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| Vanessa Chan (photo: Mary Inhea Kang) |
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Family memory and traumatic history inspire Malaysian-born, Brooklyn-based Vanessa Chan and her intricate debut novel, The Storm We Made (reviewed in this issue). The book is set in Malaya (now Malaysia, post-independence) during the 1930s and '40s, when the Japanese replaced the British as occupiers. Malayan wife and mother Cecily can't resist General Fujiwara, seduced by his promises of Asian racial autonomy. Ten years later, her collusion in his schemes will shape her three children's futures.
In your author's note, you reveal the novel's poignant, bittersweet provenance, about how your grandparents "love us by not speaking," specifically staying quiet about the Japanese occupation 1941-1945. "Excavating truths," you wrote, "was like playing an oral scavenger hunt." How much of your grandmother's stories did you integrate here?
My grandmother's stories ended up playing a formative role in framing the stories of the three child characters, because they are the age my grandmother and her siblings were during WWII/the occupation. In many cases I found her stories inserting themselves into finer details, like when one of the characters thinks she hears a plane, and immediately knows how to react to shield herself from an airstrike--that was innate knowledge that my grandma had passed down to me. They became the backdrop on which the novel is built. However, the novel is about a spy, which, while fun to imagine and create, was not drawn from family history. No one is my family has ever been a spy... as far as I know.
How did you balance inherited memories with historical research?
When I first started writing this book, during early 2020, no libraries and archives were open because of lockdown. Instead, I first relied on my memory of those stories my grandmother had told me. My uncle mailed me a book of old photos of Malaysia, and my dad, who is a history buff, was my main fact-checker; he was obsessively checking details for me--like, what kind of dishware and shoes they had in the 1930s and '40s. Research helped me fill in dates of battles and other date markers. But my family provided the things that mattered, the daily life that was lived: the "story" part of "history." For a long time, I felt insecure about this, as an author writing historical fiction, as though I were disrespecting the genre by not having a multi-page bibliography; but I've realized that for histories that are underwritten, perhaps this is the way to bring them to the fore--with memories and stories.
Are your grandparents still alive? Have they read the book?
It's one of the sadder truths of this book that my mother, my uncle, my grandfather and my grandmother all died before it was published. My grandmother passed in January 2023, one year before publication. She was, however, around when I sold my book (I was in Malaysia at the time, for Lunar New Year in 2022). When I told her about it, she laughed, congratulated me, then instructed me to get back to sweeping the floor. Business as usual in the Chan household!
My mother was one of my first readers. When I first started writing this novel in 2020, I would shamefully post snippets on Instagram Stories, then delete them an hour later. She learned to screenshot and enlarge so she could grab the snippets as soon as I posted them. When her illness challenged her vision, I would read snippets to her on the phone before she passed.
You use the phrase "living a life of fragments" in reference to writing your novel. Your intriguing structure cleverly mirrors that fragmentation; your chapters that hop time and viewpoints are like puzzle pieces. How did you decide on this compelling format?
When I first started writing, this was actually a linear novel about three sad children living through the tail end of WWII. But as I was writing, my personal circumstances changed. As I mentioned, the pandemic happened, we were locked down, my mother passed, and I was unable to go home to be with my family. Writing about home while being unable to go home seemed like a tragic contradiction. To give myself some joy and agency, I experimented with writing about a woman who is a spy who gets to run around and make good and bad decisions. That experiment ended up becoming the emotional core of the novel: the children's flawed mother, Cecily. I realized that in order to show cause-and-effect between the children's circumstances and their mother's decisions, I'd need to write two timelines. Keeping track of it all required me to pace around my apartment muttering to myself!
What do you hope your readers might learn about Malaysia from your novel?
I always say that stories only become history when they are written down. I'm hopeful that my novel helps to build a larger awareness of Malaysia's history and its people, and the impact of WWII on Southeast Asia. But also, I'm hoping that The Storm We Made becomes a part of the burgeoning movement for more Southeast Asian literature--historical, contemporary, speculative, fantastical--whatever it is! We're seeing more novelists and writers from the region emerge, and I would love for Southeast Asian voices to take up more space.
Given Malaysia's colonial history, was anti-Japanese sentiment a part of your Malaysian childhood?
Actually, no! My grandmother always said that she draws a distinction between the government, soldiers, and civilians--and she always refused to denounce the Japanese as a people, even if she acknowledged the cruelty of the Occupation. The story of the teenage girl, Jujube, who has a friendship with a Japanese customer at her teashop, is based on my grandmother's relationship with a Japanese civilian who was kind to her and her sisters. After the war, he would write her detailed, beautiful letters, with hand-drawn maps of Japan. Then he returned to Malaysia to look for them. She told me he called down the phonebook to find their family, and then burst into tears when she and her sisters were able to reunite with him in Kuala Lumpur.
At the time of our chat, your pub date is a month away. Already, Storm has received substantial attention. What's been the biggest surprise thus far?
I never thought anyone would care about a book about Malaysia. I wrote it only because I felt compelled to, because stories call out to writers. So it's been gratifying and surprising that people want to read the book, and are sharing it with others. Readers are busybodies--the best kind. They're curious, they want to know things: history, gossip, etc. And, it seems, they are interested in Malaysia, despite my preconceptions.
What are you writing next?
I have a second book under contract with my publisher: a story collection, The Ugliest Babies in the World, about girlhood, coming of age, and how that intersects with colonialism. It's funny, it's a little bit gross, it's feral, and occasionally shocking. I've also started a new novel, but that's barely an infant. All I'll say is that it interrogates the idea of tourism--and asks the question, can one ever have an authentic experience as a tourist? --Terry Hong