Katie Waldman (3:29)

Yeah. Well, and actually, speaking of that, I wonder if I could ask you to read from the passage on page 153, and you're talking about the baseball team that Gwen plays for, for Auto America and their rival, which is China, Russia, the amalgam of China and Russia. And you're describing why the rivalry is so intense. But in doing that, you kind of get at the. The symbolic weight of baseball for Americans. And I should back up and say that it's narrated by Gwen, the main character's father.

Gish Jen (4:01)

Okay. Perhaps this was fear, pure and simple, on the part of Gwen's teammates. But feeding their obsession, of course, was the sense that baseball was more than a sport, that it was a crown jewel. There were people who said it wasn't even invented in America. There were people who pointed out it was mentioned by Jane Austen long before it was ever mentioned here. But if baseball took on a hallowed meaning, it took on that meaning in our American dreams. For was this not the level playing field we envisioned? The field on which people could show what they were made of? And didn't we Americans believe, above all that everyone should have a real chance at bat? Didn't we believe that with the good of the team at heart, something in us might just hit a ball off our shoe tops and send it sailing clear out of the park? If Gwen's teammates were playing chine rusher for something, I thought it was for this, for a chance to show. My mother would have said that even if we all returned to the dirt and the wind and the rain, like the plants and the animals, we had a bigness in us, Something beyond algorithms and beyond upgrades, something we were proud to call human. Or so it seemed to me.

Katie Waldman (5:19)

Could you maybe describe just a little bit what's happening with Gwen and baseball? When the book begins, it turns out.

Gish Jen (5:27)

That she is quite a talented pitcher. And as the book goes on, she comes to the attention of the netted. They are engaged in international competition, and so they would like to see Gwen come and play for them. She has to decide between a world where she can actually realize herself. I mean, the netted world is one where there have stadia and there are coaches and, you know, all the things that she needs to be the pitcher that she has it in herself to be and to stay in the surplus world, she'll never know, you know, can she throw an 85 mile an hour fastball? You know, in the surplus world, she will never know that. So, you know, she has to kind of decide whether she would cross this line and also whether it would make any difference. You know, I mean, why stick with the surplus? Is that going to help matters? So she has to ask herself some pretty hard questions as well as the question, of course, of, you know, whether she could bring her family with her. You know, is that betraying something? And, you know, would. Does it do any good for her parents to insist that their affiliation is with the downtrodden?

Katie Waldman (6:43)

Yeah. And I think specifically with this book, it's also interesting because you've got this sort of encroaching state and AI and baseball seems to represent something sort of natural and unaccountable and miraculous. So you've written eight books, and many of them are realist fiction. And I'm wondering, why did you decide to write a dystopian novel?

Gish Jen (7:05)

Well, of course, dystopias are in the air. I'm hardly the first writer to think to do this, but for me, you know, I was kind of at a funny time of my life in that I was newly an empty nester. My daughter had just gone off to college, and as a parent of someone going out into the real world, I was worried about the future. And so my orientation toward what was going to happen in this country, which had already been there, was really, really pronounced because of my time in life. But there's also another way, I think, in which I wanted to write a dystopia partly because I wanted to write about our times, but to write in a realistic mode about our times and everything that's happening, we would have nothing but shock and anger, like, oh my God, this is happening. Oh my God, this is. This other thing is happening. And that's not the book I wanted to write. You know, I didn't want my book to be all about reaction to these things happening. I wanted to write about what it would feel like if these things all continued. And what if our word became what it could become? You know, what would our lives be like?

Katie Waldman (8:18)

Well, it's funny because you wrote a piece in the New York Times when Steve Jobs died. And it was this lovely kind of ode to the early computer as an alternative to the typewriter. And you write, what came out of this computer was not further from the human heart. It was closer. It was looser, freer, more spontaneous. And this is 2011, and in the resistors, your vision of technology is so much darker as kind of authoritarian force. So I just wonder, like, how did that transformation happen? Do you see it as like a switch flipped from optimism to pessimism or.

Gish Jen (8:57)

No, I don't think that a switch was flipped. I think that I still see technology as enormously liberating. So I'm not actually a technophobe, but it's hard not to notice that authoritarian governments have managed to take technology and use it in frighteningly effective fashion. So I do spend a lot of time in China, so I have seen what the Chinese government has been able to do with technology. Yeah.

Katie Waldman (9:24)

And when you do go back to China, what do you see?

Gish Jen (9:27)

Well, you know, so I was sitting down to this book in 2017, and, you know, so I saw already that there were cameras in the front of classrooms. You know, you would have every single question, every single reaction recorded. Obviously, that has a chilling effect. Already at that time, they were piloting their, you know, social credit system, so that was already being rolled out in certain cities, and already, you know, no one could really function there without WeChat. And already it was known that WeChat was censored, and, you know, everybody was aware of these things. So, you know, already it was becoming clear that technology was a hugely effective tool that they now had.

Katie Waldman (10:10)

Yeah. I mean, it's so interesting that one journey of the book is just watching Gwen Blossom and her parents being so proud of her as she sort of takes over her own freedom and her own life story. But at the same time, there's kind of this shadow narrative that that's kind of what happened with AI, that humans gave birth to this creature and gave it more and more freedom and more and more leash, I guess. And then it developed into this kind of nightmare sentience. So I just. I found that sort of symmetry really interesting.

Gish Jen (10:47)

Well, thank you. You're the first person to comment on that. But what you see in that, I think, is that, you know, I myself have a little bit of ambivalence about freedom. You know, look, I look at autocratic leaders, and I am against, and I am pro freedom. But there's another way in which I. In the case of technology, which, you know, we now are at the point where, you know, chatbots can develop their own language independent of us, that we can't even. A lot of people are quite unnerved by the fact that if you ask a big tech company, well, how does this work? That even for them it's a black box and they don't really know. And that kind of thing makes us nervous. How could it not?

David Remnick (11:36)

The novelist Gish Jen, speaking with the New Yorker's Katie Waldman. Jen's new book is called the Resisters. I'm David Remnick and thanks for joining us this week. And don't forget that next week we'll be joined by a living legend, a term I don't use lightly, Pam Grier. See you then.

Narrator/Announcer (11:55)

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Alexis Cuadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Bottin, Ave Carrillo, Rann and Corby Kalalea, David Krasnow, Caroline Lester Gofen, Mputubwele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses and Steven Valentino, with help from Alison McAdam, Morgan Flannery, Meng Fei Chen and Emily Mann. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsarina Endowment Fund.