Hellooo!!!

A few weeks ago I reviewed the excellent Monkey Around by Jadie Jang  a refreshing contemporary fantasy of a reincarnated Monkey King in the form of a young female activist in San Francisco’s Bay area. The book also looks at community activism and how communities evolve in cities. The book is one of my highlights of my reading year so far. Jadie (also known as Claire Light) kindly talked to me about how the book and future instalments.

How do you like to tempt people to read Monkey Around?

Hi! I think the big hook is “female Monkey King in San Francisco,” but some people also like “is an activist involved with the Occupy Movement.” “Urban fantasy with mostly non-western mythological creatures” is another hook. If that doesn’t getcha, how about “all over the Bay Area, shapeshifters are getting their souls sucked out, and Maya is the only one who can figure out why … when she’s not making hot drinks or pranking everyone within earshot”?

What was the appeal of re-inventing the Monkey King myth? How does Maya fit and challenge that role?

Well, all of urban fantasy is updating old myths and folktales, so why not give a Chinese legend the same treatment? Gender-bending the Monkey King is also a pretty contemporary thing to do. But it’s also about: what would the Monkey King choose to be in this century, in this place? I think he’d find it pretty funny, and pretty fitting, to be a young woman in San Francisco. It speaks to his place as an outsider, a god who is considered “less than” other gods, and who is relegated to a lowly position despite his overwhelming accomplishments and abilities.

While there is a mystery to be solved you aren’t making Maya the typical lone urban fantasy detective. In fact, they’re more focused on their community and also political activism which was so refreshing. What led to those choices?

No big mystery there ;). Maya lives and works in my own community, doing the work I and my community members do. My purpose here was to represent a corner of the world—my corner—that is almost never seen in media or the arts; to depict and normalize Asian Americans, progressives, and activists, at a time when the mainstream narrative of all three is pretty hostile.

It’s not a coincidence I did this during Trump’s administration. I was working on something else when he was elected, an early, partial draft of MONKEY relegated to a drawer for a time. But when the election happened, every writer and artist I knew was just struck silent for weeks afterwards. All our work seemed so … pointless, so silly. And every writer and artist I knew then either doubled down on a political project, or shifted gears towards a project that spoke to the place we found our country in suddenly.

I shifted back from a more “artistic” story to MONKEY, a deliberately commercial and accessible book that depicted activism and progressivism and immigrant communities during a time when a large chunk of our population was rallying behind the most fascist, anti-immigrant leader we’ve seen in nearly a century.

In the novel identity is a theme. We have the Bay Area full of characters from many cultures (and some of those also mythical creatures) all deciding who they want to be? What interests you on that subject?

I’ve spent my adult life working in “identity politics”; more specifically, working in the cultural corner of the Asian American section of the social justice world. Our project there is to make space for the Asian American voice in our broader society, and to normalize being Asian American, being people of color, being more recent immigrants, in American society. So naturally I wanted to reflect both this social justice project, and the reality of living in a very diverse community in a very diverse region. On a very basic level, the Bay Area you see in MONKEY is the Bay Area that I live in, minus the magic and monsters (we have our own form of magic, and our own type of monsters.)

What else can we look forward to you in the future and where can we find out more?

Right now I’m working on finishing up the sequel to MONKEY AROUND, currently titled MONKEY TIME. After that, we’ll see how sales go and if my publisher wants to put out a series. When I’m done with MONKEY TIME, I’ll either work on my alternate history Mars novel, or a dark urban fantasy taking place in Berlin. The latter will require another trip to Berlin, though, so a lot will depend upon how the pandemic develops. You can keep up with me easily though: I’m about to launch a new website at clairelight.org and you can always catch me offering unsolicited opinions at @seelight on Twitter. I’ll also be reading at San Francisco’s Litcrawl on Oct. 23, and attending Discon online in December (the weekend before Xmas.) Hope to see you all out there!

If there was one book (not your own) that you wish you could get everyone to read what would it be?

Only one? Whew! I think everyone should read One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A perfect novel, and sublime.