To describe Ai Jiang as an up-and-coming writer is to have already got behind the curve, as she is, in many ways, already there: a Nebula, Locus, and now Ignyte award finalist, with many, many stories in such venues as F&SF, The Dark, and Uncanny, she also has three longer works out just this year (Smol Tales From Between Worlds, Linghun, and I am AI). We caught up, if ever-so-briefly, with the Chinese-Canadian author and spoke about what she wants to get across in her stories, how she writes about identity and mixed backgrounds, culture and immigration, and cyberpunk and AI.

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You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that you want to write stories that are not only entertaining, but also make a difference. In what way?

I feel like stories have the ability to connect people, to help others understand those who are not from the same background or have the same experiences or worldviews and values, but also see that despite the differences, there is also universality to the concept of humanity in how things might resonate in unexpected ways. But I also think that stories allow us to view the world through a different lens, come to understand our reality through reflective storytelling—the hope that remains, the triumphs, the failures—and hopefully, we can become more empathetic to one another.

In many of your stories you speak about identity, particularly in relation to East and West, to feeling split. I know many people, particularly of mixed backgrounds, feel this way. Do you feel sometimes that others perceive you as not belonging to one group or the other (or to any)? Do you still feel you’d wish to merge your own split identity into one whole, and what might that be?

It's funny because depending on who I ask, I might get very mixed answers. Some might tell me I’m “not Chinese enough” and others might tell me I can “only ever be Chinese,” and sometimes I wonder why there is such an obsession with categorization, though I do understand the need for it at times—in relation to marketing and different genres. But that also means that cross-genre works are difficult to put a finger on, or perhaps they actually have the opportunity to hit multiple audiences at once.

But in thinking about marketing, I also think about my identity in a similar sense in that I am very “cross-genre,” not only in my writing, but also in my cultural background in that it’s a strange blend of the traditional beliefs and values I’d been raised with through my grandmother and parents, but also the Canadian educational and social environment I grew up in outside my home.

When I was younger, I wanted nothing more than to assimilate fully into Canadian culture. When I felt like I was drifting from my family and relatives, I wanted nothing more than to hold onto my Chinese upbringing. But neither of these cultures are perfect, and I feel like aimlessly trying to hold on to one over the other was more detrimental than simply embracing both and learning from both and using one to inform the other. I think to love one’s culture and background doesn’t necessarily mean you have to agree with everything within it, and I think having both a Canadian education and Chinese upbringing helps me better reflect on the merits of each but also their shortcomings so I am more critical about the ways my values and beliefs are shaped and better understand why they exist and what has led me to them rather than simply saying, “This is just how things are.” So I suppose that is my long-winded way of saying, no, I wouldn’t want to be one or the other, but perhaps in a sense I’ve been trying to merge the two all along to create a blend that makes sense for who I am.

I feel like the more receptive you are to other cultures, the more understanding you will become towards people in general, and perhaps the more your thoughts and ideas might resonate because of broader reflection. For me, it’s interesting to know and explore why people think the way they do, how they make the decisions and what the root causes are for these choices—whether culturally, socially, or politically—and what the influences are for their beliefs and values, and why people might willingly or unwillingly change them depending on their background and upbringing. I don’t know if that made a whole lot of sense, but identity is a complicated topic I’m still far from understanding.

Is this also what you mean when you talk about immigration as a kind of death, the death of a part of us? Could you elaborate?

I think of immigration, now more than ever, as not only a movement between physical places or countries, but also a movement across time, and no matter which type of immigration we are experiencing, a part of us is lost because whatever memories we had created in those places, during those specific times, and the people we were at those moments, at least I don’t believe can be truly reclaimed. And isn’t that a bit like dying, in a sense?

When we move from childhood to our teenage years, we cannot reclaim our childhood. When we move from our teenage years to adulthood, we cannot reclaim our teenage selves. And similarly, when we turn from adults to elders, we cannot reclaim our adulthood.

I think of immigration as the same thing.

Moving from China to Canada, you cannot reclaim the self you were during the time you were in China. You can return, refamiliarize yourself with a place and its people, but it won’t be the same place it was months ago, years ago, decades ago, and likely, neither would you.

That’s so true! I guess the follow-up question would be, would you ever want to?

I wouldn’t be the same person I am today if I did, and I like to stick to the motto of having no regrets, so I suppose no, I wouldn’t want to return. I think often when we try to “re-experience” something or desperately hold onto the past, it isn’t the same as how we remember it most of the time, and to many, that can be a disappointing thing.

Your stories always open with such wonderful feelings, images. Do you start with these in your writing process, or do they come later, after the story is well underway?

I am very much a start-with-cinematic-scenes-and-imagery-in-my-head-and-interesting-concepts type of writer. What I am truly trying to say and the emotion behind my characters and their world do not fully emerge until much later, when I finally realize what these images are trying to tell me or reveal to me about something I’ve been unconsciously brewing on and had never realized until it manifests on the page, through stories, through worlds both like and unlike our own, and characters like and unlike myself.

Linghun is absolutely fascinating. How long did it take to write? What ideas did it spring from? Was it easy to write, did it flow?

The initial draft took about a week of non-stop writing when I had a break during my master’s program. But the editing was spread out over a long stretch of time and done sporadically. I was thinking about the idea of ghosts and the way they are usually depicted as vengeful and the ones doing the haunting, but when I thought further about their unchanging and stalled-in-time nature, I wondered if it wasn’t the living who were unwilling to let the dead go through clutching tightly onto fading memories and people we refuse to acknowledge as gone—sometimes so much so we lose sight of those who are still here.

I think it was both easy and difficult to write Linghun in the sense that I tried to include both emotionally charged characters and ones that were number to grief and prolonged mourning, so to switch the mind on and off between perspectives while keeping in mind craft-related things was difficult. But I do enjoy a challenge, so writing Linghun was definitely an eye-opening and perhaps cathartic experience. Sometimes, we don’t realize we have been mourning until we have finally moved on. Denial, not only in the sense of grief, is very much a thing that might go amiss, especially when it comes to self-interrogation.

Writing with many different PoVs can be difficult (and interrupt the flow of a story), but in Linghun it doesn’t. Is there a way that you approached this? Or did it happen naturally?

It's funny because I hadn’t specifically planned to alternate the POVs the way I had in Linghun, and it was only through looking back on the structural organization through the audiobook that I noticed there was naturally an alternating pattern. But I’d mostly thought about what information I needed to present that was most relevant to the story and which POV might be the best to show it when deciding which POV to use for each scene, and in terms of Wenqi and Mrs, especially near the end, which sections might be best to alternate in the short back and forths that might help draw out their parallels.

I very much enjoy structural intentionality in fiction, so I like to incorporate it when I can, which is to say almost all my current novels-in-progress will have some form of unconventional structure or POV-use or concept, but more likely than not, a blend of all three.

In I am AI, there is so much depth of character across all the characters, even though this is very much a first-person PoV. How do you achieve this? Do you look at the story from the different points of view? Does it flow naturally from being so in touch with what the protagonist is seeing/feeling/doing?

I was told that every character is the protagonist of their own story, and I feel like by thinking about each character with this in mind, it helps me better picture what their lives might be like if they were the character I’d told the story through instead. I feel like connecting the lives of the surrounding characters with the narrator themselves and their experiences also adds greater depth and complexity to what is being compared and reflected upon, much like the way our own lives might inform how we contextualize and make sense of what we hear others say or do.

What was the inspiration for I am AI? There seems to be a connection between the rise of AI-created art and ChatGPT, but that’s definitely not all this book is about.

I had actually written this last year, with the earliest draft dated to the beginning of November. At that time, the main AI art floating around was still WOMBO with Midjourney just coming along (this is from what I recall, so I could be wrong). But I don’t remember ChatGPT being a big thing during that time, or it was only starting to become a topic of intrigue.

When I wrote I am AI, I thought a lot about writing burnout, but also just burnout from work in general given long hours, overtime, the system of toxic productivity that is very much expected of most workers these days if they want a promotion, or to rise above those competing for the same positions. Before pursuing fiction writing full time, I was a ghost writer, and the job was very much dependent on output—the more you write, the more you earn. I constantly tried to hit high word counts when I could, with 150,000 words or so spread across a variety of projects within a three-month period, but this didn’t include the reading and research time it took to inform the words written.

When I was editing I am AI, this was when ChatGPT became a topic of interest, along with the uptick in AI art and people pretending that they had illustrated the generated artworks themselves. And with the rise of AI backdrop, a lot of the creative community’s concerns made their way into the existing layers of I am AI’s narrative where I tried to explore not only the fear of being replaced, but also the fear of losing what makes art meaningful: our humanity.

Cosmetic and illusory image manipulation has become a sort of cyberpunk reality, or will do in the near future. As this happens, we’re seeing more and more identity-switching, leading to various kinds of -fishing and -facing (and Hollywood casting non-ethnic actors in ethnic roles, albeit with pushback). What do you think about the future ease of such identity switching, whether with physical augmentation or through apps?

This isn’t something I’d thought much about, but I do think it is rather difficult to fake a background no matter how good an actor/actress a person is, and I would say this is very true of regular people masquerading as someone of a different identity as well. I think there are subtleties to each culture, background, identity that are very difficult to mimic naturally even with practice. Perhaps someone can pick up a lot of mannerisms or speech patterns, but I feel like it is difficult to pick up all of the touchstones unless a person has been a part of that identity, or at least living among those of a particular identity, for a very long time.

In what way do you think your background changes the way you perceive or write cyberpunk (or does it)? How did you come into writing the genres you do (horror, cyberpunk)?

I think a lot of my fears and uncertainties or confusions come from my background, but also from the world in general, which informs the genres I write in. With tech dominating our everyday lives, it’s difficult not to think about the ways in which it might be detrimental to our future (dystopias, tech dominations, climate disasters) as much as it has the potential to also save it (solarpunk, lunarpunk, environmentally friendly tech and alternatives to non-renewable energy). But in terms of horror, I feel like the world at this moment has caused people a lot of fear in relation to agency, identity, of bodily anatomy, of belonging and unbelonging, of capitalism and consumption, of the frightening increases in the cost of living, of physical and emotional safety, of war, of political conflict, of violence, of what it means for children during such turbulent times.

I tend to look at the inclusion of different cultures as giving true depth to the worlds and stories we create. Do you see the inclusion of different forms of language and characters as creating depth or foreignness, as being organic or difficult (or a combination of these)?

I think this is difficult in the sense that it has been ingrained in our minds that including different cultures is something difficult and foreign only because it is not familiar throughout much of the Western literary canon, but I very much think it should be something that comes more organically given the world we’re living in now. But I also think that including different forms of language and characters of backgrounds outside our own requires a great amount of care, intention, and understanding, just as it is difficult to talk about people who know nothing about it; it will show in our stories if we try to include characters from backgrounds and cultures and identities we don’t first try to understand in our own lives outside of the stories.

What do you think the future of the real world holds for us in the next ten years? Do you see it being similar to the path in I am AI?

As bleak as some of my answers might have been and the dreary depiction of the world of I am AI, I am an unrealistically optimistic person, I must say. I do hope that humanity triumphs over AI in the sense of artistic creation and forging human connection, and that AI will be seen more as a tool, much like digital art programs that simplify creation processes so we can focus more on the development of our ideas, or as a way to save time on mental and physical energy-sapping tasks that take away from the creation process, such as administrative tasks and scheduling.

What do you see on your own path in the near future?

It’s difficult to say, because I do agree with all the other writers I have spoken to in that publishing is unpredictable, and you never know just how much publishers are willing to bet on you and your stories, if any of them do, so I can only do what is in my control, which is to continue writing and hope that people will want to read my words and that reading them affects them somehow, even if just a little.

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You can find Ai Jiang on Twitter (@AiJiang_) and Instagram (@ai.jian.g), and her works in many places, but especially the publishers’ own websites: Smol Tales at buy.bookfunnel.com/x5zxbciv4g, Linghun at darkmattermagazine.shop/products/linghun (or for signed copies from her local indie: littleghostsbooks.com/product/linghun-signed-/986), and I am AI at shortwavepublishing.com/catalog/i-am-ai-novelette/. Ai Jiang’s own website is www.aijiang.ca.