Club Friday Q&A: Author Jen Sookfong Lee
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Kyrani Kanavaros
Broadcaster and author Jen Sookfong Lee's new memoir in essays, Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart starts with a very common immigrant experience: learning how to be in a new country through pop culture. "The soap operas, the fashion magazines, the celebrity gossip, and the hockey fandom—was how [my family] found a way in, studying, learning, and parroting what the white people around them were consuming," she writes. "Maybe we were missing privilege and whiteness, but we could watch what everyone else was watching and try to close the distance between us and them. [But] pop culture also became the measure by which we judged ourselves, which was a relationship that was equal parts motivating and demoralizing." That's literally all I needed to read to know that I a) was going to love and feel seen by this book and b) wanted to talk more about the role pop culture has played in Lee's life. Read on for our chat about the heartbreaking act of loving things we don't see ourselves in, acknowledging how far we've come and (duh) Rihanna.
What inspired you to write about pop culture in this way?
You know what? The funny thing is that pop culture is something that I've always really loved and cared about. And I think when I was younger, when I was trying to seem smart, and impress people, it was something that I used to suppress a little bit unless it was 'prestige pop culture.' So you could tell a bunch of intellectuals that you watch Mad Men and they don't think you're dumb. But if you admit to watching Love is Blind, people will be like, 'Whoa, why do you want to watch this human train wreck?' But I think as I got older—I'm in my 40s now—I realized that the lines that divide pop culture from 'high culture' are always arbitrary. And then I began thinking about representation, particularly for Asian women, and I realized that so much of the pop culture that I love does not feature Asian women at all, because Asian women have often been invisible in majority culture. So two questions arose for me: one, why do I care so much about pop culture in general, but two, why do I care so much about pop culture that didn't actually serve me? And there was just so much material.
I have felt exactly like that, especially at the beginning of my career. I'm a woman of colour, I've always looked and sounded younger than I am, and I have a real desire to be taken seriously and to be considered smart. But when say, 'Oh, I really love YA fiction, and I really love romance novels,' I've found that you run the risk of people just not taking you seriously. But now, I'm older and more confident and the media landscape has shifted, too, so it's easier to say that there's a lot to think about here, and it's frankly kind of irresponsible not to critique this culture that we're consuming all the time. My feminist screed has become, 'No, we're going to talk about all these things—and you're going to come out of the conversation smarter than when you went into it.'
Yeah, exactly. And if we talk about these things in really critical ways, then other people who may not have felt like they were allowed to talk about pop culture in serious ways—or even not-so-serious ways—will feel that they have a safe enough space to do so. With my book and the way that I write about pop culture, unless I'm writing about like Gwyneth Paltrow, who is always a rage trigger for me, for the most part, I'm coming at it from a place of fandom. I'm always questioning why I love this. When we're writing academic things, we often try to take our emotional connection out of the critique, and I didn't want to do that because for me, the emotion that we feel when we're reading or consuming pop culture is actually quite telling about what the creator intended, or about the parasocial relationship you have with this thing or celebrity or whatever. So interrogating that emotion is a really valuable thing, in my view.
I think about this a lot when it comes to Hallmark holiday movies. Because if you want to talk about something that doesn't serve us, these things don't even reflect my own fantasy of what I want my life to look like. And yet there's something very compelling about them! I have a friend who is Indo-Canadian and we used to have this conversation every November where we would try to figure out why we watched these movies. We were like, 'What in the world are we thinking?'
It's funny, right? There's a part of you that knows objectively that this particular cultural phenomenon is not great. It doesn't represent us. We don't want this wedding. We're not this kind of a person. But yet, we love it.
And to your point, that is such an interesting, fertile place for conversations that can help you understand the things you've internalized as positive, even if you don't actually feel that way. Or at least, that's how it can be more me. Have you always understood the role that pop culture plays in your life? Meaning: have you always thought about it academically, even as you also enjoy and love it? Or is that a more recent thing?
To be honest with you, I don't even think I remember when I started thinking about it academically, which probably means I've been doing it a long time. I remember when I was married, my ex-husband—who I'm still very good friends with, actually—and I used to have these arguments all the time about the television that I liked, or how I really liked fashion magazines. He would tease me for it. Meanwhile, he was probably watching Homicide: Life on the Street or something, and reading Infinite Jest? I would find myself forced to defend what I liked, and I think it probably started around that time. I would have been in my early 20s and I was trying to explain to somebody else why the thing I liked were valuable and worth liking.
I do think the way we think about pop culture has changed a lot. Social media, in particular, has changed things because people are quite publicly sharing what they consume and why they consume it, and it has caused a huge shift. I remember being in a literary theory class at university when I was 20 or 21. We were talking about queer theory or gender theory, probably discussing Judith Butler's work, and I said something about Xena: Warrior Princess and how Xena was a queer icon and the whole class sat up straight, because it was something that they knew. It was one of the first times I understood the power of something that is consumed by so many people. We can talk about Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes or whoever all day long, and it's great; it's valuable. But do we really understand these concepts unless we start applying them to the things that we know really well and love?
Yes! I often use the example of the Kardashians; they are so pervasive in our culture and the way they look, they way they dress, the decisions they make and the businesses they start, all have real consequences. They shift how we think about beauty, or labour, or race. So, if we were to just ignore them, because they're reality TV stars, we'd actually be doing ourselves a disservice. They require critical thinking because they are so pervasive. And the same goes for Bridgerton or whatever other thing that takes off. Not paying attention to that thing because it's popular—and coded as feminine—is unfeminist and silly, but also irresponsible.
It is irresponsible. And when we say that we love these shows or celebrities, that does not mean we're not able to be critical of them, either. Obviously, there is lots about the Kardashians that we should question and interrogate, 100%. But I think we also have to ask ourselves, why do people keep consuming this content? What is it that they're giving us? What is the fascination? And the answer is Kris Jenner, but that's fine.
Listen, that woman is a genius. An evil genius, but a genius.
Evil genius. A capitalist evil genius.
I'm very interested in hearing about the process of writing this book. I really like that each essay connects to a larger theme—for example, the Princess Diana section talks about shame and the idea of the 'good girl,' which aren't necessarily the first connections I would make if we were thinking about this public figure. So, how did you decide what themes or situations from your life to pair with pair with specific pop culture moments or figures?
Writing this book was actually more organic than almost anything I've written in prose. I sometimes call my chapter topics—Princess Diana, Bob Ross, Anne of Green Gables—pop culture assets, which sounds so capitalist, but there you go. So, I sat there with the pop culture assets and thought, 'These are the things that matter a lot to me.' And, then I had to really think about why. I wrote a brief synopsis on why for each one, and then I went at this book chapter by chapter, which was pretty methodical.
But having said that, once I got into writing each essay, the way that it grew was unpredictable. I think a lot of readers will probably be able to tell that the structure of the book, and the structure of each chapter, is actually quite circular. I start at a place and I bring you back to that same place by the end; it's about depth of understanding rather than going from a linear A to B.
And I mean, my editor at McClelland and Stewart, Anita Chong, was really good at pushing me to explore more and give more depth, both in the parts that were about me specifically, but also in the parts that were about famous people. I don't think I'm spilling any secrets here, but she cannot stand the Kardashians. She hates them. So that chapter was a real challenge because she kept pushing me. She was like, 'I don't understand it. I don't understand it.' So I had to keep pushing and pushing. And I think that chapter is the strongest one in the book, because she made me consider how I was going to sell this to people who don't give a shit about the Kardashians.
What is your favourite essay in the book? I mean, can you even choose a favourite?
There's two. The one about Rihanna and the one about Sia, because they are the chapters that I feel reflect more closely who I am now and I much prefer who I am now as opposed to who I was when I was like twenty-one, you know? With both of these chapters, I think there's a real sense of relief, of letting go of the idea of being respectable or a good girl, which has been the thing that has haunted me my entire life. There's a real sense of like, you just don't have any more fucks left to give.
The Rihanna essay started as an imaginary conversation with Rihanna, until I realized it was silly—I cannot put words in Rihanna’s mouth, right? But then I thought, 'Well, what if she was telling me what to do? What if she were the boss of my life? Wouldn't I be a better person?' Because I love her so much. And then it came together so much better and more quickly, because of the idea that Rihanna really should be the boss of my life.
I agree with you. But I just also appreciate thinking about fandom in this way. We often talk about fandom in the context of young, straight women who are experimenting with love and sexual desire in a very safe way, but for women, being a fan of another woman is so much about wanting to be like them. It's seeing these characteristics and wanting to have that strength or that creativity or that whatever. So I really love that that you delve into that, too.
The images that I always went back to when I was writing that chapter were those paparazzi photos of Rihanna leaving a restaurant with a glass of wine—she just takes the glass with her. I want to do that! I want to be confident enough that I’m like, 'I paid for this, I’m going to walk out with this glass.'
My favourite essay from the book is the one about Anne of Green Gables. What you wrote about finding comfort in the stories of Anne of Green Gables as a child and how that was different from the comfort you found as an adult was really striking. I actually got a little emotional over your ending, which gets at the idea that happiness rises and falls all the time for all of us, which I found very comforting. But I also wanted to ask you if reading Anne ever made you feel more connected to Canada? The reason I ask is because we moved here from Trinidad when I was four and I distinctly remember reading these books and understanding that they were a very important part of Canadian culture. As a kid, I just wanted to fit in, so before I even liked the books, I liked the idea of doing something Canadian. Was that ever part of your reading process?
Yeah, I think so. Engaging in something that was so archetypically Canadian was part of the appeal for me. It doesn’t get more Canadian than Anne of Green Gables. And the fact of the matter was, I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in East Vancouver where literally nobody looks like Anne, nobody had a farm, I had never been snowshoeing—all of these things that we think about when we think about Canada, or that version of Canada anyway. And all my life, I had been trying so hard just to find the place to fit in, as many children do, especially immigrants and like racialized children. So, with Anne, which was first experience with fandom, it felt like I was partaking in something that so many other people had a part of. I feel like everything I learned about Canadian history before the age of 12, I really only learned through Anne of Green Gables books.
Yes, 100%. And geography.
Yeah, I didn't know anything about World War One until I read Rilla of Ingleside at, I don't know, age 11.
But this also goes back to what we were saying about how we aren't in so many of the things that we loved.
No, we're not.
Another theme that I found very relatable was the part where you say that the feminist writers you were reading didn't give you the language to talk about Asian fetish. I found that so relatable—I discovered feminism in high school and it gave me a language to explain the unfair things that I had been noticing on my own. But I also had a moment where I realized that feminism at that time was limited and it actually couldn't give me enough language, which was quite jarring and disappointing.
It is really disappointing. The moment you realize that white feminism has by and large failed BIPOC women is a real like loss. It wasn't even that long ago, I was fully an adult when the white feminism conversation was first occurring, to my knowledge anyway, and I remember feeling like, 'Well, who am I going to be friends with then?' Who was going to be the safe person I can talk to at a party, when I'm the only person of colour in the room? I've come to a place now where I understand and have synthesized and processed it, but it's a really huge disappointment.
Absolutely. And the question of who I'll talk to when I'm the only person of colour in the room is such a real one, because we so often are, even now. I had maybe five minutes in 2020 where I was like, 'Things are gonna be different.' But I don't know if things are that different now.
I think they are different. The example I use a lot is, when my first novel came out, it was 2007. I was thirty years old, and I looked much younger, which is part of the problem, I think. But I was almost always the only woman of colour in a room, including audiences, people who work there, everything. People almost never assumed I was the author that was reading or being featured. It was a really lonely place for me to be. But by the time my third novel came out in 2016, I saw so much change. It's not that people on the executive or management or directorial levels of these organizations or events changed that much. But the authors were changing, and the people in the audience were changing.
There were all these young women of colour in the audience who were coming to see me and they would tell me they were there because they read my books when they were teenagers and, I thought, this is the most amazing change. It's not that I didn't have racialized readers before, because I always did. But the readers were feeling comfortable enough to come into what was once a very white dominated space, and that was huge. I wept tears of joy over this. Now, I work in publishing, and I can see that the industry has changed a lot. The faces that I see at these events and the faces I see in meetings are completely different, and they bring with them an amazing, different perspective. The books they like are different, the stories they want to tell are different, as they should be. It's a really exciting thing to see.
I do think lots of lots of things need to change. And I'm not an emerging writer anymore, so I think for emerging authors, the experience might be quite different. No one's gonna say anything racist in my face anymore—I’m too old now, people are just not gonna do it. But I am aware that younger and more emerging authors will often experience aggressions, some micro, some not-so-micro.But I do think a lot has changed. If you take the long view, over the last 15 years I have seen so, so much change, and I do think there are really good people who are trying to make Canadian literature a welcoming and safer space for everybody.
You know what, I'm actually so glad that we talked about this too, because I think sometimes I have this realization myself, and then forget it. When I think about the beginning of my career to now there's such vast differences in what we can talk about in journalism, whose voices are amplified, all of these things. But when you're in it, sometimes it feels like all I can see are the things that still need changing. So, it's good to actually look back and see where we came from and acknowledge that there has been change.
There has been change, and I don't want people to forget that because if we can see that the change has occurred or is occurring, it gives us a bit more fuel in the gas tank to keep pushing.
Yes, exactly. What are your current pop culture obsessions?
The new SZA album is so good. I played it and I was like, 'What? What?!' Before, I knew her mostly from the song she did with Kendrick Lamar for the Black Panther soundtrack. But yes, love SZA. Love that album.
In terms of what I've been reading, I'm really excited about Bad Cree by Jessica Johns. Jessica is Indigenous and the book is a horror-literary hybrid. I love horror, so I'm really excited to see BIPOC authors taking on genre fiction and making it their own.
I was very obsessed with the White Lotus as everybody was. I went on a deep dive about all the actors and discovered who was hooking up with who on set, so that was a very big moment for me. And you know what movie I really liked, and I think that some people didn't like? The Menu with Ralph Fiennes.
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