Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction

Ploughshares is pleased to present Vincent Yu with the third annual Ashley Leigh Bourne Prize for Fiction for his short story “You Just Make Me So Happy,” which appeared in the Fall 2020 issue, edited by Editor-in-chief Ladette Randolph. The $2,500 prize, sponsored by longtime patron Hunter C. Bourne III and selected by our editors, honors a short story published in the journal in the previous year.

In “You Just Make Me So Happy,” Yu examines the overextended relationship of a young couple grappling with the immediate realities of terminal illness. As Rich’s remaining months become increasingly burdensome, Rose revisits the moments she could have left before his diagnosis bound her to him out of pity, if not love. Befriending the dying man sharing Rich’s hospital room, Rose confronts the narrative around which Rich’s identity is fastened, experiencing “the kind of stymied guilt that Rich must have felt through most of his life—the implications of deficiency, the vast accumulation of unremittable debt” as Rich’s parents take charge of his care.

Yu is the national sales coordinator at W. W. Norton & Company. He graduated with a degree in evolutionary biology from Yale University, where he was a staff member of the Yale Literary Magazine. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Able Muse, and Ninth Letter, in addition to Ploughshares. He is currently working on a novel.

What inspired “You Just Make Me So Happy”?

My fiction begins in a petri dish. I consider a difficult situation, often of moral ambiguity, and I drop a character into the middle of it. With this story, the situation was basically, What happens when all the redemptive qualities are drained from a relationship, leaving only the promises and liabilities? And What do you do when the act of leaving becomes its own ethical (and logistical) dilemma?

From there, it was like trying to map a completely dark room. The details involving tennis, the eventual fleshing out of Rich’s parents, the final straw with Pepper, the competing love interest, were all components of the story that I needed to stumble over and get a handle on, first, before I understood where everything fit.

What did you discover or grapple with while writing the story?

I’m pretty hands-off with my characters, even as I’m putting them through their narrative paces. The act of writing informs my own understanding of them, so it was only after several drafts and rewrites of this story that Rose’s reactions and responses started to ring true. I needed her to be desperate and emotionally exhausted enough to be swayed by this other character she meets at the hospital, while still sharp and independent enough to maintain her sense of self-preservation.

Rich was a tricky character to figure out too. I wanted to explore race at an angle with him: he’s a second-generation Chinese American, but the reader never really gets his point of view. His identity is, if anything, used to buttress his most toxic qualities. The problem was making him unpleasant enough to abandon, but sympathetic enough to pity.

How does this story fit with the rest of your work?

The story takes place in Western Massachusetts, near the Berkshires, which is where I grew up, and where I still feel the most comfortable setting my work. Like much of what I write, it explores race and relationships and coming to terms with age.

My only goal when beginning a new piece is to create something compelling enough to make the reader wonder at how strange and occasionally lovely life can be. I hope that this story is consistent with that, and with the timbre of my work as a whole.

What are you working on now?

I’ve recently finished a novel about the son of Chinese immigrants who gets in a car accident, shatters his knee, and becomes hopelessly addicted to opioids. I’m also working on a manuscript in which three Chinese folk tales inform the history of a small New England town and its many inadvertent relationships. I hope to find good homes for both.