On Being a Double Other: An Interview with Cherry Lou Sy
When I first met Cherry Lou Sy in Brooklyn through a mutual friend, I was excited because I could count on a single hand the number of times I’ve met someone else of Filipino-Chinese, or Tsinoy, descent. That is, to have a parent who is ethnically Chinese, but born and raised in the Philippines, part of one of the largest overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia.
Sy explores this heritage in her devastatingly unflinching debut novel, Love Can’t Feed You (Dutton). The novel follows 17-year-old Queenie as she immigrates with her brother and Chinese father from the Philippines to join their Filipina mother, who has been working as a nurse in the U.S. for five years. Upon arriving, Queenie’s family fractures under the pressures of money, gender roles, and clashing cultures. As her family falls apart, Queenie must forge her own identity and path while suspended between two countries, two identities, and two parents.
Sy is a writer/playwright originally from the Philippines of Chinese and Filipino heritage. Currently based in Brooklyn, New York, she received her BA from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and attended Brooklyn College’s MA in English Literature as well as the MFA in Playwriting program, where she studied under Mac Wellman and Erin Courtney. She’s a recipient of fellowships and residencies from VONA and Tin House, among others.
I spoke with Sy over Zoom and a series of WhatsApp voice memos in October 2024 about gender roles and expectations, how poverty and money contort family dynamics, the fallacy of the “American Dream,” and Filipino-Chinese identity. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Nicole Zhao: What inspired you to write this novel?
Cherry Lou Sy: I was inspired to work on it after reading The Lover by Marguerite Duras because of the relationship between the narrator and a 27-year-old man she takes as a lover. She’s French; she’s young. There was something about how she talks about being French in Indochina, being looked down on by everyone both in her community and the man’s community, that really got to me. For him, it doesn’t matter because he is wealthy, but for her, a lot of it is taboo.
I started thinking about my own background because my mom is Filipino, my dad is Chinese, and they have a big age gap. This idea of a young girl and an older man made me think: What is that relationship like? What if they had a kid?
NZ: I wanted to ask you about gender roles because I feel like a lot of the novel is about these messages that Queenie is getting about what a woman should look like and be like. I was curious about why it was important for you to highlight all the different messages Queenie is getting and how she’s reconciling them?
CLS: The messaging, especially for younger girls, is that you are only worth something if you’re a “good girl.” And then there’s a definition of what a good girl is—someone who adheres to social norms. You’re a good girl if you follow the same path as your parents, if you have a career, get married, [and] have kids.
But I was also contending with how that gets subverted when people immigrate. Suddenly, those gender roles could be reversed, where, instead of mothers being homemakers, they’re actually the breadwinners. What does that do to the way they see themselves, the way they see their spouses, other men, or their families? I’ve met nurses who, because they’re the breadwinner, don’t cook, don’t clean, and then look down on their husbands because they’re not making any money. It’s interesting to see how that type of feminism can be toxic too. These women take on the patriarchal role—they feel that now they’re entitled to being the boss and abusing people. They’re like, I’m the man of the house now, so I can do XYZ, so shove it.
NZ: How did that observation influence your perspective on feminism?
CLS: I kept thinking feminism was supposed to be liberation for all, but if you wrest power from someone else, what [does a] responsible wielding of that power [look like]? Do you do the same thing to other people who abused you? What is the responsibility of a “feminist” when the power swings their way? Of course there’s independence, but what does that mean? Does independence mean you extract yourself from the family?
Especially now, having had a baby, I think about what independence looks like. I have seen stories of women leaving their families in search of independence and happiness—is that the right thing to do? For them it is, but for the children, it’s not. There’s a responsibility. Whether you like it or not, you are tethered in some ways. How do you express freedom and independence through that? What is bodily autonomy when you’re feeding your baby 24 hours a day?
It depends on each woman. It’ll change depending on where that person is in her life.
NZ: How are you thinking through it now as a new mom?
CLS: I’m still adapting because I’m also going through postpartum depression. I’m very aware that, whether I like it or not, a lot of what I’m feeling is also partly the hormones and the things that my body is going through as a natural, biological process of having grown a baby in my body. There were points when I just didn’t feel like myself. And I started questioning, What does it mean to be myself? That’s something I’m still asking. I don’t have an actual answer.
NZ: Thank you for sharing. It can be vulnerable to admit we don’t have the answers and we’re still figuring things out.
Related to that idea of what it means to be a “good girl,” there’s this idea of the “fallen woman” and “beggar woman” in the novel that seems to haunt Queenie. What does being a “fallen woman” mean to the novel and to Queenie in her conception of womanhood?
CLS: In traditional society, there’s this idea of what a woman should be. First, you’re a girl (maiden), then you’re the woman who becomes the wife, then the crone. If you go outside of that, you’re bad.
What if you’re engaging in premarital sex and get pregnant out of wedlock? This idea of chastity tied to womanhood is very prevalent in traditional society. Once a line is crossed, she’s already “dirty,” “damaged goods,” “unclean”—all these permutations of being a bad girl. Nobody wants to be that. They become desperate. Then, they have a fall from grace—if a girl has fallen, then nobody respects her and anything goes. So, the idea of chastity tied to womanhood is actually quite dangerous.
NZ: Is that why Queenie makes certain decisions in the novel regarding her sexuality that seem inexplicable and questionable? At a point before doing sex work, she thinks to herself, “How will I make the pain inside go away if I don’t try? I don’t want to be innocent anymore… I remember things my mother has said about… how you need to be aggressive in America.” She makes choices that follow in the footsteps of her mother’s sexuality even though she despises her mother in a lot of ways.
CLS: There’s two camps: Either you go further than your parent or the total opposite. Queenie, in trying to understand her mother, is asking herself, Is this what happened? Is this how she did it? It’s her quest to see if she is in control of her own sexuality. She ties everything to transactions at that point—knowing her mother married her father because she thought he had money to secure her. Her best friend, Yan, was also doing stuff like that—she saw Yan as being worldly. So she’s thinking, Maybe I’ll be worldly too. Maybe I won’t be hurt if I do this [sex work] first.
NZ: That makes a lot of sense. She’s trying to figure out if she really is going to become her mom or walk away from that path. Her best friend, Yan, was also in similarly complicated sexual relationships, and she thinks, “Just like Yan, I want to be carefree.” Queenie is not surrounded by examples of positive, nourishing sexual relationships. They’re all fraught.
CLS: Everything around her is transactional—literally, from the moment she’s conceived.
NZ: How do you see the differences between gender expectations in the U.S. and in the place where Queenie is from in the Philippines?
CLS: In the Philippines, gender roles are super traditional. There’s this term, decente, meaning “decent,” where someone has to always be a proper, church-going girl. There’s this saying, “The mother is the light of the house,” translated as Ilong no tahanan. When I think of gender roles, women are the basic foundation of the home. Here, not necessarily.
Americanness feels like it’s about the young, bold, restless. Conquering, Manifest Destiny. Sexual awakening is something I tie to an American way of life. The mother starts embodying that because of the liberation she feels being in America as the breadwinner.
NZ: How does that idea transform by the end of the novel?
CLS: I don’t know if the idea of the “beggar woman” transforms, but there are bigger things Queenie now has to contend with, like violence against Asian bodies, which, in the bigger picture, is always there, like a specter.
I decided that, because of what was happening during the pandemic with all the violence against Asian elders, that [plot point] made the most sense. Also, from a metaphorical point of view, Queenie experiences the death of the old guard and contends with what is sacrificed in the name of assimilation—this idea of the “traditional” or patriarchal.
NZ: Could you elaborate more on what the characters felt they had to surrender in coming to America?
CLS: Most of the time I feel like immigration stories say everyone comes to America for a better life. When I was growing up, I saw this cartoon, An American Tail. They used to say, “There are no cats in America and the streets are paved with cheese.” When people come here, what they don’t realize is you have to surrender things to assimilate, to get the American dream. You have to forget traditions, your past, to remake yourself and reinvent. That’s how a lot of the characters in [my] novel were affected. They had to change to be more aggressive.
For example, Queenie’s father’s friend, Mr. Park, the laundromat owner, also has to sacrifice his own pride around doing “women’s work.” Same with Queenie’s father, who has to do menial work, which he wasn’t doing in the Philippines as a business man. They go from middle class or rich to this. It’s a big wake up call for immigrants, especially for the men. It’s such a huge psychological stress.
For the women, maybe not so much, especially from more patriarchal and conservative countries and coming here being more independent and free. What does it mean though to give up parts of your culture? Not everything from traditional culture is amazing; some of it is toxic.
NZ: Something else very present in the novel is this dynamic in the Philippines and among the Filipino diaspora of people being so focused on money. Ma marries Papa because she thinks he has money. There’s mention of the many mail-order brides and women who marry foreigners explicitly to leave the Philippines and make more money. It’s a dynamic I’ve observed personally as well, as someone also descended from immigrants from the Philippines. What do you think contributes to this dynamic and why was it important to you to capture this dynamic?
CLS: The dynamic about money in the Philippines is mostly about poverty. Because it’s so poor, people feel the need to make everything transactional. I felt that, if I wasn’t capturing this dynamic around money, then I wasn’t being authentic to the experience of someone from the Philippines.
When people go back home or get calls from relatives, it’s all about money, What can you give me? When you can’t give it, it’s like you’re useless and then they curse you out. For example, my mom has had relatives suddenly pop up on Facebook and they all want to be friends with her. Next thing you know, they’re asking for—they call it—loans, but of course they’re not loans. They’re like, Give it to me. My mom has been used by relatives.
NZ: I agree, money is such a huge source of tension and rupture in the Filipino communities and families I know. Filipino-Chinese heritage, [specifically,] isn’t often reflected in literature to my knowledge. What do you see as unique to Filipino-Chinese culture that you depict in the novel?
CLS: I agree that I don’t see a lot of Filipino-Chinese characters reflected in literature. The Chinese, especially in the Philippines, are already an Other, so I wanted to reflect on the idea of being an Other already in the Philippines and then immigrating to the US and being a “double Other.”
For me, just the idea that this Filipino-Chinese culture exists in the novel is already something major and different.
NZ: Expanding on the nature of Filipino-Chinese identity, I noticed that Queenie doesn’t resonate with Zeus, Ms. Flor, her mother, or other Filipino characters. Queenie also doesn’t resonate fully with Yan, who’s Chinese. That probably contributes to her feeling of alienation in America. I was curious about your own experience as a Filipino-Chinese and your experience finding community if at all in America. What are your experiences as a Filipino-Chinese person in America? Do you think there’s a way to be successful in America, achieve your dreams here, without surrendering a part of your past?
CLS: I felt like I definitely didn’t belong to Chinese or Filipino communities. I talk about this in an essay in LitHub. In primary school, some Filipino kid said to me, “Your people—Chinese people—are stealing Filipino people’s money.” I was representative of the Chinese who have been stealing from Filipinos for generations. In the U.S., I remember being fifteen years old and liking this Hakka boy from high school, and this Cantonese guy from my school said that I should like my own kind. Those two experiences encapsulate why I felt so distant.
I feel I don’t quite belong. It’s hard especially when I don’t speak Chinese. I tried learning Mandarin. While I was learning it, I felt I was being judged by elderly Chinese people who seemed to say, But why don’t you know it? It’s so shameful when you don’t know your culture. Even though it wasn’t my fault. It’s complicated.
[So] I don’t know if there is a way to survive in America without surrendering your past. You have to be in such an insular environment in order for that to happen. Some of what you have to do is forget things.
Nicole Zhao (@nicolegzhao) is a writer from Queens and daughter of immigrants from China and the Philippines. Her work has been published in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Electric Literature, Apogee Journal, and Witness, and she is an alumna of VONA/Voices Workshop, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Tin House Workshop, and Kenyon Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction and essays explore how things like identity, power, and technology facilitate and fracture relationships. She is at work on a novel and short story collection. Born and raised at the intersection of Elmhurst and Jackson Heights, she is now based in Brooklyn.
Cherry Lou Sy (@sy.cherry) is a writer/playwright originally from the Philippines of Chinese and Filipino heritage. She is the author of the novel Love Can’t Feed You, which received a starred Publisher’s Weekly review and was featured on best debut lists by Amazon Books, Debutiful, and People magazine. She received her BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU and her MFA in playwriting from Brooklyn College, where she has been an adjunct lecturer in the English and American Studies departments. Cherry is also a teacher with PEN America’s DREAMing Out Loud. She’s a recipient of fellowships and residencies from VONA and Tin House, among others.