Recently, I got a request to design a book cover from Leland Cheuk, publisher of 7.13 Books, one of my favorite indie presses. I'm always jazzed to work with Leland. His press puts out all sorts of really great titles, and it's just a wonderful press to work with.
What I didn't notice when I first said yes to the job was that this wasn't a cover project for his press. It was for him. Also the author of the fabulous No Good Very Bad Asian, among others, Leland has a novel forthcoming from Harvard Square Editions, a publisher I worked with years ago when they put out Susan DeFreitas's (incidentally award-winning) Hot Season.
I was excited to work with Leland on his novel—and honored that out of all the cover artists he knows and works with, he trusted me with his own book.
And then when he sent me the description of the novel, I was even more excited, because this was a book that was very much up my alley, a book I wanted to read right now:
On Election Night 2016, Lee Zhou—a disillusioned Chinese American musician busking in Brooklyn—overdoses and wakes in 1960 in the body of his grandfather, a persecuted writer in Mao’s China. Meanwhile, the grandfather, Zhou Ge Yun, comes to in Trump’s America, inhabiting his grandson’s body, unable to speak English, and bewildered by the future. As both men struggle to survive in their new realities—one in a famine-ravaged reeducation camp, the other in the midst of Trump’s first term and ICE’s immigrant crackdown—they begin to see their mirrored lives as the only way to reconcile a fractured family, and each embarks on an unforgettable journey to find their ways home.
Blending historical realism and speculative fiction, SOULWAKING examines how authoritarianism echoes across generations and continents.
Blending historical realism and speculative fiction, SOULWAKING examines how authoritarianism echoes across generations and continents.
So many reasons to be excited about this book!
Leland told me he was interested in a very minimalist design, and he sent me a link to Fitzcaraldo Editions, a publisher that does super simple, elegant covers. He also sent a couple mock-ups he did himself that showed what he was thinking of for his own. Red as a background color. White lettering with a touch of yellow.
"My initial thought on the red covers," he told me, "was that it evokes the red and yellow of the China flag while evoking the red and white of the MAGA hat."
Harvard Square Editions was interested in introducing some blue into the color scheme to help bring home the American side of the twofold story. They also suggested a couple other completely different concepts which would have been great to explore, but I won't detail them here because we never did get around to exploring them, zeroing in on a cover we liked before we had a chance.
I started my work by trying some really minimalist versions based on his thoughts/mock-ups...
and then added a little more detail as I went, but still keeping my efforts very simple and spare.
My own first impulse upon hearing about the book was to want to split the cover in half and center an object on both sides of the split, one straight up, one upside down. Sort of like this example...
The objects would be mirrors of each other, but unlike in my example, they wouldn't be the same. They'd be two similar but different objects, used to depict the duality of the story, the two different time periods, maybe, or the two different countries, China and America. If the object on one side was a very simple icon of the Statue of Liberty, say, maybe its mirror object would be a building or tower that was just as recognizable as a Chinese landmark.
When I mentioned this thought to Leland (during the ideation period, Leland was communicating directly with me and then discussing things separately with the folks from Harvard Square), he said if there was an image on the cover, it should perhaps be a pair of shoes. He sent me a link to what he was thinking about and said, "I remember my grandpa wearing these shoes."
They're called bùxié 布鞋 and are traditional Chinese cloth shoes, often black and white with a white heal. You can read about them here.
With this idea, the concept shifted from the double-one-up-one-down-object to just a single object—well, a pair is technically a double object, but you know what I mean—but knowing how important spareness was to this cover, I figured maybe our single-double would be good on its own. I did a little research to find some more pictures of those shoes, I liked the one he sent me, but wondered whether our shoes should be pointed forward like in the picture, or a side view to get a little more detail. I found two pairs that I liked, one pointing left and one pointing right. The one pair seemed an older version, and I thought, with my undoubtedly biased American brain, that that pair would better evoke China, at least to the American audience. I went into Illustrator and built the three different pairs so that Leland could choose his shoes.
I made some samples using the shoes.
Along the way, I had a bit of a brainstorm. What if, instead of a pair of shoes, it was a single clock, dead center in the cover, split in the middle with English language numerals on one side and Chinese numerals on the other? That would get to the duality of the story and also the time-travel element.
I found some photos of Chinese clocks and went to Illustrator to build my own.
That second example was me taking the concept what Leland very politely termed (and I agree) a bridge too far by flipping not only the clock but also all the text—and doing so by using Google translate, which gave me a stand-in translation that was, I'm sure, garbage. But Leland really liked the clock concept. He asked if I could take the sample on the left and do a blue version and a white version. Oh yeah, blue; with this set, I'd sort of forgotten about the publisher's request to bring in blue. In playing with color, I didn't love the white tries, but the blue was nice. I also explored a red-blue combo.
Leland really liked the blue. He said it, "evokes water, which is a continuous symbol in the book—baptism, freedom swimming, escape over water." I love when something I do in a design unwittingly gets to something in the book that's unexpected. He also liked the red-blue split. When he sent samples to the publisher, they liked that red-blue split the best. They made a suggestion that I thought was really interesting. They wondered about changing "a novel" to "the novel." A nod to the fact that Leland will be working on doing an audiobook. I hope that happens because as a big fan of audiobooks, I'd love to read it that way.
I made the change, and we had our cover.
Soulwaking will be officially out in the world in April, 2027. More information on Leland the writer is here. And on Leland the publisher of 7.13 books is here. And more information on Harvard Square Editions is here.
The story behind the story is fascinating too! I thought I'd close this with some interview questions I sent him about the book.
What was the inspiration for Soulwaking?
First, the grandpa in the book is based on my real-life grandpa. Ge Yun (1925-2018) was a dissident writer, who joined us in the U.S. in the early 1980s to help raise my brother, myself, and my cousins. Here, he wrote books (in Chinese) and his debut essay collection Opening The Window to America was a big hit and launched a decades-long literary career. Near the end of his memoir, which I had translated, he summed up his life by writing something to the effect of: "at least I kept the devils (or bad guys) awake at night." I tried to find a word that encapsulated that sentiment. Originally, it was "ghostwaking," and the publisher and I went back and forth and landing on "soulwaking," which could have a lot of meanings within the book.
When you suggested the shoes for the cover, you mentioned that you remembered your grandfather wearing those shoes. It made me wonder whether there were any elements of your grandfather in your character Zhou Ge Yun. Are any of the characters in Soulwaking based on you or your family?
The vast majority of the details within the book are true and based on my family. I got the details from my grandpa's collected writings, which I pored over with Google Translate. The character for "Zhou" is the same one as "Cheuk." My family is from South China and Cantonese. If they came from North China and immigrated to the U.S., my last name would probably be spelled "Zhou." The main American character is named Lee, and my family and my oldest friends call me "Lee."
The time-traveling though is entirely fictive!
Follow-up question to that: have you ever been a busking musician? A non-busking musician?
I had some open mic days in college. I've played guitar at a campfire sing-along level most of my life, and I've been doing some songwriting. I want to spend more time on it, but this writing thing keeps getting in the way.
You told me you did loads of research for this book. And I quote: "the amount of research - ugh why did I do it?! :)" I'd love to hear about that process.
I did a lot of painstaking work to recreate my grandpa's personality and way of thinking. I made sure to minimize any American idioms and even the places, like America, are written in Pinyin ("Meiguo") because my grandpa knew zero English. I read dozens of books on the Chinese labor camps during that time period. Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China's Gulag, by Harry Wu, was especially influential. And Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives, edited by Peter Orner, published by McSweeney's in 2008, compiled oral narratives of undocumented immigrants, some of whom detail their lives in detention centers. Unfortunately, the US has been treating immigrants this way for decades. Trump might have turned the dial up a notch or two, but the infrastructure and the system has been in place no matter which party is in office.
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