Chloe Gong.Photo: Margaret K. McElderry Books
When the pandemic hit in March 2020 and her school shut down, college seniorChloe Gongreturned to her childhood home in Auckland, New Zealand.
While her mom took care of her laundry, Gong was left to focus on writing the sequel to her wildly popular YA novel,These Violent Delights, a fantastical twist on Shakespeare’sRomeo and Juliet, filled with monsters and gangs and set in 1920s Shanghai.
“It kind of felt like diving right back into the world. It was so nice to see the characters again and to see the world that had been put on pause in my head,” Gong, now 22, tells PEOPLE of writing the sequel,Our Violent Ends, out Tuesday. “The 500 pages… came together really fast. I wrote it during March to May-ish when lockdown first started. So I was just sitting at home on my couch, tapping away all day. My mum was doing my laundry and all that because I was at home. So all I had to worry about was my fictional world.”
“I had very little else to do with my time. I was a big, big reader, and I was a big library reader, particularly, because I grew up in Auckland, New Zealand where books kind of moved quite slowly down to that little country at the bottom of the world,” she explains.
Margaret K. McElderry Books
“When I first started, when I was 13, it was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to tell the story to myself, just to amuse myself,’ " says Gong. “And the stories I wrote weren’t very original at all. They were not things that I even believed I could, or wanted to get published.”
As she got older, Gong started writing stories based on her own characters and storylines.
“I didn’t feel restricted in being like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I can write this’… because I’ve been writing for so long that I could just jump into it,” she says.
By the time Gong was attending the University of Pennsylvania, where she double-majored in English and International Relations, she’d begun to writeThese Violent Delights. Her debut novel follows 18-year-old Juliette Cai, the heir of the Scarlet Gang, and Roma Montagov, who is in line to take over the rival gang the White Flowers. The teens not only navigate lingering feelings from their past romance and a longtime blood feud, but are forced to work together to end a vicious madness that threatens Shanghai.
WhenThese Violent Delightspublished in November 2020, it landed in the No. 3 spot onThe New York Times' YA bestseller list. Gong has garnered attention because of her age and talent. She’s also celebrated for bringing Asian and LGBTQ characters to the forefront in fantasy.
“There’s not enough out there, I think, where a certain racial or core identity is the character’s backstory,” she says. “And then their plot line is just completely unrelated — about fighting monsters and falling in love. I think that’s something that everyone wants to read about.”
Gong says that balancing schoolwork and writing was like “having two very different careers.” While in college, she relied on lists and planned out her work schedule months in advance. Since graduating, Gong has moved to New York City.
“For the first time, all I’m doing is writing,” she says of life post-college. “It’s very strange. I think for other people who graduate as well, it’s like, ‘Oh, now if I’m not a student, what am I?’ I’m definitely going through that life crisis, for sure.”
When Gong isn’t busy working on her next novel, she takes to TikTok to engage her fans. Her fanbase has swelled since she started talking aboutOur Violent Endson social media during the pandemic.
“For whatever reason, it started picking up, and people were interested,” she says. “People were really eager to find out more about the story that I was making jokes about [and] making meme videos about.”
Our Violent Endspicks up right after the ending inThese Violent Delights. In the sequel, Gong switches up Juliette and Roma’s positions.
“I had the opportunity to make Juliette be the one keeping everything from Roma, and Roma being the one in the dark so he could get pushed to so much more anger and, I guess, fury,” Gong explains. “And then Juliette gets to explore softness and sadness.”
Gong also enjoyed further exploring the setting of Shanghai in the 1920s, which she says she originally chose for its beauty and “absolute lawless debauchery.” Historically, China was on the precipice of a decades-long civil war that began in 1927.
“There were just so many interesting ideas that were present there,” says Gong, who was born in Shanghai. “Because it was exploring not only imperialism, colonialism and its effects, when it’s coming from the outside. But then what is happening on the inside, because there’s a lot of class warfare as well. What role do these main characters also have in contributing to the state of their city? Because it’s not just outside effects that change it. It’s also what the people inside do.”
Gong has an encouraging answer for fans who wonder if Roma and Juliette will overcome their demons.
“Ultimately, what I’ve been trying to push the duology towards is the question of: are Roma and Juliette brave enough to choose love?” she continues. “If they are, then yes, they can overcome. But, on top of that, there’s also [the question]: can they overcome it in a city like this?”
Our Violent Endsis on sale now.
source: people.com
