By Yeow Kai Chai

The curious case of Mok Zining's debut book: is The Orchid Folios a poetry collection, a documentary novella, or, aptly for a cross-genre contemplation about a heavily cultivated flower, that problematised word, a "hybrid"?

Such is the enigmatic beauty of Mok's work. Released last year in the midst of the pandemic, its interweaving of lyric verse, journalistic research, and fiction revolving around a florist feels rightly evolutionary, and at times tentative (in the best sense of the word), with plenty of negative space for one to ponder and wander.

It has its beginnings in 2016 when she wrote several poems for an undergraduate class at Northwestern University in Chicago, but the book began to take its form in early 2019 in the second semester of her creative writing programme at the University of Minnesota.

"to keep/arrangements                       open/for associations," she writes in 'Floristry Basics: Trimming', which makes for a guiding ethos for her epistemological mission. The awareness of movement, of spaces, is not surprising, especially when you consider that she's also a dancer.

In her bio ("ever so slightly" updated, she points out), she confesses a preoccupation with "random things: orchids, arabesques, sand." In fact, her next book, intriguingly, will be about sand, and its role in reclamation and construction.

Clearly, hers is a fresh voice which seeks to clarify, and unearth underlying truth(s), infinitesimal they may appear. Her essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Cincinnati Review, and The Rumpus, among others.

Currently shanghaied in Singapore but still busy working towards an MFA in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches writing, she takes time off to answer our Proust Questionnaire.

1. What are you reading right now?
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth by Veeraporn Nitiprapha (trans. Kong Rithdee) and Feel Free by Zadie Smith.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play or poem, what would you be and why?
I would like to be Qfwfq, in Calvino's Cosmicomics. That seems like a wild life.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
That I am a florist or a gardener. I wish I were a gardener. Perhaps one day I will be.

4. Name one living writer and one dead writer you most identify with, and tell us why.
I work associatively, and as such I identify with writers whose works traverse a wide field. Maggie Nelson does this in Bluets. I also identify with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee.

I guess I identify more with books than with their authors. Maggie Nelson's The Red Parts, for example, is nothing like Bluets, although it is also a very good book.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
No. I do believe, however, in exhaustion. When I am exhausted, I turn to reading, non-verbal art forms, and letter-writing.

6.  What qualities do you most admire in a writer?
Clarity, generosity, precision.

7. What is one trait you most deplore in writing or writers?
Small-mindedness.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
"To flower-arrange words so sand-piss/ ash sounds like Melodious plot of/ beechen green, try, nary!" – Cathy Park Hong, Dance Dance Revolution.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I...
Am a painfully slow reader. I am especially bad at reading graphic novels and comics. Although The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye is one of my favourite books of all time, it took me a week of dedicated reading to finish the graphic novel.

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy or an action thriller to watch, which would you go for?
A comedy. I prefer to relax and give my brain a break. I have enjoyed tragedies and action thrillers, but I default to comedy.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
Currently, one of my favourite words is mull. The "m" is soft and muted, the "u" round, and the two "l"s lengthen the sound of the word and make me linger, which is exactly what "mulling" feels like to me.

I am not a huge fan of words used to encapsulate big concepts. The way that it's been used, the word "hybridity" has become quite slippery.

12. Write a rhyming couplet that includes the following three items: plié, stigma, flips.
Oh dear – this will be bad.

The wasp lands in a plié and the labellum flips
it onto the stigma. On its back, pollinia for another's lips.

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
My notebook and my 0.38 uniball signo pen, black ink. Very basic.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
The morning, after breakfast, with coffee.

15. If you have a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
I would invite Charlie Chan Hock Chye, Sparrow (a composer) in Madeleine Thien's Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and maybe Alfonso and Sonya Barabinski (puppeteers) from Deaf Republic. We would talk about our respective art forms and the role of art in society. This seems like a very sombre dinner that sounds good only in theory.

16. In 'Identity Theft', an essay posted on The Rumpus, you spoke about your place in America as a "cultural alien" in the weeks leading up to the 2016 US presidential election; and the spectre of cultural appropriation in the choice of subjects to write about. In The Orchid Folios and elsewhere, have such contemporaneous developments limited, steered and/or deepened your creative pursuits?
I have changed and learned so much since I wrote 'Identity Theft' that, to be honest, the essay itself feels alien to me. Looking back at the essay, though, I was surprised to see one sentence that reads like it could have been written by present-day me: "An identity appears singular and stable only because it hides behind the façade of a noun." I guess this sentence made its way into my subconscious. The Orchid Folios is not interested in the surfaces of things as much as it is the processes that shape the things that look stable (e.g. identities, culture, words). Thinking with the language of processes and systems has certainly deepened my understanding of cultural phenomena.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
I won't have a tombstone.

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