interviews

Kristina Ten’s “Tell Me Yours I’ll Tell You Mine” Gets Spooky About Girlhood

Photo by Roman on Unsplash

Like the stories it harbors, the title of Kristina Ten’s debut short story collection is both a promise and a provocation. Close your eyes and you can picture the kid who used to whisper those kinds of words to you at the slumber party. It’s the smirking boy who knows where his dad keeps the booze; it’s the pierced girl you’ve been having queer dreams about.

Granted, Ten’s mode is speculative fiction, and so, in her rendering, that friend you’re crushing on speaks a cursed language she picked up from a demented video game. That chemically curious boy doesn’t just huff glue—he uses it to conjure ghosts. Tell Me Yours I’ll Tell You Mine summons the ominous possibilities of fantasy, horror, and science fiction, infusing adolescence—and adulthood—with even more danger than they already had.

The characters of *Tell Me Yours *are vulnerable in more ways than one. They are often immigrants, like Ten herself, navigating schools and workplaces allergic to “foreigners.” Others are women whose bodies are under siege, fleeing Earth to seek abortions, or doing (literal) battle with sexist doctors, or darkly manipulating their flesh to keep their spot on the volleyball team. Yet there are no easy victims here; Ten also affords her protagonists resilience and revenge. The book’s pages are sticky with blood, yes, but also with guts.

I spoke with the McSweeney’s Stephen Dixon Award winner and Shirley Jackson Award finalist by phone.

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Chelsea Davis: A theme throughout Tell Me Yours is disorientation. We meet many of your protagonists as they’re struggling to adjust to a new place: a new country; a new summer camp; a new planet. Are there aspects of speculative fiction that make it an especially good fit for exploring displacement?

**Kristina Ten: **In writing speculative fiction, I think what I’m doing is trying to build a world in which my characters feel at home or feel a sense of belonging. Because of the various intersections of their identities, they haven’t found that place in the real world.

For someone like me, home has never been a place with fixed coordinates. I moved to the U.S. when I was young, and since then, I’ve lived in New York, New Jersey, Boston, the Bay Area, Colorado, Chicago, and then to New York again. I joke with my family that we all have permanent motion sickness. So because I don’t have this commitment to home as a specific place, I think that I look for those places in speculative fiction.

Also, with a place like Moscow, for example—I lived there as a kid, but I don’t remember it well, and it’s very difficult to go back now. So creating a speculative world allows me to imagine a place I don’t remember well, to visit people I can’t easily visit in reality, and even to reclaim, and make better, places that I’ve been.

CD: Do any examples of that last move come to mind from this collection?

KT: When I write about San Francisco [in “The Advocate” and “Adjective”], I write about it fondly but critically.

For someone like me, home has never been a place with fixed coordinates.

I can very rarely write about a place when I’m presently living there. It always has to be in the rearview. I think that like with the distance of speculative fiction and also with the distance of time, I can think about it a little bit more critically.

**CD: In addition to disorientation, has writing these stories helped you better understand any other aspects of your experience of immigration? **

**KT: **Looking at the collection all together, I’ve come to the realization that just being perceived is terrible. All of my characters are so concerned with how they’re defined by other people. They want to be American enough, or to be immigrant enough, or to follow the rules of the American healthcare system enough to be deemed a docile enough patient, but also a patient who advocates for themselves. And they always fail.

These characters are all people-pleasers. They lose themselves completely because they are trying to anticipate what these other people in their lives want them to be. That can ladder up to obedience at the level of citizen and nation, like in “Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod.”

Something that I don’t think was in my thesis—so to speak—when I started writing this book, but that I think I started to poke at as I wrote, is rules. What do rules offer us? How can they serve us? When do they stop serving us? I’m interested in obedience and disobedience and rule breakers.

**CD: Your mentioning rules makes me think about how many of these stories are either structured as a game or feature games as a plot event. “Adjective” uses Mad Libs as a hermit crab form; there are also video games (“Dizzy Room”), jousts (“The Advocate”), card games (“The Flood”), trivia (“Another Round Again”). **

**KT: **Where games and rules have served me in the past, and where they serve these characters, is that they’re a language with which to speak to the world when you don’t feel like you have another shared language. Maybe you’re the first-generation kid at school, or the new kid at camp, or the new employee at the office who feels like a fish out of water. When it’s difficult to relate to people, games are this way of speaking to people that goes beyond language, generation, and past experience. I think fiction can be the same way—the stories that we tell each other.

**CD: I wanted to return to what you said a little bit earlier about how being perceived is terrible. Vulnerability is such a double-edged sword in Tell Me Yours: there’s vulnerability as weakness in “Bunny Ears,” and as the chinks in your literal armor, in “The Advocate.” But then you also channel the idea that we can’t connect with other people without some degree of vulnerability, like in “Mel for Melissa,” which highlights a girlhood friendship forged through sharing intimate pain. Are you feeling vulnerable as you watch your first book enter the world? **

**KT: **There’s always a degree of vulnerability in putting yourself out there. This is my debut collection, and like all writers and artists, I feel this very volatile shift from just typing away in jumbo-shrimp/pretzel form for ten hours a day over my laptop in the dark to suddenly being at book events and having to talk out loud to other people about this thing that had felt so private.

Violence is always at this remove through metaphor and image that makes something more bearable by abstraction.

That said, the truth is that I do also have the armor that you’re talking about, as someone who’s predominantly a fiction writer. I am in awe of memoirists, and creative nonfiction writers and lyric essayists and poets. They have less of that defense.

But when my parents come up to me, and they’re asking, “I read this story, and it’s really sad, and it’s obviously about XYZ,” I can say, “Oh, mom and dad, no, no, I understand your concern, but it’s fiction. 100% fiction.”

CD: There are some eruptions of intense body horror in these stories. I’m thinking of “Bunny Ears,” “Mel for Melissa,” “The Flood,” and “Last Letter First.”

**KT: **Up until a few years ago, I was really invested in the distancing power of fairytales—in how that distance allows us to talk about things that are difficult to talk about. It makes it easier for the writer in the writing; it makes it easier for the reader in the reading. In a fairytale, a character isn’t actually depicted being brutally raped, but instead the petals of a flower curl on the ground. Violence is always at this remove through metaphor and image that makes something more bearable by abstraction. I’ve found this so valuable in my own writing.

I was also really interested in the way fairy tales have been applied over the years at different times in different countries to circumvent censorship—again, through the abstraction of message.

Then I read some fiction by Dorothy Allison, who isn’t a speculative fiction writer, but writes in a very in-your-face way about really difficult things like violence and intimacy. She has a speech, which is included at the back of the 20th anniversary edition of Bastard Out of Carolina, about the presentation of violence in fiction. How sometimes no other way of writing violence, except explicitly, suffices. It made me wonder, “Am I leaning on abstraction to look away? What could be gained from looking at this thing unflinchingly?”

After that, I became less interested in abstraction and more in direct, this-is-how-it-is writing. And even in going a step beyond that, towards the exaggeration that we see in body horror. I’m still interested in fairy tales; I just have a different relationship with them now than I did a few years ago.

CD: One of the stories in Tell Me Yours that most clearly engages with folklore is “The Flood, The Tumble, The Talons, The Trick.” A water dragon gets kidnapped by an abusive man who uses her magically self-healing body in horrible ways to support his card shark hustle. What about that mythological creature made you want to bring it to our own era?

**KT: **Pretty much every time I’m playing with fairytales or myths, I end up transposing them into modern settings. I find it comforting seeing these great, infallible figures fall—to see that some of the most difficult things in life are difficult even for gods and immortal beings. They’re not free of the exoticizing male gaze, in “The Flood, The Tumble”; or, in some of my other stories, of immigration offices and DMV lines and the mania of planning a wedding.

We moved from Russia when I was young, and my father’s side is Korean. In a way, I was thinking about writing this story for my grandfather, who passed before I was born but who still has this active presence in our family through my father.

I’m interested in the slippery threshold between spaces of realism and spaces of speculative writing.

The water dragon comes from the stories that he read growing up. At least in “Western” media, it’s the variety of dragon that I see less often. I think the story pokes a little bit of fun at that, at folks assuming that “dragon” equals a winged, fire-breathing thing.

CD: It’s a violent story, in ways that are both disturbing and cathartic. Is there a connection between gender and body horror for you? A lot of the characters who have bad things happen to their bodies in Tell Me Yours happen to be girls and women.

**KT: **I guess in part the violence is happening and circling around female characters because that’s mostly who this book is about; all of the protagonists are women in the collection.

But I also think that’s the part of the book that’s nonfiction—it’s not speculative at all, but grim, gritty realism. There is a line in “Mel for Melissa” that talks about how these characters have been raised to feel like their bodies are malleable—malleable at the hands of other people. This leads to this sense that they sometimes take up too much space. At other times, they feel so insubstantial that they might just blow away.

All they’ve really known is other people asserting what they want on their bodies. All they’ve known is that kind of violence. So, it’s counterintuitive, but for the characters in Tell Me Yours, committing violence themselves can be a reclamatory movement because they’re taking control of their own bodies. Yes, it’s horrible, what the characters do in “Mel for Melissa” and “Bunny Ears,” but it is a choice they’re making. Whereas throughout their lives there’s been so much push and pull from external forces on their bodies, their minds—what they should look like, how they should behave, what they should think.

CD: Part of what makes that coercion possible in “Mel for Melissa” is that the protagonists are teenagers. There are a lot of young characters in this collection, and the book’s dedication evokes that period of life, too: “for the last one awake at the sleepover.” What about the years before adulthood draws you to narrativizing that age?

**KT: **Childhood is this time where anything is possible. Being a speculative fiction writer—especially a slipstream or fabulist writer—I’m interested in the slippery threshold between spaces of realism and spaces of speculative writing. So I’m drawn to that time in our lives.

Some of those rituals that we engaged in—saying “Bloody Mary” in the mirror, or using Ouija boards—I probably scoffed at and pretended not to believe in. But I did those things because I did believe. That’s a space that I am always trying to access now that I am an adult.

**CD: The kids’ parents are often absent in these stories, too. **

KT: We see that often in fairy tales, where one or both parents are missing.

But I’m also probably just drawing from what I know. I am an only child, and I moved to the States with my parents when I was young, and they were both working a lot. I never had an official babysitter. Sometimes I got dropped off with the family next door. But as soon as my parents deemed me old enough, I babysat myself.

Because I didn’t have siblings around me I was also one of those kids who spent a lot of time around adults. I was that “precocious” and “old soul” kid. I stepped into that role very comfortably, and I grew up quickly because of that.

I think maybe that’s one of the reasons that I lean back toward childhood in my work. If you’re a kid who was forced to be an adult early, maybe as an adult you find yourself returning to your younger years, embracing some of the playfulness that you didn’t then.

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