Early in Muriel Leung’s novel-in-stories “How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster,” the character Mira addresses the listeners of her ham radio station. The young woman started the broadcast after earthquakes hit New York and acid rain falls on the city on a weekly basis. “When I tell you that disaster is a ghost machine, I mean it literally,” she says.
She would know. Mira has moved in with her mother after breaking up with her girlfriend. Mira and her mother aren’t the only ones living there — their apartment is also home to Grandpa Why, a poltergeist who also happens to be Mira’s late grandfather. Also in the apartment building is Shin, a ghost cockroach who befriends Mira, and Sad, a headless man who develops feelings for Mira after hearing her broadcasts.
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“How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster” is Leung’s first fiction book, following the poetry collections “Imagine Us, The Swarm” and “Bone Confetti.” Leung grew up in Queens, New York, and moved to Southern California to get a PhD at USC; she is now a member of the faculty at the School of Critical Studies at CalArts.
Leung discussed her book via telephone from her home in Glendale. This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Q: What was the origin of this book?
It started with the titular story. I began writing it when I was in Baton Rouge doing my MFA there, a couple of years after Hurricane Katrina. Baton Rouge is sort of a refugee city that has received a lot of folks who had to relocate because of Katrina. There’s this sort of acknowledgment that the rains are ever-present and that any disruption to everyday life was commonplace. Folks had this ongoing joke, “Well, if there’s a power outage and the meat is going to go bad, you just throw a barbecue and invite everyone to it.” I think that it’s such a contrary attitude to New York in which a lot of the folks, if there’s a power outage, the first thing people think is, “How do I get back to work?”
It made me think about the different contexts in which rain influences our lives. I started to think about what it would be like to be in a city that feels familiar to how I grew up, and what it would be like to have to navigate the constant presence of water. How would you survive that? Years after Katrina, there was also Hurricane Sandy in New York, where a lot of my family members who lived in public housing projects lost power for four weeks because the city was prioritizing the Financial District a couple blocks away, to get Wall Street up and running. I thought a lot about the informal systems of care that took place during that time too. So this is a story not just about one family and one apartment complex, but it is about the whole building in itself and how different people come to influence each other’s lives, even in a contained space like this.
Q: Did the Covid pandemic inspire any of the stories in the book?
I wrote so much of it before the pandemic started. I think the official first draft was somewhat complete before that started. I had shown some of these pages and worked with the author Aimee Bender, who was a mentor of mine during my time at USC, and she wrote to me during the midst of the early days of the pandemic, and said, “I can’t stop thinking about your book.” I think it feels maybe oddly predictive, but to me, it says maybe more about the ways in which different points of disaster do kind of repeat themselves.
As people, we become selfish but also highly generous during these times. The ways in which our grief manifests, there are always going to be some similarities across every disaster. So in some ways, it is about maybe understanding, what would people do if they come across a kind of disaster in which there seems to be no end? What would you do if you were presented with that situation? Some people would not survive. And then for those who are inclined to survive, what kind of actions would you take to make life more bearable? That was a question that a lot of us asked during the start of the pandemic: if you are self-isolating or if you are contained, what can you do to establish connection?
Q: Ghosts have been a theme in your work before, particularly in your poetry collection “Bone Confetti.” What is it about ghosts that resonates with you so strongly?
There’s no exact translation for the kind of ancestral entities that are culturally specific for me as a Chinese person, but we do have a practice of honoring ancestral spirits. “Ghosts” isn’t necessarily the precise word, but there is this acknowledgment that your ancestors are always with you and you talk to them every day as if they’re here. It’s not that the ghost is just someone who’s dead and has malicious intent towards you, but just someone who’s still a version of themselves. Their metaphysical existence is just different.
For me, it is about where ghosts come from, especially if it comes from the kind of death that we see in our everyday lives, which are a product of so many things like war, genocide, or just natural causes. Anyone who’s endured any of that does continue to bear it, but I also believe that the dead also do carry that with them if they are a form of ghost in this world. We’re always haunted by the external circumstances of the world of our individual relationships with that person who’s passed. It is about recognizing that just because something has passed doesn’t mean it leaves you.
Q: Was your process for writing ghost characters similar to the way you wrote the living characters?
There are some similarities in the sense that the ghosts also have emotional and psychic lives that are very rich as well. The difference is that in this world, the ghosts have certain metaphysical limitations. There’s something that’s also warped about memory, too; the ghosts, when they come into the world, arriving due to the factors of rapidly increasing death all around, carry some shock with them. There is a reveal towards the end about where some ghosts go, but for the most part, ghosts come into the world with some of their memory wiped, with the exception of Grandpa Why, who because of his particular way of moving through the world seems to have certain knowledge that others don’t. But for someone like Shin, the ghost cockroach, who’s struggling to remember, both of them find themselves somewhat limited by their metaphysical capacities.
And for someone like Shin who still carries the reminder that he’s still a cockroach and no one really likes that, it still follows him. There’s really no one who can commiserate with him in this life. He has a human best friend, Mira, but she’s self-absorbed at the moment, so he has his own sense of queer mourning, learning and longing. Grandpa Why is free in some ways because he’s lived a full life, he’s unencumbered, and he’s also the patriarch. People still have to pay respect to him. And there’s a kind of arrogance to his poltergeist nature as well. So some aspects of their living existence still carry through into their ghosthood, but for the most part, their various conflicts have to do with an existential crisis. They’re just different stakes because of their metaphysical limitations.
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