Lara Vapnyar on Immigration and Self-Knowledge
by Yoojin Na
When I first walked into Lara Vapnyar’s seminar at Columbia, I found a pretty, dark-haired woman sitting in the middle of tables arranged into a C-shape. I didn’t realize she was the professor until she introduced herself. She spoke softly yet clearly with endearing residues of a Russian accent.
In the following weeks, we discussed some of the most original works I’ve ever read—DFW’s “Backbone,” Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In the Grove,” Martin Amis’ Time’s Arrow, and Italo Calvino’s “Prose and Anti-combinatorics.” She listened to her students kindly but, at moments, surprised us with her sharp candor. Somewhere along the way, I realized, without having to look her up, that she was the author of a short story that has haunted me since I first read it.
I found Lara Vaypnar’s “Katania” in the October 2013 issue of The New Yorker while searching for writing I could emulate for my MFA portfolio. What I discovered was a voice so singular that it couldn’t be reproduced.
“Katania” is narrated by Katya, who grows up in Soviet Moscow where “fathers had a tendency to die, or to lose themselves to alcoholism, or to simply ‘up and go.’” She makes friends with a neighbor girl Tania who has also lost her father. Together, they make up Katania, a country made of glued-on bridges and candy-wrapper rivers. In Katania, their dolls have a father and a husband. In Katania, their dolls live in lavish houses and go as they please without being branded defectors.
The two girls try to sustain this fantasy world as long as they can, but their real-life jealousies and insecurities make it impossible. In the end, Katya, a recent divorcee, visits Tania at her summer home in the Berkshires where she has recreated a very literal interpretation of Katania, complete with six bedrooms, hard-smiling kids, and a husband who eerily resembles the father doll they played with as children.
In her new novel Divide Me by Zero, Vapnyar gives us the rest of Katya’s story—her immigration to the US, the slow dissolution of her marriage, and the heartbreaking death of her mother through chapters organized around mathematical concepts. I had the privilege to ask her some questions about the new novel over email.
Yoojin Na: In Divide Me by Zero, Katya’s father Daniil is an oceanographer. But when his sister leaves the country, he falls under government scrutiny and is told he can never again go abroad for fieldwork. This news causes him to have a heart attack and die. Up until that point, Katya has a relatively happy childhood. What were your intentions in killing him off in such fashion? Are you trying to communicate something political about growing up in the USSR?
Lara Vapnyar: I used a lot of autobiographical material without thinking about it. I would change “real” events only if they didn’t fit the logic of the narrative. This happens to be exactly how it went with my father.
YN: Len, Katya’s husband, is an interesting character. It almost seems that there are two of him—the Russian Len, who is completely enamored with his wife, and the American Len, who finds his wife a burden. This transformation struck me as wholly believable yet simultaneously ineffable. It isn’t that their daily lives change all that much. In both countries, Len works as a computer programmer and Katya as a writer. In both countries, they live in a cramped space with a grumpy older woman. Yet somehow, in America, Len learns to resent his wife and mother-in-law. Why is that? Is it something specific about the American culture that changes Len?
LV: Yes, from the first glance, everything stays the same, but something very important changes, in their inner lives, in their perception of the world. When they met, both of them were very young and had just shoots of their future adult personalities. Immigration made them grow up very fast (in a year as opposed to decades), and they evolved in very different ways. Len’s practical, almost puritan side grew, so he fit in so much easier with the American culture. Katya got possessed by her “mysterious Russian soul,” a mix of unpredictable, selfish and intensely romantic.
YN: Katya wants to believe the love in her marriage was lost somewhere in the transatlantic flight. Do you agree? Do you think Len and Katya would have been happy if they stayed in Russia? Is their love the price of their American Dream?
LV: If they stayed, it would’ve taken them longer to evolve, but eventually they would’ve been unhappy together.
YN: It’s interesting to see how each character—Katya, Len, and Nina—cope with alienation that comes from adapting to a new life. One would expect that their shared experience would bring them closer together, yet the very opposite occurs. As a child of immigrants, I found this family’s growing apart poignantly real. Why do you think such estrangements happen?
LV: Adapting to a new country is a very hard lonely process that takes up all your unique resources. You have to become your true self first, only then you can figure out how to adapt that person (your true self) to the new life.
YN: In some ways, your book is a chronicle of losses. Katya loses her father, her homeland, her husband, her mother, and her lovers. Katya, herself, is divided by zero, by nothingness. Yet, through such an equation, she becomes infinite.
LV: I think that’s because she finds her true self. It’s taken her a very long time, but she finally understands who and what she is, and even if she knows that this person is flawed, she accepts her, as in “accept what you cannot change.” That self-knowledge is priceless.
YN: There are parallels between Katya’s life and yours: You are also an immigrant from Russia. You are also a writer. You’ve also lost your mother, who was a math professor. Moreover, your book contains meta-fictional aspects. You acknowledge that you are challenging the “fictional status” of your book by including a photo of yourself as Katya. Why not write a memoir? Why was it essential for you to write a novel?
LV: I couldn’t write “the whole truth,” because of personal reasons, and because I wanted to build a beautiful logical structure. Our real lives are just too chaotic.
YN: Can you elaborate more on the structure of your book?
LV: The book is divided into three parts. First part is childhood and coming of age. Second part is love. Third part is death. The secret that I’ve divulged to some of my students is that childhood, while it is very exciting and easy to write for the writer, is very frustrating to the reader because it is boring. Your childhood is boring! This knowledge inspired me to include love in the first part. Scenes from the second part about love migrate into the first part about childhood. That way, childhood is not boring because it’s interspersed with exciting moments about love and sex. And my second part about love is peeking into the third part about death. Certain scenes about death are migrated into the second part about love. And my third part about death resolves in large around the first part about childhood. So, I have perfect structural balance.
YN: Can you tell me a bit about your own immigration experience and how it shaped you as a writer?
LV: It gave me a gift of greater empathy—the most important quality for a writer. As I tried and failed and tried again to fit in, I would try to understand other people as well as I understand myself.
YN: What did you learn about yourself in writing Divide Me by Zero?
LV: The first thing that comes to mind is that I am a bad, deeply flawed person. I’ve always known that but writing about the darkest, most shameful moments in my life only confirmed this. I feel so much guilt! But while I cannot fix my past, I can at least try to be somewhat better in the present. The second is how much my mother meant to me, and how much I still miss her. The third might sound obnoxious, but it’s how I feel. I learned that I am a very powerful writer.
Yoojin Na is a writer and an ER doctor. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Quartz, The Rumpus, and others. She is working on a memoir that explores her identity as a 1.5-generation Korean American and a formerly undocumented immigrant. She currently lives in New York City.
