Ewen Ma writes fiction and poetry, devises theatre, and is a lapsed Visual Cultures research student made in Hong Kong. Ewen’s work has appeared in venues including Uncanny, The Deadlands, Fusion Fragment, Anathema, Voice & Verse, and Apparition Lit. A 2018 graduate of Clarion West, Ewen was also shortlisted for the Future Worlds Prize in 2020. Ewen currently lives in the UK and can often be found haunting cemeteries or climbing up walls. Following three previous appearances for poetry, “Désolé” is Ewen’s first short story in Uncanny, a poignant tale of family and memory, set in a dystopian near-future world.
Uncanny Magazine: “Désolé” has a lot of great elements—memory chips, complicated relationships, dealing with bureaucracy, navigating duty and obligation. What was your inspiration or starting point for the story?
Ewen Ma: Thank you so much! The story started out as a character study of someone being put through the gauntlet of bureaucracy, a contemporary, sci-fi take of sorts on Kafka’s The Trial. Two things have always frightened me since I was very young: the crushingly cold, empty callousness of government bureaucracy under what Deleuze would call a “control society,” and the idea of having your entire consciousness (memories, self, and all) be legally not your own, reduced to nothing more than data, or research, or a curiosity. The state-sanctioned commodification and exploitation of the self, as it were. Hence the INData chips, hence Mrs. K.’s ordeal at the INData centre.
One thing that weighs heavy to me, especially in recent years, is the concept of home— what it means to love a place or a city, to be attached to a vibrant culture and way of life you grew up in, and then have all of that be ripped from under your feet in the wake of an inevitable catastrophe and you’re forced to reckon with the idea that no matter how much you may love the place you call home, it will not love you back and was never meant to last. I knew going in that with “Désolé” I wanted to explore the emotional weight of choosing to stay (or not) under those conditions, but it wasn’t until several pages in that I discovered the story would do so through the portrait of a queer, interracial family going through the aftermath of a cataclysmic event in a city called H, but it felt like the right, natural way to tease out these ideas, as well as ideas about art and legacy and survival which I’ve long been preoccupied with. I was also digging into a lot of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattariby way of Brian Massumi at the time of writing, trying to wrap my head around rhizomes and assemblages and lines of flight, how the individual operates within and beyond systems/networks (such as families or cities or state and government systems) as its own multiplicity, the relationship between nomadism and spatiality and citizenship and placelessness and the minoritarian. I don’t pretend to fully grasp any of these interesting ideas as well as I ought to, but these were all floating around in the back of my mind and subconsciously informed a lot of the core elements of the story as I was developing it.
Uncanny Magazine: I love the relationships between the characters, revealed gradually as the story progresses. How do you come up with your characters? Do they ever do anything you don’t expect?
Ewen Ma: Oftentimes, instead of coming up with a single character, I tend to start with sets of character relationships first. People do not exist in a vacuum, and neither do characters—even with the loneliest characters, they’re defined by scaffolding of the world they exist within and the people they’re closely linked to, whether they like it or not. No man is an island, and an individual functions within a network of systems that define who they are. I love playing characters against each other or setting them up as foils for one another, digging into the shared histories between them in order to get to know those characters and their relationships to one another. I also really enjoy experimenting with different voices and multiple perspectives (especially diverging perspectives on a particular event or situation) in fiction, which was what made “Désolé” such an interesting story to play with, voice-wise and character-wise.
In “Désolé,” Oliver K. was a character that took me by surprise. Not having his point of view in the story was a deliberate structural choice I made, but it came out of a long struggle of figuring out how to give him a voice and more agency, and trying to figure out why he would make the choice that leads to the story’s inciting incident. Trying to put together who Oliver is while writing the story was like assembling a jigsaw puzzle—I only discovered why he was the way he was by seeing him through the eyes of the people he mattered to, and he became a character with a far darker undercurrent to his backstory and mental landscape than what I initially set out to write.
Uncanny Magazine: “Désolé” has a lovely dystopian feel to it. What are some of your favourite dystopias, from literature or other media?
Ewen Ma: Is it too cheesy to say that my favourite dystopia is real life? If favourite is even the right word for something I both love and hate. Ahem. Anyway. My favourite kinds of dystopian fiction are the ones that show the fragile beauty of life (and nature) through the cracks of an otherwise bleak world destroyed by human hubris. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and the video game The Last of Us come to mind (despite the many shortcomings of the HBO adaptation), and a dystopian post-apocalyptic short story that I adore is Natalia Theodoridou’s “Poems Written While.” I also love Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel for what it has to say about art and survival, and similarly The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa about memory and the preservation of memory under authoritarianism. I also recently read the fantastic Owlish by Dorothy Tse, which I highly recommend for its chillingly prescient portrayal of the (fictional) dystopian city of Nevers.
Uncanny Magazine: Oliver is strongly tied to City H, but Rocco is more of a wanderer. Which do you find more relatable?
Ewen Ma: I’ve been one or the other of them at various points in my relatively short life, but I would have to say definitely Oliver. Even though he doesn’t have a point or view in this story, I think he’s…Oliver is someone who’s rooted so deeply in his city (and not just due to his INData chip) that removing him from the network of relationships and memories he’d developed in City H would almost be as painful as removing his INData, but at the same time to stay in City H means remaining within a totalizing system that will keep exploiting him and the people he loves. I guess that’s a conflict I (and perhaps a lot of other people in similar situations) strongly identify with. These days, I’m trying to be more like Rocco, though—never settling, going wherever the wind blows me toward, letting home be wherever my feet touch the ground.
Uncanny Magazine: You write both poetry and prose—what is your favourite thing about working in each form? What do you find most challenging?
Ewen Ma: I love poetry for its cadence, its malleability and playfulness, its incisiveness. A lot of my favourite poems strip away the trappings and fripperies to dig through the raw materials of language itself (and of narrative and storytelling form)—using as few words as possible to get at the emotional and/or thematic core of a certain subject. There’s also an ability to say a thousand different things at once with a simple word or line of poetry, which I deeply appreciate. I only ever write poetry (and prose) in English, but my poems are heavily influenced by music, especially Cantopop. There’s something about the lyricism of contemporary music from Hong Kong and its capacity for wordplay and double-entendres that I’d love to be able to capture in my own work, and I’m fascinated by how Cantopop lyricists such as Wyman Wong are able to fold dense metaphors about heavy subjects such as exile or LGBTQ rights or the impacts of urban renewal into what are on the surface simply love songs. The challenge in poetry comes in the revision process, though. Most of the time I spend on my poems involves long hours of trial-and-error: picking the precise word, arranging a line or paragraph in just so to evoke connections to other ideas or emotions for the reader.
As for prose: flash fiction versus short stories versus novels/novellas are all very different beasts, obviously, but I find that prose usually comes far easier to me than poetry. I like the tangibility of having a narrative and characters to work with, however small the space to do that work is, and the infinite possibilities that can come out of prose structure, especially experimental prose. I tend to think of the differences between flash fiction, short stories, and novel(la)s in terms of bodies of water: a small deep well, a long stretch of river, or a vast sea. And while I particularly enjoy being out at sea, I love all of them. Making sure that all the individual components of plot and structure and character motivations actually make sense when thrown together is the most difficult part of writing fiction for me, though!
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Ewen Ma: I’m currently polishing up a completed manuscript of a “Frankenstein meets Infernal Affairs in Disco Elysium” science-fiction/horror novel which (fingers crossed) I’ll be hitting the agent querying trenches with soon, as well as revising another novel that took me a few years to complete—that one is part near-future speculative climate fiction, part wrestling with my complex relationship to the escapist portal-fantasy stories I grew up with, and it’s near and dear to my heart. Alongside those and some more short stories, I also have a novella I’m drafting, a frivolously self-indulgent queer adventure-romance that I’ve jokingly dubbed “cyberpunk Fingersmith in hell”, but hah, whether or not it’ll be fit for anyone’s eyes but mine by the time I finish writing it is anyone’s guess.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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