The debut novel from E.Y. Zhao—Emily to people who knew her growing up in Clayton—centers on the world of competitive table tennis, which is one Zhao knew well. She was coached by the legendary Sheri Xu, whose sons Justen and Alex Yao were on the U.S. national team, and Zhao herself once ranked third in the U.S. for girls under 13, although she’s quick to downplay that achievement. “There’s not many people in the U.S. playing table tennis,” she says, at least not competitively.
In her book, Underspin, out now from Astra House, Zhao is less interested in the science of becoming a ping pong champion and more in the hypercompetitive arena around champions—something, again, she knows well.
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“The book is centered around a prodigy, but a lot of the narrators are people who are not prodigious,” she says. “They’re pretty good, or they’re just getting started, or they’re just curious about the scene, and a lot of the book’s central concern is, What does it mean to be around somebody who’s very excellent? What kinds of feelings and ideas do we project onto them? What do star athletes mean to us?”
The milieu that inspired her interest in those questions wasn’t just Xu’s family or the St. Louis Table Tennis Club. Zhao, who graduated from John Burroughs School and then Harvard University, says being in a hypercompetitive academic environment raised some of the same questions.
“These feelings of competition, of inadequacy, of being pitted against other kids that are heightened in sports but exist everywhere, I was interested in investigating those,” she says. “And table tennis was the natural setting for it.”
Zhao, 28, credits Burroughs for offering a “very robust arts and literature education,” something she says she’s increasingly aware that she was very lucky to have. “I always felt at Burroughs that the arts and humanities are to be taken very seriously and approached with a lot of rigor and care,” Zhao says.
But while the New York City resident proudly touts her St. Louis roots in her official bio, her hometown makes an appearance in her first novel. She says it still helped to inform the book.
“I think there’s a Midwestern ethos running through it,” she says. “I feel there’s something very observant and humble about people from the Midwest, but in a sharp way that is conducive to being a writer.” She mentions John Williams’ classic novel Stoner, set in Columbia, Missouri. “That book is very Midwestern to me, and these feelings the book explores about being a little bit on the periphery, about considering your place in the world, a lot of that feels informed by my Midwestern upbringing.”
And who knows what the future brings? This book, Zhao says, is not particularly autobiographical; that may change as she keeps writing: “For future books, maybe a more recognizably St. Louis will be there.”
E.Y. Zhao will be featured at Left Bank Books tonight at 6 p.m. in conversation with WashU professor Edward McPherson. Full details online.
