Can you talk a bit about how this story took shape and what inspirations fed into it?

Happy to! Buddhism teaches that life is a cycle of suffering and rebirth, and the only way to escape it is to achieve enlightenment. I’ve always found that theme interesting, especially in how it plays into creating Buddhist characters in wuxia/xianxia stories. “Memories of Temperance” is a look at other attempts at escaping the cycle—successfully or not.

To me, this story has a lot to say about the power and destructiveness of forgetting, through Chun Wei’s attempts to burn herself out by refusing to reincarnate and Shi Yan’s endurance in holding on to her humanity. If that’s the case, what was it about this theme that led you to wrap the story around it, or did I miss your intention entirely?

Memory and forgetfulness—the way they make us into the people we are and the consequences they bear on a person and the people around them—has been a theme I’ve been personally interested in exploring. My late grandmother suffered from dementia during the final years of her life, and she was Buddhist. At the end of her years-long battle with that illness, she had forgotten the difficult life she’d lived as a single mother of four, which seemed to change her into a different person, even as she slowly became unable to remember everyone she loved. Chun Wei’s and Shi Yan’s characters explore other ways that people might escape the cycle of suffering and rebirth—Chun Wei by forgetting and Shi Yan by refusing to forget. Each bears a different price, changing them accordingly.

As someone unfamiliar with Diyu, I appreciated the details of the underworld voyage this story took the reader on. How did you shape the story around the established nature of the realm of the dead, and were there places where you shaped it for the story’s own needs?

The Naihe Bridge is well-established, but the rest of Diyu was fun to play around with, particularly the Impermanences. When I lived in Singapore, I once visited an unusual theme park—Haw Par Villa. It contains many statues and dioramas depicting scenes from Chinese legends and religions, including Buddhism. I don’t remember much of the park other than the Ten Courts of Hell, a subterranean space full of tunnels. The story’s Diyu is not as crowded: I imagined a limitless space of tunnels sufficient to contain all the souls of the dead who might reject reincarnation, enough for its further reaches to be lonely. Haw Par Villa has recently reopened to the public after renovation, for anyone who might be interested in a more unusual sort of theme park.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a story that starts with the protagonist awakening. What led you to choose this mode of introduction in particular?

Time is a key theme in this story, and as such I chose to have the protagonist start with the most common marker of it—a person waking up into the next “day.”

Is there anything you’re working on that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

I’m currently working on a cyberpunk-themed book, but it’s early days yet, so I’m still getting a general feel for the entire story. Hopefully, it’d be something people would love to read!