An Interview with Hua Hsu
By Aditya Gandhi, Pomona '22
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Hua Hsu is a staff writer at the New Yorker and a tenured associate professor of English and director of American studies at Vassar College. His writing tackles cultural topics, with particular focus on music and immigration. Hsu approaches his journalistic writing in an unorthodox manner, often trying to recreate a certain mood or make his perspective understood rather than convince readers of a particular opinion. |
What drew you to a career in cultural criticism?
I was kind of accidentally a poli-sci major in college, and I think I always assumed a typical kind of immigrant path where I would find a normal job with benefits, and being a lawyer seemed easier than becoming a doctor. I’d done high school debate, so poli-sci seemed like a sensible major, but I didn’t really connect with most of the classes I was taking until my senior year, where I took a course that was basically a political history of American literature. [The professor] was so good at doing these readings, which made me interested in the politics of culture. That’s where it started.
How do you carry your Asian-American identity into the cultural criticism that you do? Do you carry it at all?
I like reading about Asian-American things when I think I have something meaningful to contribute, but it’s not really foregrounded in a lot of my writing. There are places in every piece that I write where I think, that’s the Asian-American side of me, and maybe the way it manifests is that I don’t ever really feel like I’m coming from a place where most readers would associate with. But I never really write about things from an Asian-American point of view, unless it’s a case where that point of view would help the reader understand.
For example, once I wrote this piece about whiteness, and in the first few paragraphs I mentioned these two court cases involving Asian-Americans and how American notions of legal whiteness derived from these court cases around Asian immigrants. A friend of mine said, “Oh, that was totally you holding down this Asian-American perspective.” Most people writing about race would never have used those two court cases. Maybe it comes out in ways like that, as reference points.
Where do you draw the line between your politics and your criticism in your writing?
I think we all bring political sensibilities to bear on things, but I try not to let it over-determine the course of my writing. I want someone to understand how I came to a conclusion, or why I feel a certain way, and so if I can do that without expressly talking about how I feel about poverty or wealth distribution, I think it’s just more effective. On occasion, I write things that are kind of more aggressively political, but looking back, those things always seem very timestamped. I’d rather just have someone understand how I came to a conclusion and follow that thought process.
You’ve spoken about how when you started writing professionally you lost your individual voice but gained more clarity in your writing. Was that trade-off for the best in your opinion? Is there a way to keep both?
Whenever you enter a professional system, you have to compromise a bit of your idiosyncrasy. Writing is one of those fields where all you have is your voice and your perspective. It’s probably true that my voice is not as foregrounded as it used to be when I was just writing for myself and my friends, but I feel like my ability to convey my perspective is much stronger. I’m definitely the kind of writer where people wouldn’t react as well to my “voice” as they would to my perspective and me welcoming them into the piece that way.
I guess I’ve never seen it as a trade-off. It’s a trade-off in that having to do things for money is a trade-off, and entering into a workplace is a trade-off; you’re going to have to make compromises. But to me, I enjoy the challenge of finding spaces in a piece of writing where I can be myself and figuring out how I can get the reader there.
Is the cultural criticism that you do more of a creative or an academic endeavor?
It’s a little of both. For me, the interaction between creative work and academic work is actually teaching. Teaching takes place in an academic sitting, but it’s a very creative endeavor to try and sit with a bunch of people in a classroom and just figure something out. I see writing as more connected with my teaching than with either academia or creativity. I see writing as an extension of teaching.
When you’re teaching people creative writing, what do you find to be one of the most difficult things about trying to guide people’s writing?
I think the most difficult part of teaching writing is convincing students that you need boring sentences along with the interesting ones, the dazzling, radiant, I’m-trying-to-stunt-on-you ones. All writing is about managing that rhythm between setting a scene—with sentences that you don’t have to think too hard about to understand—and being creative with your phrasing, which you can do once you’re in that scene. There’s a tendency when you first self-identify as a writer that every sentence, every syllable, every word should count—and it should, but it can count in different ways and moments in a piece of writing.
A lot of my favorite albums have interludes, like Frank Ocean’s Blonde. A few interludes in that album—I always think I should skip them, but in reality they enhance the overall experience of the album. A lot of my favorite albums—the first Wutang album, or Farside’s, or Blood Orange’s—there are these moments that are really small, ephemeral, and then they lead into these songs that are indelible, astonishing. I see writing in the same way. Some of the writing you do isn’t meant to be showy; it should just get you to the next thing. The reader needs that space to breathe, reflect, and pause. It’s hard to teach that because you’re conditioned to think that you should make everything sing.
What other connections do you see between music and writing?
A lot of things I try to do in my writing probably are the result of my obsessing over music as a younger person: an interest in rhythm, an interest in giving someone space to feel like they’re part of something like any good song can do. I’m really obsessed with how things begin and end. I grew up in an era when you had a limited amount of albums and you just obsessively listened to these albums. I always think of the first song and the last song, how an album hangs together. Maybe that’s one of the big ways in which I see music and writing as related.
How does the need to support yourself financially factor into your writing? Is this necessity contradictory to the act of writing, or can they work together?
It’s pretty hard to support yourself financially just as a writer. There are ways of making money writing, which often involve things that deviate from why you became a writer in the first place, like ghostwriting The Rock’s autobiography or something like that. Generally speaking, the publishing industry and journalism are just not necessarily growth industries where people can really support themselves the way you could once aspire to be a journalist and pursue a stable middle-class life. Personally, I’ve been incredibly fortunate because first of all, I’ve had very supportive parents, but I’ve also had this full-time job teaching at a college. That’s allowed me to be judicious about the work I choose to do. That sort of created this illusion, perhaps, that I have integrity as a writer. In reality, it’s just that I have the freedom to not have to do everything required to pay the rent.
I think one positive thing is that there are increasingly more opportunities for people who just want to tell stories through writing, whether it’s through podcast or radio. A lot of people I know are getting into TV or movie writing—there’s way more space in film or television for intelligent, thoughtful, inclusive storytelling. So there’s still a lot of possibilities open to people who like to write, but the life of a writer is much harder financially than it was thirty, fifty, a hundred years ago.
You said in your talk that producing pieces on time can be worth more in the industry than producing quality work. How does that make you feel as a writer?
I’m in a fortunate position where I trust my editors, and so sometimes you just need to hand things in on time to get to the process of editing, which in my case can be really collaborative. It really varies for different forms of writing. If you’re writing a novel, you would probably want to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be before submitting it. But the rhythms of journalism are such that you just have to get things turned in because the magazine, the newspaper, the website will publish regardless of whether you are a part of it. You’re one of twenty people whose words will appear in it. The lifespan of a book is really different from the lifespan of an article.
You said regarding your piece for The New Yorker on Crazy Rich Asians that you were hoping to recreate a certain mood rather than to get a certain message across. Does that hold true for the cultural criticism that you usually do?
In each of my pieces, even though they’re not aggressive takes, there are opinions there. My pieces are just a bit looser in how they get to those opinions. I’m interested in playing around and figuring out how to do it stylistically. A lot of journalism is driven by opinion, and mine is too, but I don’t want the opinion to be the thing leading the piece. I just sort of want us [the reader and I] to get there together.
I’ve definitely written pieces for The New Yorker that don’t land a punch, and that’s okay. As a writer, I’m always curious as to what anyone can get out of something—I’ve written this because this is just my thing, but I have no illusion that you have to think the same way. The Crazy Rich Asians piece you mentioned, some people read it and found it really stirring for some reason; other people read it and were like, “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.” I think both reactions are equally valid. I didn’t even know fully what I was trying to say, and I’m just thankful that anyone will read anything I write.
What do you hope that people will get out of reading your pieces?
I think I always try and give people a few things to think about, and I hope they think about them. But I don’t want to tell you how to think, or which things to focus on. I think I always try and have more than one point when I’m writing something. I hope someone understands why I have the opinion I do rather than my being able to convince them of something. I’m not really writing advocacy journalism that speaks truth to power. I write about culture, and culture is pretty ephemeral and individual, so I’m just giving you a perspective. It’s not supposed to replace your perspective, it’s just supposed to open up to this space where our perspectives can commune.
I was kind of accidentally a poli-sci major in college, and I think I always assumed a typical kind of immigrant path where I would find a normal job with benefits, and being a lawyer seemed easier than becoming a doctor. I’d done high school debate, so poli-sci seemed like a sensible major, but I didn’t really connect with most of the classes I was taking until my senior year, where I took a course that was basically a political history of American literature. [The professor] was so good at doing these readings, which made me interested in the politics of culture. That’s where it started.
How do you carry your Asian-American identity into the cultural criticism that you do? Do you carry it at all?
I like reading about Asian-American things when I think I have something meaningful to contribute, but it’s not really foregrounded in a lot of my writing. There are places in every piece that I write where I think, that’s the Asian-American side of me, and maybe the way it manifests is that I don’t ever really feel like I’m coming from a place where most readers would associate with. But I never really write about things from an Asian-American point of view, unless it’s a case where that point of view would help the reader understand.
For example, once I wrote this piece about whiteness, and in the first few paragraphs I mentioned these two court cases involving Asian-Americans and how American notions of legal whiteness derived from these court cases around Asian immigrants. A friend of mine said, “Oh, that was totally you holding down this Asian-American perspective.” Most people writing about race would never have used those two court cases. Maybe it comes out in ways like that, as reference points.
Where do you draw the line between your politics and your criticism in your writing?
I think we all bring political sensibilities to bear on things, but I try not to let it over-determine the course of my writing. I want someone to understand how I came to a conclusion, or why I feel a certain way, and so if I can do that without expressly talking about how I feel about poverty or wealth distribution, I think it’s just more effective. On occasion, I write things that are kind of more aggressively political, but looking back, those things always seem very timestamped. I’d rather just have someone understand how I came to a conclusion and follow that thought process.
You’ve spoken about how when you started writing professionally you lost your individual voice but gained more clarity in your writing. Was that trade-off for the best in your opinion? Is there a way to keep both?
Whenever you enter a professional system, you have to compromise a bit of your idiosyncrasy. Writing is one of those fields where all you have is your voice and your perspective. It’s probably true that my voice is not as foregrounded as it used to be when I was just writing for myself and my friends, but I feel like my ability to convey my perspective is much stronger. I’m definitely the kind of writer where people wouldn’t react as well to my “voice” as they would to my perspective and me welcoming them into the piece that way.
I guess I’ve never seen it as a trade-off. It’s a trade-off in that having to do things for money is a trade-off, and entering into a workplace is a trade-off; you’re going to have to make compromises. But to me, I enjoy the challenge of finding spaces in a piece of writing where I can be myself and figuring out how I can get the reader there.
Is the cultural criticism that you do more of a creative or an academic endeavor?
It’s a little of both. For me, the interaction between creative work and academic work is actually teaching. Teaching takes place in an academic sitting, but it’s a very creative endeavor to try and sit with a bunch of people in a classroom and just figure something out. I see writing as more connected with my teaching than with either academia or creativity. I see writing as an extension of teaching.
When you’re teaching people creative writing, what do you find to be one of the most difficult things about trying to guide people’s writing?
I think the most difficult part of teaching writing is convincing students that you need boring sentences along with the interesting ones, the dazzling, radiant, I’m-trying-to-stunt-on-you ones. All writing is about managing that rhythm between setting a scene—with sentences that you don’t have to think too hard about to understand—and being creative with your phrasing, which you can do once you’re in that scene. There’s a tendency when you first self-identify as a writer that every sentence, every syllable, every word should count—and it should, but it can count in different ways and moments in a piece of writing.
A lot of my favorite albums have interludes, like Frank Ocean’s Blonde. A few interludes in that album—I always think I should skip them, but in reality they enhance the overall experience of the album. A lot of my favorite albums—the first Wutang album, or Farside’s, or Blood Orange’s—there are these moments that are really small, ephemeral, and then they lead into these songs that are indelible, astonishing. I see writing in the same way. Some of the writing you do isn’t meant to be showy; it should just get you to the next thing. The reader needs that space to breathe, reflect, and pause. It’s hard to teach that because you’re conditioned to think that you should make everything sing.
What other connections do you see between music and writing?
A lot of things I try to do in my writing probably are the result of my obsessing over music as a younger person: an interest in rhythm, an interest in giving someone space to feel like they’re part of something like any good song can do. I’m really obsessed with how things begin and end. I grew up in an era when you had a limited amount of albums and you just obsessively listened to these albums. I always think of the first song and the last song, how an album hangs together. Maybe that’s one of the big ways in which I see music and writing as related.
How does the need to support yourself financially factor into your writing? Is this necessity contradictory to the act of writing, or can they work together?
It’s pretty hard to support yourself financially just as a writer. There are ways of making money writing, which often involve things that deviate from why you became a writer in the first place, like ghostwriting The Rock’s autobiography or something like that. Generally speaking, the publishing industry and journalism are just not necessarily growth industries where people can really support themselves the way you could once aspire to be a journalist and pursue a stable middle-class life. Personally, I’ve been incredibly fortunate because first of all, I’ve had very supportive parents, but I’ve also had this full-time job teaching at a college. That’s allowed me to be judicious about the work I choose to do. That sort of created this illusion, perhaps, that I have integrity as a writer. In reality, it’s just that I have the freedom to not have to do everything required to pay the rent.
I think one positive thing is that there are increasingly more opportunities for people who just want to tell stories through writing, whether it’s through podcast or radio. A lot of people I know are getting into TV or movie writing—there’s way more space in film or television for intelligent, thoughtful, inclusive storytelling. So there’s still a lot of possibilities open to people who like to write, but the life of a writer is much harder financially than it was thirty, fifty, a hundred years ago.
You said in your talk that producing pieces on time can be worth more in the industry than producing quality work. How does that make you feel as a writer?
I’m in a fortunate position where I trust my editors, and so sometimes you just need to hand things in on time to get to the process of editing, which in my case can be really collaborative. It really varies for different forms of writing. If you’re writing a novel, you would probably want to make sure it’s as good as it can possibly be before submitting it. But the rhythms of journalism are such that you just have to get things turned in because the magazine, the newspaper, the website will publish regardless of whether you are a part of it. You’re one of twenty people whose words will appear in it. The lifespan of a book is really different from the lifespan of an article.
You said regarding your piece for The New Yorker on Crazy Rich Asians that you were hoping to recreate a certain mood rather than to get a certain message across. Does that hold true for the cultural criticism that you usually do?
In each of my pieces, even though they’re not aggressive takes, there are opinions there. My pieces are just a bit looser in how they get to those opinions. I’m interested in playing around and figuring out how to do it stylistically. A lot of journalism is driven by opinion, and mine is too, but I don’t want the opinion to be the thing leading the piece. I just sort of want us [the reader and I] to get there together.
I’ve definitely written pieces for The New Yorker that don’t land a punch, and that’s okay. As a writer, I’m always curious as to what anyone can get out of something—I’ve written this because this is just my thing, but I have no illusion that you have to think the same way. The Crazy Rich Asians piece you mentioned, some people read it and found it really stirring for some reason; other people read it and were like, “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.” I think both reactions are equally valid. I didn’t even know fully what I was trying to say, and I’m just thankful that anyone will read anything I write.
What do you hope that people will get out of reading your pieces?
I think I always try and give people a few things to think about, and I hope they think about them. But I don’t want to tell you how to think, or which things to focus on. I think I always try and have more than one point when I’m writing something. I hope someone understands why I have the opinion I do rather than my being able to convince them of something. I’m not really writing advocacy journalism that speaks truth to power. I write about culture, and culture is pretty ephemeral and individual, so I’m just giving you a perspective. It’s not supposed to replace your perspective, it’s just supposed to open up to this space where our perspectives can commune.