Juli Min starts with the future to understand the past in her novel 'Shanghailanders': NPR

AILSA CHANG, HOST:

Have you ever met someone new and wondered what happened to them to make them the way they are now? Like, where does this sadness or anger or tension in the marriage come from? How has the past shaped who they are today? Well, a new novel by Juli Min presents these questions by introducing us to a family in the future, in 2040. And then it slowly reveals who these individuals are by telling their stories in reverse. A wealthy Shanghainese, his beautiful Japanese French wife, their privileged and complicated daughters – each narrator takes turns unwinding the past, leaving us at the end with a better understanding of the beginning. Juli Min joins us now. To welcome.

JULI MIN: Thank you very much for inviting me.

CHANG: Oh, well, thanks for being with us. So I loved how this book revolves around what we think of as the beginning, middle, and end of a story because you're telling the story in reverse chronological order. For example, we start in 2040 and it's 2014 at the end. So I want to ask you, why did you want us to move backwards through these characters' lives?

MIN: I really wanted to create that feeling of surprise for the reader. I wanted the reader to first meet each character and have their impressions, their judgments, their prejudices, and then, going back in time, really understand them more fully through different points of view, through the other family members and through the different secrets and secrets. some kind of trauma…

CHANG: Yeah.

MIN: …What they experienced in the past.

CHANG: Yeah, and it made me wonder: What does it mean for a story to move forward anyway? For example, a story unfolds as we learn and understand, right? And often, we can only understand things by going back into the past.

MIN: That’s true. The two mother and father characters, Leo and Eko, are sort of halfway through the crisis of their marriage. They have been together for decades and are both considering leaving the marriage and family…

CHANG: Yeah.

MIN: …When we first meet them. And so I wasn't necessarily very interested in the plot of: will they stay together or not? I was really interested in understanding who they were as people, how their marriage and relationship had impacted their family, and where they came from – not just their past, but also their family history.

CHANG: Yeah. But it was so interesting – I’m glad you brought up Leo and Eko. It was so interesting to me to know what going back in time did to my emotions as I read their love story because if I had met them at the beginning of their love story, when Leo was thinking to Eko as the most charming and reckless person he knows. , I would have been tempted, like, seduced by their promise. But reading their origin story at the end of this book ultimately made their blossoming romance sad for me.

MIN: Yeah. There is a bittersweet quality to following this path. But, you know, I think that in a long relationship, any relationship – whether it's between sisters, between parents, between lovers – there is a way in which the past lives on with us in the present and in the future. and sometimes, I think, maintains a relationship through difficult times. And I wanted that bittersweetness but also the hope of the ending to be sort of something that the reader takes away and has to decide how they want to feel.

CHANG: You also feature the perspectives of behind-the-scenes characters in the lives of this extremely wealthy and extremely self-centered family. We are in the driver's head, in the nanny's head. And they know this family so intimately, and yet they're still so separated. Why did you want to include their stories in this book as well?

MIN: This book is the story of a family, but I also wanted to capture something that felt true to me about contemporary Shanghai. I wanted to capture the variety of experiences, the extremes of experiences, the intense social stratification and the way that, you know, a city, much like a family, is a kind of ecosystem of relationships. We all depend on each other. We all nourish each other in various ways, we nourish each other economically and emotionally. And so to the people who work for this family – the nanny who has been with them for six, seven years, their private driver – I wanted to show how these lives are so rich and busy but also quite invisible to the Yangs.

CHANG: That's right. And it was very painful at times – I was so drawn to the nanny, Ayi, because she had so much love to give to these troubled girls, but it made me think about what it felt like to to love someone you can't call your own. ?

MIN: It was actually inspired by my own search for a nanny when I was a new mother. And I remember I interviewed one person and I asked her about the previous child that she was taking care of, and she broke down crying, sobbing, saying that she missed that girl so much. And you could feel the strength, the purity and the intensity…

CHANG: True love.

MIN: …Of this love. It was true love. And no, you know, shortly after that, I kind of sat down to write this character.

CHANG: Well, in this book we don't just visit people from the future and go back to their past. We also meet a Shanghai of the future, then travel back in time to a Shanghai of the past, specifically when the city was still foreign to Eko, the wife of this book. And you mentioned: I know you've lived in Shanghai for many years now after marrying a Shanghainese. When I was reading your book, I wondered if you too felt like a stranger in Shanghai when you first arrived, like Eko?

MIN: You know, I had a very complicated relationship with Shanghai when I arrived. I was quite ill when I arrived…

CHANG: Oh.

MIN: …Quite a long time. And I didn't know if that was the result of Shanghai or…

(LAUGH)

MIN: …You know, what was going on. And then when I got better, I really started enjoying the city. And one of the ways I connected with the city was through writing. For several years I wrote and researched a historical novel set in the early 20th century, Jazz Shanghai.

CHANG: The often romanticized era…

MIN: Yes.

CHANG: …From Shanghai.

MIN: And I mean, this novel is in my drawer…

(LAUGH)

MIN: …Locked up.

CHANG: It never came out. ALL RIGHT.

MIN: But, you know, it really helped me build a relationship with the city. And then, when I wanted to write something more contemporary, I had been living in Shanghai for more than five years. I had met so many people. I spoke Mandarin. And I really felt like I wanted to capture something true about contemporary Shanghai, and I felt like I was better equipped to tap into something true to the city that I lived in and the city that I like now.

CHANG: Does Shanghai feel like home to you now as someone who is not Chinese, but Korean-American?

MIN: It really feels like home.

CHANG: Yeah.

MIN: I mean, I have two young children. They speak Chinese fluently. You know…

CHANG: Wow.

MIN: …We have a home, and, you know, I have a family now, and I'm, you know, the… kind of at the center of that family as a mother, and that's really become a home.

CHANG: Juli Min's new novel is called “Shanghailanders.” Thank you so much for speaking with us and congratulations on your debut.

MIN: Thank you very much, Ailsa.

(SOUNDBITE OF ORIOL SIRINATHSINGH'S “OPEN SKY”)

Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit the terms of use and permissions pages on our website at www.npr.org for more information.

NPR transcripts are created on urgent deadlines by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio recording.