After his mother dies, the protagonist of Kat Tang’s debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, chances into a gig as a “rental stranger”: someone hired via app to be whomever the client needs. For ten years, he immerses himself in roles ranging from airline hypeman to mourner, lives alone in a utilitarian apartment, and zealously enforces boundaries personal and professional.

When a nosy new client, Darlene, threatens to undermine his long-running role as father to a girl named Lily, Stranger must confront the trauma that launched his career and try to make sense of a future without it. In wry, lucid, and compassionate prose, Tang explores the costs of intimacy and performance.

I had a chance to speak with Tang over FaceTime about persona, real-life rental strangers, and the lessons we can take from loneliness.

E.Y. Zhao: Stranger projects many versions of himself. Consciously, he doesn’t want to be seen through. But when he’s with Mari and Lily, the family where he’s played a father for eight years, he subconsciously hopes that they will see through him. Especially at a time when we project so many personas, how do you think about the tension between wanting to be taken at face taken at face value versus wanting to be seen through? 

Kat Tang: There’s so much fear in projection. We’re always wanting people to see us a certain way on social media or even to our families. And there’s a fear that if it is known who we truly are or what we are really like, we might be rejected. So I think that’s what he’s toeing the line between. He wants to be perfect but he also wants to be known, and he doesn’t know how to let people in and let himself be vulnerable. He hasn’t really had experience doing that, and he sees that when he’s working with other clients, when they are vulnerable, it can be ugly. It’s a very ugly part of people. I don’t think that it’s easy for us to show that, especially nowadays, when everything’s so curated. But it’s so necessary to remember that we are messy. We make mistakes and that’s okay. We shouldn’t have our lives ruined if we say something or if we do something wrong, it’s all about changing and being able to change from that.

EYZ: The idea for rental strangers came from real rental services in Japan. What questions or insights about American society did the premise raise for you? 

KT: The rental stranger business in Japan made a lot of sense to me for Japanese society because it is very image-focused, family is an important thing, divorce rates are not as high, so it’s less likely that a child will grow up without both parents. So I can see why renting a parent might be more normal there. Transporting that concept to the US, I ended up thinking about what it is that people, let’s just say in a big city like New York City, might want. And I think other than the family aspect of it, a lot of it seemed similar, at least in my imagination. Of people who just don’t want to appear alone. Who want to be seen as desirable in front of their friends or family. That applies across the board. It could be having fans at an event or having a mourner at a funeral. It’s all just to show that we were loved and cared for by someone at some point. So I thought that was quite universal. 

EYZ: Darlene initially hires Stranger to play an alcoholic brother. After first you think she’s practicing an intervention with her own alcoholic brother, but actually, she’s writing a novel about a protagonist with an alcoholic brother. It’s a funny reversal, conducting real-life rehearsal for fictional work when we often think of fiction as something that enhances real life. Can reading and storytelling be a rehearsal for real life or vice versa?

KT: I think that oftentimes when people turn to literature, even if they don’t know it, they’re seeking something. And whatever it is, we’ll find it on the page, whether or not the author intended it. It’s what I’ve come to realize after hearing people talking about my book. Like, “Oh, that’s what you got from it? Great, I love that, but I never even thought about it.” We each come to literature with our own wants, our own needs, our own worldview. And I think that whatever we find in there is often what we want to hear or what we are already thinking about. And then the other way around, at least for me, as a writer, there’s so much that comes from my life that influences my fiction. How can it not when you’re just one person with one little monkey working in your own skull?

EZY: Another central concern of the book is white lies. I was curious if writing this book challenged or changed the way that you think about white lies in everyday life.

KT: There’s this part of the novel where Stranger talks about when someone isn’t well and you say, “Oh, is there anything I can do for you?” or “Do you need anything?”, but you don’t actually mean to do it. You just say that as words of sympathy and there’s no real intention behind it. That in some ways is a lie, and you’re just using it to show that you care. So I’ve been thinking about that recently, and in my own life, I’ve tried to do less of this performative lying, so to speak. Saying things or doing things where I’m just saying it because I think that that’s what someone else wants to hear. But if they were to actually say, “Oh, yeah, I would love some chicken soup,” then I would be like, “Oh, I didn’t intend to do that at all.” So in that way, I’ve been thinking more about the intentions behind words, even if they’re meant to soothe. How if you don’t actually plan on carrying them out, they can hurt people. How much are you saying things to manipulate people versus saying it because you mean it?

EZY: Sometimes we say the thing that comes next in the script, not because we want to deceive anybody or because we’ve got pernicious intentions, but because that’s the smoothest way to keep the situation going.

KT: Totally. And everyone does it all the time. And honestly, I think when people say, “Oh, do you want anything?”, everyone usually says no, because there’s this communal understanding that this is what we say, we don’t actually want to ask anything of you. But I think we can do better. I think we can be more attentive to what we say and intentional in what we ask for or offer each other. And the times that I have felt the most cared for or seen is when someone offers me something and then they do it. I’m like, “Oh, wow. You weren’t just paying lip service to that. That’s incredible.”

EYZ: Stranger’s waking life is all scripts and roles. What is Stranger’s self if all of the external trappings belong to other people? How do you build him or think about him?

KT: I’ve been asked this question a couple times, in different ways. Someone asked me, “How do you write a main character with no name? Who is Stranger?” And surprisingly, even though he’s always taking on these other roles, his self was relatively easy to pin down because he’s so observant and he does have a personality in his judgments. He’s actually quite judgmental, because I feel like people who are observant oftentimes can be judgmental. And the other thing is that the way he portrays himself is very constant, because he’s always trying to take care of other people or to predict their needs. And trying to not think about himself. But in that way, he’s showing who he is by the things that he does or does not do for himself. And that’s how I was able to think about who he is as a character. That and also his past and how he’s trying to push all that away. But he very much has a past: as an Asian American, or half-Asian, growing up in LA. He didn’t come from nowhere. And a lot of that influences the way that he thinks about his surroundings, living in New York, being raised poor. He has a lot of characteristics to him that, because it’s in first person, you get to learn about as he’s going about his other jobs.

EYZ: In some ways, somebody so disciplined about his values and judgments is a more consistent character than people in real life. Because in real life, most of us are inconsistent and change our minds.

KT: Yeah, it’s like those rules that you were trying to follow until they break you or until you grow beyond those bounds. And that’s what’s happening with him as he’s growing too big for the rules that he set for himself. Which, like you said, oftentimes is easier to pin down. Because I’m working on a novel right now and the main character is all over the place with their wants and needs. I think most people are like that. But it’s tough to write.

EYZ: Throughout the book, Stranger gets to play out a variety of situations. How did you curate them? 

KT: The early draft of this novel was a bunch of vignettes of him in different jobs with different names and third persons. It wasn’t until later on that you realize they’re all the same person. A lot of what ended up in this version came from that. I had a lot of input from friends. I would tell them like, “Hey, so I’m writing this novel about a rental stranger.” And then some would be like, “Oh, have you considered he could be rented for this, he can be rented for that?” And the one where he’s in line at the airport and he’s being paid to say how wonderful the airline is? That was because I was in the airport in San Jose, and it was winter, and there had been a big storm. The lines were crazy and it was awful. And someone in front of me was like, “I’ve been with this airline since I was in college. They always take care of you. It’s totally fine.” And I was like, what a plant! Who would say that out of the blue? And then I was like, wait, this is great.

EYZ: If you were to rent a stranger for an event, what would it be? 

KT: I actually went to Japan in April and rented a father. And it was so different than what I expected. I, as the client, felt the need to keep him interested, even though I was paying for the interaction. I was like, “Oh, gosh, I hope he likes me. What does he think about me?” And because he was a rental father, I ended up asking him a lot of questions I thought one should ask your dad, but I realized I never even asked my own dad. And so after that, I asked my dad the same questions and he had some really great answers. And I was like, I can’t believe it took me renting a pretend father to realize the things that maybe I should talk to my own father about.

EYZ: It is like getting to rehearse things that are very scary to approach with people we know.

KT: Exactly. And with the pretend father, there are certain things he said or expressed where I was like, “I don’t think I agree with that.” But because I didn’t have to ever see him again, I was like, “I’m not gonna fight with him.” And then I thought, why don’t I have the same kind of grace with my family? It’s just so interesting to have the real thing and the fake thing. To compare those two and be like, “Oh, I could change this about how I treat my real dad.”

EYZ: Did you get to ask him why he was in the profession?

KT: Yeah. For the most part, when he meets with Japanese clients, they just want someone to listen to them. Usually in Japanese society, older men are always telling people what to do. Often you’ll get female clients who will just want to talk to him and have him listen and encourage them. Apparently, the age he’s at is considered non-threatening for women. I was like, sure, not in America. But then we talked a bit about that. And I asked him about his own family. And he was like, oh, yeah, I’m actually divorced and estranged from my son. I was like, Ooh, interesting that you would then be taking on this role to meet with other people and even pretend to be their dad when you’re not close with your own son.

EYZ: It is exactly the dynamic that you portrayed in the book, right? Where it’s painful to be truly intimate.

KT: Yeah. But you can get a little hit of that from pretending.

EYZ: Stranger tells himself that he chose his vocation as atonement for his mother’s suicide. He let her down and now he wants to support other people in moments of need. But at the end, he reveals this is made up. It’s a literally narrative-shattering revelation, where the things that we believed as readers aren’t true either. It’s a really bold ending. How did you get there?

KT: I always knew that he was going to leave for California. And I think I had a shattering moment too when I realized the reason why. When I thought of the ending, I was like, “Oh, of course it has to be this way.” Because the whole story, as much as I know a lot of people want it to be about him and Lily or him and Darlene, it is just a story about Stranger. And his coming to terms with himself and accepting himself. And I’ve had people tell me, “Oh, why is this such a sad ending?” Actually, I think it is a really hopeful ending.

EYZ: He’s able to change.

KT: He’s able to let go of the narrative he had about punishing himself and look into the future. He wasn’t able to do that before because he wanted so much to matter to his mother, he wanted so much to atone for something that he never had a part to play in in the first place. I was talking to a friend, maybe two years ago, and he was talking about the horror of indifference from a parent. And I think that’s when it really clicked what it was that was going on with Stranger all along. 

EYZ: Which he tries to replicate, as often happens. 

KT: Yeah, exactly. And so I think that’s when the ending really clicked into place. And I was able to finish. 

EYZ: And I felt implicated as the reader, because Stranger kept saying, “It’s my fault she killed herself.” And eventually I was like, maybe? But it’s never a child’s fault that their parent killed herself.

KT: Yeah, that’s part of it too! The things that he says, the reasons to back it up, are pretty flimsy. I did want the reader to be like, Really? there must be something more, he must have done something really bad. But no, it’s just him trying to keep the reader at arm’s length. 

EYZ: What do you think the role of loneliness is in our lives? What can we learn from Stranger?

KT: Even though a lot of the book is about people running away from their loneliness, I do think that there is a place for it in our lives, as long as it’s a stillness. The ability to be with oneself. For the book, there’s a big way in which people reached out in order to assuage their loneliness, but not necessarily to the right people, always to these strangers, to drugs, to partying, to whatever it is, to make you feel a little bit less lonely. But at the end of the day, I think what Stranger realizes is that he isn’t able to make these people less lonely. And so it’s actually like, within oneself or more genuine connection that is necessary. And not just a quick fix.