|
|
| Photo: Hillery Stone | |
After graduating from college, Wendy Lee went to China to work as an English teacher. She has featured both cities in which she lived, Fuzhou in Fujian Province and Xining in Qinghai Province, in her novels. The first, Happy Family, is about a young woman from China who becomes the nanny to an American couple with an adopted Chinese daughter. The second, Across a Green Ocean (Kensington, January 27, 2015), deals with a Chinese American family a year after the father dies, when the son goes to China to find out long-held secrets in the family's past. After residing in New York City for 13 years, Lee now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and cat.
On your nightstand now:
A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. I've watched the TV series but have only started reading the books now. The adaptation seems remarkably faithful thus far (unfortunately, the same people die).
Favorite book when you were a child:
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. The physical book itself is pure magic: the alternating red and green text, the intricately illustrated chapter openers, even the dust jacket that looks like a medieval painting. I don't think the e-book version would have the same effect on a child today.
Your top five authors:
Marguerite Duras, Mary Gaitskill, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri and Alice Munro.
Book you've faked reading:
Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. This was assigned for a class, and I think I just looked at the photos.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Home Cooking by Laurie Colwin. Colwin is well known among food writers, but even to someone who isn't that interested in reading about food, her personal essays are full of life and warmth. Her piece "Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant" (which inspired an anthology of the same name) encapsulates everything about being young and living in a New York City apartment that is way too small for you.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine. Tomine does amazing [artwork] for the New Yorker, and his graphic novel about young people looking for love and identity is no exception.
Book that changed your life:
Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri. Before Lahiri's work, I hadn't read much about Asian-American characters from the generation I identified with: the children of immigrants who retained some of the native country's traditions and habits, but were much more aware of how they clashed with the predominant American culture. This short-story collection was very inspiring to a young writer with my background.
Favorite line from a book:
From the short story "Theft" by Katherine Anne Porter: "In this moment she felt that she had been robbed of an enormous number of valuable things, whether material or intangible: things lost or broken by her own fault, things she had forgotten and left in houses when she moved: books borrowed and not returned, journeys she had planned and had not made, words she had waited to hear spoken to her and not heard, and the words she had meant to answer with bitter alternatives and intolerable substitutes worse than nothing, and yet inescapable: the long patient suffering of dying friendships, and the dark inexplicable death of love--all that she had, and all that she had missed, were lost together, and were twice lost in this landslide of remembered losses."
Which character you most relate to:
I'm not sure, but according to a BuzzFeed quiz, I'm most like Oskar Schell from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer: highly intelligent but anxious and depressed, a lover of adventure and stories but often discouraged by reality. Some of this is true.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. The first time I read it, I skipped most of the war parts because I wanted to know what happened to Natasha and Andrei.
Book you wish you had written:
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer. I love how this book tackles the subjects of artistic talent, success and money--how these things are related and whether they have any bearing on each other. Definitely an interesting subject for a writer!