Filipina Teen Struggles to Achieve Her Dream in America

Love Can’t Feed You

By Cherry Lou Sy

(Dutton)

Interview by Diane Slocum

Teenage Queenie comes to America from the Philippines with her Chinese father and younger brother. Her Filipina mother has already been in Brooklyn for years working as a nurse. Queenie loves books and dreams of going to college but nothing in America turns out right. Her mother has hardened during her years here, focusing on making money and expecting Queenie and her father to do the same. The family is in constant turmoil. As the years go by, going from one crisis to the next, Queenie wonders if she will ever achieve her goal.

AUTHORLINK: How did you get the idea for this story?

SY: I was reading Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and was captivated by the story of a young fifteen year old French girl who had an affair with a rich twenty-seven year old Chinese man in French Indochina. I had never encountered a Chinese man as a romantic lead in any story and I didn’t realize how much of an impact that made on me. I saw in the story something similar in my own parents’ backgrounds. My mother is Filipina and my father is Chinese. She thought that he was wealthy. I wondered what it would be like for the characters in The Lover to have a love child and I superimposed my own parents in that relationship and went from there.

AUTHORLINK: It sounds as if your life may have followed the path Queenie was hoping for. Did you draw on much of your own experiences or of others you knew to develop your story?

SY: To flesh out the protagonist Queenie and her world, I took inspiration from some of my experiences as well as stories I’d heard from others. I also did research on the subjects I wasn’t too aware of. Because of Queenie’s proximity to my own heritage and some of my experiences, there are people who believe that Queenie’s story is my story, and that LOVE CAN’T FEED YOU is not a fictional piece, but rather an autobiographical one. I may have even lost a friend because of this debacle. This person kept asking if what I wrote was true. I had replied that it’s not and that it’s fiction. She then questioned why I was talking about Filipinos in a negative light, and I asked whether she was insulted for Filipinos. Might I add that this conversation tired me because she is white and as a person of color, I do not have to write an ethnographic account of my people and have the burden of representation foisted on me and that if it deviates from her idea of what this people should be, that it’s false. We are not a monolith.

AUTHORLINK: How did you construct the story? Did you plan ahead or let it develop as you wrote? Did it change much in revisions?

SY: I learned how to write a novel by writing this book. I didn’t plan it. I didn’t have the discipline to write a novel. This may sound strange, but I didn’t even know what my novel would look like. I just knew that I wanted it to have a feeling, and I was looking for a container. I ended up choosing three parts broken down into sections. Initially, the book was even more fragmented and did not strongly follow a plot or clear timeline. That changed through the editorial process. Additionally, I was experimenting in the beginning with only using present tense and also began with the protagonist as a five-year-old in the Philippines, but these elements didn’t work.

AUTHORLINK: Some of your chapters are really short, most of them under five pages, many only a page or two, some as little as 14 or 16 words. How does this work with your story?

SY: There was one reader who described the “chapters” as “matchstick chapters” and I really liked that. Because these extremely short sections, in my mind, were supposed to be pruned sections. I come from an experimental playwriting program where structure was not limited to the typical Aristotelian story structure. One of the themes I learned from my playwriting teacher Erin Courtney is about the shape of plays. I applied this to my novel where I saw the shape as a grafted tree from two different styles. The first half is more grounded, the root if you will, and the latter half is the bushier unkempt scion or upper part of the tree where some parts seem undeveloped. It was my version of experimentation in this novel.

AUTHORLINK: Many of the novels I read are about teenagers, especially girls, struggling to get along in an adult world, often in a land unfamiliar or unfriendly to them or their parents. Shortly before yours, it was Malas by Marcela Fuentes. Earlier on, two others were A Country You Can Leave by Asale Angel-Ajani and Holiday Country by Inci Atrek. What is it that makes a story primarily about a teenager a novel for adults rather than being considered a Young Adult story?

SY: To your point, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s debut novel Purple Hibiscus published in 2003 is about a fifteen-year-old girl trapped in a home with a religious terrifying father. The recent books you mentioned suggest that the coming-of-age theme is stronger than ever and that it is still universal. That being said, my book’s protagonist, Queenie, starts out as a seventeen-year-old, but by the end of her journey, she is twenty-three. I compressed five years of her life, and the narration becomes unmoored the more Queenie assimilates. My protagonist also briefly engages in sex work and that’s probably not something you typically see in a Young Adult novel.

AUTHORLINK: How did you get your title?

SY: One of the editors I spoke to came up with the title. He was so invested in Queenie’s mother and what she has to say. Her entire point-of-view rallies around the phrase “love can’t feed you,” which she tells her daughter. After hearing that, I knew right away that Queenie’s journey was about contending with this value system that does not center love but survival.

AUTHORLINK: Besides just enjoying the story, what do you hope people can carry with them after reading your novel?

SY: I always go back to the mother’s words: “Love can’t feed you.” I want people to think about what they value. But at the end of the day, people will take what they want to take from the book regardless of the author’s intention.

AUTHORLINK: How did changing from your MFA in playwriting to writing a novel go for you?

SY: At a writing workshop a few years back, someone made a comment that I had an MFA in playwriting which meant that I was at the same level as someone with an MFA in fiction. I vehemently disagreed then as I do now. They are two very different genres. Even the feedback style is very different. In my playwriting workshops, we would read a play together out loud then we would give our feedback. Plays are meant to be heard, after all. You can’t do this in a fiction workshop. You must read beforehand, sometimes several times, in order to give someone proper feedback. An MFA in fiction also usually means that you have a built-in community of readers and mentors, which becomes important especially if you are building a writing career. I had trouble finding people to blurb my book, for example. In the initial stages of writing my novel, I did not have a lot of beta readers who would give me the feedback I needed. I had to take a lot of fiction writing workshops. I feel like I am always playing catch up because I am not as well read as I would like. It reminds me of the time I got made fun of in my graduate English program for not having read Walt Whitman yet.

AUTHORLINK: What are you working on next?

SY: I am currently working on a speculative novel about a family where the father dies, and his firstborn, a forty-year-old spinster daughter, tries to follow him to the afterlife through a medium to stop a family curse from activating. I am using elements from history, Taoism, the Chinese beliefs of the afterlife, indigenous beliefs, the Japanese isekai/otherworld genre, as well as the story of Er from Plato’s Republic to explore the idea of origin and legacy.

About the Author: Cherry Lou Sy is originally from the Philippines. She received her BA at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University and her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College. She is an adjunct lecturer in the English and American Studies departments at the College. She is a playwright and now a novelist with the debut of Love Can’t Feed You.

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