“I do still think that you will always be from where you are from. But I also think that there are always more places to be from.”
Fiona Jin is a writer from Ames, IA with roots in Beijing. Her writing has been published in Ghost City Press, GASHER Press, the Center for Fiction, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, Eucalyptus Lit, and Sophon Lit, where K. Iver selected her calculus poem "Maclaurin Series" as the winner of its Poetry Contest.
Why do these pieces mean ‘homing’ to you? How do they resemble your relationship to place?
To me, “homing” is my relationship to the spatial axis, the (0,0) of the Cartesian plane which even the furthest coordinates are defined in relativity. “Étude” was inspired by several of my own ambiguous and intense adolescent relationships, and in a very direct way, the places that these relationships gave meaning to—the stage, the practice room, the airport—have defined how I see myself interpersonally. But I think this poem is also about, more broadly, the accessibility of possibility. Esmé is perceived as being almost impossibly perfect, parallel to Emily’s life and yet always at a distance. As “echo[es]” of each other, Emily desires the kind of possibility that Esmé seems ever-closer to achieving—prestige and approval defined in a highly narrow, specific way—while never understanding what exactly to do with that possibility: What all of her and Esmé’s suffering is for beyond the comparison of the two. In this context, place exists as an ever-present boundary that is influenced by but ultimately transcends physical space.
“Dream in the Middle of a Cornfield” is a bit more literal. I’ve visited Iowa many times in different contexts. Every time, I see the same space through a different perspective, and yet notice how much that difference pales in comparison to my always deepening understanding of how this place has shaped me as a person from the start. The dream landscape serves as a metaphor for the spatiality of this place, far beyond its isolation down the highways of the American heartland.
Is there a place you keep returning to, literally or in your writing?
I’m obsessed with places of stagnancy, where knowledge and belief ferment and become inextricable. This is perhaps a natural consequence of having lived most of my life in small, isolated towns in the Midwest, where the lack of public transportation, community third spaces, and the culture of materialism means your life is animated by precisely what keeps you in place. There’s the physical reality of four-decades-old creaking trains a three-hour-walk from home or the internalized mentality of learned helplessness. There’s the concrete window of my apartment in Beijing out of which my grandfather smoked to death. There’s the school playground where I, already “the Asian kid,” stuck out even more by running into a pole and sitting there with the blood dripping down my head. There’s the sun-bleached concrete sidewalk crumbling to pieces as the surrounding lawns swallow down their chemical beauty. Places where being there, whether for the first, second, or umpteenth time, make you realize that wherever you go, there you are.
In both “Étude” and “Dream in the Middle of a Cornfield,” you are on the road. Is there a connection between home and movement?
I think movement peels back the surface layers of ephemeral circumstance to reveal more permanent stakes and tensions. In “Étude,” it’s places like the intimate exhaustion of the red-eye flight that establish Esmé as the repeated destination of Emily’s “homing” no matter which increasingly far and prestigious spaces they become privy to. It’s interesting how places of movement like airports can reinforce feelings of confinement rather than freedom. Having moved for reasons I then scarcely understood countless times, the airport to me became as routine as the cul-de-sac. Meanwhile, “Dream in the Middle of a Cornfield” is set in a personal imaginary of my birth city of Ames—the geographical center of Iowa, home to one of the state’s two major flagship universities amidst miles of sprawling prairie. My oldest memory is set in Iowa: a vague, dream-like set of still images of my raw wood-scented house and its single twiggy backyard peach tree.
Back then, Iowa was merely a backdrop for my everyday life. It’s only after moving between countries and within the Midwest that I’ve realized how everything leads back to Iowa, even if my quotidian functions do not take place there. A recurring metaphor that I often think about—and therefore write about—is the future as a seemingly endless road, disappearing down the vanishing point of an impossibly flat plain.
I’m thinking back to our conversation at YoungArts Week in 2024, about your home in the Midwest and your family’s home in China. In that conversation, when noting how hometowns haunt our writing, you said “you will always be from where you are from.” Has your definition of home changed since then? Has your writing changed?
I’m honored that you remember my answer! The idea of home—that is, the (0,0)s of my existence—definitely continue to inform both my writing and my life more than any of my other identities. More than the Census-like label of “Asian American,” I am a Beijingren with parents from the mountains of Gansu and the pearl farms of Zhejiang. More than the acronym “LGBTQ” that categorizes the queer community, my relationships to sexual and romantic love are informed by the places that defined my access to their possibility. More than a student, my relationship with knowledge is shaped by my background in public, open-enrollment schools, places that educate the vast majority of America’s population and yet perpetuate certain inequalities as they defeat others, complicating narratives of social mobility, freedom, and privilege. I think what’s changed since then—my junior year of high school—is my understanding of agency. I do still think that you will always be from where you are from. But I also think that there are always more places to be from.
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Dream in the Middle of a Cornfield
Fiona Jin | Poetry, Homing
When you are made from lost things, like the single Walmart manila folder
on your mother’s first metal office desk from 2002, memory is retribution
as a function of distance. In Ames, Iowa, the roadside Hy-Vee still sells
expired lottery tickets, the old Chinese restaurant caving under the weight of
Americanized futures in wafer cookies, ones like you will always find your way
home but never I am sorry for all the blood down your collar. Never I am sorry
for teaching you to say sorry. Two lifetimes later a balding man will underline
in red my uses of am, was, & will be, but there are no tenses in Mandarin, only
a past defined as completion, a future defined as completion of want: 我死了,
我要死了. Only everything, including me. So in these dreams, there is always
something in the periphery: clouds churning into gauze, crows shot into dust,
my own blooming breath rotting like sunflowers. The televangelist’s crumbling
billboard ad preaching what I already know about fear. What I keep understanding:
As I sweat cherry soda along the cornstalks off I-80, the ground sweetening
with red 40 & aspartame & derivatives of memory, maybe it doesn’t
matter. In every direction, the enormity of my future is all beneath my feet.
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Étude
It didn’t start with Esmé Zhang, really, but with this: treble clefs crushed
under three plastic binders & The Great Gatsby, Yamaha keyboards
becoming red-eye flights to recital halls. Orchestras of practice
rooms the soundtrack to our pre-apocalypse, with how sustained notes
deteriorated to silence & collective sweat coated off-white keys—her
a better echo of me on the same competition circuit. The only time
I touch her, sophomore year at the 2 a.m. baggage claim, she’s answering
my question with you just really need to mean it, my second-place medal
tucked between a rubric annotated with red could play with more genuine
emotion that Esmé’s soft, uncalloused hands give back to me. Esmé
does her nails—baby blue and barely lacquered—despite piano. Despite
the ridges on her acetaminophen bottles. Because you can love anything
with enough practice but Esmé knows how to hurt more than I do
—leaving her practice room with that smokescreen smile of I know you
won’t tell. Some nights, Esmé still plays perfect D.C. al Fines on repeat, haloed
by the glow of my iPhone screen—still fractured after I threw it to the ground
the first night, Lichtenberg figures down her appassionato digital face
as māma prays to yēsū in the kitchen: wǒ de tián na let my daughter be
just as holy. Also, let her get that gold medal. I have lessons twice a week, now,
but I learn from experience, don’t I? Fraying bandages taming swollen fingers.
The sterile glare of a million stage lights. The way I know each standing
ovation like a mechanic knows an obsolete engine. More than anything,
Esmé & I sharing the same shallow breath that January forever ago
in the failing concert bathroom, her glistening face & blank eyes teaching
me one last time everything she knew that I didn’t, & I wanted to ask if all
this was still her just practicing, Emily or if for once she finally meant it.