“I Think I’m Done Striving”: Delia Cai Against the American Dream

We all have moments we’d rather forget. Maybe an awkward high school crush or a fight that broke up a best friendship. That reluctance to return to a site of remembering is the focal point of Delia Cai’s debut novel, Central Places, which tells the story of Audrey Zhou, a Chinese American woman living in New York City who returns to her hometown in central Illinois after eight years away. She arrives to support her father before a surgery, bringing her affluent, white fiancé Ben in tow, his first introduction to her parents. The visit extends longer than expected, unearthing memories of a place Audrey was attempting to leave behind and resurfacing romantic feelings for Kyle, an old high school crush.

In the midst of it, Cai details the contrasting contexts of a working-class small town outside Peoria, Ill., with Audrey’s upwardly mobile ambitions in New York. There’s an immediacy in which Cai captures place and time that fully immersed me in this fictional world about a hometown return that is almost-but-not-quite exactly like her own. 

Throughout Central Places, Audrey wrestles with questions about how to introduce Ben to her middle-class Chinese immigrant parents, whether it’s possible to repair fractured relationships she left behind in search of bigger dreams, and how to navigate an ongoing feeling of otherness. It’s these self-interrogations that drive the narrative of Cai’s work, which is effusive in its compassion for its ensemble of characters. 

I was lucky enough to catch the Los Angeles leg of Cai’s book tour, where she sat in conversation with fellow Asian American fiction writer Elaine Hsieh Chou. Approachable and warm, Cai herself is still incredulous at the enormous success her writing has yielded the past few years. We related in the stubbornness and thick skin one has to develop in order to persevere in journalism. Over the past decade, her arc in media spans a fellowship at The Atlantic to running her media newsletter Deez Links to her new position as senior correspondent at Vanity Fair. Even now, she shares that the imposter syndrome feeling is very real. 

I sat down with Cai via Zoom to discuss the tension and disbelief that is the backdrop to Central Places and a reflection of her own fish-out-of-water moments: her Asian American experience living between the Midwest and the coast, state school pedigree and Ivy League prestige, and the struggle to build community.

JIREH DENG: How did your passion for writing start and where did the inspiration for your book arrive from?

DELIA CAI: I was a big reader as a kid. My mom would drop me off at the neighborhood Barnes and Noble on Saturday afternoons so she could run her errands in peace. I loved it because I could just sit and read a bunch of books all afternoon. I remember writing little stories when I was a kid, coming up with skits with friends. But I started writing stories in earnest around middle school, because I got really into writing Harry Potter fanfiction. Then I began inventing my own stories.

JD: It’s interesting that you got your start writing Harry Potter fanfiction, because your book is almost like a spin-off of your own life, particularly with the political happenings that are the backdrop of this novel. There’s a general sense that this is the pre-Trump era of politics and a period where Midwestern communities are experiencing financial hardship and struggling with the opioid crisis. Even Audrey’s dad, who’s an engineer, is implicated in the working-class struggle of his peers — he’s preparing to be a scab during a strike. There’s all this texture that feels very journalistic to me. How did your journalism background inform your writing this book?

DC: Journalism helped me put things in historical and political context that I just didn’t really understand as a kid. For example, in my hometown, a small town outside Peoria, Ill., the manufacturing giant renegotiates contracts with the unions every six years. It’s a huge thing because most people know someone who works there, and it impacts everyone because there’s this idea of a strike looming and who’s going to run the plants? At the time, I only understood that whole dilemma in the way that my parents told it to me, and they understood from the way that their superiors at work explained it to them. We were not a family that read socialist or leftist media; it was just sort of this thing that happened. Now, getting older, I’m learning about labor rights and making these connections. I think a lot about the culture and norms we grow up with, that I didn’t notice until I was out of it. My journalism background helped me contextualize my own world, and helped me understand my childhood and the place I grew up in better.

JD: The characters and places in the book feel very fleshed out in a journalistic type of way with your attention to detail and everyone’s humanity. Audrey aspired to go to New York City to get away from her past, which prevented her from being close to the people from her hometown. I also sense that cultural expectations from her immigrant Chinese parents weigh heavily on Audrey so much that she’s developed this intense fear of failure. How does this track with your trajectory to New York City? How does it tie into how we think about immigrant parents, that pressure to do better and gain upward mobility?

DC: Something that I really love about the novel is that Audrey changes her mind about the stories that she’s told herself about people in her life. When she says, ​“My best friend and I fell out and we don’t talk anymore” — like, is that really true? What role did she play in that? Audrey spent her whole childhood telling herself, ​“I can’t wait to get out of here.” That’s definitely something I’ve wrestled with a lot in my life. If you know you’re going to leave, why would you invest in these relationships? Did I cut myself off from people, or was this really an isolating place to grow up? Did I contribute to that isolation by being really self protective? Aiming for upward mobility comes with this inherent rejection of one world you’re trying to escape from for another. It’s a meta immigrant narrative for Audrey. Her parents came from China to the United States, and she’s moving from this small Midwestern town to this big New York City life. She’s sort of split between these worlds.

JD: And it causes her to have fractured relationships with the people in her town and her family. The distance between what Audrey wants for herself and what her mom wants for her. Your book has us, as readers, sitting in discomfort, but I see that discomfort being generative as a tool. There’s that dichotomy between how her fiancé Ben sticks out in this Midwestern town, with racial tensions and that sense of political elitism coming from the coasts. Audrey is a Chinese woman, bringing home her white fiancé. How were you thinking about this tension as you were writing the book?

DC: When writing this novel, I was really curious about exploring these tropes of the Asian American mom or the trope of an interracial relationship between an Asian woman and a white man or even just the coastal elite versus middle America divide. It can be fun and snarky to take a stance one way or another on these dynamics. For example, during the Trump election, the New York Times did all these stories like, ​“Here’s what real America is like, we went to this diner and interviewed a bunch of people who represent a very specific Midwestern or Southern perspective.” It was really easy to make fun of that because it was so clear they were looking for a certain type of narrative which gave confirmation bias, you know?

So when looking at these dynamics, my thesis wasn’t so simple. Interracial relationships can be so fraught, people have really strong feelings about it and a lot of toxic beliefs, especially within the Asian community. It was important for me to give these things a 360-degree view. I tried to consider what about a relationship like this — for these two characters, specifically — is so appealing? What about it makes it work and not work for them? I didn’t want to make any sweeping theses. In the book there are these microaggressions, but then there’s one very blatant incident of textbook racism and I wondered for a long time if that was stereotypical to put in. Like, does there need to be a very obvious racist incident for it to be legit to the Asian American experience? Sometimes racism is really random, and I’m just like, ​“Wow, I feel like I’m living in a diversity and inclusion ad.”

JD: I definitely know what you mean. It’s like you’re just going through life existing as a person and then it just smacks you in the face when someone else decides that you only exist as a category. Your book feels very reminiscent of the melancholy in the film Minari where this immigrant family is really isolated in their Korean American experience in Arkansas. You realize, ​“I’m really alone out here.” Can you talk about how you’re exploring experiences that aren’t always represented in media and how you’ve figured out your own path through that?

DC: I was so surprised when I moved to the East Coast and started meeting Asian Americans who grew up in these coastal enclaves where they felt really enveloped in the security of their identities. I just didn’t know that there were teenagers in SoCal or Flushing, who grew up not feeling the way I did. On TV, you see being Asian American as an isolated experience. There’s London Tipton on The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, or the Chang Triplets on The Proud Family. I actually thought that was the norm, and then I met people and found out there are entire communities and subcultures where you could grow up Asian American and not feel singled out in everything you did. That was just so mind-blowing to me. I kind of just wanted to bring to light one very specific experience that I had. At the time, I didn’t realize in the context of the Asian American experience, that my experience is actually pretty rare statistically.

JD: In your interview with the Longform podcast, you talk a lot about feeling plucked out of your Midwest town and trying to make sense of New York City. I’m really curious to hear how your life experiences inform your own character development of Audrey.

DC: This is something I’m struggling with, just on a daily personal level, but I still feel like I don’t really belong anywhere. In some ways, growing up, that was the default belief of not looking like anyone else in my friend group. I’ve had this underlying implicit feeling that I don’t belong, and I carry it with me in these increasingly different circumstances and contexts. At Atlantic Media, my first job after school, many of my colleagues were Asian but most were Ivy League kids. No one cared that I was Asian but all of a sudden I felt like I didn’t belong because I’m from a small town, because I went to a state school. Some of my childhood beliefs come back to haunt me in different ways. I’m still figuring out how to actually form connections and create a sense of belonging for myself.