Comedy as Coping Mechanism

Comedy as Coping Mechanism

Leland Cheuk on his new novel about the life of a Chinese American star.

BY ALEX BEHR


MY GOOD FRIEND Leland Cheuk named his Brooklyn-based indie publishing company, 7.13 Books, after an auspicious day in 2014. That year he’d been struggling against a potentially lethal form of pre-leukemia that had landed him in an isolation ward in New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. I’d met him in a writing class in 2001 and liked him instantly. I visited him on July 4, 2014, sterilizing my hands, making small talk through a mask with him and his wife, Jessi, and feeling all our actions and words had a physical and mental scrim in this disease land that shouldn’t be his land. We knew without stating it that my brief visit could be the last. But he still made jokes—always. In an essay about his illness in Salon he writes: “My wife tried to shave my head, and we laughed at her tentativeness with the clippers. She had never shorn anyone before. She left the back of my head mostly untouched, which made me look like I was trying to grow a chemo mullet.” Fortunately, on July 13, after a bone marrow transplant, his red blood cell counts moved up. The transplant saved his life. And later that day he got an email announcing a book deal for his first novel, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong.

Leland has been to many prestigious residencies, including MacDowell, taught at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and elsewhere, has two novels and a short story collection published, is working on another novel and collection, and has written numerous reviews, essays, and short fiction. Leland is generous, not only with the authors he’s published, but also with close friends. (At his wedding dinner party in 2009, piles of books formed centerpieces down the tables as party gifts; I snagged Out Stealing Horses.) His take on life can be dry and cutting; it’s informed and perceptive, but not pretentious. He’s clear about what he can—and can’t—do for his authors. (In 2018, he published my debut collection of short stories.) I’ve fewer friends as honest as he.

As the white adoptive mother of a child born in China, I can tell Leland things I would tell few others. At a bar, in texts, or on the phone, he’s always willing to listen when I talk to him about my son’s experiences with racism, both as recipient and—sometimes—as perpetrator. Despite our efforts, my son has internalized some negative stereotypes, much like the anti-hero protagonist in Leland’s second novel, No Good Very Bad Asian (C&R Press). The book is in the form of a confessional letter by Sirius Lee—a Chinese American comic and film star—to his young daughter. NGVBA dives into stereotypes and codes we ascribe to people unlike us, and culturally determined roles we inhabit to our detriment. Sirius Lee copes with bullying and the vicissitudes of fame, addiction, abandonment, infidelity, chronic illness, glass ceilings based on bigotry, Hollywood’s fickleness, and parental grief. So go out and buy it already. —Alex Behr

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Alex Behr: As a teen, your main character is saddled with the name “Hor” (Hor Luk Lee), and school bullies target him. Soon after meeting a comic and reality TV star, Hor takes on the stage name “Sirius Lee.” His mentor is a hard-living older white comic named “Johnny Razzmatazz.” How are stage names useful to you as a fiction writer, creating a world of Hollywood wealth? And how do names as a second-generation Chinese American resonate with you in terms of assimilation (or not)?

Leland Cheuk: My dad is named Hor Lam, so I borrowed it for the obvious joke in it. The sound of names is important to me—maybe too important? I’m all about weird-sounding names. My work has been influenced by absurdist, comedic novels that used to be more popular like The Confederacy of Dunces or Money. They have great protagonist names: Ignatius Reilly, John Self. Showbiz names have to have a ring to them, too.

To answer your question about assimilation, showbiz names are often used to downplay one’s minority status. Mel Brooks was born Melvin Kaminsky, for instance. Lenny Bruce was Lenny Schneider. But they’re also used to make one sound special. Like Ozzy Osbourne’s real first name is John. I chose Razzmatazz because of the word’s English derivation and it means razzle-dazzle. It’s also one of my favorite Pulp songs.

Behr: I loved seeing this YouTube clip of your standup act. What have you learned from standup that’s helped your reading/performance skills? What’s one thing you wish other fiction readers would do?

Cheuk: Thanks for saying that. Doing standup helps you listen while performing. Now when I’m reading, I’m always listening carefully to the audience at the same time. Are they receiving the joke the way I want it received? If not, I might read it differently next time. I might omit something in the reading that I don’t think they’ll get. I always pause after jokes to let people laugh, and I always let every last person finish laughing before moving on. And I never run the light (while they don’t flash a light in readings telling you to get off stage, they really should!). I would tell fiction readers to not just read their work, but to listen.

Behr: My friend Gregg Turkington, performing comedy shows as Neil Hamburger, has an abrasive style and has no fear taking on hecklers. In the Creative Independent he states: “I would get slots opening for bands, whether it was Tenacious D or Bad Religion, and I would walk off the stage as people were throwing things and booing. People would say, ‘How can you deal with this? Doesn’t this just destroy your ego?’ And it didn’t. It really didn’t, because I was in that same zone that I learned from [San Francisco punk band] Flipper. The zone of being like, ‘I’m putting on the show that I would like to see, and the people that agree with me, and there are a few, they enjoyed it, so I’m happy with it.’” Do you have that attitude, too?

Cheuk: Not on stage! That sounds a bit terrifying. My standup persona was one where I told a lot of jokes that played off a fairly bland, genial demeanor. But I hadn’t gotten to the point where I was comfortable dealing with hecklers. That said, my writing does tend to probe some dark and alienating topics—for better or for worse. And for that, I don’t apologize. I stand by my shit. That’s punk, right?

Behr: Your jokes onstage and in the novel often revolve around the marginalization of Asian Americans as an ethnic group. Does Sirius use humor as a survival skill? Is it successful (because he’s a success) or is he trapped? For instance, he writes to his daughter, who’s half-Chinese and half-Caucasian, “They’ll never see you as an American. They’ll always wonder where you’re really from.”

The questions I always ask of my work are: “Is it entertaining? Is it funny? Does it make the reader think? Will the reader be moved by this?” I ask those questions in that order of importance.

Cheuk: I don’t know if Sirius’s survival is threatened in a literal sense, though he does have suicidal ideations in adolescence, as many do. He uses humor to get attention and not be invisible. I suppose invisibility is a form of death or erasure. Comedy is a coping mechanism for him.

The question of “is he successful or trapped?” is basically the central question of the novel. One can make a good argument that he’s both. I hope the book is about America: a place where you can be a comic of color who is as successful as, say, Chris Rock, and a place where, by and large, many of the most successful comedians of color traffic in the broadest ethnic stereotypes (see: Gabriel Iglesias, Russell Peters, and so on).

Behr: Johnny mentors the teenage Sirius and is his entrée into a comic career. Sirius doesn’t seem to appreciate that he lives in a very funny household, albeit cruel, such as when the dad says, “Friends are useless.” Who was the inspiration for Sirius’s father?

Cheuk: Sirius’s father is a composite of Asian parents I know. It’s fairly common for Asian parents of my parents’ generation to say stuff like “Friends are useless; focus on your studies,” or “Why do you want to be cool like those white jocks? They’re going to be pumping your gas when you’re a doctor.” Real talk: I’m not sure Asian parents are one hundred percent wrong about this!

Behr: In Paris Review, George Saunders recalls talking with David Foster Wallace about fiction. Wallace viewed entertainment as a “problem” in fiction because authors need to control their impulse to be liked. He didn’t want to be aware of the audience—it felt like pandering. How do you respond to that?

Cheuk: I’m just not that snobby. Part of the skill of the comedian (and the author) is to entertain. Part of the reason that literary fiction has slid so far down in importance to the broader culture is that many of the most acclaimed books aren’t terribly entertaining. The questions I always ask of my work are: “Is it entertaining? Is it funny? Does it make the reader think? Will the reader be moved by this?” I ask those questions in that order of importance.

Behr: Saunders also writes that “writers tend to come out of families in which it is understood that language is powerful.” How is language powerful in your family?

Cheuk: My family is where it is today because of the power of language. My grandfather was labeled a Rightist and put in a labor camp because he and his co-workers criticized his boss during the Hundred Flowers Campaign [1956], when Mao asked everyone to criticize the Party and then everyone who did was thrown into camps. He and his entire family (my dad included) were persecuted, bullied, and denied opportunities for decades because he criticized his boss. My grandfather’s Rightist label directly led to my parents risking their lives to flee from China to Hong Kong and then seek a better life in America. I’m basically born here in America instead of China because of a few words my grandpa said at work.

Behr: How was going to China when your first novel was translated and published there different than what you expected?

Cheuk: I didn’t expect to fill a room in a museum and to be mobbed at my signing. Nor did I expect to be pulled aside before the event by a Communist Party official for tea, during which they lavished me with compliments, half of which I didn’t understand. Then I got a tour of the official Guangzhou radio station and did an interview. It was all pretty surreal. I just didn’t expect people to care that much. For one day, I felt big in China.

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Behr: You use Johnny to show white bitterness against any person of color who’s “made it,” falling on the stereotype that it wasn’t based solely on hard work, talent, etc. Have you encountered that attitude in the comedy world and were you expected to deflect it, or did you challenge it? What about in the lit world?

Cheuk: I didn’t really encounter that attitude personally while doing comedy in New York, which to be honest, is still really predominantly white and male, so much so that you have these all-black comic shows, all-gay comic shows, etc. But you hear it, for sure. You know a comedy show is nearby if you’re at the bar and there are two dude comics grousing about why so-and-so is famous and why they aren’t. In the lit world, on the down-low, I’ve definitely heard that stuff said to me in confidence. There’s a tiny kernel of truth in it, and it’s worth acknowledging, but on the whole, the numbers in publishing and literature show pretty definitively that white folks are doing fine.

Behr: Sirius feels self-loathing when, as a successful comedy star, he makes money “stir-frying” assorted stereotypes and verbally attacking audience members. He states in the letter to his daughter, “I usually picked on my fellow yellows.” He’s trapped into easy financial security through audience attacks and starring in trashy movies as a “type” (with drug and alcohol addiction as his shadow). How did you decide his career arc would go that way?

Cheuk: Well, I just looked at Hollywood now. It’s pretty out in the open that almost every leading Asian has had to make compromises on this front. Randall Park and Constance Wu had to put on an accent for six years while doing Fresh Off the Boat, a title that itself refers to a stereotype (though Eddie Huang aimed to reclaim and subvert that stereotype). For every Ali Wong, there are dozens of Matthew Moks, Ken Jeongs, and Jimmy O. Yangs playing roles that actively keep Asian in America from being seen as Americans. You can’t blame the entertainer for taking those jobs so they can have careers. The system is fucked.

Behr: Your protagonists in NGVBA and in The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong each marry or have major love affairs with white or biracial (Asian and Caucasian) women. Without divulging too many plot reveals, things don’t go well, but the characters are too complex to completely blame cultural differences. Did you know fairly quickly in writing these novels that each character would fall in love, disastrously, with someone who has a background much different than his?

Cheuk: I’m not sure it was planned at first. It just came out after several drafts and the issues of identity became a bigger part of Sirius’s life. I think there are a lot of white people who see racism as an issue of offensive words, when it’s really something that permeates every part of a person of color’s life. And sadly, that includes one’s love life. I’ve gotten a fair amount of fan mail, specifically about this part of the book, from Asian American men about the way Sirius’s romances are portrayed. They say they’ve been there, and I’m glad I could represent the issues they went through.

Behr: The novel is written as a letter to Sirius’s daughter, living overseas with her mother, and he’s estranged from both. The letter is sexually graphic and goes into detail about his addictions and rehab and fuckups. How did you decide the letter was the best way to share this story?

Cheuk: The epistolary form was a way for me to bring the reader closer to the protagonist. You essentially become Sirius’s family member. Which worked for me because he does a lot of bad things that you might not tolerate from a stranger, but we probably all have that family member who’s a bit of a hot mess. I thought it would be funny that he raunches it up for his kid daughter. Ali Wong thought so, too: she did the exact same thing in her memoir, Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life.

Bad taste is when a joke is too broad. Good taste is when a joke is very specific and yet resonates with a lot of people.

Behr: Not that any author has to stay with his direct experiences, of course, but why did you decide to make Hor’s family live multigenerationally, own a liquor store, etc., in a lower-middle-class mostly Asian community, as opposed to where you grew up in Silicon Valley? And what inspired you from your childhood when you were creating this intense, memorable (and hilarious) family?

Cheuk: I was tired of writing about myself. And if you look at the comics that become huge stars, pretty much all of them come from a working-class background. The famous comic that gets on stage and says, “So I went to Harvard…” doesn’t exist. Most of the famous comics of our time didn’t go to college. They started in their teens and started by hanging out twelve hours a day at a comedy club, taking tickets or serving drinks in exchange for stage time. Some of the bullying incidents did happen to me in school. There were triplet girls who made fun of me mercilessly. Dog shit was kicked in my face.

Behr: What would you ask a bully from your past?

Cheuk: When I was in grade school, I seemed to have a lot of female bullies. I’d ask: “Were you crushing on me back then?”

Behr: I was mad that Sirius left his parents millions of dollars, instead of all of it going to his daughter, especially after how they treated him (probably reflecting my sociocultural upbringing). Was it always clear to you he would pay them back?

Cheuk: While Sirius’s parents didn’t treat him great, they also risked their lives to immigrate to America from China, had Sirius and raised him in America, worked eighteen-hour days for decades, and mortgaged their business to put Sirius in the high school where he ends up meeting a famous standup comedy mentor. Sirius probably pays them off with some bitterness, but as with my family, you may not always like what they say to you or about you, but when you look at the biggest decisions of their lives, it’s hard not to be grateful.

Behr: If you could ghostwrite a comic’s memoir, who would you choose, and what would you ask?

Cheuk: Probably Greg Giraldo. I thought he was a genius. So smart. Underappreciated by the general public, who knows him primarily as a roast comic. Gone too soon. I wouldn’t mind picking Sheng Wang’s brain. He’s a comedian whose background is closer to mine. Went to Berkeley. Has a really deadpan joke delivery. I love his stuff. I’m curious if he thinks he should be more famous.

Behr: In your essay in Salon you write: “I’ve always identified and empathized with society’s underappreciated artists, perhaps as a reaction against my parents’ stereotypically Asian, professional class emphasis on material success, which struck me as pathological—both a distillation and misreading of American values.” Have your parents read NGVBA? If so, what did they think?

Cheuk: No, they wouldn’t read a Chinese book, let alone an English one. I’m lucky that way. I can write what I want about them. They’re mostly supportive of my work now. They don’t get it, but they’re not on my ass about doing something more practical anymore. What’s interesting is my grandfather was a political writer, and I ended taking after him. And my dad’s grandfather (my grandpa’s dad) was a highly successful businessperson like my dad is now. Since that Salon essay, I’ve become more forgiving of my parents’ worldview after finding out that like me, they followed in the footsteps of family members who inspired them.

Behr: In Re/Search’s Prank, John Waters is asked to compare good taste and bad taste in humor. He answers, “The difference is that one of them’s funny. Bad taste is easy: I wouldn’t do AIDS jokes, I wouldn’t do rape jokes. There are topics that would offend me to do jokes about, only because there’s no way you can give it a new or a witty angle.” How do you respond to good taste versus bad taste in your writing?

Cheuk: I just try to write jokes I haven’t heard before. That’s good taste to me. Bad taste is when I’ve heard the joke a thousand times. Like I’ve heard a million rape jokes, a million jokes that use AIDS as a punch line. Bad taste is when a joke is too broad. Good taste is when a joke is very specific and yet resonates with a lot of people.

Behr: Did you do pranks when you were young? What was your relationship with your brother, Larry, like, in terms of humor?

Cheuk: We’re not pranksters, really. I think we’re more absurdist. We like to take something ridiculous but real and exaggerate it even further. That’s what’s funny to us. We’ve always had the same sense of humor. I think it comes from growing up in a household where our parents just didn’t understand us at all. My brother went to art school. I wanted to write. They still don’t understand us. They don’t understand why we would want to be creative rather than make money and drive luxury cars and buy houses until we drop dead.

Behr: In your very funny book trailer, directed by your brother, you derive humor from extremely critical parents with heavy Chinese accents, such as when the mom says in a loud deadpan: “You so ugly!” What if someone racist laughs at your jokes that are playing on stereotypes? Is that a risk that’s worth taking?

Cheuk: While many Chinese parents do seem harsh to other cultures, I’ve also heard from readers who are not Asian that their parents were similarly harsh, so there’s something universal about a parent verbally abusing their kid. Part of what makes an artist’s art unique is finding the art that only they can make. It’s the same in comedy. Anyone can do a dumb joke about how flying sucks. The much more difficult work comes in telling a joke that’s yours. Not everything in the world is mine to write about. Unlike a lot of white writers and comedians who seem to want to write about anyone or anything, I don’t have trouble admitting that the entire world is not mine. I wouldn’t tell jokes based on black stereotypes unless it somehow related to me personally, for instance. Those stereotypes aren’t mine.

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Behr: We both loved the Sellout by Paul Beatty. A satirical novel, it’s praised as managing to “eviscerate every social taboo and politically correct nuance, every sacred cow, while both making us laugh and wince.” What, if anything, from that book helped you in writing or revising NGVBA?

Cheuk: I was well into writing my novel when I read The Sellout. I’ve loved Beatty’s work for a long time. I might be misremembering this, but I believe my grad school mentor, the novelist Michael Lowenthal, assigned me The White Boy Shuffle as well as a Percival Everett novel one semester. He had a clearer idea of the type of novelist I was interested in becoming than I did at the time.

Behr: In the Rumpus, you state, “As a Chinese-American, I’m weary of having to 1) educate white folks about my culture and 2) justify my existence by being good all the time.” To the LA Review of Books you say, “I was just talking to someone the other day about how I personally, as a writer, have started to feel weary of selling my ethnicity.” But isn’t it good to have writing that discusses things people may not want to discuss? It’s subversive in that it is funny. You have control. That must have some appeal to you?

Cheuk: Sure, but what if I didn’t want to write about me or my ethnicity or immigrants or refugees? What if I want to do something like what Téa Obreht just did, write an awesome Western about the Camel Corp in the late 1800s? Would a big house editor want to buy that from Chinese American author? For an actor in film/TV/theater, it’s typecasting. And a lot of authors have to deal with some limiting factor, whether this issue is race, class, gender, or genre.

Behr: Paraphrasing Matthew Dickman from a poetry class I took: We can’t really write about an emotional topic if it’s “solved” in our minds. That’s why we often write about the same thing obsessively. What are some of your obsessions, especially ones coming out in the novel you’re working on now?

Cheuk: In no particular order, obsessions going on in my book projects right now: wealth inequality, climate change, mortality, forgiveness, friendship, capitalism, finitude, and a middle-aged person’s comfort in contradictions and complexity.


Leland Cheuk is the author of the story collection Letters from Dinosaurs (2016) and the novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong (2015), which was also published in translation in China (2018). His newest novel, No Good Very Bad Asian, is out now from C&R Press. Cheuk’s work has been covered in BuzzfeedThe Paris Review, VICE, San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere, and has appeared in publications such as Salon, San Francisco Chronicle, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, Literary Hub, among other outlets. He is the founder of the indie press 7.13 Books. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. You can follow him on Twitter @lcheuk and at lelandcheuk.com.

Alex Behr, author of Planet Grim (7.13 Books), is a Propeller contributor. Her last interview was with the author Kimberly King Parsons.

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