The balance between creating a trendy world in Fantasy novels or contemporary Young Adult (YA) fiction and managing to say something that matters can be tricky. More often than not, genre fiction asks only that the writer provide strictly what their audience wants, nothing more and nothing less. In Livia Blackburne’s sweet new YA novel Clementine and Danny Save the World (and Each Other) that balance is front and center. Blackburne gives us Clementine Chan and Danny Mok. She’s a Chinese tea shop blogger whose online forum discusses the important elements of a great tea experience (ambience, advertising, experimentation) while also steering into the encroaching threat of gentrification. Will a primarily white population, heavily financed and susceptible to trends, ruin the classic nature of old Chinatown? He’s the son of Chinese tea shop owners who opines a little more than Clementine about the encroaching dangers of gentrification:
“I think of that lady who visited our shop with her dead-animal purse, gushing about Fragrant Leaves to Mom and getting our name wrong in the caption. Spending more time posing in the aisles than she actually spent drinking our tea. ‘It’s all so shallow. Substance doesn’t matter as long as you have the right filter.”
It’s these types of knowing lines from Clementine and Danny, who tell the story of their lives in Chinatown through alternating chapters, that make this novel surprisingly powerful and compelling. What is an “authentic cultural experience”? How has “fusion” corrupted the essence of a culture’s cuisine? As Danny writes, “What’s wrong with simply taking pride in our culture as it stands?”
It’s within the conventional tropes of a “meet cute” surface as seen in such films as You’ve Got Mail that writer Livia Blackburne manages to reach below the expected and create a strong pair of characters and a story that can resonate with any culture. What happens when aspirations toward modernity mean risking authenticity? How authentic is an experience (like tea culture) when it’s filtered through sensibilities that cannot possibly understand it? What’s lost when retaining your heritage means compromising, acquiescing, and surrendering? Sampan recently spoke with Livia Blackburne about Clementine and Danny Save the World (and Each Other), gentrification, and the winds of change. What follows are her responses to our emailed questions.
SAMPAN: You wrote your first novel while a student at MIT researching the science of reading, specifically how the brains of young people change and how they read changes as they get older. Cognitive neuroscience can get very heady (excuse the pun.) Do you miss those early days writing your blog? Are you still regularly updating A Brain Scientist’s take on Writing ?
BLACKBURNE: The 2010’s were a great time for blogs. I do miss the blogging community we had back then. Everybody was writing longform musings and talking with each other in the comments. That got replaced by social media, which is nice but not quite the same dynamic. That said, even if the blogosphere were still going strong, I probably wouldn’t have time for it these days. I stopped updating A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing a while ago, partly due to time constraints, partly because I had contracted work to worry about now, and partly because I’m now quite removed from the neuroscience world. I do think I learned a lot while writing the blog though. I grew a lot in craft very quickly because I was always reading with an eye for writing techniques I could blog about.
SAMPAN: MIT and the city of Cambridge can seem a world away and apart from Boston’s Chinatown, back when you were a student and especially today. Gentrification, class division, and a rising tide of Asian hate (especially since the start of Covid) have combined to make things very combustible and they’re only likely to get worse. How did you perceive Boston’s Chinatown while you were a student here at MIT?
BLACKBURNE: I attended Park Street Church when I was in grad school, and it was a weekly ritual to have lunch at Chinatown with my fellow MITers after service. I have fond memories of Taiwan Cafe, dim sum, and Penang. I didn’t engage with Chinatown much beyond that though. It was a place to visit, but sadly I didn’t take the time to really get to know the community.
SAMPAN: Gentrification is a big theme in Clementine and Danny Save the World (and Each Other.) Its consequences in California’s Chinatown are equally felt here in Boston’s Chinatown, probably more so now than ever. How hard was it to balance the political and racial elements of white-washed gentrification with the demands of genre writing? The YA and Fantasy genres have effectively dealt with such deep themes. For the former we can Renee Watson’s This Side of Home or Daniel Jose Older’s Shadowshaper. Your novel has the added element of a meet cute rom-com. Was it difficult to write a novel that fits YA convention as well as being socially conscious?
BLACKBURNE: I’m drawn to stories that explore deeper philosophical issues. My earlier fantasy titles explored complex morality and issues surrounding life and death. When I wrote Clementine, I was really excited about delving into the nuances of gentrification. Of course, it’s a tricky balance to put in enough of a theme to make the story richer while not being so heavy handed as to become preachy or bore the reader. Because I do think the primary purpose of a novel is to entertain. I rely on my editor to tell me if I’ve hit the right mix. She thinks so, and I hope readers agree!
SAMPAN: Clementine and Danny Save the World (and Each Other) is your first contemporary YA novel. Did you draw from real-life inspirations here?
BLACKBURNE: After writing fantasy for my first five novels, it was quite a relief to write about the real world. For one thing, I no longer had to spend all that time on world-building. If I had to come up with a character name, I simply went through my mental Rolodex instead of having to mess with historical naming guides or natural language generators. And I did draw heavily on my lived experience as an Asian American female. There’s an encounter that Clementine has with a white guy in the first scene that’s an amalgam of encounters I’ve had with creepy dudes. The mahjong-loving Auntie Lin is based on my own grandmother, who was quite the mahjong shark. I was able to put so much of my upbringing and culture into the book, and I’m really grateful for that.
SAMPAN: Why do scientists make for such compelling writers? There’s Oliver Sacks and his accounts of everything from sleep comas to music and the brain, Daniel J. Levitin on the brain and music, and MIT’s own Alan Lightman on the mysteries of time itself. Lightman is the only one of those who has ventured into fiction. How do you account for that? Could fiction itself be a more daunting prospect than theoretical physics and brain science?
BLACKBURNE: My first inclination is to guess that there are quite a few scientists who write fiction, especially science fiction and fantasy. I can think of several science-oriented friends who are into it. But perhaps it’s easier for scientists to be published in nonfiction because it’s their area of expertise. They’ve already done the legwork in their personal research, and a publisher is more likely to regard them as an expert.
SAMPAN: One of the more evocative moments in your novel comes at the start of Chapter 22. You write in an epistolary mode, with Clementine and Danny’s voices taking over alternating chapters. Clementine is a tea shop blogger and high school journalism newspaper editor, and Danny is the son of Chinatown clerks soon to surrender to gentrification. Clementine reflects in Chapter 22 about the power her writing can have: “Maybe I don’t have to wait for someone to die before mapping out the ripple effects of their lives.” Are you hopeful that young people like Clementine can save Chinatown from gentrification?
BLACKBURNE: I bounce between optimism and pessimism. The forces driving gentrification are strong, and sometimes it feels like an uphill battle to fight them. At the same time though, I’ve encountered many dedicated young activists in the course of researching for the book. These are young people who give so generously of their time to help the communities that they love. They’re resourceful, hardworking, and determined, and I already see the fruits of their labors.
