ARTIST
PROFILE

IN

According to Lillian Li, 
University of Michigan MFA 
and author of “Number One 
Chinese Restaurant” (2018), 
the 
success 
of 
Chinese 
restaurants in America is 
the best-kept secret in the 
business. Following the Gold 
Rush and the completion 
of 
the 
Transcontinental 
Railroad, 
Chinese 
immigrants were blacklisted 
from 
most 
industries 
by 
white workers who feared 
they would drive wages down 
and were confined to the 
“women’s work” 
of 
laundry 
and 
cooking. 
Many 
of 
the 
original owners 
of 
Chinese 
restaurants had 
no 
culinary 
training 
and 
could 
only 
estimate 
the 
flavors of their 
homeland, 
making 
them 
sweeter, saltier 
and 
tangier 
when 
they 
realized 
that 
American 
palates 
preferred 
bold 
flavors. In an interview with 
The Daily, Li pointed out that 
“Now there are more Chinese 
restaurants in America than 
McDonalds. It’s actually one 
of the most inspiring stories 
of entrepreneurial underdog-
ship, and it’s crazy that most 
people don’t know it. America 
loves the underdog, but they 
don’t like the underdog when 
it has a foreign face.”
“Number 
One 
Chinese 
Restaurant” 
is 
a 
dark 
family epic in the tradition 
of 
two 
other 
University 
MFAs, Celeste Ng (“Little 
Fires 
Everywhere” 
and 
“Everything I Never Told 
You”) 
and 
Jesmyn 
Ward 
(“Sing, 
Unburied, 
Sing” 
and “Salvage the Bones”). 
The 
novel 
follows 
three 
generations of the highly-
dysfunctional 
Han 
family 
and 
their 
employees 
at 
the Beijing Duck House, a 
thriving Chinese restaurant 
in the D.C. metro area, as 
they attempt to reconcile 
their 
competing 
visions 
of 
business 
success 
with 
their 
tangled 
personal 
relationships. 
When 
a 
mysterious fire razes the 
Duck House, this ensemble 
cast of characters is forced 
to 
confront 
the 
tensions 
that have simmered beneath 
the surface for years, and 
to choose where their first 
loyalties lie: to family, to 
ambition, to integrity or to 
survival.
The novel is loosely based 
on 
Li’s 
own 
experience 
working 
in 
a 
Chinese 
restaurant, a job so strenuous 
that she left after only four 

weeks. Li said, “It gave me 
a look into the emotional 
difficulties of a service job, 
particularly a service job 
where 
you’re 
working 
in 
a Chinese restaurant and 
have a Chinese face. There’s 
an extra level of alienation 
and 
dehumanization 
that 
happens with the customers 
to the servers. It made me 
wonder what it would have 
been like if I had been in that 
space for longer than four 
weeks, if I hadn’t had the 
opportunity to leave.” This 
notion of being trapped — by 
a toxic work environment, 
by 
family 
obligation 
and 
by 
the 
characters’ 
own 
insurmountable 
flaws 
— 
resonates 
throughout 
the 
novel 
in 
a 
way 
that 
steadfastly 
resists 
sentimentality 
or idealization. 
Li’s worldview 
flirts 
with 
pessimism but 
never 
steps 
fully over that 
line, 
landing 
instead 
on 
a 
sometimes 
grim, 
often 
funny 
and 
always sharply 
observed realism. She said, 
“I think it’s a worldview that 
is interested in the darker 
side of human connection 
and 
intimacy, 
but 
also 
understands that you have 
to have some moments of joy 
and grace, even within that 
darkness.”
In 
Li’s 
novel, 
these 
“moments of grace” tend to be 
rooted in love, vulnerability 
and 
self-sacrifice, 
while 
darkness 
manifests 
in 
the desire for 
wealth, prestige 
and 
power, 
embodied most 
clearly in the 
nefarious, 
Godfather-
esque figure of 
Uncle Pang. In 
a twist on the 
Faust 
legend, 
Jimmy 
Han, 
owner 
of 
the 
Duck 
House, 
must 
decide 
between selling 
his soul to Pang 
in 
exchange 
for 
fulfilled 
ambition 
and 
freeing 
his 
family at last 
from the mobster’s clutches. 
For Li, this kind of moral 
arithmetic is typical of the 
way business and ambition 
require people to rearrange 
their 
value 
systems. 
She 
is 
suspicious 
of 
highly 
profitable 
businesses 
in 
general, 
and 
her 
novel 
functions as a twist on the 
American Dream narrative, a 
national myth that positions 
economic 
success 
as 
the 

key to true belonging and 
respect. Li said, “I think 
the American Dream is an 
incomplete narrative. It’s all 
about grand success for your 
life, that you can end with 
much more than you started 
with. And I think that that 
can only happen if there is 
some kind of original sin. If 
you trace any success story 
far enough back you will 
see a real crime. Success 
basically 
means 
that 
you 
have more resources than 
your neighbor, so how did 
you 
get 
those 
resources? 
And how did you get so many 
more resources than your 
neighbor did? But those little 
crimes are very normalized 
in our society.”
Li’s 
work 
also 
speaks 
eloquently to the ways these 
calculations 
of 
success 
change across generations. 
For the first generation of 
Duck House owners, success 
can be measured in purely 
economic terms, while their 
sons realize that no amount 
of money can buy them the 
respect and prestige that 
they truly desire. Li said, “I 
was trying to speak to this 
idea that for most groups 
of people, no matter how 
much money you have, you 
still can’t buy your way into 
influence. 
Because 
money 
has entered the bloodstream 
of our society so much, it 
seems to be the only way to 
get the universal things that 
people want: to be desired, to 
be attractive, to be respected, 
to have dignity. What this 
book says is that money can’t 
buy everything, but there is a 
reason why we think it can.”
Li’s distrust of profit as 
the 
primary 
measure 
of 
success expands into her 
own experience 
with 
the 
publishing 
industry, as an 
author and as 
a 
bookseller 
at 
the 
cult-
favorite 
bookstore 
Literati. Li has 
no 
desire 
to 
make 
writing 
her main source 
of income, and 
her respect for 
the publishing 
industry comes 
precisely from 
the things that 
decrease 
its 
profitability. 
Li said, “What 
I 
love 
about 
the publishing 
industry is that they are 
uniquely bad at business. 
Bookstores can return any 
books they don’t sell. There’s 
no 
formula. 
Nobody 
can 
predict what book is going 
to sell well. It kind of defies 
a lot of attempts to make it a 
really profitable, smoothly-
running business machine. 
You can be bad at business 
and still be successful, and 
that’s really heartening!”
ALEC COHEN / MICHIGAN DAILY

ALICE LIU / MICHIGAN DAILY
Lillian Li on publishing 
and her role in business

English, Business & arts

“My job is all about how do we get 
people to move,” Marcus Collins, 
the chief consumer connections 
officer at the advertising agency 
Doner Company, said. “That is, how 
do we leverage what we know of the 
behavioral sciences, the evolving 
media landscape and a close 
proximity to culture in an effort to 
get people to adopt behavior.”
In addition to working for 
Doner, Collins is an intermittent 
marketing lecturer at the Ross 
School of Business. Collins started 
as a musician before entering the 
business world and has collaborated 
on 
marketing 
with 
dominant 
cultural forces like Beyoncé and 
iTunes. This unique background 
gives him critical insight into the 
crossover between business and the 
arts, and how to go about knocking 
down the partition that consistently 
separates the two.
In 
a 
sit-down 
conversation 
with Collins, we touched on 
the polarization of the arts and 
business, specifically within higher 
education: 
“There’s 
a 
certain 
pragmatism to business, I mean 
the business school, it’s a practice 
school.” Collins elaborated on the 
natural inclination to discount the 
arts due to its theoretical nature, 
with a recurring theme of “art for 
the sake of the body of knowledge 
that we amass.” However, Collins 
shifted to note how critical it is for the 
arts and business to collide. “When 
we look at art as a manifestation of 
culture, it’s completely different,” 
he said. Collins referenced Emile 
Durkheim, a father of sociology, 
when he defined culture as “the 
system by which beliefs, values, 
communication and artifacts are 
adopted by a populace of people.” 
He noted that “when the culture 
moves, we move in concert. That is, 
the people who align to the culture, 
they act in solidarity with the group 
of people.” In simple terms, it moves 
as so: Who do businesses want to 
influence? People. What influences 
people? Culture. And the arts, well, 
they play a ridiculously large part in 
culture.
For 
English 
and 
Business 
students, 
like 
myself, 
who 
consistently feel like oil and water, 
Collins established a clear mix of 
the two. When we view art as a 
manifestation of culture which 
dictates human behavior, it becomes 
extremely practical and business-
like to be in close proximity to 
the arts. Collins highlighted this 
relationship when he discussed how 
culture, and consequently the arts, 
is used to develop strong marketing 
tactics. He described art as “a lever 
that you pull from a pragmatic 
perspective of going to market, of 
being a business person.” Collins 
reiterates art as quintessential to 
human behavior: “What we feel 
drives what we do. Art is evocative 
that way, it stimulates particular 
emotions, 
which 
stimulate 
particular behavioral outcomes.” 
In this way, business cannot be 
without the arts. How humans 
exchange and transact with one 
another is so closely related to not 
just culture, but to how we feel, 
which largely comes from artistic 
influences.
Collins masterfully put this into 
perspective, using my own writing 
as an example to draw from. “We 
discount art on a theoretical level, 
we say, ‘this is subjective or this 
has nothing to do with commerce.’ 
Like you writing an essay, what does 
that have to do with commerce? 
But when your essay becomes the 
manifesto for a populace of people 

and their culture, now you as an 
author of said prose, are really 
powerful.” 
Collins 
emphasized 
that “culture is the vehicle by 
which 
art 
becomes 
tangible.” 
This operationalization of art is 
wildly powerful for businesses. Art 
allows them to connect with their 
consumers and develop the genuine 
relationships necessary for the 
success of a firm.
This, however, suggests the other 
inevitable link between business 
and the arts: authenticity. The 
seemingly inevitable event of a “sell-
out” is something that all creators 
fear. Collins explained how artists 
and businesses alike must maintain 
their 
convictions 
to 
capture 
human admiration, matching their 
behaviors to their belief systems. 
“Authenticity comes from one’s 
ability, one’s grit, to maintain their 
convictions,” Collins said. “Living 
up to your convictions is a cool 
thing. And when a brand does that, 
it gets adopted by people who see 
the world similarly.”
Collins provided clarity with 
examples, detailing how Pabst Blue 
Ribbon saw dramatic increases in 
sales when their belief system of 
self-expression and egalitarianism 
matched 
with 
“hipsters” 
who 
believe in the same values that 
PBR does. Collins illuminated the 
idea that businesses and artists 
approach authenticity in similar 
manners: “This is my belief system 
and the populace of people who 
believe what I believe connect to it.” 
Collins referenced “the old Kanye” 
as a prime example of having a 
belief system and finding a dense 
community that readily connects 
with it.
The crossovers between business 
and the arts are clear, and Collins’s 
career speaks tribute to that. On 
an everyday basis, however, how 
does one interact with academic 
entities that are so often placed on 
opposite ends of the spectrum? 
After attentively listening to my 
trials and tribulations as a Business 
and English student, he provided 
immense hope, delving into the 
means of operating with agency in 
the “business-arts” space.
When asked what combines 
the arts and business together, 
Collins responded immediately. 
“Humanity,” he said. “You have to 
see the humanity in the business 
like you see the humanity in the arts. 
The idea of transaction is personal. 
Business is about exchanges. We 
try to humanize things to make 
meaning out of it.”
Business and the arts share 
connection and empathy, even 
when humanization seems miles 
away from the likes of business. “If 
you don’t understand people, you 
don’t understand business,” Collins 
said. “Business is all about people. 
Everything we do in business is 
about getting people to take on a 
behavior.”
Collins constantly reminds his 
students that marketing is about so 
much more than just selling things. 
“Marketing is going to market,” 
he said. “Well, what is the market? 
People.” Lucky for me, and lucky for 
Daily Arts, the arts spur emotion 
and behavior like none other and 
therefore have a powerful capability 
to 
alter 
the 
market. 
Collins 
summarized what students in the 
space of business-arts should hold 
steadfast in: “How do you leverage 
the arts (visual, written, audio) and 
use those as vehicles by which we 
interact with humanity?”
To Business and art students 
striving keep their energy flowing, 
this ode from Collins may spark 
your zest. “Your foot in each world 
is what makes you so powerful,” he 
said. Collins elaborated that artists 

do not only know the culture, they 
drive the culture and at the end 
of the day, businesses latch onto 
culture manifested by the arts. 
“Brands who lead culture are more 
successful than brands who follow 
... it’s more so about, ‘how do I 
make these things come together 
by leveraging the power of the arts 
to solve problems creatively?’ And 
then look at the world of art and 
find, ‘how do I operationalize this 
from a transactional perspective?’” 
he said.
As a student who started 
out business-focused and now 
desperately clings to the arts, I 
decided to seek out the inverse 
perspective. For students who 
start 
with 
arts 
and 
follow 
with 
entrepreneurship 
and 
marketability, how do they move 
towards the avenue of considering 
their art from a transactional 
perspective? Daily Arts reached out 
to Jonathan Kuuskoski, assistant 
professor of music in the School of 
Music, Theatre & Dance and chair of 
the department of entrepreneurship 
& leadership. Kuuskoski made it 
glaringly apparent that students 
with the inverse of my academic 
path converge into a similar space 
of mixing the arts with business 
and that the resources to do so are 
abundant. Kuuskoski works to help 
students in the performing arts 
live a sustainable life, and provides 
them the correct resources to do so. 
Kuukoski’s department provides 
over 20 courses in topics such as arts 
management, arts marketing and 
financial management, in addition 
to providing immersions, coaching 
and funding for internships and 
ventures.
Kuuskoski noted a commonality 
in students who want to make 
their art at all costs, but need help 
selling it. He guides students in 
navigating this process, particularly 
in reaching for collaborations and 
partnerships and in establishing 
their personal strategy. His advice 
included finding a vision. “How 
would the world look in 10 years if 
you achieved your goal?,” he said. 
“What’s the vision for your work, 
that goes beyond the generic ‘make 
great art?’”
Just as Marcus Collins spoke 
of 
authenticity, 
Kuuskoski 
emphasized the importance of 
holding true to one’s convictions. 
“Start by reflecting back on your 
core values, so you can articulate 
what is distinctive about the ways 
in which your artistic output will 
set you apart,” he said. Moreover, 
Kuuskoski touches on humanity as 
a means to traverse business and 
the arts, just as Collins reiterated 
that “business is all about people.” 
Kuuskoski relays to his students 
that “every successful artist has a 
circle of collaborators, of people 
who were meaningful to them. 
These people could be potential 
investors and supporters.”
In 
reflecting 
upon 
my 
conversations with both Collins and 
Kuuskoski, it became extremely 
apparent that businesses aim to 
infiltrate our culture and ways 
of behaving, and that these ways 
of behaving often spur from art, 
even if companies aren’t aware of 
it. As Collins said, “Being close to 
the culture means understanding 
the artistic artifacts that come 
out 
of 
the 
culture. 
Having 
proximity to the arts allows you to 
operationalize that in a business 
realm.” Consistent closeness to art 
is not only a passion of mine, but 
it’s also extremely powerful when 
used in a continuous manner with 
business. I aim to harness the power 
of this concurrence, and Collins and 
Kuuskoski gave me the assurance 
and moral to do so.

Now there are 
more Chinese 
restaurants in 
America than 
McDonalds

SAMANTHA CANTIE
Daily Arts Writer

JULIA MOSS
Daily Arts Writer

B-SIDE SECONDARY

What I love 
about the 
publishing 
industry is that 
they are uniquely 
bad at business

6B — Thursday, January 24, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com