Entering the Twilight Stage of My Life: An Interview with Renny Gong by Evangeline Lim

I first discovered Renny Gong when reading Split Lip Magazine’s archives. His work lingered with me, so naturally I had to learn more about the writer behind it. After some light and casual internet stalking, I can officially declare myself a fan of his work, especially “Durian’s Snacking Problem,” published in Quarto Magazine—partially because of the sharp voice and partially because I’m quite fond of the fruit. 

Renny is an MFA candidate in Fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he is an Iowa Arts Fellow. As someone still in her undergrad years, his writing journey is truly inspiring to me. To learn more about Renny you can reach him on Twitter @rennyxgong and Instagram @renny.reviews!

He and I talked extensively over email about everything from fish bones to his novel to his time in Iowa. 

Evangeline Lim: What’s your favorite hobby? 

Renny Gong: My favorite hobby, by far, is playing cards with my family—shēng jí (升级, ‘Upgrade’) or guàn dàn (掼蛋, ‘Throwing Eggs’). The problem is there’s only three of us—my mom, my dad, and me—but both of these games are four-person, two-person-per-team games, so we don’t get to play that often. Probably for the best—if there were four of us, we would waste away, become enslaved to the game, this intoxicating and decadent game. Here’s an insightful little story: one time, we saw a grandma crossing the street in Boston. Like someone else’s grandma, just walking. We barely knew her, met at a party just once, but we got out of the car, bounded after her, proposed our idea, and then we were—now four of us—playing cards on a table in a Whole Foods parking lot for hours, abandoning our day, until the sun went down. 

EL: Ouuu that sounds so fun. I have to play it one day. Maybe drive by the Whole Foods parking lot if you want to join me. Okay, let's talk writing. Your flash fiction, “Fish Bone,” was a delight to read. I especially admired how seamlessly it balances multiple elements—both with the interplay of humor, curiosity, and reflection, as well as the dynamic structure that weaves together past and present. Could you share more about your process in crafting these layers and finding that balance?

RG: My actual father really did ask me (actual me) that question in the opening line: “Do you think white people know that fish have bones?” So I have to give him credit. It sort of sounds like a joke question, like haha. Or it sounds like a question that is meant to probe or metaphorize race relations, which, sure. But if you really think about it—like let’s be serious for one moment—it is entirely possible, or even probable, that most white people can and will go their entire lives not knowing what cì (刺) is. Pin bones, which is what they’re actually called in English, are removed from the fish fillet before cooking, by a person with a tweezer or a machine. What I’m trying to say is that, at the very least, a white person will never ever ever finish a culinary engagement involving fish and end up with one million tiny little bones on their plate that they themselves had labored to sort through in their mouths. That’s just not how white people restaurants work. Like fish and chips, what happens? You chew the fish—gnom gnom—and then you swallow all of it. Okay, so it’s really not a silly question from my father. And it’s not funny!! It’s serious. And! Guess what, pin bones, cì (刺), they’re not even bones! They’re calcified ligaments. So, much to think about. One more thing—one time, unlike the narrator in “Fish Bone,” I really did talk to a real-life white person about this (I went to white people high school). And he said, “You must admit, all factors equal, you would rather have NO bones in your fish than BONES in your fish.” But here’s the thing: my grandma, my father’s mom, she said to me last year, she said: “If there are no bones in my fish, I DON’T WANT IT.” So, how do you explain that?? 

EL: That is indeed probable. Come to think of it, I’m not sure if I would rather have bones or not in my fish. I hear you’re working towards your MFA in fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop! How exciting! Can you tell me more about that and how your first year post-undergrad has been treating you—highs, lows, and everything in between? Has your writing changed or evolved during this time?

RG: Every day in Iowa I spend so much time walking. The library is 25 minutes away, so walking there and walking back, that’s 25 + 25 = 50 minutes. At Columbia, the library was, at worst, like 90 seconds away. So that’s a pretty big difference. I miss a lot of things about undergrad. I miss my friends. My friend Christina just visited me and we had an emotional time reckoning with the distance between us. She lives in LA now. I miss New York. In Iowa City, there are about eight locations—the coffee shop, the other coffee shop, the Pho restaurant, the Chinese restaurant, the gym, the Writers’ Workshop, the library, the river. It’s like a little game, like Pokémon. Like the Truman Show. Especially since all of the buses in Iowa City are free. Recently I discovered the buses, and how free they are, and now I’m addicted to taking the bus. One time, there was a bus that stopped at a bus stop and I just happened to be walking by and I just got on the bus. I had nothing else to do. It kind of feels like I’m entering into the twilight stage of my life. Like dying. There are some great things, though. I live in a house. And it’s huge. My bathroom alone is the size of a New York City apartment. You could comfortably put a bed in the bathroom, that’s how big it is. Also, at 10am on the first Wednesday of every month, they test the Tornado Warning Siren. The whole town listens to it together and it’s quite beautiful, the sound. 

EL: I love taking the bus too! Except for that one time I took the wrong one and ended up in the complete opposite direction … I want to know what’s your favorite thing you’ve ever written, as well as your favorite thing about writing in general? 

RG: My favorite thing I’ve ever written is the novel I’m working on, which is about ping pong. My favorite thing about writing is probably getting into flow-state. Because flow is so mysterious. It’s kind of like sleeping, where you have to pretend for a while to be asleep before it happens to you. For me, I have to write and delete and rewrite and delete a single sentence for like half an hour before the thing can get going, if I’m lucky. There’s this New York Times series, “10-Minute Challenge,” that invites you to “look at one piece of art for ten minutes, uninterrupted.” A piece of art like Lee Krasner’s The Seasons (1957). And the first few minutes, there’s always such an incredible, almost impossible, amount of resistance, like “Why am I doing this,” or “I can’t imagine looking for another seven minutes,” things like that, but then somewhere in the middle, if you keep going, it starts to become very very interesting, and then when the ten minutes is up, you think, “oh shoot, already?” or “I could totally go on for longer, much longer.” And getting into a writing flow-state is kind of like that, if you can just push through the false starts or the self-doubt or the anxiety of boredom or the discomfort of being alone or whatever else there is, there will be something there. It’s kind of like faith. Or maybe like gambling. Like betting the house on the horses. You’ll get there eventually, surely, with enough houses and enough horses. And then once you get there, it’s really magical. Like real magic. You have all this control, the feeling that you can’t quite make any mistakes anymore, like the next word is perfectly correct. And everything else falls away except for the thing you’re doing, including time—five minutes, five hours, you have no idea. There’s also something to be said about the choice to focus. I kind of realized that anything can be euphorically interesting if you just choose to look at it for longer than you want to. Like The Seasons (1957) was Krasner’s first painting after her husband, Jackson Pollock, crashed his car and died. But the painting is this lush, verdant, exuberant thing. That’s the whole marriage right there. Also you get to see faces in the painting after a while, faces everywhere. That’s the other thing I learned from this New York Times article, this word “pareidolia,” which is the act of imposing meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual. But I kind of think that applies to everything or anything. I think that’s why I sometimes like to read and write basically flat things, like just information. Like receipts. Or population statistics. Looking at something for longer than you want also applies long term I think. I’ve been working on this novel about ping pong for like four years now. And in the middle, I had thoughts like I just want to finish this thing, I just want it to be done and out. But I just completed a big draft and now I think, there’s so much I haven’t said yet. Like for instance, when ping pong players can’t tell if the ping pong ball is broken, like if the seam is too small to see, they’ll (we’ll) sometimes sniff the ball, because broken ping pong balls emit a camphor smell. If you smell camphor, the ball’s broken. That’s not in the novel, but maybe it should be. 

EL: Wow, from now on, I’m going to smell the ping pong ball before I use it. How often does your own culture and experiences show up in your work?

RG: Hmm. I feel like 100 percent of the time. 

EL: Finally, I have to ask—have you ever choked on cì?

RG: There were a couple of close calls in childhood, and every time it was pandemonium in the house, chairs overturned, etc. But no emergency room visits. Although there was one time, when we thought, my parents and I, that there was a shard of contact lens stuck in my eye. It was back when I wore hard contact lenses aka “rigid gas permeable” contact lenses aka “Ortho-K,” which you have to wear overnight. And it broke. Like shattered, in or around my eyeball. My father drove me to the emergency room in the middle of the night, and a doctor pinched and lifted my eyelid and looked around in there, but there was nothing. 

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Evangeline Lim (@ev.angline) is currently pursuing English and Media Studies at the University of California Berkeley. She is an intern at Split Lip Magazine and a weekender staff-writer at The Daily Californian. Outside of reading and writing, she loves trying new restaurants, watching romcoms, and her pet turtle, Murdtle.