By Yeow Kai Chai

A citizen of multiple worlds, Cathy Park Hong prances around, sometimes as a lost migrant, and other times, as a reliable tour guide, in the interstices between real and imagined, familiar and disconnected.

Increasingly, her books resemble cinema, epic in visual sweep and intimate in its polyphony of pidgins. Her second poetry collection, Dance Dance Revolution (2007), awarded the Barnard Women Poets Prize, is a fascinating serialised narrative set in the Desert, a made-believe tourist town.

The middle section of her latest book, Engine Empire (2012), invokes Shangdu or Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty in China; but transposed to modern times as a Shenzhen-like boomtown driven by factories, pleasure domes, and an army of workers reproducing replicas of Rembrandt.

Hers is a universe flitting between ideal and corruption, urbane and cowboy – making her an aptly chosen featured author at the last Singapore Writers Festival in November 2013, which was themed Utopia/Dystopia.

Born to Korean parents and raised in Los Angeles, she was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She is an associate professor at Sarah Lawrence College where she teaches creative writing. Currently on sabbatical, she is working on poetry and fiction.

1. What are you reading right now?
Books I'm sipping:
John Crowley's Little, Big; Renata Adler's Speedboat; Latasha N Nevada Digg's TWERK; Geoffrey Nutter's Rose of January; Jean Paul Sartre's Selected Essays; Andrew P Morrison's Culture of Shame; Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary; Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land.

Books I'm rereading for the nth time:
John Berryman's The Dream Songs; Gerard Manley Hopkins's Selected Poems; Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.

Books that sucked me into the Hole:
Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch; Hilton Als's The Women.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
I always related to Ivan from Brothers Karamazov or maybe I just had a crush on him. Alyosha and Dmitri are so easy to categorise in their extremities but Ivan is complex! He's full of doubt and has a crisis of faith and ends up having a long, conflicted heart-to-heart with the Devil. Do I want to be him? Probably not.

I'd rather be a character from one of my favourite children's books like any one of those survivalist pioneer girls – i.e. Laura Ingalls – where the focus is on adventures rather than tortured introspection.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
After a couple of people read Dance Dance Revolution, they assumed that I'd be this odd bird and were surprised to find that I was deeply sane. This sanity is an act, of course.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
I don't know if I exactly identify with them but I gravitate towards authors who build their own worlds and languages because they're at odds with the ones they live in like Octavia Butler and David Mitchell or Paul Celan, Theresa Cha, and Fernando Pessoa.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
I overcome it through massive amounts of reading, looking at art, seeing movies, going on trips. I need great reservoirs of time to sponge up experiences and reading material. If I were writing all the time, I'd be chugging out the same boring poem.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
Empathy, wit, and imagination.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
Pettiness and arrogance.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
Berryman once said, "the writer of long poems need gall, the outrageous, the intolerable – and they need it again and again. The prospect of ignominious failure must haunt them continually."

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
Am proudly ambidextrous. I was originally a lefty until my mother forced me to be right-handed so I could fit in with the rest of the world. But my left-hand refused to lie dormant and began to slyly take over activities like drawing, playing pool, eating soup… I still write with my right hand, but I now have a neat party trick where I can write simultaneously with both hands in opposite directions. According to the Internet, ambis are prone to synesthesia, schizophrenia, and bisexuality.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
Although I love a good comedy and can even tolerate the occasional crash-test orgy thriller, I'd go for tragedy. I like to be destroyed after a movie.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Right now, I'm partial to that Singaporean word that gives a lilt to the end of every sentence: Lah.
I shy away from sanctimonious nouns like Truth and Beauty. Sorry, Keats.

12. Write a Singapore-based couplet that includes the following three items: chili crab, penumbra and Singlish.
This is bad but here goes:

In the penumbral moon's slant, the Singlish king of rap chants,
He's the God of Jams, spicier than chili crab.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
My black, unlined notebook.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Always early morning.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
It wouldn't be my favourite writers since they're probably depressive and socially awkward. So I'd want opinionated thinkers or bon vivants like Susan Sontag — she was such a difficult diva but she can school me any day — Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin.

16. You and your husband, video artist Mores McWreath, collaborated on an intriguing e-chapbook called The Rub for Manhattan's New Museum of Contemporary Art, weaving GIFs and haikus to explore concepts of shame. Tell us, was it tough to mix business and pleasure? And what did you discover about each other that you didn't know before?
We discovered that it's best not to mix business with pleasure. A problem with collaborating with a loved one is that you're so comfortable with each other, you don't censor yourself and you end up saying whatever's on your mind. A little restraint = healthy collaboration. Mores has declared that he will not collaborate with me again unless he's offered US$10,000. He's a funny guy. Despite all that, we're quite happy with the way The Rub turned out.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
I have no idea.

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