Luke Liu

Q: Please introduce yourself! Share your name, pronouns, and something fun, interesting, curious, or important (take your pick) about yourself that you would like your audience to know.

A: I’m Luke Liu, he/him. I’m a high school junior in Shanghai, raised in the mountain coast of Wenzhou where chair-shaped tombs rise across the hills and taught me early how memory carves itself into the land. Those structures, solemn and overwhelming, stirred concern as well as awe and led me to draft proposals on burial reform that later entered government work. In 2024 I carried another legacy when I became the youngest ritual leader of the six-hundred-year-old Taigong Festival, guiding thirty thousand people through a ceremony of devotion and remembrance. From these crossings of ritual, environment, and ancestry grew my book that expands to the wider landscape of Han funeral customs, ancestral rites, geomancy, and funeral practice.

Q: What genre or format do you write in? (for example: romance, fantasy, short stories, poetry, etc.)

A: Narrative nonfiction that leans on ethnography and memoir. I care about sentences that hold both data and breath.

Q: Who do you write for? Who is your audience, and are you seeking to reach a particular type of reader with your work? Why?

A: I write for curious readers who want to step inside a village without feeling like visitors. Students, scholars, and families abroad will find echoes of their own memories here. The book is about culture, yet also a long gaze across generations. In a world that changes quickly, it asks how we face death and how we hold on to home. Readers who care for Chinese culture, folk belief, anthropology, or sustainability will find both intimacy and scale in these pages.

Q: When did you decide you wanted to write?

A: I began in primary school, when a teacher assigned us to write short essays. Each time I searched my own memory it felt like massaging the scalp, a quiet pressure that made hidden thoughts surface. Writing showed me how quickly time passes, and in that speed I found real joy.

Q: What got you interested in the world of writing originally?

A: Names were disappearing. A family story paused mid sentence when the elder grew tired. Writing felt like carrying water from that well before it dried. I kept returning because the pages kept giving back.

Q: There are so many possible avenues to take. Why write?

A: Writing lets me walk with people long after the meeting ends. It also lets a reader in another city stand at the same tomb and feel the same wind. I hope the work moves carefully through communities and leaves them a little stronger.

Q: Similarly, why pursue being an indie author? What is your goal?

A: Independence lets local voices guide structure and tone. I can show the long footnotes of a field day, the contradictions inside a single ritual, the hesitation before a prayer begins. My goal is simple. Tell it honestly, share profits with community partners

Q: What do you do to hone your craft?

A: I read widely, especially works on culture, and I listen to many interviews to hear how others tell their stories. I write by hand to slow down my thoughts. Over time, these small practices have made my writing feel more grounded.

Q: What tricks do you use to get out of writer’s block?

A: Walk uphill without headphones. Ask a sharper question and answer it with a scene, not an opinion. If that fails, go return.

Q: Would you mind telling us about your writing process?

A: Field first. I travel to villages, watch, listen, and photograph sites with permission. I keep a ritual log for each visit with time, weather, who spoke, and what offerings burned. Then I draft scenes, map themes on index cards, and build chapters that move from practice to meaning. Community readers review sensitive sections before I lock anything.

Q: Do you have any other writing “hacks” that other writers might benefit from?

A: Date every paragraph while drafting so you can trace your thinking. Keep a cuts file so edits feel like relocation rather than loss.

Q: Where do you get your inspiration?

A: My inspiration rises from the hills where I was born. At first I watched the chair-shaped tombs scatter across the slopes, bright white against the green, and I wondered why people built them. That curiosity sent me into archives, into villages, into long talks with elders who still remember the older ways. From there the path widened. Burial rites, second burials, festival fires, prayers for wandering souls, the logic of geomancy and the pressure of ecology, just all of these became part of the story. I write to to understand how memory can live in changing ground.

Q: Would you like to share anything about your current work in progress?

A: My current work just came out on Amazon. It is Death Rituals and Belief Systems among the Han Chinese in Southeastern China, a study that began with the tombs of my hometown and grew into a wider look at Han funeral customs, ritual, and ecology. You can find it here: Amazon link.

Q: Do you consider yourself a minority? If so, would you be willing to share the ways in which you are?

A: I come from a mountain county and study in a megacity. I often stand between dialect and standard speech, village time and school time. The in between shapes me.

Q: Does this impact what you write about? If so, why and how?

A: Yes. I pay attention to border places and border people.

Q: What do you wish you found more of in books today? Why?

A: Fewer summaries, more scenes. Maybe books that trust readers to hold complexity without rushing to simplify

Q: What does representation in literature mean to you? Is it important to you? How so?

A: Many rooms under one roof. Every room with its own light and furniture. When readers see their rituals treated with care, they stand taller. When others enter those rooms with humility, communities feel heard

Q: How do you think representation in literature affects culture? Does it?

A: Stories tune our sense of what deserves attention. A respectful portrait can steady a practice that was losing ground. A lazy page can harm a family’s memory. Culture bends toward the stories we repeat.

Q: Does representation play a role in what or how you write? Please talk about why or why not.

A: Absolutely. I write with villagers rather than only about them. Names and places appear with permission. Fees for community consultants are budgeted from the start.

Q: What advice would you give to new writers?

A: Build a daily practice that fits your life!

Q: What do you wish someone had told you when you were finding your path?

A: Publish slowly. Invite critique from people who know the world you are describing.

Q: Where can readers find your work? Please share links and pertinent information.

A: Kindle Edition under the title Death Rituals and Belief Systems among the Han Chinese in Southeastern China. Search my name Luke Liu. You can also find it directly on Amazon here. If you are in a library network and want a copy for community programs, message me and I will help.

Q: What would you like to share or say to the Underground Bookshelf audience that hasn’t already been brought up?

A: I want to thank the audience for caring about stories that come from small places. My book began with tombs on the hills of Wenzhou, yet the questions belong to everyone: how do we face death, and how do we keep the memory of home alive. If these pages can spark even one conversation in your own family, I will be grateful.

Q: Thank you for sharing your thoughts, today. Any final words?

A: May our living keep faith with place and one another. I am grateful for every reader and every careful question.

About the Author

Luke Liu is a high school junior in Shanghai, originally from Wenzhou. He began journaling in fifth grade, and what started as a quiet ritual of remembering grew into a deep engagement with memoir and nonfiction. After moving to Shanghai alone for high school, his writing turned inward, shaped by distance and memory. His essay, In the Space Where a Name Was Erased, asks what it means to belong to a ritual that was not made for you. The questions led him to co-found the Taigong Ji Youth Initiative, a national project linking 28 ancestral halls to update rituals, preserve stories, and invite new ways of belonging. More than a heritage NGO, it is a response to the disorientation many young people feel between globalized modernity and local memory. Luke also serves as Deputy Secretary-General of the Liu Ji Cultural Institute, where he works on burial reform and sustainable land use in southeastern China. In his free time, he plays the Guqin, an ancient Chinese instrument, and tries, with limited success, to convince his dog Gutou that shoelaces are not prey.