The Semiotics of Girlblogging

Tess Pollok interviews Olivia Kan-Sperling about her debut novel, “Little Pink Book.”

By Tess PollokAugust 6, 2025

• Fiction

FANTASY CANNIBALIZES REALITY in Olivia Kan-Sperling’s first full-length novel, Little Pink Book, a delirious, dream-addled sojourn through the Orientalist daydreams of Limei, an introverted barista at a café in Shanghai. Limei spends her days at the counter making latte art and her nights divulging her increasing desperation for passionate romance on her blog. As her fan fiction–fueled desires seep into the banality of her everyday existence, Limei’s own solipsistic nature is called into question by a narrator of dubious authority. A novel of surprising semiotic intelligence and expression, Little Pink Book provides a Chinese translation of the text alongside the English to interrogate the nature and limits of language.

 I spoke with Kan-Sperling over Zoom two months before the book’s publication this August. Among other things, we discussed the novel’s origins as a hybrid exhibition text-exercise in fan fiction and the Chinese blogosphere as a source of inspiration.

¤

TESS POLLOK: The book was initially written as a companion piece to a video installation by the artist Diane Severin Nguyen, correct?

OLIVIA KAN-SPERLING: Yes, so Diane Severin Nguyen was having an exhibition in Shanghai, and normally they would commission someone to write a critical exhibition text, but Nguyen had read my first book [the 2022 novella Island Time], and she convinced the gallery to let me write this. It was originally a fan fiction of her film In Her Time [2023], and it was supposed to be made available to a Chinese audience—which is why it’s written in English and Chinese. In its original iteration, it was only a few chapters, but I expanded the idea into a full-length novel. It also became about myself more as I was writing. I’ve never thought of myself as a “Chinese American writer”—Chinese American person, sure, but these were never themes I was working with in my art. So it also became about the space between those legible identities, negotiating the insideness and outsideness of that.

What about Limei, the main character? The narrator gives her a hard time about being “so unique”; she’s constantly criticized for being a manic pixie dream girl. It feels appropriate that this was born out of fan fiction, because she reads as the prototypical Mary Sue.

I’m so glad you brought that up, because that was the driving force behind the narrative’s structure. I was interested in constructing a character with a very fine line between their own internal dialogue and that of the omniscient narrator. I wanted to create a sense that Limei might be completely different from what we, the readers, might [be led to] believe about her—that we might have no access to her interiority at all. Or maybe it’s that she is narrativizing her own interiority—maybe she is talking about herself in her head that way.

Would you say the novel is also about fantasy? There’s a preoccupation with daydreams and Limei’s girlish fantasies of sex and romance.

Totally. I think fantasy has been the main subject of my writing thus far—because that’s all writing is, really. Even if you’re doing autofiction … Ultimately, it’s always a little movie that you made in your head—and it’s always about you in the end, for all writers. Maybe “alienation” is too Brechtian, but I’m interested in creating points of rupture in language that show where fantasies occur, where form shapes emotion and interiority. In some scenes, Limei seems melodramatic, or like she’s acting; I almost thought of her as being given lines to perform.

What parts of the internet did you draw on while doing research for the novel?

I read a lot of Chinese e-novels. I sort of touch on that in Little Pink Book—they aren’t necessarily fan fiction, but they’re self-published online, mostly by teenagers and middle-aged women in China. I ran them through Google Translate and they’re all basically rape fantasies and coercive romances. Enemies to lovers—a genre Diana’s work is also really interested in. I was fascinated by how much they contained stories that involved a character falling in and out of media, like into or out of a movie. Many of them follow a plot where a boy comes out of a movie or the female protagonist suddenly finds herself in the movie—something like that—revolving around a nexus of sex.

What’s compelling about these fantasies of sex is that they revolve around connecting with another person, but this other person will always have their own reality. So all these women who have this perverse and highly explicit fantasy of having sex with a Chinese prince from X dynasty—it almost reminds me of Sally Rooney, who’s a really competent writer [in general], but her sex scenes are actually hot. When you become aware of how language can work in that way, it becomes far, far more powerful than you realized; it opens up a whole new register.

The fan fiction inspirations you mention almost remind me of Pinterest, because there’s a world-building quality to the novel—like it’s a collection of posts designed to evoke a certain feeling.

Yes! I wondered whether that was legible. I was very into Tumblr, and for inspiration for the book, I also looked into the Chinese blogosphere, starting from the 2010s onward. They have so many blogs that we don’t have access to in the United States. I’ve always been obsessed with blogging and Tumblr because of how they use images. Instagram is different because you’re producing images of yourself and your life, but on Tumblr, you’re shopping for images of completely random objects (or, in the case of Pinterest, you’re pinning random things to construct your identity).

If you look at girlblog Tumblrs, the way they use hashtags is so interesting. They string together these signifiers that are entirely divorced from their original meaning. It’ll be like #lana, #coquette, #angel, #slut, #virgin … Sometimes terms that directly contradict each other. Things just come loose in this way and become something between an object, image, or identity category. That’s how I think of Limei using language in her head.

Wasn’t your thesis at Brown on semiotics?

My thesis was about the semiotics of computer programming language design. That language acts very specifically. We all know language does things and doesn’t do other things, but with this book I was interested in loosening the believability layer between the words describing reality and the words describing fantasy. Like, oh, she actually just threw herself in front of a car? What power do words actually enact?

What initially drew you to investigating online writing and fan fiction in your work?

I think of all of my work as interpretation. That’s why I was so excited to work with Diane on this project, because art criticism wasn’t an interesting form to me, and she was willing to work with me on that. I really enjoy the process of taking an object and finding new meaning in it, whether that’s fine art or Kendall Jenner’s Instagram. You certainly don’t need to have seen Diane’s work to understand my book, but creating an intertextual network between a bunch of different media forms has always been an exciting idea to me: all these different texts and formats being in conversation with one another.

I think that’s also why the book is so interested in prefab narrative genres. It’s almost like a pop song, the way you know how a romance genre book is going to unfold. I wanted to push on that until it was painfully obvious, until the tropes weren’t concealing their conceptual investments at all. I’m so nerdy and into media theory and semiotics, and I wanted the book to reflect that—but I don’t know, maybe that’s not classy in literature.

That can be so classy in literature! People value the way that narrative devices provide structure, and what I loved about this book is the immediacy of it—it’s raw, material, and substantive without relying on typical narrative modes.

I definitely wanted to touch on that because the immediacy is meant to suggest a passivity, or maybe a different relationship to agency. I think the character, Limei, is described in these ways that are very typical of the Western humanist subject, like Amélie. She’s so individual and wants to express all these unique qualities of her selfhood; she sort of represents where literature comes from in this highly subjective way. But there’s something so generic about her that intertwines with that.

I think it comes from the years I spent on Tumblr—thinking that being unique is the most important thing. I’m only myself, obviously, but I think many readers of books have a personality that’s similar to mine. Everyone has interiority, but then there are people who are obsessed with themselves as having interiority. I wanted to capture how boring that can be, how much that type of thinking can shut out the world. I wondered about what it said about me that I was like that as well, that my head is programmed—and how much my own thoughts and feelings feel repetitive, even to me.

¤

Olivia Kan-Sperling’s fiction and essays have appeared in n+1, Heavy Traffic, and The Paris Review, among other magazines. Her first book, Island Time (Expat Press, 2022), about the psychogeography of Kendall Jenner, is a recursive novella figured as a virtual world. She lives in New York.