Anelise Chen’s hybrid memoir starts with an ingenious typo: Clam down, Chen’s mother texts her as she copes with her divorce, and poof!, the protagonist becomes a clam, determined to learn everything about her species and kin.
Though its namesake is a sedentary bottom feeder, Clam Down transports us from a heartsick Friendsgiving in Paris to an ambivalent research trip along the Camino del Santiago to a hopeful artist’s residency in Arizona; across every stage of infatuation, heartbreak, and bittersweet contemplation; and, finally, through a process of mutual understanding with the protagonist’s father, who spent years away from his family to develop a program called Shell Computing. Along the way, the clam contemplates her own adaptive behaviors in love and family life, the significance of shells to artists and cultures across the world, and the long lineage of immigrant resilience and invention.
With meticulous research and generous self-insight, Anelise Chen creates gorgeous pearls of wisdom about history, family, love, and the beauty and terror of opening up to other people. I had the immense pleasure of speaking with her over the phone, safely on dry land.
E.Y. Zhao: I loved how Clam Down explores scientific theory as a form of storytelling, and how, conversely, storytelling is a kind of archeological science and biological process. How did your relationship to research and science evolve over the process of writing the book?
Anelise Chen: It changed me completely. I grew up in the suburbs and then lived in cities my whole life. And I barely took any science classes when I was in school. I Asian-failed chemistry, got a C or a C-plus or something. I didn’t know anything about nature. I had total plant blindness. I didn’t know the difference between a species and a family and a genus. I couldn’t tell you the difference between a pine tree and a maple tree. Through the process of writing this, I became so much more interested in the natural world and am so much more literate than I was before. And I just love it. I feel like I missed out on this education, like going to the Natural History Museum and being a kid again. That kind of wonder, my whole life is oriented around that now. How to captivate that wonder, how to share it, how to harness it in writing and spread it around. And it all happened because of this weird typo. Just thinking about clams. When I started writing this, I didn’t know what a clam was. I was like, it’s a kind of food, but what is it, actually? Is it alive? I didn’t know. So it really has opened up a whole new way of being in the world.
EYZ: You’ve been working on Clam Down for eight years. How do you feel sending it into the world?
AC: I’m always telling my students, if I just write about what’s personal to me, will it be relevant to anyone else? If I just write about my family, how is this going to affect or move anyone? But the more specific you are, the more relatable it is, in a way. So I’m trying to fall back on that.
EYZ: It’s so funny to hear you say that, because I feel like this is the most personal book to me I’ve ever read. To use a shell metaphor: what’s so beautiful about stories is that they have infinite variation, and in that variation, you find something resonant with the entire earth.
AC: The other shell metaphor I latched onto is by the poet Francis Ponge. He has a poem called “The Mollusc.” At the very end, there’s a line about how the mollusk secretes its shell, and after it dies, there’s this empty vessel, and the vessel is there for others to inhabit. That’s such a cool thing that books do: you secrete it, you write it, and then you leave and other people can go inside and use it. So it’s almost like my job is done. I can leave now and have others enter it and make use of it however they see fit.
EYZ: That’s such an apt metaphor. And it connects to a quote I noted: “All stories have one simple goal to mark out zones of possibility and impossibility.” What zones did this book help mark out for you?
AC: It made me aware of the zones that had been marked out for me, what seems possible and impossible. It’s not the case anymore, but when I was in my twenties and trying to become something, like, Who am I, what am I going to be, and what are my goals?, it could be at odds with what my family thought was appropriate. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to have this kind of life as an artist and without family. I wanted to break the mold, but the mold had been made for me. There’s that whole therapy movement where you have to tell a new story about yourself to change because stories are what constrain you, but the story you tell yourself is always influenced by the stories you’ve been told. How can you begin to tell a different story?
It is sobering because I just finished reading my audiobook, and it’s such a weird experience to go so slowly through your own work and reinhabit it. I came home from the first day of reading like, Oh my God, I haven’t changed at all. Everything that I wrote, I’m still the same. What does that say about me? And then my husband said, “Well, your book is about self-recognition and acceptance, not about transformation.” And I was like, yes, thank you.
EYZ: What you said about the therapy movement—there’s some Lacan concept where he says you can’t change the narrative per se, but through psychotherapy you can change which person you are in that story, reposition yourself and see it from a new angle. Which you literally do by writing about yourself from the third person. What was it like to narrate yourself in third?
I wanted to break the mold, but the mold had been made for me.
AC: It was fun and liberating, and that’s why I ran with it. When I first started writing, everything was so fresh. It was happening in real time. Writing it in first person felt too close and writing it in third person felt somehow still too close. But writing from third person clam was just the right amount of distance and humor and irony that I could finally enter the story. But then I had to turn it into a book. It became really constraining and stifling and I thought, how am I going to keep this going for 300 pages? Which is why the book became so polyphonic. But it was useful to have that top-down, detached POV.
EYZ: Can you walk me through that writing process? Secreting the shell that is Clam Down?
AC: Oh. Just, you know, a lot of head bashing and misery and complaining. The primary ingredient is confusion and a dogged determination to answer the question, whatever that is. I’m just always confused. There’s always questions floating on my mind. Like what am I trying to figure out and why am I so compelled by this? Where’s the energy here? Why this image? Why is the clam so funny to me? That generates a lot of notes and propels me to read, and that leads to more notes. So the reading, questioning, and notetaking start to cohere, and then you read it over and you’re like, Oh, there’s a thread here. There’s patterns emerging. Then you have to narrativize it. And you think, How do I plug it in to the larger story? But what is the larger story? I have magnet boards in my office where I plot out the story, then replot. And once you replot, information gets slotted in different places. Just an example: there was this section about animal communication versus human communication, how animal communication is so much more straightforward because it’s nonverbal, and words are so deceptive and don’t actually represent what you’re thinking. So where do I put that in the narrative? Where does it make sense for that to come up? That note card kept moving around. Should it come in the beginning? Should it come at the end? Is it going to come with a dad interview? So it really takes a long time. That’s a little bit in the weeds.
EYZ: I wanted to get in the weeds! There’s a moment where your dad thinks, “It’s been so many years. I can’t remember how to use my own program. The creator can’t enter his creation. I have to force quit the whole thing and start over.” When you felt that way about this book, what kept you going?
AC: Just stubbornness. That is one thing that I share with my dad. He had to see his program as far as he could take it. Writing is so lonely and so hard. Nobody can help you. You can get feedback, but you still have to be the one to solve your own problems, because you’re the only one holding all the details in your head. How do you describe how painful that is? The best you can do is have a cheerleading squad. I have a group chat with my friends, Lisa and Eugene, and we use it to commiserate. Like, I can’t solve your problems for you, but I know how hard it is. And that’s basically it. You just have to keep going. I mean, I could’ve stopped, right? You can always just stop. That’s another answer. Like maybe it’s just not meant [to] be right now. I’ve quit several projects. Sometimes you have to put it aside.
Writing is so lonely and so hard. Nobody can help you.
EYZ: Any wellsprings of inspiration that saw you through?
AC: I always read Sigrid Nunez when I’m stuck. I can never really figure out how she structures her books, so it lets me be a little looser because I’m so obsessed with structure. Calvino. I read “The Spiral” many, many times. The voice is so light.
EYZ: I’m curious about the structure Clam Down ended up taking. There’s third-person clam throughout, but also, in the later parts, sections written from your dad’s point of view and historical documents from Asian clams’ points of view. How did those come in?
AC: I hadn’t planned to write in my dad’s voice, but once I started interviewing him, I was like, Oh, there’s no way to capture him, because it’s so funny and some of the things he says are inadvertently very poetic. And I didn’t want the perspective to be the judging daughter. So his voice just took over. That was really fun to write because I had so many text messages and emails I could study. And the Asian clam stuff—that happened early on. I struggled with the form, initially. Should I write it? How should I write it? Every way I wrote, it kept sounding like an Asian American history book. I knew I had to do something more. The whole book is what clams can teach us; it seemed logical to extend that to interviewing actual clams. And I loved oral history: I read a lot of oral history compilations, I love the voice in them. You can really sense the person behind the interview. So I experimented with that and it felt right.
EYZ: Were there other ways you tried to access your dad’s voice? There are moments of interiority, like when he says “this project has gotten away from me,” or when he’s thinking about you: “Oh, she’s always here to ask for something and it’s really painful.” How did you tap into that?
AC: Well, a lot of that he just tells me. He talks a lot about his anxieties and what he dreamt about. It’s my thinking pattern too. I got it from him, the way he thinks through to the end of every terrible scenario. And his very uncharitable assessments of people, he just says that out loud, but later will take it back. I feel like pretty much everything I wrote he told me directly. Also, when he was taking me through the photographs and decided [I could] use this material, he was really good about narrating his internal thoughts.
EYZ: That embodies one of the book’s core themes, which is the surprise people contain. In some ways your dad is protecting himself and closed off to the world. But then there are these moments of poignancy and vulnerability.
AC: I think this happens a lot with our immigrant parents. It’s like the portal will open and then it will close. And that’s it.
EYZ: Does your dad feel like it’s going to be strange to see himself in fictional form?
AC: He always says, “I try very hard not to have any kind of emotional response.” So he’s good. He built his shell and it’s airtight and he doesn’t want to do anything to puncture his equilibrium. He hasn’t read anything of mine and he doesn’t plan to read it. I don’t even think he’s curious. I think he’s just like, okay, it’s yours now.
The whole book is what clams can teach us.
EYZ: Did you find that liberating while you were writing?
AC: It was. But I was also so anxious, because if someone’s going to read it, you want to feel you have permission. My mom read it. Then I feel, Well, you gave me permission. There’s this section in the book where I’m like, Wait, what did [my dad] mean when [he] said don’t betray [him]? For two or three years, I was just writing and I was like, I have no idea what [my dad] means by that, but I’ll just keep going. And then I finished. And even now, sometimes I’ll wake up and I’m like, Oh my gosh, what if my dad’s not okay with any of this?
EYZ: It does seem like, based on the exchange in the book, it was a kind of permission to write the version that feels true.
I have a semi-related question that’s just: What is freedom…? I don’t know if you want to take a stab at that?
AC: That is the question!
EYZ: Is there anything else on your mind as Clam Down makes its way into the world?
AC: I guess it is still just the question: should we clam or not clam? Especially right now, the sense of overwhelm and crisis is acute. What should our response be? But I do think, in the end, maybe we should try to open up. We should try.
