J. B. Hwang’s debut novel, Mendell Station, is a gorgeous book about grieving one step at a time. Like many of my favorite works, it invites an intimate conversation between writer and reader. Miriam has recently lost her best friend, Esther, in a tragic accident and consequently lost her faith in God; years ago, she lost her father. She tells her story, we sense, not to preserve these deep connections, but as a way to seek them. 

Her crisis of faith leads Miriam to get a job with the US Postal Service, quickly becoming an essential worker when the nation is thrown into quarantine during the pandemic. She wants a job that is physical, and where she can be alone. Miriam becomes our guide to the invisible ecosphere that is the USPS, taking us on her routes through San Francisco. Her wandering starts to feel like a pilgrimage, the recursive argument she has with herself a meditation for God. She writes letters to Esther that she carries in her satchel, crossing out the address on the envelope and writing in “DEC,” the USPS abbreviation for deceased. 

With grace and humor, Hwang gives us a dignified portrait of the job of a mailperson, showing us how these essential workers are so often compassionate towards each other, working overtime to help meet demands. She describes in deft detail the daily labors of postal workers who receive no hazard pay and are often invisible to those of us at home unless we have a complaint. Hwang also calls out America on its conspicuous consumption during COVID, where we stocked up on supplies and hoarded luxuries, rarely thinking about the people who have to lug each of those packages to our doors—and how little has changed since.

Inside the mailer that should have had Janice’s book, USPS dropped an empty envelope at my door with an apology that the mail inside had been too damaged to deliver. It felt right, somehow.’

Annie Liontas: Like Miriam, you lost your best friend. Was writing this book a way to move through grief and a way to remember her?

J.B. Hwang: I wanted to write fiction because I didn’t feel like I could ever fully capture my friend who died, and I didn’t want that pressure. I also didn’t want to talk about our families; I wanted to invent new ones. Fiction gave me more freedom to explore questions of grief and their friendship. One of the conversations between Miriam and Esther is that family is not voluntary—you’re born into it, you don’t have a choice—whereas friendship, you do choose each other. They learned their first lessons of love from their families—in the midst of and through ugliness—but as friends, they can also do things differently.  

I don’t think that just because someone is your best friend, they can be with you in every single moment. It was important for me to show that when Miriam has her spiritual crisis after her dad dies, she feels this distance from Esther. And Esther too—when she’s going through her searching period, there’s this gap between them. I think the beautiful thing about friendship is that it can persist despite the gaps between two people. Even death is a gap, some could argue the most unbreachable gap. But Miriam’s love for Esther continues and they’re still friends through these letters, through these conversations in her head.  

AL: Miriam and Esther are, at least on the surface level, complete opposites. As someone who has a best friend very different from me, I appreciate the truth in this. We as readers are drawn to these characters in part because they are so drawn to each other.

JBH: I think Esther is such a vibrant, full-of-life character. Her volume is louder than Miriam, who is a quieter person, and she engages with the world in such an intimate way. She is vulnerable and open to it, thoughtful, generous, kind, loyal. She lets everything in—and she also lets everything out. Also, she’s no bullshit. Miriam is spiritual and quiet and contained, more guarded. When they meet each other, they have to meet a little outside themselves. They’re two opposite personalities with the same desire to love. They both need this friendship, they’re both hungry for a deep and genuine connection, and they don’t want to waste time doing things that they think don’t matter. They find weight in each other—the significance and weight of the other that helps them feel fully accepted and free. Rather than being threatening, these differences become a way to grow and be challenged. I think they appreciate the discomfort and the stretching that the other forces them to do, which is not at all like the discomfort and stretching that their families make them do. I think for both of them, it’s spiritual.  

AL: Miriam is going through a crisis of faith as a result of her tremendous grief. How do you understand faith? What does it require of us and why has that become so impossible for Miriam?

JBH: What’s interesting about faith is that people think it’s about giving over to something, a blind trust, and that there’s this aspect of “just believing.” But whether or not you’re religious, everyone has faith in something—any framework about what the universe is, what your life is, who you are. Like you could believe in democracy or humanity, the scientific process. Someone could ask, Why do you have faith in yourself? What proof do you have that you should have faith in yourself? And for Miriam, that happens to be God. And I’m a big fan of rationality, but I don’t think it’s everything. After she loses that faith, what Miriam is learning to do is to be in a state of not fully believing in anything, but kind of be in this state of questioning, being unsettled, living through that. And how crazy it is to be alive with all of the dark shit, the things that don’t make sense, the beautiful things that knock you off your feet. She was used to having a much more solid foundation of God and religion, and when that was gone, her physical sensations become really important to her. Embodiedness becomes really important to her.  

AL: We really see this after her father dies. Miriam goes from someone who might identify as asexual to a person who seeks out sex with strangers and the “immanence” of “real men.” Her lack of sexual experience is one of the big differences between Miriam and Esther. What does sex offer Miriam in her time of grief, and how does it fail her?    

JBH: When Miriam’s spirituality—the frameworks underlying it—are shattered, she wants to be flooded with physical sensation. That’s what sex offers her after her dad dies. At that point, she doesn’t have a spiritual crisis in the sense of, like, God doesn’t exist, but she sees her life ahead as so bleak and doesn’t know what to do with it or whether God is good. And one thing that will shut off those questions is the physical sensation, the weight, the heat, of sex. What I find interesting about that episode is that it ends. She doesn’t then go on to engage in romantic relationships or continue to hook up with people.

AL: You were a postal worker in San Francisco at Mendell Station. Can you tell us what that was like?

JBH: In the beginning, before everything becomes automatic muscle memory, it’s actually very hard because you have so many things you need to concentrate on at the same time. You need to walk without falling while your eyes are on your mail. You need to remember where each house’s mailbox is. And then there’s small packages versus big packages. Not only is there the mail in your arms, but you have small packages in your satchel. And you have to remember which addresses had a small package. Big packages are delivered separately straight from the truck. It’s a lot to keep track of. For Miriam, part of what’s so helpful about the job is that she is mentally fully engaged—it keeps her mind on a leash. But also repetitive motions put a wear on the body. There are obvious things, legs and feet; shoulders, especially if you’re carrying weight on heavy days; the sun. It’s a very physical job. And if you’re constantly doing overtime too, it adds up. Even your fingers can get sore. Until then, I’d never had the entire lengths of each finger be sore before.  

AL: What was it like to be working for the USPS during the pandemic? What were you and your co-workers facing in that time of uncertainty?  

JBH: There is a rhythm to the year—usually Christmas is slammed—so high volumes for extended periods of time was not a new thing for mail carriers. But Christmas lasts a month, and the lockdown wasn’t ending, and it was during a period when your body is supposed to be resting, in the spring. People were ordering so many packages. That change was hard, not knowing if and when it was ever going to end, when your body needs that break. And on top of that, there were staffing issues because people would get COVID. They tried to stagger start times to reduce infection rates, but that was a bummer too, because you normally have camaraderie in the morning, everyone chatting and cracking jokes. So morale was down. But actually, even with the staggered work times, the package volume was so high, everyone was stuck in the station for extended periods of time loading their trucks that you ended up overlapping with your coworkers anyway. It was constant change, new policies, and uncertainty. I was lucky to live alone, but other people who were living with those who are immunocompromised had to be quarantined from their family members.

Doctors and nurses, even outside of [the] pandemic setting, their jobs command a certain degree of respect. But not as much grocery store workers, not mail carriers, not sanitation workers. But that’s wrong. Without them, we’re screwed. We all need each other.

AL: One of the things I most appreciate about your work is that you have this crisp, unadorned style, even as you’re grappling with suffering, whether we’re talking about grief, or the exploitation of workers, or physical abuse between Miriam’s parents, one of whom has muscular dystrophy. Why is it important for the book to look at these moments head on?

JBH: It’s hard to ignore when it’s in your immediate family and surroundings—the scale at which suffering came to our consciousness during the pandemic, especially with the racial injustice that had long been present. When something is so complicated, difficult to describe, and all knotted up—my impulse is to untangle. To try to see what’s there, at the heart of it, the kernel. To clarify what seems unnavigable while maintaining that sense of confusion, grasping.  

AL: You write that the USPS is “a service asked to stand on its own while being accessible to all. This was part of its charm and sadness – a service not driven by profits or recognition… the only witness to the Postal Service was itself.” If we lose the USPS under the Republican administration, what do we lose?  

JBH: It’s funny, one thing I can agree with is there are inefficiencies in the post office. It’s often the source of humor and absurdity in the story, and there are real things that can be improved and changed. But I think in this age of maximum profits and maximum efficiency, we have to ask who gets left on the wayside. Like our libraries, the post office is such a noble institution that serves literally every person in this country. No matter where you live, no matter how far away or remote you are, you have this lifeline, this connection to community. It’s such a beautiful thing with no glamor and recognition in it. Most people don’t know that the postal service doesn’t take a single tax dollar—it’s fully self-sustaining, and it serves everyone. It gives to all—at cost. Don’t the Christian nationalists see how Christ-like that is, and that it’s worth saving? We as a people need to do everything we can to protect it, to continue being accessible to everyone in this country. 

AL: Can you tell us about the dead letter office in Atlanta?

JBH: I love the idea of a place where undeliverable, unreturnable mail gathers as proof of all these thwarted attempts at communication. You would think at some point, [the USPS] would just throw it away. Like, “We tried our best, too bad,” which we do with business mail, ads. It shows the amount of respect and reverence that post office has for first-class mail. We never throw away first class mail—we know it’s precious to someone even if it can’t get to its destination or returned to sender. I think the post office is so charming because of the things that it reveres.

AL: What was the most memorable package you delivered? 

JBH: I was always surprised when I delivered liquids—really large quantities of water or juice—because of the way it sloshes, and it’s way heavier than non-liquid packages. I’ve delivered mealworms, probably as food for another pet. I remember the box had air holes. You can also deliver a potato. You can just put an address and postage on the potato, and the postal service will deliver it for you.

AL: I’m definitely sending my best friend a potato!  

JBH: [laughs]. I would much rather deliver a potato than gallons of water.