By Ada Tseng
Alice Greenway's debut novel -- a story about two sisters living in Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution -- took home a First Fiction award at the 2007 Los Angeles Festival of Books.
The question "How autobiographical is your book?" is sometimes an awkward one for authors to answer. Perhaps it is because the idea of your novel simply being a rehashing of your past doesn't give due credit to the craft of fiction-writing. Perhaps the assumption that one necessarily draws from personal experience is limiting for a writer. Perhaps it's too revealing.
At the LA Times Festival of Books "First Novels: New Visions" panel, the authors mostly side-stepped the question with generalities (and rightfully so) -- or instead, in one case, offhandedly mentioned that, actually no, he never wrote letters to his brother-in-law's killer in prison, pretending to be a woman so he could exact revenge by breaking the murderer's heart (Antoine Wilson, The Interloper); Alice Greenway, on the other hand, tackled the question head-on. She actually started out wanting to write an autobiography.
"When I first started, I wanted to write a memoir, and I wanted it to be funny," says Greenway of her dramatic debut White Ghost Girls. "But it sort of ended up being an un-funny novel [laughs]."
A blond American and the daughter of a foreign correspondent in Vietnam, Greenway spent her childhood in many different places, including Hong Kong, Thailand, Israel, and the United States. Having a special fondness for Hong Kong, Greenway wanted to weave a genuine portrayal of what it was like for her growing up as an expat in Hong Kong during the Cultural Revolution -- running around on the beaches with her sisters, cherishing stories about the Vietnam War from her often-absent father, and being alternately sheltered and jolted by violent realities that came with political unrest.
For White Ghost Girls, the recent winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, Greenway started with a similar structure of her real-life family. The father is a Vietnam War photographer, her mother paints watercolors trying to hold on the beauty of her surroundings while her husband is often away, and there is a loyal-but-aggravating relationship between two sisters, set up through the characters of Kate and Frankie. Kate, cautious and shy, is often consumed by the aggression and rebelliousness of her older sister Frankie, a provocateur who yearns for attention, a firecracker waiting to explode. To round out the colorful world, the sisters are raised by Ah Bing -- a Chinese ahmah based on a nanny Greenway had in real life -- and Kate has a subtle flirtation with a deaf Chinese boy named Fish.
"What Kate, the narrator, has to perform is the careful tightrope walk between three worlds: Chinese, American and Vietnamese," says Greenway. "Sometimes those worlds collide and intertwine."
Greenway has lived in Hong Kong off and on, in different periods of her life. As kids, she and her sisters lived in Hong Kong first as small children in 1967 (when the book takes place) and again for a couple years in 1974 when they were adolescents. After Greenway graduated from college, she went back to Hong Kong and worked for the South China Morning Post as a journalist for a few years, and she revisited Hong Kong again recently while doing research for her novel.
"I think when you're really small, you absorb all the sensations of a place," says Greenway. "I think if I had only lived there when I was three, I'd probably have a vague, romantic notion of it, but luckily for me, I had all these sensory experiences of Hong Kong overlayed again and again over the years that I could draw from for the book."
Although almost every scene has some basis in reality ("It's like I took a tiny part of each person and highly exaggerated it."), as she wrote, things became more and more fictionalized. The result is a novel that uses lyrical prose and intricately sensual detail to tell a complicated story of illicit excitement, impulsive transgression and ill-fated adventures.
APA talks to Alice Greenway about her childhood, Saigon ducks, researching for White Ghost Girls, and the timeless excitement of Hong Kong.
APA: What do you most remember about growing up in Hong Kong?
Alice Greenway: Growing up there, I remember mostly the 70s. It was really fun. As an expat in Hong Kong back then, it was extremely safe, so children my age went around by ourselves a lot. There was a lot of freedom. My father worked for the Washington Post then -- they had a company junk -- so every weekend we would head out with lots of friends, go swimming, climb up rocks. And in those days, it was the sort of the beginning of pollution [laughs]. It's not like how it is now where it's kind of overwhelming. So the trash on the beach was something fun. You could build forts on the beach out of driftwood and pieces of rope and bits of styrofoam. They were thing you found, treasures you could make things out of. So I have a very idealistic memory, a very nostalgic memory, of Hong Kong.
APA: Did you mostly hang out with the expat community?
AG: My parents had a lot of British and American friends, and they had some Chinese friends, but it was probably the Chinese that had some contact with the West. The expat community was pretty tight then, but my parents made a great effort to go out to see festivals, see new territories, go to dragon boat races and the tin house festival, so we weren't completely cut off. But as kids, we also had Ah Bing [a character in the novel] who's a real nanny. When we first moved to Hong Kong, we lived in a hotel; my mother hired her and she moved in with us.
I distinctly remember Ah Bing taking us back into the kitchen of the hotel, and those were the type of experiences I remember. She always took us behind the scenes, backstage. We went to temples, hung out with other ahmas. She once took me up into one of the shanty towns that were built up in the hillsides -- these refugee shacks. She took me deep inside of one of those squatter places. And I wouldn't have been able to go there with my mother or my father, so I felt that she exposed us to other parts of Hong Kong that my parents wouldn't necessarily take me.
APA: Is the character of Ah Bing close to the person in real life?
AG: Parts of Ah Bing were probably the most true of the book, [particularly] her stories about Guanyin, going to Singapore, World War II. The stories about her own family and how her father died and her mother had given her away several times -- that was all pretty much true to life.
APA: In the novel, the children go to church with their mother, but they're also constantly surrounded by Buddhist superstitions because of Ah Bing. Did you relate to that?
AG: Yes, Ah Bing was very religious. She was basically the equivalent of a nun; she hadn't gotten married, and she believed very strongly in Guangyin and had an altar. And later when we moved to America, she made an altar in the kitchen. But we didn't go to church religiously; we just went once in a while. So I think it's the way it is in the book. We grew up with two ideas side by side, and then after Hong Kong (the second time), we lived in Israel, and we went to quite a religious English school. So, for a very short while, I had a 13-year-old-being-in-love-with-Jesus thing that didn't last very long [laughs]. I think as a kid, when you have moved around and been around a lot of religions, you come out with a feeling of what they all have in common rather than what they have as differences. And you end up being quite suspicious of any one religion saying they're the only correct one.
APA: In the novel, Kate and Frankie play games where they pretend they are Viet Cong soldiers, because they hear stories from their father about Vietnam. Did you grow up listening to a lot of war stories from your father?
AG: Yes, but we mostly heard the bravado of it. I think our parents tried hard to protect us from the actual news and the horror of it. We heard the funny things and the stories where men would sit around half bragging and half entertaining. But that was one good thing about writing the book. I've heard certain stories over and over, but there were certain things I'd never heard or never dared to ask. So when I was writing the book, I wrote my dad a letter with certain questions about certain intimate things. And he wrote me back ten or twelve pages with all the answers. Things like "Were you afraid?" "Did you feel that you were also excited by the war as well as repelled?" It was really nice to get a chance to do that.
APA: In the novel, the father has a pet duck that he uses to tell stories about Vietnam to his children. In a Q&A for the book, you said the Saigon duck was real.
AG: My dad had a pet duck, and I had a photo of him with his duck. He used to send us tapes with stories. But I couldn't remember the stories, so I made up the stories [in the novel]. But the idea was from him. That was interesting, because a friend of my dad, another Vietnam journalist, who read my book, wrote me a letter saying he had written a letter to all of his children about all animals in the zoo in Saigon. So I just thought that was so interesting. What do you do when you have small children and you can't tell them the truth about what's going on?
APA: Have you ever visited Vietnam yourself?
AG: My husband and I went before we were married around 1990. That helped too, while I was writing the book, because I'd been in Saigon. When I started writing, I actually had some chapters set in Vietnam from the father's point of view, but it all sounded like such a rehash of every Vietnam book I've ever read. I couldn't write better than someone like Mike O'Hare, and I thought it just wasn't sounding very original. So I thought: I want Vietnam to be part of it. How am I going to do this? So, I decided I'd only have Kate imagining it and listening to what her father says. So, everything is filtered through her. And it actually helped that I'd been to Vietnam myself.
APA: One thing I thought was interesting about your book was: your characters are growing up in a foreign country. But in book, it's not blatant that these characters feel like outsiders, because it's very much an insular story about family. They're affected by their background, of course, but they're grounded in family. Did you ever feel like an outsider growing up all these in different countries?
AG: Well, I went to Zambia one summer. My godmother was living there, and I remember feeling like so much of an outsider there. I just felt that I couldn't understand anything about it; I had no reference point. And then my godmother gave me a novel by a Zambian set in a village, and I suddenly got a glimpse inside. This book really helped me begin to know what this culture is about. But I never felt that way in Asia. Mostly I really feel comfortable being an outsider. It's not that I don't feel like an outsider, but I feel comfortable being one. When I've been in Asian countries, I just feel at ease.
It's sort of nice being an outsider. One thing I've realized is that I really like listening to people speaking in a different language. There's something really nice about it, when you can listen to people but you can't understand what they're saying. You can listen to things like their laughter and their intonation or their accent and get an idea of what's being said. Usually when you do overhear what people are saying in English, it's rather inane or boring. But somehow listening to someone in a foreign language, you can allow your imagination to run wild.
APA: How did you want to portray Hong Kong in your novel?
AG: Mostly I wanted to give a sense of how it smelled, the sound of the rain, and those types of sensual things that I really missed. Then I thought it was an opportunity to write about Hong Kong in the way that a lot of English expatriates had written about India and what it was like growing up there as an expatriate child. There are a lot of books on India, but in most of the fiction I've read about Hong Kong (which are good), Hong Kong is usually used as an exotic setting for spies or triads or titans. It wasn't the Hong Kong that I knew as a kid, so I just wanted to portray Hong Kong in a different way than other writers had. As a home. A foreign place but also a home. And part of that were the plants and the beaches and the sounds of things, rather than as an exotic backdrop for... Western men. [laughs]
APA: Do you think how you perceived Hong Kong as a child is different than how you perceive it now, looking back on it as an adult?
AG: Well, Hong Kong just changes so fast all the time. I just went back for the Hong Kong book festival [The Man Hong Kong International Literary Festival], and I met some younger people who had just moved there from the States or from Australia or from England. And it seemed to me they had the same sense of excitement that my parents had when they were there. And I know it's a whole different city now, but that felt the same to me. So I thought, in that way it wasn't changed. But in other ways, it's completely transformed itself over and over and over again.
Back to APA's Los Angeles Festival of Books coverage
Published: Friday, May 11, 2007
