Kathryn Ma Wants to Challenge Herself

Kathryn Ma’s novel The Chinese Groove is an immigrant story unlike most. Shelley, the 18-year-old narrator, is buoyed by unwavering optimism, apparently immune to despair. Raised by his widowed father in Yunnan Province, he heads to San Francisco to claim his destiny—but soon finds the transition to life in the U.S. more complicated than he could have ever imagined.

I spoke with Ma about Victorian novels, unreliable narrators, and breaking the fourth wall.

Nina Schuyler: In your first novel, The Year She Left Us, you had four characters and intertwined stories. What did you want to do differently from a craft perspective in The Chinese Groove?

Indeed, I wanted to do something technically difficult for me. I try to do that with every piece of writing now that I’m further along in my writing. This time, I wanted to try