Chloe Gong: “All art is political”

“Are you out of your mind?” Chloe Gong’s mother shouted down the phone. Right before graduating university in 2021, Gong rang up her mother to explain that she planned to be a full-time writer. She’d failed to land a job in her dream field of international relations – the pandemic had prevented her from finding in-person work placements, and companies in the United States were reluctant to hire people they would have to fund visas for.

“Being an author is so unstable,” Gong explains. “You don’t know when your next paycheck is coming in. You don’t know how your next book will do. It is not something that you should quit your day job for lightly. And I was put in a position where I was like ‘well, I can’t get a day job. So, we’re just going to have to go with this.’”

Thankfully for Gong – and her relationship with her mother – her gamble paid off. At the age of 25, she has published five full-length novels – all of which reached the lofty heights of The New York Times bestseller list – a collection of novellas and a multitude of short stories. Forbes featured her in their 2024 30 Under 30 list. Her latest novel Vilest Things came out on 10 September and is a gritty fantasy retelling of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. She will follow it with a short story in the anthology Faeries Never Lie on 24 September. Then a dystopian science-fiction called Coldwire in 2025. Then the sequel to Vilest Things. Then two more books in the Coldwire world.

Researchers at the New York Times found in 2020 that 95 per cent of widely read books were written by white people. Diversity among main characters in Young Adult literature used to be shockingly low – 90 percent of the protagonists in the bestselling Young Adult books in the UK from 2008-2016 were white, straight, cisgender and able-bodied. Gong’s books are part of a move towards greater diversity. Most of her characters are East Asian. Her Shakespeare retellings in Shanghai include a gay love story and a transgender heroine.

Born in Shanghai and raised in Auckland, Gong was writing 100,000-word manuscripts before most teenagers were writing essays at school. The first story she remembers writing was for her history homework when she was 11. The teacher tasked the class with writing a page or so from the point of view of someone in the Great Depression. Gong got entirely carried away, and produced a lengthy epic about a spoiled rich girl from New Zealand who lost all her money, got caught shoplifting and went to jail. She insists that what it lacked in historical value, it made up for in entertainment.

Gong was a teenager during the golden age of young adult fiction. She stormed through every series that was a staple of 2010s school libraries. Whenever she ran out of books to read, she tried her hand at writing her own. When supernatural stories such as Twilight and The Mortal Instruments were all the rage, Gong posted paranormal stories on the website Wattpad. When the dystopian trilogies The Hunger Games and Divergent were in vogue, Gong wrote three violent Young Adult thrillers.

She jokes about the quality of her early work, laughing that the heroine of her paranormal series was a “super special Mary Sue” and insisting that she was “just having fun with the characters” in her tightly-plotted murder mystery. Tracking down her old Wattpad account reveals that these stories racked up a whopping 1.2 million views. It was only after Gong’s first year of studying literature and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania that she considered her writing worthy of publication. Over the summer, her friends all vanished into high-powered internships. Gong didn’t find one, so she spent the summer speeding through the first draft of what would become her debut novel, These Violent Delights.

Gong didn’t plan to retell Romeo and Juliet. But when she stepped back from the work, she realised that Shakespeare must have wormed his way into her brain at high school. Her story – about young star-crossed lovers feuding rival crime lord families – essentially was Romeo and Juliet in an alternative setting. These Violent Delights relocates the play to 1920s Shanghai. Juliette Cai and Roma Montagov are the heirs to rival criminal organisations. Their turbulent romance is set around real historical events, but with an extra helping of river monsters, family drama and gunfights.

“If you read about blood feuding families with children engaged in some kind of romance, that just is Romeo and Juliet. That is the hallmark of this Western canonical literature. Readers were always going to think about Shakespeare. So I thought, ‘okay, I honestly may as well just embrace the similarities and fully make it a retelling of Romeo and Juliet.”

Success in the publishing industry isn’t as simple as stringing words together in a pretty notebook and whisking it away to an editor. You have to be a brilliant writer and craft a compelling story. But you also have to be a brilliant author and build up a loyal audience. Gong mastered both arts. She came of age at the same time as TikTok did. The early days of BookTok – the subculture of the app dedicated to reading – coincided with the release of These Violent Delights. Gong joined to find reading recommendations, then started sharing behind-the-scenes clips of her life as an author. Soon, her videos were regularly getting 100,000s of hits.

As the online space expanded, publishers got wind of it. Book blurbs now deliberately include phrases from hashtags, such as ‘enemies to lovers’ or ‘dark academic’ or ‘forced proximity’. Publishers sponsor influencers’ videos in which they recommend particular books. Gong misses the early days of BookTok, before it became more commercialised.

“In 2020, the community was still really, really tight knit. I never think of BookTok as a place where I can promote myself. I don’t think it works that way. I don’t think my audience particularly cares to be delivered adverts. I think of it as sharing a little glimpse of my life, as opposed to convincing people to read my books. BookTok is so big now that inorganic ads are a part of it. Some land, some don’t but it’s not the same.”

She moved to New York to work on her books full time. Our Violent Ends, the sequel to her debut, reached the top spot on the Young Adult New York Times Bestseller list in November 2021. She felt dissatisfied with the fate of Rosalind, her character who (spoilers) betrays her family. Gong registered that her character unintentionally shared her name with the heroine of Shakespeare’s As You Like It.

“It started with the coincidence of their names,” she admits, “but the more I actually reread the play, the more I thought, ‘okay, this is about identity. It’s about who you are when nobody is watching. It’s also about inherited treason, and how what your parents do above you has an impact on who you become.’ And I thought, ‘Wow, that is perfect for how I need to tell her story.’”

Foul Lady Fortune and Foul Heart Huntsman retell As You Like It in 1930s China. Rosalind gets entangled in a web of spies and super soldier serum while struggling to make peace with her past. In 2023, Gong released Last Violent Call, a collection of novellas to bridge the gap between the duologies.

Gong talks almost as fast as she churns out bestsellers. Words tumble out of her as she gushes about Shakespeare, Roman history and her cat. Her day-to-day-life is a far cry from the glitz and gore of her novels. She starts each day by writing in a café. “I don’t trust New York to watch my laptop. So often by the time it’s noon, I really have to pee, and that is what triggers me to go home. Like this does not sound glamorous, but it is the truth.”

Answering emails and posting on social media takes at least an hour each day. She often ends up napping between 2pm and 3pm, before an afternoon writing session. “I try to pretend I’m a normal person who takes the time to rest. But I’ve got an upcoming deadline more often than not. And that usually means I get off at like seven or nine.”

She downplays the pressure of being a month late on her current deadline. “Like, the publisher isn’t going to yell at me if I’m late, per se. But I feel that stress when I know that every week late is another week we are hacking off at the end in order to make the print deadline. And if we don’t hack that off at the end, then the release date gets moved. I really don’t want to disappoint readers.”

Bashing out so many bestsellers does not leave much time for hobbies. “I don’t socialise that much, in all honesty. Like, I have my friends, and I have my work. And I just mind my business.” Her attempts to learn to bake resulted in collapsed chocolate cakes. Her gym trainers are barely worn. “I would like to be a sporty athletic girl. I’m so lazy. I go to the gym once and I’m like, ‘wow, I’m so fit. I could totally run a marathon.’ Then I don’t go again for another few weeks.

“This is a problem,” she admits, “I don’t think it’s healthy to have no other hobbies outside of your work. It’s an artefact of making your creative hobby your job, right? Writing and reading was the leisure activity I did for fun after I finished my homework. But now, I’m always aware that every bit of writing I do is a product for monetisation.”

She does, however, have a wide friend group of novelists. In the early days of her career, she messaged on Instagram other authors who were debuting around the same time. She has a group chat of other young New York-based authors – sort of like the Bloomsbury Group for BookTokers, but with less champagne socialism, and more cappuccino consumption. When Gong gets overwhelmed by her deadlines, she gets 2-for-1 cocktails with Dustin Thao, the author of You’ve Reached Sam, and Alex Aster, who wrote the fantasy series Lightlark.

Gong breaks up the quietness of her flat by writing to music. She particularly loves Taylor Swift. “As a writer, I really appreciate how her albums feel like cohesive narratives. There are some songs that I apply to my characters to understand them better.” She played Swift’s “right where you left me” on loop while writing Foul Lady Fortune. Gong skims down the playlist for her next release, Vilest Things. Plenty of seemingly vibrant, buzzing pop which upon closer examination have disturbingly dark lyrics – “Obsessed” by Olivia Rodrigo, “The Things I Do For Love” by bludnymph, “Make You Mine” by Madison Beer.

The more adult-orientated Flesh and False Gods trilogy is Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, but in a fantasy version of the Kowloon Walled City in 1990s Hong Kong. In 2023’s Immortal Longings, Anton and Calla compete in a deadly gladiatorial contests akin to The Hunger Games, with plenty of melodramatic flirting and magical explosions. Vilest Things comes out on 10 September. While Anton and Calla struggle for control over the empire, Anton’s first love Otta Avia comes out of a coma to cause chaos.

Gong’s fascination with Antony and Cleopatra was sparked by a paper she read for her degree, which compared the play to Romeo and Juliet. “They’re both the same star-crossed lover archetype, right? But their ages makes all the difference. Romeo and Juliet are so young. They are so much more about the folly of youth, and being let down by the adults and the societal structure around you. Antony and Cleopatra are so mature. They are the product of their own star-crossed angst. If they were only to let go of the power they are after, they wouldn’t be in conflict anymore. But they put themselves in front of love and whatever Romeo and Juliet did.”

Since Gong’s first foray into teenage fiction was with Romeo and Juliet, it felt fitting to break into the adult market with their older counterparts.Gong promises that Vilest Things will feature “a very unhinged love triangle”. “It’s more about power than it is about the man” – she laughs – “that’s my favourite line that I’ve been telling everyone.”

Although the Flesh and False Gods series is based more on Shakespeare’s play than real history, Gong enjoyed researching that era. She was delighted to discover that the real-life Antony supposedly showed his devotion to Cleopatra by assassinating her bothersome younger sister on the steps of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus. “When I read that, I was like, ‘wow.’ It sounds really bad to say it, but I love it.” This sister inspired a character for her books. The series will conclude with a reimagining of the famous Battle of Actium. “My Roman empire is what would have happened to the Roman empire if the Battle of Actium turned out slightly different.”

Despite taking inspiration from historical figures, Gong resists the urge to put real people from her own life into books. Mostly. Somebody once annoyed her so much on the subway that when she needed to write about a character who would be killed brutally in the contest in Immortal Longings, she described the man on the subway. If her boyfriend says anything particularly romantic on a date, she’ll whip out her phone and jot down the phrase so she can repurpose it in a book. She did, however, decide her cat was worthy of being immortalised in literature, and gave Calla an identical-looking pet called Mao Mao.

“All art is political,’ Gong insists, “even creating art that doesn’t directly engage with politics is in itself a choice which speaks to a political safeness, and explores what is left unspoken.” All her novels have explored power struggles in some way. Her earlier books examined the impacts of colonialism on Shanghai. The Flesh and False Gods trilogy explores what people will sacrifice for personal glory. Her next work will delve even further into modern politics.

Coldwire will be the first of a dystopian cyberpunk trilogy set in a fantastical future full of virtual realities. The characters will not know where to turn when they feel an attachment to two tyrannical governments engaged in a cold war. “It is very reminiscent of something that we have seen with Asian American relations during Covid times, where people get claims of like, ‘you are a spy for China.’ And they’re like, ‘What do you mean? I was literally born in America.’ And it turns out that there are some spies. And there are some people who are accused who were never spies. But there is such a grey area when it comes to where you belong.”

The aesthetics of cyberpunk literature – massive metropolises with crystal-like skyscrapers and soulless cyborgs – evolved out of xenophobic stereotypes in the 1980s when Americans convinced themselves that Asian technology was going to take over the world. In American sci-fi media from that time, Asian imagery was equated with a miserable dystopian future that American heroes must prevent.

“Cyberpunk tends to be Asian-inspired without engaging with politics of what that means. I really love the new angle I get to do on what you typically find in that genre.” Coldwire won’t be all heavy-going politics. Gong promises plenty of her usual explosions, break-ins and romantic angst.

After so many novels, Gong shows no signs of slowing down. She has to dash off after this interview to finish the second draft of Coldwire. She might retell Shakespeare’s King Lear to shift the focus onto the main character’s daughters. She thinks it would be hilarious in a decade or so to write about Roma and Juliette’s children in 1950s New York, but never explicitly name their parents. The children would speculate wildly on their family’s origins, while the readers have the satisfaction of knowing that these teenagers don’t see their grandparents at Christmas because of a decades-long blood feud between gangsters.

Gong’s hard work felt worth it on her four book tours around the US and the UK. “Out of the entire endeavour or being an author, touring is genuinely one of the favourite things. As my first two books came out in a pandemic, I did not get to do this at all. I was close to my readership online because of BookTok, but at the same time, I was so far away from everyone. In my head, everyone was pixels to me. They were all, like, virtual people. The first time I toured for Foul Lady Fortune, it made such a difference. It clicked when I looked out at the people sitting in the audience that, ‘Okay, these are my readers.’

At an event in Liverpool, a couple told Gong that they’d used lines from her books in their wedding vows. Last month, a 15-year-old girl walked up to her in a café and started crying. Her dad was very perturbed, until the girl got her breath back enough to explain between sobs that this stranger was her favourite author.

“It’s so easy when you are in the middle of writing a book and it feels endless to think, ‘What is this even for? Who’s going to read this?’ Then on a tour, you see that this makes a difference.”

Vilest Things is out now