“The Bathhouse for Long Life” by Claire Jia-Wen is focused around the titular bathhouse, the last relic of the Kingdom of Women, a place where visitors may submerge in one of two magical springs: the waters of conception or the waters of abortion. This sacred place of reproductive rights is tended by Aijira, who inherited the role from her mother, alongside her friends the river spirits, such as Ikka, Crane and Mask Face. One day, a woman arrives asking for help for her friend, who is pregnant but in danger, and Aijira must decide what risks she can take to help a stranger. This fantastic story unfolds layer by layer, revealing the world and histories of the characters to the reader in a way that leads to a powerful and emotionally resonant ending.
Claire Jia-Wen (clairejiawen.com) is a speculative fiction writer originally from the 626 and has work published or forthcoming in khōréō, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Lightspeed, and more. A Viable Paradise and Clarion alum, she is currently a PhD student studying human-computer interaction.
Marissa van Uden: Thank you for joining us today, Claire! I loved this mother-daughter relationship story, which explores quiet strength and dedication of women who help women, especially in an oppressive patriarchy. Without spoiling the story too much, there is a moment where Aijira sees the difficult choices that must be made when the resources to help people are depleted. Aijira says, “In the cold equations of these things, innocents suffered. We still made those calculations,” hearkening back to the 1954 short story “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. Was this story originally conceived as a response to that one? What were the original inspirations for it?
Claire Jia-Wen: I attempted the very first version of this the week after the 2024 US election; back then, it was titled “Five Encounters Between the Girl and the Sentinel at the Spring of Abortion,” and it was about a girl who wants to access the spring of abortion and the queen’s sentinel who is tasked not to let her. I never finished the story, because it had no momentum—I think it presented an interesting conflict but was kind of boring. There was also no bathhouse and no demons at this point.
About a year later, I was at the Clarion Workshop and I wanted to do a bathhouse story for my week 5 story—Isabel Yap’s “A Cup of Salt Tears” is one of my favorite stories of all time—and as I was mulling over specifics, it seemed natural to revisit the spring of abortion concept. I also reread Wen-yi Lee’s “Love Heart Soup,” which I also adore, because I was interested in the emotional affect it achieves. It’s intentionally not an incredibly dramatic story, but there’s a deep sense of longing, and you can feel the impact of colonialism on the characters and setting so keenly. In the process of writing “Bathhouse,” the entirety of “Five Encounters” got distilled into the Serolind anecdote, and I think it says something about the original that the 4K got distilled into about 150 and became more interesting for it.
This story wasn’t originally conceived as a response to “The Cold Equations;” I read “The Cold Equations,” and familiarized myself with the surrounding discourse, when I was at Clarion, and it did help sharpen my vision for “Bathhouse”—specifically, in the ways that we often construct impossible conflicts for our characters, and how they might reject that framing and push back on the construction instead. Funnily enough, I was actually leaning heavily toward taking that specific line out.
MVU: I love how you portrayed the mother, a monstress with a bloodlust for the “heroes” who enter her caves seeking to slay her, but also a champion of women’s rights and a loving mother who is just trying to do her best. She is both violent and venomous, and almost awkwardly tender at times. Did her character change much during revision process, or did you know who she was early on?
CJW: I’m glad you liked her! I don’t think she changed too much through revision, but I can go over my thought process behind her character.
The original seed for her character was that I had been mulling over why the “adult who’s done bad things gets saddled with a random kid and learns to love them” trope focuses so much on reluctant dads and not reluctant moms (off the top of my head, The Last of Us and Arcane). I think it’s a combination of women who reject children maybe being seen as less sympathetic because it’s against their “nature” and the fact that a mother getting saddled with a child she doesn’t want has uncomfortable implications against the current landscape of reproductive rights (That’s also not to say there aren't reluctant moms in media—I watched The Wild Robot a month before writing this story, and it definitely influenced my depiction of Aijira’s mother here in a way I only realized in retrospect). I kept that in mind as I wrote.
Another consideration was that I was pulling from folklore and that the spider demons are unambiguously antagonists in Journey to the West. I wanted to keep that amorality and that lethal competence—but, obviously, if she’s good at killing people, she needs to be bad (or think she’s bad) at actually talking to people, which creates the necessary conflict for her narrative arc. She keeps her core of opportunism but gains other mushier stuff. I don’t think she would think of herself as a champion of women’s rights.
MVU: I love that about her. She’s simply who she is, in all her complexities. Can you tell us what your revision process is like in general? Do you tend to take a story through many drafts, and how do you know when a story is ready for submissions?
CJW: I categorize my stories into “has the sauce” and “doesn’t have the sauce.” If a story doesn’t have the sauce, I either A) do a blank page rewrite; B) trunk it and think about it from time to time until I get an idea of how to rework it, whereupon I return to A; or C) find it showing up in an unrelated story and integrate the two. I repeat this process until I have a story that has the sauce.
Once the story has the sauce, I send it out to beta readers. Usually, I don’t do structural edits at this point, because all the structural edits have been done in the rewriting processes! Any edits from there are about making sure details come across; it’s more about sharpening and clarifying motivations/stakes/relationships than reworking them.
It's a very frustrating and chaotic process and I’m sure there are more efficient ones.
MVU: Ha, I feel a lot of writers will relate to frustrating and chaotic as a description of their process. In the story, Aijira’s mother wants to teach her that the world is cruel, and that “it did not have the same respect for life as its gentlest inhabitants. The young that didn’t weather nature’s inevitabilities, and become hardened, didn’t survive.” And yet we see in multiple ways in this story that the world’s gentlest inhabitants can wield great power for good, and that her mother—despite her fears for Aijira and her protests about taking in the helpless baby Crane—comes to trust her daughter in this. Can you share a bit more about this theme of the story and what you hope readers will take from it?
CJW: I think you nailed it pretty well! A lot of my stories are about the fight against cynicism, because I struggle with it a lot. But I think that accepting the world as immutably awful also denies yourself the agency to change it.
I’ve also recently become interested in protagonists who don’t meet conflict head on so much as they divert it—who bend rather than snap. Aijira’s not one of the revolutionaries, but she’s also not entirely resigned to what’s happened to her home either.
CJW: My family's cat. Her full government name is Caramel, but she mostly goes by Mimi.
MVU: I love that! Your debut short fiction “The Last Flesh Figure Skaters” (originally published in khōréō and reprinted in Neon Hemlock’s We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction 2024, edited by Ryka Aoki and Charles Payseur) is an incredible first publication. I remember when it came out, as it was passed around among my writer friends, and everyone was amazed this was your debut. It’s rich with layers, from complicated relationships and parental pressure to commentary on the corporate exploitation of young athletes, all tied together in a tightly written frenemies-to-lovers sapphic romance. Can you tell us about the inspirations for this piece and what its journey from creation to publication was like?
CJW:I’m so glad you liked it—I’ve always thought it was one of my lower profile pieces, and I’m always delighted to hear when it finds its audience!
Prior to writing, I had a conversation with my brother about bionic limbs, where I pointed out that hijacking them would be less profitable for the company than just collecting data from them. I had read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism a few weeks prior, and I was thinking a lot about how our data is harvested and sold, oftentimes back to the people who produced it.
Sometime later, I saw the cover of Ali Hazelwood’s chess romance, Check & Mate, and I thought: corporations learning chess through tracking players’ bionic limbs??? But computers can already play chess pretty well, so the idea was a bust. My next thought was ice skating, which was the aha moment. I wrote the whole story in a fugue state two hours before I was leaving for the airport. By some twist of fate, I ended up reading Emily M. Bender’s paper on LLMs as stochastic parrots at the airport, and that helped me sharpen the thematic elements. I also played competitive badminton when I was younger, which informed the emotional valence of the piece.
It was the second short story I’d ever written, so I didn’t have beta readers, and I basically just posted in a writing discord I was in asking if anybody wanted to swap. It worked out fantastically—I’m still critique partners with one of them today. They suggested I submit to khōréō, and I’m still so grateful to the team there for giving it a home and to Zhui Ning Chang for their sharp editorial eye.
MVU: That’s so cool it was only your second short story! What a killer piece, right out of the gate. You’ve published several stories since your debut. What are your favorite pieces so far and why? And what themes or styles are you hoping to explore more in the future?
CJW: Genuinely, “The Bathhouse for Long Life” is my favorite story I’ve written—I’m so proud of the integration of the perspectives, and the story has an unconventional throughline of tension that was incredibly satisfying for me to calibrate. I love “A Sleeper Ship is Like a Game of Go,” which you can find now in Clarkesworld, for similar reasons. It’s a big swing (triple timeline!) that took me a lot of iterations to pull off.
I’ve been writing a lot of stories about our relationship to the environment these days. Style-wise, I do like to play with structure and chronology. I’m itching to finally nail a fully nonlinear story (my beta readers all just experienced a collected shudder).
MVU: Haha, something tells me they will 100% trust you to pull this idea off. Alongside writing fiction, you’re also a PhD student studying human-computer interaction. In what ways do your studies influence your writing?
CJW: Studying human-computer interaction certainly helps ground my sci-fi. A lot of the readings I do provide useful frameworks for thinking about technology: how it’s developed, how it’s used in a multitude of ways, intended and unintended, and our meaning-making processes around it.
Being in university so much has also inspired a spate of weird (dark??) academia stories. I’ve been having the typical first year epistemological crisis, and I’ve been thinking a lot about the historically fraught and somewhat arbitrary methods we use to establish significance, as well as the colonial rhetoric science uses to position itself: the researcher as explorer, setting out to discover the unknown and organize it into knowledge.
MVU: That sounds like a fascinating theme to explore! Can you tell us a bit about your journey to becoming a writer. When did you know you wanted to write stories, and which books, films, or other art have most influenced you over the years?
CJW: I’ve always been a reader, but when I was in 6th grade, my friends and I discovered Wattpad and started co-writing a space opera we never finished. They dropped off writing eventually, but I stayed and ended up writing some novelette and novella length works that could ungenerously be called thinly veiled Fire Emblem fanfiction. Fantasy is not the most popular genre on there, and I wasn’t a very good writer, so my stories never got much response, but it really got me into the mindset of writing just for myself and finishing pieces.
When I was in high school, some authors I followed on Wattpad were doing NaNoWriMo (RIP), and I decided to join them, which is how I wrote my first novels.
I feel like I’ve been waiting all my (admittedly fledgling) career to get asked about my influences. I’m so excited.
A non-exhaustive list of foundational media: the Iliad, Shelley Parker Chan’s Radiant Emperor duology, the collection of Grimm’s Fairytales, Planet Earth and other nature documentaries, the Ghibli movies, Fire Emblem Path of Radiance & Radiant Dawn, the Dragons of Deltora series, the Chess musical, Journey to the West, Ace Attorney, and the works of Ted Chiang, Marissa Meyer, Gail Carson Levine (especially The Two Princesses of Bamarre), and Ursula K. Le Guin.
They’re kind of all over the place. Some, like Deltora, were how I fell in love with SFF; others, like Chiang’s works, expanded the boundaries of what I thought SFF could be. They’re all media I return to when writing my own work, whether for inspiration or guidance. They all have moments that inspire a feeling in me that I want to be able to invoke in my own readers.
CJW: My Pride and Prejudice clock, a Pokemon art of me that my friend commissioned for my birthday, and a stuffed avocado.
MVU: Ha, I’m so happy to be the one to first ask about your influences! The way stories impact us as creators and thinkers, and inspire whole new creations, is so fascinating to me. Absolutely love that you listed nature documentaries in there too. That’s not one I see often, but they are such beautiful works of art and storytelling! Planet Earth was incredible. To wrap up our interviews, I like to ask for favorite charities. Is there a charity or cause you’d love to raise more awareness for, and where can readers find it?
CJW: I would love if people donated to their local environmental organizations! We’re losing species and habitats, and treating the environment like an object to be endlessly extracted from.
In the spirit of the question, though, I’ll plug my school’s Graduate Employee’s Organization (www.uiucgeo.org/donate-to-geo); student unions are so important for graduate employee rights and healthy academic environments.
MVU: Thank you so much for chatting with us about your writing and creative life! Can you tell us about any forthcoming publications we should keep an eye out for, or are you working on anything interesting at the moment?
CJW: I have a bunch of stories forthcoming—you can check out the full list at www.clairejiawen.com/work or subscribe to my newsletter clairejwen.substack.com for updates! I’m particularly interested in reactions to my stories in Nightmare and Lightspeed: “The Plague Comes From Chinatown,” my horror debut, and “SOFTBOY,” my AI boyfriend story.
I’m also working on a romantasy novel! It’s about a cursed sorcerer and the plucky apprentice to the local hydraulic engineering mage. There are dragons, sentient houses, and a magical bureaucracy. It’s been incredibly self-indulgent, and I’m very excited to see how it goes.