Pencils can be used for noting shopping list, writing touch stories, and making magnificent artwork. The Phoenix Pencil Company imagines a world where we can reclaim stories from the pencils they were written with. Following Monica who learn of her grandmother’s years in Shanghai working at the Phoenix Pencil Company, the story blends history with magic. To celebrate the release, we invited Allison King to chat about her book.
Can you please tell us the inspiration behind the book? Was/is Shanghai known for making pencils?
Shanghai isn’t known for making pencils, but my family did have a pencil company there at one point. While I knew vague things about the pencil company, I actually knew very little about the historical events around which they left China, and it was not until I read Helen Zia’s Last Boat out of Shanghai that I became interested in the moment in history, and began to imagine what a family of magic pencil makers living in that era might go through.
Why did you decide to include a fantasy element in your book? And can you walk us through how you designed the rules around the magic?
I’ve always been a fantasy reader, and had considered myself a fantasy writer, so was automatically looking for a fantasy element. Fantasy is an amazing way to walk through a metaphor in a compelling way. As for the rules of the magic system, there were originally much more fleshed out rules and a larger repertoire of ‘powers’ the family could unleash in the pencils, but ultimately the book was really about stories and data privacy, so only that one aspect of the magic system stayed.
Was it challenging to blend magical realism with WWII history without diminishing either element?
Yes, for sure! And because I didn’t want to write an alternate history, I knew the pencil magic couldn’t change the outcome of the war, but still had to be meaningful in the characters’ lives, and be the way that they survived the multiple wars they go through in the book. I struggled with if it was even okay to add magic to such a traumatic time, but again, the magic is a means to reflect a deeper theme, and in my case I wanted to really write about story preservation and who owns a story, and that wouldn’t have been possible without the magic system.
The Phoenix Pencil Company touches on how communication is often limited in Asian families, especially around difficult topics. What do you hope readers from non-Asian backgrounds take away from the way silence functions in the story? And for Asian readers—what do you hope resonates or even challenges them?
There’s the stereotype that Asian people are quiet and non-confrontational, which I am definitely like at times, too. But researching for this book helped me reflect on that, how if your family has been shaped by occupation and war and spying/incarceration for voicing seemingly mundane opinions, how you might end up having those instincts, even generations later. And I guess I’m trying to be more forgiving to myself when I don’t speak up, but also trying to consciously counter instincts to stay quiet. And it’s hard!
EMBRS (the digital diary-archiving platform) sounds like a great invention. How did you make sure it sounds realistic?
Since I’m a software engineer, I’ve worked on quite a few web applications, some that were not that different from EMBRS in terms of gathering insights from text. I pulled bits and pieces of my experience working at various tech startups and non-profits. I don’t think much of the technical details had to be realistic, but more so the relationship between a founder and their employees, and that startup culture of moving fast, and collecting all the data.
The concept of EMBRS feels very different from the story’s pencil-manufacturing roots. How did you come to connect those two ideas in the book?
I have a note to myself when I first started brainstorming that says something along the lines of “pencil magic –> data privacy?” So it was something I was thinking about very early on, that Monica’s storyline would be seemingly unrelated, a story about her relationship with her grandmother, and she just happens to be working on an app. But bringing it back to fantasy as metaphor—nobody wants to read a book about data privacy. But magic pencils as a metaphor for data privacy is a bit more compelling.
There’s also a subtle queer romance in the story. Why was it important to include that alongside the family narrative?
The historical timeline centers two women who are cousins but who are separated due to war. I wanted the modern timeline which features the queer romance to be both a parallel and a foil to the historical one. The parallel is that it is another pair of women who are close and create stories with each other. But I wanted the foil to be that the modern pair is much happier. They didn’t have to live through everything the historical pair did. And the grandmother often wonders if what she did was right, but I wanted her to have this sort of conclusion, that she can see her granddaughter happy with another woman, and so makes some of the pain she went through worth it.
