Nghi Vo Adds a Touch of Fantasy to Hollywood's Magic

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Melissa Bendixen: This is Audible Editor Melissa Bendixen, and here with me today is Nghi Vo, the Hugo Award-winning author of novellas When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain and The Empress of Salt and Fortune, and the novel The Chosen and the Beautiful. Nghi is here to talk about her second novel, Siren Queen. Welcome, Nghi.

Nghi Vo: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

MB: Of course, of course. For listeners new to Siren Queen, it's about the life of Luli Wei, a Chinese American queer actor who comes of age in Pre-Code Hollywood and is determined to earn her star at all costs. Nghi's version of Hollywood includes fantastical elements like soul-stealing producers, sprites, monsters, and immortality that can be traded and manufactured.

So, Nghi, Siren Queen is told from the perspective of Luli herself looking back on her life. She's a vibrant, defiant, unapologetic character, and we live inside her mind for the entirety of the novel. Can you tell us, what's your favorite part about Luli?

NV: My favorite part of Luli is the fact that she's mean, first of all. She is a tremendously mean human being. But on top of that, like a lot of mean people out there, she is afraid all the time. Almost every time you see Luli in Siren Queen, she is afraid. She's got things to be stressed out over. And even her moments of joy feel a little bit stolen.

With that in mind, my favorite part of Luli, besides the fact that she's mean and funny is the fact that she is brave on top of it. Bravery just means you do what you need to do anyway no matter how afraid you are or what is against you. And that is, to me, both the best thing about her and also the most intimidating thing about her. So she was just tons of fun to write.

MB: Yeah, I can imagine. When did you know that the story would be first-person told in retrospect?

NV: Basically, when I first put pen to paper. The way it worked was, I had the idea for the world before Luli showed up. Literally, just one night, I was chatting with my friend Grace, to whom the book is dedicated. And I just said something along the lines of, “Did you ever notice that Hollywood is basically like fairyland where there's the promise of immortality, eternal beauty, and they can take your face and swap in a new one, and changelings are a thing?”

And I went on for like two hours to poor Grace, and then I realized that someone had to be watching this. This was a setting and needs someone to observe and to tell us what was going on. And Luli just shows up more or less by magic. It was just like, “Oh, it's nice to see you. Have a seat, I suppose.”

I didn't make any consistent decisions about it until I started writing the first sentence. And the first sentence came out as first-person. And I'm like, “All right, I guess we're just going to keep on going with that.” I think I would make a more deliberate decision these days. Siren Queen is actually my first novel. It is the first novel I had ever completed. So, I learned a lot. And then some days it feels like I have learned absolutely nothing at all. I would do it differently these days, but I'm not unhappy with the way that whole process went.

MB: Siren Queen was your first novel, but The Chosen and the Beautiful came out first?

NV: Yes, that was a decision that was made by Tor.com, who published both. It was really interesting actually, because my whole publishing history has been an exercise in time travel in a lot of ways, because I wrote Siren Queen first. It was destined for a contest, I believe.And when it went into the contest, I decided that the best thing to do would be to stop looking at it. Like, just pretend it doesn't exist. It's off somewhere doing its thing in the world, and I could just live my life while it was doing it. And in the meantime, Tor.com released a call for submissions for novellas. And the first thing I thought was, “Oh, my God, it's only 20,000 words. I can totally write 20,000 words, right?”

"Beauty, glamor—it's all work. It's all work made flesh."

And so that's how Empress got written. And by that point, when Empress was written and was off for submission, Siren Queen failed out of the contest. So, I was submitting it to agents at that point. And, basically, within about a week, I got the letter of acceptance for Empress. I got two agent interviews for Siren Queen. And then a couple months later, after I did sign with my agent, Diana Fox, I pitched her The Chosen and the Beautiful.

And then a lot of things happened and a sort of schedule was hammered together over at Tor.com. And it's like a kind of magic what publishing schedules do, so I try not to look at it too hard out of fear that it might just charge me and gore me badly.

MB: I can tell you as one who used to work in traditional publishing that, yes, it is.

NV: There is an algorithm, and there is a magic, and I try not to get too close.

MB: Yeah, yeah [laughs]. So, when did you know that narrator Natalie Naudus was going to be the perfect voice for Luli?

NV: Oh, my God. The minute I heard her, I'm like, “Oh, my God, she's mine!” And she's not; she's her own Natalie, and we should all listen to Natalie because Natalie is cool. But the minute I heard the sample—I think it was actually in an email that Tor.com's director sent to me about it—and he's like, “We're thinking about Natalie for this.” And he sent the email to both me and to my agent at the time. We both heard it and we're like, “Yes, yes, whatever we need to do, that's exactly who we want.”

I think they actually had her read the first few pages for Chosen back in the day. Because she is the audio narrator for both, it was just utter, complete confidence. I obviously don't have to tell you how good Natalie is, but there's just this sense of complete control over the text, as well as just this incredibly sure touch that she has with it. Right? It really made me actually look at my work in a totally different way, hearing her read it. And it's both a pleasure and just incredibly intimidating and wonderful at the same time.

MB: Wow. What do you think that difference is for you now that you've heard her narration? How do you work differently now?

NV: To be honest, the first thing I thought was, “Oh, my gosh, she makes me sound so smart” [laughs]. But there is a sensitivity to her lines, actually. And she brought this out in Jordan Baker, who was the main character from Chosen and Beautiful. She does it beautifully with Luli. She imbues the characters that I've created with this sense of wholeness, with this sense of vulnerability, which is a little hard for me to reach, actually. I don't write a lot of vulnerable characters for a number of reasons, but they are—of course they are—they are vulnerable people in terrifying worlds. And there is something about the way Natalie does their lines, especially Luli's lines, that really sort of brings that out. It feels like a cliche to say they come alive, but she breathes something into them that I can't. And I don't know whether it's a limitation of me as a writer or a limitation of the mediums we've chosen to work in, but there's something so wonderful about how she does her work. And it's just the coolest, you know?

MB: Yeah. That's really special. Totally.

I was struck by the importance of names in the Siren Queen. In Hollywood, employees who give out their real name can be imprisoned in contracts that essentially steal their soul. So someone's real name is quite a coveted secret. And we, in fact, don't even find out what Luli's real name is. Is that right?

NV: Absolutely. We never find out. I'm pretty sure I know, but some days I'm not even sure about that, actually. One of the real pleasures of telling Siren Queen is we are getting this story entirely on Luli's terms. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that it's very much a story that's told in retrospect. And that was a deliberate decision, because as dark as Siren Queen gets, I wanted to give the readers the real assurance that Luli someday is going to be looking back on this and thoughtful and kind about her past self, and a little scornful of her past self. Because there is a kind of reality you bring to a situation when you look back on who you were many decades ago.

But I am mostly sure I know what her name is. I'm pretty sure there are people in her life who know what her birth name was, but possibly fewer than [you might] suspect, perhaps.

MB: Hmm. It’s funny because I never noticed that I didn't know her name until the very end of the story, when I was like, “Wait, her name wasn't actually Luli?”

NV: It’s a pretty good trick, right?

MB: Right. This is one of the tricks about first-person, is that you can get away with it, with her real name not being revealed. My question for you about this is: Do you think our names can shape who we are?

NV: Absolutely, I think our names can shape who we are. And I think that one of the things that I'm kind of over as a writer and as a reader of fantasy myself is the whole true name idea. It had a lot of currency back in the eighties and the nineties. It has a lot of currency in the diaspora, in the queer scene, as a matter of fact. And at this point, I'm sort of moving away from the whole paradigm of true names and kind of going into both the power and the pleasure of chosen names, things we make for ourselves, or the names we accept from the people who love us, or the names that we pick up working in spaces that surprise us, you know? Nicknames that people give us, the power that we give them or the power that we try to deny them.

"A certain amount of fantasy makes everything more real."

There's something so fun in working in that space, because one of the things that's always struck me is your name belongs to you, but you seldom use it. Other people use it. And what does that mean? There's just so much stuff to dig in there. So, yeah, it's just been so much fun to play with.

MB: Very fascinating. In both of your novels, you focus in on the draw of glamour, beauty, and fame, and on characters that exist at the fringes of these circles who want it for themselves. Can you tell me more about what draws you to these topics?

NV: Absolutely. So, I think we can blame some of it on the fact that I used to do high school theater, right? Which is just all of the emotions and all of the hormones. You couldn't get me onto a stage for love or money—not that they would probably let me on there anyway because I was a tremendously awkward teenager. My proper place, both then and now, is backstage. And that is just the best. Like, people talk about the magic of being in the theater. And there is something incredibly magical about being in an audience, or a radio play, or a musical, or whatever you like. And for me, nothing compares with being backstage, knowing that, you know, about five minutes ago the lead actress just had a big fight with her girlfriend. And she is out there anyway. Or that a piece of scenery is being held up by a 17-year-old who has just gotten what might be a concussion, but we're not going to look at that until curtain. Right? And that's fun.

And there is a kind of alchemy that I'm not sure I have ever recaptured from being backstage. I'm not even sure that I want to, because that is incredibly intense. And the things that feed us when we're teenagers are not the things that feed us when we're 40. But that is such a special time. And it is such a special place. And that is what I've always kind of wanted to bring to my books, because beauty, glamor—it's all work. It's all work made flesh. It is work that is created by hundreds of people backstage who know how to sew embroidery that looks like it's been painted on. And that's what that is. And it's beautiful. But it gets somehow even more beautiful and more dire and more dark when you think about the cost. And that's kind of what I really love playing in and messing around with.

MB: And you can really feel that in the old Hollywood setting. I can feel your fascination through the story and your draw to it.

NV: You feel the hyper fixation bleeding through, right? [laughs]

MB: Yeah. Hyper fixation [laughs]. So, let's talk about the setting. I'm curious, what was your process to capture that frenetic energy of Pre-Code Hollywood? What sort of research did you do to get that vibe?

NV: The first thing I did, which was less of a research project than just me finally having some spare time for this: I watched a lot of movies from the period in question. And what struck me, first of all, watching some of the older movies, is how foreign they are. Stories were told differently then. Priorities were different. One of the things that very much struck me, especially as we made the transition from the silent movies to the talkies, was the fact that actors weren't mentioned, there were no credits that told you who an actor was, because no one thought that that was going to be important. There's still some people out there, very devoted and very dedicated—the research project is figuring out who some of these actors on the extant films are—and it is such a passion project and such a joy.

I also did a lot of reading via biographies. And those were very, very useful for telling me both what life was like at the time and, depending on the biographer, what they wanted me to think life was like at the time. Right? I very much enjoyed some biographies about Greta Garbo, who my own Greta in the Siren Queen is very much based on. Also very handy was a lot of stuff by Marlene Dietrich, of course, just fantastic talent, and deeply involved in both a lot of queer and underground scenes. Also, a fair amount of research went into Ramon Novarro, who was Valentino's successor, who has a lot to do with Harry Long, who's another important side character in Siren Queen.

There's so much cool stuff in there. The costume pieces that took hundreds of hours to make; terrible, long days; clunky cameras that were huge fire hazards. But at the heart of it, it was just learning about the people who chose to make a life in Hollywood, who looked at this sort of nascent industry and said, “Yeah, yeah, I'm going to hitch my horse to that one,” you know? And made it work or, tragically enough, didn't make it work. And that's so wonderful and weird. And there's just so much to get into.

MB: Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. I didn't know what Pre-Code Hollywood was before I listened to Siren Queen. And for listeners who don't know, it’s a brief era in the American film industry between the widespread adoption of sound in pictures in 1929 and the enforcement of the motion picture production code censorship guidelines, which began in mid-1934. So, this time period was like this era of freedom in which people were kind of allowed to make stories about a bunch of different things like secretaries turning into prostitutes. And like—

NV: [Laughs] I did like one.

MB: —anti-heroes as heroes and things like that. Really fascinating stuff. What was it that drew you to this specific little time-period bubble?

NV: This very short and very pointy little part that basically got everyone up in arms so that the Hays Code had to happen, right? Part of it was the experimental nature of film at that point. By that point, they're sort of getting an idea of what film can really do, and also what film can make an audience feel and react to. For example, during this period, and a little bit before, there were queer people in film, there were queer people who were allowed to, basically, be happy. The Hays Code puts an end to this, in 1934, I believe. At that point, we have rules stating that if homosexual people show up in your film, they must end badly. They must die, they must be unhappy. And that sort of just did it for film for like the next 50 years, right?

A good example would be Design for Living, which is based off the Noël Coward play. It is a queer poly threesome, essentially. It ends and—I figure I get to spoil this one since it came out in 1933—but it ends with the three leads going off and being happy together. They decide that conventional marriage is not for them. They're going to be happy, the three of them together. And that's revolutionary. It's still beautifully done. It's still funny. And we wouldn't see anything like that again for quite some time, decades, honestly.

And so Pre-Code Hollywood, it is far from perfect. It is racist, it is orientalist, it's misogynist, it's terrible sometimes. But it was still much more free and much more exploratory, much more investigatory, much more exciting than a lot of what came after, which is not to say that great films weren't made after 1934, but they were different, and without the deforming force of the Hays Code, I don't know if you could say that they're a lesser, but they were very different.

MB: What appealed to you about adding fantasy elements into this historical Hollywood setting?

NV: Essentially, because I could. I'm a fantasist, more or less, beginning of the day and the end of it. I grew up reading fantasy. It is my first choice on the random stack of books next to my bed. If I can't solve things by having a shadow person drop out of the ceiling or a dragon show up, I don't know what to do [laughs]. And that's the easy answer.

The slightly harder one is a certain amount of fantasy makes everything more real. You can take a metaphor, and what happens when you peel it off the wall and make everyone look at it as if it's in 3D? There's something so much fun about subverting the expectations of what people think reality is.

MB: Well, I definitely enjoyed your take on fantasy, and the way that things would go right by you, sort of thing. And I want to ask you, when you build your fantasy world, what rules do you set for yourself as you go? Do you build the world first or discover it as you write?

NV: I've definitely done it both ways. And both times, what I have discovered is no amount of preparation I can do is going to make up for a hero who does not care about the structure. Luli lives in the world that she lives in. She has lived in it all her life. And she knows the rules. It's like, if you're born in a certain neighborhood, you know the neighborhood, you know there are streets you don't walk down, right? You know which one is the good restaurant. And you know which cashier is going to give you a break if you're like 10 cents short of your grocery bill. These are the rules you know. And that is how Luli looks at her world. There is magic, but it is about as important to her as electricity, let's say. Which is to say, it's very important, but you don't necessarily know precisely how the breakers work. You don't necessarily know which transformer runs the power directly to your building, but you know that if something goes wrong, it will just smash you flat.

"When you see a movie, when you access that very deep and brilliant mirror, you choose or don't choose to take it inside yourself. And you let it change you. What's more magical than that?"

And so I know the rules, and Luli knows the rules, but she's got a lot more things on her mind than trying to figure out what those rules are or to tell us. She's got a party to get to. And she's got a career to catch. And no matter how much work I've put in, she won't talk about it. Which is a thing that’s happened to me. And that's fine. That's going to be how that goes, I suppose. So the underpinnings are there. It's just, I need to learn how to make my main characters care about them.

MB: It's interesting; it makes sense that if it's a fantasy world that's normal, then obviously you're not going to have a character sit there and like, explain it. I noticed it was an interesting juxtaposition the way that we have things like immortality and the wild hunt and there's all these magical elements, and yet the magic of movies is still revered and a draw for everyone. Do you think in our reality movies are kind of magic now?

NV: Absolutely. The best thing about magic is when it is cheap. And I don't mean that in any sort of defamatory way. I want cheap magic. I want magic for everyone. It's a moment I was thinking about a lot when I was writing the Siren Queen. I still remember the first time I went to a movie, when I was maybe about seven or eight. And you're sitting in the dark next to your mom who maybe wishes you'd be a little quieter than you are. And the lights go down and it's cool because it was summer when I went—it's walking into another world, how cold movie theaters are, right?

And there's something exalted and strange and wonderful. And there are people on the screen bigger than people should ever be. They're painted in light and in color. And that's magic. It's always magic. It is magic that wants to tell us who we are or what a good story is. And it's up to us to decide whether or not we believe them. And if we believe them, there's something really powerful about that, getting to see a story that is yours. When you see a movie, when you access that very deep and brilliant mirror, you choose or don't choose to take it inside yourself. And you let it change you. What's more magical than that? And we can change for any reason. We can change because bad things happen to us or good things happen to us. And that's still cheap, but it's still magic.

MB: This makes me wonder, if you were to see Siren Queen be turned into a movie, what would be your reaction?

NV: I probably would think, “Cool, I must have sold my soul somewhere in the background and I just didn't notice, I was too sleep-deprived to notice. Someone should have told me about that.” It would be amazing.

MB: Yeah. Yeah. Talk about meta. So, later this year you're going to be releasing your third novella, Into the Riverlands. What do you like about novellas compared to novels or short stories?

NV: I'm done faster [laughs]. No, no. It sounds like a joke, but you have no idea how lazy I am and how very quickly I would like to be done with a story after I've done the cool parts. The joy of a novella is you are there for a short time. And you know how short it is.The Empress of Salt and Fortune, my first novella, you're only with me for 20,000 words. I am a couple of fun hours of reading. I think that's maybe 90 minutes of audiobook and we're done. You can decide if you love it or you can decide that you're done and, either way, you're only there for a short amount of time. Sometimes it's nice to just have that short engagement.

I have to feel it's a full story or [otherwise], you know, I'm just writing words. But it is so much fun to just, “Here's the cool parts, I'll see you later,” you know? And that's wonderful.

MB: That is really nice.

NV: And mine are really special because Cindy Kay, who's the narrator for those, also makes me feel very seen. And the wonderful thing about the way she's done all novellas, and will be hopefully doing all of them in the future, is the work she puts into the voices. The first time I heard her do the tigers from when the When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain, I was like, “That's what they sound like. I wasn't sure.” [Laughs]

MB: Whoa.

NV: She's good. She's really good.

MB: That's really cool. Oh man. Well, my last question for you is, what do you want to explore next in your writing? You've done historical New York, historical LA. Where are we going now?

NV: The Midwest. The Midwest. I've recently finished off a sequel novella for The Chosen and Beautiful. There's something living in my head that's basically like a novella sequel or prequel to Siren Queen. But for the next big project I have we're going to be in the Midwest, because I did East Coast, I did West Coast. I'm from the Midwest. And let me tell you, there is so much weird stuff out here that I just need to share with everyone. We joke a lot about things living in the corn, but I live by the Great Lakes, right? And we're not exaggerating when we say that the lake is the monster. Lake Michigan—which is basically, if you go around my building and look down the way, you can see from where I live—Lake Michigan has the highest kill count, I think, of any of the Great Lakes. It is dangerous and it's beautiful. I've lived out here my whole life. And I just want to share that with everyone else. Well, share it-slash-make it everyone else's problem.

MB: I see this continuing theme of maybe being drawn to things that are dangerous. Maybe a little bit, just a little bit monstrous.

NV: [Laughs]. What's fun is it if it's not?

MB: And what is a monster?

NV: Probably a lake.

MB: Probably a lake. Well, with that, Nghi, thank you so much for stopping by to chat about Siren Queen.

NV: Thank you so much for having me. This was great.

MB: Of course. And, listeners, you can get all of Nghi's novels and novellas on Audible now.