Meng Jin on Structuring her Debut Novel, Little Gods
Photo: Andria Lo
Meng Jin’s debut novel, Little Gods, utilizes a network of characters and their lives to tell the story of Su Lan, a physicist who is forever changed after giving birth to a daughter in Beijing on the night of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Through the eyes of her daughter, husband, and a neighbor, the complexity of Su Lan and her experiences are revealed.
These perspectives are presented through alternating sections throughout the book, illuminating the life and character of Su Lan. The structure of these sections evolved throughout the writing process. “In the earlier drafts, the sections were like three novellas, more loosely linked,” explained Jin. “The reader had to do more work to connect the threads together. And right before we submitted it, my agent suggested cutting the sections and in each section there was a natural break.”
These sections allow the focus to remain on Su Lan as the centerpiece of the story, bringing together people from her past even when she is gone. Su Lan does not share her own voice anywhere in the book. Jin felt strongly about this throughout the whole writing process. She wanted to show “how people are known to others. Because Su Lan is gone at the beginning of the book, she can only be known through people who knew her when she was alive.”
Beginning with the perspective of Zhu Wen, Su Lan’s last neighbor in China before moving to America, readers are introduced to her baby daughter Liya and husband Li Yongzong. Both later offer critical perspectives in piecing together who Su Lan was and who she became. Using multiple perspectives to offer readers a look at Su Lan expands the work the book is doing. “It makes the story not just about what the story is, but how the story is told. We get both the character we are looking at and the character who is looking.”
These pieces evolved throughout the six to seven years that Jin worked on the novel. Yongzong’s perspective, for example, was originally written as practice for Jin’s character building and world building, but ultimately, she included it in the book.
In addition to the story’s web of people, the time and place of Su Lan’s story offer insight into her character. Some of Jin’s research happened organically, as a response to her natural interest in topics like Chinese history and physics. Through further targeting her research to China’s student protests and the Tiananmen Square Massacre, she found a factual basis from which to build. “Research was a way of giving me permission to invent, so I would just do enough research that I felt like I could start imagining the world and making things up,” said Jin.
This work led her away from her home in San Francisco to an eight-week residency in Shanghai, where she did archival research, read about the disappearing neighborhoods of Shanghai, and returned to some of the places of her childhood. “I finished the first full draft of the book at that [Shanghai] residency. [But] I worked on this book for six or seven years, so it was done everywhere I was,” said Jin.
This process of writing in many places is fitting, because language and migration play important roles in the book. As Su Lan’s daughter Liya travels to China, she begins to reconnect with the language which she had forgotten since living in America.
“I thought of Liya’s section as a place to play with a bilingual consciousness, a consciousness that’s fractured, because her Chinese is diluted, it’s imperfect, and she is rediscovering it out of a sort of longing,” said Jin. “Language is an important concept for me, as a writer who thinks in one language and writes in another. I thought of myself as translating from their consciousness into English.”
Jin’s own consciousness played an important role in each revision of the book. “The way that I did revisions was that I would start with a blank page. I would be able to release the information in a way that made sense [by retyping the whole draft].” In addition to rewriting various parts of the book many times, she retyped the entire draft at least three times.
One of the sections most affected by the editing process was the ending, which Jin shortened. “The original version of the ending was extremely detailed, and I wanted the ending to have this propulsive feeling,” Jin said. In the end, she retyped the scene on a blank page, ensuring that she highlighted what she and her editor felt were most important to leave the reader with.
Little Gods came out on January 14 from Custom House. You can find Meng Jin on Twitter @jinittowinit or at www.mengj.in.
Megan DeMint is a writer and editor with a love for nonfiction: memoirs, collections of essays, books by journalists, and whatever else she can get her hands on. She writes articles about authors and their writing processes at Spine Magazine and works as a Communication Specialist at Cornell University. Even more of her work can be found at www.megandemint.com.