Conversations: Jenny Qi
SYNOPSIS
Emily speaks with cancer biologist and poet Jenny Qi, about her poetry collection Focal Point, which examines science, disease, love, and family.
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GUEST
Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She is a 2022-23 Brown Handler Resident, and she has received support from Tin House and others. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in Cancer Biology. She is working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother’s memoirs.
CREDITS
Hosted by Emily Silverman.
Produced by Emily Silverman and Jon Oliver.
Edited and mixed by Jon Oliver.
Original theme music by Yosef Munro. Additional music by Blue Dot Sessions.
The Nocturnists is made possible by the California Medical Association, and people like you who have donated through our website and Patreon page.
TRANSCRIPT
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The Nocturnists: Conversations
Emily in Conversation with Jenny Qi
Episode Transcript
Note: The Nocturnists is created primarily as a listening experience. The audio contains emotion, emphasis, and soundscapes that are not easily transcribed. We encourage you to listen to the episode if at all possible. Our transcripts are produced using both speech recognition software and human copy editors, and may not be 100% accurate. Thank you for consulting the audio before quoting in print.
Emily Silverman
You're listening to The Nocturnists: Conversations. I'm Emily Silverman. Today's guest is Jenny Qi. Jenny is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books poetry award. Her writing has been published in the New York Times and The Atlantic. She's a 2022-2023 Brown Handler resident, and she's received support from Tin House and others. Born in Pennsylvania, to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas, and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her PhD in cancer biology. Currently, she's working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother's memoirs. Before I spoke with Jenny, I asked her to read "Telomeres and a 2AM (Love) Poem," one of the poems from her collection Focal Point. Here's Jenny.
Jenny Qi
These are the only kind I'll write you,
when I should be reading about telomeres—
how they guard the ends of chromosomes
and wane with every breath we take,
leaving fragments of ourselves behind
as our cells grow and divide and become
ever more vulnerable, as we grow older.
I have the sudden brilliant thought
that the chromosomes in our heart cells
must have the shortest telomeres of all,
and I think how I can only admit that
I might tolerate/like/love you
when my science becomes
this bleary eyed, delirious
brain-mush. These nights,
I look at you sleeping and want to
press my lips to your forehead,
tug a corner of the sheet
from beneath your arm,
tuck myself in its place.
Come morning, you'll be
just a heavy arm slung
across my stomach,
too-warm body
curled around my spine.
But now I think
mad thoughts
like how maybe you
could be an exception
and how maybe I
could do this every night
and how maybe we
could let our telomeres
shorten
together.
Emily Silverman
Thank you so much for that reading. It's so nice to have you here. You are the first poet that I've interviewed for The Nocturnists: Conversations. So I'm so excited to talk about your collection, and your process, and poetry, and science, and all of the above.
Jenny Qi
Thank you, Emily. Yeah, I'm excited. And I'm excited to be the first poet you're talking to.
Emily Silverman
Before we get into the poetry side of things, tell us about your journey to the health sciences. I know that you have a PhD in cancer biology. How did you get interested in cancer, in research? And walk us through that process for you.
Jenny Qi
I mean, I guess, like many children of immigrants, my parents wanted me to be a physician when I grew up, because that would be something pretty stable. And so I spent most of my life being pre-med. And, in college, I found my way to research because I started working in a lab. And this lab actually did neuroscience research, using zebrafish as a model organism. And this was at Vanderbilt University. So I started doing this mainly because I was pre-med. But as I continued, I found that I just really enjoyed the lab environment, and I enjoyed the sense of curiosity I felt in everyone who worked there. And that's really something that is similar to what drives a lot of poetry, I think, is just the sense of curiosity about the world and the mysteries of the universe. So, yeah, that is how I stumbled my way into research and shifted gears from being pre-med to being on a research track.
The reason I switched over into cancer biology was largely personal. My mother had been sick with lung cancer the entire time I was in college. And so that largely informed all of my life decisions at that time. And I was pretty young, I started college when I was 16. It's weird that we expect people to just make these big decisions about their lives at such a young age. My mother passed away at the very end of college, and that was what really pushed me into pursuing cancer biology, rather than any other field that I might have been interested in.
Emily Silverman
I'm sorry about your mom. So, I just wanted to say that. It's clear from your poetry that you were really close. And so I just wanted to say that I'm sorry that you lost her.
Jenny Qi
Thank you.
Emily Silverman
There was something that you just said, which is that you really liked the lab environment. And, some of our listeners may have spent time in a lab, but a lot of them probably haven't. Can you paint a picture? What is the lab environment? Like you show up in the morning and walk in the room, and, like, what do you see? What's happening? And, what do you like about it?
Jenny Qi
I guess I'll describe the lab environment as I knew it in college. We were in, like, a pretty brightly-lit room. And, it's almost like an open office, where you have all these lab benches, and you walk in, and you walk past a bunch of your colleagues, and get to your desk, and plan out your experiments for the day. It was a soothing routine, in a way. Particularly in that time, where so much of my life was just very chaotic. And, in my undergrad lab, I mentioned that we worked with zebrafish... The zebrafish were housed in the basement. And so, whenever I went down into the basement to work with the animals, I would go down, and it was this very warm room. Almost felt like being in a womb, I guess, in a sense. And once, in college, I was just down in the zebrafish room doing stuff, and I came out and a bunch of people were outside in the lobby area. And I was, like, "What's going on?" "Why is everyone here?" And, it turned out, there had been a tornado that went through, because this is in Nashville. And I hadn't noticed it at all, because I was just, like, working in the zebrafish room.
Emily Silverman
You were in the calm womb...
Jenny Qi
Yeah...
Emily Silverman
...and violent weather was all outside. You know, when I was in medical school, I spent a summer in a basic science lab. It was an ophthalmology lab, looking at the retinas of chicken embryos. And I was really bad at basic science. My experiments rarely worked. But I do remember being surprised by the day-to-day work of science. I guess, in my mind, I had thought of it as, like, a super-glamorous thing where you're, like, uncovering the mysteries of the universe, as you said, and you kind of are uncovering the mysteries of the universe, but it's very repetitive and slow work. And it almost reminded me of cooking. I just remember there were all these different recipes for different things. And you would take your pipette and squirt different ingredients, and you had to do it in the right order. And then you would prepare your slides, and then stick it in an oven, and then you'd set a timer and it would bake. And it felt a lot like cooking to me. So I'm wondering if you found that as well, and how those rhythms were for you as a college student.
Jenny Qi
I think that's such an apt description. I don't currently work in a lab anymore. But after so much lab, I can't bake anymore because it feels too much like lab. And, like, throughout grad school, I had a lot of friends who were really into baking and I was, like, “How can you do more of this, after being in lab all day?” I think, in college, when I first started working in a lab, it all felt so exciting and new. Ultimately, I did not stay in the lab, because I did find that—as you said—the work can be quite repetitive and slow. After some time, I found that maybe it wasn't for me long-term.
Emily Silverman
And what kind of work are you doing now?
Jenny Qi
Now, I am working in competitive intelligence, in oncology still. Now I'm focused on tracking ovarian cancer, clinical trial pipelines, and putting together preparatory reports on what the treatment landscape looks like.
Emily Silverman
What is competitive intelligence?
Jenny Qi
I describe it as being similar to consulting. But primarily it involves, for me at least, keeping track of specific cancer types and new developments in treatment for those cancers. The reports are generally purchased by pharma companies. So it's helping various companies keep track of the landscape, so they know how to strategize their own developments.
Emily Silverman
It's such an interesting term: competitive intelligence. And the world of cancer is so diverse. As we know, cancer is not a single disease. There are many different types of cancer. And I remember, when I was in residency, some of the oncologists telling me that there's been a paradigm shift in cancer. Where it used to be, like, organ-based, so it's like lung cancer or pancreatic cancer, you know, melanoma. But now people are starting to group them less by organ and more by the science of how the cancers behave. In your work, how do you think about the landscape of cancer? What does it look like?
Jenny Qi
In grad school, I researched a very rare kind of pancreatic cancer, (PNETs). But the idea behind my research was not that I was focused on PNETs for the sake of focusing on PNETs, but for the sake of this mechanism that was common, both there and in other secretory tumors. There is definitely still a bit of a focus on thinking about cancers by organ. But, then, I do think we are, definitely in research, more focused on mechanism. And, I think treatment is also moving in that direction.
So I mentioned that I focus on ovarian cancer. There aren't too many non-chemo treatments for that. The big thing now is PARP inhibitors, and focusing on the DNA damage-response pathway. Beyond that, a lot of things have not been super successful in clinical trials yet. One of the big things that I was really interested in, going into grad school, and a lot of my friends have worked on has been immunotherapy and that has revolutionized treatment of a lot of different cancer types, but not ovarian cancer.
Emily Silverman
I would love to hear another poem from your collection. Why don't we hear "The Plural of Us"?
Jenny Qi
Okay. "The Plural of Us":
The end of an us
is a death
without dying.
Such a waste it seems
to discard the dreams
I dared beside you, turn
familiar hearts stone,
each to our own
separate deaths.
Waking, I remember
your crooked laugh, sitting
in your car watching the ocean
crash, shape itself against stone, shape the stone;
think of starfish and its regenerating limbs;
think of the plural limbs of an octopus, like
the octopus that slithered from its tank to freedom,
the plural octopuses octopodes octopi, with all their limbs reaching;
think how the Latin plural of -us is -i.
Emily Silverman
I love that poem. I just think it's so clever. And it touches on a lot of different themes, including loss and death and grief. And I don't know if this poem was written about your mother, but a lot of the poems in the collection were written about your mother. It's a really strong theme that carries through the entire collection. So, tell us a little bit about your mother. What was she like?
Jenny Qi
She was very ambitious and vibrant. So, an example of what I mean is that my... So, my mother lived through the Cultural Revolution in China, and that interrupted her childhood and education. And, for people who don't know what that involved... Because her father was a high school principal, and they were therefore considered educated; there was a revolt against this educated class. And, she was sent to the countryside to, like, work in a field and be re-educated. After years of that, she was able to start school again. She was in her 20s, at that point, starting high school. And she had always been someone who loved reading and writing. And, she really wanted to catch up and get back the life that had been taken from her. And so she went through all of the rest of her schooling in, like, half the time that it should have taken. Then she was a history teacher in China. And then she had to start over again, when she moved to the US, immigrating with my father. She found it really difficult to get a job, without having job experience in the US. They first settled in Pittsburgh, and she really wanted to still be a part of academia in some way, because that was what she had just always loved. So she went somewhere at the University of Pittsburgh and knocked on every door to, like, try to get a job there, because she didn't know how else to do it in this country. That led to her first job as, actually, a lab tech at the University of Pittsburgh in a diabetes lab... which I find interesting also, given that I wound up in a lab studying PNETs, which is kind of the opposite of diabetes, in a way.
Emily Silverman
So you've mentioned PNETs a couple times. For our audience who doesn't know what that acronym stands for, can you tell us?
Jenny Qi
Yeah, so PNETs: P, N, E, T, the plural of that, stands for pancreatic neuroendocrine tumors. These are tumors that arise from the endocrine hormone-secreting cells of the pancreas. And so, where diabetes is the elimination of these hormone-secreting cells, the cancer is the opposite. And, there is excess growth of these endocrine cells and therefore, excess hormone secretion.
Emily Silverman
Got it. So you're working with a disease that's almost like the mirror image of the disease that your mom was working with in the lab.
Jenny Qi
Yeah.
Emily Silverman
In your bio, you say that you're in the process of translating your mother's memoirs. So, did she write about her life, and is that what you're translating? And what is that process like?
Jenny Qi
So, I mentioned that my mother had always loved reading and writing. And, she had to let those on the backburner throughout her life, in order to work in America and make a better life for me. And so, at the end of her life, she wrote two books. One was a memoir of her childhood during the Cultural Revolution, and really was a book honoring her adoptive parents. And that was published in China before she died. So I'm glad she had the opportunity to see that. And the second book was a novel, inspired by her immigration to the US. That novel, actually, it was never published. Long story short, I had thought that this manuscript was just, like, lost forever. And then a couple years ago, when I visited my dad, I found a hard copy of this second manuscript. And it was all but the first 10 pages, which is fine. If I can get like 290 out of 300 pages, that's pretty good for something that I thought was just, like, lost forever. I mean, a lot of this process of translation initially has just been scanning things into, like, a workable document.
I mean my Chinese is definitely not as good as my English at this point. Even though it was technically my first language, I never did Chinese school or anything like that. So, all of my language skills are based on my mom teaching me, as best as she could, around work and my schooling. And frankly, it's become even rustier since she died, because I just lost that connection. It's taken me so long to even get started on this translation project, in part because it was just too painful throughout grad school. Part of it was the demands on my time of grad school, and, subsequently, work. And part of it is just, it's emotionally difficult to, like, get into that space. And if I go into that space, it takes up the large chunk of my day. And so that can be sort of challenging. I think often these days of a line from a Camille Dungy poem, where she says, "I try to write everything down to avoid the comforts of suppression." I've been thinking about that a lot, because I think, in our everyday lives, it is so easy to turn towards the comforts of suppression, and not think about these hard things.
Emily Silverman
That makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of when I would spend long stretches of time working in the hospital, and then I would have a long stretch of time off, and I would suddenly start to feel all these things in my body, like a tightness in my throat. And then I realized, like, it was always there. But when I was working, I was just numbing out and not feeling it. And then, it was only after I left the hospital that I came back into my body, and I was no longer suppressing the discomfort. I can attest that feeling it is... is unpleasant. But I also feel like the only way out is through, and so you have to feel it in order to come out the other side, more healthy and more whole.
Jenny Qi
Definitely.
Emily Silverman
Is it the memoirs that you're translating, or the novel or both?
Jenny Qi
Both. I'm kind of just, like, bouncing back and forth right now. More to come on that front. But it's in the very early stages right now.
Emily Silverman
I can't wait to hear how that project progresses.
Jenny Qi
Thank you. I'm kind of curious... if you don't mind my asking... what your process is now for dealing with these uncomfortable emotions that come up. Like, if you still find that you have to just numb out while you're working and then process it later, or if you found a way to not numb out.
Emily Silverman
It's such a good question. In some ways, it's the million-dollar question. For me, writing has always been a huge part of that. Writing and storytelling, and filtering reality through the arts, and then looking at it and understanding it in that way. For a lot of people, it's exercise. Understanding the value of movement–even if it's very gentle movement, like yoga, or walking–or tai chi is something that I've tried a little bit, and been really impressed by how just a little bit of intentional movement can work things through the subconscious.
Jenny Qi
Yeah, definitely. I turned to exercise a lot, after my mom passed. During grad school, I got really into it. I mean, part of it was also just that I had not been an athletic child at all. So it was, like, well, I guess I am in this new world now; want to try new things. And so I got really into that, like, pretty into yoga. After I was vaccinated, I also started doing an acrobatics class, kind of nearby, and that's been really fun, rewarding. I'm terrible at it. Like, I don't want people to get the wrong impression think that I'm, like, athletic now. But it's been nice to see that progress, week after week. And kind of nice as an adult to do something that I'm just bad at, and be okay with being bad at it. Now how many times in adulthood do we get to do that?
Emily Silverman
Yeah, I hear that for sure. In science and medicine, a lot of us are high achievers. Or another way to put it is that we suffer from bad achievement-itis. And I have received the advice from professionals that I should tap into the joy of failure, and try things that I'm bad at and be bad at them and laugh and enjoy that. And then once I start to get good at it, move on. Move on to a different activity so that you don't lose that being bad. Because it's something that can be really uncomfortable, but if you can find the joy in it, can actually be really healing.
So, we've talked a little bit about exercise and ways of working through difficult emotional situations, like, for example, this process of translating your mother's written work. But what we haven't talked about is your process of creating poetry. It's such a specific artistic medium, very different from writing nonfiction, or writing fiction. In some ways, it is the most primal form of writing. And I would love to hear from Jenny, the poet. How do you create a poem?
Jenny Qi
I love what you said about how poetry is the most primal form of writing, because I totally agree with that. And, I've often said that part of the reason that was my outlet and that was what came out of my grief first, is because of that primal nature. And because of the emotional urgency of poems that is not quite in other forms. And because of that, I can't really say I have like a strict process for writing a poem. Often the poems that end up being what I consider finished, at some point, come out of me ruminating on a phrase or an image. And, I might think about something that I'm obsessing over for, like, months and months before it even turns into a poem. But I think the importance of that is that it's just been like marinating.
There are other times where I do try to have more of a disciplined writing practice, and force myself to just, like, sit down and write. I've done morning pages on and off, where, like, first thing in the morning, just write three pages. And that gets all of the verbal stuttering out. I wish I could say I really did this every single day, but it kind of goes on and off. And then throughout grad school, I did something every April, which is National Poetry Month, I just called it like a daily syllabic. And so every day, I arbitrarily gave myself some kind of constraint, like, gave myself a form like a haiku or a tanka, or just an arbitrary number of syllables per line, to stick with, and just wrote some sort of little poem thing. Very few of those actually turned into publishable poems. But it's just the practice of sitting down forcing myself to get into that headspace every day. And so I enjoy, like, going through periods of doing things like that.
Emily Silverman
What is your revision process like, if you have one? Or do the poems just come out the way that they come out, and there's minimal revision? How does that work?
Jenny Qi
That varies a lot. Some of the poems do come out basically finished. And those are really nice, when it happens. There are some poems where it just takes time. Like one of the poems in this book, I wrote a draft, like 10 years ago, and I just set it down. I didn't know what to do with it; I didn't know how to change it, only that it didn't feel finished. And then, years later, I came back to it. And, I did also send it to a friend for some feedback. And sometimes the feedback is just: "shift your perspective a little, on this entire poem". And sometimes it's, like, "maybe cut these few extra words". And so, I think my own revision process also varies between those extremes.
Emily Silverman
Well, you have created a beautiful body of work here, with Focal Point. And I have so much enjoyed chatting with you about science and family and wellness and poetry. We've covered a lot of ground. I would love to close out with one final reading. But before we do, is there anything else you'd like to share with the audience?
Jenny Qi
Related to a lot of what we've talked about, something that I have been thinking about a lot lately, is that it's okay to be idle sometimes. Or rather, I'm trying to convince myself of this, because it can be difficult, I think. Like, in science and medicine, these are not cultures of being idle, but it's really necessary to the creative process and to our mental health. And so, I just want to say that, both for myself and, like, anyone else–that's okay.
Emily Silverman
I think that is a welcome message for our audience and certainly for me, so thank you for saying it. Can we close with a poem?
Jenny Qi
Yes, of course.
Emily Silverman
Let's close with the poem "When This is All Over."
Jenny Qi
"When This is All Over":
Here is what I will miss:
running through the park,
even when I hated it, cursed
my legs for their sourness;
the heron walking into the pond,
small white reflection
emerging from the verdure,
so lush it brushes the sky teal;
bees floating from poppy
to lupine to cobweb thistle,
tender hum and churn
like waves lapping the shore
like language like love so certain
how could it be any other way?
even the fog, that cool grey mist
stalking the shoreline, feeding redwoods
pale honey from a mercurial god,
feasting on city lights in waning hours;
& at the end squinting into the bright
ocean, once described by the Greeks
as wine, because they didn't have words
for the color blue or there wasn't yet blue
or maybe they were drunk
off its immensity
Emily Silverman
I have been talking to Jenny Qi about her poetry collection, Focal Point. Jenny, thank you for being here.
Jenny Qi
Thank you so much for having me, Emily. It's been a pleasure.