In E. Y. Zhao’s debut novel Underspin, Ryan Lo is the charismatic boy king of table tennis, a master of the sport’s “millimeter margins and symmetry, jewel-toned surfaces and sound, speed and brute perseverance.” Everyone, especially his coach Kristian, knows that Ryan could be world champion someday. So why does he quit competing and wind up dead at twenty-four? A novel-in-stories, Underspin depicts ambition, disappointment, love, and abuse from the perspectives of thirteen characters who knew Ryan, or thought they did.
Zhao has been praised as “a poet of table tennis,” and in another life she was the third highest-rated eleven-year-old table tennis player in the United States. By the time we met in college, she no longer played competitively, but her literary talents were already obvious. Beautifully written, funny, and tragic, Underspin is a triumph of a novel. It was a pleasure to interview Zhao about winners and losers, literary influences, and the pressure we put on children.
Angela F. Hui
Back in college we sometimes discussed our apprehensions about writing “ethnic” literature—being pigeonholed, coming off as pandering, or having our work read ethnographically. Now you’ve written an excellent book that features mostly Asian American characters, and it’s about a sport that’s very much associated with Asian people. How did you approach writing an Asian American novel?
E. Y. Zhao
I think when I worried about pandering in college, it was partly a vessel for anxiety about publishing and achieving success, and a lot of anxiety and insecurity from having grown up in St. Louis in a very white neighborhood. All that defined the terms of engagement, but since I’ve left school, read more widely, gotten more perspective on publishing, and just grown up a bit, those terms have shifted.
It is an issue I still mull over, maybe more often re: how I respond to art or see it being received in the world. It’s forced upon us by the reality of the publishing industry, the demographics of readers, and the English-speaking world, where the average assumed reader is still white; and it can’t necessarily be resolved—that is, its fundamental material conditions changed—only within the works of art. Art can respond to it powerfully, in subversive ways: some of Percival Everett and Mat Johnson’s work is a great example, though the powers that be have a way of absorbing those critiques. Art can certainly also cave to it and make caricatures of minority communities. People have spoken to it more eloquently than I could; I’d point you to “Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility” by Som-Mai Nguyen, “On Pandering” by Claire Vaye Watkins, any report about demographics in publishing. Conversations among writers and the increasing body of work by marginalized artists have done a lot to change the situation since we talked about this in school.
When I was writing Underspin, it was mainly a question of imagined audience. During her visit to UM, Torrey Peters said she writes for her “affinity group,” that is, people sympathetic to the questions and concerns in her art (for Detransition, Baby, it was divorced women), and it brought me a lot of clarity to imagine my table tennis community reading. When I was playing table tennis, it mattered in some larger sense that we were all Chinese American or Asian American, but not in a way where we had to explain ourselves to a wider and hostile world. It also made a huge difference that my agent and editor understood my project and never asked me to revise toward a skeptical audience or one that wanted sociological insights.
Angela F. Hui
How else did playing competitive table tennis as a kid shape you as a writer?
E. Y. Zhao
When I was a kid, I was playing a lot, and there was a lot of pressure on me at a certain point, but I was never good enough to live up to those expectations. I think that’s part of what drives the book, and oftentimes what drives writers: a sense of being a little on the margins, or not having full access to something and really wanting to figure out what that thing is. The book is mostly from the perspective of people who aren’t the best, who aren’t the prodigy. That’s where I was when I was playing, and I think it’s a productive place to write from.
Angela F. Hui
That’s an interesting idea, that it’s more productive to write from the perspective of someone who isn’t the winner.
E. Y. Zhao
An important piece of writing, for me, was David Foster Wallace’s essay about reading Tracy Austin’s memoir. She was a really talented tennis player, and he was excited to read her memoir because he loved tennis and wanted to understand what her secret was. But then he was disappointed because the memoir was extremely boring. She had almost no psychological insight. She said she just showed up, tried her best, and won.
For a lot of the best athletes, not thinking too hard is part of being so good, or they have some innate talent that the rest of us simply can’t acquire. That point of view isn’t conducive to the kind of gritty psychological detail and inquiry that make good literary fiction.
Also, beyond the realm of sports, social hierarchy and messaging work to make all of us identify as “losers,” right? It’s a pernicious control aspect of capitalism, especially in the US. You open media and someone’s telling you to lose weight, gain weight, read more, work more, make more money, etc. So in some sense the “loser” POV is the universalizing one.
Angela F. Hui
Is that why only the last chapter is from Ryan’s perspective? He’s at the center of the book, but there’s so much mystery around him.
E. Y. Zhao
This question tormented me throughout the entire process of writing the book! I kept feeling like I didn’t understand Ryan. I would write a Ryan chapter, but something about it wouldn’t be right. Eventually, I heard Rebecca Makkai give a talk, and she said something that really helped me: oftentimes when you’re writing a book, the thing you’re struggling with the most is actually what the book is about. So instead of trying to get rid of it or work through it, you should move it to the center of your project and see it as the emotional core.
For me, the question was, Who is Ryan? Can we know Ryan? I realized that the mystery of him—the fact that you can see somebody from so many different perspectives and still not really understand who they are or what they’ve gone through—is the heart of my project. I got rid of the other Ryan POV chapters, and the last chapter is just a moment he has to himself, not because it will help us understand him or tell us who he really is, but just to give him some sanctity as a character. I wanted to show that the book is about not knowing him, but he can exist and have his own secret life despite that.
Angela F. Hui
Do you see any parallels between writing and playing table tennis?
E. Y. Zhao
One element that translates between the two pursuits is getting better at what you’re good at and understanding when to stop hammering at deficiencies. I can’t remember where I read it, but someone wrote that every great writer has something they do so well you don’t even consider what they’re not doing or can’t do well. I’ll never be fantastic at opening with topspin in table tennis but I can counter all day. On the page, I’m going to jump around in time a lot; I read too much Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant in school. At some point, I had to give up on the idea of writing a smooth, neatly linear book—or even smooth, neatly linear chapters within a book. Some people are great at infusing liminal moments with significance, tension, and/or beauty; I have to insert a smash cut or time jump. But I try to make the most of those. Drilling and revising become similar exercises in self-knowledge and self-acceptance.
Angela F. Hui
Underspin takes place in many different settings, including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Germany, and Canada. What research did you do to write this novel?
E. Y. Zhao
The main thing I did was traveling to Düsseldorf for two weeks in the summer of ’22. They’re home to one of the best table tennis teams in the world, Borussia Düsseldorf, so I interviewed their head manager and two of their players, and I also played in their amateur club. I got a lot of details that I used in the book, but I think it was actually more important for me to get back into the feeling of playing table tennis and being around people who play table tennis, especially at that intense professional level that we don’t have in the US. It gave me the inspiration and the push to believe in the subject matter and inject some of the sense of gravitas and grandiosity that’s in the book, along with all the silly stuff about kids being dumb and people being really bad at the sport.
Angela F. Hui
You’re one of the most well-read people I’ve ever met, so I’m curious to know about your other literary influences.
E. Y. Zhao
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan was an early influence; it’s about a loosely connected group of people who are all in or adjacent to the music industry. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout is another linked collection or novel-in-stories that’s based in one community.
Each chapter of Underspin is some kind of homage to a different writer. For example, in the chapter with the psychiatrist, I was really trying to channel Kazuo Ishiguro because he’s great at writing these first-person narrators who are guilty and kind of know they’re guilty but are really suppressing it, so the reader has to read around them and figure out what they’ve done.
The first chapter with the young boys was inspired by the Mariana Enriquez story “Adela’s House.” And then the Kristian chapter—that’s the chapter I’m proudest of. It has some of every writer that I admire. At first I was really struggling with it, and it had three different third-person points of view because I was so uncomfortable getting close to Kristian. But then I remembered the Adam Johnson story “Dark Meadow,” and I reread it and realized that was the voice I needed.
Another influence I had in mind was an Elif Batuman interview in the Paris Review where she talks about the fact that a lot of ills in the world originate from how we treat children, or how we mistreat children and exercise power over them. I was thinking a lot about that as I revised the book, because it’s about abuse of power in a very specific setting, but it’s also a hyperconcentrated, emblematic microcosm of how pressure is placed on children, how these values of competition and basing your self-worth on how well you do in competition saturate our whole society, and how people become damaged by that—even the people who are at the very top. There’s no winning your way out of the hierarchy.
I’m going to paraphrase this wrong, but in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan gives a famous speech about how, when he thinks of an innocent child being abused, it makes him not believe in God. I don’t know if Underspin gets to that level of profundity, per se, but that’s something I do want people to think about. I want readers to see how young people are treated, spoken to, and spoken about, and to remember the power dynamic that always exists, whether you’re on a gymnasium floor, table tennis court, at school, or in a private home.
Angela F. Hui
How did you balance the seriousness of those themes with the humor and goofiness that are also present in many of the stories?
E. Y. Zhao
Something I really tried to remember when I was embodying the kids, especially, were the intense depths of profundity and anguish that you can access as a child and that you have to believe even the goofiest little boy can too.
That reminds me, another influence was Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, which is about middle school boys. There’s also a boy who dies at the beginning of the book, and a lot of it is from his friends’ point of view. You feel the joyousness of all these kids being extremely silly and stupid, and making fart jokes, but also really mourning their friend and showing each other love in profound ways.
It’s super corny, but you know that quote about how every child is a universe in themselves? I tried to embody that mindset when writing the book. It applies to kids, but it’s also about every person. So I tried to find what is dark and lovely and silly and serious in all the characters, even Kristian, who has a fucked up point of view, obviously, but that chapter wouldn’t be bearable if you didn’t also see what was good in him.
FICTION
Underspin
By E. Y. Zhao
Astra House
Published September 23, 2025
