Author Ling Ma Says She Thinks Like a ‘Pervy Uncle’ In New Book

Chinese American author Lind Ma discussing her new book Bliss Montage with NPR’s Scott Simon says she learned how “to inhabit the – what I call the pervy-uncle gaze.”

Ma worked for a time writing “girl” copy at Playboy Magazine where she says she obtained this skill.

SIMON: So if I could ask you to read a section from the story “G,” the drug that makes people invisible. Two old friends, last night together before one moves away – they take it together and range around Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

MA: (Reading) We would touch strangers discreetly, feathering down their cowlicks. We would eavesdrop on conversations, interjecting dialogue. We would float objects in the air, distorting others’ fields of reality. In more destructive moods, we would just flat-out damage property, fling apparel out of Urban Outfitters. We never felt guilty, as long as it was a chain. We would follow people home, go up in their elevators and into their apartments. That last thing, I like to do alone. I could feel Bonnie’s hand reaching for mine. If you’re taking “G” with someone, it’s a good idea to hold hands so that you know where the other person is, if only to tether each other to the earth. Tonight, the sensation was headier than I’d remembered. I needed to be anchored.

SIMON: Wow. Makes me think that we long to float, but we also – we long to belong somewhere, I guess.

MA: I think my entry point into that story was trying to imagine the physical sensation of invisibility. But, you know, it’s about two Chinese American girls, and they’re quite, I think, competitive with each other. But I think there must be some kind of relief in this sort of form of self-erasure. I was trying to assign a kind of physical sensation to self-erasure and have that be almost pleasurable, you know?

SIMON: This comes out of your own experience?

MA: Well, I will say that everything comes out of my own experience one way or another. And that particular friendship, I suppose, with its rivalries among, like, Chinese American diaspora – I definitely understand what that’s like. But I’d add that I once worked at Playboy. Part of…

SIMON: Oh, believe you me, I had that written down. I was going to ask you about that. You were a fact-checker for Playboy. I didn’t know they were so scrupulous.

MA: I was fact-checker.

SIMON: But go ahead. Yes, yes.

MA: I was a fact-checker. And I did other things, like write what we call girl copy – captions for, you know, nude pictorials and such. And writing those captions, I think I learned how to inhabit the – what I call the pervy-uncle gaze.

SIMON: Oh, my word. I’ve got to tell you, this interview’s taking an extraordinary turn I didn’t count on. Tell us about – if you dare – about the pervy-uncle gaze.

MA: Well, I’m a little limited in that form.

SIMON: All right.

MA: But I think I know how to inhabit that gaze. And I guess I just wanted to create the story about the relief of not being looked at, especially sometimes as Asian American women and that sense of being fetishized. But, of course, the drug later on in the story takes a darker turn.

You can buy a copy of Blissful Montage here.