Thank you all so much—to the selection committee, to all of you here with us tonight, for coming from far and wide to celebrate stories together. It’s such an incredible honor to be here. When I relayed the news of winning the Carnegie to my grandmother, she first paused for a while, and finally said: in times of success, it is most proper to be humble. And my grandmother is always right. Getting Ming’s story told right was a team effort, and I want to thank the people who helped make it possible—my spectacular team at Little Brown, my editor Ben and my publicist Alyssa, without whom, respectively, I would not have a book to share nor an audience to share it with; the Hachette Library Team, for their tireless work and boundless enthusiasm; and my agent, Lisa, for her trust and wit. I’d also like to thank my parents, for their superhuman resilience and unconditional love, and my partner, the incomparable Pia Struzzieri, who keeps me grounded, grateful, and sane.
I had assumed that the thrill of winning would attenuate—that I would become somehow jaded by the long months that interceded between when the news was first announced, and tonight—but what I didn't expect was what I feel right now: an overwhelming sense of gratitude to see all of us here, all of us who so adore stories, who have hitched our wagons to stories and their telling. It’s truly an honor to be before all of you, here, tonight.
I'll be honest with you: this is one of the more difficult things I've had to write. I wasn’t sure how to start, or where to go, what to say about storytelling at a time like this. I’m reminded of something that John Gardner wrote in his book On Moral Fiction, when he’s trying to diagnose what is to be done about the unsettling lurch in which artistic endeavor finds itself during moments much like this one—moments that suddenly feel enormously more important than all previous moments, that challenge and confront us, that demand courage in the face of despair. Gardner writes that he can think of "no good reason that some people should not specialize in the behavior of the left-side hairs on an elephant’s trunk.” But in moments like these, Gardner notes dryly, “fiddling with the hairs on an elephant’s nose is indecent when the elephant happens to be standing on the baby.” What, he asks, is the value of art-making in a world and moment that seem to demand far more serious work? What is the point of telling each other stories?
So here is what I want to do tonight. I want to make a case for you, here and now, for stories. I want to defend the making of fiction in times of need. I want to argue not only for the utility but also the necessity of telling stories—that it is not mere elephant-hair-fiddling, far from it!—that telling stories is a crucial part of the work of rescuing the baby. To start, well, I want to tell you a story.
My family immigrated to the US when I was 4 years old. When my parents speak about those early days in this new and strange country there’s a Chinese word that pops up again and again, kǔ, bitterness. It shows up in phrases like kǔlì, bitter labor, or chī kǔ, a phrase which means the endurance of difficulty and which translates, literally, evocatively, to eating bitterness. Two years after we moved to the US my father returned to Beijing, where he resumed his career as a doctor so that he could send remittances to my mother and me stateside. And because my mother worked long hours, and because I (rightly) could not be trusted to stay home alone without getting into trouble—I spent countless happy hours in the children’s section of the Flushing branch of the Queens Library, a form of ad-hoc and free childcare for book-obsessed children. I read everything I could, I was immersed in stories, in whole other worlds. It was in that library that I learned English. It was in that library that I grew up. And it was in that library that I became entranced, and remain to this day entranced, by the power of stories—their capacity to extend our horizons of experience, to open doors to the unfamiliar, the strange, and the magical.
But here I want to add something. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalls that the earliest stories she wrote as a child were “exactly the kinds of stories” she was reading: “all my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples”—despite these things being, at minimum, difficult to find in her childhood Nigeria—because the stories that she had encountered up to that point were British and American children’s books. I bring this up because, well, Adichie’s fantastic, and I’ll always welcome the opportunity to quote someone as brilliant as she—but also because a very similar thing happened to me when I first started writing. I wrote stories with white main characters who had afternoon tea and went wandering through cheerful forests. Mind you, I grew up in Flushing. And I suspect a similar sort of thing happened to many other writers of color who grew up reading books by white people about white people—through no fault of those particular stories, many of which I loved dearly, but because of a simple fact, which is that stories are even more powerful than they at first appear, because good stories always communicate more than just the content of their narratives—they also make claims on what kinds of stories can be told.
When we say that stories expand our horizons, we forget what this really means. Because they don’t erase our horizons as such—rather, they only serve to push them farther out. But because stories do not, and really cannot, explode those limiting horizons, they also necessarily enclose a field of possibility—if we are not careful, stories can teach us which stories are possible to tell, and which are impossible to imagine.
The bedrock of our world is the sedimentation of all of our stories—it is through them that we are able to access our pasts, place ourselves within the great sweep of history, and trace lines through limitless futures. Stories are all there is. When I at last encountered diverse characters in stories, it was—and there’s no other word for it—a revelation. I felt that the world had at last invited me in, that I could tell my own stories, and in so doing participate in the making of my own world. I often listen, with great envy, to interviews given by other writers who say that writing is energizing, or intuitive, or fun, because I find writing so unbelievably difficult. And yet I still write—can’t help but write—because it feels important, because when we tell stories, we make for ourselves more worlds.
So let’s return, then, to Gardner’s challenge—to argue for the necessity of art-making and storytelling at a moment when this world in which we live seems governed by systems whose capacities for cruelty and injustice beggar belief. In times like these, our stories may seem to falter. I think that what moments like these require (after the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci) is an attitude as paradoxical as it is strong: we must adopt a pessimism of the intellect, and insist on an optimism of the will.
What, then, does optimism of the will look like? Well, if stories really are all there is, then the way forward, and upward, seems to me quite clear. Because the function of art, of storytelling, is to shape our world. Optimism of the will is telling each other stories: recovering our past, imagining our future. Willing—as hard as we can will—that this our world might be otherwise: more fair, more just, more kind. I’m so honored by your faith in my and Ming’s story, and, seeing all of us gathered here together in celebration of stories, I really do feel optimistic. Thank you.
Washington, D.C., 25 June 2022