Sanjena Sathian, GOLD DIGGERS
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[0:35]Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.
[0:38]Sanjana Safian is the author of Gold Diggers, a novel.
[0:41]A Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow,
[0:43]Sanjana is a 2019 graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop.
[0:47]She has worked as a reporter in Mumbai and San Francisco,
[0:50]with nonfiction bylines for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Food and Wine,
[0:53]The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more.
[0:56]And her award-winning short fiction
[0:58]has been published in Boulevard, Joanne Saltair, and The Master's Review.
[1:02]Welcome, Sanjana.
[1:03]Thank you so much for coming on Momstone Have Time to Read books
[1:06]to discuss Gold Diggers.
[1:08]Thank you for having me.
[1:09]This is kind of a legendary podcast,
[1:11]so I'm really glad to be included.
[1:13]Legendary, I don't know about that.
[1:15]I've never had better blurbs than most authors do.
[1:18]But yeah, I really enjoyed your interview, too, with Cheng Ray.
[1:22]I'm like running behind him on all the interviews
[1:25]so I keep talking to people who have just talked to him,
[1:27]which is incredibly intimidating.
[1:29]But I had so much fun talking to him.
[1:31]I kept joking around.
[1:33]I sometimes would like people who are really important
[1:36]or literary or whatever.
[1:38]I just have to lighten the mood.
[1:39]I don't know.
[1:40]Maybe, I don't know.
[1:42]Yes, so happy to have you tread behind him.
[1:45]That's awesome.
[1:47]OK, so Sanjana, you are only 29 years old,
[1:50]and that is insanely amazing that you have written
[1:53]this novel, Gold Diggers, which is great.
[1:56]And like the cover, which is very festive and warm and inviting.
[2:02]And someplace you just want to hang out,
[2:04]that's sort of how I felt about your whole book.
[2:06]The characters are very relatable.
[2:08]And you just want to insert yourself into the fray and not
[2:14]miss out.
[2:15]So tell me a little bit about writing this book
[2:17]and how you came up with the idea for it
[2:20]and the process of writing it and all of that.
[2:23]Well, thank you for saying all those really nice things.
[2:26]Yeah, so the book takes place half in the suburbs of Atlanta,
[2:30]where I grew up the same ones that just flipped the state blue
[2:33]are diversifying.
[2:34]And it follows this group of Indian-Americans,
[2:38]second generation.
[2:40]And they are in this just hyper-competitive kind of Asian bubble.
[2:44]And Neil, the narrator, very much like me,
[2:47]is both sort of trying to be a high achiever
[2:49]and also feeling internally burned out.
[2:52]And then he kind of happens upon the fact
[2:54]that his best friend has been stealing gold
[2:57]from other Indians in the community, turning it
[3:00]into this magical elixir that helps
[3:02]her steal the ambitions of the rest of the community.
[3:05]And as you know, it just follows that group of friends
[3:08]through 2006 Bush-era Suburban Georgia.
[3:11]And so I think when I started writing that first half
[3:14]of the book, that experience of my childhood
[3:18]had been with me for about a decade.
[3:20]And I had been trying to write about that experience
[3:24]of the suburbs for a while.
[3:26]And it was always kind of somber
[3:29]and just took itself really seriously.
[3:32]And then when I kind of found this conceit
[3:35]of something a little more playful,
[3:37]I all of a sudden was able to deal
[3:39]with a little bit more serious material
[3:41]in a way that was surprising.
[3:43]So this kind of idea of like,
[3:44]estranging the familiar and then having a new way
[3:48]into the familiar.
[3:49]And when I wrote the second half,
[3:50]which takes place in Silicon Valley,
[3:53]I got to draw on my experience of living there in my early 20s
[3:56]where I was just having lots of status,
[3:59]striving, anxiety, feeling like, again,
[4:01]a massive underachiever next to my friends
[4:03]who were working for these big unicorn companies
[4:06]and having fat salaries.
[4:07]And I was trying to be a writer.
[4:09]So there's definitely some material
[4:11]that I got to call for my own life.
[4:13]So let's go all the way back
[4:15]to your younger years.
[4:19]So you went to Yale.
[4:20]Did you major, did you major in English?
[4:22]Did you take lots of writing class?
[4:23]Yes, major in English.
[4:25]I did.
[4:26]And I actually did a little more nonfiction than fiction there.
[4:29]I didn't get into fiction classes the first bunch of times
[4:33]that I applied,
[4:33]but I got into nonfiction classes with truly amazing teachers
[4:38]Fred Streetie and Phamin were my nonfiction teachers.
[4:42]And then I got to work with John Crowley
[4:44]on my fiction thesis.
[4:46]And he has advised just like generations of wannabe writers.
[4:51]And those, yeah, those teachers,
[4:53]I think really shaped me.
[4:54]They made me feel like I had the right to be writing
[4:58]when I all of my schooling before I had sort of suggested
[5:02]that that was something I was supposed to do on the side.
[5:04]What was your primary school?
[5:05]What did you think you were going to do?
[5:07]What was your main thing?
[5:08]Well, I always wanted to be a writer,
[5:09]but I think in high school I was really into policy debate
[5:13]that took out my whole life.
[5:15]And so I always had this like second gen immigrant thing
[5:18]of being like, okay, I'll be a lawyer,
[5:20]but I'll write on the side.
[5:22]Like I'll have this like respectable career
[5:24]that makes sense to my family and my community.
[5:26]And I'll just be penning stuff in secret.
[5:29]And then maybe I'll be plucked from obscurity one day.
[5:32]And then I met these teachers who were like,
[5:33]no, this is a thing you can do.
[5:35]It's gonna be really, really hard,
[5:37]but here's a little more about how to do it.
[5:41]Wow, that's great.
[5:43]That's not, by the way, what my experience at Yale was like,
[5:46]because I got to Yale wanting to be a writer.
[5:48]And my first English class,
[5:50]I was like, I don't want to take all these classes
[5:53]that are required to be an English major.
[5:54]Like, I can't remember if it was like 125 or 129
[5:59]and you had to reuse poets, right?
[6:01]Yeah, I was like, I, no, thanks, no.
[6:04]So I took a nonfiction writing class,
[6:07]which I loved freshman year.
[6:08]I remember that I can't remember the teacher,
[6:10]but I still have some essay I wrote about
[6:11]like going white water rafting with my dad
[6:13]or I don't have something.
[6:14]But then I didn't end up taking anymore writing classes.
[6:16]I wrote on the side,
[6:17]but I became a psychology major
[6:19]because that seemed really interesting to me.
[6:21]But I kind of wish I had met some of your teachers.
[6:23]I think it's really good to be able to spend time
[6:27]with material that isn't just like your own writing
[6:30]at that age too.
[6:31]So I was really glad that I did so much journalism
[6:34]because it's this like antidote to narcissism.
[6:37]You have to experience other people's lives.
[6:39]And I feel like psychology does a similar thing.
[6:42]It takes you outside yourself,
[6:43]which is important for a writer.
[6:45]Absolutely.
[6:46]I like that and antidote to narcissism.
[6:48]We need more antidotes to narcissism
[6:50]in our current culture, I think.
[6:52]Maybe we could make a list.
[6:53]Maybe we could brainstorm and put them on the whiteboard,
[6:55]you know, send the TikTok stars to journalism school.
[6:58]Maybe. Yeah, exactly.
[7:00]That's a funny article.
[7:01]If you have any interest in writing it,
[7:02]I have a new magazine mom,
[7:04]so I don't have time to write.
[7:05]So you don't have to be a mom, I like.
[7:07]So, well, that's funny.
[7:09]Okay, so you went to Yale
[7:11]and you were an English major.
[7:11]You had these amazing teachers.
[7:13]And then you graduated and then what happened?
[7:15]Because I know you got a bunch of fellowships.
[7:17]So what happened then?
[7:18]Yeah, so I was a journalist for five years.
[7:20]I worked at some regional papers.
[7:23]I did internships at the Pittsburgh Post,
[7:24]because that which I loved and the Boston Globe.
[7:27]And then I was struggling to find a job in journalism.
[7:31]It was 2013.
[7:32]The Globe had just been sold.
[7:34]Bezos had just bought the post.
[7:36]Buzzfeed wasn't a thing yet.
[7:38]I was not a great journalist.
[7:39]And so I kind of couldn't get a job.
[7:41]And then I drove my car out to California
[7:44]to get a little vitamin D after years in New Haven.
[7:48]And I ended up getting a job in journalism out there finally.
[7:52]I was a tech reporter for about a year and a half.
[7:54]And then I got sent by the magazine
[7:57]that I was working for to India.
[7:58]And I got to be a foreign correspondent
[8:00]for about two years before going to graduate school.
[8:03]Wow.
[8:04]And then tell me about graduate school.
[8:06]Well, I moved from a city of 20 million Bombay
[8:11]to a state of three million Iowa.
[8:16]It was definitely a big jump.
[8:18]But I had a really good experience at Iowa.
[8:20]It's a really strange place, but so rewarding.
[8:23]It felt to me more like an extended writer's residency
[8:26]than like a set of classes.
[8:28]And I think that's kind of on purpose.
[8:29]The director of the workshop, Sam Chain,
[8:32]has made it like ethnically and socioeconomically
[8:35]and aesthetically diverse.
[8:37]And so I got to be in kind of rich company
[8:40]with other people who wanted to do the same thing.
[8:42]And that was so valuable.
[8:44]But I also just kind of walked myself away
[8:46]in the snowy winters and got to work on this book.
[8:50]And that was really, really extraordinary.
[8:52]So was this your project that came out of that?
[8:55]Yeah, it was.
[8:56]I was writing short stories when I came in
[8:58]and I sort of offered up short stories
[9:00]to workshop as like a ritual sacrifice
[9:03]because they're gonna get kind of torn apart.
[9:05]But I spent most of my time on this novel,
[9:09]which came out of a failed short story.
[9:11]Wow.
[9:12]Well, there's a lot to get into a short story.
[9:14]I mean, there's, right?
[9:16]Yes.
[9:17]Was that the root of the failure?
[9:19]The failure of most of my short stories.
[9:21]Like most of my workshops were just,
[9:24]you're doing way too much.
[9:26]And I had a friend who I was also living with,
[9:29]who ended up being my roommate at Iowa,
[9:31]who sort of looked me in the eye and was like,
[9:34]I don't know if you're primarily a short story writer.
[9:37]You might not be very good at that form.
[9:40]I think you might be the novelist
[9:41]and that might be better.
[9:43]Wow.
[9:44]Well, that's great advice of how amazing.
[9:47]Pretty good friend.
[9:49]You have all these great friends.
[9:50]Your friends with the penguins and your friends
[9:51]with the advice that I don't know.
[9:53]That's pretty awesome.
[9:54]I love this opening line of, not the prologue,
[9:57]but the first chapter when you wrote,
[9:58]when I was younger, I can...
[10:00]This is a little, but my parents' ambitions
[10:02]for who I was to become.
[10:04]But by the end of ninth grade,
[10:05]all I wanted for myself was a date
[10:06]to the spring fling dance, a hot one.
[10:09]That's a great intro.
[10:10]I mean, how do you not wanna like keep going?
[10:13]That's like, I really think it makes such a difference
[10:15]the way people start off.
[10:18]I mean, I know this is like trite and set all the time,
[10:20]but I don't know, I haven't set it lately.
[10:22]And your sentence made me remember it.
[10:23]Let's just like, it's like how you,
[10:26]it's like, if you're throwing up in the door to your house,
[10:28]it's the first thing you say to people
[10:29]to welcome them in.
[10:30]And do you see a smile or are you totally freaked out
[10:34]or do you wanna run the other way?
[10:35]And I don't know.
[10:36]There's just something so inviting about it, so.
[10:39]Thank you.
[10:40]Yeah, I think especially with coming of age stories,
[10:42]that ends up being so important.
[10:44]Like the opening of the bell jar,
[10:46]that was the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs
[10:48]or the opening of one of my favorite books,
[10:50]the Buddha of suburbia by Hamakarashi.
[10:52]It opens, my name is Kareem Amir
[10:55]and I am an Englishman born in bread,
[10:56]but a different sort of one.
[10:58]And then he gets into what it's like to be the child of empire
[11:02]as half Indian and then also a British mom.
[11:05]And it's like, these people have to introduce themselves
[11:09]as new writers, but also as young people
[11:11]trying to come into themselves.
[11:13]So I think those people were on my mind in the opening.
[11:16]I feel like you grapple with not only coming of age,
[11:19]but almost coming of identity in many ways, right?
[11:22]Coming of an identity in an immigrant community
[11:25]and what that feels like versus just going to TCNY
[11:29]as you referenced, which I thought was amazing
[11:31]because that was my favorite place back in the day.
[11:33]Tell me about that and how that mirrors
[11:36]or doesn't mirror your own experience.
[11:38]Yeah. Well, I'm part of, I think,
[11:40]sort of the second wave of second generation Indian Americans.
[11:44]We were basically banned from entering the country
[11:46]for most of the 20th century.
[11:48]And so the Indian diaspora as it exists today
[11:51]basically begins in 1965 and my parents came in the 80s.
[11:54]And so I was coming at age in the 90s and early 2000s
[11:58]as my entire community was coming at age, right?
[12:01]And so I think as I got older,
[12:04]I realized that all of these anxieties I had about,
[12:07]being totally undatable in the white South
[12:10]and also more serious things like what it felt like
[12:14]to be brown after 9-11 and see my dad and my brother
[12:17]be harassed at airport security and my mom
[12:20]tell my brother to like, shape his beard
[12:22]and wear color tricks to look as quote unquote,
[12:25]respectable as possible.
[12:27]I saw how both of those things were not just my experience
[12:31]but actually the experience of many in my generation,
[12:34]certainly not all Indian Americans.
[12:35]But I think I aspired to say something,
[12:38]I started out just writing about these goofy kids
[12:42]who are on AIM all the time and flirting on AIM
[12:46]and also unable to talk to each other as real people offline,
[12:51]dancing to usher at school dances.
[12:53]I started writing about the stuff that was like small
[12:55]and familiar and as I was writing,
[12:57]I realized I was writing about a wider community
[13:00]coming at age and from there kind of abling to,
[13:03]or becoming leveling a critique of the community
[13:08]that I belong to that as we have assimilated,
[13:11]we have also taken on more and more power and privilege.
[13:15]And like what does that mean now that we are a little more
[13:18]at home, what do we do with all that we have been given
[13:21]and all that we have worked for?
[13:23]What does it mean to be American now?
[13:25]How do you answer that now?
[13:27]I love it.
[13:29]Well, I've been thinking about it a lot in the last couple
[13:32]of years, I think South Asian Americans,
[13:34]a lot of Asian Americans operate in this like racial
[13:38]in between space in America and were treated
[13:44]as quote unquote model minorities
[13:46]and that term is racist, both in the way that it strips us
[13:50]of the ability to be ourselves, be full, be mediocre,
[13:55]just be anything other than what the majority tells us
[14:00]but it's also historically been used as a wedge
[14:02]to drive, keep Asian Americans from getting along
[14:06]with black Americans and Latinx Americans.
[14:09]So I think as I wrote this book and started to be more critical
[14:14]of that quote unquote model minority narrative
[14:16]as it is accepted by my community
[14:18]and pushed by mostly dominant white America,
[14:21]I wrote myself to a kind of like political and moral space
[14:26]which was like we have to avoid being a technocratic
[14:30]in solar elite and we have to find a way to be
[14:33]like in solidarity with other communities of color.
[14:36]We have to read our own histories,
[14:38]the stuff that comes before 1965,
[14:41]where we've learned about how we weren't always model minorities,
[14:44]a first round of Asian Americans
[14:46]and Indian Americans in particular, we came to the US
[14:49]were unskilled laborers or farm workers
[14:52]and we're in factories and like if we think about that history,
[14:55]does that change who we are today?
[14:58]And Neil does a little bit of this in the book too.
[15:00]He's like thinking about the history of Indian America,
[15:04]reading about the gold rush and learning that the picture
[15:09]who we are today does not have to be the only picture.
[15:13]And I think that's exciting and empowering.
[15:15]That's amazing.
[15:16]And you can tell you did so much research.
[15:18]And I know at the end of the book
[15:19]you have like pages of reference not pages
[15:21]but a very packed page and a half or so
[15:24]of all the source material you used for this book
[15:28]and which is unique in that it's a novel, right?
[15:32]So tell me a little about how you wove all that in
[15:35]and why you did so much research.
[15:36]Yeah, I mean, the research is basically
[15:38]for two different historical chunks of the book.
[15:41]There's stuff that draws on traditions of alchemy
[15:44]in India, China and Europe just to sort of get inspiration
[15:47]for how this elixir would work, what its flaws might be.
[15:51]Most of my ideas for how this sort of rules of magic
[15:54]in the book function, they came from me.
[15:57]They were from my own mind,
[15:59]but then I started doing all this research
[16:01]into like Vedic alchemical traditions in like ancient India
[16:05]and finding that some of the things I thought
[16:07]I had imagined up on my own were actually real,
[16:09]like people did consume gold and tried to consume gold.
[16:12]So that was one chunk of it.
[16:14]The other chunk was this American history.
[16:16]And that actually started long before I was writing this book.
[16:19]When I moved to California, I learned that there was just
[16:23]a really rich Asian American history on the West Coast
[16:27]that I didn't know anything about.
[16:29]You kind of the only Asian American history tended to get
[16:33]in high school classrooms when I was growing up
[16:35]was Japanese internment.
[16:36]There was nothing else.
[16:38]And when I moved out to California,
[16:40]I went on this walking tour that two friends of mine
[16:43]run in Berkeley.
[16:44]That's like this history of Indian revolutionary
[16:47]to arrived in US around World War I.
[16:50]I started reading these books about Bengali Harlem
[16:54]and Bengali immigrants who arrived in New York
[16:58]in the early 20th century and kind of integrated
[17:01]with communities of color, past as Puerto Ricans.
[17:05]And this just truly blew my mind.
[17:07]And so when I was writing my own book,
[17:09]I was like, I want to have this texture history.
[17:12]And I ended up just reading about the gold rush in particular
[17:16]because it was almost like it was on the nose.
[17:18]I was like, I'm already writing about gold.
[17:20]And finding this story of an Indian man stealing gold
[17:24]or accused of stealing gold in the gold rush
[17:26]and basically being chased down by a lynch mob.
[17:29]And I found very little evidence of the sky
[17:31]outside of that document.
[17:33]And so when Neil becomes a history grad student at Berkeley,
[17:37]he's trying to chase down more evidence of this man.
[17:41]And he's heartbroken when he finds that it's just really hard
[17:45]to locate yourself as an Asian American in American history,
[17:50]even though you might have been here,
[17:51]you were just always floating in the periphery
[17:54]of historical vision.
[17:55]And that tells us a lot about why we feel the way we do
[17:58]in 2021 as Asian Americans.
[18:01]I love what you just said, floating in the periphery
[18:04]of American vision.
[18:05]I mean, wow, it like makes me feel like I'm at a school dance.
[18:09]You know, like being completely ignored
[18:10]by like the popular kids or something.
[18:12]Do you know, like the way you describe that?
[18:13]It's like, I very much know what that felt.
[18:16]Yes.
[18:18]That was my experience.
[18:20]Oh my gosh, I went to some dance in sixth grade.
[18:22]And my mother had me wear this like ankle length,
[18:25]Laura Ashley skirt, which you probably don't even know
[18:27]because you're so young.
[18:28]Oh my gosh.
[18:29]You know, the brand, okay.
[18:31]So it was like this floral skirt
[18:32]with like this matching like wool pink sweater
[18:35]and flats and a headband.
[18:37]And I was like against the wall totally shy
[18:41]and being like, I do not know how I'm ever
[18:43]going to get off the wall.
[18:44]And my mother was like, just be yourself.
[18:47]And I was like, what, who is that?
[18:49]Like, what am I even wearing?
[18:51]You know, anyway.
[18:52]So yes, I relate to that as well.
[18:55]So who is that is like the cry between mothers
[19:00]and teens over generations I feel like.
[19:03]Yes. Oh my gosh.
[19:04]And now I have 13 year old twins plus two other kids.
[19:06]And I'm just like, I have to like do this right.
[19:09]I have to play it right.
[19:10]Like I feel like I was 13, two minutes ago.
[19:12]So anyway, so what is coming next for you?
[19:15]You were doing another, are you working on another novel already?
[19:18]A little superstitious about talking about work in progress.
[19:20]But I am working on something new.
[19:22]I, what I'll say about it is that I'm writing
[19:24]from a female perspective, which is weirdly hard.
[19:27]This writing Neil was just natural.
[19:31]He was like my more bumbling, goofy side,
[19:34]but also it felt, it just felt nice to put all of my stuff
[19:39]in the head of someone who is different from me
[19:41]and his inherent difference would change how I wrote it.
[19:45]And now it's a little closer to home,
[19:47]but I've also been writing a lot of essays,
[19:49]which has been really enjoyable to return to nonfiction
[19:52]after spending time in fiction.
[19:54]Awesome.
[19:55]Well, if you ever want to write for mom's
[19:56]to have time to write on medium,
[19:57]please submit a story.
[19:59]Thank you.
[20:00]I love it, awesome. Any advice to aspiring authors?
[20:04]Yeah, I feel a little fraudulent giving advice because I'm so new here too. But read widely
[20:10]and don't just read the new stuff that everyone's talking about on Twitter,
[20:14]should still buy debut novels like mine, but read, I mean, I think it's cool to trace
[20:19]literary ancestry and try to figure out who the writers you admire today, who they admire
[20:25]and read them because that'll help you figure out who you're inheriting and like what your
[20:29]literary genealogy is. The other advice I give students is taken from Anne Thademan, my teacher,
[20:35]Yale, who used to call us into office hours and make us defend word-for-word every piece. We
[20:41]hit every phrase, every piece of writing in the like thousand word essay that we had turned in.
[20:48]And she would have this like big fat roger's, the sores, which your contractors can't see,
[20:54]but I'm holding up and help you find the most precise word. And when I do that to students,
[21:00]it sort of terrorizes and demoralizes some, especially those who really want to be
[21:05]writers because they realize that they have to do all this stuff with M-dashes and dangling
[21:11]modifiers, but you have to learn how to fall in love with that stuff as much as like your own
[21:17]raw genius. So that was good advice from Anne that'll pass on. Wow, literary genealogy.
[21:25]That's another thing you should write a whole thing about. These are such cool. You just like throw
[21:30]in. I mean, this is great. You're like brilliant and I love it and I could just listen to you.
[21:34]And I can't wait to now see. You're so like you have so much ahead of you. So I feel like nothing
[21:38]that I'm that much older, but I just am like so excited. So especially as a fellow Yale alumni,
[21:44]I'm very excited that you're up and coming and just excited for what happens. So anyway,
[21:49]thank you. Thank you. It'll be great. All right. Well, thank you. Thanks for coming on mom's
[21:56]no time to read books and best of luck with everything. I'm going to keep my eye on you.
[22:02]Having needs of me, I really appreciate it. I gave my pleasure. Take care.
[22:08]Thanks for listening to this episode of mom's Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to
[22:12]follow me on Instagram at zebi Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for
[22:17]my newsletter at zebiowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on zoom
[22:23]every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Textures Sound for the Sound Editing.
[22:27]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outroom music.