Place of Beauty: Literature, City, and Self
Asian/American Transits #1—SHANGHAI x JULI MIN
Happy Lunar New Year! 🐇
On the cusp of this Year of the Rabbit, I’m kicking off a new project called Asian/American Transits, where I introduce fellow creatives of the Asian diaspora and ask them to dig into their sense of self vis-à-vis their country of current residence and environments of upbringing.
This is vaguely connected to my academic work that attempts to map the connections between contemporary Asian America and East Asian popular culture (particularly narrative-based cultural forms). Reflecting on my own ambivalences, the places that have shaped me, the communities that I’ve been grateful to find and join, I thought this series might be a nice way to explore transnational Asian identity in a more casual context.
I’m planning to run this on a monthly basis, so please stay tuned and feel free to drop me some feedback or suggestions (especially on the project name 😅). For now, let’s get things started with my dear friend and colleague Juli Min.
Juli Min is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Shanghai Literary Review (TSLR), a journal for which I served as translation editor for a long spell. Hailing from the American East Coast, Juli has been living in Shanghai for over seven years as a writer, editor, student, and teacher—and, more recently, as a mother of two! We met while pursuing master’s degrees at Columbia University back in the day, and it’s been lovely to nurture our friendship and create opportunities to work together while blazing through our twenties and finding our way to new lives on this side of the Pacific.
Where did you grow up? How did this environment affect your sense of cultural identity?
I was born in Seoul, Korea, but I grew up in northern New Jersey. Not the areas of the state that have since become small Koreatowns and Japantowns, but the white suburban commuter communities. I didn’t have a sense of being very different from the majority white peers around me, though my earliest best childhood friends happened to be Indian and Chinese. Maybe we stuck together in a sense; maybe we knew.
I went to boarding high school in Andover, Massachusetts, and I remember once crossing a street and being screamed at by a car full of white boys: “Asian!!” At the time I remember feeling shocked, surprised, and strangely offended. What a weird thing to point out. But what a weird feeling, too, to feel confused about that first drive-by moment of racial confrontation. I think that goes to show you where I was identity-wise by high school, and what kind of environment I grew up in.
When I graduated from college and moved to Seoul for a few years, I started to see myself as specifically Korean, rather than generically Asian American. (Though I hadn’t realized that that was the way I’d viewed myself.) It was in Korea that I also felt distinctly beautiful—as an individual, in the context of my race—for the first time in my life. For what it’s worth, that was also when I started dating beautiful Asian men… and I have never looked back.
Can you describe how you came to your current creative practice? Who or what have been your biggest inspirations or influences?
I am a writer and the editor-in-chief of The Shanghai Literary Review. I always loved literature and studied it in college and graduate school, but I would say that it’s taken me a few career shifts, from academia to finance to the arts, to identify (publicly!) as an artist. I was around my late twenties and early thirties when I decided to study writing seriously, take up a job in the arts, and do an MFA in fiction. I just graduated in 2022, in my mid-thirties. I have two young kids and an MFA and a book manuscript. I would say that I had been circling around the idea of the writing life my whole life, peeping at it enviously, and now am finally pursuing it with diligence.
One of my biggest inspirations over the past six years has been working with TSLR as its fiction editor. First of all, the amazing submissions, the bravery, the confidence, the dedication, the range of talent from all over the world—it’s just incredible. Then there’s the editorial process, which I love: helping a piece stretch and grow, or just polishing a beautifully done piece.
I studied Russian literature and one of my favorites has always been Nabokov. Language and style are so important to me, and I will sometimes start a writing session just reading his work, just to sit in that place of beauty, to focus on sound and rhythm, to be reminded of the transformative power of words. But also to be reminded of the work involved. Because his work is so very unmodern in its thickness, in its muscularity, its self-conscious effortfulness.
When did you move to China? Has the experience of living here shaped your creative, personal, or social sensibilities?
I moved to China in 2015. I came here for love…
But I hated the city for at least two years. I also ended up getting very sick when I moved here. I blamed my discomfort and illness on the city. I found comfort in my work and in doing research on Shanghai’s golden era, the 1930s, jazz age of flappers and gangsters. I romanticized the city. I wrote a historical fiction novel set in those times, a rewrite of Romeo and Juliet, but with the two lovers as the daughter and son of rival gang factions. That was my first go at writing a novel, and my application sample for my MFA program. My health got better slowly, and so did my relationship to the city.
During my program I wrote a speculative novel in stories set in contemporary and future Shanghai. So, I guess you could say Shanghai past, present, and future have consumed all of my fictional endeavors for five years now! This city is so historically complicated and interesting, cool-looking, fast-paced, materialistic, foreigner-friendly, foreigner-unfriendly, loud, graceful, graceless, rich, poor. It’s really an interesting place to live and write about.
Do you have any favorite places in Shanghai?
I love the waterside parks and green spaces that have been developed along the Bund. On the Pudong side there are beautiful bike paths by the Huangpu River, where you can ride along greenery and then up long stretches of elevated paths that make you feel you’re biking among the clouds. There are complexes of museums set on the Bund near the water, with ever-present cargo ships and river traffic. There are landscaped grasses and greenery among old disused railroad tracks, just beautifully done; I am often reminded of New York’s High Line. Living in Shanghai, strangely, you can easily forget you are right by the water. There are no real usable beaches, but they really did something nice with the waterfront over the years.
What significance do you see in finding, making, and/or nurturing connections between Asia and America, broadly speaking?
Broadly speaking? We live in incredibly treacherous times. It feels as if we’re on the brink of something horrifying. Asia and the West, and specifically the two countries between which I move, are big and unpredictable. So community, understanding, connection, communication—really, what can be more important? Art is one way in.
Personally, that connection (and sometimes that divide) is where I am, physically, emotionally, culturally, linguistically. I cannot help but be there; that is where I have always been and all I have ever known.
You can find Juli’s personal website here. Sign up for Shanghai Baby, her Substack on writing, parenting, and making a livelihood in China’s metropolis par excellence. Stay connected with The Shanghai Literary Review via @shanghailit on Instagram or purchase some back issues from the online store. 🌊