Imagine What’s Missing: An Interview with M Lin
M Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Born and raised in Beijing, she writes in English as her second language; her mother tongue is Mandarin, which she favors in speech. Her fiction, nonfiction, and translations have appeared in Ploughshares, swamp pink, Joyland, Epiphany, Fence, Best Debut Short Stories 2023, The New York Times, Guernica, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar China, Words Without Borders, and The Margins. Her debut short story collection, The Memory Museum, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press on April 21st, 2026.
Alana Saab: You’ve won six fellowships for your writing and your work has been featured in the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar China and Ploughshares, to name a few. Accolades aside, you are now holding your own debut book in your hands, an exquisite collection of short stories, titled The Memory Museum.
How did you go about montaging this collection? If you can recall, what was the first story you wrote for it?
M. Lin: Thank you! Each fellowship, prize, and publication along the way has been so instrumental to the completion of the book. The order of stories in the collection turns out to be more or less chronological. The first story is the first piece of fiction I've ever written—well, a version of that, which I used for my MFA application and rewrote during my first semester. The story came out differently but the world and characters were largely the same. I don't know if this is true to every writer but it felt natural to me to go back to my childhood as the starting point. Even though it's set in the future, the meat of the story is actually situated toward the beginning of the collection’s timeline, the earliest—the late '90s as opposed to the rest of the collection, which is mostly present day.
Some people may not know this but you started your writing career as a screenwriter. You have a BFA in film from NYU.
Yes, I studied film production and writing in NYU. After college, I tried to work as a screenwriter, mostly for the Chinese film industry but living in New York. I wrote a lot in Chinese and translated a lot of scripts. I only started writing fiction in 2020.
Wow! That's so recently, and you're fabulous.
I think I just finally found out this is something I could do! This book really felt easy to write. Like, it wrote itself. The ideas just came. A lot of the stories came out pretty much fully fleshed and I didn't have to do big, structural changes. But I understand this is not going to be the case for the rest of my writing life.
Can we talk a little more about the first story, “Scenes from Childhood”? It was so striking to me because it’s a very literary short story, but the futuristic setting that frames the narrative is very genre-esque.
As I was saying, I wanted to write about my childhood, but for whatever reason, I also wanted a very old voice to narrate it, which dictated the need for the story to be set in the future. But for the longest time, I didn’t know how I could put these childhood memories together, until—the title of the story and the section titles actually all came from classical music, a piano suite by Robert Schumann. I only learned much later that Schumann meant for this set of music to be nostalgic, too, as music for adults remembering childhood. When I came across this suite, it just clicked that this would be the structure for my story. But it’s all happenstance. I watched Rysuke Hamaguchi’s film Wheels of Fortune and Fantasy and looked up its soundtrack, which is that piano suite. I saw the titles of its movements and I was like, this is my story.
I actually wanted to ask you about creative companions that you have when writing. I know this story’s titles came from the piano suite. Did you listen to the suite as you were writing? And in general, how do you negotiate other art forms with your own writing practice?
I did listen to the music as I was writing this story, but I didn't exactly try to match the tone of every vignette to the tone of the music. I just liked having it in the background. The solo piano is so abstract that it didn’t really come to me as anything narrative. I know people who have to write in silence, and I know people who cannot listen to songs with lyrics when they write, but I can listen to anything. I’m able to just tune out that way. I like having music on, and I can even listen to techno or something. I’ve always listened to music while working, even doing homework as a child. Aside from music, films and art are really important to my writing, too. I am constantly inspired by them in ways that are surprising to me, sometimes only tangentially. For example, the same film I mentioned earlier, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, also gave me the title of the second story in the book, “Magic, or Something Less Assuring.” The film has three vignettes based on coincidences, which made me want to explore coincidence, too, in that story. I ended up with two short stories from watching just one movie. It was a good day.
As a fiction writer myself, I’m acutely aware of how much of myself exists in my fiction. I’m curious about your take. Do you feel like there is a lot of yourself in this collection?
There's so much of myself in my fiction, but my writing often surprises me, too. One of the reasons we write fiction is that we don't want to be associated with it in a matter-of-fact way. But inevitably the real self does come out. Maybe we put parts of ourselves that we actually don’t manifest in reality into fiction—it’s such an unconscious process. There are cases where you meet a writer and they feel very different from their work. But I think it’s both the real-life avatar and their work that make up the whole person.
Some of my autobiography is in the collection. The first story is based on my upbringing. My father grew up in a village, my mother for parts of her life too, and I grew up in Beijing. I have cousins who still live around the village in the story. A lot of my personal life serves as the starting point for my work. Once it becomes fiction, it just goes on its own. But I'm also thinking about stories in the book that are factually further from me, like the story “You Won't Read This in the News”, which is based on true events. I did not come from the characters’ background. I did not share their lived experience, but I still felt the story was so close to me. I have access to my extended family's stories, as I was talking about, and I also think writers are inherently empathetic toward people who are different from ourselves. If you have spent any time in China, these characters are around you all the time. It makes it really meaningful for me to inhabit their lives and perspectives. I don’t think writers should only write what they personally have experience with—it would be so limiting and boring.
But on the other hand, we need to be careful about what story we're telling and if we are the right person to tell a story—fiction can have real-life consequences. If we can answer that for ourselves, then I feel like we should write whatever we want. Of course you also have to be open to hear it when other people tell you that you got something wrong.
The story “Shangri-La” can seem far from me but it also came from my life. I did not have an affair, but I had the idea when a new Chinese massage place opened down the street from me. When I went in, I was like, I'm Chinese, they're Chinese, how are we different and how did they end up on the other side of the massage? These two groups of people don't usually have a relationship outside the transaction, the place or service. I thought, what if they did? And not only a relationship, but the most intimate kind?
Back in 2023, Jamie Khan interviewed you for Epiphany. When asked about your interest in continuing to write nonfiction, you said, “Somehow, I have so much more faith in my fictional characters. I believe that their stories deserve to be told, to be read, and I am only the conduit for them to speak to the world.”
Do you feel like there was one character in this collection more than the others who had an urgent need to tell their story?
I would say it’s—this character is probably the biggest political risk I took in the collection. The story “野火烧不尽 / no prairie fire can destroy all weeds” has five protagonists in five sections. The last section is told from the perspective of the daughter of the president of China, who was born in the same year as me. Intentionally, very little is known about her. I believe the protests portrayed in the story are very important to my generation, just as Tiananmen Square was important to my parents’ generation, though it was more short-lived and not quite as large in scale. It’s a political awakening for a lot of people my age and younger. And to know that the Chinese president's daughter belongs to the same generation was something that I felt like I had to explore. Like me, she also studied in the US, at Harvard, and lives in Beijing.
As a fiction writer, I saw this lack of information about her as an opportunity. And this is one of fiction’s great strengths—to imagine and fill in what’s missing in history. Not knowing much about her was also liberating. I don’t remember how I came up with the idea of writing about her, but I suppose, to answer your question, it was something that had never been told before, and I felt this urgency that she, as a character, needed to speak for the first time. But it was a surprise to myself, and a surprise to many readers who encountered the piece. It took the story to another place.
The inspiration for how I approached her was actually from the musical Hamilton. There is a song in Hamilton called “Burn,” which is Eliza's song after Hamilton voluntarily revealed his affair to the world and destroyed his own reputation, and hers by association. The song writes about the fact that we don’t know how Eliza responded in real life. The real Eliza didn't make any statement. But Lin Manuel-Miranda still wrote a song for the fictional Eliza and gave her the time to react in the show, in a way rewriting history. There is a negative space for the fictional character to fill in and it was emotionally very powerful. I thought that was such a clever craft choice.
Okay, let’s talk about the cover and why it was important to you. I saw an Instagram post you wrote, but I’d love to hear more.
I love my cover! My dear friend, ‘Pemi Aguda, whose book is Ghostroots, told me that she made a deck of what she liked and didn’t like in book covers for her publisher. I took that advice and made my own deck. The NOs were red covers. I hated the cover of Granta’s China issue—a yellow star in the middle of solid red. When you see that red and that star, you immediately think of communism and authoritarian China. That color can be alarming, menacing, hostile, and I don’t want those notions to come first with The Memory Museum.
Even though there are strong political ideas in this book, ultimately it is a very tender and feminine book. It is about women and the strength and forces of resistance that are rooted in their tenderness toward each other, the world, and the future. I wanted to write against the more masculine way politics and movements of resistance are usually conceived and toward how being soft, vulnerable, joyful, and connected to each other can be a stronger way of protesting, and I wanted the cover color to evoke those feelings. I felt like a red cover would limit the book’s identity to a book about China, and I believe it is more than that. Obviously Chinese readers will see a lot of themselves reflected in here, but other readers could have many other ways to relate to the book.
The other no-no I told my publisher was no Asian women’s faces or silhouettes on the cover. I know people love faces but it seems that a certain kind of fetishizing is going on when it comes to books by and about Asian women, and for that matter, Black and Brown women as well. The eyebrows, shapes of eyes, the lips. We never see a white man’s face on a cover, or men in general. I didn’t want to rely on a stereotype to give my book its Chinese identity. Instead, I asked to have the Chinese title on the cover, and that should be enough.
The cover is now a beautiful lavender hue and shows a museum ticket. There’s a date on that museum ticket. What does that date represent?
It used to be a random day. I was like, if there is going to be a date on it, it should be the pub day! The book’s own little birthday.
There’s a very powerful sentiment explored in your short story “Scenes from Childhood.” The protagonist tells us that cloud services were erased and all evidence of her existence as well as many others disappeared. She says, “Without documentation, my life belonged solely to myself again, and my memories were alive within me, in a state of ongoing metamorphosis.”
This passage made me think about who life belongs to in this era of social media, but also who art belongs to in this era of branding. Nowadays being an author is so much about having a brand and social media presence in order to sell. Do you feel the pressures of documenting on social media to create a brand?
First of all, personally I’m comfortable with social media. I don’t like to post pictures of myself but to share what I find interesting in life. I post a lot when I'm traveling, things that are beautiful, interesting, weird, funny. I've overheard conversations about people really spending a lot of time thinking about what they're putting on their social media. I don’t at all. I just take a picture and post it and don’t really think about it again. It doesn’t use a lot of my energy. So I enjoy doing it and have found it successful in the sense that I have connected with people that I wouldn't have otherwise through my posts.
But being in this pre-publication phase, and I know you have been there too, you get your first look into what publicity is, what marketing is, and I’ve gotten a much more visceral understanding of the capitalist machine that is publishing. Publicity is not about how good your writing is or how hard your publicist is working on it. Or it’s not only that, but also so much about how much money your publisher is able or willing to throw at your work, and about who knows who. And realizing that, I think there is value to everybody's personal platform. I can do what I find meaningful on my social media and do publicity the way I want. So even though I don't know who it is reaching, and the reach is small, I’m glad to bypass the money game. At its best, social media gives the author more agency in the publishing process, if you’re comfortable doing it.
When we first started talking, you mentioned that you’re working on a novel. Have you been finding it hard to write a novel, or, hard to write again in general after this publishing experience?
I have found it very hard to write a novel. I got into fiction through short stories, and I realized a while ago that a short story basically has the same amount of plot or capacity as a movie. And a novel is more like a TV series. Even without realizing it, the short story form was already familiar to me and that was probably why I pulled it off quickly. “Magic, or Something Less Assuring” was the fourth short story I'd ever written, and the first I sent out. I submitted it only to Epiphany’s Breakout Prize and it won. I think a lot of my storytelling instincts in film were transferred to writing short stories.
Now I am discovering that the novel is not something you can fully hold in your head. And I don't yet have confidence as a novelist. I'm trying to cultivate more patience. In my novel, the character is writing her first novel. She doesn't have a book published yet, but she has a contract. The other day, I found the character reflecting on what it’s like to know that what you're writing right now is going to be read by other people, by the public. She has a difficult time imagining that feeling since writing has been such a private practice. I also feel that pressure now with my second book, even without a contract.
I get that. As I work on my second novel, I think often: I miss when I believed no one was going to see this.
Absolutely. We need to get back into that state somehow.
