What Would You Do With the Last 19 Minutes of Your Life? Vincent Yu on an Apocalypse that Fizzled

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. F. Scott Fitzgerald very famously said in My Lost City, which was a posthumously published essay, that there are no second acts in American lives. Of course, he couldn't have been more wrong. Today we're talking about second acts, in a story, a new novel out, a first novel by my guest, Vincent Yu. The book is called Seek Immediate Shelter, and I think one could fairly say it's a novel about second acts. Is that fair, Vincent?

00:01:13 Vincent Yu: Yes. Absolutely. Thank you so much, first of all, for having me on your show, Andrew. It's a pleasure. The galvanizing event of Seek Immediate Shelter is a ballistic missile alert that is ultimately sent in error. It takes its inspiration from an event that really happened in 2018 in Hawaii. And for those eighteen minutes after the alert is sent, the residents of the town of Beckett have to sort of deal with the belief that their lives are about to end. And when the all-clear comes through, then they have, as you mentioned, sort of a second act, a rebirth, if you will.

00:01:58 Andrew Keen: I always joke — it's not a very good joke — but if I knew my life was about to end, I would go to Kentucky Fried Chicken. But I don't think I would have time in eighteen minutes, because we'd have to leave the house and get the order, and I think Kentucky Fried Chicken takes a bit of time to get the order. What would you do, Vincent, if you knew your life was about to end?

00:02:19 Vincent Yu: I have a very boring answer, unfortunately, which is not to say that the characters in this book have boring responses. I think a lot of them are actually quite compelling. But for me, I would get on FaceTime. I would contact my parents, my younger sister, my partner. I would try to have us all in one final bit of communication. And then I would ensure that my 401(k) and all my money — I would ensure a proper beneficiary, because nobody —

00:02:53 Andrew Keen: You haven't done that already? You could —

00:02:57 Vincent Yu: No. That's what I would ensure. I would double-check, at least.

00:03:00 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I'm not sure whether my answer — I probably shouldn't say it publicly because my wife and kids will never speak to me again. So the premise of the novel is that if you know the world is about to end, it forces you to be honest about your life and about what is important and what isn't. Of course, you've got the old cliche: on your deathbed, no one's gonna worry if you do this or that. So we're supposed to be very honest when we know we're about to die. Is that the premise of this novel, Vincent — an excuse for people to be profoundly, painfully honest about their lives and what they want and don't want?

00:03:46 Vincent Yu: Yes. Absolutely. I will admit, like a lot of my work, this novel began as a short story, with that sort of central conceit: what would I be doing if I were about to die, and how selfish or how outlandish would I behave? I wrote a story in which a character responds to that, and it was satisfying, but it did not seem enough. It did not account for a wider range of responses, and it did not account for what I'd hoped would be sort of an ecosystem of different people responding in different ways and coming to terms with how those responses reverberated afterward. So there are characters in this book who I think respond with a bit more hesitation. It is fundamentally unlikely that a ballistic missile would be sent to this part of the country. It takes place in —

00:04:55 Andrew Keen: Massachusetts. Unless it was sent probably from Alabama or something.

00:04:59 Vincent Yu: Right. Exactly. So there are definitely — I wanted to include a wider breadth of responses, of characters. There are characters who are sort of naturally a bit more disbelieving, who don't really take the whole missile alert very seriously, but something else cataclysmic happens to them.

00:05:22 Andrew Keen: So would it be fair to say — in a way I introduced this work as a second act, but it's really a third act, because we have the first act of normal life, the second act when we all think we're gonna die, but the novel really takes place after we know that the missile alert was a mistake, that there wasn't actually — that part of Massachusetts was not about to be destroyed. So the main act, so to speak, in the novel is this third act.

00:05:55 Vincent Yu: Yes. Absolutely. It is the people having to come to terms with the way in which they behaved. And there are definitely characters in this novel who behave — I wouldn't say monstrously, but they behave in a way that will color the rest of their lives. I don't think it's a spoiler to note that I have one character, a mother who has ambivalent feelings toward her daughter, beneath which is sort of the substructure of love. But she has ambivalent feelings about how her daughter has lived her life. And when she gets that alert — I never make clear whether or not she really believes she is about to die, but she does use that alert as a way to get over the activation energy of saying something a bit cruel, a bit hurtful, that she would normally have kept under wraps.

00:07:03 Andrew Keen: Vincent, the novel takes place in an Asian American community in Massachusetts. Without falling into cultural traps and getting myself into trouble, would it be fair to say that Asian Americans tend to be perhaps a little more unspoken, perhaps even a little more repressed than other communities? And for you, this offers an opportunity to force members of the Asian American community to be more forthright.

00:07:35 Vincent Yu: I think that's a fair assumption to make. I'll be honest. This book began as a series of just characters without race. What I was looking to do first and foremost was to create a group of characters all within a similar kind of socioeconomic layer and also who are all just within physical proximity of this alert. It only sort of eventually occurred to me that these characters, if I wanted to write them more truthfully and with more insight, then they would have to be Asian American, just by virtue of the fact that I'm Asian American. I thought a lot about an essay by the poet Langston Hughes in which he describes how you can never escape being a Black poet if you are Black. Even if you want to write outside of race, it's something that's inherently a part of you, and it's inherently going to affect your work and affect the way people read your work. All of that being said, this book — yes, to get back to your original question, I think there is sort of an underlying current of quietness. There's an aspect of silent excellence, silent striving, of finding the most straightforward ways to achieve success, the American dream, which within that context is financial stability. But I think that's changing. I think a lot of our stories are changing. And by virtue of that, that stereotype, that idea, will change as well. A lot of the fiction written by Asian Americans of my generation and older focuses on the impact of recent immigration, and it focuses also on troubled relationships between the immigrant parent and the second-generation child. A lot of that is just by virtue of the fact that this is a relatively new country, and Asian Americans are a relatively new group within the country. We had the Chinese Exclusion Act, that was only repealed, I believe, in the forties, and America really only opened up for a lot of my ancestors later on in that century. And so a lot of our stories are still — I would say, I don't wanna use the word hamstrung — they are, in the way that you mentioned, Andrew, a little bit quiet, a little bit subdued, a little bit striving. And I personally do wanna push back on that. I wanna write stories about third, fourth-generation immigrants, people who are American.

00:11:00 Andrew Keen: Right. Third and fourth acts in American life. Novelists have a great deal of power. They have the power to invent their narratives, to determine plots, to see who is happy, who isn't, who lives and dies, who's made foolish and who isn't. Is there an element here — I wouldn't say necessarily cruelty, Vincent, but maybe some kind of revenge on the part of the novelist? You're forcing your characters into impossible situations. No one would want to be in that situation. Of course, no one would wanna be in a situation where they think they're about to die. And then to make it even worse, to find that they aren't about to die. So is there an element of cruelty here on the part of the novelist? I'm not necessarily suggesting that as a criticism, just an observation.

00:11:54 Vincent Yu: No. Not at all. I wouldn't say there's an aspect of cruelty. There is an aspect of pressure, and I feel that's necessary to create good, compelling fiction. Everything that I start writing begins as, basically, a situation. I actually have a background in biology. I got into fiction writing fairly late in life. I never took any writing courses. To date, I have not. I don't have any kind of advanced degree in fiction. And so I take a very scientific mindset to the way in which I write. A lot of these characters — I see them almost as if they're inoculated on various petri dishes, and the petri dishes are all put into this sort of pressure-cooker situation, that of a missile alert. So to get back to your idea of cruelty — no. I feel a profound sense of empathy for all my characters. A lot of people, in the process of my having written this book, have asked, are these characters based on people you know, or are they taken from real-life experiences in some way? And the answer is no. They're all me. Every single one.

00:13:20 Andrew Keen: Right. So maybe rather than use the word cruelty — and you pointed to this in your answer — a clinical quality. It's as if you're putting all these characters, probably yourself most of all, under the microscope.

00:13:37 Vincent Yu: Yes. Absolutely. And you need — I mean, you need a thesis. If you are going to put characters or anything under that kind of scrutiny and observation, there needs to be a set of experimental conditions. And that is the missile alert in this case.

00:14:02 Andrew Keen: And of course, one of the reasons why we all still read, or many of us still read, Fitzgerald — particularly Gatsby, but all his work — is he did a wonderful job putting people under the microscope. Didn't always look very good, but would you agree? And is that what makes Fitzgerald such a great American novelist, and why his comment on second acts is so kind of resonant?

00:14:30 Vincent Yu: Yes, I would agree. What makes Fitzgerald such a quintessentially American writer, and what makes him so indelible, is his character work. It is his capacity, not just in Gatsby, but in a lot of his short fiction, like Winter Dreams. A lot of it is characters with a very underlying fundamental humanity who are then put into conditions in which it's more difficult to exercise those things. In a lot of cases those conditions are self-imposed. A lot of his characters are alcoholics. They're bum parents.

00:15:26 Andrew Keen: As he was himself.

00:15:28 Vincent Yu: Absolutely. That son of a bitch. Right? He was absolutely a victim of that as well. But yes, his ability to seek grace, to seek love of his characters, is really — if we go back to Gatsby, he lives this kind of ostentatious, Roaring Twenties, new-money West Egg kind of life. But there's a reason why the book is narrated through the eyes of Nick, because Nick knows that — I think the quote is, "you're worth more than the whole lot put together."

00:16:08 Andrew Keen: Nick Carraway, the teller of the tale in Gatsby, the narrator.

00:16:17 Vincent Yu: Yes. Exactly.

00:16:18 Andrew Keen: So this is not, of course, throwing Fitzgerald onto you. I guess there's two ways that humans can come out of this — and two ways certainly that humans came out of it in Gatsby. Some look better under the microscope, others didn't. Gatsby looked pretty good, but certainly some of the others didn't. Tom and Daisy came out looking pretty awful. When you write a book like this, which tries to get to the core of how people are and how they respond to an unusual circumstance which reveals the way they really are — do you know what you're doing? When you wrote this novel, did you have an endpoint in mind, or do you allow it to play out? Did some of these characters in this book surprise you?

00:17:13 Vincent Yu: It is definitely the latter, and that is, I think, how my writing practice has evolved over time. I'm very much a follower of the E.L. Doctorow metaphor in which he describes writing as driving in the dark at night. You're on some kind of a twisty road, and you have your headlights on, and all you can see is the next ten feet, or whatever the throw distance is. But you follow that, and you trust that it will take you to your conclusion. And that is very much how I write. That's very much how I came to write this book. The order of the stories came at a later point during the writing process. After I had actually written the stories, putting them in an order that I felt would bring the reader in and also keep the reader's attention, and also gradually widen the scope of the book — to see different characters who are introduced early kind of pop back in, to find different locations that reemerge and become central — that took more planning. That was more of having to sit down and sketch out a plan.

00:18:36 Andrew Keen: This is a book, as I said earlier and you talked about, about an Asian American community in Massachusetts. But to what extent is it also just a broader book about America? Anytime an American novelist writes a contemporary book about life in America, it's inevitable that they are taking the temperature of this country. And in the first half of 2026, obviously America is in an unusual state. To what extent is this novel, Vincent, an attempt to put America itself under the microscope?

00:19:15 Vincent Yu: I think to an equal extent as it is a book about Asian Americans. As I mentioned, this book started out with characters who had no distinct ethnicity. In their responses and in their interconnectedness, I wanted to capture a small-town ethos more than I wanted to capture anything about a community that is in particular Asian American. I wanted a lot of these characters to almost happen to be this way, because I'm an Asian American writer, and I think it's my duty, and I think I can't help writing Asian American characters. But in a lot of ways, outside of their names, they don't act in particular ways or aren't defined in particular ways that might seem Asian American, at least according to existing tropes and stereotypes. I tried to include just a dusting of politics. I definitely did wanna keep this a human story, but at the end of the day, it's a false geopolitical event. And I wanted this to be set in a community that was largely liberal, left-leaning, well off. A couple times I mentioned this celebrity president, who is obviously a very —

00:20:55 Andrew Keen: Yeah, I can't guess who that is, Vincent.

00:20:57 Vincent Yu: Yeah. Right? It's a very unsettled —

00:21:02 Andrew Keen: Just so — without forcing you to generalize too much, what does America look like under the microscope, from your point of view, as a novelist in the mid-2020s?

00:21:19 Vincent Yu: Deeply fractured, deeply concerned, ideologically just at polar opposite poles. And at the moment, without any kind of redress, any kind of way to, I think, meet in the middle. I hate to be so cynical, but —

00:21:47 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure it's cynical. It's dark, but if it's true, then it's not cynical.

00:21:52 Vincent Yu: Yeah. I think that's also another big reason why I wrote this book. I wrote this book in 2022. I started writing it then.

00:22:05 Andrew Keen: So it's a COVID book in part.

00:22:08 Vincent Yu: Yes. Yes. You know, I've been editing and tweaking since then, but it was definitely a personal response to a lot of cynicism, a lot of gloom that I myself felt about this country, which I think — these feelings have only really increased.

00:22:34 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So is there another sort of interpretation here? The novel is built on the idea of a ballistic missile threat — seek immediate shelter, this is not a drill — and of course it turns out not to be real. But maybe there's another interpretation, Vincent: that the ballistic missile has hit, and none of us have even noticed it.

00:23:02 Vincent Yu: That's fantastic. That is very apt. It's not something I ever considered, but it does seem that way. It seems that even before the alert happens and even before these characters react, there is very much a sense that this is happening in the wake of something — even before the alert. I do wanna, if possible, kinda go back to my statement about my general kind of cynicism. I wrote this book also as an attempt at hope. Going all the way back to Tocqueville's writings, the United States has always been a country in which community is often formed from the smallest units. And getting any kind of accord between those units — in this instance, small towns — is going to be extraordinarily difficult. But I do feel as if within these smaller units, the American ethos is one of selflessness. I think it's one of neighborliness. I think it's one of stepping up and doing what you feel is the right thing. It is just when you apply these individual units and you take into account the sprawl of this country, and just geographically how our political beliefs and our ideals can fracture across such great distances. But I do think that at its core, America is a nation built on small, tight-knit, empathetic communities.

00:25:11 Andrew Keen: So then you're the opposite of cynical. You're idealistic in how —

00:25:15 Vincent Yu: I think it can be a bit of both. I have no answer, no — I can't even venture an idea for how we as a nation of small communities can get together and try to find common ground.

00:25:32 Andrew Keen: Could one come to an optimistic conclusion from the fact that you wrote this book? Your day job is in publishing. You're in sales. So you're under no illusion about first-time novels. They're not gonna make you rich. They're probably not gonna make you famous. They'll get you on this show, but unlikely to get on Colbert. Is there an element of selflessness about writing this kind of book? You said you started in 2022. I'm guessing it took an enormous amount of time. You've already won some awards as a writer, so you clearly like writing. But as you say, you've never had any formal training. Is this, in an odd way, proof of the decency of America — that guys like you wanna sit down and write novels?

00:26:17 Vincent Yu: That's a very flattering conclusion to draw. I cannot say how I came to writing or why I write, or why I wrote this book in particular, other than that I can't help it. I cannot help not writing. In ways it's a passion, but it's also a compulsion. I'd go so far as to say it's a bit of an addiction. There are days, if I don't write, there is that feeling of antsiness, of emptiness, of depression that I think follows people who have more straightforward addictions. And so I'd love to consider this a work of selflessness, as opposed to an act of futility, which I also think it is.

00:27:26 Andrew Keen: Well, that's the existential philosophy of Camus, the Sisyphean quality, which he, of course, popularized after the Second World War.

00:27:41 Vincent Yu: Mhmm.

00:27:43 Andrew Keen: Another way — I guess I'm just trying to think creatively here. You're in the publishing business, so this story of a ballistic missile threat inbound, seek immediate shelter, this is not a drill — one could extend that to AI and the impact that many people in publishing, writers, critics, the general public, think about AI. I know this is not a book about AI, but what do you make of the threat of AI? Do you think that some people who are warning that this is gonna destroy not just the publishing business, but an entire civilization — do you think they may have a point?

00:28:30 Vincent Yu: I think that AI is an existential threat to many, many industries, to many entities. And I think chief among those is publishing, or any industry that deals with the written word. That being said, I am an optimist in this sense. Maybe because — I wouldn't be writing, I wouldn't be able to continue my addiction with writing if I were a pessimist. But I think the reading public already sees AI as something of — anything written with AI to have something of a scarlet letter attached to it. And I think the reading public is still hungry for stories that are complex, that are difficult, that only humans can write. And I think also that the industry — though we can call it a singular entity, the industry — it is comprised of hundreds of thousands of very, very skilled professionals. The process of publishing a book requires not just a manuscript, as you know, Andrew. I'm sure you've done it. It requires an agent. It requires querying an agent. It requires then an agent going out on submission to editors, then it requires the editor to convince the editorial board, then there are copy editors, developmental editors. It passes through a lot of human hands, and I have faith in those processes. I have faith in those proverbial hands in continuing a literary tradition.

00:30:23 Andrew Keen: Did you use AI at all in this book?

00:30:26 Vincent Yu: No. I did not.

00:30:28 Andrew Keen: I'm not sure how much you played around with Anthropic's Claude, or ChatGPT. But how close do you think AI is now to writing this kind of novel — sophisticated and all-too-human novel?

00:30:44 Vincent Yu: I've been lucky enough not to have needed to use any of these tools, and also maybe perhaps lucky enough not to have been curious enough about them to utilize them. I don't think AI is anywhere close. As with everything, there are different genres, there are different modes of stories, and some of these genres definitely do hew to more established rubrics. The outlines are more uniform, and I think those are in danger of being co-opted by some kind of artificial intelligence. At the moment, I know that AI writing has some very peculiar cadences that are very easy to pick up on. I don't doubt that that portion will evolve. But at the same time, I think that will make more discerning consumers. I really do believe that. With this increased ability to come up with novel plots, or to riff on existing plots rather, I think it might sort of help — lead the general readership to recognize tropes, to value newer, fresher stories and forms of writing.

00:32:37 Andrew Keen: However the optimist — America went through its own missile crisis in 1962, of course, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Your book is an attempt to, I think, get some artistic meaning and moral significance out of a ballistic missile threat that wasn't for real. But it seems as if, in a way, the Cuban Missile Crisis wasn't a bad thing for America to go through. It forced the nation to reevaluate itself. We haven't really had one since. Do you think there's some truth to that? Do you think this kind of existential experience might be good for America? In a broader sense, maybe even living through Trump or COVID might not be such a bad thing for America?

00:33:29 Vincent Yu: Potentially. I'll be honest with you, Andrew. I don't know if I feel qualified to say that about the country as a whole. I do think that —

00:33:37 Andrew Keen: Well, nor am I. So you have as much authority as I do.

00:33:41 Vincent Yu: I —

00:33:43 Andrew Keen: No less than anyone else.

00:33:46 Vincent Yu: Fair. Yes. But as a novelist, I really try to deal with character. And I think at the level of an individual, yes, absolutely. I think something like an existential threat like that, or just any kind of crucible which forces you to take into account the truly meaningful parts of your life, or the things that you really most cannot bear to part with — I do think that those things can be helpful in the long run.

00:34:27 Andrew Keen: The book's already getting rave reviews, although I'm sure there were many times during the writing where you regretted starting. And you said you're addicted to writing, but it's often extremely painful. Finally, Vincent, what do you know now about writing novels, and indeed about America and the Asian American community that you're from, that you didn't know before you started this book?

00:34:57 Vincent Yu: I'm gonna end on a hopeful note, I think.

00:35:01 Andrew Keen: You're defiantly hopeful, Vincent.

00:35:03 Vincent Yu: Yes.

00:35:04 Andrew Keen: Which is a very good thing.

00:35:07 Vincent Yu: I'm going to say that what I know now is that, at the most basic level, there's an audience for new fiction. There's an audience for fiction that challenges and perhaps upsets. I live in Brooklyn. I work in New York City. I will admit that I don't have a very strong connection to other parts of the country. But from what I see, from my peers, from my friends, from my colleagues, I do think that there is a strain of resistance. I think that there is still optimism, or if not optimism, at least something of a defiance, of a desire — after these next two years, or even before then — a desire to turn the page, to at least lay the groundwork for a society of greater empathy and a willingness to help those who are less fortunate.

00:36:32 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. A very altruistic, talented young writer, Vincent Yu. It's his first novel, Seek Immediate Shelter. He's already won some awards, the Ploughshares Award for his short-form writing. The book is out. I think it's gonna be one of the major new novels of the year. Seek Immediate Shelter — wonderful premise of a book. Forces us all to go onto the couch, which I think I've done with Vincent. Please, don't be offended, Vincent, by some of my more personal questions. You've been a good sport. Thank you so much.

00:37:13 Vincent Yu: Thank you.