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The Penguin Employee Book Club met last month to discuss English by Wang Gang. This book was picked in honor of Asian Pacific Heritage Month, which occurs in May. Check out Wang Gang's answers to some of our questions below.

Penguin employees who are interested in joining the next interactive book club should look out for the HR announcement of the the next book club pick.

1. I noticed that the main characters in the novel all have very unique names, like Love, Sunrise, Second Prize, and Garbage, while all of the secondary characters seem to have "normal" names. Is there a reason for this, other than to have them stand out more as characters?

Names in Chinese are very different from English names. Actually, the names of the main characters are all real names. I took them from people that I have known in real life, changing some of the details. Love Liu, for example, was the name of a female classmate of mine. I gave the main character this name because there was not enough love during that time in China. But really, the world has always needed more love.

The names of the secondary characters are all ones that I invented myself. Now that you mention it, I guess they really aren't that interesting.

When I write, I take real life experiences and real life stories as my starting point, adding fictional details as the story evolves. The names seem to be one small reflection of this tendency.

2. I thought it was interesting that a lot of the really horrible things that happened and the reactionary moments in the book were all mostly orchestrated by the younger generation. The adults were more like helpless bystanders. The roles of adult and child seemed flipped to me, especially in Second Prize Wang's relationships with Love Liu and Sunrise Huang. Is this a true representation of how adult-child relationships were during that time?

In that era, all the adults had to behave within strict limits, but the children were free.  The autocratic leaders back then started working on the adults but hadn't yet had time to completely control how children were thinking and what children were doing. Children were almost like an entirely different animal living on an entirely different planet. This is why the children were powerful, while their parents were weak.

3. In the afterword you state that many of the atrocities you witnessed as a child, you did not include in the novel. You give the impression that the times were much worse than depicted in the story and seem apologetic for not including these details. Do you regret leaving the harsher realities of the times out of the story? If you lived outside of China while writing the novel, do you think the novel would have been written differently? Did you write a similar afterword for the Chinese language version of the novel?

In the Taiwanese edition of English, the Afterword was the same, but there was no Afterword in the mainland edition of English.

Even if I were living in America, I would have written the novel in the same way, leaving out many of the harsher realities of those times. English relies on the power of our common humanity and the power of empathy to move the reader. The success of the novel doesn't rely on cataloguing the horrible things that happened during that time.

Before I started writing English, I thought a lot about how other Chinese writers had written about the Cultural Revolution. Because so many stories have detailed the many horrible things that happened during that time, my sense is that readers have become numb to that kind of writing.

People in China have found this story really interesting. So many stories have been told about city people who were sent down to the countryside, and people found the story told in English refreshing and novel.

I wrote about Xinjiang because I was born there, and I spent my childhood years in Urumqi. Memories of childhood are a great source of inspiration.

5. I was really sad when Garbage Li died. Do you think he and Sunrise Huang might have had a future or was she just using him? How come the women in her family are so toxic to men?

Sunrise Huang is in love with Second Prize Wang, but Second Prize Wang could not be in love with her. And so she turned to Garbage Li.

Sunrise Huang and Garbage Li definitely could not have had a future together. Their cultural and educational backgrounds are so totally different. She does in fact use Garbage Li, but she had no intention of killing him. These two kids had no way of knowing that the gun they were playing with in the boiler room had a bullet in it, and that the bullet inside would kill Garbage Li.

In Chapter 13, Love Liu asks Sunrise Huang "Will you be a jinx to your husband?" Sunrise Huang giggles and replies: "Who knows?"

None of us know how our lives are going to turn out.

Want more on English? Read an excerpt, listen to a podcast and look over our reading group guide.

Also, check out last month's book club Q&A with Erica Jong.

Penguin Employee Book Club, Wang Gang, English, China, cultural revolution, Penguin Books