Stanford grad becomes new Asian literary star with story of high-society intrigue

Kyla Zhao's sudden success as a first-time novelist is yet another sign that Americans have become enamored with books and movies from Asian creators.

When Kyla Zhao wrote “The Fraud Squad” during her junior year at Stanford to stave off the loneliness of COVID lockdown, she had reason to hope that American publishers would take a look at her first book.

After all, “Crazy Rich Asians,” the blockbuster 2013 book and 2018 film, proved there was a commercial appetite for Asian-centric stories, including those set in Zhao’s hometown of Singapore. She could definitely play up the “Crazy Rich Asians” angle, with some “Devil Wears Prada” thrown in. A one-time intern at Vogue Singapore, Zhao conjured a high-society world of designer name-dropping and social backstabbing to tell a story about a working-class college graduate who goes to extraordinary lengths to land her dream job at a top fashion magazine.

Exceeding even her wildest hopes, Zhao attracted an agent in 2021, followed by a six-figure book deal with Penguin Random House and the potential interest of Hollywood. But if the Jan. 17 publication of “The Fraud Squad” marks a stunning turn of events in her life, it also shows how America has become enamored with stories from Asian creators. These writers are still struggling against the expectations of the White-dominated publishing and producing industries, but slowly, they are getting real Asian stories and Asian lives in front of surprisingly eager audiences.

“When I first started writing during the pandemic, there were more authors of color being published, or I was becoming aware of them,” said Zhao, who’s juggling book promotional duties with her job as a marketing analyst for a Sunnyvale high-tech company. “It showed that there is an interest in stories coming from outside the West, starring Asian protagonists, and it probably helped convince them there would be interest in my book.”

Other writers of Asian descent agree they’ve benefited from growing interest in the stories they have to tell. They see movies like the Oscar-winning “Parasite” and the critical and commercial hit, “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and they’re heartened by the excitement over serious literary works, such as those by Min Jin Lee, Lisa Ko, Karan Mahajan, Ocean Vuong and San Jose-reared Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the 2016 Pulitzer for his Vietnam War-era spy thriller, “The Sympathizer.”

East Bay novelist Vanessa Hua said she’s noticed increased representation of Asian American writers since her first short-story collection was published in 2016. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Hua doesn’t recall learning much about Asian writers, outside of Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston, when she was in high school in the early 1990s.

While she was at Stanford, Hua joked, “I wrote bad Ann Beattie knockoff stories about lonely young white women in New York, because I thought that’s who appeared in ‘Literature’ with a capital ‘L.’”

Over time, Hua realized that her stories, informed by her “upbringing, culture and obsessions,” had value. She turned one “obsession,” a little-explored aspect of Mao Zedong’s personal life, into her 2022 novel, “Forbidden City.” In it, she explores the trauma of the Cultural Revolution through a unique perspective: a 15-year-old girl who becomes an aging Mao’s confidante and lover, as he launches his final “class struggle.”

But even as some Asian American writers get book deals and win literary prizes, the publishing industry is still “disproportionately White,” according to a 2022 report by PEN America.

The industry faced its own “moment of moral urgency” following the 2020 protests over the police killing of George Floyd, according to PEN. That year, the New York Times published an analysis that showed 90% of American fiction books published between 1950 and 2018 were written by White authors, even though Whites comprise only 60% of the U.S. population. The analysis also showed that only 22 of the 220 books on the New York Times Best Sellers list for fiction were written by people of color.

“It’s not quite there yet,” said Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, a San Francisco State professor of Asian American studies, about diversity in publishing. With Nguyen, Pelaud is co-founder of the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), which champions the works of Vietnamese-American writers and artists from other Southeast Asian countries.

Pelaud said publishers and producers still hold onto the idea that they need to gear Asian-themed stories to White American audiences, usually by shunting Asian characters to the side and relying on White protagonists to provide the point of view.

“It’s long been believed that people need to be able to identify with the narrator, and it’s always assumed that the narrator needs to be White,” Pelaud said.

When Zhao was pitching her book to agents, she discounted suggestions about changing her setting to New York or at least introducing a White character to make it more “relatable.”

The White POV character has long been the dominant figure in books and movies set in Vietnam, usually in the form of a U.S. soldier disillusioned by fighting an unpopular war in a country he sees as foreign or hostile.

In an interview with NPR’s “Fresh Air” host Terry Gross, Nguyen said, “The reality is that the Vietnamese people paid the heaviest price” from the decades-long conflict, as they also dealt with the related traumas of colonialism and displacement. With DVAN, he and Pelaud want to help Americans realize that “Vietnam is a country, not a war,” while promoting writers who portray Southeast Asians’ real lives.

In her new collection of poems, “Nothing Follows,” San Jose-reared Lan Duong, an associate professor of cinema and media studies at USC, tackles an important but difficult topic in the refugee community: family dysfunction. She writes about growing up on welfare, as her embittered father, a former lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese army, struggles in low-wage menial jobs.

In this way, Duong’s poems represent the narratives that Asian-American artists hope to see more of. As the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” enjoyed its pop culture moment, some expressed concern that its “affluence porn” and focus on old-money Chinese elites would be the “end-all, be-all.”

“I appreciated that ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ launched this new-found interest for seeing Asians on the screen, but I still think a lot more stories need to be told and represented,” Duong said.

Zhao agrees there’s a tendency for non-Asians to see Asian people as “a monolith.” She populated “Fraud Squad” with characters from different strata of Singapore’s multicultural society, and follows a similar approach in creating characters for her next two books, a children’s novel about a young Asian-American chess prodigy, and an adult novel set in Silicon Valley, about an Asian woman grappling with “imposter syndrome.”

“I want representation,” she says, “that is vibrant and diverse.”