Xujun Eberlein grew up in Chongqing, China. She moved to the U.S. in 1988 after marrying her American husband, attended MIT, and now lives in the Boston area with her family. Xujun’s essays have appeared in Walrus, Post Road, New American Media, Prism International, Divide, and DragonFire, among other publications. Her fiction can be read in Agni, StoryQuarterly, Night Train, Meridian, Storyglossia, Paumanok Review, and elsewhere. Her awards and honors are numerous, including winning the third annual Tartt Fiction Award, taking first prize in the Ledge Fiction Awards Competition, receiving the Goldfarb fellowship for non-fiction writers, getting a special mention in the 2007 edition of the Pushcart Prize anthology, being nominated for several of the Best American series, and many others. Visit Xujun’s website for more information.

In June, you won the Tartt First Fiction award for your manuscript Apologies Forthcoming, which is slated for publication through Livingston Press in the summer of 2008. Tell us about the award and your story collection.

Well, the award came as a pleasant surprise. We’ve all heard how hard it is to get a story collection published nowadays, so much so it has become a common practice that an agent has to “bundle” a collection with a novel (often not yet written), a “two-book deal,” in order to make a sale. This reminds me of China’s markets in my childhood. At the time, rice as “fine grain” was in short supply and had to be rationed. Not only that, the rationed rice was sold bundled with “coarse grain” such as ground corn, which we children hated to eat. Who would have known that one day people would favor “coarse grain” over “fine grain”? Just look at the fashionable whole-food markets today. Will the fate of short stories turn around like coarse grain someday? I do wonder.

I had an agent for about a year and a half. She bundled my collection with a memoir, and tried ten publishers or so. All rejected, and all said nice words on my writing but cited the difficulties of the short story market. After that I decided to take the matter into my own hands. Thank goodness there exist independent publishers like Livingston Press that don’t discriminate against short stories. The same collection (with a different title) has also been a finalist in the MVP competition held by the New Rivers Press. I’m grateful to them.

I hope readers will find Apologies Forthcoming both entertaining and meaningful. I hope it will be a departure from the “victim literature” that has become a stereotypic mainstream of overseas Chinese literature. The history of China is so complex; I feel very sad that Americans view it in black-and-white. I hope my work contributes a few strokes of color to that image of China and the Chinese people.

At the end of July, you were notified that you’d received the Goldfarb Fellowship in non-fiction. Congratulations! You’ve had an exciting summer. What does this fellowship entitle you to?

As you know, I’m working on my second book, a memoir titled “Swimming with Mao.” It’s about 2/3 done, and I want to finish it before the end of this year. The Goldfarb Fellowship gives me two weeks of residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, (VCCA), during which I plan to write a new chapter. This will be my first residency ever. I’ve heard lots of good things about VCCA from other writers, like nice food, nice walking trails, nice places to get writing done - what more can a writer want? I am excited.

Currently, you’re working on a book-length memoir entitled “Swimming with Mao.” This is also the title of an essay you had published in The Walrus. What is the focus of the essay and the memoir? What is the significance of the title?

The Walrus article was originally titled “Dying for What.” In the summer of 2004 I went to my first-ever writing conference, the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Summer Writers’ Conference, held at Goucher College. There I workshopped the essay. My instructor Bill Roorbach suggested that I change the title to “Swimming with Mao.” He was a great teacher, very encouraging. After the workshop I revised the essay and submitted it online - unsolicited - to Walrus. In less than two months it was accepted. I felt liberated that a story buried in my heart for nearly three decades finally got out to a large readership. I’m not a sentimental person, but I constantly cried when I was writing it, and couldn’t hold back tears when revising it.

This essay becomes the basis for one of the memoir chapters. But other than that, the memoir does not have much to do with the Cultural Revolution. I’d say the book has more to do with how my family members’ pursuit of higher purposes and heroism serves as a double-edged sword, and how deep the misconceptions can be about the ideologies and cultures of others. As Milan Kundera once pointed out, “Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands.”

I’ve kept “Swimming with Mao” as the book title because everyone I talked to, with no exception, loved it. I had, and still have, a concern that the title is not representative of the content of the memoir. But how can you throw away a title like this? Sometimes even a writer enjoys using popular words.

You’ve had tremendous success writing both fiction and non-fiction. Which do you prefer?

More accurately, I’ve been struggling with both. Was it Hemingway who once said a novelist must have journalism training? I guess I’m going the upside down way, wanting to be a journalist at a rather late time, considering that I have been a fiction writer in China since my early twenties. I’m often more fascinated by the good reporting in magazines such as the New Yorker, Walrus, Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly than the fiction. To me, writing literary nonfiction (a term I prefer over “creative nonfiction”) is even more challenging than writing fiction because nonfiction has more constraints, and less freedom. This is analogous to solving a group of equations: more constraints generally make the problem harder, but the solution more useful.

In nonfiction, you can’t dramatize as you wish, so structure, language and insights play more prominent roles. I have a soft spot for structural issues, a personality trait. I remember in undergraduate school the course that interested me the most was Theoretical Mechanics - it’s all about structures. And I like challenges. One reason that I’m writing in English is because it’s not my first language. As for insights - how can one keep gaining insights through life? That’s the biggest challenge of all.

This is not to say I prefer nonfiction over fiction, though my husband believes that I’m a natural fiction writer. It actually fascinates me to work on the two genres side by side. As if there’s a natural switch in my head, the way of thinking, the language I use, change automatically when I switch the genre. This is also a barrier in my writing, I’m beginning to believe. I want to figure out why such a switch exists in me. This is interesting.

I’ve noticed a lot of confusion over the term creative non-fiction, or literary non-fiction, as you prefer to call it. Some seem to think that “creative” means the inclusion of fictional elements, while others, me included, believe that it’s the way in which you present the facts that make it “creative.” Which is correct? Do you have a good definition of the term?

“Creative nonfiction” probably is the most commonly used term now for the type of nonfiction being discussed, but it makes me titter. Any writing is a creative activity, and good writing eliminates redundancy. Why place such a superfluous, emphatic adjective before one type of writing? And the term’s ambiguity easily misleads the readers, as you’ve noticed. On the other hand, nonfiction does not have to be literary (for example, how-to articles, daily news pieces), hence the need for a distinguishing word in order to categorize.

A piece of literary nonfiction can benefit from deploying some fiction writing techniques in its structure, but it should not fabricate facts. This is more an ethical than a terminology issue to me.

While living in China, you also wrote and published. Can you talk about the differences between the two countries in terms of the freedoms granted to writers, and people in general?

Writers in the West certainly have more political freedoms than writers in China. But there’s also the other side - writers have higher status, and are more influential, in China. In the US if you talk about Paris Review or Zoetrope All-Story to non-writers, chances are your audience will wear a blank expression because they have never heard such names. In China everyone reads literary magazines such as October (”Shi Yue”), Contemporary (”Dang Dai”), Harvest (”Shou Huo”) and Translation Forest (”Yi Lin”). Even in bad times, such as during the Cultural Revolution when writers were knocked down to the 18th level of hell, they were targeted out of fear for the influence they might have over common people. Nowadays, businessmen in China think they have higher power. When I quit my job to become a full-time writer, a Chinese friend, who had become the richest businessman in my hometown, showed pity for me when I visited him. “What can you not do that you must be a writer?” he asked me. But he was living an illusion. In China it’s not unusual to see a taxi driver, unlikely college-educated, with literary magazines by his seat. In a nation like China, with many thousands years of civilization, writers won’t be despised or ignored. In the US, I’m not so sure.

Who are some Chinese writers that we in the United States might recognize the names and/or works of?

It always seems to me that the international literary recognition is a one-way traffic between the Chinese and Americans. In China everyone, writer or not, knows the name of Hemingway. How many American writers have heard of Lu Xun or Ba Jin? Not to mention non-writers. It is puzzling.

How did you learn to speak and write in English?

In China students begin to learn English in primary school. You have to pass English exams to go to college or graduate school. However, in school we mostly learn how to read. My spoken English wasn’t picked up until I met my American husband as a graduate student. As for writing in English, I’m still learning by daily reading. I keep seeing unknown words in every piece I read, and, if I find them interesting, I jot them down in a notebook like a primary school student.

You have an engineering degree in transportation from MIT. Do you still work in that field? Do you have any formal education in creative writing?

I worked in this field for more than a decade. Then in Thanksgiving 2003 I quit my engineering job to become a full-time writer. No, I don’t have any formal education in writing. Recently I have toyed with the idea of getting a low-res MFA, but I’m unsure how much that would help. Perhaps going to conferences would meet most of my needs for lower cost?

If you could invite one author of your choosing over for dinner, who would it be? What would you prepare?

This is a hard question. John McPhee or James Wood came to mind first. What would I prepare? Some spicy Sichuan dishes, I guess, if the guests can take hot pepper well.

Why John McPhee or James Wood? Would you mind elaborating a bit?

I admire John McPhee’s nonfiction writing the most. I tried, in vain, to find a summer course or workshop taught by him. So far to study with him remains a dream for me. So does having him as my guest, I guess.

As a literary critic, James Wood’s insights over fiction writing are astonishing. Though a fiction writer works more on instincts than by following some theory, you wouldn’t want to be the object of James Wood’s red pen.

If you really want to restrict the invitation to one author, then it would be tough for me to decide which. On the other hand, I don’t know if McPhee and Wood make good companions to one another.

What is your favorite tree and why?

Ginkgo tree! Yay! This tree can live for a thousand years, and it has peculiar fan-shaped leaves. A big ginkgo is like a huge golden umbrella in the fall. When the leaves shed, they pave a bright gold cover on the ground that is strikingly beautiful. Better yet, ginkgo is not only a popular tree in my hometown, Chongqing, it also transfers well to New England. Too bad my other favorite tree, Sweet Olive, does not survive New England’s harsh winter.