Katie Lee Ellison interviews Mike Fu about his debut novel, Masquerade by Katie Lee Ellison I was lucky enough to meet Mike Fu in a crowd of brilliant writers, translators, and publishers in Tokyo. Lucky particularly because he's not from Japan, but Chinese-American, and because we instantly found things in common: a youth partly spent in New York, and connections to Tin House, his publisher, and therefore, to Portland and the Pacific Northwest. I understood quickly after meeting him is that Fu, both in writing and conversation, is deeply considered and always pushing forward. The wit I experienced in person reveals its thoughtful roots via the many complex characters, scenarios, and timelines of his writing, made seamless and compelling, beginning to end.  Fu’s debut novel, Masquerade, was released last month by Tin House. The story centers around Meadow Liu, a queer New Yorker whose parents live in Shanghai. On a visit, he discovers a novel, The Masquerade, the author of which has the same name as Meadow in Chinese, Liu Tian. Over the course of one summer, Meadow reads the novel—which takes place in a single night at a masked ball in 1930s Shanghai—and experiences hauntings, romances, and friendships that leave him spinning beyond his Millennial Saturn return crisis.  It’s a story of split and quartered identities, putting selves back together via story itself, queerness and alcoholism, and cities as a source of selfhood. In conversation with The Stranger, we got into the construction and meanings of the ghosts coming and going throughout the book, the power of belief, and where a queer, worldly human finds home.  [This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.] This book contains so many puzzles, and the four section titles and fifteen-chapter structure felt like clues. I found myself looking to the structure of the book for answers to Meadow’s questions, as well as my own about what would happen next. How did you come to the framing of the book?  The four sections was an attempt to break down this four character idiom in Chinese that essentially means mirror, flower, water, moon. It's talking about how the reflection of a flower in a mirror or the moon in a body of water have something illusory and unattainable. It comes from an old Buddhist perspective on the world. That's what I was playing with, and how the four sections got their names.  Mirrors and windows appear over and over in the book, and they are two of my favorite symbols to encounter throughout a story. Is there a symbol that's offered you any answers recently, one that you return to, or one that inspired the book? Not to be too witchy, but in general, I am a big fan of the moon. It's interesting to pay attention to what's happening with the moon, always. When you think about it from a very primal perspective, there's this thing in the sky that's been there forever, and as long as humans have been modern humans, we've looked up and seen that thing. It only makes sense that different civilizations and cultures have projected meaning onto this thing in the sky. And now we know so much about the moon, but it still retains its aura of mystique, for better or worse. I was taking notes on how frequently certain words appeared, and the popular ones were: air, light, mirror, ghosts, cigarette, fog, smoke, window, wind. Can you tell me about the role of elemental forces in the story?  Yeah, this is definitely something I was intentionally trying to weave into the book, but also struggling a little bit with placement. I was playing with traditional Chinese cosmology, the five elements: water, fire, earth, metal, and not air, but wood. I feel like some of it is very intentional on my part, wanting to make it conspicuous and have these little things for the reader to pick up on. And then at other points my editor at Tin House, Elizabeth Mayo, definitely helped me tighten up a lot of what I was doing. I ended up using a lot of similar or the same words and phrases at points, and there was a lot of paring back during the editing process for the better.  With the elements, I will say that for each, they're sort of embodied in a character, all five of them within the book.  How do you decide when to present readers with a surreal new element that may or may not have actually happened?  Alternating between present day reality, Meadow’s life, and the book within the book, I had to really be careful about how I entered and exited both worlds. I feel very good about the balance we were able to strike introducing that world, and slipping in and out over the course of the novel. But it was one of the biggest challenges.  There have been a couple different intensely convoluted plots that I had to shrink down and completely ax. The version in the book takes place in the span of one night at a single party setting in Shanghai in 1938. In a much earlier draft, it was this extremely complex plot involving many people and scenes, and it started to spiral.  It speaks to my own desire to write historical fiction, but this didn't feel like the right venue for it. I don't think I have the sort of creative maturity to fully tackle a historical fiction project right now. So I scaled back and melted it down.  One character in your book argues that if your story veers off track, you can invent a new one and start over. I wondered whether you saw that as an immigrant take or a queer take or an American take. It feels like that could be applied to any of those identities. Kind of a cop out, but I would say all three. When I was writing this, what compelled me to put in such a line of dialogue was not necessarily about any of those experiences per se, but more so having to do with age. I was thinking about when I was 34, in New York in March, 2020, starting to write it and was also preparing to move to Tokyo and uproot myself with lots of newness ahead. I think in that respect, that's probably what was subconsciously influencing me to produce a line like that. The book explores the experience of split selves. Do you think this experience is universal?  I love it. Sorry, lemme just pour myself a touch more coffee.  The split selves: I do think that—not to get too philosophical—the way we are with every individual person, that connection reflects something different about us. And oftentimes I think the clearest divide here is, imagine being a teenager. The way that we are with our friends at that time feels very different from how we are with our family because we're seen differently by our parents versus our close friends. I think that bifurcation, that splitting of your identity, it's normal and natural. I think that persists, and I think it can be healthy, to a degree. Ultimately we have different understandings of ourselves through the relationships we form. So that's one of the things I wanted to tease out in writing about this character's relationship to different friends over the years and how he feels about himself through those relationships.  What about this idea of split selves relates to being queer or to being an immigrant or to being anything at all? What about it is unique to a queer experience?  I think that sort of splitting is also all too common and potentially painful for people who have had experiences being an immigrant or being queer or just not being part of the cis hetero mainstream, this world that we live in. If you're in any way marginalized, there is an aspect of you that you're not able to be publicly, whether it’s a quality about you or your background or your sexual orientation. These are things that have to be compartmentalized. That's a painful experience for many people growing up in the US who are part of these marginalized communities. That's something that I wanted as part of Meadow's background, but also not spend a whole lot of time digging into. He has a back and forth upbringing and earlier on the book describing his early twenties, there's more hand wringing about being queer and what it means and how to go about his life. But at the same time, with all the narrative things I was trying to do in this book, I didn't feel like I needed to spend time digging into these familiar tropes of the pained immigrant experience or the queer trauma. There are allusions to that throughout the book, but I never really wanted to focus on that in this particular story. What is the difference between queer loneliness and straight loneliness? Or is it all just the terror of being human splitting us—that we're all suffering the same? The terror of being human. I think that queer loneliness in particular, more so than straight loneliness is probably, I'm just going to say more existential, because if you're a straight person, there’s different ways in which you can live your life. There's still much more of a mold that society has given us for understanding how you should proceed through different stages of growing up, getting partnered, married, family, and so on. I think the queer version of that is still a big question mark, and there's lots of different permutations of it, which is the wonderful openness of queer identity. There's so much possibility and potentiality, and I think that's really one of the most heartening and exquisite things about being queer. But at the same time, I think in the throes of loneliness or kind of questioning decisions and whatnot, you may have an idea of where you want to be in 10 or 20 years, but I would say it's not as institutionalized for better or worse as the straight version of that. And on the one hand, that leaves it so much more open for you as an individual to decide how you want to live your life and where you want to go. And then on the other hand, I think it can be really daunting or even devastating being completely without a roadmap in a certain way. That's something that I have felt personally and I have consciously or not conveyed through some of this character's journey. That reminds me of this last question that you leave open in the book, about whether Meadow will go back to Shanghai or if he will go to Portland where his friends are. My hope is that he finds a home, but I know that when you are of two selves, or more, it can be easy to think, well, if I just go back to where my people are, belonging will be easier, which can prove extremely false. I'm curious if you think Meadow finds the home and family he needs.  Yeah, belonging, right? In some ways it feels like it should be simple, but it never is, and it's something on my mind a lot, too. I'll have been in Tokyo for four years in about a month, and constantly tossing that question around in my mind, thinking about it out loud with friends and with my husband, the cheesy and short answer, of course, is that you have to create that community, family, sense of belonging in whatever space you exist. And of course, easier said than done. As somebody who moved around quite a bit growing up and has tenuous, complicated relationships to China and other spaces, I've always felt adrift between different worlds and have resigned myself to the idea that I'm not going to find that magical place where I can go and everything's dandy. It's more about how I create conditions that allow me to feel comfort and ease in my day-to-day life. At present, that means Tokyo. That means being comfortable with being a foreigner here and making my peace with the realities of living here.