On Writing Across Genres, and the World of Publishing, with Dori Jones Yang

DORI JONES YANG IS the author of eight books, including her most recent memoir, When The Red Gates Opened: A Memoir of China’s Reawakening, which documents her eight years as a Businessweek correspondent covering China from 1982 to 1990. It’s both a personal, as well as a historical memoir, and I’ve been eager to speak with her about how to include historical context in memoir and much more. Listen in and read along as we discuss that, on writing across genres and the world of publishing.

Marion: Welcome, Dori.

Dori: Well, thank you. It’s a delight to be here in your world. I’m a big fan of your podcast.

Marion: Oh, thank you so much. That’s so kind. And I’m a big fan of your work. I remember some of these cover stories so well, and I am a big… Well, a big fan of China, I think is the thing to say. I’ve been there. I care about it. I studied it in college. And so, you’re one of those people that’s kept me informed over the years. So, you were a young correspondent, foreign correspondent for Businessweek during the oh, so pivotal 1980s China, right up to, and including the bloody crackdown known as Tiananmen Square. So, that might have been enough for any writer, but you chose to write a personal memoir that includes historical context. So, why this form?

Dori: Well, I am a big fan of historical fiction and although this is not fiction, I’m inspired by the way historical novelists take a personal story and capture you, capture your heart and your imagination with the personal story. And then you get to the end of the book and think, “Whoa, I just learned so much about that time and that place, I didn’t know anything about that country and now I feel like I’ve been there with someone.” And so, I wanted to do something like that.

Marion: Yeah, I get it. My dad, who was a sports writer used to tell us that if you want to get anyone to remember anything, either put it to music or make it funny. And he didn’t mean it literally, but it was a great lesson to me in how to get and keep someone’s attention. And in your case, you choose to weave in and out of your personal experience to illuminate for us this remarkable time in China. And so why don’t you just give us a little background here so everybody can just feel their way back to this time. And we said it was pivotal, but China went from isolation to openness. Just give us some specifics so it grounds us in time, please.

Dori: Well, it was interesting writing this memoir 30-some years after the events that happened because I gained a historical perspective in that time. I can look back now and see, “Whoa, I was a witness to history in the making,” because shortly before I got to China, China had been under Mao for 30 years and was very self-contained and isolated and poor, just terribly impoverished. And then during those 10 years of the eighties under Deng Xiaoping, it opened up tremendously and did some really amazing things like allowing capitalism, which no communist country had ever, ever done. And how do you combine capitalism with the communist party? They were crossing the river by feeling for stones as they say. They were just trying to figure it out, two steps forward, one step back. And I was there when that was happening. I was very lucky I was a business reporter because the American business community was very excited about China and even though they didn’t know what they were doing when they got there, and a lot of them had trouble, they were very enthusiastic about going to China and investing there or trading there.

And also the Chinese people who had been told that if you’re a capitalist, that capitalist rotor, that’s a class enemy. Amazingly enough, a lot of them took to capitalism really well and went into business for themselves in a way that you’d think they were naturals even though they had been born and raised in a communist country. So, between the foreign trade aspect and the entrepreneurs inside China, there were some great, great stories for me to follow. And it turns out especially being a business reporter in those days was great. And I was right there. I was based in Hong Kong, but I traveled to China a lot. The main thing I was covering was the opening of China. And I got to go to many different parts of China and see not just Beijing and Shanghai, the big places, but to go to smaller towns, smaller cities and really try to understand what was going on from the inside. So that became sort of a theme for me to really understand China from the inside.

And I think that cross-cultural communication is a really important theme in my life just to try to understand other countries or other cultures, even within our own country. I think that’s a super important thing today. And that’s what I was trying to do at the time is try to understand China from the inside. And it really helped that I met and married a Chinese man, and he was able to take me inside China to places to meet people that I never would have had a chance to meet before, farmers or small-town people who were his relatives. He was actually rediscovering his relatives during the eighties. And I got to go with him, which was kind of a privileged way to do it.

Marion: It’s an extraordinary opportunity, of course, many Americans will forget that there was this 30 years where people who had had to leave China and your husband’s family is among those because they had been associated with a government that was then sort of tossed as we say-

Dori: That’s right.

Marion: … The quick version is was kind of tossed. Yeah. And then 30 years not to know what became of this family, not to know if people were still alive and then to reconnect with people who had had a very different experience, really lends an extraordinary touch to this tale. So maybe you can just illuminate that a little bit more. I was really deeply moved by some of what he had to and you with him had to realize and hear about when you reconnect with some of his closest of relatives who have experienced a very different China.

Dori: Right. I think for most Americans, for most people anywhere, the idea of not being able to be in touch with your relatives for 30 years, maybe some people think that’s great, but for most people, that’s just shocking. They didn’t know if their relatives were alive or dead. They really could not have any contact with them from 1949 all the way into the eighties. And he had come over with his parents. So just their little nuclear family and they were grandparents and aunts and uncles, and then eventually cousins. And he didn’t know where they were if they were alive or dead. And he had one address for one of them on each side and managed to then bit by bit find a lot of them. And we got to meet some of them.

One of the places we went was a very small farming village outside of Beijing that was very, very poor. 80% of the people in China or more lived in the countryside in those days. That’s not true anymore, but in those days, most people did. And we got to see what life was like for them in this very small town and what they had gone through in the intervening years. And then we also connected with his older sister. He actually is very sad. He had a half sister who’s about 15 years older. So, when the family left, she had just been engaged to be married. So, she stayed behind and married and had children and she suffered a great deal. And her family suffered a great deal because of the connection with her father who was associated with the previous government that had been overthrown, as you said. And I could see when I went to her house, actually, at one point I took a nap in her bed and I really felt like I was seeing the world from her point of view.

And all these stories I’d been writing for Businessweek, suddenly became real in a very intense way that these people who were his relatives, they weren’t privileged people or somebody that the government trotted out for me to talk to. They were just ordinary folks. And I could see how they had more opportunities and more freedoms to decide what to do with their life. They didn’t have to stick with the same job their whole life, which is the way things had been before that. They could leave that job and go do something else or start up a business or they had a lot of different opportunities and they were no longer being persecuted, which is another big change that happened in the eighties. And so, I went… It was hard to stay an objective journalist during that time because people’s lives were improving so much. I just wanted the government to succeed in the reforms that they were undertaking at the time.

Marion: It’s fascinating. I really just love the fact that you’re able with this family tale to illuminate for us the real politics of the time. And so, that blend is perfect. You answer the question really of how to give us the historical context in memoir. And you mentioned earlier about the length of time from when you left China till you decided to write this book. So, let’s talk about that. What is the benefit of time, of waiting, of looking, of watching? We know that it’s widely reported that 73% of Americans have a negative opinion of China. And yet we also know that there’s not a single world problem that can be solved unless China and the US agree to work together. So, you have this perfect timing for this book right now, how in the world did you know that? And what is the benefit of waiting all these years to write it?

Dori: Well, it’s great that you say that because there were moments when I thought this was absolutely the worst possible time for me to come out and with a book about China, because of what you just said of the opinion of China, which five years earlier, about 50/50 Americans were positive about China or negative about China. And then each year in the last five years, the opinions of China have fallen. And now they’re actually at a low point, lower than after Tiananmen Square, which is pretty amazing. But when I first came back from China in 1990, I just wasn’t ready to write a memoir. I was a very private person. I didn’t think I could write about my own personal life on paper, plus frankly, I hadn’t processed a lot of it. And I also didn’t have that historical perspective that you mentioned, and it wasn’t until about five years ago that a writing teacher of mine encouraged me to get back to that story and really write it.

And at that point, I was ready personally to write it. But five years ago, when I started writing it, relations between the US and China were pretty good. And I didn’t think that that would have anything to do with the story. And then as I got closer and closer to publication, American opinion was falling about China. But I agree with you. It was a great time to publish a book about China. This book came out in September of last year, and frankly, because of COVID and the pandemic, Americans can’t go to China now and Chinese people can’t come to the US. So, a lot of the person-to-person interactions that I had during the eighties and for many, many decades since then through my husband and his friends and people we’ve come to know, those interactions aren’t available. So, we Americans can’t get a very clear idea of what the Chinese are thinking and why they’re doing what they’re doing and why their foreign policy is what it is.

So, it’s a time when misunderstanding is also at an all-time high on both sides of the Pacific. I think a lot of Americans just don’t understand what China’s doing, and it’s very easy to make quick generalizations. And I think our government leaders are doing that.

Marion: Yeah, I think so.

Dori: It makes me very sad.

Marion: Makes me very sad too. And sadness is a piece of your story as well. I mean, heartbreak, disheartening, how many different words can we use to talk about being there for the Tiananmen Square crackdown and you leave China, you moved to Seattle in 1990, where you covered Northwest companies for Businessweek and later worked for US News & World Report covering Silicon valley. But there has to have been something you carried home with you in your heart about this time. And I so want to talk about how you then turned this around and started what now is eight books in this writing career. So, let’s talk about just turning around the emotional content of our lives and redirecting, writers need to know how to do this. Sometimes we have terrible things befall us. Sometimes things happen in our families. In your case, this is a global disappointment and shock and horror. And I’d just like to know how you channel that into a continuing career.

Dori: Well, I think there are two sides to my answer to that. One is that I didn’t realize at the time. It took historical changes to understand that when I left China in distress and despair after Tiananmen Square, I thought that it was all over for China, that all this excitement about economic reform and openness was at an end that they were going back to the way they were before. And there was no happy future for China and I was dead wrong. Most journalists don’t ever admit that, but I, and many others did not foresee the fact that China would get back on track in terms of its reforms, in terms of its openness to trade and investment in foreign countries in general, and start this amazing modernization and growth spurt that has taken China from one of the most impoverished nations in the world when I was there to a moderately developed country, which is where it is now on average. They have a $10,000 a year per capita GNP, which is only one-sixth of ours, but they’re really rather prosperous compared to where they were.

And now, I can see that. But one of your question too about making the switch from journalism to book writing, one factor for me was that even before I went into journalism, I was fascinated with the idea of writing books. So, I decided when I came back to the US in 1990 that although I was continuing with Businessweek, I was going to pivot and focus on writing books. And I wasn’t quite sure what kind of books I wanted to write which is why I became a genre jumper and wrote in a lot of different genres to try out different things. And I was able to pursue a different dream that I had even before I had the dream of journalism. So, I consider myself very lucky in my life that I was able to pursue my journalism dream and then later able to pursue my book writing dream as well. So, it wasn’t so much out of sadness, it was… I took that sadness and thought about it as an opportunity to switch gears and move into a different sort of writing.

Marion: Well, we’re glad you did. Yeah, genre jumper. This is my new favorite term. Thank you for that. I will credit you every time I use it.

Dori: Great.

Marion: You’ve written historical novels, a book on oral histories, an inspirational book on wisdom, two novels introducing middle graders to children from China. Didn’t you get the memo that you’re not supposed to do that?

Dori: Yes, I did get the memo and I ignored it, which is at my peril. And I will say there is certainly a disadvantage to that. And I understand the disadvantage of being a genre jumper, because if you don’t establish yourself as an expert in one field, then it’s much harder to get your books published. Because each time you jump into a new genre, you’re a beginner. And I did, I took lots and lots of classes each time to try to understand fiction, which most journalists don’t know anything about, including me. And then to try to understand children’s fiction. A memoir, I had to jump back into… I feel like I was going back to first grade every time I did it, but I loved doing it because most of my books, not all did have a bit of a theme, which is creating bridges between the US and China and helping Americans to understand China better. That was true of my historical novels. That was true of my children’s books.

And it’s close to my heart because I want Americans to be able to have a better sense and a better understanding of China. And you don’t always get that from your newspaper or from memoir or from non-fiction. A lot of our understanding of China comes from fiction. So, I was trying to do that with many of my books.

Marion: And I think that’s great for you to point out and so generous because it’s easy to say genre jumper – you are writing across genres – but I did and do see the connection between all of your books. Just about all. The first one maybe it’s a little outside, and we’ll talk about that in a second, but you have written with this breadth and yet there is this connective message that runs throughout. Perhaps the one that fascinates me most is titled The Forbidden Temptation of Baseball, where you took an historical event in 1870 Chinese educational mission to the US and wrote for the 10-year-old and up crowd about how hard it is to adapt to the American way of life. So, chicken and egg this for me, this is a topic that’s again, particularly timely. We expect people to assimilate. “Hey, become an American. You’re American now.” But it’s hard.

So, when did this bridge occur to you and that said, “This is my interest.” In the chicken and egg kind of way of explaining things, did you just decide on that or did the 1870 educational mission come to you and you said, “Well, that’s interesting. I’m kind of interested in keeping this bridge between America and China going?” So, how deliberate, and when did that thematic fascination occur to you?

Dori: So, I wanted to explain China to American kids and also explain about how hard it is for immigrant kids to adapt to life in the US. So obviously I was not an immigrant or the child of immigrants either. So I had to use some of my own imagination for that. I did raise a Chinese American child in an American city. My daughter is mixed Chinese and Caucasian. And so, I did have some sense from her and her upbringing. In fact, I got the idea initially of writing a children’s book from one of her teachers who asked me to recommend books about children in China today. And I thought I had a lot of books about children in China, but it turns out there weren’t any that were about children in China today. And I found that the publishing world was more interested in hearing about Chinese children in the US. So that’s why I switched to that.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And a lot of my friends when they have children decide to write children’s books, and I think that it’s so worth discussing the influences that act upon us. Yes, there’s a good topic. Yes, there’s this. Yes, there’s this interest, but if you’re going to give yourself permission to be a genre jumper, you also maybe are able to give yourself permission to be influenced by those like this teacher, be reactive to when somebody says that and then you notice there are no books for children about children in China to go ahead and write one.

Dori: I will also add that I was a history major in college, and I’ve always been fascinated by history. And when I found out that the Chinese government had sent 100-plus little boys of age 11 through 15 to the US way back in the 1870s to live with families in New England, in Connecticut and Massachusetts, I was just fascinated by that. And I thought, “How come I didn’t know about that?” And I wanted kids, whether they’re children of immigrants or plain old white American kids to know about this, it just seemed like such an amazing little piece of history. So, I started with that idea and then created this book from the little boy’s perspective of what it might have been like for him to try to go from China in the 1870s to New England in the 1870s.

Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And I love that. And I think it bears asking and I haven’t asked anybody this yet in all of these interviews about when you get an idea and how many ideas do you think you’ve had versus how many pieces you’ve published? In other words, we get this idea. We hear about this 1870s. These 10 boys who are sent to America, they go to the Northeast of America. You say, “Wow, that’s a fascinating thing.” And that one worked. How many books do you think you’ve pitched over the years? How many times do you think you’ve had that inkling and then said, “Nah, that’s not for me.” Or, “That doesn’t have the right grit.” Or, “I don’t want to spend three years on that,” versus how many times have you actually gone and pitched it to your agent or an editor and have them say, “Nah.” So, you’ve got eight, you’ve got eight successfully brought to publication. Any idea of how many you’ve thought up or how many you’ve pitched over the years that haven’t yet seen the light?

Dori: I would say it’s sort of 10 to one. I come up with lots of different ideas. I recently have been looking back over some of my journals and thinking, “Oh, that was a good idea.” It’s not so much when I pitched them, but more when I actually started working on them. So many of them, I never start to work on. I think, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting. Maybe I’ll read up on it,” but then I don’t actually start working on it. But there are a number of books in my bottom drawer, not finished, but started on topics that I thought were really fascinating at the time and I still think are fascinating, but I didn’t finish them. And this was one where I had to really push to get myself finished with it and to keep it up because I was not sure at first, it didn’t get the reception.

My agent was very, very interested in it, but the publishers were not. And that’s very disheartening as many of your listeners know. So, I just had to keep pushing it and just saying, “I believe in this project. I want to get it out in the world.” I got it out in the world and it won eight awards. So obviously, there’s people out there that were very interested even though the publishers were not, the first publishers that we approached were not that interested. So, I would just encourage people to… If they really have a project they are very passionate about, find some way to get it out there in the world.

Marion: Yeah. It’s such kind advice and I think people just don’t realize… I’ve lost track of how many books I’ve pitched. I’ve lost track of how many times my agent has said, “No.”

Dori: Well-

Marion: That’s pretty much the end of the conversation.

Dori: … but it’s interesting that agents will say no to things that might end up being really, really good books. So, each writer has to decide for themselves if the agent or even the publishers say no, do you drop it? Do you leave it in your lower drawer or do you find a way to get it out in the world? And one of the amazing changes in publishing since I went into it, since I started writing books, is that there are different ways of getting your books out in the world and if you really want to get it out, you can get it out there, whereas 20 years ago, that wasn’t true.

Marion: Right. I think it’s the most exciting time in the history of publishing quite honestly. And let’s talk about that. I want to talk about your most recent publisher, so let’s do it sort of as the over the arc of your career, your first book, Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time, just introduces this company that aimed to do well while doing good. And this was a bestseller. You had tremendous success. This is a big publisher, a remarkable head of a company to work with. And you went from this over the course of your career to publishing with She Writes Press, which is a hybrid publisher, which is the newest hottest thing going. So, talk to us a little bit more about that, digging in, going from maybe one of the big five, going to the children’s books, going to the hybrid publisher. What’s the difference along the line? Elaborate a little bit for people about these choices.

Dori: Well, of the eight books that I published, the first three were traditionally published, which was really the only way in those days to be published. And the second three were self-published through Amazon. And then the last two were done through hybrid publishing where there’s traditional distribution to bookstores. And there’s a press that is curating the submissions and also providing really fantastic covers and designs and standing behind the book and making sure that it gets out there in the world. But the author, in addition to the press co-invests in the project, and there are very different ways of publishing and a lot of different routes. And I think in the course of my lifetime, that traditional publishing has gotten harder and it seems to have narrowed their interests. You have to already be a celebrity. You have to already have a blog and a following.

And even then you don’t necessarily get something published. And there are different incentives at the national level basically for traditional publishing than there might have been say, 30, 40 years ago. You can talk more about this than I can, but it does seem to me that there has been a change in traditional publishing as well as a change in the fact that other options are available. And I think that in each case the writer needs to look at what the other options are and what are the pluses and minuses for each and whether or not it’s worthwhile to publish a different way.

Marion: I think that’s great and very generous. And I am fascinated. I did look carefully at who published each of your books and I said, “Oh, this is the person I want to talk to.” I am a huge fan of She Writes Press. I think it’s a fascinating business model. I love the women who started it and I’m not connected to them in a business way at all. I just admire the outlook and the alternatives and the input that the writer’s allowed to have in this model, which is not something that I’ve ever had having published with four of the big five. So, as we start to wrap this up, I’d just love for you to comment a little bit about the life. You have a writing life, but I’ve also read that you play the piano, the violin, the cello, and the Chinese zither.

And for me, creativity begets creativity. If I’m not cooking, I’m knitting. If I’m not knitting, I’m gardening. If I’m not gardening, I’m writing, I’m playing music. These things feed me. And I’m a huge believer in working out every day to kind of keep my head able to sit still for long enough to write. What about you? Just talk to us a little bit about your daily life and this fairly broad creativity that you apparently live by.

Dori: Well, I love music and I’m a dabbler, as you heard. I said, I’m a genre jumper. I’ve tried many different foreign languages because I really love foreign languages. And I’ve tried to learn many different types of musical instruments because I love music. And I think that that sort of dabbling is a theme across not just my writing life, but across my whole life. And I try to include a lot of different aspects of those other types of living in my daily life. So, I do a lot of working out. I’m actually recently taking another look at written Chinese, which is very hard thing to do. And I had studied it before, but I’m much better at speaking Chinese than writing. So, I’m spending some time with that now. I think it helps as a brain exercise as well. So, I’m always trying a new way and something new, something different. And that’s part of my creative life.

Marion: Well, it shows in the eight books that you’ve written and published and we’re so grateful and can’t wait to see what you do next. Thank you so much, Dori. It’s just been a joy to talk with you.

Dori: Well, thank you, Marion. I really enjoyed talking with you as well.

Marion: The author is Dori Jones Yang. The book is When The Red Gates Opened: A Memoir of China’s Reawakening, just out from She Writes Press. See more on her at dori jones yang dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.