Taiwanese American author Gloria Chao travels to Taipei for the first time on the page in her new YA romance, Ex Marks the Spot. When 18-year-old Gemma Sun is contacted by an attorney, who tells her that her Taiwanese grandfather recently died—and that he’d left Gemma old newspaper clippings with a secret message urging her to visit his apartment in Taipei—the news causes a rift between Gemma and her mother, who’d told Gemma that he died a long time ago. Blaming her mother for her disconnect with her heritage, Gemma determines to fly to Taiwan to unravel the mystery behind her grandfather’s message. But to do that, she’ll have to make nice with her popular and charismatic ex-boyfriend Xander Pan, whose connection to their culture she envies. In a conversation with PW, Chao spoke about exploring her own identity through her work, pushing the boundaries of children’s literature, and making the leap from YA to adult fiction.
You write in your acknowledgments that you drew from your love of puzzles and Taiwan to craft Ex Marks the Spot. Can you elaborate?
Ex Marks the Spot is a combination of so many things that I’ve always wanted to write about. As a kid, I loved puzzles and puns, and I used to make treasure hunts for my family. They were terrible; the clues were things like, “go to the piano,” “go to the kitchen.” They were not clever riddles by any means. But they were how I connected with my family. That was where the idea for this book first came from—I wanted to have this treasure hunt, and then I realized I could also combine it with another thing that I’ve always wanted to do, which was write a book set in Taiwan, my family’s home. I was lucky enough to visit my grandparents there growing up, and it always felt like this magical place to me. I wanted to try and capture a little piece of that magic for the reader, so I packed the novel with all my favorite sites and food. I was the hungriest and most nostalgic I’ve ever been while writing this book. It ended up turning into a love letter to my culture, to my family, to Taiwan, and to puzzles and puns and games.
What was it like being able to write about Taipei and Taiwanese culture in a way you hadn’t before?
I almost felt like I had too much information. I went through old family photos and wrote a list of all the things I wanted to include. I was like, “How am I going to work everything in there?” There are so many things that I couldn’t get into the book.
But in some ways, it almost felt easier to write than my previous books because there was so much information to work from. I just felt so passionate about it. I really wanted to capture all these different pieces, so that when I’m describing a certain place, I not only described what it was like but also how it felt for me when I was there.
Themes of exploring one’s cultural identity are evergreen throughout your work. How does that show up in Ex Marks the Spot?
I feel like questioning who you are is such a universal thing that we deal with in so many different parts of our lives, but especially in this 17–18 age range when we’re trying to figure out what the next step of our life is. Knowing who you are and what your relationship is with your culture and your family have always been big questions for me, especially when I was writing my first book [American Panda], which was very much inspired by my life. My family had a hard time when I changed careers from dentistry to writing, so a lot of that made its way into American Panda. I keep coming back to identity because it’s something that I’m continuing to question for myself. Writing has helped me a lot with it; it lets me take a step back to see it from my character’s point of view, and it helps me figure out what I want my own relationship with my identity to look like.
It’s also something that Gemma thinks about in a way that none of my other characters have. Her mom really pushed assimilation, so she grew up without knowing anything about our culture and without speaking the language. And then there’s her ex-boyfriend Xander, who’s the complete opposite. He speaks perfect Mandarin, and he knows everything about Taiwanese culture, so she feels embarrassed by the fact that she isn’t connected to her roots. She’s so insecure about it that she puts on a brave face and pretends like it doesn’t bother her. It isn’t until she goes on this journey and meets all these other Taiwanese Americans with different experiences and different relationships to their culture that she realizes it’s not a one size fits all. It doesn’t have to look exactly like Xander’s relationship, and she doesn’t have to speak the language to feel connected. It isn’t until the end of the book that she figures out how she wants her relationship to her culture to look and that’s something that I feel like I’ve only recently come to realize myself.
Your forthcoming novel, The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club, is an adult mystery. How was your experience been like shifting categories from YA to adult?
I think the bigger change for me was going from romance to mystery. I feel like I’ve always been pushing the age limit with YA. I had a hard time selling American Panda because I wanted it set in college, and in 2016, there weren’t that many YA books set in college—everybody thought YA had to end in high school. But even once I published that one, I continued pushing the age limit: my third book, Rent a Boyfriend, has characters who are 19 and 21. I feel like I’ve always been on the borderline between YA and adult, so it didn’t feel like that big of a transition. Obviously, the protagonist [of The Ex-Girlfriend Murder Club] is older, and in some ways, they’re dealing with different things, but I’m still talking about questioning identity, so I almost feel like there weren’t that many changes. It was more difficult figuring out how to write a mystery and how to plant all the clues.
Ex Marks the Spot by Gloria Chao. Viking, $12.99 paper Dec. 31 ISBN 978-0-593-69271-4
