3 Questions with Julia Schiavone Camacho

Julia María Schiavone Camacho is the author of Chinese Mexicans: Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910-1960 (North Carolina, 2012). Her short fiction and novel excerpts appear in The Florida Review, The Coachella Review, and The Hopper, and her work has been nominated for Best of the Net Anthology. Julia teaches history at Goshen College. She loves to read and walk. Among her favorite things are cheese, chocolate, coffee, tea, and red wine. She is from Tucson and grew up traveling across the Arizona/Sonora borderlands. Although she misses the austere beauty of the desert and the mountains, she appreciates the greenery and the seasons of the Midwest. Julia and her husband live in Michiana. Visit her at juliaschiavonecamacho.com.

HFR’s Nonfiction Editor Steffi Sin chats with Julia about her piece “Zhong Yi” from Issue 69. You can preorder the issue here.

In "Zhong Yi,” you skillfully weave familial tensions with the clash of different cultures, namely your husband's Chinese culture and your own Mexican-Italian heritage. What was the process of balancing these tensions and mapping the intersection of these cultures?

Though the story is from my perspective, it’s informed by how my husband and I have shared the ways we’ve experienced our own cultural crossings with each other. How we’ve worked at it together and grown, recognizing it’s not easy but it enriches us. Our first trip to China brought forth tensions with his family that converged on the zhong yi. We had to navigate the ensuing cultural conflicts and misunderstandings. I think stubbornness, ours and that of his family, was part of the drama. It was perhaps a way to protect ourselves. But it sharpened the divides. It took us time to realize that and begin to move toward bridging them. As the story grew from it, the zhong yi helped frame the broader intersections for us.

“Zhong Yi" is strongly rooted in place and family. How does place inform your characters and their choices?

The trip to China was an important time for us as a couple and as part of my husband’s extended family. For us, in distinct ways, it was demanding and necessary and fulfilling. Although the various places we visited in China are at the center of the story, our memories of instances and events in the US influenced how we experienced the voyage, so those had to be woven in. Our cultural crossings and the challenges therein reached a critical point on that trip. In China for the first time together, we found ourselves off balance. We stumbled. We didn’t always make the right choices as we tried to navigate clashing expectations and shifting cultural understandings, because it’s never static. But we learned from it all and have come to a better place. Not perfect, but better.

 Is there anything you'd like to share about "Zhong Yi" that we don't know?

After our wonderful, exhausting, emotional journey to China, my husband encouraged me to write about it, with the zhong yi friction at the heart. It created the thread for a larger set of issues and conflicts. He read drafts and made suggestions, but wanted it to be told in my voice. The experiences have been painful. Writing about this has been healing for me, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to share it.

Steffi Sin is a Chinese-American writer from San Francisco. She will be graduating from the MFA program in Creative Writing at Arizona State University in May 2022. Her work has been published by The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is Nonfiction Editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review.