SF: Where did the idea come from to make Lillia’s family acrobats?  

RD: I love the circus, partly because of the willingness of acrobats to take risks in order to convey (and give the gift of) beauty. The juxtaposition of that sort of performative danger with the real and palpable danger of war created an alchemy I found both painful and profound. I wanted to give Lillia tools I consider iconic of the resilience teenage girls often show (and less often get adequate credit for), one being flexibility. Of course I mean this both literally and figuratively; I wanted Lillia to be able to change her shape to accommodate unfamiliar and painful circumstances. She wants, as I think we all do, to be able to transcend her own sorrows and difficulties — in other words, to fly. So I gave her aerials and a willingness to move, to transform, to get above herself and her own life. The circus offered me a beautiful, literal way to render some of these ideas (and I got to go to almost a hundred circuses while I was researching, one of the great joys of this project!). Both of my daughters now take aerial silks lessons. They came to the circuses, spent all those summers in Shanghai, read the novel, and helped me endlessly by being incredibly lively and thoughtful about what it feels like to grow up, and to fly.  

SF: Lillia is in an interesting position: she is a refugee living in poverty herself, but in some ways, she has privilege over people around her who are originally from China. Was it difficult to find the right balance? 

RD: It’s always complicated to write about socioeconomic and racial disparities, and also to write about anyone else’s culture or country. At the same time, I think most writers feel a moral and political obligation to imagine the lives and perspectives of people who are radically different from us and from each other. My first book, Foreign Babes in Beijing, a memoir about the years I spent in China, was a good training course for me in the challenges of writing about someone else’s home. In both my memoir and Someday We Will Fly, I tried to be as nuanced as possible; to ask more questions than I answer; and always to be cognizant of the very real possibility of getting aspects wrong. (I have a lot of readers of my early drafts, and I listen carefully.) Regarding my portrayal of the relationship between the Jewish refugees and their Chinese counterparts, many of the accounts I read and the interviews I conducted suggested that those relationships were “transactional,” but I don’t believe that; with so many refugees living in such close quarters with their Chinese neighbors, there were bound to be relationships of every possible sort, and I know of Chinese composers who studied with Western musicians, of interracial couples who met during the war and married, of children who were born of those unions. In any case, I’ve spent so much of my own life in China, and the deepest and my most identity-shaping conversations and experiences have been with my Chinese friends. So the portrayal of Lillia’s relationship with Wei, a friendship of great depth, feels true to me. I believe, and want to convey in my work, that what makes us proximate as human beings outweighs and transcends the forces that threaten to disconnect us (cultural and linguistic norms, fear, uneven distribution of fortune or resources, unfamiliarity, discomfort). 

SF: Was there any pushback about including the social club where Lillia dances, since it’s such a mature element? 

RD: I’ve never had publishers, editors, or readers ask me to defang the difficult or dark parts of my novels. I think we’re mostly in agreement that young people endure genuine suffering and that to soften the edges of their experiences is to patronize them and do them a disservice. I made Lillia young in her mind and life experience at the opening of the novel because I needed to show the agonizing transformation from being sheltered and composed entirely of hope and faith to being increasingly alone and sophisticated about the basest impulses of human beings. I wanted readers to have to endure those moments of revelation, to see Lillia learn that women she knows are being forced to sell sex, that we have the capacity to let each other starve. For those moments to be alive in the book, to matter, Lillia needed to be young before they happened, and to have to grapple herself with a question all girls face in some way: how much of ourselves will we be required to give? I write teenagers not just because I love them (my own and my students), but also because they’re such dramatic and shape-shifting hybrids of children and adults; they can have such self-awareness and even awareness of the world, and also sudden and stunning lacks of reference points. My own daughters are a constant model of this strange contradiction. I wanted Lillia to have some (potentially false) confidence that she could escape whatever might be required of her (sexually, or even just in terms of self-survival at the cost of the survival of others). So I gave her an innocent, sad, and also reassuring hope I think many of us hang onto even as we stand on the stages of clubs or in hallways leading to back rooms. That there’s still a possibility it won’t happen to us. Lillia’s naiveté is partly meant to show the turbulent and somewhat agency-less coming of age, and also partly to suggest denial, her unwillingness to look straight at what’s happening, because she knows that if she stares at the horror directly, it may burn her vision out and leave her hopeless. I’m fundamentally a hopeful person, and of course I did not subject her to what I consider to have been the worst-case scenario outcomes. I needed her to be okay.