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A Story Does Not Need to Be Large to Wound You:
Jay Ruzesky interviews Edmond Pang

First of all, congratulations! Your fifty-word story “Grandmother” recently won the San Diego Library Shop’s Shorties Award, and The Malahat Review’s Novella Prize is your second literary win in a year. One of the things the judges liked about “The Suitcase at Yokohama Station” is the “propulsive narrative” drive of the story which I think comes partly from your work in film. How connected is your film writing and your literary output? Is the novella a path to a screenplay or are those two genres of writing complementary?

Thank you, Jay—and thank you to Rob Benvie and Liz Harmer for the care they took with the judging. The “propulsive narrative” quality you mention is something I have been thinking about for a long time, and yes, it began with cinema.

When I was young, after watching a movie I loved, I often felt an urgent need to retell the whole plot to someone else. I slowly noticed that the stories people responded to most strongly usually had a clear desire, pursuit, event, or object at their centre. There was something the characters wanted, something they chased, something that made the story move. Later, from Hitchcock, I learned the word for this: the MacGuffin.

When I was researching “The Suitcase at Yokohama Station,” I kept encountering a reference to an unusually heavy suitcase containing 120 pistols. I thought: there it is, the real MacGuffin hidden inside the historical record. The story could not begin anywhere else. It had to begin with that suitcase.

But I don't see the novella as a path toward a screenplay. Film taught me rhythm, scene construction, visual tension, and momentum. Fiction gives me what film cannot always provide: interiority, historical density, silence, and the texture of language itself. A screenplay often has to externalize feeling; fiction can stay with the feeling before it becomes action. In that sense the two forms are complementary, but neither is reducible to the other.

The politics of your story are an important element because they enrich the plot of arms smuggling with larger social concerns. I’m wondering how you think about the politics of your story. Does the political background add realism to the multinational setting? And do you have a sense of perhaps educating your North American audience to the complexities of politics between Hong Kong, mainland China, and Japan?

I don't think of it as educating the reader, exactly. The political and historical relationships between Hong Kong, mainland China, and Japan are layered and often misunderstood, even within Chinese-language contexts, let alone by North American readers. What I hope to do is not to explain history from above, but to let the reader feel how history enters ordinary lives.

The relationship between Hong Kong, Japan, and the mainland was not yet what it is today. In the late Qing years, Yokohama was where exiled revolutionaries trained, printed, and quarrelled; British Hong Kong gave them legal cover and remittance channels they could not get in Canton; Tokyo’s policy toward Chinese students shifted between welcome and surveillance. The tensions between these places did not begin in the present. The novella is partly about tracing some of those older pressures back to an earlier moment.

For me, politics is not a backdrop, but a system of pressure. When I was researching the years around the 1911 Revolution, I found myself less interested in grand speeches than in the strange, practical, and sometimes morally ambiguous ways revolutionary work was financed and sustained. The cause depended not only on belief, but on remittances, revolutionary bonds, overseas Chinese communities, secret societies, and people moving money, weapons, and trust across ports such as Vancouver, Victoria, Yokohama, Hong Kong, and Guangzhou.

That was the discovery: revolution as logistics, debt, trust, risk, and performance, not only as ideology or sacrifice. So yes, the political background gives realism to the multinational setting. But more importantly, it gives weight to the characters. I’m drawn to the hidden infrastructure of revolution, not only to its public mythology.

The ending of your novella suggests a sequel to follow, or perhaps the possibility of expanding the novella into a longer piece of fiction. Is there more of this story to come?

Yes. “The Suitcase at Yokohama Station” is the first completed part of a larger work, which I now imagine as Echoes in Eternity: A Novel in Five Interlinked Novellas.

The story goes back to the years before the 1911 Revolution. Most people remember the successful uprising that October, but I became interested in the failed attempt just before it: the Guangzhou uprising of April 1911, now remembered through the seventy-two Huanghuagang martyrs. Many of those young revolutionaries were not people without futures. They had studied in Japan; some came from wealthy families, or from families connected in some way to the Qing power structure. I became fascinated by the question: what pushed them toward a planned, almost suicidal assault on the Viceroy's yamen in Guangzhou?

I first began researching this subject around 2003, when I intended to write it as a film screenplay. I completed much of the script, but because of the censorship and market realities around Chinese-language historical films, the project became almost impossible to finance. The research, notes, and unfinished pages went into a drawer.

Later, a media editor friend named Anthony encouraged me to finish it. He even created a Chinese-language column for me, hoping the serial form would force me to continue. I was too busy then, and I failed to keep it going. The project stopped again. I always felt I had let him down.

Many years later, after I had moved to Vancouver, I learned that Anthony had passed away. That was when I felt I should finally bring this unfinished work to some kind of completion, not only for myself, but also because he had once believed in it when I no longer did.

So yes, there is more of this story to come. This prize has made me feel, for the first time in a long while, that the book may actually be possible.

Your dialogue is very effective, and the judges also remarked on your “elegant prose.” You’ve said that you started writing in English just a few years ago. What writers do you draw on most as literary influences and what about their work inspires you?

I have always gravitated toward writers who can create a whole world quickly, before the spell breaks.

In secondary school, like many young readers, I went through Haruki Murakami and Milan Kundera. Kundera taught me that large historical questions and private emotional lives can intersect without one becoming merely the background of the other. Murakami taught me that the strange can enter ordinary life without announcing itself too loudly.

Later, Raymond Carver taught me something essential about silence: how dialogue is often most powerful because of what the characters cannot say, or will not say, or do not yet understand that they are saying. Etgar Keret showed me the absurdity and cruelty that can exist inside very short forms. A story does not need to be large to wound you. Sometimes a few lines are enough.

Ha Jin was important to me in a different way. He made me understand that writing in a second language is not only possible, but that the distance between the writer and the language can itself become part of the work. The friction is not a deficit. It can be the material.

What inspires me most in these writers is not only style, but permission. They gave me permission to understand that elegance does not always mean polish, and that clarity does not always mean obedience. As a second-language writer, I did not inherit English; I am learning to live inside it, one borrowed room at a time.

Men provide for most of the plot consequences in your novella, but women characters also seem crucial. Do you think about some sort of balance in terms of gender dynamics?

Yes, very much. Even though the visible action in this novella belongs largely to young men, I have always been interested in the cost of masculine heroism: the lives and silences left behind when men turn themselves into history, revolution, or myth. The men often create the historical event; the women inherit its consequences.

So for me, gender balance does not only mean giving men and women equal amounts of plot action. It also means asking who pays for the story after the heroic moment has passed. Who waits? Who keeps the family alive? Who is forced to live with political choices that men can later turn into legend?

One of the later stories I am developing involves women disguised as brides in traditional red bridal dress, pretending to travel to Guangzhou for marriage, while smuggling revolvers hidden in the hollows of their wedding chests.

That image has stayed with me: a bride who, beneath red silk, carried not only her family's expectations but the weight of an uprising. The unrecorded labour of revolution includes not only the men who appear in the official record, but also the women who carried its risks, its aftermath, and sometimes its most dangerous secrets.

 

 

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