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| Kat Tang (photo: Colleen O'Connell Smyth) |
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Kat Tang is a graduate of Columbia's MFA program, where she taught as an Undergraduate Writing Fellow. Born in China, relocated to Japan, and raised in California, she is fascinated by how we make and fake human connection in a technologically evolving world. Her short stories and graphic narratives have appeared in Electric Literature, The Margins, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. She lives in St. Louis, Mo. Five-Star Stranger (Scribner, August 6, 2024), Tang's debut novel, follows a professional Rental Stranger resolutely devoted to his perfect rating but whose long-term gig as a young girl's fake father is in jeopardy.
What made you decide to keep the narrator of Five Star Stranger unnamed?
Name and identity--especially for someone like me who tried on various names after immigrating to the United States--are closely tied together; for a narrator who is both unknowable to himself for a large portion of the book and a mystery to the audience, it made sense to me that he would remain unnamed.
Was it also a significant choice that he fills roles for other Asian identities beyond his own?
Asians in America are often mistaken for one another, so why not use this to his advantage? Make money from the ignorance of others?
The narrator is obsessed with maintaining his five-star rating, claiming it can make or break his profile, but it also seems to have slipped into his personal sense of worth.
Yes. I think our society is obsessed with rankings. We (by which I mean, I) can't even choose a restaurant to eat at without checking its reviews. It seemed natural that on an app where people are being ranked and reviewed, this would seep into his sense of self-worth.
It's because of his fraught relationship with his deceased mother that the narrator endeavors to succeed at this job. How did you find ways to instill in your narrator such an authentic portrayal of guilt and emotional strain?
I think guilt can be a powerful motivator, especially for people who are very conscientious. It also can be a very selfish emotion--thinking that your guilt matters or makes a difference. I drew on both of these to flesh out the narrator's emotional tension.
The narrator's arrangement to be Lily's fake father is his only long-term assignment. But because he otherwise spends his time alone, this also makes it his only relationship, right?
Yes, and that isolation is self-imposed as part of his atonement for his relationship with his mother. He's afraid of making connections because he's afraid of hurting or being hurt by other people, but he wouldn't readily admit this to himself. Instead he would say that he's too busy to maintain relationships, that any outside relationships would compromise his ability to be a perfect Rental Stranger, or that there's no point in fostering a relationship for free.
At one point, the narrator notes that sometimes his customers "conflate kindness with love," yet he seems to agree with Darlene when she describes the inability to love as "something defective in you that you're not capable of kindness." Why, then, does he work so hard to keep kindness and love compartmentalized?
The former, what the narrator performs, is a pretend kindness. It's like the "let me know if you need anything" when you know that the other person isn't going to take you up on the offer--a performance, an act. I think what Darlene is talking about, however, is a true kindness--a care that extends beyond the self. A kindness that bridges the self to others. He keeps this difference in mind because he's afraid of the latter, afraid to tether himself to another--to love.
Lily, the narrator's fake daughter, doesn't know he is not her real dad. What was the challenge in creating a bond between two characters based on a lie?
The difficulty was balancing the lie with the true affection that the narrator has for Lily. Even though he is paid to act like a perfect father, his feelings for Lily urge him to act in imperfect ways: being rude to Lily's friend Piri, for example. This blurring of the lines of what makes a relationship "genuine"--affection? official title? thoughts? actions?--is something I hope readers will be left questioning.
There are such beautiful details marking his love for Lily, such as when he realizes her exposed wrists would chafe in the winter air. How did such vivid images come to you?
Some time ago I began to associate the act of noticing with love. When writing from the perspective of someone who really cares about someone else (that second type of "kindness"), I try to think about what they might see and what small details they would pay attention to that no one else, not even the person they care about, notices.
Are there any books that inspired your novel?
I was inspired by the article in the Atlantic, "How to Hire Fake Friends and Family," by Roc Morin back in 2017, and wrote a very early rough draft then. By the time I was ready to write this version in 2021, I had a couple books rattling around in my head: The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oë, The Sellout by Paul Beatty, and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, among many others.
What are you working on next?
I'm actually quite far into the first draft of a novel about a woman from the Bay Area who runs away from her problems by traveling to Japan, where she befriends a mysterious, enchanting woman. When her new friend goes north to visit family, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami strikes--cutting off all contact. In an effort to find her new friend, the protagonist travels to Tohoku to search among the destruction. It's been one hell of a ride researching and writing it so far. --Samantha Zaboski