Kevin Chong discusses the inspirations, from Vancouver's Chinatown to 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' behind his metafictional novel 'The Double Life of Benson Yu.'
I’ve written books about horse racing, but [Vlautin’s book] intrigued me because I liked the idea of writing about a boy on his own. Benny [the boy who becomes Samurai] is 12, because it’s a vulnerable age — not-quite child and not-quite teenager. The summer I was 12 I was in Chinatown at my grandma’s in a one-room studio apartment in a housing project. And so spatially, that’s the setting I drew from.I was being vague.
Benson’s writer’s block kicks in when he’s asked to write a memoir, instead of the comic books that helped him process his past. How do you think switching to prose unmoors him? If you’re confronted by somebody who has taken something from you, done something terrible, maybe you’re not in a position to write about it in a way that’s level-headed, that allows for ambiguity. That’s something Benson is trying to figure out, or is learning over the course of the story.
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