Words of Wisdom

Photo by Jason Doiy

Her Lucky Face: San Francisco author May-lee Chai, whose debut novel, My Lucky Face, has just hit bookstore shelves nationwide, is optimistic about the future for Asian-themed works. "There should be no limit to what we can write about," she says. "There hasn't been for other writers, so there shouldn't be for us."

May-lee Chai writes about love, loss, and self-discovery

BY HANE C. LEE

Like practically everyone else the morning after Princess Diana's funeral, May-lee Chai was reflecting on the life of the lady. "I hate to admit it, but I was really moved," she said, confessing that she cried during Elton John's rendition of "Candle in the Wind."

Chai knows a lot about loss. Her debut novel, My Lucky Face (Soho Press, $23), is dedicated to her mother Carolyn, who died of cancer last year. A few years previous, Chai had been diagnosed with a tumor of her own, the discovery of which precipitated her withdrawal from a Ph.D. program in Chinese architectural-art history for which she had just been awarded a full scholarship. Luckily, her tumor turned out to be benign. But being confronted with such potentially devastating prospects forced Chai to take a serious look at her life and her future.

"When I thought I had cancer and didn't know how long I might live, or if I was going to be really sick, I re-evaluated what I wanted out of life," she said. "What I always wanted was to be a writer."

So she abandoned her lifelong plans for a career in academia and enrolled in a creative-writing program. This allowed her to stay closer to home, which made it a bit easier to take care of her mother when she fell ill a few years later.

Perhaps it is Chai's experience with this sort of abrupt and life-altering change that best informs the subject matter of her novel. Lin Jun, a smart, dedicated middle-school teacher in Nanjing, is assigned the role of "special assistant in charge of the foreign teacher," a young American woman named Cynthia who has been hired by the school to spend a year as an English instructor. As Lin Jun's friendship with Cynthia grows, so does her awareness of a world outside her limited experience. Lin Jun is faced with the dichotomy not only between the individualistic attitude of her American friend and the self-denial on the part of women in her own society, but also between China's rapid modernization and its traditional values.

The basic plot of the book traces the deterioration of Lin Jun's marriage to a frustrated writer. Distant, self-absorbed, and threatened by Cynthia's influence, Lin's Jun's husband, Shao Hong, loses his temper one evening, dumps the contents of his rice bowl on the table, and then knocks over the table itself onto its side--and his wife onto the floor in the process. It is at that point that Lin Jun finally realizes she is unwilling to sacrifice her happiness for the sake of societal convention and decides to divorce her husband, even if that means having to bear the criticism and outrage of her parents-in-law, the school administration, and the community.

Even beyond illustrating the epiphany of Lin Jun's self-discovery surrounding her decision, Chai also offers an interesting examination of family life in contemporary Chinese society as well as a primer on the Cultural Revolution. Lin Jun's narration frequently dips into her childhood memories of living in the countryside with Auntie Gao, a former classmate of her mother's, after her parents are sent away to be "re-educated," and delves even further into the past through the accounts of her parents-in-law.

My Lucky Face
Soho Press;
272 pp.;
$23

I asked Chai what it felt like getting her first book published, particularly from the perspective of an Asian Pacific American woman.

"The process was difficult," she sighed. "Just writing [the book] took me a number of years. And then getting an agent took like a year. I just got one of those books that listed agents, and I sent query letters--query letter after query letter after query letter. It takes weeks or sometimes months to get a response to your query letter. And then, you don't send the whole book, you send a sample, and if they like it. ... It's just incredibly time-consuming. After I had the agent, she was the one who found the publisher so I didn't have to worry about that, thank God.

"Because of Amy Tan, now there's a market [for APA writers]. People realize, this can sell; it's not just this obscure minority-fiction thing that isn't part of America. At the same time, because Amy Tan is such an iconic figure, there are the inevitable comparisons. I mean, I have heard from agents--not my agent, of course, but others--who say, 'Oh, she writes nothing like Amy Tan,' as a point of rejection. It's like, 'Well, why would I? Why would anyone write like anyone else?' But I think [Amy Tan] blew apart the market and made a space for us."

Such a space has been made that Chai has found publications as established in the mainstream as Seventeen magazine wanting to print her work. The short story that was published there depicted a Cambodian family living in Texas. Chai herself spent a good part of her formative years in the Bible Belt, and described to me an adolescence filled with racially motivated abuse.

"People shot our dogs in front of our house, people put dead snakes in our mailbox," she recounted bitterly. "I would walk home after school and people would drive up in their pickup, roll down their window, and shout 'Jap' at me. My brother was constantly being attacked. ... I wanted to die. I wished I could've killed myself."

Instead of succumbing to destructive self-hatred, Chai was determined to repudiate the kind of ignorance that motivated such behavior. She devoted herself to Chinese studies as soon as she could leave South Dakota.

"I learned to read and write Chinese; I went to live in China for two years," she explained. "I wrote my first novel about China, and it's not about exotic China or freakish China. It's about, you know, ordinary Chinese people."

Chai firmly disputed the suggestion that My Lucky Face could be labeled "a woman's book," but conceded that the fact that her father loved it may not be strong enough an argument. However, she pointed out that her male characters, though flawed, deserve to be judged on more than simply their surface behavior. While Lin Jun's husband, for example, isn't depicted particularly sympathetically, Shao Hong is actually the character with whom Chai identifies most closely.

"The husband has to be a jerk, otherwise there's no point in giving him a divorce. But I kind of sympathize with him because he's a frustrated writer. I think every writer kind of sympathizes with a grumpy, frustrated writer."

There are other facets of the story that Chai evidently drew from elements of her own life: Chai spent a year as a teacher in Nanjing, where her father's family is from; she has a brother, like Lin Jun's, who was seen as an outsider by his peers and consequently got into a lot of fights. These and other shared elements notwithstanding, the novel is clearly a work of fiction.

Still, Chai finds some non-Asian readers confusing her for the character she writes about. Despite the advances APA writers before her have forged to penetrate the consciousness of mainstream Western society, there are still a lot of assumptions made.

"There's always some kind of freak [question] like, 'Is this autobiographical?'" she said, referring to some readings she has given to audiences Asian and non-Asian alike. "You know, even after I've gotten through explaining that, well, I'm American, born in America, and this character is obviously a Chinese woman living in China."

Considering the hardships she's already overcome, it's fairly easy to see how Chai takes such remarks in stride. What she's most concerned about as a writer is continuing to challenge the constricting expectations imposed upon Asian Pacific Americans--not only by the public but by those within the publishing industry--and encouraging others to push those boundaries as well.

"Never, ever allow anyone to define what you can write about based on your ethnicity. If editors look for Asian writers to only write a specific story based on ethnicity or based on what they think that writer is capable of writing about, that would be very damaging. Fight the good fight," she proclaimed, thrusting her fist into the air. "Write what you feel strongly about in your heart, and don't worry about how other people will perceive it or your ability to write it. Because if you want to write a story and you do the work, then you'll write it well--and there should be no limit to what we can write about. There hasn't been for other writers, so there shouldn't be for us."

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