When I meet Rachel Khong at a café to discuss My Dear You, her new collection of short stories, we’re dressed in identical leopard-print pants. The moment—absurd yet sweet, implausible yet true—feels like one Khong herself might conjure in one of her bold and delightful tales, which imbue off-kilter or lightly fantastic stories with emotional realism. In one, a woman develops a friendship with a sex robot; in another, the heroine learns she can’t conceive…because she’s an alien.
“I struggled for many years to write,” Khong tells me over coffee (in full disclosure, she and I are friends). “Stories helped me find my voice.” The practice seems to have worked. Khong has published two novels: the epigrammatic Goodbye, Vitamin, which won the 2017 California Book Award for First Fiction, and the generations-spanning Real Americans, a New York Times bestseller. With her new collection, however, she returns to her roots.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Why do you like to read short stories, and why do you write them? Are these practices coming from the same impulse?
When I first started writing, I wrote short stories because novels are so daunting. Stories were manageable to me, manageable even when they were not manageable, when it was so daunting to ever finish my first one.
Short stories were what introduced me to the idea that I might become a writer. When I was in high school, I went to Costco with my parents, and I’d always go to the book section. That’s where I found The Best American Short Stories 2001, edited by Barbara Kingsolver. That book introduced me to the fact that writers were writing today. They were writing contemporaneously, and they were metabolizing the world we were living through. Until then, I thought writers were dead; they were Virginia Woolf and F. Scott Fitzgerald. I didn’t realize I could be a writer. I grew up in this house of two civil engineers, people with practical jobs. The concept of being a writer felt mythical and impossible. Stories opened that door for me where I was like, Oh, these contemporary authors are writing stories, and this book is at Costco!
You read a short story a day, and you reflect on that daily practice in your newsletter, Short Story Short. How did that daily practice come about?
It began during the pandemic. I was reading one poem and one story a day because I was feeling frustrated with social media. I was seeing into my friends’ and acquaintances’ lives, but it wasn’t intimate in any way—they were superficial glimpses. It felt so different when I was reading a poem or a story, which reminded me and oriented me to the fact that there is so much depth to people. Everyone has a unique perspective. In a story, you can feel the writer’s effort and their interests and perspective.
I have friends reading a story a day now too. The practice seems hard at first, but sometimes you have the energy to read a 40-page story, and other times it’s like, I will read this one- or two-page story. The fact that it can be all of these different sizes is amenable to living.
The tone of the stories in My Dear You is so complex. They’re a little goofy but also completely sincere at the same time. Did you think about a tonal throughline for the collection? Is this your natural voice in these stories?
The tone is just what comes out, and what fits a particular story. The complexity of that tone mirrors being a person walking around feeling five different emotions at once. I’m sad, and then I’m happy, which is funny. I’m interested in how emotions are never clear-cut. Even when you’re grieving, for example, you have to laugh. But I do get to be more playful with stories because they’re shorter. I get to be wacky.
This collection is more personal than my other two books, but everything I write is so personal: It’s an effort to understand myself better, to understand the world better. The novels take years, and the stories will pop up as a way to accommodate passing interests or questions. If something happens to catch my attention that doesn’t quite fit into the novel, I can put it in a story. Because they’re sort of a release from the novels, they naturally adopt that playful tone.
I love how this book handles race, specifically being an Asian American woman. It’s as thorny as I imagine it is in real life. In “The Family O,” for instance, a group of Asian American women get revenge on the white man who fetishized them; in “My Dear You,” there’s a racist dog in heaven who barks at Asian people—which, I admit, made me laugh out loud.
I was interested in writing my own experience of racism and how I encounter racism in everyday life. These stories have a range. Some of them are more overtly about race, and other ones, I was interested in having characters encounter racism when they didn’t expect it or when they were going about their everyday lives. That has been my experience. When I brought “My Dear You” to my writing group, one of the members thought the dog came out of nowhere, that it felt separate from the story. I remember insisting, “No, the point is that she’s not thinking about her Chineseness as she’s going about her day, until this animal starts barking at her.” Racism is imposed upon her, which is true to certain experiences. Sometimes, of course, racism is more overt, but I wanted to write about this kind because I didn’t see it as much in fiction.
In fiction, I’m interested in depicting the daily feel of life, in the mix of emotions. Racism is bad, clearly. But it’s also, often, so funny and weird.
In one story, “D Day,” God texts everyone that they’ll be turned into animals on a set date; in “Tapetum Lucidum,” the main character is haunted, in a way, by living ghosts. These turns to fantasy are treated with a comic matter-of-factness. What is your relationship to magic or the supernatural?
As a reader, I was raised on fairy tales, on the fact that a wolf could dress up as your grandmother. My favorite stories were ones in which impossible things happened, and they were treated matter-of-factly. These stories also had an emotional core that was very human. That’s how I’m approaching it. The world is surreal as it is. I dip it into a greater surreality. With anything that I write, I have to listen to the story and see if the story wants to go there.
I find a lot of things magical. The fact that you can grow a tree from a seed: That’s magical. There’s the magic of our everyday lives. We take it for granted.•
