Deborah Treisman interviews the writer Han Ong about “My Balenciaga,” his story from the March 23, 2026, issue of The New Yorker.
I came upon the two words “the Balenciaga,” in a New York Review of Books essay on “The Collected Stories of Mavis Gallant.” The reviewer, Gabriele Annan, put them in quotation marks, and then proceeded to quote the sentences that followed the initial mention of a Balenciaga dress in a Gallant story, in which, once again, “the Balenciaga” was invoked.
In the story, the dress is a reminder of a more exciting time in the lives of the married protagonists, who have returned to Canada after having traipsed around the globe for years. I’d read “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” a couple of times before, and it had never sparked my writing brain. But witnessing it secondhand, as it were, and especially seeing the two words isolated that way in the review, I immediately thought two things. One: Why is the story not entirely about the Balenciaga? Two: If I want a whole story about a Balenciaga, I’m going to have to write it myself. Funny how one’s brain works. Reading Gallant’s stories, and the stories of Alice Munro, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and V. S. Pritchett—to name a few of my favorite short-story writers—is an occasion for me of mute happiness. I have nothing to contribute but my admiration. Journalism, however, is a different ball of wax. It seems fair game for my writing; news articles have been a source of inspiration for some of my other stories. When I told you about the roundabout journey from “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” to “My Balenciaga,” you initially used the words “inspired by,” and I pushed back: “If I’ve taken two words from an original story, and not really even from the story but from a review of the story—does that still qualify as being inspired by said story? Is there a more apt word than ‘inspired’? Maybe the route of inspiration is postmodernist—a Xerox of a scrap of a Xerox, as it were—although there is nothing postmodernist about the resulting story itself.” It’s equally important to me to point out that I wouldn’t have ventured very far with “My Balenciaga” if I didn’t have a deep fund of fashion knowledge to draw on. That comes from my love of the Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, which made me seek out books and films on her and on fashion. Those gave me the belief that I could pull off a story set in a milieu of models and designers and a researcher tracing a dress’s provenance. The story revolves around a dress that may be a Balenciaga, of course. But, more important, it revolves around a mother and a daughter and their relationship. The mother is a Filipina former model, who moved to New York—partly to escape the judgment of her parents in Manila—and raised her daughter as a single woman. What drew you to this scenario? I suppose you could say that this is a kind of “royalty-in-exile” story—a genre I have great interest in. In this instance, the “royalty” is the mother. She has been “exiled” from the glamorous precincts of her beauty and youth, and currently lives with her retinue: a sympathetic elder sister and a daughter whom she treats as a co-conspirator in her fantasies and fabrications. Instead of desultoriness—a common atmosphere in these sorts of stories—the prevailing mood is one of qualified happiness. Here is a lesson I’ve taken from V. S. Pritchett, the master of qualified happiness : Contra the writing-workshop wisdom, you don’t need conflict in a story. Maybe a “wrinkle,” a few minor complications, but no more. All you really need for a satisfying short story is a zestful spirit and nimbleness of language. And how much more zestful can you get than a character who puts on a Balenciaga dress to sit at her writing desk? That image would be right at home in a Pritchett story! The mother was stunningly beautiful. The daughter, Lucy, refers to herself as ugly—and is called “beautiful” only after she gets a haircut and then wears the Balenciaga, which seems to make others see her differently. How does the physical disparity between Lucy and her mother affect their relationship? If I wanted to take a photograph that would be emblematic of the relationship between the mother and daughter, I’d pose Lucy on a lower eye line than her mother. She’s gazing up, with a shy half smile, at her mother’s face, which is turned, per her model’s training, directly to the camera, challenging and coquettish, and with a nearly convincing pose of invulnerability. Lucy has no interest in her father, even once she knows who he is. Why do you think that is? Maybe Lucy understands that to make contact with her father is to breach her relationship with the person she loves most in the world? Maybe she understands, but doesn’t want to live with, the answer to this question: surely, her mother must have needed some financial help and must have told Lucy’s father of Lucy’s existence, so why hasn’t he made contact? The death of Nora Aunor—a Filipina singer and movie star—sets the narrative in motion. Why does she play that role here? And was she an important figure in your own life, too? I’ve said that what started “My Balenciaga” were those two words in The New York Review of Books. Equally important for me, with this story, is that I wanted to pay tribute to Nora Aunor, a lodestar of my youth, whose recent death made me reflect on the idea of inheritances, as well as shifting notions of beauty. In the story, the mother and daughter remember Nora primarily as an avatar of their “vanished youths.” And, of course, Nora’s career of starring in weepies ties into the mother’s ritualistic crying at the opera, among other occasions. The story begins with Nora’s death, in April of 2025, and continues through to the present moment, late winter, 2026. I began writing it almost on the heels of the New York Times running her obituary in May. It was July when I started. It would perhaps have been more logical to tell a story that runs parallel to the time of its composition in the present tense. But as soon as Nora died, and as soon as I had decided that I was going to write a story that included her, there was no question but that I would use the past tense because the past tense so clearly evoked, for me, the lost world in which Nora belonged. She was my first experience of rabid fandom, but I read her obituary with a certain detachment; also with sadness, as much for Nora as for me, that young boy in Manila who looked up to her, and also the adult who hadn’t thought of her in a long while. The mention of Anna Magnani in the story helps set Nora’s stardom in context: both were terrific actresses with great histrionic gifts; both were much loved in their native countries; both had looks that were said to be typical of the features of their countrywomen, rather than hewing to a homogenized standard of “Hollywood beauty,” though I feel that Nora’s was a true beauty, and Anna’s came more from her being a force of nature, an indomitable spirit. Also, of course, germane to this story is the fact that Lucy has both legacies: a Filipina mother and an Italian father. “My Balenciaga” leaves a big question unanswered, because Lucy chooses not to know the answer. Why do you think, by the end of the story, she no longer wants to learn the truth? All I’ll say is: Lucy has the truth. She has her truth. And it’s not an empty truth, because it seems to be corroborated by many good hunches—for example, the feeling that she is “being held in place by a firm hand,” when she puts on the titular dress to accompany her mother for a walk in Central Park. Also, it’s important to add that, although by the time the story ends Lucy has decided not to look up the answer she sought, that doesn’t mean she never will. Maybe the length of time she is taking is the time she needs to acclimate to possible disappointment. You published a story in The New Yorker a little more than a year ago, “Ming,” which circles around a similar question of the authenticity and value of a creative work—in that case, an antique Chinese ceramic cup. Do you have a particular interest in that theme? I’m interested—and have been for a long time—in the idea of fakes. My first novel, “Fixer Chao,” for instance, was about a fake feng-shui master. So authentication is an outgrowth of that original interest. Also, and probably most important, I recognize that objects have spirits. That we invest objects with spirits, and the process of authentication is a kind of divination. And that is very interesting to me. ♦
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