Cindy Pon battled her way through LA traffic to attend the LA Times Festival of Books, and not only did she brave the crowds, she even let me drag her to what we hoped would be a quiet spot (trumpets, French horns and helicopters notwithstanding) to ask about the Diversity in YA tour, her Phoenix duology and what she has coming up next. (And once again you’ll have to excuse my Cinema Verite hand held shooting…)
Byrt: Cindy, so tell me a little bit about your Diversity in YA tour that’s coming up.
Cindy Pon: Well, Malinda Lo and I spearheaded it, and it’s launching in San Francisco on May 7. And we’re really, really excited about it – we basically had been talking about it kind of as a joke, like we should go on tour together! – and then we realized that both of our Asian inspired young adult fantasies were coming out around the same time (they both got pushed back to within a week of a each other), and I said, well we really should do this. Then we decided to invite other authors along the way, who write diverse characters or are diverse themselves, and we’re super excited – we’ve got awesome authors joining us at each stop. And I don’t want to name people because I’m afraid I’ll forget someone – but you should definitely check out our website at DiversityinYA.com.
Byrt: As the diversity tour – is this celebrating the current state of diversity, or are you hoping to encourage more diversity in YA, encourage people to read outside their comfort zone?
Cindy Pon: Definitely. I think that we’re celebrating how far we’ve come, but there is still a long way to go. Including diversity, being inclusive, often makes people uncomfortable, or it makes people angry. Some people are like, oh it’s not an issue, it doesn’t really matter, and then some people are like, no, it has to be THIS, NOW. I don’t think it happens instantaneously, even though that’s what we want – we want things to be right and perfect instantaneously – and I think it’s a journey, and it’s a road, and it’s a big endeavor that we want to go for. Nothing is easy, that way, you have to kind of struggle and work for it. So I think we’re on our way – I mean compared to what I had to read as a young adult, I didn’t see any kind of representation, or any books about me. I know that there were some out there, I just didn’t find them myself – and there’s just a lot more now, so we’re very excited about that. There’s dialogue that’s happening and I think that educators, librarians, editors, agents, writers, they’re all talking about it, and I think we felt the time was right to kind of come together and use it as a banner to tour under.
Byrt: How does it compare, being YA as opposed to adult fiction, in terms of diversity. Do you think it’s harder, in some ways, because of the restrictions on YA?
Cindy Pon: Actually I fell into young adult by chance. I wrote Silver Phoenix as an adult fantasy novel, not realizing that it could have been marketed or sold as young adult, and I just happened to find a YA agent versus an adult fantasy agent, and he brought it to the YA editors, and nobody ever raised an eyebrow about it being more adult. So I think there actually was more- the editors were more receptive. Silver Phoenix went to auction with three different publishers, and that tells me that there is excitement for including more multi-cultural stories, and more diverse stories, and I think that editors are looking for it. So I think that YA actually is trying to be more, to bring the change on. It’s just I think we’re in a tough place right now with the business – because of the recession, and publishing, you know, lots of editors moved or got laid off, there’s a lot of shuffling going on, and then the fear of e-books and all this kind of stuff – so I think risks are harder to take. But I do believe that some editors definitely find it to be a passion, and are still looking for multi-cultural and diverse stories, and that’s wonderful.
Byrt: So let’s talk about the Phoenix duaology – and Silver Phoenix (yes, I did mean Fury of the Phoenix, *facepalm*) just came out not that long ago – so what were some of your influences for writing a mythological, Chinese based fantasy – were there any legends or myths or stories you were read as a child that helped influence this?
Cindy Pon: Fury of the Phoenix just came out – Silver Phoenix came out in 2009, so Fury of the Phoenix is the sequel. And for Silver Phoenix I actually had to do as much research as any other average American. I grew up with the more well known folklore stories that are tied to holidays, but not anything – I came from a family where I wasn’t read to a lot, so whatever I found, I found by myself, and I grew up reading the stories that I found, which weren’t Asian based or Chinese based. So I actually had to do research myself, and I happened to find this Book of Bestiary that’s a very, very ancient Chinese book that the average Chinese doesn’t know – it’s 2,000 years old, and it has pages and pages of monsters and trees and fruits and different mountains and lakes and creeks and gods and things like that – and I used that as an inspiration for both Silver Phoenix and Fury of the Phoenix, and I also made up stuff, which was the fun part. That’s what authors do – they will be inspired by a certain culture, but they will make up stuff too. So yeah, I did both.
Byrt: In terms of Chinese influences growing up – if reading wasn’t a factor, were there any films or anything that you really identified with growing up, in terms of the Chinese / Chinese American experience?
Cindy Pon: No. (laughs) I’m awful!
Byrt: You’re like, I’m American!
Cindy Pon: I’m awful. I was just a typical- I had friends who would do all of the dramas, and all of that stuff, with the Chinese language, and they’d watch it with their parents. My family was- they would be watching the Chinese stuff in the living room, and I had my little TV and I’d be watching all the American shows. I did some research and watched a lot of the Wuxia movies that made it over from China, but that was research after the fact – I didn’t see it before and I was quite surprised when a lot of people were like, oh, you wrote a Wuxia. And I was like, really? I did? Can you tell me a little bit more about this? It sounds like a very interesting genre, and I think it does fit in it, some ways – but not perfectly – but I was very surprised that the fans of it were telling me that’s how it was, and it was quite by accident. Happy accident.
Byrt: From the first book to the second – with Zhong Ye, there was a major evolution in terms of being the villain in the first book and then in the second book he really was the protagonist. Can you talk a little bit about that process of taking someone we all hated from the first book and making us care about him in the second?
Cindy Pon: When I thought about the second novel- I knew that I needed to have both the storylines of Silver Phoenix and Ai Ling, but the minute I thought about it, I knew that I needed it to be narrated by Zhong Ye. He had more to loose, and I just felt a dual narration between Ai Ling and Silver Phoenix was too close, in a way, because they were reincarnations of each other. And Zhong Ye’s storyline was so much more interesting, so… I was very, very nervous about the whole thing, because we’re talking about a teen eunuch as a hero in a young adult novel – when are you going to see that again? I was afraid to do it. And my editor said, make it work and convince me that this is how it needs to be, and I think that I did. To me, Fury of the Phoenix is all about consequences, from what happened in Silver Phoenix, the choice. What Ai Ling had to do, no matter why she did it – if the gods wanted her to, if it was the right thing, whatever she did – she had to suffer the consequences from the first book. You don’t just do this fancy heroine thing and then you go, la-dee-dah, and everything is good – that’s not how life works. And for Zhong Ye, I just love great characters, and I just kind of wanted to juxtapose the storyline between Ai Ling and Zhong Ye, because it shows that they made- they thought about the same things, they made similar choices, and how you can really go the wrong way, even if it’s with the best intentions – the best intentions pave the way to hell, and that’s literally what happens. I think that he is sympathetic – I’m not trying to redeem him in any way, I’m just trying to show that people make mistakes and terrible things can happen from these choices that we make
Byrt: And not to be too spoilery, but in some ways it was a very traditional Chinese love story, in terms of Zhong Ye and Silver Phoenix. Did you think about that at all as you were writing it, or is that just what happened?
Cindy Pon: That is what happened, because I had to follow what I said in Silver Phoenix, and we know that Silver Phoenix dies, so we knew that it was a tragedy. And no matter how gross and evil Zhong Ye was, he was still a twisted romantic, because he was trying to make Ai Ling love him, because he believed that he could somehow redeem himself. So he was kind of twisted and still romantic in that way – he stayed true to this love of Silver Phoenix. So, yeah, I guess it is traditional Chinese…
Byrt: As an American watching Chinese cinema, I’m always like – just be happy! Stop it! -you know?
Cindy Pon: I give you that too – I give you that too! There are two story lines, so it’s not totally everybody flings themselves off the cliffs, thankfully, because people gave me crap about the ending of Silver Phoenix.
Byrt: Really?
Cindy Pon: Oh, yeah. They didn’t like it at all – they were like, I would have given it 5 stars but I threw the book across the room after. They were very upset by it, because I don’t think it’s a very traditional young adult ending, and people accused me – when they read it, some people were like, well obviously she’s setting us up for a sequel. And no, that was the story. If I hadn’t sold the second novel- I’m glad that I sold the second novel, but to me the story was inclusive in Silver Phoenix. I mean, you want to know what happens to Ai Ling and Chen Yong, but they weren’t at a time when anything romantic made sense to me, and I write for the characters, to make sense, not for the readers to be happy (laughs). Unfortunately. I’m sorry, I’m very bad that way! But it made sense for them, to go through – to grow together in Silver Phoenix, so I think that it’s more rewarding in a way, instead of forcing it to happen.
Byrt: Absolutely. So where do you go from here? Do you have a completely different series planned next? Will you stay in your fantasy world and do something with a new character?
Cindy Pon: I do have a contract with Greenwillow Books for a picture book, which features my Chinese brush art, so I’m very, very excited about that. I’m not familiar with the process of writing or creating a picture book, and Greenwillow Books puts out such wonderful picture books, so I’m really excited to work on that with my editor. And then my next novel I’m hoping to write is another Xia fantasy that doesn’t include the characters in the two previous books. It’s in the very, very baby stages and I just know that it’s a half shape shifting snake demon as the heroine, and a wanna be monk as the hero. I have those two in my mind, so I’m very excited about it.
Byrt: Very cool. Alright, well thank you very much Cindy for taking the time, and make sure to catch Cindy and crew on the Diversity in YA tour.
Cindy Pon: Thank you!
Byrt: Thank you!
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