{"id":309609,"date":"2026-04-15T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=309609"},"modified":"2026-04-14T13:45:53","modified_gmt":"2026-04-14T17:45:53","slug":"using-absurdity-to-expose-the-faulty-inhumane-logic-of-our-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/using-absurdity-to-expose-the-faulty-inhumane-logic-of-our-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Using Absurdity to Expose the Faulty, Inhumane Logic of Our World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Look to your left. Now look to your right. I\u2019m 100 percent confident that any one of those people in your eyeline\u2014regardless of their reading taste\u2014would love a book by Rachel Khong if you put it in their hands. Like many readers, I fell in love with Khong\u2019s writing through her debut novel, Goodbye, Vitamin<\/em><\/a>. I recently finished listening to her latest novel, the New York Times <\/em>best-selling Real Americans<\/em><\/a>, on audiobook and found myself taking the long way just to keep listening a few minutes more. My Dear You<\/em><\/a>, her new short story collection, completes the trinity\u2014the literary treasure trove that is Khong\u2019s body of work.<\/p>\n\n\n

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In My Dear You<\/em>, Khong turns her attention to a wide-ranging cast of characters navigating scenarios that are at once surreal and deeply familiar: a government program that alters how people perceive race and gender, a cat that conjures the ghosts of past relationships, a vision of heaven where memory itself begins to slip. Oscillating between the absurd and the intimate, these stories explore identity, love, relationships, friendship, and the quiet, often overlooked ways we misunderstand one another. The result is a collection that is as funny as it is unsettling\u2014one that asks what it means to love, to belong, and to be a person in a world that rarely makes as much sense as we\u2019d like it to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat down with Khong to talk about absurdity as a lens, identity and belonging, and the complicated, often contradictory ways we connect with one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Greg Mania:<\/strong> One thing I love about My Dear You<\/em> is how the stories take these absurd or speculative situations and use them to look closely at very ordinary human feelings. What draws you to that space where the strange and the everyday collide?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rachel Khong:<\/strong> I guess I don\u2019t think of the strange and the everyday as separate things. To me, the everyday is <\/em>strange, and vice versa. So many things that are happening now are so strange and unbelievable\u2014whether it\u2019s the Epstein files or anything that comes out of Trump\u2019s mouth. At the same time, our internal lives are such rich territory. Obviously we\u2019re still writing and painting and making music about human emotion. Even though we\u2019ve been doing it for hundreds\u2014thousands\u2014of years, there is so much more to write and sing about and explore: The complexity of human emotion is endlessly deep and interesting and just weird. I feel that it\u2019s my job to make art that comes from my particular experience, living through this very strange moment in time, metabolizing the events I\u2019m living through on a national and global level, but also on a really private and personal level. I\u2019m not sure why the stories get so weird, but if I were to articulate it\u2014though articulating feels really antithetical to the way I work, which is more intuitive\u2014I think it\u2019s a reaction to our circumstances: When the powers that be want sameness, conformity, and fascism, I want to exist in the world of my own imagination.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GM:<\/strong> Why do you think the absurd can sometimes reveal truths about the real world more clearly than realism can?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think of the strange and the everyday as separate things.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

RK:<\/strong> Absurdity is a way of exposing the faulty logic of systems we\u2019ve grown used to. Realism reproduces the world as we recognize it, but I\u2019m more interested in making the structure beneath our world visible. When something becomes ridiculous (like what happens in \u201cThe Freshening,\u201d for example), we are more likely to question if our rules make sense to begin with. I recently read the stories of Leonora Carrington; her stories are so strange and absurd\u2014our world isn\u2019t always recognizable in them. But what she and other surrealists did was to suggest that the systems we take for granted as rational and logical really aren\u2019t so\u2014they\u2019re actually terrible and inhumane. What\u2019s absurd isn\u2019t talking hyenas, it\u2019s inequality and the fact of billionaires; it\u2019s losing track of every person\u2019s humanity. Absurdity can be such a powerful lens for looking at racism, misogyny, capitalism\u2014it reveals the illogic embedded within systems that present themselves as rational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GM:<\/strong> This is your first short story collection. What did writing short stories allow you to explore that felt different from writing a novel?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

RK:<\/strong> Stories were how I found my way into writing fiction in the first place. I have been writing stories far longer than I\u2019ve been writing novels. Often, I use stories as a way of exploring topics\u2014writing my way into what I\u2019m interested in. Goodbye, Vitamin<\/em> grew from a short story about a character named Ruth. That novel expanded my interest in memory, and how we can love each other with our faulty memories. And though they are so tonally different, writing [the story] \u201cMy Dear You\u201d led me to writing Real Americans<\/em>, because it introduced me to my interest in choices: What do we choose for us, and what\u2019s already chosen? How do we become who we become? Stories are a way to experiment, too: I\u2019m much more wacky and playful in my stories because I think wackiness is much more manageable and palatable in small doses\u2014it would get annoying (for both the reader and the writer) in a novel. And I love precision and brevity in writing; I love that stories can be distilled and potent.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GM:<\/strong> A lot of the stories seem interested in how we see one another\u2014or fail to. I\u2019m thinking in particular of the story where the government injects everyone with a drug that makes them see others as their own race and gender. What interested you about exploring identity and perception that way?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

RK:<\/strong> I\u2019ve been really interested in projection for a while now\u2014what we think and assume about other people. I think it\u2019s gotten even worse with social media and the internet. These tools that were supposed to help us have a more democratic society are instead fostering and fomenting a more fascistic one. We assume so much about other people that really isn\u2019t true; we forget the richness of every individual person, forget that everyone else\u2019s lives are as complex as our own. What we assume about other people can be fatal, especially when it comes to Black men and boys dying at the hands of police. How did things get so inverted that the people who are supposed to be protecting us instead cause harm to an entire community? With \u201cThe Freshening\u201d in particular, I wanted to try to answer that question: How could we stop this violence? How could we stop making these fatal, racist assumptions? Obviously the answer isn\u2019t so straightforward.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GM:<\/strong> There\u2019s also this recurring question across the collection about what it means to be an Asian woman in America. When you were writing these stories, what kind of questions about identity and belonging kept surfacing for you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These tools that were supposed to help us have a more democratic society are instead fostering and fomenting a more fascistic one.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

RK:<\/strong> The main question was probably, \u201cThis again?\u201d We\u2019ve talked a lot about absurdity, and I do find racism more than a little absurd. I was interested in writing racism in the way that I experience it most often, which is in a quieter way, almost as an afterthought. It happens when doctors don\u2019t take my complaints seriously, because I\u2019m \u201cprobably\u201d healthy. It happens when people confuse me for another Asian author, which happens more often than you\u2019d think. The fact that my books get the most attention when it\u2019s AANHPI month in May. A lot of literature covers racism that\u2019s more overt, that\u2019s really loud, but I was interested\u2014especially in these stories\u2014in presenting it in the more mundane way that I often experience it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GM:<\/strong> The dating stories in the collection are often very funny but also a little painful in a recognizable way\u2014awkwardness, misread signals, lingering ghosts from past relationships! What about love and intimacy at this stage of life felt especially rich or compelling for you to explore?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

RK:<\/strong> It\u2019s been a while since I went on a date, and I never experienced online dating, but I can recall the weirdness of dating so vividly\u2014and can imagine the weirdness of it, especially now with apps and, like I said, so much projection about other people\u2014that I wanted to write about it. I wanted to write about desiring and being desired, about expectations and falling short, about how the way we love other people might not be exactly the way that they\u2019d prefer to be loved. We bring a lot of assumptions into relationships\u2014about the other person, about what relationships should even be\u2014and at the same time, relationships can be so life-changing and essential and deeply loving. I\u2019m sorry the fetishizing guy is named Greg, by the way. I promise he\u2019s not named after you!\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GM:<\/strong> I appreciate the clarification\u2014I was getting a little nervous there! But I\u2019m curious about what you said about people wanting to be loved in particular ways\u2014why do you think that mismatch happens so often in relationships?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m not entirely sure our lives are so ordinary; I\u2019m not entirely sure things are exactly as they seem.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

RK:<\/strong> Well, every person’s perspective is so different\u2014shaped by an entire life. I think the mismatch happens with books, too; I could give a book I love to a friend, but my friend might hate it. Who or what you connect with can be so subjective, which is why it feels kind of miraculous when you do<\/em> meet someone or something you deeply connect with. With both books and relationships, I think it’s important to be humble and open. The assumptions we bring to relationships probably aren’t correct. Can we be open to how interesting the person or book might be, rather than jump to conclusions based on who or what we’d like them to be?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GM:<\/strong> Several of the stories brush up against the supernatural. There are ghosts, heaven, even the end of humanity! What do those possibilities open up for you when you think about what might exist beyond the boundaries of ordinary life?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n