Rita Chang-Eppig: On Practicing Radical Acceptance

Rita Chang-Eppig received her MFA in fiction from NYU. Her novel about an infamous Chinese pirate queen, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, has been selected as an Indie Next pick for June 2023 and an Indies Introduce pick for Summer/Fall 2023. Her stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2021, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Conjunctions, Clarkesworld, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, and elsewhere.

She has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, the Writers Grotto, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

In this post, she shares her thoughts on practicing radical acceptance to navigate publishing, why she's obsessed with women leaders, and writing what calls to you.

Name: Rita Chang-Eppig
Literary agent: Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary Management
Book title: Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Release date: May 30, 2023
Genre/category: Literary
Elevator pitch for the book: Based on the life of a legendary Chinese pirate queen, Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea is an exploration of leadership, ambition, and motherhood, following the rise of Shek Yeung from peasant girl to the commander of the largest fleet in Asia while drawing upon elements of Chinese mythology.

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What prompted you to write this book?

I’ve been obsessed with women leaders my entire life, partly because I wanted to be one when I was a child. My first-grade class was holding elections for class president and vice president, and little egomaniac that I was, I nominated myself for president. After school, my teacher pulled me aside. The presidency was probably best reserved for a boy, she told me, but how would I feel about vice presidency instead?

That night, fuming, I wrote a letter arguing for gender equality. The next day, I got a few of the other girls in my class to sign the letter and, together, we delivered it to the teacher. Let’s just say she was not amused. Luckily, I changed schools a few months after that, so I didn’t have to suffer her ire for long.

That was the end of my own political ambitions, but I remained fascinated by women leaders. This really reached a peak around the time of the 2016 election. I started thinking about women leaders throughout history, and Shek Yeung immediately came to mind. More than anything, I was thinking about complicated women leaders, ones whose decisions I might not have personally agreed with but whose reasoning I understood.

In my previous life I was a psychologist, and in the field, there is this morbid term of art called the “psychological autopsy.” You conduct it on someone who has already died (usually from suicide, but not always). You can’t ask the person any questions, can’t make them fill out any questionnaires. All you have are whatever documents the person might have left behind, what the people around this person observed, and your clinical judgment, to construct a profile. In a way, I was using that same skill set while writing Deep as the Sky, Red as the Sea, though I’m sure many of my own projections made it into the book, too.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

Seven years if we’re counting those initial years throwing ideas at the wall, four if we’re counting from when I finally started drafting. The core idea didn’t change through the process, but additional ideas about motherhood, spirituality, etc. wove themselves into the narrative as I wrote.

It’s a little bit like French-braiding: You start with the core braid, and then you add strands as you go. The end result is, I would like to think, a more complex and beautiful picture than if I’d stuck only with the core.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Abandon all hope. I’m kidding. Actually, I’m not kidding. I’ve learned that it’s really important to not attach any hopes or expectations to this process because so much is just outside of your control.

You might not get something you felt certain you would. But you might also get something you never imagined. In general, the publishing process is forcing me to practice radical acceptance, which is like broccoli: I don’t like it, but I know it’s good for me in the long run.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

I was continually surprised by the echoes of the past in the present moment. There are sections of the book that might seem like authorial insertions, like I was trying to make a statement about our society using a historical vehicle. But it actually went in the reverse direction: I would learn about something in my research and feel surprised by the similarities to the present.

You know those magazine headlines that read, “Stars—they’re just like us!” It was like that, except with people from 200 years ago. I really shouldn’t have been surprised by this. Before Notre-Dame de Paris burned down, I used to spend time reading the prayer plaques that hung inside the cathedral. Some of these plaques were from hundreds of years ago, and they basically said, “I hope I pass this exam.”

There’s something so humorous and yet also humbling about the idea that, since time immemorial, there have been stressed out students during finals begging God to let them not flunk out of school.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope readers will connect with some of the ideas I’m exploring, such as the stories we tell about iconic women. The fact that most people refer to Shek Yeung as “Ching Shih” or “Zheng Yi Sao,” both of which translate to “Zheng’s wife,” already tells you what you need to know about her erasure. And when people actually talk about her deeds, she tends to be cast as an irredeemable villain, or in some cases, a feminist icon. Either way, she’s reduced to an archetype.

I’m also exploring the stories we tell about ourselves. We all tell stories because it’s hard to live while being brutally honest with yourself. In the case of trauma survivors, which she is, or perpetrators of grave crimes, which she also is, stories can keep people alive, keep them moving forward.

But mainly, I hope readers will get a kick out of reading this. It’s a novel about pirates.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Write whatever you feel called to write. When I first started querying agents in my late 20s, I was getting feedback that essentially said, "Your prose is good, but write realist stories about poor immigrants instead of cyborgs."

Obviously, there is nothing wrong with realist stories about poor immigrants, but there is something wrong with telling marginalized folks they must write about x. Unfortunately, back then I really took that criticism to heart, and I wasted the next few years trying to write stuff that fit a certain mold. And surprise, surprise, the stuff I produced wasn’t good! As one of my MFA professors liked to say, if you’re bored writing something, then your readers are going to be bored reading it.

It got to a point where I almost gave up. Then one day I started drafting a weird urban fantasy novel with sentient balls of fire and tar pits, and my guiding principle for that book was, what do I personally want to see happen next?

So I wrote an entire novel like this, and it reminded me that writing was supposed to make me happy. Because if I wanted to make myself miserable, I would get a 9-to-5 job I hate, and at least that would come with a 401K.

That fantasy novel will never see the light of day, but I’d like to think I carried the lessons I learned into this one.