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April 4, 2022
Jean Chen Ho's Playlist for Her Novel "Fiona and Jane"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Jean Chen Ho's Fiona and Jane is a striking novel about friendship, an auspicious debut.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"Intimate, cinematic. . . . The world Ho creates between the two women feels like one friend reading the other’s story, wishing she were there"
In her own words, here is Jean Chen Ho's Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Fiona and Jane:
My “playlist” for The Largehearted Boy is actually an album that I’ve listened to many, many times, from beginning to end without skipping a single track. Mos Def’s 1999 solo debut, Black on Both Sides, is not unlike a favorite novel I return to every so often, discovering something new and precious each time.
I listened to Black on Both Sides on repeat the summer I had an internship with a Hollywood producer. My commute was a little over an hour long, from the suburbs in the southeast corner of LA County to the hills that overlooked the Pacific Ocean in the west. I’d be able to finish the entire album on the drive, volume on max. Mos Def’s voice pumped out of my Toyota Camry speakers, while I maneuvered through traffic across five highways (the 91, 605, 5, 10, 405).
I got the job through a diversity program at my college career center. Monday through Friday, I drove from my parents’ house in Cerritos to the producer’s mansion in Brentwood. I did script coverage and faxed things for her and took inventory of the gifts she received on her birthday, etc. One weekend I helped her with a special project, moving a dozen banker’s boxes from her home office to a storage facility, and she paid me an extra hundred bucks for it on top of my biweekly stipend.
I didn’t hate the job; I didn’t exactly enjoy it, either. It was slightly better than working at Foot Action, which was what I did for money the summer before. Working for that Hollywood producer, I was hoping to learn something in those months. About myself, or about what possibilities existed for me, in the future.
Black on Both Sides remains one of the finest examples of art, in my mind, that merges aesthetic excellence with an irrevocably political point of view. The album fuses sonic beauty and prodigious lyricism with anti-capitalist ideology and radical self-love. From the stories of his growing up in Brooklyn to a discussion of global, diasporic, and historically rooted Blackness, Mos Def’s music was where I learned something that summer. “Mind over matter, soul before flesh / Angels hold a pen, keep a record in time…”
In the fall, I went back up to Berkeley and carried on with school. I submitted a report to the career center for their diversity initiative.
Some years later, I saw Mos Def perform at the Fillmore in SF. The man had charisma just dripping off him. This was some time in the 2000s, after I’d graduated college with a degree in English. In those years, I didn’t yet know how to say: I want to write fiction. It would be years before I could claim that desire, and feel brave enough to sign up for my first writing class. And longer, still, to learn how to make something artful, beautiful, and political all at once. I’m still learning, of course, how to do that. I listen to Black on Both Sides every so often to remind me of what’s possible.
Jean Chen Ho is a doctoral candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Fellow in fiction. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her writing has been published in The Georgia Review, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Guernica, The Rumpus, Apogee, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and others. She was born in Taiwan, grew up in Southern California, and lives in Los Angeles.
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