A conversation with M Lin, author of the Memory Museum
This week, NüVoices podcast cohost Chenni Xu interviews M Lin, author of the recent short story debut, Memory Museum, out everywhere where books are sold. Chenni met M at her NY book tour stop at McNally Jackson Seaport where she read to a packed audience of friends, family, and new fans.
M Lin's debut short story collection takes readers from migrant worker dormitories in Kunshan to post-apocalyptic futures – all rendered with the precision of a screenwriter and the emotional range of someone who has had to learn to see China from the outside. The Beijing-born, US-based writer joins NüVoices Chair Chenni Xu to discuss how distance (from home, from language, from certainty) became the engine of her fiction. They also get into writing characters whose lives look nothing like your own.
On being a Beijinger living in the United States during COVID:
“I grew up as the Han majority [in Beijing], and I had never thought about race, I never thought of myself as, I mean, I have, I thought of myself as Chinese and nationality, but I had never thought of myself as Chinese, the kind of ethnic, the ethnicity.
Only when I came to the US, I started to kind of have this awareness, it's kind of a bodily awareness of being Chinese, being seen as Chinese, perceived as Chinese, and furthermore being Asian to have this solidarity with other Asians from other countries.”
On writing about your birthplace in your secondary language:
“I was away from China, and I had decided to live here in the US, but I do think that afforded me both being physically far away and English being linguistically one degree removed. It really did afford my writing a sense of emotional clarity, and that doesn't mean any kind of lack of ambiguity or any kind of closure, but I think for me it really did give me a sense of clarity when I explore these narratives.”
On having a dedicated writing hour every day:
“When I write I would like to have at least one solid hour of undisturbed time that I put aside, so I could sit down and get into it and write something.
but our life gets busy and gets so fractured, I very rarely get a solid chunk of time, so now I just like to try to get rid of anything I put on myself as an excuse not to write.”
Shownotes:
Self-care tips:
Chenni: Realizing New York is a cultural city, and enjoying ballet and outdoor arts activities this summer.
M: Look at an open space.
Recommendations
Chenni: Solvej Balle's timeloop series
M: The new film, "Two mountains weighing down my chest" by Viv Li
About our guest:
M Lin is a Beijing-born writer now living and working in the US. Her stories have appeared in Ploughshares, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, and Best Debut Short Stories 2023, and her nonfiction can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. M’s debut short story collection, The Memory Museum, is out now wherever books are sold.
About our hosts:
Chenni Xu is a strategic communications advisor who began her career at Brunswick Group in Beijing and New York and later led North America communications for Ant Group from 2018 to 2022. She subsequently led product communications at Ripple and most recently supported U.S. market entry efforts at the Brazilian fintech Nubank . She currently advises companies operating across geopolitical and regulatory boundaries. Chenni currently serves as Chair of NüVoices, having been with the non-profit since its founding in 2018.