What exactly are memories?
A means to survival? A physiological or, increasingly, a technological experience warped into a type of commodity? Maybe, memories are an accumulation of a life or, as Julio Cortázar wrote in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, “a mirror that scandalously lies.”
In Yiming Ma’s remarkable debut novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, memories are all the above and still more. When an unnamed narrator inherits a collection of memories, which are contained in a technology called Mindbank and banned by a far-future Qin empire, his freedom and life are put in jeopardy. From these memories, which span epochs and contain both small and grand rebellions, a constellation of lives and histories emerges.
I was mesmerized by the novel’s intimacy and scope and was thrilled to talk to Yiming about memory, language, and empire.
Michael Zapata
After reading These Memories Do Not Belong to Us, I couldn’t help but turn to a verse from Jorge Luis Borges’ 1969 poem “Cambridge,” which reads: “We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” One thing that shook me in your novel was how memories are both commodified and then censured and even re-written by the Qin empire. I kept thinking of that phrase “a pile of broken mirrors.” How did you find yourself writing so presciently about memory?
Yiming Ma
While certain Memory Epics were written earlier, I started These Memories Do Not Belong to Us during the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, when the virus was still news from Wuhan. As the world shut down over the next few months, I became obsessed by the idea of memory as this great equalizer—that when everything else was stripped away, at least we would still have our pasts. Then I had a chilling thought: What if even our memories were no longer safe?
To use Borges’ metaphor of the broken mirror, the scattered shards on the floor reflected the implications of my question back at me, and all I saw was my fear.
Because what is left of our identity, our humanity, when we can no longer even have ownership over our memories?
Michael Zapata
Your prose is lucid and powerful. It threads epochs and a multiplicity of interior worlds. What is the relationship between language and memory?
Yiming Ma
Let’s start with the science: human language and memory are intrinsically intertwined.
Have you heard of the term infantile amnesia? It refers to the phenomenon that most people cannot remember anything before their third birthday, and the reason for that is believed to be that language acquisition may be essential for our capacity to encode and organize memories into our life stories.
Personally, language is more intrinsically tied to memory for me, because I have a somewhat rare condition known as near-aphantasia, which means that I have almost zero mental imagery. For instance, when I recall the StoryStudio Gala in Chicago where we met, I remember our evening together in narrative and facts, along with intense emotions, rather than visual scenes.
As a result, I am extremely careful with what imagery I use in my books. I tend to paint scenes through vivid brushstrokes, leaning into the interiority of my characters so that what they fail to notice is usually more critical than what they do see. Because that’s often how it is for me.
Equally important is what they ultimately do recall seeing, the language they use in the future to remind themselves of their past, whatever past that is true for them.
Michael Zapata
At some point while reading, I was reminded of Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, but instead of stories being inked onto a titular character, I felt that each of your interconnected stories (and the memories they contain) were extraordinarily inked onto the body politic of the Qin empire. I absolutely loved this form and how it allows you to write about technology, the self, and empire. How did it emerge?
Yiming Ma
I appreciate you bringing up the body politic of the Qin empire, which is influenced by my early childhood in China and then as an immigrant to the West. There was a moment with my editors in which we discussed whether it was possible to rewrite the Qin empire as an anonymous authoritarian regime without invoking China at all, since I did not want Western media to misconstrue my novel as criticism of my birth country. But in the end, we decided that so much of the novel’s richness stemmed from my cultural understanding, and too much nuance would be lost. After all, the themes are universal and could just as easily apply to what’s going on in the United States today as anywhere else.
In every Memory Epic, I wanted to explore a different limb of the body. For instance, by the age of seven, the importance of the Gaokao exam, China’s famous standardized test for post-secondary education, was already engraved into my soul.
All of my relatives’ children were enrolled in test prep and afterschool classes. During the Gaokao, construction projects and traffic around testing centers are halted. There are stories of parents bringing slingshots to knock down birds whose songs might distract the students. As I was writing my more speculative stories, I was stunned by how unnecessary it was sometimes to invent completely novel ideas for a world taken over by Qin: I kept being reminded of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, so brilliantly drawn from not just imagination but also history.
My wife also happens to be a memory researcher, and I think that understanding the nature of memory, the ways we experience it in such disparate ways—it gave me a sense of permission to write this book in a constellation form. Without such, I don’t think I could have explored stories as wide-ranging as a sumo wrestler and his mother’s recipes to an AI interrogation featuring poems from Kaveh Akbar.
Michael Zapata
A selfish follow-up question to keep me up at night: What should we fear most about technology today?
Yiming Ma
My friend, you may not like this answer, but I genuinely worry that we as writers are too idealistic in arguing what AI ideally should or should not be, that we will never unite with sufficient solidarity to have an influential voice in the conversation.
Just in the last week, Trump lifted restrictions on Nvidia to sell H20 chips to China, despite national security concerns. AI is a global arms race, and the technology is progressing far more quickly than the literary discourse, largely US-centered, can follow.
To properly engage in the discussion, writers need to understand AI more than just through how it negatively affects most of us today. Too often, I read about it through stories of university students dependent on ChatGPT for completing assignments, but the reach and potential of AI stretches far beyond.
Michael Zapata
Throughout the novel, which spans centuries and myriad characters, there are moments of both small and big rebellions (concealed memories, self-exiles, forbidden love, the act of running, activism, even hope itself, etc.) Your unnamed narrator, who inherits his mother’s memories, says, “I do not deserve to be called a hero for sharing these memories. In my mother’s stories, many of the protagonists were unwillingly thrust into their moments of resistance as well. Often, they pushed back, not out of moral clarity or courage but because the world had abandoned them, leaving them no choice but to rebel” (pg. 65). What draws you to acts of rebellion as narrative?
Yiming Ma
Growing up as an immigrant, I was taught to blindly follow the systems in power, to succeed within their rules to survive. I was born in Shanghai but moved to New York and then Toronto in my childhood, before slingshotting between Shanghai and Toronto again. All in all, I attended eight schools before the eighth grade. In every new environment, I had to adapt, had to hustle in order to compete. It was only after I succeeded in many traditional measures of success (i.e. academically through Stanford, professionally through McKinsey) that I even gave myself the permission to put pen to paper and write my first story.
Until These Memories Do Not Belong to Us emerged, I did not know that I was drawn to acts of rebellion as narrative. Because for most of my life, I did not believe myself capable of resistance. I did not believe I had the right to resist in a foreign country which did not belong to me; when you consider my birth country, that was also a place where the freedom of speech is not tolerated.
This novel, with its constellation of stories written in different styles before and after the War, follows my own arc of learning that sometimes resistance is necessary for survival. Even as I appreciate that sometimes all we can muster are small resistances, that survival in itself can be a form of resistance too.
Michael Zapata
Has living a storied life yourself, in Shanghai, Canada, and the United States, impacted how you write about empire and rebellion?
Yiming Ma
If there’s anything I’ve learned from living and working across five continents, travelling to more than forty countries, it’s that we collectively are quite similar, that we have more that unites us than divides. Forgive the cliché, but I truly believe that.
I would have never been able to write “Chankonabe” without completing a sake internship in Tokyo in my late twenties or returning to Japan in my early thirties to support my wife’s research fellowship. Beyond my knowledge about the Gaokao, my time working at Pearson Education was what gave me the confidence to imagine a standardized exam in VR testing resilience, rather than knowledge, in “Promised Land.” I used to invest in affordable schools serving tens of thousands of low-income students in different African countries, which led me to imagine the creation of the African Autonomous Economic Zone, as a homage to the special economic zones such as Shenzhen that China established to experiment with capitalism.
I am not an ordinary writer, perhaps because I never imagined myself as having the privilege to write, being a first-generation immigrant who grew up in poverty. Nor did I intend These Memories Do Not Belong to Us to be a novel of resistance, publishing during a truly terrifying political time. But like the protagonist of my book, I don’t think I have a choice anymore.
I have to release these stories. It’s up to you to decide whether it was worth all the sacrifices.
FICTION
These Memories Do Not Belong to Us
By Yiming Ma
Mariner Books
Published August 12, 2025
