Yiming Ma and I first met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference in 2019. We were in the same workshop, where he was working on the vignette form that would later make up the structure of his inventive debut novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us. I remember being struck by his path to writing, which began with an ambitious career in tech that forked into a passion for the page.
This tension is clear in his novel, which sets up a dystopian future where memories—told as stories—are accessible through an invention called Mindbanks, and shareable among citizens and government entities alike. The novel begins when our narrator decides to release his mother’s memory “epics” after her death, many of them arguably critical of the authoritarian Qin government (formerly China). Through his courageous choice, we’re introduced to a series of vignettes that give us glimpses of this new, frightening world: a boy offers charity to his childhood love after the world war that destroyed her family and raised Qin to global dominance, a sumo wrestler from the since-incinerated Japan reunites with his elderly mother, a female writer and her mentor inadvertently become two of the sole survivors of the Chrysanthemum Virus after their town is locked down for quarantine. More chilling than the imaginative spaces these vignettes go is how familiar these tragedies feel to our present day.
As the publication date of These Memories neared, Yiming and I discussed his novel over email, while trading texts about life updates and creative ventures. That our current technology enabled these glimpses into each other’s lives to dovetail with our conversation about storytelling, agency, censorship, and AI was its own commentary on the impossible tangle that is technological advancement and human connection.
Lillian Li: This is such a structurally unique novel, made almost entirely of vignettes that can be read in any order. What inspired you to go down a more experimental route?
Yiming Ma: Have you heard of Olga Tokarzuk? Her book Flights was the first time that I heard of the term constellation novel. It was a revelation to me.
I just arrived in my studio at the Millay Colony, which I didn’t realize would be in this massive and beautiful barn. Here in upstate New York, I can finally see the stars. That night sky is truly the inspiration for my structure: a constellation of memories/stories that can each stand on their own and shine brightly, but also combine to form some greater power.
LL: Constellation is an apt term. It speaks to our ancient inclination to group things, and to project over that grouping a shape, image, even narrative.
I’m interested to know how Flights inspired you and/or taught you the structure of a constellation novel, and what the experience was like to go from reading one to writing one. Any learning curves or dead ends along the way?
I am both fascinated and terrified by the nature of censorship.
YM: Flights blew me away with how it was able to hold together thematically, despite its 116 narrative passages differing greatly in content, form, and length. What I took most from Tokarzuk’s Flights is that artistic forms do not have to be so absolute in their definitions.
These Memories is a novel but also, it’s structured as a collection of banned memories, banned stories. At the beginning, I worried about the invisible lines between different forms, whether they truly mattered; later, I came across an interview Tokarzuk did in the Yale Review in which she described borders as “one of the most amazing ideas humanity has ever devised: to cut yourself off, delimit the zone of your influences, divide into ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Especially in Central Europe… the borders have ceaselessly changed depending on political shifts… devised by people arbitrarily.”
Flights gave me a sense of permission, the courage to ignore the borders within fiction that can also sometimes seem arbitrary. I chose to believe that regardless of how the publishing machine might one day market my book, that the right readers would eventually find it. And that to them, it would feel like reconnecting with a long-lost brother, or discovering some other kin that they never knew they had.
LL: That seems very freeing, and potentially frightening, to relinquish control like that. In the prologue, your book gives permission to the reader to pick and choose which vignettes they want to read, in the order they want to read them, even providing a map to help them do so. I have to admit that my first read through I went the traditional route and read them in order, but my second turn through I’m picking and choosing. Given that order is an illusion in your book, how did you choose the current order as it’s been printed?
YM: It’s fascinating to read you describing order as an illusion uniquely in the novel, when I believe that order can often be intrinsically artificial, especially in story collections when a reader objectively has the power to flip to whatever chapter or tale they wish at any moment. By actively relinquishing control of the order in my prologue, I truly felt as if it was an act of reclaiming power rather than losing it.
A vast majority of readers do follow the original order, so it did require significant consideration to arrive at those decisions. Certainly, it did not start in that order…
LL: That’s true, a reader can read a novel in whatever order they want to, like those who always read the last page first. So I suppose it’s the permission you grant that feels unique to me. You even go beyond permission with the narrator actively encouraging people to choose their own order, like choosing their own adventure, or fate. “Embrace your freedom,” he tells us.
The narrator is grappling with this decision himself, to continue going down the path set for him by society—which would be to delete the blacklisted memories he’s inherited from his mother—or to follow what he believes is right by uploading the memories to the public domain. The memories themselves are incredibly varied (from folk tales to a new immigrant’s story to a pandemic thriller), but what they share is that they have been labeled as dangerous by the authorities. What a government bans is so telling of what they fear will be their unmaking. What was the relationship for you as the writer between creating these memories and figuring out why this dystopian government has censored them?
YM: I am both fascinated and terrified by the nature of censorship, namely its duality of explicitness and the vast room often left to interpretation. As the narrator grapples with the memories left by his mother, I wanted him to also question why certain memories were banned, because in reality, there is always ambiguity—a human or AI authority figure must eventually make a decision in situations that are mostly not so black and white.
How can one not be seduced by the memories of strangers?
I wanted readers to recognize the power of such uncertainty, in how ambiguity may expand the scope of power. Fear is created, whether or not that was the original intention of a ban. Especially if the line is blurry, how close do you want to get? What if you belong to an identity group that is less powerful? The most careful people I know regarding borders, always ensuring that their documents are in order, are immigrants. In many cases, the more precarious one’s situation is, the less they may feel like they can afford to risk. The less they may feel like they can afford to resist.
Another theme I wanted to highlight through my collection of memories is how the same ideas once celebrated can later be disowned. History reveals how precarious the dominant beliefs of any period can be. When the author and artist Tessa Hulls was reading my novel, she texted me asking whether the exploding Chrysanthemum on my cover was a reference to China’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, a brief period starting in 1956 in which Mao encouraged intellectuals to speak freely, to “let one hundred flowers bloom in social science and arts and let one hundred points of view be expressed in the field of science.” Unfortunately, the very ideas and critiques invited became the basis for persecution once the political winds shifted. Highlighting this cyclical nature of censorship and ideas was important to me.
LL: With your fictional invention of Mindbank technology in These Memories, in which one’s memories can be uploaded and made public, you’ve followed the forfeiture of one’s inalienable rights to its logical and terrifying end by coupling it with the advancement of technology. How were you thinking of technology and its place in our current and future world during the writing of this book?
YM: Before writing These Memories, and perhaps after writing too, I had an intense career that often crossed over with tech. It’s slightly taboo in the literary world, but many people do intersect with the business world, whether in their past or through their spouse or even in their secret jobs at Google or Amazon. I used to serve as the Chief of Staff to various leaders, and I will always remember these competitive cultures focused on continuous improvement—in order to win. What winning meant varied across teams, but in the case of AI for instance, I find that most tech colleagues are keen to offhand the crisis of the labor transition to the government rather than address the impending job losses themselves. It’s really not difficult for me then to envision a future in which the advancement of technology does not lead to a more equitable or fulfilled society.
As much as literary folks like to denigrate business and tech leaders, I believe that many are constantly in a state of stress and fear. They are under immense pressure and may very well be afraid for the survival of their organizations. Nevertheless, their actions can cause great harm. Regardless of intentions, there can be a dark side to any new technology. Why would that be any different for a technology allowing memories to be shared—or sold?
LL: I’m always interested in the world-building within books like yours, which imagines a not-too-far-off dystopian future. It seems like you’d have to balance escalating current geopolitical tensions with creating entirely new conflicts and socioeconomic issues. At the same time, you’re walking the reader through this world with vignettes that can be read in any order. How did this affect the world-building for your dystopian future setting?
YM: It’s no coincidence that I began the Memory Epics with “Patience and Virtue and Chess and America,” set during the transitional period soon after the Qin empire conquers the West, rather than stories set in the distant future. The majority of this Memory Epic takes place in a former private school for wealthy dignitaries and families in Washington DC, now turned into an orphanage after the War. It’s written in a more traditional narrative style, as I wanted the first story to feel grounding for the reader. Since the War has only recently ended, and the Mindbank technology is still restricted to a few, the teenage protagonists of this story are in some ways engaging with a “brave new world” as much as the reader.
Here’s a secret: the first draft of the novel opened with “Fantasia,” one of the most speculative Memory Epics. When one publishing confidant read this draft, they gently advised me that their recent pandemic “experience with submissions… is that [editors] are unwilling to be challenged/don’t have the energy.” To tell the truth, that contributed to my decision to open with the story that arguably features the most straightforward prose and structure in the book.
All of those authorial decisions were intentional, along with the alternating rhythm of Memory Epics, the stories ranging not only in style but also length, set in vastly different eras before or after the War.
LL: The way these Memory Epics jump in time also allows you to create a sense of history, even as you’re spinning a future narrative, and one of the most convincing ways you do so is having references to other Epics within the one we’re currently experiencing, such as the armless swimmer of Yangtze, which outside of its Epic is referenced as a folktale from an immigrant father’s childhood. I love how your book makes the argument that stories are the connecting thread across generations of humanity. We can’t help but be moved, persuaded, and shaped by stories, and Mindbank technology is seductive because it takes the power of storytelling even further, into complete immersive empathy. So given all you’ve considered, are you tempted at all by the possibility of sharing memories with other people?
YM: How can one not be seduced by the memories of strangers? Not only to experience the world from their eyes—to appreciate what they notice, to embrace whatever emotions flow through them—but also to forget at will.
Like so much technology, wouldn’t such be the sharpest double-edged sword? Since we can all empathize daily with the pain that memories and stories can inflict, while simultaneously understanding that they may also contribute to what makes us human? Isn’t this why we’re so worried about the stories of our future being written by AI? But also, imagine how joyous it might feel to be fully understood because it suddenly became possible to share memories and convey your deepest emotions without the inadequacies of words.
How could you give up that dream?