A Few Questions with Genie Giaimo

February 1, 2007

1. In one of your interviews you note: “I'll skirt the issue of what's
" literature" since that seems more of a question about the Canon than what
moves and affects readers.” In my thesis I try to re-conceptualize this
type of distinction between high and low literature. I am interested then
in what you believe your writing, in particular the Choice series can
offer to both the public and academia and whether or not writing in this
popular tradition can in fact bridge a gap that more “literary” writing
(and I say that very tongue in cheek) cannot?

I am not exactly sure what my writing can offer the public and Academia, but I know what I tried to do in the Allen Choice novels: I tried to write about a Korean American in a way that hadn't been written before, writing about an assimilated Asian man who wasn't exoticized and who would show all readers (in and out of Academia) a complex and developed person with race and ethnicity only one facet of his multi-faceted life, and to do so in a way that would make readers interested in both the character and the story. I wonder if the supposed distinctions between "high" and "low" literature are anything but false labels that change over time. I recently found an old copy of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises as a dime-store paperback, the cover a painting of a brooding Montgomery Clift-ish man with a bottle of rum, and the tagline "Could he live without the power of love?" running above the title. It screamed of low-brow melodrama. Isn't this marketing more than anything else? Now that Chandler, Hammett and the noir pulp writers of the twenties and thirties have Library of America editions of their works, with stacks and stacks of academic dissertations written about them, what do the labels really mean? I was fully aware of the way my Allen Choice novels were probably going to be marketed ("A Novel of Intrigue" was a compromise when I was hesitant with the "Thriller" subtitle. This was not for any elitist reasons; I just did not think Over the Shoulder is a thriller in the same way that, say, a Ludlum novel is. I was worried about false advertising, about annoyed bookbuyers expecting one thing but getting another.), and I was also prepared to be ignored by most critics in the short-term. But I was also certain that good writing is good writing, no matter what the cover looks like, and that over time good writing outlasts everything.

2. In one of your interviews you mentioned that you count Hammett as one
of your influences and although you mentioned other authors as well I am
using the old paradigm of hard-boiled fiction with an emphasis on Hammett
so I am most interested your statement: “Hammett was a pretty big
influence, not just for the Allen Choice novels but for me in general.
Hammett had Modernist aspirations and these revealed themselves in his
prose; he embraced the vernacular and brought Literature into the gritty
realm of crime and criminality, but with style and concision. Allen Choice
is a descendant of Sam Spade in that sense, but yes, Allen was also my
attempt to write a fully textured Asian American male character.”
My question then is: Do you ever feel the burden of writing in a tradition
that has been occupied by the white-male-heteronormative view of the world
up until fairly recently? How do you negotiate this genre that has been
bound up with these conventions without appearing formulaic or somehow
traditional? (Forgive the choppy nature of this question I do realize that
your character breaks with this tradition but mostly I am interested if
you ever feel this type of Hawthorne-ian guilt?)

Burdened by the conventions of the genre? Quite the opposite. I felt liberated that I could try something that hadn't really been done before, at least not in the way I was attempting. I relished in the opportunity to have my detective Asian American. No, what burdened me in a different sense was every time I saw a new novel being published by an Asian American that was about a young Asian American "coming to terms with what it means to be Asian" or something like that. I was burdened by the portrayals of Asian Americans in popular culture as Kung-Fu experts, Confucian-speaking wise men and women, prostitutes or Dragon Ladies. The hegemonic role of white men wasn't just with crime and noir fiction, so it wasn't very difficult to ignore that when it came to working in that mode with my own aims. Regarding the second part of your question, what form of literature doesn't have its own conventions? Yes, mysteries can be formulaic, but so can Coming-of-Age novels, as well as Middle-Aged-Suburban-Divorce novels. It doesn't matter what kind of novel you write, you are always striving to do something new and different. I think most people assume that only genre novels have formulas and conventions. Everything does. A haiku does. A sonnet does. It's interesting that you mention Hawthorne, one of my mother's favorite writers and someone whom I read at a young age. Perhaps his struggle for finding a new American literature in the face of the European legacy mirrors on some level the growth of Asian American literature, but instead of the Puritanical threads woven into Hawthorne's fabric, many Asian American writers hybridize American lit, using different genres to help reflect their own sense of hybridization.

3. In my reading of your text in conjunction with Mosley’s Devil in a Blue
Dress and Paretsky’s Indemnity Only I located a certain type of body
politics emergent in these narratives. I recognize that race, ethnicity,
and isolation are some of the main themes that you explore in your
writings but I am interested in whether or not you use the theme of
passive bodies and bodies in motion to speak to a larger issue in the
lives of people who can be termed “Othered”?

That's an interesting question. People who are Other are always under the gaze of the majority, and that might point to the idea of passivity versus motion, that motion attracts attention and attention reinforces Otherness. I think that with some of my novels there's a diffidence with the characters that reflects their hyperawareness of being noticed and looked at; perhaps this engenders a stillness. There's also the idea of motion as a means to escape the Gaze. Allen Choice runs all the time. None of this was conscious on my part.

4. Would you say that the memoir genre has had any influence on your
writing? In particular here I am referring to the immigrant memoir,
although I know that the Choice is a second generation Korean American but
in my own reading of your text it seems that there is a coming to
American, growing into autonomy theme- could you respond to this in some
way?

It's not the immigrant memoir that's influencing the Allen Choice novels, but the investigation of the self that often involves a memoir-like attention. Honestly, I don't read that many memoirs, but I do like the essay as a form, and perhaps what you're detecting is Allen Choice's contemplative tone. Any inward and intellectual investigation has in its untangling of issues a movement toward illumination, and an investigation into the self has movement toward autonomy of some kind. This is true not just of memoirs but of philosophy.

5. What does the temporary restoration of order at the end of the first
Choice text accomplish? Does the way in which Choice comes to understand
his own identity speak more to the aim of the text than the actual solving
of the crimes?

Yes, the solving of the crime - the discovery of "who done it" - wasn't the point of the text. I think that's pretty clear to most readers. The mystery element was the vehicle to write about Allen Choice. I'm not sure if there's a true restoration of order at the end, since there are emotional ripples from what Allen has learned, but at least the police aren't after him anymore. What does this accomplish? Some relief for Allen and the reader, I suppose.

6. Does Choice appropriate certain stereotypes of Korean Americans and use
them as a form of resistance? If you don’t think so what are his forms of
resistance in the novel, if any?

He knows tae kwon do but barely uses it. He probably could've learned Korean very easily, but never did. These forms of resistance aren't necessarily conscious protests but individualistic, quirky character traits. That he's not a graceful academic student perhaps goes against a stereotype, but this isn't something he chooses. He just does not like taking tests, and had no interest in what he was studying, so he dropped out. He consciously resists too much authority over him, balking at an infringement on his self-determination. Allen Choice sees himself as pretty isolated, and therefore probably doesn't consciously see himself as part of any group with stereotypes to appropriate and subvert.

Genie Giaimo is a Master's candidate at Clark University. Her dissertation is entitled "From a Body Acted Upon to a Body Acting: The Significance of Ethnicity, Race, and Gender in Contemporary Detective Fiction."