The following Q&A has been edited for clarity, and is a companion to the review of “The Takedown,” an Audible Original written by Lily Chu and narrated by Phillipa Soo.
Can you recount how you got into narrating Lily Chu’s “The Takedown”?
Sure. I was approached to narrate Lily Chu’s first book, “The Stand-In.” I loved the story. I thought it was really funny. Lily had a great sense of humor.
That was during the pandemic. I actually recorded it in my closet, mostly. Which was … very challenging because I found out that New York is not a very quiet place.
During that time, it was just miraculous that we could make things. I am not a tech-savvy person, but the pandemic forced me to be. I feel lucky and grateful that I made some great relationships coming out of my school. Starting my career in this business, it was like an education after my education. Being in a recording booth is not something I had been familiar with, and so through productions I had been involved in, I got to just gain the comfort of being in a booth and what that means, how to use your voice in different ways, experiment, and ask for what you need.
I did the second book the year after that, and “The Takedown” is the third one.
Can you speak a little more on what it was like growing up Chinese American in Illinois?
I had a beautiful childhood.
There was a really specific cultural experience living in the Midwest and having parents who aren’t necessarily immigrants. My father’s parents came over from China in the fifties, and they met here.
I recall many, many, many, many family reunions sitting at the table a bunch. My grandmother would be speaking Chinese to, you know, my dad or my aunts, or there would be friends or uncles over, or aunts over, and I had no idea what was happening, but there was an inherent learned comfort. It’s really valuable for young people to be outside of your comfort zone and know that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and that you being uncomfortable or not necessarily understanding is just a way for you to listen and learn.
My husband always says that you can’t learn anything if you’re not the only one talking. It’s really key to sit and listen. That was a really large part of my growing up – being in awe of this culture and ancestry that I come from, and at the same time knowing that my experiences are different from the generations that come before me, and paying homage to that, and also celebrating it and enjoying it in my own way.
What was it like recording the most recent of Lily Chu’s books, “The Takedown”?
It’s a romcom, but there’s still a tonal levity to it and a lightness that exists in all of the books. I think in terms of this specific character, Dee Kwan feels like she’s on a much more mature journey. It’s not so black and white.
She’s also going through a journey for herself as a young woman in the world, and really, that very difficult conversation that you have to have with yourself: How to make boundaries with your family that are healthy, which I think is a very adult thing. It’s not necessarily easily resolved, you don’t necessarily get everything you want from the people you’re needing things from. It takes a certain level of maturity to feel like there’s progress even if everything isn’t resolved.
Lily Chu does a great job of exploring that nuance of wanting to feel like everything’s tied up in the bow. The older that I get, the more I realize that those things don’t happen, that I have to tie the bow for myself, that the situation might not necessarily be tied in a perfect bow.
What were some of the things in the book that spoke to your identity?
The key is my perspective around that cultural aspect. As a narrator, I can have an opinion about it, which will help those non-Asian audiences understand something culturally that they didn’t before, without over-explaining it and having the Asian community feeling like, “Well, of course. Like, duh, we get it.” This is also a story for us, so why over-explain it?
Context clues and perspective. That’s the fun part. You get to be in on a way of living and a way of speaking about things, and experience life and culture and food that maybe you’re not familiar with, but you still have to participate. You may feel a discomfort because you don’t understand it, but like I was saying earlier, that’s kind of where all the listening will happen. And that’s what I loved about this writing.
You’ve done a lot these last few years. So if you were to make your own project through any medium and any kind of story, what would it be?
Well, it’s funny that you mention that, because I have made something of my own. I wrote a children’s book.
Piper Chen!
Yes, “Piper Chen Sings.” I wrote it with my wonderful sister-in-law, Maris Pasquale Doran, and we have a great illustrator, Qin Leng. It’s coming up in the spring and I’m really excited about it.
She’s sort of like a mini avatar of a younger version of myself, because the question that I often get asked is, “If you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be?” It’s this story about a little girl who loves to sing, and music is a really large part of her life. She’s asked to sing a solo, and she has to overcome her feelings and butterflies.
And though it is a story about a little girl who loves to sing, I think it’s also a story about feelings and learning how to hold a bunch of different feelings at the same time. For Piper Chen, it’s “I’m nervous and I’m scared to do this thing, but I love to do it.” And ultimately, her knowing that she has a choice to make, that she has autonomy there.
And, you know, I love, I love stories and doing an audiobook and reading something like an Audible Original. It just reminds you of those first times that you ever heard stories where your parents sat you down, or your loved ones, or your older siblings. You sit down before bed and they read a story to you out loud. Our first exposure to stories is hearing things. When approaching something like an audiobook, I try and hold onto that excitement as the reader. To know that the audience is hearing this for the first time and those voices, and the specificity and the ups and downs and the quality of the voice – that all to me was so exciting growing up. I’m always keeping that in mind – this may be my fourth take of this line, but somebody is hearing this for the first time.
What has it been like to see more Asian Americans in the room in these past few years?
I’ll give you an example of something that happened to me the other day.
I was at the opening night of my husband’s play. My husband is Stephen Pasquale, who’s also an actor, and he is in Sondheim’s last musical called “Here We Are,” and it’s Off-Broadway. It has a diverse cast, and one actor is an actor named Jin Ha, who’s a friend, and is also Asian American. We both went to a conservatory around the same time, and it just makes me feel so proud.
It’s exciting, and it gives me hope not just for our own community, but for all communities. It’s another thing that we can add to this wonderful palette of different versions of stories and cultures, and know that it’s there, like a tool for humanity to better understand each other. Let’s make really good stories and then make sure they’re diverse, and add that to the shelf of empathy tools.
“The Takedown” is available on Audible, and will be available in print in May 2024. You can listen to the audiobook here.