How reality becomes fiction

"Sunbirth" author An Yu on how dreams and memory fragments feed her literary imaginings

In our Ink Book Club discussion last week, we talked about how An Yu’s Sunbirth came to her in the form of an image: people with heads replaced by miniature suns, who became the novel’s mysterious Beacons. We’ll have the chance to discover more about her process in our live conversation with her on Wednesday, August 27, at 12:30 p.m. Eastern. But in the meantime, here’s an essay by the author that offers a glimpse into her thinking.

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By An Yu

My dream last night began with me standing on a platform waiting for a train. It was at a station that, as far as I know, doesn’t exist in reality. But in the dream, I recognized it. The rusted iron gates, the arched stone ceilings, and the cramped ticket vendors behind dusty panes of glass all had a faint familiarity. I was with a man who was too tall for me to see his face, so I can only recall his chest, the smell of smoke, and the brown wool sweater he wore with a necklace dangling over it. The pendant was in the shape of a pocket watch. I remember him saying, in a deep and lazy voice: “This is not a real watch. It merely resembles one.”

I remember other things from the dream too, some that may stay with me for a long time and others that will soon be forgotten. As I’m going about my day, the carvings on the pendant keep coming back to me, but other details, like the train’s destination, had already escaped me the moment I woke up.

Beijing, the city I was born and raised in, is much like a recurring dream to me—familiar yet elusive. I moved to New York when I was eighteen and then to Paris five years later. In a way, I never really managed to return. On the many times I visited, my experience of the city had been fragmented. To paint a cohesive picture, I had to gather the pieces first, like editing together a scene shot on different cameras.

Most of my years of writing I’ve spent far from home, and the longer I’ve been away, the more Beijing came alive in my imagination. I found myself returning there often; not the city that existed on a map, but the place that lived in my mind. Over the years, faded memories made way for stronger ones, new memories were created, and as all this happened, the impulse to write about each of them has become more powerful than ever.

Memories are some of the most abstract of things. Yet in their abstractness, there is a clarity unlike anything that we can perceive with our senses. When we cannot rely on our immediate experiences to illustrate a place, a mental lucidity comes to us. How could we identify something as being familiar if there wasn’t anything alien about it?

The dusty colors of Beijing winters, the sweaty scents in taxis, and the smoke rising from roasted sweet potatoes are all vague and distant to me, yet the lens of my memory can render these details more vivid than ever while blurring out the surroundings. Distance is our friend. It is a filter that strains out the insignificant and leaves only those that we remember; the ones that are meaningful to ourselves, our characters, and our stories.

Our memories of a familiar place are much like miscellaneous objects in a box that have been collected through time, and when we sit down to write, we open the box and select a few that will piece together a larger sense of place. In writing, such memories are precious to establishing setting. Each time I revisit a place in my mind, I see it somewhat differently.

Characters experience setting the same way, depending on the mind space they are in. Setting is not inert. It is alive, moving, and shapeshifting. It is subjective and, as a character changes, the setting does too.

The gaps in our memories, the things we don’t remember — the shapes of tree branches, the time the streetlights would turn on, the texture of the walls, etc. — are spaces of wonder. Such empty spaces can be filled with the brushes of the imagination. They are where reality becomes fiction. In a story, a real place doesn’t have to be 100 percent real.

What better way to write from the imagination than being at a distance and ignoring the confinements of one’s immediate reality? Without a mountain in front of us, we could construct our own. Without trees, we could paint leaves in any shape and color. Without all of it, we might even build another world between the cracks of memory.

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