Jean Kwok, SEARCHING FOR SYLVIE LEE
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[1:54]I recently finished searching for Silvili by Gene Kwok, also small animals by Kim Brooks,
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[2:14]Did I say that enough times?
[2:15]Oh my gosh, I loved talking to Gene Kwok.
[2:18]I just adored it and she's writing for my next anthology, which I'm really excited about.
[2:23]Moms also don't have time to.
[2:25]Anyway, Gene is the award-winning New York Times, an international best-selling author of
[2:30]Searching for Silvili, Girl in Translation, and Mambo in Chinatown.
[2:34]Her work has been published in 20 countries and taught in universities,
[2:37]colleges, and high schools around the world.
[2:39]An instant, New York Times bestseller, searching for Silvili was selected for the
[2:43]Today Show Book Club and featured in The New York Times Time, Newsweek, CNN,
[2:46]The New York Post, Washington Post, Oh Magazine, People, Entertainment Weekly, and more.
[2:51]Gene has been chosen for numerous honors, including the American Library Association,
[2:54]Alex Award, The Chinese American Librarians Association Best Book Award,
[3:00]and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award International Shortlist.
[3:04]She has appeared on the Today Show and spoken at many schools and venues,
[3:07]including Harvard University, Columbia University, and the Tucson Festival of Books.
[3:10]A television documentary was filmed about Gene and her work.
[3:14]She immigrated from a Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five,
[3:17]and as she tells me in this interview and you'll hear more about it directly,
[3:20]she worked in a Chinatown clothing factory from much of her childhood,
[3:23]while living in an unheated, roach-invested apartment.
[3:26]In between her undergraduate degree at Harvard and MFA in fiction at Columbia,
[3:31]she worked for three years as a professional ballroom dancer.
[3:33]Her beloved brother Kwan passed away in a tragic plane accident
[3:37]and was the inspiration behind searching for Silvili.
[3:39]Gene is tri-lingual, fluent in Dutch, Chinese, and English,
[3:43]and studied Latin for seven years.
[3:44]She currently lives in the Netherlands with her husband, two sons, and four cats.
[3:48]Hi, how are you? Can you hear me?
[3:51]Yes, I can hear you.
[3:52]Hi, oh, I don't want her to meet you.
[3:55]Hi, it's a nice to see you.
[3:58]Oh, it's great to see you too.
[3:59]I am such a fan of yours and of your show.
[4:02]So when they said you were interested in talking to me,
[4:05]I was just thrilled.
[4:07]Oh, I'm a fan of yours too, so this works out perfectly.
[4:11]So would you mind telling listeners what searching for Silvili is about?
[4:16]And then I want to hear what inspired you to write it.
[4:19]Okay, well, Sushi for Silvili is the story of two sisters and a mother.
[4:25]And what happens is that the dazzling, beautiful, successful older sister Silvili
[4:32]goes to the Netherlands to visit her dying grandmother and she just disappears.
[4:38]And her younger sister, Amy, who's always been like in her shadow.
[4:44]You know, Amy's the stuttering shy one.
[4:47]Amy has to pull herself together and try to find her beloved older sister.
[4:54]So it's this story about the deeply rooted secrets that tie these three women, Silvili,
[5:01]Amy, and her mother together.
[5:03]Amazing.
[5:04]And how did you come up with the idea for this bit?
[5:06]Well, you know, the inspiration for this book was actually deeply personal because
[5:12]my brother, Quon, who was the dazzling brilliant one in our family, disappeared about, I guess,
[5:20]10 years ago. And, you know, he was the one that we had always looked up to.
[5:25]He was the one that we always went to when there was a problem.
[5:30]You know, I was the black sheep of the family.
[5:32]So nobody ever listened to me.
[5:34]You know, I grew up in a very conservative Chinese family.
[5:38]And I am the youngest of seven children.
[5:41]Oh my gosh.
[5:42]Seven children.
[5:44]Exactly.
[5:45]And I'm a girl.
[5:46]So it's like, you know, the two markers of hierarchy were age and gender.
[5:51]So I was at the bottom of the bottom of my entire life.
[5:55]But my brother and I, you know, we really loved each other.
[5:58]And he always was so great to me.
[6:00]And there was never any jealousy between us.
[6:03]Maybe because there was a 10 year age gap as well.
[6:06]So when he disappeared that night, I really thought,
[6:10]oh my god, you know, there's nobody to turn to.
[6:13]The person who has to figure out what happened and take charge is me.
[6:18]So that is the beating heart of this book.
[6:21]That feeling of loving someone so much and having relied on them,
[6:26]your whole life and then needing to kind of grow as a person
[6:29]in order to try to help them.
[6:32]And so what happened with your brother?
[6:34]Well, you know, what happened was that it happened right before Thanksgiving.
[6:39]So right around this time of the year.
[6:41]And we figured out at first, you know, he hadn't called home when he was supposed to call.
[6:46]And that's the kind of thing where you think for a responsible person that's strange,
[6:50]but it can happen, you know, you can get really busy or you can forget.
[6:54]And nobody had been able to reach him.
[6:56]So people were kind of alarmed but not really, you know, panicked.
[7:00]But when he didn't come home for Thanksgiving, that was, you know, a true sign that something was wrong.
[7:07]How old was he at the time?
[7:08]How old were you?
[7:09]Like when was this in life?
[7:11]Yeah, well, I was in my 30s.
[7:13]I guess if he was in his 40s and I was already living in the Netherlands,
[7:17]but I was getting these panicked phone calls from my family in New York because,
[7:21]you know, as you may know, you know, I grew up, I was born in Hong Kong.
[7:26]I grew up in New York City and we grew up extremely poor.
[7:29]I mean, we're working class immigrant family and I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn that was
[7:36]unheated for most of my childhood.
[7:38]So, and, you know, I've worked in a clothing factory with my brother and with my family
[7:44]from the age of five through really most of my childhood.
[7:48]So that was, you know, that was our background.
[7:51]And Kwan had always been the person that I looked up to
[7:55]and who kind of showed me a way out of that circle of life at the factory,
[8:00]you know, where you go in as a child and you leave as an old woman,
[8:04]you know, dragging plastic bags home to your apartment
[8:08]because you really never leave the factory.
[8:10]And did you, sorry to keep interrupting, did you go to school or not?
[8:14]I did. I did. We all went to school.
[8:16]You know, what would happen is that my father would pick me up.
[8:21]So I would wake up.
[8:23]I would go to school.
[8:24]My father came and picked me up after school and I would go to the factory in Chinatown
[8:31]and work until like nine or 10 at night.
[8:33]So all of my homework, all tests, everything had to be done
[8:38]on the subway or during breaks at the factory.
[8:41]And my brother Kwan, my other brothers who were, you know, 10 years older,
[8:45]like they were in the high school phase at that point,
[8:47]they did the same thing and they had of course much more pressure.
[8:51]They had SATs, they had papers, projects, tests,
[8:54]all of which could only be squeezed into those train rides or breaks at the factory.
[8:59]And what was even worse was that, you know, for them,
[9:02]I would go home around nine or 10 at night with my parents,
[9:05]which is late for a little kid.
[9:07]But for my brothers, you know, they actually went on to a second job
[9:12]waiting tables at a restaurant until the middle of the night.
[9:16]And in fact, that was how I actually began to write.
[9:19]So I'll tell you the moment I didn't decide to be a writer,
[9:23]but the moment I began writing was when I remember one night,
[9:27]I was sleeping on my mattress on the floor because we didn't have beds.
[9:31]And oh, my God, you do not want to be sleeping on a mattress
[9:35]when your apartment is overrun with a vermin the way ours was.
[9:39]Because you would just hear the mice like racing past you at the night.
[9:44]I was like, I know, and I'm like a very terrified of vermin person,
[9:48]you know, to this day.
[9:49]When I go in the garden, I put on like a radioactive suit.
[9:52]So I was the same when I was a kid.
[9:54]And, you know, it's just a terrified of things crawling on me.
[9:57]I would be constantly making noise.
[10:00]and banging around me to try to keep things away.
[10:02]But in any case, I was really asleep.
[10:04]And one night, corn came home, and it was like the middle of the night,
[10:08]and he lay a package on my pillow next to me.
[10:12]And there was so unusual because we were paid one penny per piece of clothing
[10:20]that we did at the factory.
[10:21]So after long process of processing the clothing, we were paid one penny per piece.
[10:27]And of course, piecework is also illegal.
[10:29]But that's a whole other story.
[10:30]There are a lot of things in my childhood that were illegal.
[10:33]But so we were paid by the piece instead of by the hour.
[10:37]And so you can imagine, we had debt, we had rents, and we could barely afford food.
[10:43]It's 100 pieces of clothing before you have a dollar.
[10:47]So I really didn't have toys or anything like that.
[10:52]And so it was amazing to get this gift that he had somehow managed
[10:56]to save enough to get me a gift.
[10:58]And I guess what amazes me to this day
[11:01]is that he had not given me a toy or a piece of candy,
[11:05]but he gave me something that would change my life.
[11:08]He got me a blank diary, and he said,
[11:12]whatever you write in this will belong to you.
[11:15]And that was just such a powerful idea for a kid
[11:20]who had changed countries, changed culture, changed languages.
[11:25]I didn't speak a word of English when I came to the U.S.
[11:27]and I suffered for it greatly in school.
[11:30]So it was just amazing to have a place
[11:33]where I could put down my thoughts and my dreams.
[11:35]And the fact that my parents had gone from being parents
[11:39]to being people who were even more scared and confused than I was.
[11:45]So Juan was a really important person in my life.
[11:47]And he was the first person to leave the family.
[11:50]And he went to MIT.
[11:52]And so he showed me that there was a way out.
[11:55]And he would help me by giving me things like a typewriter.
[12:01]And so into work with, so eventually I followed and I went to Harvard as well.
[12:06]And I began the rest of my life in his footsteps.
[12:10]But the fact was still that he was the older brother.
[12:12]And he was the one who was listened to at home.
[12:15]And when things really went wrong,
[12:19]he was the one who stepped in it, fixed them.
[12:22]So when he did not come home for Thanksgiving,
[12:24]I mean, we just, I remember I just thought I thought,
[12:28]oh my God.
[12:29]And I realized that this was something that was going wrong
[12:33]on a level greater than any I had ever experienced before.
[12:37]You know, this was not like failing a test or,
[12:40]you know, the normal things that go on are some guy breaking up with you.
[12:43]I mean, this was really serious.
[12:46]And we didn't know what had happened to him.
[12:49]So, and he was, he didn't, he wasn't in a relationship at that time.
[12:53]So it wasn't like we had a girlfriend or a wife who would know what he was doing day by day.
[12:59]And finally, you know, we found out from a friend that he had flown to Texas to buy an airplane.
[13:07]And he, you know, we'd grown up, he became quite successful.
[13:11]And he was a scientist, but he loved everything that went really fast.
[13:16]So he was a pilot as a hobby.
[13:19]And he'd gone to buy an airplane.
[13:21]And that was all we knew.
[13:22]So of course, you know, I start trying to call airports, small airports in Texas.
[13:28]Do you know how many airports there are in Texas?
[13:31]There are really a lot of airports.
[13:33]It's like a long state to disappear.
[13:36]You know, that is not a good place to disappear.
[13:39]So it was just, it was just impossible to figure out where he was and what had happened.
[13:43]And finally, I had to do his email.
[13:46]And once I did that, I was able to, you know, retrace his steps and what we found out.
[13:52]And of course, all these things are going through your head, like what happened to him.
[13:55]You know, was he kidnapped, you know, did the sale go through?
[13:59]Did they trick him?
[14:00]Did he, you know, there's so many things could have happened between, you know,
[14:05]the airplane purchase and his disappearance.
[14:08]And we found out that what had happened was that he had bought the plane.
[14:14]Everything had gone well and he had taken off, but he had not landed.
[14:19]And so that was the next stage of the mystery was to try to figure out, you know,
[14:26]what happened to the plane?
[14:27]And something that I never realized before was that, you know, if you have an accident in a car,
[14:34]you are found because, you know, you're by highway or you crash into someone's house or, you know,
[14:41]but if you crash in an airplane, actually a lot of people who crash in those small planes,
[14:46]especially if something happens in a wooded area, they're never found because an airplane may seem
[14:53]large to us is actually nothing compared with, you know, the forces of nature.
[14:58]So they can just disappear into the woods and you never know what happened to that person.
[15:04]So if there was a period of really a couple of weeks when we were trying to track down what had
[15:10]happened to him and, you know, amazing volunteers, search and rescue.
[15:14]And you're thinking every day, oh my god, he might be like dying of thirst with a broken leg next
[15:21]to that plane, right?
[15:22]That's the worst thing that you don't know if any delay is, you know, making the difference
[15:27]between life and death. And what happened eventually was that they did find his body and it,
[15:34]he had been flying at home to West Virginia and somehow in the mountains, a sun and storm had come
[15:40]on. He had to lower the plane to escape the lightning and thunder of the storm and in doing so,
[15:46]he nicked a tree crashed into the side of a mountain. When that happened, he had died instantly.
[15:53]And, you know, it was, of course, the worst thing that had ever happened to me to hear this news.
[15:58]But in a way, it was also a relief to know, you know, just the act of knowing is a gift in a time
[16:05]like that. So it's, you know, tremendous loss, but I was really grateful to all of the volunteers
[16:12]and the Air Force and everyone who had looked for him and actually found out what happened.
[16:18]So when I set out to write Searching for Sylvie Lee, which is my third novel,
[16:23]I wanted, of course, to talk about this story, but I couldn't do it. You know, it was so painful,
[16:30]there was so much, you know, that was tied between being this story that I just couldn't move forward.
[16:37]And then I realized I need to not make it a man who disappeared. It has to be a woman.
[16:43]And the moment I made her, made the story about two sisters, it changed everything, you know,
[16:50]and the Sylvie and Amy took on their own life. And so, of course, the emotional engine
[16:56]is still there because that's at the heart of why I wrote this book and also many issues about
[17:03]language and culture and, you know, how well do we really know the people that we love most?
[17:10]You know, what secrets are we hiding from the people we love the most? And what secrets are
[17:15]they hiding from us? So once I made that change, then the story just, you know, flowed and came
[17:24]out as if it were complete. Wow. What a story. First of all, I am so sorry for your loss. Second,
[17:31]and I'm incredibly impressed by your detective skills and ability to have figured out what happened
[17:36]at the time. And I'm just so sorry that that all fell into your lap and that you had to live
[17:42]through that. And also, going back to your childhood, the fortitude and immense, just mental willpower
[17:51]and just strength to get through that type of childhood and still end up at Harvard. I mean,
[17:58]I went to like this cushy private school and kids couldn't even get into Harvard falling
[18:02]on over each other to try to get in. So I am just so impressed. And now, like, and I didn't know
[18:09]that entire backstory and the novel, which I did read, I didn't even realize now and of course,
[18:15]all has so much more meaning to me. So thank you for sharing that story. And then I also saw that
[18:21]your mother has passed away. So I wanted to ask you not to like open up every old wound you have,
[18:26]but I wanted to hear what happened with her. I know it was about 10 years ago and you've written a
[18:31]a lot about that. So I wanted to hear about that and how maybe that affected, you know, this other
[18:35]trauma and, you know, wind and sequenced it, everything happened. And then sort of how did you,
[18:41]how are you able? This is a lot of questions. But look, how are you able to move on really and go back
[18:47]to writing and go back to focus after everything that had happened? This is what I love about you and
[18:52]why I'm such a huge fan of your work because you go right to the heart of why people do the things
[18:59]they do. And I think that I kind of right from trauma to trauma, you know, I think that for me,
[19:06]if I try to write about something too directly, then I can get blocked. But, you know, writing from me
[19:13]is a way of transforming the things that happened to us. I think that's what books are about. I
[19:20]think books are about connection and communication. And yes, you know, maybe you went to a
[19:25]cushy private school, but you had your own problems. You know, we all life is hard for all of us,
[19:31]you know, life is hard in so many ways. And I think it's the great thing about books is that
[19:37]you can live somebody else's life, but you can also connect to them and realize how much they
[19:42]are like you and how many struggles they've gone through that actually at heart similar to the
[19:48]struggles that you went through yourself. And so, you know, my mother is indeed a very big influence
[19:53]my boss, you know, tragically my mother died after my brother. So that was, you know, this is how
[19:59]life is so unexpected.
[20:00]affected. And it's one of the things I say to people is they love the people you have
[20:05]around you that you and try to appreciate having them around you because you can never
[20:10]know what's going to happen. I mean, never, ever anticipated that I would lose my young,
[20:17]healthy, vibrant brother before I lost my mother. You know, so that was my mother's
[20:23]of course a tremendous loss and influence in my life. And when I was little and we were
[20:28]working in the factory and I was going to sleep on that mattress on the floor, you know,
[20:32]I would look up and every night of my childhood. My mother was sitting up late, falling asleep
[20:40]over these bags of clothing that she had brought home from the factory. And because the
[20:45]apartment was unheated in New York City, which is of course incredibly cold in the winter,
[20:51]in the back of the apartment. In fact, the people had thrown bricks to the windows and the landlord
[20:56]had a bother to fix it. Like the landlord had not bothered to fix many things. In the front,
[21:01]they did fix the windows because obviously they didn't want to complain. But in the back,
[21:06]when nobody could see they didn't. And so, you know, our windows there were only covered with
[21:11]black plastic bags and duct tape and the wind would gust against them all winter. But we did the
[21:17]only thing we could, which was that we turned on the oven and we left it on day and night
[21:23]throughout the winter so that it was like this little source of heat in the kitchen despite
[21:28]the, you know, lack of glass in the windows. And my mother would just sit by that oven and fall
[21:34]asleep next to the oven every day working hard. So in my books, you know, of course I talk about
[21:40]language gaps and about the differences between the first generation and the second generation.
[21:46]But I have a lot of sympathy for the first generation because I am a first generation immigrant
[21:51]myself. And I know, you know, what my mother went through. I know what it's like to be the
[21:59]person on the subway who is just weird, who maybe smells weird, who's carrying a lot of plastic bags
[22:06]and oh my god, does not even speak English, you know. And to us, English speaking folks,
[22:12]it feels almost like an insult that somebody didn't bother to learn English because English is of
[22:18]course the universal language. And we have the luxury of traveling everywhere over the world
[22:23]and everyone bends over backwards to speak English to us. So we never have to think well how
[22:29]good's my Russian? You know what I mean? What if I had to speak Russian to everybody in the world?
[22:34]How well would I be able to do that? And it's very easy to make a judgment about somebody
[22:40]based upon how they speak and what level their English is at. And I saw people making that
[22:47]judgment upon my mother, my entire life, you know, because she never learned to speak English.
[22:53]The only word she ever learned of English was when boys we call the house, she would pick up the
[22:59]phone and she would say, gee, not home. And then she would hang up the phone. So that was the only
[23:05]like bit of English she ever learned. And so I saw what she looked like from the outside. And I knew
[23:12]what she was like in Chinese from the inside. And so, you know, when I wrote Searching for Civil
[23:18]League, for example, the narrative is told by these three women, Sylvie, Amy, and Ma. And they're
[23:26]all thinking in their own languages. So Sylvie was raised in the Netherlands with her grandmother,
[23:32]Sylvie is thinking in Dutch, which I also speak because I married a Dutch diet and now living in
[23:37]the Netherlands. Amy is thinking in English, and Ma is thinking in Chinese. So you have moments
[23:44]like when Amy goes to see Ma and we see Ma for the first time. And we see how Ma from the outside
[23:52]is this, you know, quiet, simple, beloved, but simple woman who's kind of getting berated by the
[23:59]customer in the trifling hours. And then we open into Ma's chapter and we realize this is a completely
[24:06]different person in her own language. She's deep, she's poetic. She has a wealth of feeling
[24:13]that she cannot communicate in English and that she also tragically cannot even really communicate
[24:19]to her own daughter. And that's what happens in an immigrant family that, you know, we come to the US
[24:26]and oftentimes the younger generation does not know the original language as well as the parents.
[24:34]The parents don't pick up the new language as well as the kids. And then you have this huge kind
[24:39]of language communication gap between the people who actually love each other the most.
[24:45]And so then what ended up happening with your mom? So my mom died of cancer and we knew that she had
[24:51]kind of been sick for a while. She was doing really pretty well until the very end. So she didn't
[24:57]suffer very long for which I'm glad. But you know, we knew she was getting old and getting frail.
[25:02]And so it was when she passed away, it was a different kind of grief. I mean, it's always a
[25:08]huge shock. And it's always, you know, it's always really terrible. I mean, I still have dreams where
[25:15]everybody's alive. And then you wake up and you're just confused by what's reality and what's not
[25:21]reality. But it was, it was different. It was different while my brother who disappeared so suddenly
[25:27]out of nowhere. That was just such a shock. I mean, that that was just, you know, you're not
[25:33]for a loop because you did not see it coming. Well, well, I again, I'm just so sorry for all the stuff
[25:40]that you have been through. And I'm curious about your family. I know I'm like barely talking about
[25:45]the book now, but you have such a, you know, captivating story yourself. What ended up happening
[25:52]like was your mother still working in the factory? And what happened to your older siblings? Were they
[25:56]able to achieve a point of sort of comfort in their financial situations that your parents could
[26:02]stop working or what ended up happening? Yeah, we all luckily wound up doing well and getting out of
[26:09]the factory. So because I have these older siblings, they worked really hard and they were actually
[26:16]able to take my parents and us out of the factory. So my mom, you know, had a lot of happy years
[26:23]along with my father. My father was pretty sick when I was a kid and he died when I was pretty
[26:27]young. So my father wasn't out much of the day-to-day life of the family as my mother was,
[26:34]but my mom had a lot of happy years. And I remember, you know, of course my brother,
[26:38]Kwan, and I understood she was getting old even, you know, before she began to get sick in any way.
[26:45]And we would like make sure to take her on trips to like Las Vegas. Can I just tell you,
[26:50]like, don't go to Las Vegas with your mother? Yeah. I mean, I love my mom. It was great to be
[26:56]there with her. It was like, she was like, those girls are not wearing anything. Don't look.
[27:02]We would like go through the casinos like blind. She's like, they're gambling. Oh my god, you know,
[27:09]come on. But she really liked the food. You know, she liked all the buffets and she liked
[27:13]the big hotel and stuff like that. So we had a good time, but we took her on a lot of trips
[27:18]and we had, we had a lot of really good times with her. And I guess it's one of the ironies
[27:23]of life that when my brother died first, you know, I had all these photos of the three of us
[27:29]that I had taken really to remember my mother. And then instead was my brother who had gone.
[27:35]But I will say that that was the time in my life when my debut novel Girl and Translation
[27:40]was published. And it was, you know, surprisingly very successful from the moment it was published.
[27:47]And I was really happy that they were able to see that, you know, they just kind of saw the beginning
[27:53]of that. And they were, you know, at first, my family was kind of surprised that I do write about
[27:59]my past, you know, searching for silver leaves. Of course, in many ways about the disappearance
[28:04]of my brother, but also I would say the price of the American dream, you know, that what
[28:10]who pays and how do you pay for achieving that type of success. And what happens if you're not
[28:17]capable of achieving the American dream of achieving that success. So, you know, that's what
[28:22]silver really is about. But my first book we're on translation is really about those years when
[28:27]we were really poor and they're living in that apartment and working in the factory. And I remember
[28:34]they were a little bit surprised that I had written about it because people who come from a background
[28:41]like mine don't usually grow up to become writers, you know, I think I had that instinct as well
[28:47]for a long time that if you're able to escape that life, you want to put it behind you, you know,
[28:52]you want to forget about it. You feel ashamed of it. It feels like nobody else ever had anything
[28:58]comparable to what you went through. And so you just want to move on. So, I had written, you know,
[29:04]the book as fiction thinking that nobody would ever read it and that nobody would ever ask me to
[29:10]speak on your real life. And then of course, my book became very successful. And, you know,
[29:15]everybody was asking me, so are your books based on your real life. So, my family were,
[29:20]they were a bit in a shock when that came out. But then I think it really turned to pride
[29:25]because so many people were so kind and had, you know, the generous reaction you just had,
[29:30]which was, you know, how amazing that you survived that and managed to come through whole and in one
[29:37]piece. And I think that that shame has turned into pride. And I think that I give a lot of credit
[29:44]for who I became and coming through as I hope a kind person as opposed to a bitter,
[29:52]hard person that can also occur when you reach success. I really give credit to my mother,
[29:57]because my mother really brought us up to say,
[30:00]Well, you know, the most important thing is who you are, you know, and the people you love and the things you have. Yes, it's nice to have enough. It is essential to have enough.
[30:11]But once you have enough to eat and to live after that, it's really all about who you love and who you are.
[30:19]That's so nice. That's so, I mean, it's so important and it's so important to get that message out and find what unites all of us. I think in a time of such divisiveness, stories like yours are so important to hear and messages like your mothers. They just like go to the root of what is common and shared among everybody no matter what the background or circumstance is like.
[30:44]Wow, Jean, I am just like in awe and so impressed. And now I have to go back and read your first two books, which I haven't read yet. So you're giving me more work here now.
[30:55]Well, you know, I think you are so right that, you know, we are in a time of such divisiveness. And I think this is a moment when books can do so much for us.
[31:07]And it's something that I think about when I'm writing that I don't want to preach to anybody and I want the book to be a really fun read just by itself. You know, that's a page turn on a mystery and suspenseful.
[31:21]And you can turn the pages just enjoying the story. But I also think that, you know, the reason that I do these things with language and with culture and race and and immigration in the books as an underlying themes is that I hope that somebody who's reading the book just for enjoyment and pleasure might pick up something else, you know, about what is it like to not speak the language.
[31:46]What is it like to be judged. And I think the great thing about novels is that it's in one medium where you are really placed inside someone's mind, regardless of gender, color, race, socio economic status.
[32:03]It doesn't not matter who you are. You really walk a mile in someone else's shoes. And that's an opportunity, I think, for the author to show the reader. This is what is like, you know, this is what happens.
[32:18]You know, I especially since searching for severely was a read with Jenna today show pick. I reached a wider audience than I had before.
[32:27]And I reached some people who had really not read books like mine. And it was really great because, you know, they say, you know, wow, I had no idea that somebody who might be of another race.
[32:41]But who might speak English perfectly could still encounter racism, the way that your characters did or I had no idea how frustrating.
[32:49]It must be to be more and to be kind of trapped within this bubble of not being able to express yourself truly the way you want to to the world and to your own children, you know, to listen to your children beyond the phone and that know what they're talking about.
[33:07]It's just so difficult and yet so many people go through that. But I do see a focus and means of connection. Absolutely.
[33:15]It's great because, you know, a lot of book service a tool to share your voice, right, to find your own voice. But I feel like your book actually helped you find your mother's voice, right, the voice that maybe you never got to experience.
[33:28]And that you didn't want to be lost and that's just beautiful. I mean, that's amazing. And I say this, by the way, to my kids a lot, like, how would you like to be dropped in, you know, to bed and you try to talk, you know, I mean, I am not, I mean, I took French and college or whatever, but like, I'm not particularly good at languages.
[33:45]So to drop me in another culture, no matter what people said about the importance of that language is not going to make me be able to learn it or master it any faster, right.
[33:54]Everyone has skills and some people are, you know, foreign language people and some people are not, but to have that one skill out of so many be the thing that determines your intelligence is something that not enough people think about on a day to day basis.
[34:08]And you're absolutely right to highlight it and all of that. But now I have to find out like what's going on now? Are you writing another book? Like what's happening with you in the future? I now I have to now I'm like, you know, sorry, I've been like captivated. I'm running long on this interview because and I didn't even ask you anything I wanted to ask you.
[34:26]I'm loving our conversation as well. No, so I am, I am actually finishing my next book and I'm really excited about this book because it is, you know, a mystery.
[34:38]So we learn our immigrant story kind of like so really and what happens is that when the book opens, we are reading a letter from a woman, a Chinese woman to someone she loves and she, we don't know who she's writing to and she is begging this person for forgiveness for her role in a murder.
[35:00]So that somebody was killed. We know that she was involved in it. It was a person who was very important to the person she's writing to who she loves more than anything in the world.
[35:13]But we don't know who any of these players are and she says, you know, I hope that when you hear my full story, you will forgive me and that maybe, you know, you will come to me and we could be reunited and then we rewind 15 years and she starts to tell the story of what actually really happened all those years ago.
[35:36]And it's only at the end of the book that we find out who she's writing to who, you know, got killed and why she really did everything she did.
[35:45]Oh, my gosh, now I can't wait to read that.
[35:49]We'll send you a copy as soon as we've got what we'll send you on. Please do, please do.
[35:53]Do you have any advice to aspiring authors or for aspiring authors, I should say.
[35:58]Yeah, I have a lot of advice. I think, you know, I would say to go back to my own problems with writing searching for Sylvia Lee.
[36:06]I think that as a writer, you kind of have to walk this line, you know, on the one hand, you need to write from your burning passion.
[36:16]You need to write from your trauma. You need to write the things that make you uncomfortable that hurt you.
[36:21]And what I do think is wonderful about that is that, you know, sometimes stuff happens to us and it just seems like, why is this happening?
[36:30]There's nothing good in this. There's nothing redeeming. This is so unfair. This should not be happening to, you know, me or to this other amazing kind.
[36:40]of wonderful person. And I find writing to be a kind of magical thing that I guess it's, you know, giving your attention.
[36:49]When you pay attention to something like that, when you describe it, when you tell it to someone else, it transforms it into something that is so senseless into something that is a means of connection that maybe we have that we can learn something from into something, you know,
[37:07]And I would say that as a writer, yes, you need to write to that place and you need to write that truth.
[37:12]But on the other hand, sometimes it can be too right on the nose and it can be too hard to go forward in that way.
[37:22]And what you have to do is just change the thing that silencing you and it could be a change like I did from, you know, changing from a man to a woman
[37:32]and letting the book take on its own life, or, you know, it could be that you have a character in your book that is a censoring character that might be connected to somebody in your own past that didn't want you to speak.
[37:45]And you know, I would just say just kill that person off. There's nothing wrong with it. Just kill them off. It's fine. You know, I mean, not in real life. Okay.
[37:53]I know, I know, I know, just get rid of them. And sometimes if you do that, that can be pretty magical that suddenly you're able to tell things that you were afraid to speak about before or change them enough that you could deal with having them in your book.
[38:09]So that is what I would say, and maybe one last thing to say to aspiring writers is that sometimes it's very hard to know what advice to take and what advice not to take.
[38:19]And I would say, yes, absolutely be as open as you can. But on the other hand, you wrote what you wrote for a reason.
[38:27]And I always think that it's better to have a living vital in perfect creature than like a perfect corpse lying on a slab that is maybe in total proportion, but it's no longer alive.
[38:43]So whatever that vital spark is that is making you write what you write, you have to nurture that and keep that alive.
[38:51]Wow. This is amazing. I am so feel so fortunate that we got a chance to talk. And I just wish we could talk longer. And now I want to like stay in touch and meet you and all the rest.
[39:01]So I'm so glad our paths across in life and I'll email you after.
[39:06]But thank you, Jean. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for showing everybody what's really important about life in so many ways and also for the entertainment that your books provide.
[39:17]So, you know, it's like a one-stop shop idea.
[39:20]Well, thank you so much. And I do want to say before we get off that you know you do so much to promote reading and authors and you have incredible and
[39:30]incredible taste. And I have been a really big fan of yours for such a long time. So yes, I'm so happy we got to meet. And that we had this chance to talk.
[39:39]Me too. Okay.
[39:40]Well, thanks to you.
[39:41]Take care.
[39:42]Okay.
[39:43]You too.
[39:44]Bye bye.
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