Q&A With Alec Ash 

Alec is a journalist and author who writes about China. Alec’s books are nonfiction, and they are Wish Lanterns, China’s Youth & his recent memoir that was released back in April of this year, The Mountains Are High. Jake Adelstein introduced us via email, and I was so lucky to read and speed through Alec’s memoir The Mountains Are High. If you haven’t read The Mountains Are High yet, you need to get a copy now available wherever books are sold! 

Q: Alec, would you please give a brief description of each of your books starting with The Mountains Are High? 

A: My first book, Wish Lanterns, followed the lives of six young Chinese (or young in 2016!), born between 1985 and 1990. It was very much narrative nonfiction, and there was no first person in it at all. I’ve also edited a collection of expat writing called While We’re Here. But The Mountains Are High is a very different kind of book, blending reportage with memoir.

Q: How long did it take you to write The Mountains Are High? Why was now the right time to write and release it? 

A: The whole process took three years, although it germinated for longer than that. 2020 was the year in which I was living the material and taking notes but didn’t yet know how it would work on the page; in 2021 I was beginning to outline and write the book and doing additional interviews; and 2022 was the most intensive writing year. Then it takes another year to publish, with edits and revisions.

Q: You lived in China from 2008 till the end of 2022. What made you realize it was time to move on? 

A: It was just time. I woke up one morning in the summer of 2022 and realized there was a big wide world out there, and it was time to move on. Everyone got tunnel vision in Covid. I was gone by the end of the year.

Q: If you are currently writing another book, will it be like Wish Lanterns & China’s Youth? Or will it be a sequel or like The Mountains Are High? 

A: I’m not working on another book right now, but I’m turning my eye to essay writing again, a form I’ve always enjoyed but done less of.

Q: You are originally from England! That’s one of the many places I would love to see one day! Where are your favorite spots in England? 

A: Oxford is my hometown, and I’m biased but I think it’s one of the loveliest towns in the land. Bath is also nice, and the Lake and Peak districts. Scotland is terrific but that’s another country entirely.

Q: A lesson I remembered reading The Mountains Are High is that while location changes can be good, if we don’t change our mindset the problems will still be there & that we have to love ourselves before expecting others to. Are those the lessons you want readers to learn & remember after reading The Mountains Are High or are there other lessons, you’d like for readers to learn?

A: I think I’ll leave that for readers to discover or consider themselves.

Q: I like how you didn’t gloss over that China is a communist country and that you changed people’s names in the book for legal and political reasons. I also liked how you acknowledged that China isn’t tolerant towards religion. What did you think of the backlash Disney received in 2020 since they filmed Mulan near a concentration camp in Xinjiang where the Uyghur Muslims are being held? I feel like the media everywhere doesn’t cover the genocide there as much as it should. 

A: It’s hard to write a “soft” book about China these days (as in, about human stories and experiences) because there is always the nagging thought that you are eliding the harsh political realities of the nation, where Muslims are still interred, and various vulnerable groups have few rights. So, I think it’s always important to acknowledge politics even in a work about society and culture.

Q: How does it feel knowing that Wish Lanterns was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week? It sounds like a dream come true! 

A: They did a great job of it, and I’m glad they took my advice with procuring the opening track, Miss Dong, which appears in the book too.

Q: Would you say your career as a journalist helped with writing your books? You write so beautifully! Sometimes I forgot that while I was reading The Mountains Are High that it was a memoir and not a fiction book. 

A: I think a career in journalism can help getting book deals, but can harm the writing of the books sometimes, in that you become used to a certain style of journalistic writing, whereas literary nonfiction is a different form. So, I always aspired to more literary writing, including using the tools of fiction craft within a non-fiction tale – but a journalist with literary aspirations is the worst kind of journalist!