In “Heirlooms,” your story in this week’s issue, Ben, a young man in Houston, is playing host to Mitsuko, the mother of his boyfriend, Mike, who’s flown to Japan on the spur of the moment to visit his dying father. Mike’s parents are divorced, and so the switcheroo—Mike going to Japan, his mother coming from Japan—has something of the setup of a farce, or an updated version of an old-fashioned drawing-room comedy. What appealed to you about this basic premise?
The mundanity was pretty attractive to me, you know? I thought it’d be fun to parse the ways that a seemingly commonplace miscommunication—a mismanagement of flight dates, which might be a fairly major logistical fuck-up, sure, but not necessarily one that’s implausible in scale—could yield life-altering shifts among everyone involved. I’m finding that found families are a recurring motif in my work, and when the members of those communities come from seemingly disparate, or at least parallel, origin points, you end up with a ton of flexibility narratively.
In this story, as in past ones—I’m thinking of “Visitor”—there’s a great focus on hospitality. Here, Ben must accommodate in his apartment for weeks a woman whom he’s never met. Why is hospitality such a theme in your stories, and do you have general thoughts about it?
The act of caring for someone is transactional, irrespective of the intimacy underlying each gesture, but the question of who’s benefitting from that transaction, and how, isn’t always immediately apparent. When I’m trying to figure who a character is, and why they are the way that they are, I spend a pretty inordinate amount of time circling around their love languages. The ways that a character expresses their affection, or their inability to conjure it, tells me a good deal about what might drive them in the midst of any particular story. And what might be even more interesting to me are the roads a character navigates (or doesn’t) toward that self-realization. In a lot of ways, the creases in a character’s relationships—whether they’re platonic or romantic or familial—are the spaces that I’m most interested in parsing: they yield tensions that can be trickier to define, and consequently more fascinating to untangle.
At the same time, hospitality also ties into the pillars of pleasure and comfort. The way one pleasure ranks in relation to another for a character tells me just as much about them as their desires and disdains and all of the other details—and what’s especially fun is when those pleasures differ wildly among folks in a relationship, or the simulacrum of a relationship. So if the comfort implicit in physical intimacy (or the type of physical intimacy, or the degree of physical intimacy) is less important to a character than sharing a childhood recipe, or telling a story about a relative that’s been passed through their family for decades, then the first thing I’m wondering is, Why, and then, How will this impact their respective revolutions among other characters? I think it’s always a trip to fool around with how much of themselves characters give one another (or don’t) and under what circumstances (and why).
The story often flashes back to scenes from the relationship between Ben, who’s Black, and Mike, who’s Asian-American. What’s the nature of their relationship—what keeps them together in a turbulent situation?
Most of the narrative is concerned with their trying to figure out that exact thing—like, what do you call a romantic relationship whose undefined corners overtake the vision of what its participants believe a relationship should be? One way of playing with that narrative, for me, was splitting the novel that this story’s pulled from into two voices: Benson’s and Mike’s. I’m a little infatuated with how shifting vantage points and time lines around a single inciting incident can invert that moment’s emotional weight; giving both men room to speak on the situation felt like one way to arrive at a clearer sense of where their relationship was taking them, and how they end up where they do. And then there’s the larger question of what each character believes that a lasting relationship between two queer cis men, living as minorities in the States, can ultimately look like (or if there even is an “ultimately” to consider).
Neither of them has a roadmap, so to speak, in the way that their straight friends and peers do. They don’t have comps. So each of them has learned by doing, and trying, and failing, and failing again, and fucking things up into some semblance of joy, and attempting to reconjure that joy in whatever form that they can, even if it hurts them and those around them—and then they have to figure out how to deal with that. It was really important to me to avoid being prescriptive regarding their relationship—what interested me the most was Mike and Benson’s attempts to figure it out on their own terms, whatever those looked like.
But anyway. It isn’t as if neither of them can leave, because the door is open. And they both know that the door is open (which is very different from its just being open). But they choose to stay (maybe). So figuring out whether it’s for one another, or for themselves, or for some other thing that they can’t quite define is the journey that I’m interested in taking with them.
“Heirlooms” is adapted from your novel “Memorial,” which will be published in October. How does this story fit into the overarching narrative of the novel, and how do its themes resonate with those of the novel?
The story is one running thread in a novel consisting of many shades of thick and thin threads. I’ve been calling “Memorial” “a gay slacker dramedy,” which I stand by, in that it’s a narrative whose trajectories are neither hard-line nor without definition. And I’ve been calling it “a lowercase love story,” which I also stand by, in that its focal points are the quieter moments inhabiting each character’s negotiations of one another. One buddy of mine read it early and called it a novel about ambiguity, and a few other friends said they thought it was about how to find a home, and what made a home, and whether a lasting home is out there for anyone. I’d just as soon say it’s about two queer dudes in Houston trying to figure their shit out, and then one of their mothers enters the picture to help them, sort of.
A large part of what got me to finish the book was trying to condense the narrative’s themes into something tangible, whatever that looked like. So I’m taking a lot of joy, which has been hard to come by lately, from seeing readers contort them and form their own impressions of where each character ends up.
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Bryan Washington on “Lowercase Love Stories” - The New Yorker
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