q&a: Naomi zeigler

An interview with the author of "Sleeping Beauty hair"

by Tova Seltzer

Naomi Zeigler is a writer, journalist, cultural critic, and now a member of a tech startup in her work as an executive associate at Quorum, a platform for public affairs and stakeholder engagement. While her poetry has recently appeared in Tacenda magazine, her piece in Grace in Darkness will be her first prose publication since graduating from American University last May.
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In “Sleeping Beauty Hair,” Zeigler recounts growing up as a daughter adopted from China into a white family, faced with ignorant attitudes and a sense of cultural disorientation. She seeks connection with the distant side of her heritage through whatever ambassadors and fragments are available—Chinese employees at restaurants and theme parks, an ornamental hand mirror purchased at Epcot. Throughout the story, details of physical othering recur and make themselves naggingly known: when children mimic her narrower eyes, when she worries over the flatness of her nose, when her father comments that he “doesn’t see” her race—a comment that reinforces the idea that belonging is something to be seen, something bodily. Even among Asian students at college, she feels out of place, unable to relate to the traditions and memories that immigrant families share. “The only connection I have to China is my birth,” she writes, “and that is not enough.” Not enough to belong to Chinese culture, and yet still too much to not be seen as other in America.

During her time as a literature major specializing in cinema studies and minoring in women’s and gender studies, Zeigler worked as a journalist with the school newspaper The Eagle, publishing cultural analysis and reviews of current film, music, performance and art. From summer 2016 until spring of 2017, she also served as the paper’s Opinions editor. In October of 2016, she offered an op-ed titled “I am angry, and that is alright with me,” a rebuke of then-presidential-candidate Donald Trump and his supporters from within her own perspective as a woman and a survivor of violence. Zeigler described her relation with social conditioning and the pressure to be polite and manageable, and how she had realized during that ugly election cycle that her natural reactions should fuel her activism: “I know what I want and I have the drive, ambition and intelligence to take it. But I am rarely angry. How foolish I was to believe that I was not to be angry.” Her experiences have fostered a dedication to seeing and calling out injustice, and this engagement with the world often starts from the heart, in personal exploration. ​

Thus, it’s not surprising she’s begun to work in the personal essay genre. Apart from her Eagle op-ed and her Tacenda piece, Zeigler’s work was primarily critical and academic until “Sleeping Beauty Hair,” but it was a form she was happy to try. “I have always had a soft spot in my heart for writing that is confessional,” Zeigler said when asked about the shift in genre. “There is a vulnerability in really being able to lay yourself out for consumption. Anyone can make judgments on what you write and when you're writing about yourself, the stakes are even higher. Nonetheless, there's a freeing element to this as well because you no longer have to keep it inside you and let whatever voice whispers into your ear be the only voice you hear.” Like Zeigler’s 2016 op-ed, “Sleeping Beauty Hair” was propelled by the election of Donald Trump, when a friend encouraged her to help combat the dark times with new creativity. Throughout the drafting and editing process of the essay, Zeigler pushed herself to write something more introspective and personal than ever before. ​

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Though less obviously personal, Zeigler’s academic writing too has been a source of identity exploration and growth, both on and off the page. Zeigler wrote her undergraduate capstone on issues of embodiment in the 2013 speculative film Her, in which a man falls in love with a bodiless artificial intelligence program. Questions of body and identity stemming from her own life, and from the writing of “Sleeping Beauty Hair,” were on Zeigler’s mind as she wrote on Her and critiqued the orientalism of its futuristic world. During the capstone process, she was also grateful for the connections she formed with faculty. “I would be remiss not to mention how influential and healing it was to have two mentors working with me on my capstone who were Asian,” she commented. “Coming from a background that was very white-American left me with virtually no mentors or important figures in my life who looked like me and could empathize with many of my experiences.” 

In “Sleeping Beauty Hair,” Zeigler recounts adolescent attempts at connection that never quite reach authenticity. The “Chinese” hand mirror that she cherishes for years finally cracks apart, revealing its cheap manufacturing. “Its artificiality makes me blush,” Zeigler writes of this revelation in her essay. “It’s a tchotchke, not a keepsake. I feel foolish for thinking otherwise, as if purchasing tchotchkes from Epcot on family vacations sufficiently accounts for embracing my culture, heritage, ethnicity.” In working with her capstone mentors, as well as trading thoughts with new friends and peers, she has found real support in the pursuit of her identity.

Though she had explored technology and its implications in her capstone topic, working for a tech startup after graduation was never how Zeigler expected to use her literature degree. But her work at Quorum isn’t such a large leap. “I'm very interested in the philosophical ramifications of technology and I often bring this up to our developers, especially as they write their code,” she explained. “I see writing code as a form of creation in a very literal sense but also from a high-level figurative analysis. They are breathing some sort of life into lines of numbers and text, how cool is that?” The company creates software that allows organizations with many different missions to make an impact on issues they care about, so each workday takes place at a convergence of influential activity. She finds it exhilarating to be in a field full of so much innovation, watching the future be formed and reformed. 

​As for the future of her writing, the way forward isn’t yet mapped, but Zeigler expects to continue exploring personal themes one way or another. “I will probably never stop writing about myself,” she said. “Everything I write is, tangentially, about me. For me, writing is about knowing yourself and learning about yourself and putting yourself down on paper. Every academic paper I have written reveals something about me and is written for me. Writing lets you be a little selfish or maybe just self-indulgent. And in a society where women, especially women of color and especially Asian women, are told to shrink and be quiet, being selfish can be powerful.” Such is the power of Zeigler’s clear and unapologetic voice, one we can look forward to hearing from further as the world comes to need it ever more.