She said she wanted me to meet her parents up in Squamish the week after I came back and that if I wanted to die it would be okay, but only after I meet her parents. So we drove…
My daughter, Savi, instructs me to wear shoes when I go for my morning walk. She says it’s not considered exercise otherwise. I tell her my toes feel imprisoned in shoes and slide my feet into chappals before I…
I ended it in Chicago, when the snow bloomed in every direction and plows passed over and over across the major roads like blunted razors. It was no use; people abandoned cars in the middle of streets. Cafés shuttered.…
CRAFT is thrilled to welcome Alan Heathcock as guest judge for our 2022 Short Fiction Prize. Heathcock is the author of Volt, a collection of short stories from 2011, and 40, a debut novel that publishes on August 2,…
Thank you for your submission. We must begin with the lines—far too restated in this piece. Like I’ve mentioned before, a good artist looks more at their subject than at the paper. Think about what your mind is naturally…
I am humming along to Lucky Dube’s voice over the radio on the windowpane. The cavernous room swallows his tenor, leaving his words bare, airy, like scattered feathers in the sun. I do not know what it means to…
By Lee Upton • Probably like many writers I’m protective toward my characters—even though I put them in impossible situations or give them unfulfillable longings. I pretty much pickle them in vulnerability. Sometimes I let them avoid any action…
Content Warning—miscarriage, childbirth I wake up to a uterus on the pillow next to mine. It looks vaguely like the image I saw on the pamphlet when I was browsing for birth control. I close my eyes again. The dull,…
I want to be a better person, so I hide my bad habits. When I lived alone, in a chilly, oceanside city, I let the evidence accumulate like flotsam around me. Now, I’m twenty-seven and I live in my…
That Friday night, on her way back from the library, Jia saw a boy in a baseball cap coming toward her. She listed to the side, knelt to tie one shoe, then the other, hoping he’d walk past. But…
Two bookending scenes guided how I wrote this story: the main character’s initial encounter with the boy and her final moment in front of the class. At first, I envisioned this story as a piece of flash, where Jia is preparing to teach her first class as a TA and realizes that she not only knows one of the students but also that he had called her a chink. But, with fewer words, the momentum leading to “Shut up! Shut up!” seemed nascent and half-baked. I didn’t want Jia to come off as having snapped; I saw her as finally carving out enough space for herself. The idea of stretching it over the span of a weekend presented ready-made guideposts to both anchor the action and illustrate how, through a series of daily, banal moments (going to the supermarket, hanging out by the pool), the interior of a character comes to light.
The location of Syracuse, New York, where my father studied for his PhD, came to me right from the start. As a child, I knew it only as a place where my parents made friends with other Chinese graduate students, bemoaned the lack of good Szechuan food, never figured out where to buy earwax removal sticks and goji berries, and yes, ate pasta covered in ketchup. It was only when I started considering where to apply for college that I learned Syracuse was considered a massive party school. That juxtaposition laid the groundwork for a rich setting, where “the snow falls in sideway slants,” that I wanted to serve as a character in and of itself.
I sought to imbue Jia with universal desires: to fit in, to be liked, to not flinch at one’s reflection in the mirror, and, most of all, to rise up to any challenge or injustice with the perfect, cutting remark. How many times have I thought to myself, If only I had said that in the moment! This story is an homage to that sentiment, where, ten times out of ten, the right words don’t come easy.
Relatedly, many of my stories touch on a theme of endurance. I struggle with that core attribute in writing and in life because endurance, from some perspectives, can resemble passivity—keeping your head down, freezing or ignoring the violence inflicted on you, hoping the other person will eventually get tired and leave you alone. The slew of recent anti-Asian attacks has brought that dichotomy to the fore. But, in many ways, endurance is survival. This story’s ending is meant to be aspirational. Maybe it did actually happen. Or maybe it’s what, later that night, lying in bed, Jia wishes she had done. Perhaps it’s what she’ll tell her children so she can make them proud. Perhaps it’s what we tell ourselves—Oh sure, I would have said the same exact thing. I would have stood up for myself. I would have told them all to shut up. But do we ever know for sure?
JOY GUO lives in New York with her husband. She is a white collar and regulatory defense attorney. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Okay Donkey, Passages North, Atticus Review, Maudlin House, and SmokeLong Quarterly.
