Xiaolu Guo’s new novel, Call Me Ishmaelle (Black Cat/Grove, Jan. 6), gives Herman Melville’s classic 1851 novel, Moby-Dick, a feminist twist. As the title suggests, its protagonist and narrator is a woman—a British teenager who, orphaned and separated from her brother, boards a whaling ship disguised as a man to explore the high seas. Guo, born in China and now living in London, thoughtfully considers the implications of a cross-gendered, multicultural sea voyage, considering racism, sexual violence, and varieties of religious practices while also delivering a powerful seafaring yarn.

Guo is an accomplished novelist, memoirist, and filmmaker: Her 2017 book, Nine Continents: A Memoir in and Out of China, received the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. And though Ishmaelle is one continent and more than a century distant from her own upbringing, she describes it as a very personal book. Speaking by phone from London, Guo discussed her early experiences with Melville’s novel, Ishmaelle’s non-Melvillean inspirations, and what’s involved in rethinking a classic. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I read an interview where you said you gave up reading Moby-Dick on your first attempt because it was too difficult to read in a Chinese translation. What made it so challenging?

I think Moby-Dick is difficult to translate into Chinese because of the biblical references and Shakespearean language. Biblical language can be translated into French or German or Italian or Spanish. But Melville’s style is something that’s very difficult to render in an East Asian context, because of the religious differences.

What brought you back to the novel in English?

It happened when I was in the U.S. years ago. It’s interesting how the geopolitical environment changes someone’s reading. When I was first living in the U.K., I was reading the Brontë sisters, Victorian literature, George Orwell. Then when I was in New York, I thought to read some quintessential American classics, and it was such an incredible experience.

How did you begin the process of writing your own variation on Melville’s book?

It was a sort of thought experiment. I thought about the first sentence—“Call me Ishmael”—and wondered, What if Ishmael was a woman? As a woman reader and writer, it’s a very automatic sort of experiment, wondering how a female Ishmael would act on a ship. What sort of conflict and drama would she go through? Also, I was reading a lot about Victorian-era girls who disguised themselves and went on ships. There’s an incredible archive in the U.K.’s National Maritime Museum’s website about them. It’s bizarre that there’s no female sailor in disguise on the Pequod, when there were so many cases of it. So even before I began to write, I already had a quite different novel in my head.

You’re not trying to assume Melville’s style, though you do capture the spirit of wildness and recklessness in the novel’s prose, while focusing on different themes. You describe the whale as “the woman they wanted, but transformed into a demon lover, or an avenging hag.” Ishmaelle says, “Here I was, a woman, in the midst of these womenless men, in a ship dedicated to violence. How could I possibly survive?”

It would be a mistake to mimic Melville’s style, given that I’m an Asian writer. I would never mimic a 19th-century English tone, because the language doesn’t belong to me. What I needed to do was develop a very simple, straight, direct, feminine approach. The language had to be based on something physically felt—the bodily feeling, the embodiment of the landscape, the wind, the rain.

When I was reading Moby-Dick I thought about how it was men only, and also that the whale is male—only males were hunted. I thought it was very important to bring in a female whale and a woman’s view on the world and nature, because she will think very differently. Instead of this violent confrontation with the whale, she might find a special way to communicate rather than try to conquer it like the rest of the crew.

I don’t want to say I took a “feminine approach” in a simplistic way. I just think that a female character would view nature very differently. My intention was to build a relationship between the whale and Ishmaelle, to view the whale as symbolic—the incredible force of nature—but nothing to do with evil versus good. It just embodies nature itself.

One thing that I was struck by is that this novel de-Americanizes Moby-Dick. Your narrator is British, not American, and many of the characters on the ship are not American either. You’re writing outside of the American grain.

I don’t think of it as “de-Americanizing,” because Moby-Dick is one of the first international novels. I was playing around with its internationalism. There’s something really boundless, borderless, about it because of the nature of a whaling ship. The ship has to take on new sailors and new whalers from different lands. What I did do was bring in a more Asiatic seascape and more Asiatic characters. There was a whaling industry at that time in East Asia, in Japan—even in Korea and the South Seas around New Zealand there were great whalers until the whaling industry died. Melville had this international vision about the world contained in one ship. That’s one of the most amazing qualities of the novel.

Muzi, one of the characters you introduce, is a Taoist who helps the captain by consulting The Book of Changes. How did you come to integrate that element?

Moby-Dick is a Christian novel, and I would’ve liked to write a Taoist novel, one from the perspective of East Asian spirituality. The spirit of Taoism is something that’s amazingly mysterious, interesting, and wonderful. There’s no separation in Taoism between heaven and earth. There’s a sort of ungraspable flow. That ever-shifting nature is something I thought was enormously interesting. I wanted to create a character to embody that spirit. In Moby-Dick there’s only one Asian character, named Fedallah. He’s a very shadowy Persian character who supports Captain Ahab. Well, that’s great, but the only Asian character is so shadowy and negative, it’s kind of a pity.

There have been countless attempts to reimagine Moby-Dick in novels and films, from Ahab’s Wife to Star Trek II. Did you spend any time with any of those?

The other books I read weren’t related to Moby-Dick at all. The first book I read in order to write this novel was Othello. My Black captain, Seneca, is based on Othello. It’s a story of love and jealousy—wounded, injured love leading a man to go beyond his limits.

Another book I read a few times before I began this novel is Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. I was always extremely interested in sea voyages, and I’m also interested in 19th-century exploration—all the kinds of species Darwin encountered. It’s an amazing book, beautiful and very rich. I loved that book so much that I thought about imagining a fictional journey based on Charles Darwin’s own voyage. Without reading that book, I could not have written this one.

Mark Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix.