Category Archives: …Author Interview/Profile

May 6, 2013 · 7:33 am

On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman + Author Interview

On Sal Mal LaneAllow me to start with the simple end: Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane is stupendous. I’ll even embellish that verdict and add that it is actually fan-huththa-tastic... the tmetic meaning of which should encourage you to go get your own copy and check the “glossary” at book’s end. You’ll surely find some choice vocabulary there to aptly describe your own reading experience.

As in Freeman’s absorbing 2009 debut, A Disobedient Girl, the intricate lives of young children take center stage in On Sal Mal Lane. In 1979, the titular Sal Mal Lane is a small cul-de-sac on the outskirts of Sri Lanka’s largest city and former capital, Colombo; in spite of the diverse households, the residents live in relative peace. If they are not exactly friendly, then they certainly live as tolerant neighbors one and all. The Herath family of two parents, four young children – Suren the musician, Rashmi the singer, Nihil the cricketer, and baby Devi the favored – and their servant move into the quiet enclave, reshuffling friendships and alliances throughout the lane.

The Heraths are educated and cultured, and their four children, whose ages range from 7-and-a-half-year-old Devi to 12-year-old Suren, “were different from all the others who had come and stayed for a while on Sal Mal Lane.” In addition to each being neat and clean, well-mannered and talented, their devotion to one another – ”the way they stood together even when they were apart … every word uttered, every challenge made, every secret kept, together” – is a gift to behold.

Even as the Heraths’ lives intertwine with that of their neighbors, beyond the safety of their small street, the rest of the country is at an impasse. Ethnic, religious, and political differences among a population with a long history of divisions, colonizations, and suppressions foment through the years, leading up to a coming civil war that will break out in 1983 and last over a quarter-century. “Everyone who lived on Sal Mal Lane was implicated in what happened … the Tamil Catholics and Hindus, the Burgher Catholics, the Muslims, and the Sinhalese, both Catholic and Buddhist. Their lives were unfolding against a backdrop of conflict that would span decades … And while this story is about small people, we must consider the fact that their history is long and accord them, too, a story equal to their past.”

Freeman surely doesn’t disappoint. As she unwinds what happened – with prose both lingering and breathtaking – the children, even the lane’s bully who could have been different with just the occasional kindness, will charm you, tease you, play with you, and when they leave you, they’ll shatter your heart. “To tell a story about divergent lives, the storyteller must be everything and nothing,” Freeman’s prologue concludes. “If at times you detect some subtle preferences, an undeserved generosity toward someone, a boy child, perhaps, or an old man, forgive me. It is far easier to be everything and nothing than it is to conceal love.”

What possessed you to write this novel? How did it come about?
First, I had been a little down about a magazine piece that did not work out. [The article] had to do with the end of the war [the Sri Lankan Civil War – July 23, 1983, to May 18, 2009], and the editor wanted a very pared-down story with easily identifiable villains and saints. I wanted to write a more nuanced story. Second, I didn’t set out to write this novel, in particular. I was just dabbling with this and that, sketching out some anecdotal bits about growing up down a lane like this one. It was one of my brothers, Malinda, who nudged me down this road. He started chatting back with me – via Google Chat – reminiscing about that time and there it was – the novel I wanted to write. This story that was the one I had been trying to put into that magazine article, the one that was not easy but faceted and brittle and gentle and layered. [... click here for more]

Author interview: “Feature: An Interview with Ru Freeman,” Bookslut.com, May 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

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April 1, 2013 · 8:22 am

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer + Author Interview

Tomorrow There Will Be ApricotsIt began with a story. I know, I know, that’s what they all say.

But Jessica Soffer‘s debut novel, Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots, really did begin with a short story she wrote in 2009 for a graduate school assignment. In sharp contrast to the novel’s lyrical title, the short story was severely entitled “Pain,” and encompassed a woman’s life from early childhood to adulthood lived in, well, pain. The story’s protagonist was a self-harmer, addicted to pain. “There was something about her voice that I found so compelling,” Soffer explains, “and I wanted to make her something larger, to take her with me.”

Four years later, that woman reappears as the teenager Lorca, half of Soffer’s protagonist duo in Apricots. “Soon into the writing process, an image popped into my head of a young girl and an old woman cooking together in a kitchen,” she recalls. And thus Victoria, the novel’s octogenarian widow, came to life: “Victoria is a nod to my father’s [Iraqi Jewish immigrant] culture.”

In a city of millions, Lorca and Victoria are isolated, lonely Manhattanites. Separated from her country-dwelling father in New Hampshire, Lorca lives with her less-than-maternal mother in her aunt’s apartment. A wise-beyond-her-years eighth-grader, Lorca is suspended when she’s discovered in the bathroom harming herself (yet again), and has just one week to convince her mother not to send her away to boarding school. She’s convinced that if she can duplicate her chef mother’s favorite dish – the elusive grilled fish called masgouf, redolent of memories and spices – she will somehow escape further separation from what is left of her family.

Lorca’s search leads her to Victoria, who once upon a time with her husband ran the Iraqi restaurant in which Lorca’s mother last tasted that perfect masgouf. The uptown restaurant closed years ago, Victoria’s husband Joseph has just passed away, and Victoria’s one leftover relationship in the world is with the needy upstairs neighbor for whom only Joseph seemed to have any patience. In the week following Joseph’s death, Victoria must confront their decades together, filled with too many secrets and unsaid truths that refuse to remain buried. In the maelstrom of Victoria trying to reclaim her life, Lorca appears at Victoria’s door – impossibly young, beautiful, and perhaps even hopeful enough for both lonely souls.

“I’ve always found that something profound exists in a relationship between an older and younger person,” Soffer says. “They can illuminate corners of life for each other in such a unique and energizing way.” That profundity – and the shared humanity – is at the core of what becomes Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots.

Reading Apricots, I admit, made me so hungry. Those sort of descriptions has to mean that you’re very facile in the kitchen. So, who taught you to cook?
My father’s mother was a healer in Baghdad and instilled in my father the notion of eating for one’s wellbeing. There was nothing processed in our house when I was growing up. For a cold: ginger, ginger, ginger. For dessert: honey on an apple. My parents weren’t big cooks or fans of elaborate eating, but they did think about consumption, about nurturing the body through food, in a way that stuck. I imagine that a childhood like that, with an emphasis placed on eating mindfully, is likely to turn out a person deeply interested in food, which I am. I learned about flavors from my father and his sister – but I’ve been self-taught from there on out. I read insatiably about food, watch cooking shows, eat out, ask questions: I’ve absorbed a lot of cooking know-how from the world.

And you’ve also discovered a way with words. How did you decide to become a writer?
My mother is a voracious reader, and an editor, grammarian, and true crime writer. She put a book in my hands before I knew what to do with it and so it began. Red pens, manuscripts, books on every surface of our apartment attributed value to words above all else. Words for decoration, for work, for pleasure, forever. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write and, perhaps more importantly, when I didn’t organize my thoughts in sentence form. There’s a constant narration stream gushing through my head always and the only way to interrupt it is through writing. So I write.

I wasn’t quite sure from this part of your bio: “the daughter of an Iraqi Jewish painter and sculptor.” Are both of your parents Iraqi Jewish? How did your ethnic history affect your identity formation?
My father is an Iraqi Jew. My mother is not. Her grandparents came from Russia, but her parents were born in Brooklyn, and she was born in Florida. Her parents were the only grandparents I knew and big fans of pickled herring, matzo brei, gefilte fish. They ate Chinese food on Sundays and went to the movies on Christmas and lived in Boca Raton and played Barbra Streisand in their Cadillacs. I like matzo brei but I can’t say that my grandparents’ “experience” informed mine. My parents built their own bubble of culture around art and books and New York City and that is the particular background I owe most to. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Jessica Soffer,” Bookslut.com, April 2013

Readers: Adult

Published: 2013

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February 20, 2013 · 9:20 am

Author interview: Pauline A. Chen

Red ChamberA couple of days after filing my feature on Pauline A. Chen, I got on the phone to ask her all the questions I couldn’t find answers to out there in the virtual world of google-ing.

True confession moment: I admit I was a wee bit intimidated as the land lines connected us between DC and Cleveland – just what sort of person takes on the most canonical text in Chinese literary history (The Dream of the Red Chamber) and makes it her own (The Red Chamber)? I actually expected a Glenn Close/Cruella de Vil sort of megalomaniacal voice to pick up. Lucky for me, I could put that overactive imagination away, because really, as gutsy as her literary move has been, she’s not at all the hardened character I had dreamt up. Always good to start an interview with a sigh of relief.

Let’s begin with the basics: I understand you spoke rudimentary Chinese as a child because your parents didn’t want their native language to impede their children’s English proficiency. So when and how did you learn Chinese? Which dialect? And are you fluent now?
I took beginning Mandarin in college [Harvard], but the Chinese language program was just getting started at the time, so the classes were not terribly challenging. After I graduated, I spent a year in Taiwan teaching English and that’s when my proficiency really improved, just because I was living in a Chinese-speaking environment. One of my English students in Taiwan introduced me to 9th-century Tang poetry, which I fell in love with – until then I had never imagined that such a developed and sophisticated literary tradition even existed in China.

I came back to the U.S. and went straight to law school, but on the side, I took classes in classical Chinese language and literature. By the time I finished law school, I had realized working over the summers at law firms that I did not want to be an attorney. I went straight into a PhD program in East Asian Studies, and that’s when I began to study Chinese literature in earnest.

I’m pretty fluent in Mandarin, but my training in graduate school focused on reading pre-modern texts – mostly poetry from the fourth century to the ninth century – so I would say I’m stronger in classical Chinese. I can understand quite a bit of Taiwanese, but my attempts to speak it are usually treated with frank derision by native speakers.

You were so certain going into college that you wanted to be a writer. Where did that determination come from?
For as long as I can remember, I liked to write; I had an impulse to make up stories. And reading always gave me such tremendous pleasure. But really, I had no idea what it meant to be writer. Growing up, I never revised anything I wrote, or asked another person for feedback. I just had this dream as a child, but had no comprehension that this was something I had to work towards.

And then during your four years at college, your writerly ambitions just disappeared. How? Why?
The first reason was that at Harvard, students have to apply to get into creative writing courses, and I got into poetry, not fiction. I struggled in the poetry because then, as now, I was fascinated by poetry in other languages – I studied Latin poetry back then – but really didn’t know the English poetic tradition very well. The deeper reason was that I just didn’t know how or what to write. As a teenager I had loved Jane Austen, but at college I started to realize that emulating her style and subject matter would have been faintly ridiculous, and that I needed to find a way to incorporate my own perspective and experience into what I wrote. Years later, when I read V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, I understood that this was what he had experienced when he tried to write like a worldly, Evelyn Waugh-like sophisticate, while trying to suppress his own experience in a peasant family on colonial Trinidad. I also was too undeveloped, too uncomfortable with my own background to use it as a platform from which to write.[... click here for more]

Author interview: “Q&A with Pauline A. Chen,” Bloom, February 20, 2013

Readers: Middle Grade, Adult

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February 18, 2013 · 9:18 am

The Red Chamber by Pauline A. Chen + Author Profile

Red ChamberWhen the teenaged Pauline Chen arrived in Harvard Yard, her intention was to become a writer. The American-born daughter of Taiwanese parents, she grew up amidst Long Island’s endless strip malls and was determined – she wrote in July 2012 at Tribute Books – to shed her “provincial” upbringing. By the time Chen graduated in 1986, she had reinvented herself as an “international sophisticate” whose literary preferences had “distinctly European sensibilities: cigarettes and grappa at Parisian cafés; country dances and muslin frocks in a Derbyshire ballroom.” Her undergraduate degree was earned in Classics, and belied a particular interest in Latin poetry.

During her four years in Cambridge, she shed her “frizzy perm and Long Guyland accent,” but gone, too, by the time she graduated, were her authorly ambitions: “… I stopped feeling that I had anything to say. My writing dried up; I did not understand that the experiences which made me nervous and uncomfortable, which I was quick to bury, also made me creative.”

Although she didn’t create, she also didn’t stray too far from the page. After Harvard, she went to Yale Law School and got her JD. She went south to Princeton where she finished a PhD in East Asian Studies with an emphasis on reading pre-modern Chinese poetry from the fourth to ninth century in original classical Chinese. She had stopovers in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where she honed the rudimentary Mandarin of her childhood into fluency, before settling in “most alien of all” – Ohio – to become a professor of Chinese language and literature, squarely on the tenure track. She got married. She had a child.

And then she got cancer.

Diagnosed with a rare, highly aggressive ovarian cancer in 2001 just weeks after giving birth to her son, Chen returned to some of the comforts of her childhood when her mother moved from New York to Ohio, to take over Chen’s family’s care. Chen’s mother… mothered: she cooked, cleaned, and cooed over her newborn grandson. When the chemo erased Chen’s appetite, her mother’s rice was sometimes her only nourishment. When her baby cried, only his grandmother could comfort him. When Chen required more advanced treatment in another state, Chen’s mother took full charge, following her daughter with her grandson, setting up a new apartment, and smoothly continuing her patient care.

Chen’s mother’s “generosity and talents … enabled [her] to survive,” Chen wrote at Goodreads in September 2012. Before her cancer, Chen’s focus was honed on her demanding academic career and the financial independence it offered, which she thought set her far apart from her traditional mother who had arrived in the U.S. to pursue a PhD in Pharmacology but chose to stay home after her eldest was born with a congenital defect (from which she eventually recovered). Not until her youngest of three children entered school did she get her pharmacist’s license, with which she worked in hospitals for the next 30 years. Growing up, Chen internalized the contempt with which her engineering professor father treated her mother: “I had always failed to give her credit for her talents, for the very reason that she had chosen to devote them to the service of those she loved, rather than to the professional realm.” Only as an adult – and a cancer patient relying on her mother’s unconditional support – did she recognize the “idyllic period of our childhood”: “For years I deplored my childhood circumstances as narrow. In fact my parents had lived on two continents and spoke three languages. All along the narrowness had been in my own vision—and I had had to travel to the ends of the earth in order to see the place that I had come from.” [... click here for more]

Author profile: “Pauline A. Chen and The Red Chamber: ” … to finish the story for myself,” Bloom, February 18, 2013

Tidbit: Click here for my review of The Red Chamber, originally published in Library Journal. Click here for my review of Peiling and the Chicken-Fried Christmas in BookDragon. And click here for a follow-up Q&A with Chen.

Readers: Adult

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January 7, 2013 · 7:17 am

Prophecy [Book 1 of Prophecy Series] by Ellen Oh + Author Interview

As the mother of three young girls, Ellen Oh is constantly on the lookout for good books that showcase female empowerment. She’s found a few here and there – say, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, The Girl of Fire and Thorns trilogy by Rae Carson, The Hero and the Crown and The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley, and maybe a few others – but to ask for characters with whom her Korean American daughters might directly identify seemed too tall an order. So the former entertainment lawyer and adjunct college professor decided to write her own: Prophecy, the first of a planned trilogy, debuts this month.

“People feared Kira,” the heart-thumping, fantastical young adult novel begins. With her yellow eyes and unprecedented fighting skills, Kira is hardly the average teenager, much less the picture of modesty and subservience befitting a court royal. Her uncle the King considers her a “freak of nature, and a terrible embarrassment to the royal family,” and yet he must rely on her warrior strength to protect his only son and royal heir.

Throughout a fantasy version of third-century Korea, demons, imps, hobgoblins, and shamans threaten the entire peninsula, falling the seven kingdoms one by one. In Kira’s home kingdom of Hansong, evil forces are moving through the ranks, possessing even once-trusted officials. The horrific events that the great ancestor, the Dragon King, prophesied are proving true: “Seven will become three. Three will become one. One will save us all.”

When and how did the idea for your Prophecy trilogy come to you? Did Kira arrive fully formed like Athena? Or did you struggle to bring her to life?
Kira and [her cousin Prince] Taejo were the easiest characters for me to write, because they did literally spring out of my head, much like Athena – I love that analogy, by the way. I like pretending I’m Zeus! The cousins arrived fully formed, with very specific details about how I wanted them to be. When the idea for Prophecy first came to me, it was about a young prince who is believed to be the hero of a legend. But as the legend progresses, his female cousin – who is also his bodyguard and a far better warrior – turns out to be the true hero. I initially wrote Prophecy from Taejo’s perspective, but he was coming out too whiny and jealous. That changed when the point of view switched over to Kira’s. That’s when the story became more alive, moved faster, and became more relatable, at least to me. Which makes sense because the story was always about Kira – I just had to let her tell it.

Besides the shift in perspective, did the story change in other ways over the various revisions?
I think, overall, the story became more emotional. As a writer, I tend to be oriented more toward action, action, action. Both my agent and editor were really good at making me pause and ask, “Yeah, but what does Kira feel when this happens, or that happens?” I always knew the “how” and “what,” but during the revision process, I had to really work on expressing Kira’s reactions, her emotions.

Besides the obvious fact of your Korean ancestry, why did you choose to set your first novel in ancient Korea? As a fantasy writer, you pretty much have unlimited freedom as to where and when.
I chose ancient Korea for two specific reasons: the first was just practical – I couldn’t find anything like a fantasy adventure story set in ancient Korea in libraries or bookstores; the second was more personal – ancient Korea was such a fascinating, turbulent time with kingdoms changing, collapsing, being taken over, dealing with amazing politics and endless intrigue. But the specific moment I realized I had to write about ancient Korea was when I read a Genghis Khan biography and came to a point in the book when the Mongols invade Korea, and the entire royal court flees to Ganghwa Island (which is at the mouth of the Han River), where the Mongols aren’t able to cross the river to get to them. The Korean leaders are out there laughing, while the poor peasants are getting raped and killed by the Mongols. And then the royals, who’ve been safe and sound in their island fortress, come back to tax the hell out of the peasants and steal all their food. All those layered dynamics between the haves and have-nots were just so visual, interesting, and ultimately inspiring to me. That was feudal society at its best – from my perspective as someone who’s interested in the history – and at its worst – from a human perspective because you really see the worst of what people in power do to their citizens. And through it all, the common peasants endure and survive. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Ellen Oh,” Bookslut.com, January 2013

Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult

Published: 2013

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December 3, 2012 · 8:02 am

Publisher Interview: Sunyoung Lee and Kaya Press

Early this year, at almost 18 years old, Kaya Press flew the nest. Leaving behind the comfort and familiarity of New York’s publishing world, the non-profit indie specializing in “books from the Asian diaspora,” moved offices across the country to Los Angeles. Now comfortably ensconced in the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity on the University of Southern California campus, Kaya has a new address, new community, new books, new staff, and is definitely basking in new energy.

With all the latest changes, the one Kaya constant is Sunyoung Lee… although she does have the fairly new title of “Publisher and Editor.” Founded in 1994 by Soo Kyung Kim, a postmodern Korean writer, Kaya was originally intended to house a journal of Korean literature-in-translation, which eventually morphed into Muae, a spirited anthology highlighting the newest in Asian Pacific American writing that Library Journal named one of “The Best Magazines of 1995.” Muae fell victim to the Korean economic collapse of 1997, but under the bolstering management of Juliana Koo and Lee, who took over that year as managing editor and editor, respectively, Kaya managed to survive – and thrive – living up to its namesake: “Kaya was the name of a tribal confederation of six Korean city-states that existed from the middle of the first until the sixth century CE,” their website officially explains. “Although the Kaya kingdom was an iron-age culture, it is remembered as a utopia of learning, music, and the arts due to its trade and communication with China, Japan, and India.”

Kaya Press channels that international history, feeding its artistic vision by regularly pushing the boundaries of the Asian Pacific Islander (API) diaspora through the titles the tenacious press has published thus far. A small sampling might include an enhanced reprint of the groundbreaking 1937 classic East Goes West by the first Korean American novelist Younghill Kang; American Book Award-winning The Unbearable Heart by Japanese German American poet Kimiko Hahn; Chinese Australian Brian Castro’s already-major-award-winning-in-Australia novel, Shanghai Dancing; the lauded Commonwealth Prize-winning Where We Once Belonged by Sia Figiel, which was the first novel by a Samoan woman to be published in the United States; and Migritude by Kenyan-born, South Asian-descended, citizen-of-the-world performance artist Shailja Patel.

The word “kaya” echoes the diversity of its authors: in addition to its ancient Korean representation, in Japanese, Kaya is also “summer night” or a type of yew tree that withstands harsh environmental conditions; in Malay, kaya means “rich”; in Indonesian, “prosperous”; in Tagalog, “to be able”; in Sanskrit, “body”; in Turkish “rock”; in Zulu, “home.”

For Lee, home is where the press is. In order to sustain it, she’s worked endless day jobs and freelance gigs – from Billboard magazine to Publishers Weekly – in addition to teaching the requisite composition classes, to pay the bills so she could nurture Kaya well into its teenage years. Now that she’s settled into rooms of her own at USC, Lee’s ushering out the next set of Kaya titles: Lament in the Night, which includes two 1920s Japanese American novellas by Shōson Nagahara, translated by Andrew Leong; The Hanging on Union Square, an experimental novel originally published in 1935 by H. T. Tsiang; Water Chasing Water by Seattle-based poet Koon Woon; and Korean American adoptee Nicky Sa-eun Schildkraut’s debut poetry in Magnetic Refrain.

It’s been a full decade since we officially talked about Kaya. So, what’s your latest, greatest news?
The biggest news, as you know, is that we moved to LA this year. We’re publishing a bunch of new books, and a lot of wonderful new people are working with us. This is the largest group of people we’ve had involved with Kaya. USC gives us funding to pay for two part-time grad students – they’re 25% part-time – and we also get a lot of volunteers. Their involvement – both undergraduate and graduate students – means while they learn hands-on about the publishing process, I’ve been able to do more strategic work, to put more energy into Kaya, and that’s been really gratifying. [... click here for more]

Publisher interview: “Feature: Sunyoung Lee and Kaya Press,” Bookslut.com, December 2012

Readers: Adult

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September 4, 2012 · 10:33 am

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng + Author Interview

I can count on one hand the books that I’ve given by the dozens to lucky relatives and friends over the decades. One of those counting fingers belongs to Tan Twan Eng‘s debut stunner, The Gift of Rain. With the impending American release this month of his long-awaited second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists, I grabbed the chance to interview the young writer … only to thoroughly embarrass myself by the third question by revealing my inexcusable myopia, as I referred to Tan’s native Malaysia as an island.

“Terry,” he gently corrected, “Malaysia isn’t an island, but a peninsula, and Penang is an island off its northwest coast.” My mortified apology was met with “It’s a part of the world not many people know much about,” which gave me yet another reason to continue to spread Tan’s titles far and wide.

Longlisted for the coveted Man Booker Prize in 2007, The Gift of Rain was an astonishing accomplishment. Its protagonist is the half-British, half-Chinese Philip Hutton, the youngest (and only mixed-race) child of a powerful British trading family based in Malaysia. On the eve of World War II, the gorgeous islands show no hint of the devastation about to unfold, and young Philip finds himself befriending an elegant Japanese man, Hayato Endo, who has taken residence on the tiny island across the Hutton estate.

Endo begins to train Philip in the Japanese martial art aikido, transforming the distant teen into a strong and confident young man. But nothing is as it appears, and as the much-feared Japanese military finally lands on Malaysian shores, surviving the war will mean betrayal and redemption, and ultimately love.

Like Rain, Tan’s second novel is exquisite; like Rain, The Garden of Evening Mists arrives stateside with Booker-longlist approval, announced just weeks before the U.S. publication date. This time, Tan’s protagonist is a damaged, wary woman, Teoh Yun Ling, who has just taken early retirement from a lauded career as a respected judge; she has at most a year before she will lose all language and memory to aphasia.

She leaves Kuala Lumpur for the highlands of central Malaysia to Yugiri – the eponymous Garden of Evening Mists – where she’s agreed to meet a Japanese scholar writing a book about Yugiri’s creator, Aritomo, the self-exiled former gardener to the emperor of Japan. Four decades earlier, in spite of being the single survivor of a murderous World War II Japanese prison camp, Yun Ling apprenticed herself to Aritomo; she sublimated her fear and loathing in the hopes of learning to create the perfect garden to honor her older sister who died in the camp. Almost 38 years have passed since Aritomo disappeared, and now threatened with erasure, Yun Ling begins to record her, his – their story.

In both unforgettable novels, Tan manages to intertwine the redemptive power of storytelling with the elusive search for truth, all the while juxtaposing Japan’s inhumane war history with glorious moments of Japanese art and philosophy. His is a challenging balancing act, and yet he never falters, intimately revealing his stories with power and grace.

Because you’ve set both novels primarily during and after the brutal occupation of Malaysia during World War II, both are understandably infused with a symbiotic mixture of horror and beauty. What is your fascination with that time period? You were decades from being born.
The Japanese Occupation of Malaya (as it was then called) was one of the country’s most traumatic experiences. Growing up, I heard some stories about the Occupation from my parents. My father was a child when it happened, so he didn’t have any terrible experiences, but he heard about them from his family. My mother has no direct experience of it either, as she was born after the war.

Do you think you will return to that time again in future works?
I don’t know if I’ll revisit that terrain in my future works. If I do, I’ll want to find something new about it to write, angles that haven’t been explored before.

How have you lived with the terror of your homeland’s history – World War II through the “Emergency” that finally ended in 1960 – that you recreated in your books? Both books must have taken years to write, which means you must have had to endure long years of inhabiting the historically accurate world you had to conjure forth on the page?
I’ve always been interested in that period of our past, so I had been reading up and collecting materials on it for years. When I wrote The Gift of Rain, I had all the details I needed in my head and it was a just matter of crafting the story. There comes a point when the writer has to forget his research and just, simply, tell the tale.

Writing The Garden of Evening Mists, on the other hand, required more extensive research. The settings and the time period were different from Gift‘s, and I was never much of a gardening man, so it took a lot of work to learn how to create a Japanese garden. But the more research I did, the more fascinated I became with it and the more I appreciated it; I realized that the principles of gardening could be applied to life, too.

Dealing with the horrors of the Japanese Occupation and the violence of the Malayan Emergency was at times emotionally draining, but it’s the writer’s responsibility to feel, and then to convey those emotions to the readers, otherwise the writing will come across as lifeless. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Tan Twan Eng,” Bookslut.com, September 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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July 2, 2012 · 8:22 am

The Collective by Don Lee + Author Interview

Don Lee is definitely a good news-bad news sort of guy, albeit all in the same breath.

Good news: he’s not going to Texas this summer, because his fourth and latest book, The Collective, is published this month and he’s going on a book tour so he can meet his waiting readers across the country. Bad news: he’s not going to Texas this summer – specifically to Marfa, one of his favorite places to write – because he’s going on a book tour so he can meet his waiting readers across the country.

Good news: as soon as he gets back, he’s planning to start another novel. Worst bad news: as soon as he gets back, he has to get working on another novel and start the whole cycle of worry all over again.

In spite of all that neurotic hand-wringing, Lee has figured out how to deliver with every book. Lee the writer arrived pretty much fully formed in 2001 with his quirky debut story collection, Yellow, which was populated by the inhabitants of fictional Rosarito Bay, a northern California seaside town not unlike Half Moon Bay. His memorable cast of characters was so real, I was convinced I knew at least a few of them (I lived in that area for a few years). His many awards – that began with the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters –  proved well-deserved; Lee’s steadily garnered continuous kudos with the novels that followed, Country of Origin (2004) about the disappearance of an African American hapa woman in Japan, and Wrack and Ruin (2008) which returns to Lee’s fictional Rosarito Bay of Yellow to the unexpected, wacky reunion of two very different brothers.

The Collective is, undoubtedly, his most personal novel, although don’t let the overlaps with his real life fool you – Lee’s an incorrigible storyteller. The title refers to the 3AC, the Asian American Artists Collective, founded by three friends who meet at Macalaster College and reunite after graduation in Boston. Eric Cho, who narrates the novel, is a Korean American from southern California with hopes of becoming a published writer someday. Jessica Tsai is an independent, feisty artist, the child of Taiwanese immigrant parents from upstate New York. Joshua Yoon is a brilliant, angry Korean adoptee, raised as the privileged only child of two liberal Harvard professors. No spoilers (this happens in the second paragraph): Joshua’s violent, shocking suicide opens Lee’s third novel.

Burning first question: I have to start backward just to be contrary since I leaked the beginning. So Joshua’s first book, which gets glowing reviews, is called Upon the Shore and it’s set in Korea’s Cheju Island. And, of course, his (chosen) last name is Yoon. Immediately when I saw that title in your Collective, I thought of Once the Shore, the much lauded debut title from Paul Yoon, which is set on an imaginary Korean island not unlike Cheju. Then I noticed that Paul Yoon gets a nod in your acknowledgments so obviously you must have a personal relationship with him. Upon the Shore, Once the Shore, Joshua Yoon, Paul Yoon? Any correlation intended? You would not want to wish Joshua’s career and life on Paul, would you?
I’m good friends with Paul Yoon, and it was all an inside joke, but now you’ve outed us, dammit! I first met Paul in Boston. His girlfriend, the writer Laura van den Berg, was my student at Emerson, and then in 2008, the three of us became close when we were all living near Harvard Square for the summer, within blocks of each other. They’ve become two of my dearest friends. Paul is famously reclusive and private. For a while, Laura maintained a hilarious fake Twitter account for him, @No1Hermit (he made her take it down eventually). So to needle him, I initially used the title Upon the Shore in a short story of mine, referring to a cheesy fictitious film, and then decided to use the title and his last name in The Collective for Joshua, and it grew from there. But no, Paul is not at all like Joshua. He’s a strangely upbeat person. I’m much more like Joshua than he is – morose and prone to depression and pessimistic by nature.

Now that you’ve ‘fessed up to your resemblance to Joshua, I must ask the next obvious question: how much of The Collective is real? I know writing in first person sometimes can bring up that sort of question, and this is your first book in first person, right? Certainly the details of Macalaster College are authentic as you were there for a year teaching, and you were also an editor at Ploughshares for years and years before your Midwest gig. You don’t necessarily have to reveal details – although you’re more than welcome to if you want to! – but maybe you might share a few general overlaps to real life?
Yup, first thing I’ve ever written in first person. That was the challenge I posed for myself with The Collective. With each book, I try to do something very different, both technically and tonally, which is not, actually, a good career move for a writer. It’s easier on everyone – booksellers, publishers, readers, agents, reviewers – if your books follow a somewhat familiar trajectory. It’s confusing to people if you don’t, I’ve learned.

There are quite a few autobiographical elements in the book – a few of my romantic disasters and a lot of the staging, like the old Ploughshares office in Watertown, which was the shithole I describe for Palaver – but not as many as you may think. I didn’t hang out with many Asian Americans in Boston, because often I was the sole non-white person in the room when I went to literary events. I was never in an artists’ collective, though later on I had friends in the Dark Room Collective [founded in 1988 in Boston by a group of established and emerging African American poets]. I never got caught up in any of the racial controversies that are portrayed (I based the rigmarole with Jessica and the Cambridge Arts Council on my friend Hans Evers’s experience way back in 1994, but embellished it with a racial component). I’ll say this, though: this is my most personal book yet. A lot of what these characters feel, I have felt acutely at various points of my life. But most of the main actions or events in the book are made up.

I loved Joshua’s obsession with Haruki Murakami the runner… I’m still chuckling at the oddest moments over the “Is that him?” reference. I myself am a running-Murakami groupie, that is, I’ve so enjoyed running with a Murakami title stuck in my ears. So does this mean you’re a runner, a Murakami groupie, or both?
Both. I was a real Murakami junkie for a while, and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle remains one of my favorite books. I used to run every day along the Charles River in Boston for something like 15 years, but eventually my knees gave out, so I started biking. Man, I miss running, the simplicity and accessibility and meditative quality of it.

The only time I caught sight of Murakami was at MIT, where he was giving a reading. There were no seats left, and the guards started herding the people who were standing, including me, out of the auditorium, so I never got to see him read, but I veered down a hallway and passed right by him as he waited to enter.

We published a story of his in Ploughshares, but I only dealt with his agent in New York, his assistant in Tokyo, and his translator, Jay Rubin, at Harvard. But the assistant asked for five extra copies of the issue to be shipped to Minami Aoyama, and it made me happy to imagine Murakami thumbing through them. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Don Lee,” Bookslut.com, July 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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May 7, 2012 · 7:55 am

One Red Bastard by Ed Lin + Author Interview

Ed Lin is not Robert Chow, his fictional alter ego who has starred in three of Lin’s four books. If nothing else, Lin is just too young, too happy, and too funny to resemble the Vietnam War veteran-turned Chinatown, New York City cop. The other major difference? Lin got the girl – charmer that he is – while Chow is probably going to remain single for a good long time.

This month, Chow faces his third grisly Chinatown mystery in One Red Bastard. Introduced in Lin’s second novel, This Is a Bust, Chow is the lone Chinese American policeman in 1976 New York Chinatown. Having returned from Vietnam with secrets too horrific for words, Chow can only face the inhumane aftermath of war by drowning himself in booze. While his higher-ups think he’s fit only for ribbon-cutting ceremonies and other such photo ops, Chow manages to solve his first Chinatown murder solo – it helps to speak the language! – and picks up a few true friends along the way.

Personal demons aside, the sobered-up Chow is settling well into his tough-guy-on-the-outside-caring-citizen-on-the-inside leading man role in his second title, Snakes Can’t Run. Still the token Chinese American cop in New York, Chow has finally graduated to full-time detective. When two corpses turn up under the Brooklyn Bridge, Chow’s investigation eventually leads him to chasing down immigrant smugglers – otherwise known as snakeheads – who traffic in human flesh.

Now in One Red Bastard, Chow is finally hoping to earn his gold badge, regardless of the endless obstacles some of his superiors throw his way. Chairman Mao is dead, his fourth wife and widow’s in jail, and their only daughter wants to seek asylum in the good ‘ol U.S.A. Mao’s grown-up baby girl (who hardly knew big Daddy) sends an official representative to check out her immigration prospects. Meanwhile, Chinatown is divided on what Li Na’s defection might mean to the already politically factionalized Chinese American community – especially between the Mao-supporting Communists and the Taiwan-bolstering Kuomintang.

Chow’s girlfriend, who’s working hard to establish her career as a journalist, scores the one interview with the Chinese official. Of course, he wants to meet over dinner, in his swanky Plaza Hotel room – but he swears they won’t be alone, as he has bodyguards galore. But in the wee hours, his bludgeoned body ends up dumped in Chinatown, and – surprise, surprise! – the police insist Chow’s girlfriend was the last person to see the foreign official alive…

Okay, so spill it… Which side are you on? KMT? Commies?
I never pick sides! Well, shoot, let’s remember that the KMT and Commies have been really good friends and terrible enemies at times over the years. It was a coalition of Chinese nationalists, Republicans, and Socialists that brought down the last “Chinese” dynasty, the Qing, in 1912. I put that in quotations because it was a foreign dynasty founded and run by the evil Jurchens [an ethnic group who inhabited present-day Northeast China, who adopted the name "Manchu" in the 17th century] who colonized China and treated ethnic Chinese people like second-class citizens over the 250 years-plus of their reign. Members of my family have been a part of the Commies, the KMT, and the native Taiwanese movements. It always helps to have more than one membership card in your wallet. Even better to belong to a few secret societies, too. You never know when the wind’s gonna change. Look at what great buddies the KMT and Commies are right now, agreeing about how Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. Phooey!

And how did you choose Mao’s youngest daughter – and only child with his infamous fourth wife, Jiang Qing, Ms. One-Quarter-of-the-Gang-of-Four – as your focal point for Red?
People always talk about how cunning Mao was, but what about that Jiang Qing? She was an actress early on, and you can never trust them. They lie. Like Mao, Jiang changed names and traded up with partners and spouses when it was expedient. I wondered what life has been like for Li Na, the daughter of Mao and Jiang, who spent her early life hidden away with distant relatives. (She is 71 or 72 now.) She has lived a quiet life, and only a handful of old photographs exist, which is a little strange for the sole offspring of two of the most infamous people in modern Chinese history. I’ll bet that Li wanted to get away from it all at some point. She would have wanted to give America a shot since it was the most fascinating country to Chinese people after Nixon’s visit.

Does this upcoming trip to Taiwan have anything to do with your affiliations?
Sorta. I haven’t been to the island in years and I want to see what’s up. I’m going hardcore Taipei, since I’ve never really been to that city. My father’s family is from central Taiwan, a real benshengren stronghold. They are Taiwanese who originally came over from China centuries ago, as opposed to the Johnnies-come-lately waishengren who washed up on Taiwan at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949. There have been all kinds of tensions over the years between the benshenren and waishengren, not to mention the Hakka people and indigenous Taiwanese. My trip is a vacation in the disguise of research for another book. On a different note, I discovered that there is a university in Beijing that has an Asian American literary department. I’m going there in June to deliver the keynote address for their conference.

I don’t want to allow any spoilers, but who’s the “one red bastard”? Uhh… lots and lots of “red” bad guys, but you’re sort of leading your readers astray on purpose, aren’t you? ‘Fess up!
It’s a mix of “red” herrings with the literal and figurative meanings of “bastard.” I love to trick people. It makes me feel smart. [... click here for more]

Author interview: Feature: “An Interview with Ed Lin,” Bookslut.com, May 2012

Readers: Adult

Published: 2012

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January 9, 2012 · 12:42 pm

Beneath the Lion’s Gaze by Maaza Mengiste + Author Interview

Maaza Mengiste‘s voice, delivered by telephone many thousands of miles away, sounds impossibly young and happy. She’s easy to talk to, easy to laugh with. She’s in Rome for another few months, enjoying the spring sun, sipping another cup of tea in a nearby café, and watching the many American tourists wandering by.

Her idyllic life for the moment seems at odds with her own early past — filled with uncertainty, inexplicable violence, and constant fear. Born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Maaza was just 3 years old when the 1974 Ethiopian revolution broke out, ousting a 3,000-year-old monarchy and replacing it with the brutal Derg regime that destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives before its collapse in 1991. Maaza was too young to understand what was happening, but perceptive enough to retain shattering images of that horrific time that have stayed with her through the years. Decades later, Maaza pieced together those memories to write her award-winning, critically acclaimed debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, published in early 2010.

At the core of Maaza’s searing work are one family’s hellish experiences during the 1974 revolution. The family’s patriarch — the good doctor Hailu — is a prominent, proud man highly trained to alleviate pain, cure illness, and save the dying. And yet he can do nothing for his beloved wife who lies in a hospital bed, shriveled, exhausted, and ready to pass on. Hailu’s elder son Yonas gravely tries to hold his family together, but is himself helpless when his young daughter becomes seriously ill and his wife Sara is crushed by the fear of potential loss.

Unlike the controlled, watchful Yonas, Hailu’s younger son Dawit is still idealistic, still fueled by a rash temper that once put a fellow student in the hospital when Dawit, too young to understand rape, witnessed that student committing a vicious crime against a family servant. Dawit is devoted to his dying mother, emotionally dependent on his sister-in-law Sara, and in love with a headstrong young woman. He looks on in anguish and disgust as the new regime claims his childhood best friend, who uses complicity as a way to escape his deprived past spent in a mud shack adjacent to the luxury of Hailu’s two-story home.

The revolution shatters the family’s lives: Hailu’s humanity, Yonas’ responsibility, Dawit’s ideals will all be tested. As if working pieces of an intricate puzzle, Maaza presents an epic historical moment too few of us know of, laying the most atrocious acts next to radiantly tender moments and juxtaposing utter cowardice with utmost bravery. The result proves unforgettable.

Based on the strength of that single novel, Maaza was chosen by the 10×10 team to write the Ethiopian chapter of the 10×10 documentary film. Her enthusiasm about the project is palpable, and she admits she is most excited about connecting to the Ethiopian girls. Almost shyly, she reveals her own experiences when, at age 7, she left the comfort of her family to escape the growing danger of remaining in Ethiopia and traveled alone to the United States as a tiny refugee. For over a decade, she grew up in a group home run by a Christian couple in a small town in Colorado: “No one has ever heard of it; it’s on the border with Kansas,” she says. She remained there, living with a revolving group of other refugees, until she graduated high school and left for college.

Maaza softly admits to her isolated youth as “difficult, and I wouldn’t want to wish it on anyone.” She adds, “maybe that’s why I feel so connected to the plight of children.” [... click here for more: author interview appears on pages 5-11]

Author interview: 10×10: Educate Girls, Change the World Book Club Kit, April 2011, pages 5-11

Readers: Adult

Published: 2010

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