Structo Issue 19

diversity in the sense of it’s not just one, but many. When you are a member of a marginalized group, there’s always going to be a tendency to market your work by suggesting that it is somehow representative of a whole group, that it is somehow speaking for a whole group. But I don’t think I care about that. I don’t care about other people speaking for me, and I certainly don’t care about speaking for other people. I simply wish to share the full diversity of our global culture. To the extent that a lot of the works that I love that have been very influential on me, are not well known. Then I feel joy in promoting these works and trying to promote everyone’s understanding, because it’s beautiful and it’s a treasure. Why would I want to hoard it to myself? I wish to share it with everyone. That’s how I feel about it.

But I don’t feel, particularly, a strong impulse to speak for anyone. I feel that’s very deeply problematic, and it goes into areas of identity policing. Which people have been trying to do for good and bad reasons for centuries, especially in recent decades. I’m very much opposed to any kind of identity policing. I want to do my own thing and have other people to do their own thing. And in that lack of a unified narrative, that’s where true diversity is found. structo: Is there any particularly interesting writing happening that you’re amazed that people don’t know about? liu: I guess one thing that I found to be particularly fascinating is the idea of new narrative forms. New ways of telling stories that are made possible by the advance of technology. The whole idea of hypertext fiction has been going around for decades without really breaking through, but we are starting to finally see some examples of hypertext fiction that are actually working. One area in where I’m seeing a lot of interesting traction is the idea of text fiction.

That is, stories told in the form of text messages back and forth between fictional characters. I mean I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of these on BuzzFeed among other places. I think they’re just amazing as an art form. If I were an academic this is the kind of thing I would be focusing my research on, because I can imagine myself just getting absorbed into this. I think this is a fascinating development. I can’t wait to see how this is going to turn out.

You can hear all kinds of complaints about this sort of thing, people saying, “Oh this is just so symptomatic of our age where we have no attention span to read a novel or even a story, we have to read text messages and get our desire 