Rita Chang-Eppig knows damn well how to suture her readers into her fiction from the very first line. The captivating opener from “The Bad Kind of Puppy,” originally published in The Rumpus, begins: “One morning, after her husband had left for work, Clara noticed a ticking in her house.” Then there’s the visceral beginning of “The Miracle Girl,” originally published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, and which was later featured in The Best American Short Stories 2021 anthology: “On the first day of her stigmata, Xiao Chun’s palms bled so much that the school sent her home early.”
In just one sentence, Chang-Eppig staples us into the flesh of her work, leaves us reeling from this predicament, and then, in an instant, utterly absorbs her reader. But nowhere is her technique more present than it is in the opening to her debut novel, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea (Bloomsbury): “The moment Shek Yeung saw the enemy’s cutlass carve through her husband, she learned two important things about herself: First, she loved Cheng Yat more than she’d ever thought she would be able to love the man who had, without much consideration of her wishes, stolen her away to the sea. Second, she would not mourn him.”
Scalpel in one hand, pen in the other, Chang-Eppig is in full command as she introduces us to Shek Yeung, the real-life pirate queen she’s rescued from history. Part speculative fiction, part historical novel, part political thriller, her book is entirely adventurous. A few weeks before publication day, I had the chance to talk with Chang-Eppig about weapons training, ogres, and what it was like bringing the main character of her book (back) to life.
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The Rumpus: You first read about Shek Yeung in a book that dedicated, at most, two or three sentences to her existence. When you were doing that later excavation on her, what was the event in her life that made you want to reclaim her from the footnotes of history?
Rita Chang-Eppig: For me, strangely, it was her retirement. I think she’s best known for having gotten away with it all, scot-free, with her piracy. Something I remember from when I was younger was that she was basically paid to retire. The government essentially bought her off and paid her to stop robbing them. She was able to receive a pardon and keep all her money. In this case, I think it was her ending that inspired me to write this thing. I wanted to see if I could trace her steps back, to see where her path started as the commander of this fleet.
Rumpus: I thought it was fascinating that she lived until the ripe-old age of . . . what?
Chang-Eppig: She retired around the age of thirty-four, and then she died when she was sixty-eight or sixty-nine. Remember, this was the 1800s.
Rumpus: Exactly. The fact that she was the one who was able to negotiate the arrangement, too, is an incredible detail. As part of the extensive research to flesh out eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Canton and Taiwan, what would you say was the most interesting detail that you wanted to nail in the writing of the book?
Chang-Eppig: As a person and as a writer, I tend to geek out about stuff, and there were so many things I was fascinated by that ultimately had to get cut from the novel. My editor was telling me things like, “Nobody wants to read five pages about the types of weapons these characters used.” There were all kinds of details I found out about weapons, about the types of ships they used, but I’ll say that the one detail that was really most instrumental in helping me develop the plot was the financial circumstances of the time, of the peasants back during that period.
It was a time of huge financial precarity for a lot of people due to all these famines that kept happening, partly because of natural catastrophes but also partly because the emperor had all these policies in place that made it easier for these famines to happen. One of the facts I found that was so helpful was that one month’s supply of rice at the time cost about seven months’ wages for a typical peasant. You don’t have to be a mathematician to see that this wasn’t a sustainable system, and I think that was what made me realize why Shek Yeung’s fleet got so huge, because all of these people were desperate. If someone came along and said, “I have a way for you to feed yourself and your family,” who wouldn’t do this? Who wouldn’t take advantage of this opportunity?
Rumpus: I love how you paid such excellent attention to the economics of the period, too, and how much it influenced your characters. I also love a good swashbuckling adventure, and your novel had so many excellent fight scenes. In one particular moment, Shek Yeung has to figure out how to close the distance between herself and a Portuguese soldier so she can dispatch him with her cutlass. You referenced this a little bit in a recent piece with Lit Hub, but can you talk a bit about your background in martial arts?
Chang-Eppig: My background is in karate. I took it for many years when I was younger, through my middle-adult years, but I was never very good at it. I took it because I enjoyed it and because I felt like I was learning important things from it, but I was never the top student in class. I was never the one winning the sparring matches. That said, I met a lot of really incredible people as a result of these classes, people who were so good at what they did.
While I was writing the novel, I knew that I couldn’t draw so much from my own fighting ability, but I did ask myself how my former instructors and fellow students might approach situations like these. There were actually a couple of instances where I went back to former instructors and asked them to explain how they would approach certain fights, like the ones I depicted in the book, and I absolutely benefitted from having access to people who were really good at these weapons and fights.
For example, there was a fight scene with Cheung Po, the main male character in the book, and I remember seeing these particular swords in a museum in Taiwan. I don’t know why, but I just knew that these were the types of swords Cheung Po would use, similar to these arnis sticks that I’d trained with before.
While these sticks weren’t my area of expertise, I remember guest instructors who were incredibly proficient in these weapons. They’d have these clinics where they would come and perform these basic moves with us. And I remember these instructors would break the body down into parts that were accessible to the reach of these sticks. So when I tried to imagine Cheung Po swinging these swords like arnis sticks, I would see him aiming one toward the head and another toward the knee because that’s how these instructors were training us. He would be aiming for places like the temple, the shoulder, and the knee because they would have the greatest impact.
Rumpus: While we’re on this subject, one of my favorite lines from the book happens at the end of an interrogation Shek Yeung has with a government official she’s taken prisoner: “Maybe there was an essential violence in women, too, this thing that pricked at them from the inside like a needle a seamstress had forgotten to remove from a beautiful embroidered robe.” You reserve the most violent moments for the women, like Shek Yeung, Madame Ko, and Lam Yuk-Yiu. Can you talk a little bit about how you wanted to present violence in the book?
Chang-Eppig: Before I really started to focus on my writing, I worked as a psychologist. That’s my background. I worked as both an adult psychologist and a child psychologist for years. When I was in training for child psychology, I participated in a program that was aimed at reducing relational violence among preteen girls. The thesis of this program focused on resisting the stereotype that women and girls aren’t violent, that there’s this natural kindness or softness that’s part of them. The program demonstrated that this isn’t what the research shows and that there’s actually a lot of aggression and violence inherent in preteen girls. It just comes out in a different form because society tells women and girls that it needs to come out in a different form. This often takes the form of relational bullying, spreading gossip, and that kind of stuff.
So I thought: If this innate aggression is present in all humans, regardless of gender, and if it’s society that tells women and girls that they can’t do physical violence, how would this change in a society where physical violence was necessary for them to survive? And that’s what I was trying to explore here: is it really true that women and girls aren’t as innately violent as everyone else, and in what kinds of ways does this violence manifest?
Rumpus: Since your background is in child and adult psychology, what made you want to move more of your time and attention into the literary field? Do you see these as dual careers or identities, or one in the same?
Chang-Eppig: I’ll be honest with you: I don’t know right now. For many years, these areas have coexisted for me, but they’ve been parallel, nonintersecting paths. When you’re working as a psychologist, nobody wants to hear about your book. And it’s frankly unethical because you can’t be in a session with a client and say, “By the way, I’m writing a novel.” And because what I write about isn’t directly related to psychology—I’m not writing some kind of roman à clef about a psychologist, for example—it’s strange there, too, because I like to write weird stuff, like pirates and ghosts and cyborgs.
This past year, because I’ve been busy with book-related stuff, I’ve temporarily put my license on hold. And I honestly don’t really know what’s going to happen with both of these lives.
Rumpus: I’m always curious about this, too, but who were some of the writers you had to read in order to be able to pull off Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea?
Chang-Eppig: One author who really informed a lot of the book was Pu Songling, who compiled this amazing collection of short stories called Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. He was this bureaucrat who lived in the 1600s in China, and he went around to all these villages, asking everyone he met in them to tell him the strangest story they’d ever heard. And he would just write all these stories down, keeping these written records of oral folk tales alive, kind of like what the Grimms did.
Rumpus: He sounds like he beat the Grimms by about a century.
Chang-Eppig: One of the things Pu did was that, even though these stories were all about ogres and vengeful ghosts and river spirits, the way they were told was very different from Western tales. Where Western stories might start off with, “Once upon a time” or “A long time ago, in a land far, far away,” where the idea was to distance the reader from the events, Pu’s stories always described the events as happening in this specific year, in this particular village, at this specific street corner, and so on. He always included details to assure you the account was real. There might be a disclaimer he would add, like: “If you don’t believe me, talk to this butcher’s brother since he was there to witness the appearance of this ogre.”
After I read this book, I thought about how I was going to add speculative or magical elements. I knew I wanted to be deliberately vague, as to whether something was actually happening. For many people across the world and across time periods, there isn’t always this strong delineation between fantasy and reality. They might defend these events and say, “No, this really happened to the butcher’s brother.” Instead, I wanted to give the events in the book more of this slipstream feel to them. The question isn’t, “Is this happening?” or “Is this not happening?” The point is that Shek Yeung believed these things were happening to her. I wanted to depict reality in that time period, in the way that people might actually perceive it. And while I don’t think I needed Pu’s collection in order to be able to write the book, I know it helped me figure out how to shape the book’s overall tone.
I also had to read a number of nonfiction books about that particular time period, too, about things like maritime culture during the 1800s and so on. I joke about this, but I know that there have been a number of PhD students who have been so helpful to a lot of authors, because they’ve written about very particular subjects. For me, what was really helpful for the book was being able to do these deep dives into dissertation research, to see if someone had explored these very specific and distinct topics.
Rumpus: So many visits to ProQuest and JSTOR and places like that, in order to get the details about Shek Yeung correct?
Chang-Eppig: Not just Shek Yeung but the other, real-life characters, too. People like Cheung Po and Cheng Yat were real, and so was Pak Ling, the government’s agent against the pirates—I jokingly call him the “Pirate Van Helsing”—and the other fleet commanders, too, like the Blue Banner Fleet commander’s wife, Lam Yuk-Yiu. She was absolutely real, and she had quite the reputation as a markswoman. She was reportedly really proficient with Western firearms, and she apparently spoke fluent English. She was also known as a very sexual being, and this was in a time where if you had more than one lover, you were seen as a harlot. When I learned that she was very much a real historical figure, I knew she had to play a significant role in the book.
Rumpus: I loved that you were also careful to include a pantheon of sexualities in the novel, which was true to life. In a lot of other historical novels, this might be glossed over entirely or not even mentioned, but these sexual dynamics were at the forefront of the book, and it was weirdly refreshing.
Chang-Eppig: It shouldn’t be refreshing, right? Because in a lot of situations, especially pirate culture, the system was primarily a meritocracy. They didn’t care about ethnicity or gender or sexuality, as long as you could do your job. The focus instead was on whether you could be useful at sea, and if you could, anything went. What kills me now is when Conservatives these days get up in arms about these details being considered part of a “woke” agenda, what they refuse to understand is that this is actually being true to history. It might not be the slice of history that they learned, but this was part of the larger scope of what actually happened.
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Author photo by Lily Dong
