Photograph by Basso Cannarsa / Agence Opale / Alamy

Your story in this week’s issue, “No More Maybe,” centers around a Chinese couple who have immigrated to the United States and are hosting the husband’s parents, while awaiting the birth of their first child. Can you describe how the story came about?

I agreed some time ago to contribute a story to an anthology being put together to benefit the A.C.L.U. I had just finished a nonfiction book when I agreed to do this, and, though I did imagine that I would eventually return to fiction, I was, in truth, enjoying the avenues that nonfiction had opened up when I suddenly found the A.C.L.U. deadline looming. Indeed, so reluctant was I to change gears that I all but convinced myself that, having not written fiction in some years, I had forgotten how. But there it was. I had two weeks in which to write something.

As the title of the anthology was “It Occurs to Me That I Am America,” I began with an immigrant family. And, of course, the very letters A.C.L.U., not to mention the national discourse, brought racism to mind. Immigration, I thought. Racism. Immigration. Racism. Honestly, things did not look good. Then desperation bred inspiration, and voilà—the story wrote itself.

Unfortunately, though, it was way too long for the A.C.L.U. anthology: I could immediately see that I was not going to be able to get this down to the fifteen-page limit the editors had set for fiction. And so, with five days to go, I wrote a second, very different story for the anthology. I can have a kind of dialectic in my writing, and will sometimes swing from one pole to another as I move from project to project. And, sure enough, while “No More Maybe” turned out complex and sensitive, the other story—“Mr. Crime and Punishment and War and Peace”—came out punchy and funny, a love story with a happy ending. Probably the punchiness reflected my increasing desperation, just as the amplitude of “No More Maybe” reflects, I think, a writer rediscovering the spaciousness of fiction. In any case, that is how I see this twin birth today. The second story may be the love story, but “No More Maybe” is a story by a writer in love, once again, with her form.

The narrator is telling this story in English—less-than-perfect English—hence her sometimes simple syntax and grammatical errors. Why did you decide to write the story that way, rather than having her tell it in fluent Chinese, rendered on the page as fluent English? Or why didn’t you tell the story in the third person and avoid the language issues altogether?

When I was researching my last novel, “World and Town,” I visited a lot of fundamentalist churches with a friend who was studying to be a minister. And, one day, as we were driving around, she said something interesting. She said, “I always thought that a writer wrote. But now I see that a writer listens.”

The narrator in this story is entirely fictional, as is the situation. Yet I heard this story much more than I wrote it. And, for whatever reason, this is the voice that I heard it in—a voice speaking Chinglish, which was, in many ways, my first language. Of course, the writer in me is aware that, however a story comes to you, it’s ultimately up to you to decide whether to keep it in that form or not—a cold-eyed decision that involves technical appraisal and writerly judgment. And so to take your second question first: if you ask why I stuck to the first person rather than moved to third, the answer would be to preserve a certain strategic intimacy.

I have written about racism in Asian characters before. It’s a tricky thing, as I cannot assume a reader whose own anti-Asian sentiment would not be triggered by the characters’ bigotry. I once read an essay called “Distrust of the Reader in Afro-American Narratives,” by Robert Stepto, and I remember realizing as I read—this was when I was in graduate school—that I shared that distrust. I remember considering, too, given that distrust, what strategies might be helpful. And, of them, the use of the first person is among the most disarming.

In “No More Maybe,” the narrator is not herself racist. However, the racism of the people around her is filtered through her eyes. I don’t want to give too much away here, but there is a moment when the family seeks to explain a terrible thing they have just read; and what’s sad, I think, is that they reach for clichéd explanations that don’t necessarily reflect what they think, let alone the reality of the situation. They are just so upset—by what they are realizing about the father, really—that they don’t know what to say. And, seeing them through the narrator’s eyes, we sympathize with the characters, I hope, at least as much as we judge them. They remain human.

As for why not have this narrator narrate in Chinese: because I would just be trading one headache for another. Were she speaking in Chinese, she would be making many references difficult to translate; and how to render the flavor of her speech? I would have all the issues a translator has. Meanwhile, for all the challenges of representing her English, there is something so hopeful and poignant about an immigrant telling a story in her adopted tongue. She tacitly assumes an interested reader, and she has tacit faith that she can reach that reader. I sometimes remember, when I am writing a story this way, how I myself feel when trying to relate something in Chinese. In one way, it’s hopeless. In another, there is the listener, trying hard to make out what I’m saying. And so I go on, even if means botching every line. It’s awful but beautiful.

As you said, your most recent book, “The Girl at the Baggage Claim: Explaining the East-West Culture Gap,” was a work of nonfiction. Do you feel that that book has a bearing on this story? What is the relationship between your fiction and your nonfiction?

That there are overlapping concerns between my fiction and my nonfiction is no surprise: my concerns are simply my concerns. But, of course, fiction and nonfiction proceed from different parts of my brain, and have different aims. “The Girl at the Baggage Claim” endeavors to articulate two very different ways of filtering the world. The implications of these are far-reaching, profound, and deeply relevant to our world, yet little grasped by the general public. I am thrilled to have, for once, written a useful, educational, and, for some, liberating book.

A story like “No More Maybe” can make no such claims to usefulness, and we wouldn’t want it to: fiction is so much more about accuracy and poise and other qualities that may ultimately tell us something about what it means to be human, but wouldn’t tell us anything at all if the writer aimed to do anything of the kind. As it happens, though, this story does depict something that I might not realize it was depicting had I not written “The Girl at the Baggage Claim”—that is the emotional life of a highly interdependent family. A great deal of my fiction has dealt with the tension between an increasingly independent self and its interdependent family of origin—a conflict that naturally accompanies Americanization. This story doesn’t do that. Rather, it portrays how an interdependent family works—how involved the family members are with one another, how finely they negotiate between their own desires and those of others, and, finally, how warmly they love one another. Did I mean to portray these things? No. I meant to write a story about immigration and racism. But, there it is, the power of fiction—a thing so much greater than the writer who writes it.