House of Staunton Interviews Author Kyla Zhao

May Li is all set to represent her middle school at the national chess tournament, but as the stakes get higher, she’s not sure she can trust her instincts. Performance anxiety creeps in, and her doubts grow. Is she really as good as she thinks she is? Can she lead the chess team? And hardest of all, can she prove herself without losing her love of the game? These are themes Kyla Zhao's latest book deals with.

I had the great pleasure of sitting down to talk with Kyla Zhao, author of May the Best Player Win. This is her third novel and first foray into middle-grade fiction. Described as a family-friendly version of The Queen's Gambit, May the Best Player Win explores gender stereotypes and the pressure to succeed through the eyes of a young chess player, May Li.

A Conversation with Kyla Zhao

This interview with Kyla Zhao has been edited for length and clarity.

Ratcliffe: What inspired you to write a novel about a middle school chess player?

Zhao: I started playing chess when I was six. For context, I was born and grew up in Singapore. I played scholastically throughout elementary and middle school in Singapore, and I was also selected for the National Junior Squad. Towards the end of middle school, my motivation and my passion for chess began to decline for a variety of reasons.

First, I became more aware of how female chess players were perceived. I remember, when I was 11, I was at a co-ed tournament. I overheard my next round opponent talking to his friend, saying, “Oh, next round I'm playing against this person called Kyla Zhao.” His friend said, “Oh, you'll be fine! It's a girl.”

Small moments like that were very jarring realizations for me. I became less motivated to practice chess, or to even play chess. It's like, “Why am I trying so hard, when by default I'm not going to be as good as the boy next to me?”

Also, there were not that many female chess players around, and I really enjoyed the social component of chess. I like being with my friends when I play. As more and more of my friends dropped chess, I just didn't have that sense of social fulfillment anymore.

I felt increasingly isolated, and I didn’t feel like I really belonged in this space. And so that was that. After middle school, I stopped playing competitively. I dropped out of the competitive circuit.

Fast forward a few years, and it's the middle of the pandemic in 2020. I was in my third year at Stanford University, and online chess became really popular during lockdown. All of my college friends were picking up chess, and it hit me that none of them know I play. I started reminiscing about all my years playing chess, wondering how far could I have gone if I had continued? This led to the bigger question of, “Why didn't I continue?” Those two questions were really the genesis for this book.

Ratcliffe: I felt like this was a universal story for anyone with a passion who decides to pursue it competitively. What do you think makes chess such a good vehicle for these kinds of universal stories about our joy in our hobbies, and what can happen when we turn that into a competition?

Zhao: I think in chess more than anything else, it's really easy for people to start focusing more on the competition aspect of it than on the enjoyment of the game itself. For instance, I write books, but there is no objective way to measure me against another writer. There's no sense of winning or losing in writing. With chess, there's a very clearly defined winner and loser.

For a young child, being in that sort of environment where you either have to win or lose can instill the mindset that you have to win. I found myself falling into that mindset, and after a while I wasn't thinking about winning; I was focused more on not losing.

When I was younger, my playing style was quite aggressive. I was more of an attacking player. Once I became more fearful of losing, I began playing a lot more conservatively. I didn't really feel like I was showing my true self on the chessboard anymore.

Ratcliffe: You've talked about the difficulty in keeping your joy when you feel compelled to win. I wrote down “chess tunnel vision.” Can you expand on that and what you think a healthier relationship with chess is?

Zhao: I think tunnel vision is a really good way of thinking about it, because May gets really into her own head. It feels like chess is consuming her whole life. When something takes over your whole life, it's very tempting to start equating self-worth to how well you do in that activity.

I think a way to develop a healthy relationship with something is to open up to people and explore different things with them. Remind yourself that the world is so much bigger than just this activity, and you, as a person, are so much more than your achievements in this particular activity.

For instance, even within chess, Bobby Fisher was the only American world champion. He became rather mentally unstable, for lack of a better word, because his whole life was completely consumed by chess.

We are starting to see now, among the younger generations, people are a lot more active in different things. They're not just playing chess, they do sports, they do entertainment. I think that's a really good way of keeping ourselves balanced.

Ratcliffe: You captured the physical sensation of being really stressed out particularly well. How did you develop that aspect of May’s story?

Zhao: Well, very sadly, a lot of that was drawn from personal experience. Fifteen years later, I still remember how it feels to sit down a chess board and feel like my whole body is tight and clammy. I remember feeling like my chest is so tight that I can't even breathe, and every breath feels like forcing something out, so a lot of it was drawn from personal experience.

Ratcliffe: I've been there, too, so that was really relatable for me.

Ratcliffe: May’s parents are both very supportive, but they also have high expectations. Can you talk a little bit about striking the balance between May not wanting to let her parents down, and May needing to be honest with them about how she's feeling?

Zhao: I think, like you said, it's really about honesty and open communication. Her parents are supportive, but I can also see how their support might put even more pressure on May. It's like, “My parents are so supportive, I can’t let them down.”

From the parents’ perspective, they are supportive of May's chess career, because they think that that's what she wants. They are willing to do whatever it takes to support their child's dreams. But it comes across as, “Oh, my parents are so happy when I do well, maybe it's just because I'm doing well.” This disconnect between the parents and a child is really common and very universal.

Ratcliffe: May’s parents--the love language in their family seems to be food.

Zhao: Yeah, Absolutely.

Ratcliffe: I love the descriptions of food. It reminded me of reading Amy Tan, where so much of the cultural environment is embodied by food. Talk a little about the food in the novel and if there’s a special place in your heart for the items you chose?

Zhao: Not to generalize, but I do feel like in Chinese culture, adults or the older generations tend to show their love with food. They're not as likely to come out and very explicitly say, “I love you.”  The way they convey it is to bring you good food. That was kind of the culture I grew up in, and that's what I wanted to convey in this book.

Also, it was during the pandemic. None of us could go out and eat. I was surviving on frozen pasta. A large part of the food scenes in this book was their communal nature, but I was living alone. In a way, I was living vicariously through my characters. It was quite torturous, because I was writing about all these good foods.

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Ratcliffe: May refers to pomelo as “grapefruit’s fun uncle,” and I love the phrasing of that. Was that a phrase that you already knew? Or is that something you made up?

Zhao: I think I made that up. I was arguing with my American friend one day, and they were convinced that grapefruit and pomelo are the same thing. We went off in a long tangent about that. I should go tell them about this!

Ratcliffe: Tell them they made your book, even if obliquely!

Ratcliffe: Let's talk a little bit more about you and your career so far.

Zhao: Like I said earlier, I was born and grew up in Singapore, and then I moved to California to attend Stanford University. I graduated in 2021 with a Master's in Communications and a Bachelor's in Psychology.

I think my love for psychology really came from playing chess. Even from a young age, whenever I was sitting down at a board across from someone else, it felt like the two of us are in our own little bubble. You get so attuned to the other person, their little micro-expressions, even their breathing pace, and you begin to pick up a lot about their personality as well.

I think that there are two different camps of chess players. There's one group that believes in playing the objectively best move in any situation. I fall into the other camp, which is more psychology-based. You try to understand your opponent's psychology. Then you try to play the move that would be most difficult for them, even if might not objectively be the best move.

A lot of chess is about figuring out your opponent's psychology and finding ways to complicate things. That's why, many, many years later in college, I chose to study psychology. Now I work in Silicon Valley, in a tech industry, and I write books on the side.

Ratcliffe: In other interviews, you’ve talked about being Singaporean, and how you feel it’s important to represent AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) characters in your novels. Can you share how you strike a balance to include diverse characters while making it seem organic to the story?

Zhao: Yeah, I think for me, representation is really about including characters of that background. They will have their own quirks, their own characteristics, their own preferences and habits. I think when it comes to Asian representation, it's important for me for readers, especially younger readers, to see characters in the media that they can identify with and relate to. That helps them realize they are also capable of achieving all these things.

Growing up, I felt like in all the media I consumed, the main character was always some girl with blonde hair and blue eyes. I felt like, for the longest time, only those characters could be the main characters. In the shows, Asians like myself were always the nerds on the sidelines. In a way, I thought maybe that was all we could achieve. I'm glad it's changing now! Asian characters can also be main characters. They can be superheroes like Shang-Chi. They can really be anything they put their mind to.

Ratcliffe: Middle-grade novels are set in late elementary or middle school. What did you find enjoyable about it being in middle school, and what was challenging for you?

Zhao: This is my third published novel, and I would say that this was much harder to write. I started writing this when I was already an adult in November 2020. It was during the Presidential election, and I remember feeling so cynical and jaded when I watched the candidates quarreling on television and behaving in a way that would get them sent to detention.

I had to write a book that was meant to be full of youthful vibrance and innocence. So, in a way it was hard to capture that voice. I also had to explore some very heavy topics like gender imbalances and performance anxiety, but do it in a way that would be understandable and engaging for a younger audience without oversimplifying things. That was a tricky balance I had to navigate myself towards.

The enjoyable part was that it was something so different! It almost felt like traveling back in time. In a way, it was like I was rediscovering the magic of chess through May Li’s eyes. I remembered how much I used to love chess and how excited I was whenever I could play a really good game or discover a really aggressive tactic.

Ratcliffe: I don't want to spoil anything about the book, because I think people should read it, but there's a storyline through the book about taking risks. Can you tell me in your own words what you wanted to tell middle schoolers about taking risks?

Zhao: I would want the message to be to try new things, even if they might not work out.

Growing up, from a very young age, I was instilled with the mindset that something is only worth doing if you can get a tangible award for it—a certificate or trophy, or some sort of recognition. But…I think it is important to try and do things even when there is no promise of recognition. Do something purely for the sake of it, take that risk, even if it might not pay off.

Life would be a lot less vibrant, I think, if we were to only stick with things that are not risky or things that we already know we would be good at. And like, you know, I think we were put on this earth so that we could try different things.

Ratcliffe: One last question, speaking to the chess community specifically, what would you like to add?

Zhao: Even though the book stars a female chess player, I think it is very important for boys and men to read it. I think it's important for girls to be able to stand up and speak up for themselves. At the same time, I don't think we should be put in a situation where we have to stand up and speak up for ourselves. I think it is important for all genders to understand the implicit and explicit gender biases that we might hold. We can actively try to unpack those and make them a thing of the past.

Talking to a lot of other chess players, especially chess coaches and female chess players, they’ve observed that this phenomenon has not faded away at all. I think we still have so much work to do. I hope that my book can play a small part in raising awareness about this.

Ratcliffe: Thank you so much for your time talking with me.

Zhao: Thank you. This was the highlight of my day!

Learn More About Kyla Zhao and Her Work

Kyla Zhao’s book, May the Best Player Win, is currently available in hardcover from House of Staunton. If you would like to know more about the author and her books for adults, check out her website: Kyla Zhao.

Kyla Zhao graduated from Stanford University in 2021 and is now an author living in Silicon Valley. She competed in scholastic chess tournaments for many years and was selected for her country's national junior squad. For her writing, she's been selected as a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and awarded a Certificate of Recognition by the California State Assembly. Her books have been featured by CBS, NBC, Good Morning America, Vogue, Buzzfeed, and more.

Praise for May the Best Player Win:

IM Carissa Yip, the current US Women's Chess Champion, called May the Best Player Win: "A game-changer for readers of all ages, regardless of whether you play chess! This book will have you inspired to conquer your next match in life." 

"A great read for almost any age group! It offers the opportunity to discuss critical issues such as gender and culture... [I] look forward to more books like this by the author!” —Jerry Nash, Chairman of International Chess Federation’s (FIDE) Chess in Education Commission