3 Questions with Sylvia Chan
Sylvia Chan is an amputee-cyborg writer, educator, activist, and author of We Remain Traditional (Center for Literary Publishing, 2018). Her poetry and essays appear in Poetry, Zócalo Public Square, The Cincinnati Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others, and have been named a National Poetry Series finalist and a Best American Essays Notable. Chan has received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Zoeglossia, Bolt Cutters, and The Center for Art and Advocacy’s Right of Return. She lives in Tucson, where she works with crossover and foster youth, and writers who have been impacted by the criminal justice system.
Social Media Manager Chloe Jensen talks with Sylvia Chan about their work from Issue 76, preorder now!
In your essay, “Never Stay Still,” you mention previous efforts to write about your father, including as a “thinly veiled” character in your poetry. How was writing a nonfiction essay about your family history different, and why did you choose this medium for this story?
I think about writing flashbacks, specifically, trauma loops. In poetry, the parts that I use to cutaway from Memory #1 and fuse Memory #2 are almost always sound-based, because music is my former art. Cutaway lines across a poem, and even an entire poetry collection, can say stunning work without having to walk my motivations across the pages.
I gravitate to nonfiction when I want my cutaways to stay still--longer sentences, varying punctuation, and unflinching hesitance, before another flashback jolts my readers away. For my nonfiction, the cutaways are uncomfortable truths.
Your essay confronts the challenges of centering your experience within a multi-generational story. How did the act of writing this story influence or change the story? Can you share a little about this essay's research and writing process and any surprises that emerged or challenges you faced related to writing nonfiction about family?
Imagine always knowing your grandparents were brutally murdered--and that’s how your father became an orphan; that’s how you ended up in foster care. I’ve wanted to know who my grandparents were. And I’ve never gotten those answers. That’s the braided arc: I can safety-pin the stories, but I’ve to fill in the blanks.
“Never Stay Still” is my first essay that codeswitches into Cantonese, which I inherited from my foster mother. I’m shamed by my father regardless of my fluency that matches his Cantonese. Research is survivalist, invisible, and intimate when no one is expecting me to write my story.
Is there anything you’d like to share about your essay that we don’t know?
I cannot think about interacting with my father without having a panic attack. In my adult life, I’ve been estranged from my father for a near decade, though we have always repeated these steps of reconnection, disappearance, and heartbreak for my entire life. This is the crux of uncomfortable truths for children of addiction, foster care, and abuse: I can try until I say no. It will never be enough.
But that’s why stories like mine return to one place and close the flashback, one at a time. I need to go back on my own terms.