In her essay collection, We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg, Franny Choi interrogates the common metaphor that likens Asians to robots, exploring how this trope has impacted her life, her identity, and even her experience of pleasure. By critiquing cultural touchstones from Terminator 2 and Battlestar Galactica to The Flaming Lips and beyond, Choi grapples with what makes us human and how to envision a better world without repeating the mistakes of the past.
I spoke with the writer over Zoom. We talked about how they balance social justice organizing with the demands of their day job, the value of dissociation, the transition from writing poetry to nonfiction, and why we all need to be very specific in our opposition to AI.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Cecelia Thorn: I was struck by your level of compassion for robots or cyborgs, and what you call “thingification” with ourselves, and even for our desire to be objectified. It helped me develop more compassion for my former self, who sometimes craved objectification, probably because I equated it with worth. While reading your book, I felt like you were achieving this intimacy with the reader with some very intentional craft choices, like your use of the second person, and how you occasionally break the fourth wall in order to address the reader directly. This got me wondering if you had a specific reader in mind while you were writing this book?
Franny Choi: If there’s any kind of intended reader in mind, it’s someone who’s kind of like me in that they have been minoritized or oppressed in some way, whether it’s via race or gender or queerness or disability or something else; somebody who’s been in that position of being treated like an object, and who might find that experience to be complicated.
Because I think what you’re saying about those moments when you sort of identify with an object, I think that’s actually a really scary and weird thing to write about. Because it feels risky, given the real material impacts of objectification and thingification (Aime Cesaire’s term) to admit that there might also be pleasure to be found there. That’s where queer theory and art have taught me a lot, in always insisting that joy and reclamation are always possibilities.
I was somebody who was encountering these depictions of objecthood and machine personhood, and having these complicated feelings — like, no, that’s not me, but also like, maybe there’s a reason why I keep showing up back at the scene of objectification. There’s something that draws me to it, and maybe it’s something like pleasure.
So yes, I think there’s a very particular ideal reader who’s an Asian femme queer person, but I don’t my reader is limited to that at all. I think it’s anyone who looks at the world and is like: that’s weird. (Laughs.)
CT: I also wanted to mention how much I loved the essays that were titled “notes toward an essay.” I loved how these sections read more like poems. I loved the use of white space and the line breaks and this fragmented structure. So it made a lot of sense to me that your background was in poetry, and that you’ve published books of poetry before. So what was the hardest thing about transitioning from writing poetry to writing a book of creative nonfiction?
FC: Honestly, one of the biggest things was like the scale of time that is required, the amount of time just literally spent sitting and writing.
Because my process of writing poetry is really about experiencing the world, thinking and absorbing, and letting all that stuff ferment, and then finding the right time to be able to create this really distilled version of the experience into language.
But in the essay world, I’ve been finding it to be more of a process of building the thing from the ground up, which means hours and hours of research and writing, literally writing. I’ve never typed so much in my life.
Another difference I’ve enjoyed is thinking at the scale of the essay. In poems, the gesture, or a single metaphor or image, or a single feeling can kind of be the end point. And I just found that really unsatisfying, actually, in the case of an essay. Whenever I got stuck somewhere, and tried to rely on the kinds of lyrical gestures I was used to making, it felt like an easy out. And I realized there was usually a lot more interrogation that I needed to do, to keep pushing beyond that stuck place. So it was really going underneath. It ended up being a completely different process for me, honestly.
One of the reasons I wrote this book was because I wanted to learn how to really write nonfiction. And I learned so much; my brain has expanded in so many ways by working in this art form.
CT: And my brain expanded in so many ways by reading it. I also noticed the repetition of the phrase “ghost in the shell,” and the idea of having all these different selves. I was curious if the process of writing this book has helped you integrate or reconcile these different selves, or if integration is even the point?
FC: Man, that’s such a good question. I think any writing that I do that ends up feeling really worthwhile is writing that leads to a deep interrogation of myself, where I feel changed on the other side.
I think that I came to more compassion about parts of myself that I might have blamed before.
But integrating them? I don’t know. In one of the essays in the book, I write about dissociation and the idea of having multiple selves that you present to the world in different situations. I don’t actually bring this quote in, but I remember reading something the psychoanalyst Phillip Bromberg wrote, which is that the goal for people who have experienced dissociation isn’t to have one coherent self, but to be able to stand the spaces between selves.
The thing about robot and cyborg stories is that they are fundamentally asking, what is a human, and what is a self? What is this thing called subjectivity that we experience? Which leads us to philosophical problems like the “ghost in the shell.” If you could take your consciousness and put it into a different body, what does that mean for the boundaries of the self? So yeah, I emerged understanding myself more deeply, but if anything, my idea of what a self even is was all blown apart.
CT: Do you think the upcoming process of publication will add anything to that?
Fc: I think that maybe the benefit of being a debut nonfiction author who has already had a poetry publishing career is that there’s already sort of a ‘Franny Choi persona’ out there in the world, so I don’t have to build her from scratch. And that persona doesn’t not feel like me.
But of course it still is a weird thing to be so public after being so insular in the process of writing. In the past, I’ve tried to find ways to make the pub part of it be creative in some way,by thinking about the performance and presentation of a book as also a creative act. That said, the joy of just connecting to other people after being alone can be enough, I think. I’ve been lucky to live my writer life in community, and in some ways that’s the whole reason I write: to connect with others. There’s a lot of anxiousness for sure, but especially after chipping away in the dark for so long,this part — it’s pretty joyful, you know?
CT: I love that. You’ve also written about something I feel like a lot of of us are struggling with right now. You’ve written about ICE and Gaza and feeling so deeply about what’s happening in the world, but you’ve also written about what you witnessed after the George Floyd protests, and how you’d see some of your friends experiencing overwork and then burnout. So I was wondering like, with your history as an organizer, how do you balance that today? Like you wrote about crying in the shower after watching the news about kids in Gaza, and how hard it is to see, but also how you refuse to go numb, because these people deserve for us to witness and to feel it. It’s something I struggle with a lot. Like how to feel it and then to function in the world as a mom. Like I know you’ve got this full-time job, and all these students. So I was wondering if you have any advice about not turning away. Like feeling it all, and taking action when we can, and how to balance that with daily life?
FC: I really appreciate that question, it’s something I’m really thinking about right now because I’ve been feeling lately like the balance is off in my own life, because I’ve been pretty subsumed by work and not really connected to action lately. And I think it’s bad for me. There are so many ways to turn away, and there’s so much incentive to not look and not feel and not act. But I think it poisons the spirit, eventually. This is going to sound simple, but it helps to schedule in advance that I will go and do a thing: participate in an action, or a community work day on a farm, or something. It’s the same way that I sign up for gym classes to force myself to go to the gym.
But saying that also makes it sound like it’s a chore, and I don’t think it has to be. So much of the lifeblood of activism, in my humble experience, is about building relationships: people to struggle alongside.
And it’s also about seeking out and cherishing those spaces that help feed your belief. So for example, I just got back from the Brew & Forge retreat. On the day-to-day, helping to run this organization mostly entails a lot of administrative grunt work. But when we’re in that space, with these incredible poets and organizers, it helps me remember what it’s all for. And organizing for justice doesn’t just become more possible; it becomes urgent, a responsibility that I now have to this person next to me. And that is life-enabling. So I think finding ways to get reminded of that and realign the compass are so crucial.
CT: Totally. Love that. Wait, so your organization is called Brew and Forge?
FC: Yeah, that’s the name of the organization I started a few years ago.The retreat is called the Witches and Warrior Retreat and it’s for BIPOC poets and organizers in the Northeast. It’s usually something like six poets, six organizers, and we hang out in a retreat center in upstate New York and write together and learn, and we have some faculty come and teach workshops. Writers have been part of social movements for the entirety of modern social movements. So that organization is a very small project trying to cultivate some places where writers and organizers can learn from each other, and where people who do both can grow their practice.
CT: That is super cool.
FC: Well, I also want to thank you for asking that question, because I have sort of worried that this book that’s about robots and Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and stuff will seem like it’s just about the problems of Asian American women and the interests of sci-fi fans. I think it’s important to keep insisting that the goal is to fight and resist all kinds of oppression, and not just fight for my own people.
CT: Oh no, I got that. I felt like so many people were seen by this book. That’s why I wanted to ask that question earlier, about how you imagined your reader, because I felt like it was very expansive, you know? Like I felt seen in it. Like at one point, you use the phrase like “people who have suffered girlhood.” And so many of us have done that, and so many of us have experienced objectification, so I felt like this book includes so many people whose experiences might be very different from your own.
In your book, the robots are more personified than, you know, a bunch of code. Still, I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on generative AI?
FC: There are so many things I could say; obviously, it’s a really big and complicated topic. I guess maybe what I’ll say is that I think sometimes there are conversations about AI that hinge upon it not being a human. And I think those kinds of arguments kind of run out of steam after a while.
Part of the reason I wrote this book was because of the close association between Asian people in particular, and oppressed people writ large, to robots and machines. That metaphor has allowed the West to say, these people are not people, and therefore we can work them like machines, or otherwise exclude them from the domain of humanity and human rights. One of the weird results of this is that xenophobic, racist, and ableist ideas are also baked into how robots show up in our cultural imagination, which means they are in the room whenever we complain that, say, AI is soulless. So I don’t think that the reason to hate AI is because it’s not like us. I think the reason to be up in arms about it is that it is a technology that’s being intensely invested in in order to consolidate wealth in a very small pocket of billionaires and in the US military.
What I mean is that the problem is technofascism, and how AI is lining the pockets of some people, while strengthening the military and the surveillance state. And then there are all kinds of enormous collateral damage that happens along the way, to jobs, to the environment, and to our ability to think for ourselves. I’m not an anti-technology person; I’m enough of a Star Trek fan to think that there’s some really awesome stuff that could happen with really amazing computing technology. But I think having that, plus capitalism and the military-industrial complex, is almost certainly a recipe for disaster.
About the Author: Franny Choi is the author of the essay collection We Radiant Things: Notes on Being Alien and Becoming Cyborg and several collections of poetry, including The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022) and Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019). They also coedited the anthology We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word (Haymarket Books, 2024), and their work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Franny is a member of the literature faculty at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge, a project that builds connections between writers and social justice movements.
About the Interviewer: Cecelia Thorn lives in Colorado, where she sold cannabis for over a decade while trying to figure out how to become a writer. She’s written for the Denver Post, among other newspapers, and she now writes a Substack, Thoughts Not Bots. She’s also on Instagram, although she has complicated feelings about it, because of the techno-fascism referenced above.