Photo courtesy of Olivia Kan-Sperling.
To mark the release of her second novel, Little Pink Book, writer and editor Olivia Kan-Sperling joined Nymphet Alumni’s Alex Alario earlier this month, but not before they made a quick detour to Modern Tea Shop. “This is very Asian,” the podcast host said as she flipped through her heavily annotated copy of Little Pink Book while sipping a 100% sweet, 100% ice pink guava milk tea (Kan-Sperling, for her part, opted for a green grape milk tea). Her novel follows Limei, a sensitive young woman living alone in Shanghai as she spends her days making latte art and expressing herself on her personal blog. One day, she draws the attention of a handsome bad boy. Over tea, Kan-Sperling and Alario dove into the book’s wide-ranging inspirations, from 2010s alt lit and Lana Del Rey’s “Video Games” era to Chinese dreamcore and the staccato charms of ESL vernacular, a major reference point for the novel’s tongue-in-cheek prose style.—SIMON DWIHARTANA
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OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING: Okay. Hi.
ALEXI ALARIO: Hi, Olivia. This is Alexi speaking. We’re sitting in my bedroom. We just got some tea from Modern Tea Shop. Maybe we’ll start by talking about our orders, because mine was inspired by Little Pink Book in its own way, and the way that it tastes actually has a lot to do with the novel, I feel like.
KAN-SPERLING: Yes, yes.
ALARIO: The tea that’s in mine is pomelo flower Longjing tea, and it’s 100% sweet with 100% ice. There’s also some salty cheese foam on top and water chestnut boba, which we both tried, and it has a really hard shell on it, and the liquid that comes out is so nutty tasting and weird.
KAN-SPERLING: It’s very odd because it’s like nutty jello. It’s like if there was peanut-flavored jello that pops into your mouth.
ALARIO: Yeah. But it looks amazing. And what did you get?
KAN-SPERLING: I actually decided to sort of order against the grain and not get a pink drink. I got Emerald Green Tea Grape Slush, which I guess is just green tea with mashed up grapes floating on top. Right?
ALARIO: [Laughs] It’s almost like lawn clipping.
KAN-SPERLING: [Laughs] Yeah, literally. It’s very bitter. You know how grapeskin has that really bitter flavor? I think that’s what makes it bitter, and it goes really well with the green tea. But yeah, I can’t have black tea too late in the day because then I’ll stay up too late…
ALARIO: The design of these cups is really amazing. We see some beautiful calligraphy.
KAN-SPERLING: There’s some Impact font, but then also the romantic Chinese calligraphy, which is cool.
ALARIO: That’s very modern.
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah, it is indeed a modern tea shop.
ALARIO: So I don’t know if I’m allowed to say I prepared some questions, but I did. I know the interview is supposed to be really fun and free-wheeling, but I took notes when I was reading your book because I loved it.
KAN-SPERLING: Because we’re very Asian.
ALARIO: This is very Asian, I know. I wish that I had highlighters or something. I’m scared because I have a history of shameless Orientalism. But once again, your work has aligned with my special interests, especially in aesthetics. Your first book, Island Time, was super tiki, which is something that I’m still into to this day. And now, Little Pink Book has taken a really beautiful turn. It’s like this hyper-feminine Chinese-century dreamcore novel, and there’s so much that I’m excited to talk about.
KAN-SPERLING: You have, I think, probably the sharpest mind on aesthetic tropes, which is something I’m so interested in and is basically what the book is doing formally. Which is trying to isolate all of these different cliches in literature but also in consumer culture. And, yeah, I’m half-Chinese, and I do know my Chinese family and stuff, but I’m basically not; I’m Wasian from Massachusetts. The idea of “Orientalism” is fascinating to me because in the West, people are still like, “Oh, identity politics appropriation,” but that just does not exist from an Asian perspective. China is the one exporting culture.
ALARIO: I literally wrote my thesis about that in college. And no one at my school was fucking with it because it was just like, “Why I like to be a cultural appropriator.” 50 pages long.
KAN-SPERLING: [Laughs] Me too.
ALARIO: But it’s crazy. If you go to any random strip mall in a random town, they have a fake Japanese supermarket or a boba place that has really orientalist vibes. So it’s something that I feel has accelerated, and we really feel it in New York, obviously. In addition to being Chinese-American, you’ve been living in Chinatown for quite some time. Do you feel like you found inspiration from your daily life among the Chinese diaspora, or were you mostly informed by your experiences on the mainland?
KAN-SPERLING: I only went to Shanghai for two weeks as research for this book. But Chinatown is inspiring every day. It’s amazing. You do get so much of this visual culture—tea stores, et cetera. But I was surprised in Shanghai how quaint and romantic it is, which is maybe a word that keeps returning to me when thinking about this aesthetic. The book is very situated there. I thought Shanghai was going to be all cyberpunk crazy. But actually, it’s cute and small. And that very much informed the vibe of the book.
ALARIO: Yeah. I feel like the main embrace that I’ve seen of Chinese aesthetics here has always been a downtown creative type ironically embracing the weird collages or knockoff misspelled stuff made-in-China plastic vibe. But that’s only such a small portion of what the Chinese people have to offer visually.
KAN-SPERLING: I feel like when people think of Asia, it’s mostly Japan, which is way more pop and hard-edged in the visual style.
ALARIO: I loved how indie the book was.
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah, it’s indie. [Laughs]
ALARIO: So Little Pink Book kicks off in media res with this very enigmatic sex scene. It also features a toxic love interest and your end notes mention Chinese web novels as a source of inspiration, especially the coercive romantic fantasies mostly written by women. Wait, I need to pull up my phone for this. I keep getting ads for this game… It’s not a game. It’s an app called Ta Ta Xing Qiu, which I think translates to his/her planet. And the tagline of it is that “you can meet interesting souls and expand your life.”
KAN-SPERLING: Oh my god.
ALARIO: You can talk to all these different hot guys and it gives dialogue of them blowing up your phone. And the guys always are—
KAN-SPERLING: They’re bad boys.
ALARIO: Yeah, they’re bad boys. They’re always wearing a big Arc’teryx jacket or something, but the example dialogue is always full of borderline abusive, toxic jealousy conflict. It’s always like, “You got drunk again, didn’t you?” Or, “I saw you talking to him.” And it’s like, why in the fantasy world of having an e-boyfriend would you want to be barraged by that on your phone? I don’t know. But do you think there’s a reason why this dark-sided toxic love vibe is popular in China as opposed to a more straight-up fantasy of romance and adoration?
KAN-SPERLING: I have no idea why. I know so little about Chinese culture. But I guess my vague, perhaps stereotypical impression of dating in China is that it’s much more about, I don’t know, stability or marriage and these kinds of values. Whereas, I think the dominant, romantic ideal in America is still Prince Charming, one true love, passionate love story.
ALARIO: Yeah. It seems like that. I’ve read some of the mainstream romantasy books that are super viral in the English-speaking world and the fantasy that they come up with is so weird. It’s basically a hot Golden Retriever that gives you a sponge bath, or a lot of it is literature teacher, teacher’s pet stuff. Endless validation and protection, but zero possessiveness. Just constant acceptance and telling you you’re perfect and stuff.
KAN-SPERLING: Wow.
ALARIO: Yeah. I found myself really falling for your main guy even though he was kind of a dirtbag.
KAN-SPERLING: [Laughs]
ALARIO: But next question. The main character, Limei, is frequently described throughout the book as being special and authentic and pure and naive and vulnerable. She’s also a perfect aura farmer. There are just these moments described of a hair falling in her face or just a natural way about her that is just really beautiful. But throughout the story, there are all of these attempts to pervert or exploit or humiliate her. Can we talk about how her vitality and aura changed over the course of the novel?
KAN-SPERLING: Totally. In terms of Limei’s interiority, I wanted there to be this instability constantly throughout the book, where we don’t know whether what we’re getting is fake or authentic. By the end of the book, that distinction doesn’t even make sense, I guess.
ALARIO: The sensitivity thing and emotional vulnerability that she has and how easily affected she is by things was something that I found really fun to read. Not that she’s a crashout, but when one thing happens, it affects her mood so easily. I think we also think that it’s cool when people are really steely and not affected by stuff.
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah.
ALARIO: My friend Jamal just came back from Asia and he came up with this list—“a brief inventory of decorative English phrases.” And it reminded me so much of your book because there are these temporal words like “moment, today, every day, time, season.” And narrative words like “story, melody, memory, dream”; emotional amplifiers like “warm, happy, curious, gentle, sweet, relationship.” And this is the kind of stuff that you see in poorly translated merchandise, things with English words on them. Did you find yourself consciously borrowing from this ESL vernacular when you were writing?
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah, totally. That was the primary inspiration for the prose in the book. There’s a bunch of semi-art projects that are into appropriating this language, but it’s so boring to me that no one tries to actually write in that style.
ALARIO: They just take a picture of it.
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah. That list that you read is amazing because I think it brings out that these are not just weird mistranslations. It’s actually a really specific type of language. There’s a bubble tea shop called Sweet Moment in Chinatown, for example. Or like, Good Fortune Trading Company or whatever. You notice that all of these businesses are named in this very literal way after the effect that they were supposed to have, whereas there wouldn’t be an American hotel that’s called Premium Best Hotel. [Laughs]
ALARIO: [Laugh] Yeah.
KAN-SPERLING: It betrays this almost touching belief in the power of language. And that was an aesthetic I was interested in exploring in the book. If you keep hitting the reader over the head with these adjectives like, “She’s so cute and small,” it just stops being believable, which is why when you see Sweet Moment Cafe you’re like, “Am I going to have a good time there? Maybe not.”
ALARIO: [Laughs] It does raise suspicions for sure. It’s like this new generation that comes out of the overly positive and sincere slogans from the Cultural Revolution generation, but those seem more forceful and persistent.
KAN-SPERLING: When I was in Shanghai, there was this fancy hotel across from where I was staying. And on the gate outside it said like “Truth” and “Dignity,” “Patriotism” and “Dedication” and“Hard work.”
ALARIO: [Laugh] Oh my god.
KAN-SPERLING: Just this idea that you should be striving to be a good person. I’m not sure if that actually has any effect on society, but it’s so different than the words you see walking around New York City.
ALARIO: Definitely. They are American commercialism words. I also noticed that there are a bunch of these temporal references in the book that feel very musically based. Music is a big thing in the book, which I’m excited to talk about. There’s this Paris of the East Shanghai stuff from the 1930s. There’s a trashy hedonistic 2000s-does-’80s disco nightclub thing going on, which I really loved because I love the Japanese bubble generation disco era. And then there’s also this soft focus 2010s indie bedroom pop era. And this all sounds like classic Nymphet Alumni word salad. But yeah, I just wanted to talk about some of those.
KAN-SPERLING: Totally. Lana’s [Del Rey] “Video Games” music video, which came out in 2012, was a big inspiration. I think that was her big breakout. This was when Instagram had all those fake vintage camera filters, and Lana’s video is this collage of retro footage, Chateau Marmont or whatever, but then also like skaters—which is why I also wanted to incorporate “old Shanghai.” At first, I wanted this to be way more explicitly a historical fiction novel set in 2012 where Limei is that kind of “indie” girl. This was also the “alt lit” era. I was working on this at the Giancarlo DiTrapano residency in Italy, which is this program connected to Tyrant Books, and they have this library there of all those 2010’s era alt lit books. Originally, I wanted to do it where half the book is written in this fake Chinese English. And then the other half… Because okay, the character is a “blogger.”
ALARIO: Yeah.
KAN-SPERLING: So the other half would be from her blog, written in this style where I would try to imitate “autofiction.” Well, I love Megan Boyle’s Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee, this totally underrated, amazing book. And then there’s also Marie Calloway’s What Purpose Did I Serve In Your Life, which I think was in a way the start of this wave of glamorization of girls just having like, shitty boyfriends and posting their L’s. So I was thinking about all of those things, even though what I’m doing aesthetically is totally different from alt lit. I feel a lot of kinship with the general attitude, but I just really can’t write like that. [Laughs] So I had to take it all out.
ALARIO: [Laughs] That’s so funny.
KAN-SPERLING: I wanted it to be that the “Chinese” part is the one that actually feels more real and emotional and the “autofiction” part, which is supposed to be raw and unfiltered, actually feels totally fake.
ALARIO: I love that.
KAN-SPERLING: But it just didn’t work.
ALARIO: Well, I’m glad we get to talk about it because that’s really funny. But I feel like if she were an auto-fiction blogger, that wonderful lack of self-awareness that she has would be erased. I imagine her as a Clairo-style webcam girl. Obviously, we can’t hear the music, but I was imagining her having the heart filter on her head or something like that. But I like this idea that she is, in another universe, an autofiction poster who’s just dramatizing her life and being annoying.
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah.
ALARIO: I was glad to get out of my Koreaboo bubble and into more Chinese stuff while reading this. This is my last question. So I’m really obsessed with the Soft Filter Calligraphic Coffeeshop, which is where Limei works and where we first see her. Baroque tea and coffee creations are a sector of the food and beverage industry that I feel like I’ve been tracking really carefully for years, just because I’ve been wondering how many ingredients can they put in one drink. If you or Limei had your own beverage collab like the Hailey Bieber Erewhon smoothie or Addison Rae’s Matchaful drink, what would you want it to be like?
KAN-SPERLING: This is a great question. The whole reason it couldn’t be set in 2012 anymore was because of the drink culture.
ALARIO: Yeah. If it was 2010, she would’ve been just making nitro cold brew or something.
KAN-SPERLING: Exactly. But okay, I think Limei and I are actually quite different. Limei, I realize, she’s never drinking coffee.
ALARIO: That’s true.
KAN-SPERLING: I think her whole problem is that she’s so wilted and under-caffeinated and emo.
ALARIO: That’s the thing. She’s so not a consumer in general.
KAN-SPERLING: Exactly.
ALARIO: She wears these clothes and has these fantasies, but we never see her really participate with the world.
KAN-SPERLING: No. She’s an indie girl.
ALARIO: Which makes her the perfect product because she doesn’t want for anything.
KAN-SPERLING: But if I had a brand collab, it would be with Coca-Cola. [Laughs]
ALARIO: [Laughs]
KAN-SPERLING: The drink has to have bananas. It would be banana-flavored Diet Coke and it would be a Dunkin’ Donuts drink that also has espresso and almond milk.
ALARIO: [Laugh] Oh, that sounds really bad. That sounds really gross. I think I’ve had the banana Oreos or something like that.
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah, banana’s totally underdone.
ALARIO: It’s weird because another advent of modern beverage stuff is that they’ve gotten really into realistic flavors. We were talking about this with your grape drink earlier. American grape flavor is really gross, but I was so refreshed by your grape drink, which actually just tasted like grape skin.
KAN-SPERLING: Exactly.
ALARIO: And I think the same thing could go for bananas. Instead of the banana laffy taffy stuff, there’s an opportunity to have real banana flavoring.
KAN-SPERLING: Bananas used to actually taste like banana flavoring when banana flavor was first developed. But then they went extinct. There was a plague or something. [Laughs]
ALARIO: There was a plague, and then they replaced that banana crop with this one breed of banana called the Cavendish, which is now the big long banana that we see today because it keeps better when you’re shipping it.
KAN-SPERLING: Oh, that’s so sad.
ALARIO: I randomly read a book about all this stuff. There are so many weird earlier prototypes of fruits and vegetables that are now lost to time because they just didn’t ship well or didn’t keep well or just had traits that were not good for logistics. If I had a lot of money, I would probably do a business that would have vintage editions of fruits, like pre-Columbian fruits.
KAN-SPERLING: Now that I think about it, banana flavor is an amazing metaphor for the entire book.
ALARIO: That’s true. But we have the Shanzhai banana.
KAN-SPERLING: Yeah.
ALARIO: That’s all. Thanks for talking with me.
KAN-SPERLING: Thanks, Alexi.
