The world of Alice Evelyn Yang (Weinberg ’20) is full of mystery and intrigue, but it was among the folds of family history and folklore that the author found her narrative voice.
Yang’s debut novel, “A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing,” hit shelves Jan. 27. The book is a multigenerational family saga steeped in magical realism, tracing one family’s survival through the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, the Cultural Revolution in China and immigration to the United States.
Building her writing confidence at Northwestern
When Yang began her time at NU, she planned to major in environmental science, she said. But, after taking several English classes, Yang said she couldn’t ignore her love for literature.
She recalled taking Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction with then English Prof. Megan Stielstra. Stielstra was the first professor who gave her the confidence to be a writer, Yang said.
“That was all the encouragement I needed,” Yang said.
Stielstra, who is currently an acquiring editor at NU Press and creative writing teacher in Chicago, said she knew early on that Yang had great potential. During Yang’s freshman year and Stielstra’s last year as a faculty member, Stielstra emailed another professor about Yang to “make sure that her talent was known.”
“The last line of my email was, ‘Please save this email for when she wins the National Book Award,’” Stielstra said. “That is something that I felt and saw when she was just a freshman.”
Stielstra still remembers an essay Yang wrote for her class, titled “The American Dream Wrapped in Tissue Paper.” In it, Yang wrote about her experience finding out she was confirmed as an American citizen while in a children’s museum.
The essay delves into Yang’s perspective as the daughter of first-generation immigrants, Stielstra said.
Stielstra said she was deeply moved by Yang’s essay. She said its subject matter is “deeply vital” in the “current cultural and political dialogue.”
“In addition to being just a beautiful writer, Alice is a very brave one as well,” Stielstra said.
After graduating from NU with a B.A. in Creative Writing and a minor in Environmental Policy and Culture, Yang enrolled in Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction writing, where she earned a fellowship from the Felipe De Alba Fund for excellence in first-year writing and a nomination for the Henfield Prize, one of the most prestigious awards available for graduate students, during her second year.
Early inspirations
Yang developed a love for reading and writing at an early age, and by fifth grade, she had written her first novel.
Though her parents initially discouraged her from pursuing a career in writing, support from Stielstra and other English professors solidified Yang’s commitment to the work.
Yang recalled reading a book of craft essays by Anne Lamott in high school. The book, “Bird by Bird,” begins with advice from the author’s father to her brother: “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Lamott expands on this adage, urging her audience of writers to tackle storytelling one part at a time.
Yang referred to this advice frequently while drafting “A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing” — taking it “bird by bird” has been a key approach in all of her novel writing, she said.
When it came to writing her family saga, Yang found inspiration from “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck and “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee. These works prompted her curiosity about her own family history, which became the foundational idea for her novel.
“For me, it was just trying to imagine what a familial history with my background looked like, and also how that history would impact me on a day-to-day basis,” Yang said. “Like if I had any inherited trauma responses, if I was wrestling with any ‘demons’ of my own that had just been passed on to me through history.”
Charting history, plot and personal experiences
At 23 years old, Yang began her first draft of “A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing.” She kicked off the process with deep historical research into 20th century China, charting the historical timeline of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Cultural Revolution.
Though she was encountering much of this history for the first time, Yang knew she wanted the novel to explore key moments like Red August, which captured the country’s intense struggle with political violence and class tension.
A complex story of one family’s perseverance through these continuous cycles of violence starts to unravel throughout the novel. Jumping between the perspectives of main characters Qianze, her father Weihong and her grandmother Ming, Yang interrogates the legacies of colonial violence that are perpetuated through generational trauma, familial abandonment and haunting figures of mythology.
“I had this loose idea of a Scheherazade-frame tale that goes back into history, but what I wanted was this Russian nesting doll structure where each generation that comes after is carrying the debris of the past,” Yang said.
Drawing inspiration from the Scheherazade narrative framework of the “One Thousand and One Nights” folktale, Yang bounces between character points-of-view and time periods, fueling interest through cliffhangers and mystery.
Yang also drew heavily from her family’s history, as well as other archives documenting the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Cultural Revolution. Through multiple rounds of interviews with her parents and the help of her father in translating materials from Chinese, she constructed a detailed timeline that would later inform each of the novel’s distinct time periods.
When fleshing out the family dynamics, Yang wanted to focus on the impact of lived experiences and trauma passed down from Ming to Weihong to Qianze. The protagonist also acts as a lens through which to better understand Ming’s and Weihong’s pasts, while unknowingly grappling with the trauma she inherited from both of them.
Yang said she envisioned her characters within a “three-tier structure in which each subsequent generation inherits something.”
Yang maintained a physical diagram of her story’s trajectory, according to her friend Clara Yan. The two met eight years ago while interning at the Modern Language Association of America in New York together.
Yan described the diagram as Yang’s “Conspiracy Wall,” dubbed after the “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” meme. The diagram included a collage of Yang’s research materials, character arcs and historical notes. Throughout the entire process, Yang has always paid precise attention to the small details, Yan added.
“She’ll really sit with a single word or a phrase, or she’ll come back to it over and over again,” Yan said. “She’ll really weigh not only its meaning, but its texture — like the emotional residue it leaves behind it in the passage itself and think about how that word sits in the larger context of the chapter and the novel.”
Pulling the family dynamics together, “A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing” opens in present-day New York but calls back several times to the main character Qianze’s childhood home in Norfolk, Virginia, mirroring Yang’s own background.
Growing up on one of the southernmost edges of the state, Yang said she was no stranger to the racial hostility that shaped her predominantly white community. Qianze’s sense of alienation in her childhood home strongly echoes her own, Yang added.
“I definitely wanted to draw on my own experience growing up in the South,” Yang said. “Having Qianze as this frame narrative and having her as a grounding character for the reader before you’re dumped into the history, I did want to make her narrative and her voice feel grounded in our reality.”
The novel’s magical realist elements were inspired by Latin American literary traditions, Yang said. She spent her junior year at NU studying abroad at the University of Oxford, where she took a tutorial in magical realism.
Yang said she learned that much of Latin American magical realism is about reclaiming traditional folklore and utilizing folklore to discuss colonialism, occupation and oppression.
“I just was really interested in this kind of slight diversion from reality to illustrate a point about oppression,” Yang said. “I wanted to use magical realism and folklore as a device to talk about intergenerational trauma, talk about inherited trauma, and how the consequences of that — if the background and history isn’t told — could be devastating.”
For Yang, the book was also an exploration of folklore and how understanding transcends generations.
Rather than follow Chinese mythology, Yang chose to engage with Japanese folklore. Her decision to do so echoes one of the main themes of the novel.
“I wanted to pose this question of what happens when the oppressor or the colonizer’s folklore basically colonizes,” Yang said. “(It’s) this idea of Japanese folklore leeching into the land and then into the lineage as sort of an inheritance of that post-colonial trauma.”
When it came to incorporating all her research into the book, Yan said Yang was especially concerned with portraying an accurate representation of the events she wrote about.
Often flipping between dog-eared books and annotated research papers, Yang would consult the “Conspiracy Wall” before mapping out her writing for the day, Yan added.
“She wanted to make sure it (the story) was told right,” Yan said. “This is a novel that’s dealing with incredibly heavy history — generations of trauma, the legacy of Comfort Women, inherited silence — and it never feels careless and sensationalized for the exact reason … she took a really deep responsibility in telling the story.”
Stephanie Cuepo Wobby, a fellow writer and friend from Yang’s MFA cohort, attributed the quality of Yang’s work to her consistency and dedication.
Cuepo Wobby added that even in the midst of drafting her novel, Yang has also been a source of support to fellow writers.
“She’s always been such a steady person, a very dependable person,” she said. “(It’s) hard to find a person like that who stays consistent, doesn’t let (the challenges) get to their head.”
Yang completed her first draft in 2023 and soon after connected with an agent. In the weeks leading up to the book’s publication, roughly three years later, Yang reflected on the impact she hopes her writing will have on readers.
The book honors both the national tragedies that take place within it and Yang’s own family history. In dedicating the book to her parents, Yang said she hopes her writing will preserve their memories.
“I wanted it to feel real, and I wanted it to be an act of empathy and understanding what my parents went through, what my grandparents might have gone through,” Yang said. “I was just trying to understand them, and I feel like the book has brought us closer.”
A critical moment in history
Amid the celebration of her book launch, Yang remains deeply cognizant of the political and social environment that her book is entering. Given the recent rise in violence towards immigrants in the United States, Yang acknowledged the role of writers and artists in holding those in power accountable by acting as historical witnesses.
Stielstra commended Yang for being unafraid to write about the immigrant experience.
“I think those stories are of the greatest value right now in this world,” Stielstra said. “It’s a really radical and profound act to tell the truth of human beings, and I am just so proud of Alice for telling that truth.”
Yang also addressed her concerns about the declining value of creative work in society.
“I know that right now, there feels like there’s less value in art — especially with (artificial intelligence) art coming out, AI books coming out — but I think more than ever now our society needs human-written stories in order to understand this moment in history,” Yang added.
Looking to the future
Yang, whose work has been published in several literary journals and magazines, said she is currently drafting her second novel. Additionally, Yang has been working on a series of essays to accompany the launch of her debut — in particular, she said she is hoping to publish an essay titled “Bad Diaspora Daughter,” exploring how her perspective on immigrant narratives has changed since she first drafted the book. The author will also be visiting the Northwestern campus on Feb. 16 for a reading event.
Addressing fellow writers, Yang said she wants to encourage others in the same way that her professors supported her.
“In a time of fascism, art is so necessary,” Yang said. “Reading and books (are) how we empathize with others and how we can also imagine alternative futures.”
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