Tan Twan Eng discusses The House of Doors

Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng’s latest novel The House of Doors has just been included on the longlist for the Booker Prize. Devika Misra recently attended An Evening with Tan Twan Eng in Singapore and here paraphrases some of the conversation.

The House of Doors is a multi layered yet very readable work of historical fiction. The narrative explores Tan Twan Eng's  characteristic themes of love, loss, longing and betrayal, and is set in colonial Malaya, as are his previous works, The Gift of Rain (2007), and The Garden of Evening Mists ( 2012). But this time Tan Twan Eng has taken the arguably audacious step of fictionalizing legendary writer Somerset Maugham. Maugham had in fact himself fictionalized the tale of crime and scandal that is narrated to him by the female protagonist in The House of Doors. She is part of the expatriate community in Penang; he portrays her, and her community, with subtle criticism and nuanced sympathy. 

Tan Twan Eng was inevitably asked: what was the genesis of The House of Doors?

TTE : "Well, actually there are two origins for this novel. One of them is Somerset Maugham and the other one is Dr. Sun Yat- Sen…I first read Somerset Maugham's short story The Letter when I was in my teens. I loved it very much. I found it very gripping and exciting. I was even more intrigued when I found out that he had based The Letter on an actual murder trial, which had taken  place in Kuala Lumpur in 1910. The murder trial of Ethel Proudlock, who was accused of murdering a man she claimed had tried to rape her. The only problem with her justification of killing him was that she shot him five times, … six times, and four in the back as he was running away. So there was all this scandal about Ethel Proudlock. I felt that this would make a very interesting novel about how Somerset Maugham came to write and hear about this one. That's how it started. So I had Somerset Maugham, except I didn't know what to do with him, because obviously the story isn't substantial enough for a full-length novel."

Food glorious food – a feast of stories from Read Paper Republic

Nicky Harman writes: Paper Republic is a registered charity/non-profit website dedicated to promoting enjoyment and understanding of Chinese literature in translation. I am one of its volunteer workers and trustees. As part of our mission, we publish Read Paper Republic, occasional series of complete, free-to-read short stories (or poems or essays) translated from Chinese to English. 

This year, after our foray into Covid stories, entitled Epidemic, which explored how some of China’s best writers have been personally affected by the COVID-19 outbreak, we decided on a more upbeat theme. The current series, entitled Food Glorious Food, is made up of six contemporary pieces all based on or around one of China’s favourite pastimes: eating. 

In Food Glorious Good, we have featured well-known authors from the Chinese-speaking world, including Xu Xiaobin, Hong Ying, Wu Ang, Sabrina Huang, Yang Shuangzi, and Zheng Zhi, all translated by up-and-coming literary translators. The stories range from historical fiction exploring complex relationships and social inequality to a clever, unnerving tale of kidnap at the hands of a food delivery driver. And it is this last story which we have chosen as a splendid climax to our series. The story is called ‘Winter is Coming’ and the author is Wu Ang. 

Bugis Nights by, Chris Stowers

 Devika Misra and Chris Stowers discuss his debut travel narrative, Bugis Nights. 

It’s taken Taiwan based writer and photo journalist Chris Stowers nearly 35 years to publish his debut travel narrative Bugis Nights. This light but exciting read is part memoir and part fantasy. Stowers chronicles his journey on both land and sea as a young backpacker across Asia in the late nineteen eighties. Basing much of his story on diaries and photographs, Stowers harks back to a time when travel, he says, was “simpler, easier slower”…essentially more fun!. But Stowers’ story is about far more than the trials and triumphs of a young naive explorer. It is an endearing and perceptive observation of human behaviour in tough circumstances. With quiet humour, Stowers illustrates the courage, optimism and openness of the itinerant backpacker.

Eternal Summer of the Homeland: Agnes Chew talks about writing a story collection and being the Asia Winner of the CSSP

Courtesy of Author

Book Synopsis

The stories in Agnes Chew’s first fiction collection illuminate the complexity of choice when duty and desire collide, and what a person is willing to sacrifice. A daughter grapples with an unexpected discovery in the aftermath of her mother’s death. A husband struggles to understand his wife’s reaction to her pregnancy. An adolescent and a domestic worker exchange secrets whose weight they find they cannot bear. And in a corner of Changi Airport, a nondescript office cubicle, a patch of open forest, others strive to find meaning and home.

Courtesy of Author

Author Bio:

Agnes Chew is the author of Eternal Summer of My Homeland (2023) and The Desire For Elsewhere (2016). Her work has appeared in Granta, Necessary Fiction and Litbreak Magazine, among others, and her story, ‘Oceans Away from my Homeland’, won the 2023 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia Region). She holds a Master’s degree in international development from LSE; her prize-winning dissertation, which examines inequality and societal well-being in Singapore, was featured in Singapore Policy Journal. Born and raised in Singapore, she is currently based in Germany. 

 

 

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EC: Agnes, welcome to Asian Books Blog, and congratulations on being the Asia Winner for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the publication of Eternal Summer of My Homeland. Let’s start with this: what draws you to the short story? 

 

AC: Thank you so much, Elaine, for your kind words and for this opportunity! I actually started out writing creative nonfiction, and when I ventured into the realm of fiction writing, the short story form felt like a natural (and conceivable) choice. The more short stories I wrote, the more I found myself drawn to the form. I appreciate its requisite focus on purity and intensity—the way it compels you to distil meaning within a compact space. It’s also a thrill to be able to write a short story within a feverish span of hours or days, especially when I compare it to the far longer process of writing a novel, which I’m now working on.

 

Play the Red Queen - A Vietnam War Crime Thriller

Saigon 1963 – multiple American military advisers and South Vietnamese Army officers are gunned down by the mysterious Red Queen, a deadly Vietnamese assassin. Two MP detectives, Ellsworth Miser and Clovis Robeson, are called in to investigate but find themselves stumbling into a mystery that's much deeper with international implications.

Singaporean writer Soon Ai Ling's stories are translated, transcreated and adapted by Yeo Wei Wei. An interview with Nicky Harman

 

Diasporic and Clan are two volumes of short stories by the sinophone Singaporean writer Soon Ai Ling, translated, transcreated and adapted by Yeo Wei Wei. Yeo has done a translation of Soon stories in Diasporic, and then transcreated and adapted them in Clan. As a translator myself, I was intrigued by this adventure in story-telling, so I asked Yeo Wei Wei to tell me more.

NH: could you tell me how you came across Soon's stories and what attracted you to them? 

WW: I received an email from Ailing one day out of the blue whilst I was in Norwich doing my MA in Creative Writing. She had asked Eva Tang about my translation of the subtitles and song lyrics for Eva’s documentary The Songs We Sang. She liked my translation very much and wished to approach me to ask if I would translate her fiction. After I finished my MA, I returned to Singapore and I looked for Ailing’s book of short stories in the National Library. I read them and I also watched Eva’s short film that was based on Ailing’s story “Chef Tham”. Ailing’s stories are set in China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. The Chinese diasporic contexts in these different countries are the basis of the rich story worlds found in her fiction. She is unique for this reason, amongst Singaporean Chinese authors. I was also attracted to the predicaments of her protagonists. Very often, her stories deal with the private struggles of men and women in traditional Asian family settings. They are individuals torn between personal desires and family history, hierarchy, family values and expectations.  

Ghost Girl, Banana: Elaine Chiew Chats With Acclaimed Debut Novelist Wiz Wharton

About the Book:

Set between the last years of the “Chinese Windrush” in 1966 and Hong Kong’s Handover to China in 1997, a mysterious inheritance sees a young woman from London uncovering buried secrets in her late mother’s homeland in this captivating, wry debut about family, identity, and the price of belonging.

Hong Kong, 1966. Sook-Yin is exiled from Kowloon to London with orders to restore honor to her family. As she strives to fit into a world that does not understand her, she realises that survival will mean carving out a destiny of her own.Thirty years later in London, having lost her mother as a small child, biracial misfit Lily can only remember what Maya, her preternaturally perfect older sister, has told her about Sook-Yin. Unexpectedly named in the will of a powerful Chinese stranger, Lily embarks on a secret pilgrimage across the world to discover the lost side of her identity and claim the reward. But just as change is coming to Hong Kong, so Lily learns Maya’s secrecy about their past has deep roots, and that good fortune comes at a price.

 Heartfelt, wry and achingly real, Ghost Girl, Banana marks the stunning debut of a writer-to-watch.  

About the Author:

Wiz Wharton, Courtesy of Author

Wiz Wharton was born in London of Chinese-European heritage. She is a prize-winning graduate of the National Film and Television school, where she studied screenwriting under the filmmakers Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears and Kenith Trodd. Ghost Girl, Banana is her debut novel. Adaptation rights have also been optioned by a leading UK production company. She lives in the Scottish Highlands. Her twitter handle is @Chomsky1and Instagram is @wizwharton 

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EC: Congratulations on your debut novel, Ghost Girl, Banana, which has just launched to much critical acclaim in the UK. In your acknowledgement, you mentioned the story’s inception as ‘the discovery of some old-fashioned floppy discs in a box’. Can you tell us about how a whole novel was borne out of this discovery? 

WW: Yes, so this happened back in 2020 when I was moving house and discovered the discs in a box of my late mum’s possessions. Initially, I had no idea what they were, and it was only later that I discovered they were transcriptions of her diaries, kept since she arrived in the UK in the early sixties as an immigrant from Hong Kong. Although painful to read in parts, they were also transformative in revealing so many of her experiences which she had never really spoken about during her lifetime. That stoicism is germane to many women of that generation, I think, as much as it’s also a cultural thing, but I remember wondering how many other hidden stories there were out there, and what a tragedy it was that they weren’t more represented in the British fiction space. As much as a novel is always an ambitious creative project to embark upon, I had a whole wealth of information in front of me to draw upon, so I was very fortunate in that respect.