2024 First Chapters Contest.
