Interview with XiXi Tian, Author of All the Way Around the Sun

Welcome to YAOTL, XiXi. Please tell us about “All the Way Around the Sun.”

 Thank you for having me! “All the Way Around the Sun” is about a girl who embarks on a college tour road trip with a childhood friend with whom she has had a complicated past. Over the course of the trip, she grapples with her family’s inability to talk about her brother’s passing a year ago, as well as her growing feelings for her childhood friend. For fans of The Farewell and Past Lives. 

Stella is such a beautifully complex protagonist. She’s guarded yet yearning for connection. Complex characters always seem to have such strong voices. How did you develop her voice?

 This is a tough question to answer. I felt like Stella was quite a different character than Annalie and Margaret from my first book. She was much quieter and subdued, and yet she feels very deeply. When developing her voice, I tried to bring those elements out about her. In some ways, it helped for me to draw a contrast with the other characters I had written, to make her seem more distinct.

I was drawn in by this structure: present-day chapters interwoven with memory sections. What made you choose this narrative approach? How did you decide which memories to include?

I am a big sucker for books with flashbacks. And I think, generally, as a writer, you tend to make your own books reflect what you like to read. So for this one, I wanted to incorporate memories to help the reader get a sense of Stella’s relationship with Sam, given his absence is such a big part of the story, and yet without flashbacks, you wouldn’t really understand why. I wrote them in second person, because I imagined Stella coping with her grief by talking to her brother in her head.

 In terms of which memories I included, I wanted it to be somewhat linear as they grew up, so the reader would experience how the relationship evolved over the years.

The novel beautifully captures what Alan calls the "satellite baby" experience: children raised by grandparents while parents work abroad. This creates such complex family dynamics, where love exists but connection is fractured. How did you approach writing about this specific aspect of many immigrant families' stories 

I personally am not a satellite baby, but my brother did spend a year in China when he was four with my grandparents. I also know of people who were satellite babies, because I think this is somewhat common among Chinese immigrants. Even as not a satellite baby myself, I have always been interested in exploring this “dual identity” of feeling not enough for one country as well as the other.

One of the things that I wanted to draw out about this arrangement is how it might impact your family dynamic. How do you reconnect with your parents when they are absent from your life for so long in the formative years of your life? How do you let go of your primary caretaker (your grandparent) when you come to the United States? These are the questions I wanted to provide one version of answers for. I don’t have any kind of judgment around whether it is good or bad to be a satellite baby; I think these things are too complicated to distill down to a binary. But I hoped to show a nuanced portrayal.

Alan's character arc from childhood friend to someone who betrays Stella to potential love interest is so nuanced. How did you balance his redemption without minimizing Stella's hurt?

It was a tough balance! Most importantly, I think Alan’s betrayal had to come from a place that the reader could empathize with. He wasn’t doing it just to hurt Stella; he was doing it because of deep insecurity and fear. I think that gave him a pathway to be redeemed. You dislike him for taking the coward’s way, but you understand it, at least.

Stella carries enormous guilt about keeping Sam's secret. How did you approach writing about survivor's guilt and the burden of secrets?

Stella is a very deliberate person and very conscious about hurting other people. I think she understands the power of secrets. She struggles with how sharing a secret can either save someone or destroy someone, and that weighs on her greatly, because she doesn’t really know which way it will come down. I wanted to explore all of those different elements of keeping a secret, particularly in Asian families, where keeping secrets is almost a routine part of many relationships.

Da Ji Cun, the disappearing village, serves as such a powerful metaphor. Can you talk about how place functions as character in your work?

Whenever I write, I bring a lot of elements of my own experience into the work, whether it’s in the emotions or the setting. In my first book, I set the book in a town based on where I grew up. In this one, I introduced this Chinese village which reflects the place spent many summers as a child, where my paternal grandparents used to live. The village no longer exists, and I thought this concept of disappearing people, disappearing places, was really a good parallel for what Stella was experiencing with her brother.

The family's decision to hide Sam's death from Nai Nai raises serious questions about protection versus honesty. How did you come to include this thread? Did you worry about readers judging this decision too harshly?

Yes, I worried about it a lot. I was inspired by the movie, The Farewell, which deals with this issue, but it is actually a fairly common thing in Chinese culture and one that I’ve experienced personally with elder relatives in China. I wanted to provide cultural context and nuance to this decision, because it may be very incomprehensible to a Western mindset.

At the end of the day, I hoped to show that no matter what decision you make here, it’s a hard one, where people get hurt, and a lot of these characters are trying to do what they think is right.

What do you hope readers, especially young readers navigating their own family expectations and identity questions, take away from Stella's story?

That you are not alone!

What’s next?

I am working on a third book that’s very different! It is in the adult upmarket women’s fiction genre and has some horror elements, but it is about intergenerational trauma and complicated mother-daughter relationships—so in many ways, covering familiar ground as my other books. I just love writing about uncomfortable family dynamics because I think they shape everyone’s lives. And being able to approach those dynamics with a darker lens has been very invigorating and fun for me. I hope I will have more to share soon!

Where can we find you?

You can find me on Instagram @xixiwrites.

~

XiXi Tian was born in China and immigrated to the United States when she was a year old. She grew up in central Illinois, graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a degree in history, and then attended Harvard Law School. She is a writer, lawyer, avid reader, and lifelong Midwesterner no matter where she lives. Her debut novel, “This Place Is Still Beautiful,” was an Indies Introduce and Indie Next Pick. “All the Way Around the Sun” is her latest novel. You can visit her online at xixiwrites.com and on Instagram: @xixiwrites

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