I’m so honored and privileged to welcome Mia Tsai to Bookish Brews today. I met Mia virtually at FIYAHCON in 2021, a virtual convention centering the perspectives and contributions of BIPOC in speculative fiction. Her thoughts on writing, genre, and particularly fantasy worldbuilding are so brilliant I’m so excited to have her here today. I’ve heard her speak at a variety of online conferences, and I’ve been a huge fan of hers ever since. She’s brilliant and I can’t wait to see more from Mia in the future. Bitter Medicine is a stunning story filled with magic, romance, and a world that swept me away, so today we’re talking about fantasy worldbuilding. But first, a little about Bitter Medicine.

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Bitter Medicine by Mia Tsai

To protect her older brother from her younger brother, Elle has shrunk herself and her magic to stay unnoticed. But she can’t help but challenge herself by giving high-powered glyphs to her client, crush, and the agency’s top security expert, Luc, whose next job is hunting down her younger brother.

🎨 Contemporary ✒️ Debut Author 💗 Fantasy Romance 🌱 Character Growth

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• Genre: Contemporary, Fantasy, Romance

Bitter Medicine is an absolutely stunning mix of action, romance, wit, and magic that you don’t want to miss. The multicultural fantasy worldbuilding in a multinational world is something I so rarely see in the fantasy books I read but something that I see every single day in my personal life. It’s so refreshing to see that reflected in Bitter Medicine in such a genuine way, and I’m so excited to talk about it with Mia today. Everyone, please welcome Mia Tsai to Bookish Brews!

Interview with Mia Tsai

Amanda: Hi Mia! Thank you for joining us at Bookish Brews. I’m so excited to talk to you about fantasy worldbuilding. Before we get started, can you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about Bitter Medicine?

Mia Tsai: Hi Amanda! Thank you so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this for a while! For the audience, I’m Mia Tsai; the Ts- is pronounced like the double Z’s in pizza. 

I’m the author of BITTER MEDICINE, which is an adult contemporary fantasy with heavy romance elements, about a magical Chinese calligrapher named Elle who believes in order to protect her older brother from the younger brother who wants him dead, that she needs to hide herself and make herself small so as to go unnoticed. She’s successful at fooling everyone except for her client Luc, a rather handsome and mysterious French half elf security specialist whose latest job threatens to expose her and her secrets.

Amanda: I fell in love with the world of Bitter Medicine. What were some rules, goals, or inspirations you had when worldbuilding? Were there any fantasy worldbuilding rules or conventions that you specifically rejected when writing?

Mia: I didn’t have too many rules, but one of them was that all the mythologies of the world were real and could coexist. Mythologies could contradict one another, but they wouldn’t invalidate one another. That allowed me to expand the world while giving me the space to include mythologies we don’t typically see in the West, as well as allowing mythologies to apply only to their specific cultures.

I’m more of a soft magic systems kind of person; I like my magic to retain its mystery and wonder. Once you start introducing multiple rules to the world, then readers will start asking about how those rules are applied. Breaking down the applications of those rules can be fun, but it can also devolve into nitpicking and rules-lawyering, and that’s not what I like to see in my own writing. I grew up in a superstitious environment where there are practices inviting more luck into your life. It’s not quantifiable, and neither did I want my magic systems to be quantifiable.

There’s only one rule in the Roland & Riddle world which pertains to every fae, and it’s a classic fairy tale trope. Every single fae has a talisman that, when broken, causes them to stop being fae. It may be the only rule, but it’s a powerful rule, and there are no exceptions.

Amanda: How do you think that allowing all mythologies to be real and to coexist affected your ability to worldbuild? 

Mia: I think it really opened it up to lots of possibilities! First and foremost, it allowed the company, Roland & Riddle, to go global and to have, like many international companies, multiple branches with region-specific boards of directors. But, because of the ability to travel instantaneously to any branch in the world, having those mythologies be valid also gave me the freedom to put someone like Elle, who is Chinese and who belongs to Chinese mythology, in a place like Raleigh, North Carolina, where a completely different set of local mythologies exist, and let her have adventures.

There’s plenty of conflict and tension to be had with cultural clashes. Add in a mythological clash, and stories arise. The worldbuilding, in effect, opens up stories that can take place anywhere, with characters from anywhere–which allows a more genuine storytelling to happen.

I had envisioned the world of Roland & Riddle as a tabletop game, actually, where the player could take aspects of their own culture and inject them into their character without appropriating or tokenizing others while also playing in a world where it’s normal to meet characters from all over. The tabletop game didn’t happen thanks to a lack of energy to problem-solve on my part, but that’s really what the worldbuilding does for me–it gives me or my characters the grace to be themselves as they are, anywhere they are.

Amanda: I’m really interested in what you said about how it allows for more genuine storytelling. What do you mean by that? How does it allow for more genuine storytelling?

Mia: Not to say other methods of storytelling aren’t genuine, of course–but for me, opening up the world-building allowed me to get to the character faster. To have those characters exist without explanation, very much the way people in your life exist without explanation. They’re here, they look like this or sound like this, and it’s fine because the international scope predisposes you to accept that. And since the stories can take place anywhere, I feel like I don’t need to frame or contextualize things as much. 

There’s so much explanation people in the West expect from their storytelling. Some explanation is great, but overexplaining hinders the story. And honestly, sometimes, even when there’s lots of explanation, I’d still get lost in the explanation and be impatient and skip ahead to whenever the story actually started. The explaining, for me, is a result of “Why?” and not “Why not?”

So, why not? It’s fiction. It’s got magic in it. Don’t we want to get into the story?

Amanda: You implied people in the West expect more explanation in storytelling than the rest of the world. Where do you think that Western expectation comes from?

Mia: I am extremely not a subject matter expert here, so your mileage may vary with this answer. But I do see a rather direct line from things like the scientific method and rationalism to a need for explanation. Western science was used as a bludgeon in the hand of colonizers, for example–native and local knowledge was often discounted unless it was to the benefit of the colonizers, who would then “discover” it, take it, document it, and bring it back to their home countries to be analyzed and broken down, absent of its context or cultural importance–and those cultures that didn’t adhere to the tenets of reason were seen as lower than and in need of education.

There was very little respect for experiential learning and little room for the unknowns of life. So, for me, the rigidity of the Western scientific process is a background to things like hard magic systems and needing everything to make sense in mass media, though this isn’t something I always articulate.

I don’t want to make it seem as if all the fantasy we’ve had in the West sticks strictly to systems. There’s plenty of fantasy that relies on folkloric traditions–if we look at Tolkien’s work, for example, there are no lists of rules. Go far enough back in Western fantasy history, and you find wonder and awe and things left unexplained.

Amanda: How does the international scope in setting and magic in Bitter Medicine mirror the world we live in today?

Mia: I think it mirrors the way of life or point of view of people in dense city centers, where you never know who you’re going to run into when you’re out. It’s wonderful to meet new people from all over the world, and in so doing, you find your world is more interconnected than you think. As for the magic, getting handwritten good luck charms is still fairly common, so it’s not farfetched to imagine one or two more levels of magic in those things.

Amanda: Do you have any advice about worldbuilding fantasy worlds for fiction writers? Anything you’d like to tell readers about fictional worlds?  

Mia: I think it’s good to find at least one thing to get really nerdy about, like specific plants or aspects of the environment or ranks in a system, and to ask lots of questions. Be curious about the world you’re exploring. But also be careful not to mirror the real world too closely if you aren’t ready to address the issues that will invariably come up. 

If you have an oppressive system, then the next questions are who it oppresses, and why. And the questions after that are how that oppression is carried out and how that affects your world’s society, the economy, the environment. And then that leads to more questions. In the course of answering those questions, you may find some real-world parallels you didn’t intend to put into the world.

Or, conversely, putting those parallels in may be purposeful on your part, and if it’s purposeful and you’re making a statement with those parallels, own that statement.

Amanda: Thank you so much, Mia! Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

Mia: I think that’s it! Aside from a plug for my own book. Bitter Medicine is available now from retailers big and small!