Ai Jiang

Welcome, friend! Today I am chatting with author, Ai Jiang, about her novella, Linghun. This story has lingered with me months after finishing. Ai wrote about ghosts, the weight of love that can’t move on and the bravery of those who choose to live again. I am grateful for her of taking the time to interview about it. I hope it gives you some great insights into the book.

---

---

Get to know the author: Ai Jiang

Hi Ai! It’s such a pleasure to have you on Armed with A Book. To start us off, can you tell my readers a little about yourself?

Thank you so much for having me, Kriti! 

I am a Chinese-Canadian writer, Bram Stoker, and Nebula Award winner, and Hugo and Astounding Award finalist from Changle, Fujian currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. I wrote A Palace Near the Wind, Linghun, and I AM AI. 

Linghun is set in HOME, a town unlike any other. What first inspired you to imagine a place where grief takes such a physical, haunting form?

Before it became a novella, Linghun took the form of a flash fiction piece that explored the way the living haunted the dead rather than the other way around. I was thinking much about how ghosts appear to others based on their memory of them, paused in time, and I wanted to explore the ways in which a ghost might manifest differently to different individuals dependent on their last memories of when the ghost was still alive.

Each character grieves differently—Wenqi, her mother, her father, Liam, and Mrs. How did you decide on these varied portrayals of loss?

I thought much about how I myself experience grief, and how those around me have mourned—whether they are loud or quiet in the way they express their loss, if they numb or undergo painful suffering, and how much had their lives been shaped and affected by the people they have loss. 

Wenqi’s parents are consumed by their grief, leaving her to feel like a side character in her own family. What did you want to explore about children and the “inherited” grief of their parents?

Grief, I find, like most emotions, are extremely powerful in the ways it affects those around them. Like when angry, or sad, there’s a sort of energy that people undergoing these emotions give off. Children, I think, are some of the most sensitive people to emotions as well, particularly from people they have such close relationships to (forced or otherwise) such as their parents. With Wenqi and her family, I wanted to explore the concept of inherited grief in the form of a distance that it has driven between members of the family, because of the disconnect their experiences, yet Wenqi is forced to live in mourning alongside her family. I wanted to explore the kind of choicelessness that parents might force their children into both consciously and unconsciously .

Mrs.’s story—told in second person—hit me deeply. Why was the second person the right voice for her?

I absolutely love the intimacy and insistency of the second person voice, and I feel like it’s especially fitting, and felt particularly natural to write as well, for Mrs.’s case because she’s a character who has been living as though outside of her own body, living always for others rather than for herself, to the point she has forgotten who she is, and feels as though she’s always watching her life as it passes, rather than actively and presently living it.

The lingerers waiting on the lawns are one of the eeriest parts of the book. Where did the idea for them come from?

One of the images I had when writing the lingerers was funeral attendees and the ways they stand so eerily still, with sometimes solemn and numb expressions, as though they were lost, had wandered their way towards the dead. I wanted to offer a similar atmosphere with the presence of the lingerers, of people who gather around the dead, of glassy-eyed mourners who can’t bring themselves to move forward both literally and metaphorically, of individuals who seemed to be waiting for time to pass until they can join their dead loved ones rather than moving forth with their lives. I wanted them to be presented as individuals who have been stalled in time even though the world around them is still ongoing.

Wenqi and Liam are brutally honest with each other in ways others can’t be. What did their friendship allow you to say that other characters couldn’t?

I think because two characters are individuals who are so tired with the world and the people around them who don’t listen to them, they latch onto the first person who seems to listen and understand, even if the relationship ends up being one more toxic than healing. They are two individuals who want to heal but no longer know what that is supposed to look or feel like, and so escape, no matter what form, is what they become drawn to instead. 

In your author’s note you connect the story to your uncle’s passing. How did personal grief shape this book as it developed?

My uncle’s passing was the first time I’d experienced the death of a family member who was extremely close to me. But at that point, I hadn’t seen my uncle for a year or so, what my memories of him were prior to when he had gotten ill, compared to those back in China who had witnessed his deterioration and last moments in the hospitals. It made me think much about memory and the ways we remember those who have passed, how different they may be to each person, and how the ghosts of those who have passed might present to us differently rather than as one steady entity.

What parallels do you see between grief and migration—between losing loved ones and losing a sense of “home”?

I think there will always be a sense of loss to grief, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be connected to the idea of a person, but anything, really. I think the similarities between the two is losing the sense of a familiarity, of a person who perhaps you are used to in your life, their presence, their voice, the little actions that may be as mundane as taking out the garbage or being the one who always replaces the lightbulb, and when they’re gone, you suddenly realize that there’s no one taking out the garbage anymore on Wednesday nights or that you don’t actually know how to replace a lightbulb yourself without breaking them because you’ve never had to. Similarly with losing a home, moving to a new place, you become defamiliarized and perhaps disorientated with the surroundings, the new customs you were unaware of, relearning and unlearning things you’ve always known within a different context. 

Do you have a favorite quote or passage from the book that you find yourself returning to?

From the novella itself, “You are the mountain I cannot climb and the wound that refuses to heal.”

From the afterword, “Grief is a language that tears us apart, but it is also what brings us together.”

If HOME were real, would you ever want to live there? Why or why not?

No, because as much as I would love to see loved ones who have passed, I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a vicious cycle of grief, and I’m sure those who have passed would want to be left to rest, to move forward, too, because the world, regardless of whether we are ready or not, will continue on without us. 

For readers who loved Linghun, which book would you recommend they read next?

Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram, Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker, Withered by A.G.A. Wilmot, This House Isn’t Haunted But We Are by Stephen Howard, Mapping the Interior by Stephen Graham Jones, Beloved by Toni Morrison. 

Would you rather live in a haunted house with a friendly ghost or a perfectly quiet house with no neighbors for miles?

Definitely a haunted house with a friendly ghost—it would be like having a roommate who likely has endless stories they could tell you! 

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Please do keep a watch for the second book in the Natural Engines duology titled A River From the Sky as well as my first novel An Empire in the Clouds, both forthcoming next year, April and September respectively! 

Thank you so much for spending time with me!

---

Thanks for joining us! Add this book on Goodreads. It is available wherever books are sold! You can find my review here.

Connect with Ai on her website.