Permission to not be legible to everyone
H. Felix Chau Bradley, in conversation with Arielle Burgdorf
H. Felix Chau Bradley. photo credit: Surah Field-Green
H. Felix Chau Bradley is the author of the 2021 short story collection Personal Attention Roleplay, published by Metonymy Press. PAR is a creative, eclectic exploration of genre, queerness, and intimacy that has already received critical acclaim. Bradley’s stories deal with the messy complexities of relationships—whether romantic, platonic, or technological. Their work brings in elements of horror, sci-fi, and mythology, shifting in perspective and form, because as they say in this interview: “experimentation through writing is urgently important in times of crisis.”
AB: How did you decide to order the stories in your collection?
HFCB: I thought of it the way I used to think about track order for my old band’s releases—I wanted to be sure that the rhythm and voice varied throughout: that the longer and shorter stories played against each other, that all the stories told in first person weren’t lumped together in the same section, that the stories from kids’ perspectives would alternate with the stories narrated by adults, etc. I knew that I wanted to begin with “Maverick,” partly because it’s the first story I wrote and partly because it is one of the more hopeful pieces, and that I needed to end with “Soft Shoulder,” which is the story with the most tension, narrative build, and clout, I think.
AB: Many your stories engage with the idea of merging/melding both as a form of solidarity (I'm thinking of the collective "we" in "Soft Shoulder" and "Only the Lonely"), and as a dangerous form of codependency or racial stigmatization in "Personal Attention Roleplay." How were you thinking about the practice of merging, and the divide between individuality and community?
HFCB: Yes, the attraction to and absolute terror of melding or merging with others is a major preoccupation in this book. It’s something that I’ve noticed in my own life, and in the lives of my friends, which is to say in QT/BIPOC communities that I’m part of—the ecstasy of recognition that can happen when we befriend, organize with, or fall in love with other people who are “like us” at least in their identities and political stances. This initial joy can easily lead to total engulfment, or to abrupt break-ups. When the connection is interrupted or lost, often due to some form of interpersonal conflict, it can feel like the most terrible betrayal, because of the expectations of mutual understanding that often come with early queer relationships, especially, possibly between queers who are also racialized. These betrayals also often happen in larger groups, collectives, organizations, and other forms of queer community, where the idea of “chosen family” is very powerful (for reasons that I completely understand), and they hurt just as much.
AB: Related to that disappointment in community, your story "Only the Lonely" is relatable for anyone who has been involved with and subsequently betrayed or let down by various types of groups rooted in identity. V was such a self-righteous but frustratingly realistic character. As a writer, how do you try to strike a balance between portraying someone like that accurately and not being completely negative?
HFCB: Everyone always asks me who the character V is based on—and all are disappointed when I tell them that V isn’t based on anyone in particular, that they are a collage of characteristics of many people I’ve known in the activist/punk scenes in my city. And I very much like a lot of those people! I think the secret to writing characters who are unlikeable, frustrating, selfish, or morally bereft (I’m thinking of Logan in “Soft Shoulder” rather than V here) is that I need some part of me to empathize with them, to recognize the parts of myself that overlap with them—I have to interact with the parts of myself that are ugly, selfish, arrogant, and cruel. I’m not sure if that makes the stories optimistic, but it does help them to retain some amount of kindness or warmth, I hope, even if the characters themselves come to bad ends.
AB: There's a mixture of spoken and written languages throughout Personal Attention Roleplay. In the story "The End of Gods and Heroes," Tommy talks about the loss of Japanese and longing to speak Japanese with her family like Shirin speaks Farsi with hers. The story took on a new dimension to me in light of Bill 96 in Montreal and the literal language police forcing immigrants to abandon their native tongues for French. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that, on the tensions between the control and preservation of language, and more broadly, how language influences your work?
HFCB: Language and the process of language acquisition and/or loss is taking up a larger space in my work lately. I’m currently working on a project that stems from my decision to start learning Cantonese, my mother’s first language, which she didn’t speak while I was growing up. It’s incredibly difficult, much more so than it was for me to learn French as a second language in childhood. It’s opening me to different avenues of thinking and meaning-making, which is helping me find ways to write that feel new.
As someone who is lucky enough to speak more than one language, I feel very strongly that the world shouldn’t devolve into an English-only default. However, the CAQ [Coalition Avenir Québec] in Quebec is stoking francophones’ fears of language loss (even though this isn’t probably happening on any dramatic level) in order to foment xenophobia and other forms of racism, couched in the rhetoric of “language protection.” The Quebec government is supposedly fighting for linguistic autonomy against the backdrop of anglophone dominance in Canada; however, as a colonizing force themselves, they of course have no interest in supporting the ongoing health and teaching of local Indigenous languages on the same land. Not to mention the fact that many Indigenous groups have stated that curtailing services in English in the province adversely affects their communities: for example, Cree and Inuit students in northern Quebec who have done their schooling in English will have far fewer secondary education options in their regions, putting them at a major disadvantage. Of course, reducing the rights of English language speakers also has a major impact on refugees and new immigrants to the province, who face enough barriers as it is without being denied essential services in English—the bill says that they will only have six months to learn French before they are no longer allowed to be served in English at government offices and elsewhere.
AB: You interviewed the Canadian writer Gail Scott about her essay collection Permanent Revolution. She was part of a bilingual community of women who collaborated together on theory, writing, and translation. How do you feel that her work relates to yours?
HFCB: I’m a big fan of Gail Scott’s work and it was a real pleasure to interview her; I found her to be very generous. At first, I was drawn simply to her portrayal of lesbian—or about-to-be-lesbian leftist radicals in Montreal (Heroine), and then I realized that what I really get ignited by is the way she harnesses her prose to move her characters. How language can be an active part of narrative, rather than just a container—that you can start your writing inquiry from a place of linguistic interrogation, that this might really get you somewhere new. How experimentation through writing is urgently important in times of crisis, or overlapping crises, which is of course true of the present moment.
I’m moving more in that direction now, after this first collection of stories, which are more straightforwardly “plotted” for the most part. I took a poetry workshop with the writers Zoe Imani Sharpe and Fan Wu sometime last year, and they proposed a writing mode that involves reading a text not so much for its meaning as for its shape and sound, and then, once you’re full of that, writing as freely as you can to see what emerges. This has become a valuable practice to me, and I find texts by Scott, and others whose rhythms I admire to be so helpful to work through or from, in that way. They unstick me.
AB: What books are you enjoying/inspired by right now?
HFCB: I just read Pamela: A Novel by Pamela Lu, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, by Samuel R. Delany, and A Fairly Good Time, by Mavis Gallant—and all three of them (though they’re all very different) reminded me how to enjoy reading again. TSR, TSB feels particularly urgent as a text, even all these years later, particularly Delany’s assertions about the importance of the possibility of spontaneous interclass contact in cities and neighbourhoods (sexual contact included, of course), as opposed to “networking” which is what happens when people only interact with others through curated social experiences (which are often dictated by urban planning and architecture, and the law), a problematic that resounds especially strongly now that we’ve been in this pandemic for so long, mutual aid projects are waning, and the developer-driven housing crisis is so acute.
AB: I agree; TSR, TSB is still startlingly urgent to me as a text. As Delany says, connections that are formed often save people’s lives when there is a fire or even when someone just needs to borrow a tool. And he does a great job of explaining how the porn theaters created a kind of community safety—not that he always felt 100% safe, but essentially that people looked out for one another in ways that the police failed to.
HFCB: Yes, I loved that he wrote about the community safety practices that arise spontaneously when people can gather regularly without being policed. There was a recent viral Twitter thread (by @nessguerrero) about how the new presence of a taco stand in a neighbourhood in LA made that area suddenly much safer-feeling, simply due to the increase in foot traffic, neighbours crossing paths at the stand and meeting each other, and the presence of people who now care about that particular corner and can keep an eye on things without cops ever being called.
AB: Yes, that’s a great example of community care. So what projects are up next for you?
HFCB: As I mentioned, I’m loosely working on a novel (maybe?) whose logic and language is based in my current attempt to learn Cantonese (both its spoken and written forms). It’s possible that this won’t be a novel at all, but a second collection of short pieces—it’s too early to tell. I’m also starting to experiment with translation (French to English).
AB: That’s fascinating about the different logic and language—so is the sentence structure different based on Cantonese syntax? You mentioned before that learning Cantonese is opening up new possibilities; I was wondering if you could speak a little more on how it’s informing your writing process?
HFCB: Yes, for example, I’ll take a linguistic concept from Cantonese that doesn’t exist in English (such as the fact that there aren’t really any verb tenses, but rather indicator words that can be placed after verbs to give a sort of texture to the action being described) and try to make it work in English, which results in a funny sort of linguistic dissociation. Part of learning a new language for me, especially one so different from English and French as Cantonese is, is how it makes me see and understand things newly—how the new language (how it’s spoken, how it’s written, what’s assumed within it and what is omitted) creates a disjuncture between what I thought I knew about the world and how I now need to approach the world in order to speak in this new way. This helps with writing, since what I’m often trying to do is to write about mundane things, or at least commonly experienced things, in a way that is eerie or strange—I try to reconstitute these normal things so that I and the reader can experience them anew or at least from a surprising new angle. This can be particularly helpful as a method when writing about characters who are, for example, sliding into new genders, or other new forms.
AB: Your Twitter and Insta handles make reference to the book Notes of Crocodile by the late queer Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin. Is she an influence for you as a writer, and what do you appreciate about her writing?
HFCB: Yes, you caught the reference! I read Qiu’s Last Words from Montmartre first, and found it compelling and frustrating—I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It led me to other works, like the films of Theo Angelopoulos. I find myself thinking alongside Qiu in some passages, and becoming utterly alienated by the logic and emotions of other passages—and I enjoy that push and pull. I don’t like to read texts that are totally comprehensible to me.
I chose Notes of a Crocodile for a book club on translation that I was reading, and some white readers worried that the text wasn’t “universal” enough. Of course it’s not! It shouldn’t be. Notes of a Crocodile is so incredibly emo, in all the sections about the young queers in Taipei who can’t make themselves understood even to each other: those character relations have definitely influenced me. And then there are those absurd, drily hilarious interludes about Derek Jarman (the late English director, writer, gay activist, theatre designer, and gardener, whose work I also came to through Qiu) and the eponymous crocodile, who is a stand-in of sorts for the subject position of queers in Taiwan at the time—doing media interviews, being analyzed in all its everyday behaviours. I love how strange those parts are.
I received permission from those two books, in some way, to not attempt to be legible to everyone. And to write from the part of myself that is prone to obsessing over the minutia of emotion and the art of others.
Arielle Burgdorf is a writer, translator, and PhD student in Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Her work has been featured in Tasteful Rude, Filling Station, Crab Fat Magazine, X-Ray Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. She was also a Lambda Literary Emerging Fellow for 2021 and her chapbook "I am an Unhappy Male Painter" was recently published by Greying Ghost Press.