Tiger Girl–Unveiled

I just received an advance copy of Tiger Girl, my novel that’s officially coming out this October!

My publisher, GemmaMedia, sent me a few copies in advance of publication so that I could see the cover and layout. I’m so excited!

It’s gorgeous! Much thanks to Howard Wong of Grace Image Photography in San Francisco for the cover design.

The story follows Nea Chhim, the protagonist of Dragon Chica, on a journey to find her biological father. They were separated because of war and the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. In Tiger Girl, Nea directly confronts her past and tries to reunite the multiple missing branches of her family. However, as is so often the case with good intentions, Nea’s quest does not turn out as she anticipated. To find out what happens, look for Tiger Girl in bookstores (or online) this October!

Mark your calendars: The book launch party will be held at Books Inc./Opera Plaza in San Francisco on October 26, 2013, beginning at 5 p.m. Cambodian American singer Laura Mam will be performing an acoustic set in Khmer and English!

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Are “Ethnic” Heroines a Tough Sell?

Here is an essay I wrote for the diversity series at  ForeverYoungAdult.com.

(You can check out their website and follow them on Twitter @4everYA for more YA news, tips, and interviews!)

Heck YA, Diversity!: Are ‘Ethnic’ Heroines a Tough Sell?

Author May-lee Chai stops by to discuss the trubs she had with publishing her “ethnic” heroine book, Hapa Girl — and how her following books (Dragon Chica and Tiger Girl) found a home with the YA crowd.

For this week in Heck YA, Diversity!, we’re pleased to be joined by May-lee Chai, author of Hapa Girl, Dragon Chica, and the upcoming Tiger Girl, who shares her personal experiences in getting books with “ethnic” heroines published.

Are “Ethnic” Heroines a Tough Sell?
by May-lee Chai

A number of years ago, I was working on a memoir about the violence my family encountered when I was growing up. When I was twelve, we moved from the New York City metropolitan area to rural South Dakota where people used to stop their cars and pickups to stare at us as we walked together on the sidewalk. We were the first mixed-race family with a Chinese father and a white mother that people in that community had ever seen. It was a town of five thousand residents, ten bars, and a university. My parents had assumed because there was a university there, people would be more tolerant. But that wasn’t the case.

My parents had bought a small farm, and men took to driving by our house on the weekends to shout racial slurs at us. As this was the 1980s and the time of Japan-bashing in the media, many of those slurs were “Jap!” or “Japs!” Later men took to shouting at our property and over the years five of our dogs were shot dead in our driveway.

Adults as well as some of my classmates told me to my face that the Good Lord had not intended for the races to mix and that’s why he’d put them on separate continents. (This notion, by the way, was one of the reasons a judge in 1965 ruled that interracial marriage should be illegal.) I was seen as a sign of the End Times, of a coming Apocalypse when Satan would reign on Earth. Mixed-race people like me simply should not exist.

Well, that was a tough environment to grow up in, as you might imagine! But I thought it was very good material for a memoir. I’ve got inherent drama, conflict, and a survival story. Hey!

I’d been working on the manuscript for a while when a literary agent with a list of very famous clients said she wanted to represent the book. I was naturally thrilled. However, I soon discovered her idea of the book was very different from mine. She told me she wanted me to focus on my father and mother’s marriage and to eliminate my brother and me from the book. (I just got removed from my own memoir! I thought. How the hell do I write that? Who’s going to narrate?) Then she said she wanted me to focus on “the good people of South Dakota” (rather than the racists who shot and stared) and write about my parents’ “cultural” differences and how they overcame them.

Well, how exotic, I thought. And I told the agent that I couldn’t re-write the book in that way. It just wasn’t my conception of the story.

The agent’s reaction was so alarming and upsetting to me that I didn’t try to contact another agent. Instead I ended up selling the book myself to an academic press (Temple University Press) who published books about Asian American history. Academic presses and small presses don’t need agents to send manuscripts to their editors; they will work directly with authors. The decision worked out well for me. My memoir, Hapa Girl,  received a great full-page review in the international edition of Time magazine and received a number of literary accolades. It continues to be taught in colleges and universities across America. Eventually, I also found a wonderful agent who understands what I’m writing about and knows how to represent my work.

But part of me wonders how many other writers out there get discouraged from writing the stories they wanted to tell by the same kind of sh*tty “advice” that had been given to me. And how many of these writers don’t persist and find another agent or don’t know how to approach a press on their own? What if they just take the rejection to heart and give up? Or worse, try to write the kind of bland story that they’re told to write?

I think part of the problem is that there are people in the publishing industry who underestimate readers. One of the great things about the YA field is that editors assume readers want a grittier kind of story. Adolescence sucks. It really does. Growing up is hard. School can be brutal. Families and community can let us down. And young adult readers know this. They’re not looking for a pretty, bland story that’s been watered down for mass consumption.

For this reason, I thought my novel Dragon Chica would work for a young adult audience. It’s the story of a young Cambodian girl, Nea Chhim, facing down adversity from poverty to gangsters to family fights as she grows up in the Midwest. I tried to tell the story in a way that the character and her family and their problems felt real to me, and so that the reader could get to know them. Dragon Chica (GemmaMedia) ended up doing very well with YA readers. The YA genre attracts so many people, young and mature, because readers have discovered this is where the gritty books get published.

My next novel Tiger Girl, which continues the story of Nea Chhim in America, is also going to be marketed as YA. In some ways, I think it can be easier to have an “ethnic” heroine in a YA novel than in a book marketed only for the adult literary crowd.

The problem is not readers. I know there are a lot of readers—of all ethnicities!—who want to read interesting stories with interesting characters and strong heroines. Perhaps because of what has historically been sold, perhaps because of what Hollywood continues to mass produce, some people in the industry are indeed afraid of “ethnic” heroines. They worry that they won’t appeal to a mass market. They don’t know how to market them. Then they worry when the heroine doesn’t seem exotic enough.

And bringing in a person of color means we’re also bringing up history and race in America. Those are tough subjects. They are not bland.

Sometimes when we talk about race and racism, (I know because I’m a teacher), people think the r-word means “I hate white people!” and they’re afraid to listen. White people don’t want to get beat up, figuratively or literally, any more than anyone else does. But acknowledging a character’s ethnicity allows us to talk about history and community and how power is constructed and how we have to fight against this power divide if we’re going to survive as individuals and as a nation. We shouldn’t be afraid because we really need to have this talk.

Besides, that’s what the best novels allow us to do: Enter scary terrain and emerge all the stronger for it.

Thanks for stopping by, May-lee! Check out her website or find her on Twitter (@mayleechai).

(originally posted on the Forever Young Adult website: Published June 28, 2013 by Smarty Pants)

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Dragon Chica at Louisiana State University

I was honored to learn that students at Louisiana State University are reading my novel Dragon Chica in Penelope Dane’s English 2025:Fiction class this semester.

I recently participated in a Q&A with them about the novel via email. I thought their questions were so good that I’m posting them online—with their permission– in case other students reading Dragon Chica were interested. (Some of the questions may also be helpful to students writing papers about my short story, “Saving Sourdi,” as the novel and the short story are about the same family.)

I’d like to thank the following students for their questions: Courtland Douglas, Frank C. Wilson, Steve Ochsner, Sydney Carlton, Alfonso Croeze, Brittni Naylor, Megan Templet, Caitlin Waldo, Katie Jenkins, Sara Sonnier, Megan Prudhomme, Gretchen Goodman, Danielle LeBlanc, Morgan Matthews, Maddy Womack, Tyler Harris, Caroline Lero, Chelsie Draughter, Adi Brannon, Blake Broussard, David Bastien, Paige Smith, Stephanie Harper, and Alise Stauder.

And many thanks to Penelope Dane for teaching Dragon Chica and arranging this exchange! I’m always excited to hear from students from around the country.

SPOILER ALERT: if you haven’t read the novel yet, plot points are revealed in the following questions and answers. You may want to stop reading here.

Q1: Do you believe memories and time spent together are more important than biological links? If so, would you reveal the truth to Nea if you were placed in Ma or Sourdi’s scenario?

1) I believe there are many kinds of families: the people you are biologically related to, the people who rear you, and the people you choose to have be your support network. Sometimes one family can be all three, but not always.  I know why Sourdi told Nea—she loves Nea and believes she should have this knowledge. In this sense I do believe that knowledge can be empowering. I felt Ma was afraid to tell Nea—afraid it would hurt Nea and afraid it would hurt her relationship to Nea. Whether Nea can forgive Ma (and what Nea does with the secret Sourdi told her) are actually the subject of the sequel!

Q2. Is Nea overreacting and spoiled at heart or do the people around her make her life more unbearable due to their opinion and views on revealing the truth?

2) I am completely biased in this regard: I think Nea is great and do not think she is spoiled. I think she has to fight for some very basic rights and she is willing to fight on behalf of her family against injustice, which makes me like her very much. 3) I think Nea’s family members just really have difficulty understanding her. They are caught up in their own emotions and are often overwhelmed by their own traumas and memories of the past. This makes it very difficult for them to be present for Nea and try to understand how she is processing the world around her.

Q3.I would like to know if you agree with Ma’s decision to marry off Sourdi?

3) In real life I would be totally against marrying off a young teen to anyone, much less an older man. As a teacher, I believe it’s most important to stay in school and get as much education as possible. HOWEVER, in real life I do know of many girls who married quite young, some even younger than Sourdi. I’ve also met many women who came to America as refugees and who were put in arranged marriages as teenagers by their parents. So Sourdi’s plot line is to honor these women and girls I’ve known and their particular life struggles. In the novel, I’m not trying to render a judgment so much as illuminate why such choices were made at a particular place and time. I’m hoping it will create understanding and discussion. I am not advocating for such early marriage any more than I’d be advocating for a hurricane or an earthquake or murder if I were writing a book in which one of those events occurred.

Q4. What kinds of discrimination did you face when growing up?

Q5. What do you think about the current state of race relations in this country?

4) Ah, these are huge questions. Let me just say I faced different kinds of discrimination at different times in my life depending on where I lived. When I was very young 6 and under, I lived in a university town in Southern California, and felt very safe and protected from the outside world. From 6-12 I lived in a diverse, immigrant community in Northern New Jersey in the New York City metropolitan area. There were race riots—literally—at my father’s school in NYC yet again I really didn’t face much discrimination. When I was 12, we moved to a rural community in South Dakota. No one had seen a mixed-race Chinese-White family before. Now people followed us down the street or turned and stared at us. Men drove by our house in the countryside and shouted names out their windows. Eventually men shot and killed six of our dogs over the years. My brother was attacked physically time and time again. I was called every name possible by classmates and even random adults. I was told mixed-race people were a sign of the Devil and the coming End Times. It was pretty awful. I also witnessed terrible discrimination against other people—including Cambodian refugees who’d moved to our town to open a restaurant. So these things did inspire me to write this book.  I wanted to bear witness. Speaking up is one way to help overcome prejudice.

5) As for race relations in this country, we’ve made a lot of progress and there’s still a long, long way to go. I think we need to get to know each other—as real people—not as “types” and show respect for our histories and our experiences. Then we can stop being afraid of each other. I know that sounds very kumbaya-esque, but I believe it’s possible!

Q6. Why did you pick the story to take place after the Khmer Rouge and not during? Do you think this affected the reader’s view on the book especially if they did not know about the Khmer Rouge?

6) I really like this question! I thought a lot about this issue actually when I was working on the novel. I decided I wanted to set it in the US *after* the family has already survived the Khmer Rouge for a number of reasons. 1) Plot-wise it’s hard to compete with the Khmer Rouge for drama. If I put those scenes in, they tend to overwhelm everything else. 2) In real life, most Americans knew next to nothing about the Khmer Rouge when Cambodian survivors started arriving in the US in the early 1980s. Therefore, starting the novel with the family already here mirrors the real-life experience of Cambodian refugees and the communities they ended up in. It was like suddenly here are these people and no one in the town apart from the families themselves really knew the history about WHY they were here. The American bombing campaign of Cambodia had been kept secret from the American public during the Vietnam War. Most schools taught nothing about Vietnam and how the violence spread to affect Cambodia and Laos. There was very little media attention—the media were obsessed with Japan in the 1980s and the Soviet Union, not that much introspective stories looking back at the American War in Vietnam and its lingering consequences. I wanted to reflect this historical reality in the novel.

Q7. Does Ma make up the dreams that she has that prompts them to move?

7. No! In my mind, Ma takes dreams very seriously. She has had to follow her instincts and “trust her gut,” as we say these days, because she had very little objective information to go on her whole life, not during the war or under the Khmer Rouge nor afterwards in America.

Q8. Did you know someone who experienced the Khmer Rouge Regime?

8. Yes! I first met Khmer Rouge survivors when I was fifteen. A Sino-Khmer family moved to our town in South Dakota to open a restaurant. The mother was very nice and kind to me and she ended up telling me about how her children died under the Khmer Rouge regime. Later, when I went to college in Iowa, which was a designated refugee relocation state in the 1980s, I met many more refugees and KR survivors. As a journalist after I graduated, I interviewed survivors for the AP. I still know many survivors and their children. What’s really interesting is how the American-born generation is now going back to Cambodia to both seek their roots and help their families’ ancestral homeland. What’s cool is that nowadays many children of survivors and survivors  themselves are going back to enjoy the resurgence of Cambodian traditional culture. Pol Pot tried to destroy the arts and culture of Cambodia, but now there is a thriving arts scene with new music, dance, literature, etc. and there are also many business opportunities, all of which is appealing to a new generation world-wide.

Q9. Do Cambodian families arrange marriages often to benefit their families financially?

I’m going to end with this question because I think it lends itself to some interesting cross-cultural comparisons that would be great for discussion. Throughout human history, most marriages were probably arranged. I think non-arranged marriages and the whole concept of marrying someone for love are relatively recent ideas.

My suggestion: please discuss the following couples and the rationale (stated and perceived) behind their marriages.

1) Kim Kardashian and Khris Humphries

2) Royal couples: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Charles and Diana, William and Kate.

3) George Takei and Brad Altman

Thanks, everybody, for your questions!

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My Night with Cambodian Cinema

I wanted to let everybody know about a wonderful documentary, Golden Slumbers, about Cambodian movies of the 1960s and 70s that’s currently playing in the San Francisco International Film Festival. There’s still time to catch showings in Berkeley and San Francisco at the SFIFF.

The film beautifully blends interviews of surviving filmmakers, actors and fans, who describe the movies they loved so much before the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1979. Between 1960 and 1978, Cambodian filmmakers made 400 films, which were wildly popular. Fans remember venturing out to some of 30 theaters in Phnom Penh despite bombs, grenade attacks, and the unrest during the 1970-74 civil war.  As one producer recalls pointing out to his financial backers in Hong Kong: When times are rough, people need to be entertained.

Director Davy Chou is the grandson of one of Cambodia’s most successful film producersp, Van Chann. Chou was present at the screening in San Francisco and participated in an ethusiastic Q&A after the late screening at the SF Film Society Cinema on Saturday night.

Chou was utterly charming. He revealed that he had to “fake” the visually stunning ending that showed footage of a classic movie projected onto the brick wall of a former movie house that now serves as home to 100-some impoverished people. In fact he said it’s impossible to project the film onto dark brick and so the shot was digitally rendered. But the metaphor was real and sincere: showing the beauty of Cambodian film as a haunting presence juxtaposed with the present lives of young Cambodians, who remain transfixed by the new movies and music videos they watch on TV.

Chou’s parents were also in attendance. (In fact, I discovered I was sitting right next to them!)

Chou mixes interviews, stunning shots of contemporary Cambodia, vintage posters and photographs, and snippets of 1960s and 70s -era soundtracks in this artistic exploration of Cambodia’s “golden age of cinema.”

I highly recommend this visually arresting film to all cinemaphiles.

(And yes, I got an autograph from the very talented French Cambodian director!)

Director Davy Chou's parents (at the San Francisco screening)

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Crossover Dreams: Dragon Chica Review

 (My publisher Trish O’Hare at GemmaMedia  just sent me a link to this review of Dragon Chica by Lyn Miller-Lachmann, author of the novel Gringolandia about life in Chile under Pinochet. This review just made my day! Writing can be a lonely affair, as writers never know if our works will be meaningful to other people. When I hear back from readers that the story resonates with them, I am cheered immensely!–May-lee)

Crossover Dreams: A Review of Dragon Chica

July 4, 2011

By lynmillerlachmann

Reading Ann Angel’s review of Carlos Eire’s memoir Learning to Die in Miami—and then reading the book itself—got me thinking about the crossover genre, books originally published for adults that have found a wide audience of teens, or books published for teens or younger children that have become adult favorites. My own Gringolandia first came out as a YA novel but is now showing up in college classes and on bookstore shelves in the adult section. In various stops on my blog tours several years ago, I participated in thoughtful discussions on why the novel was published as young adult rather than adult, as its teen protagonists moved almost exclusively in an adult world, with the high stakes reflected in this exchange between Daniel and his girlfriend after they’ve entered a brutal dictatorship (Chile under Pinochet) with forged documents:

With her finger, Courtney traces the map in the guidebook. “We have to be back before curfew.” She flips to the previous page and says, “It’s kind of like the government is our mother.”

“Yeah. Except she doesn’t ground you when you miss it. She shoots you.” (208)

The same high stakes characterize May-lee Chai’s Dragon Chica, published by indie press GemmaMedia as an adult novel but of interest to teen readers who appreciated An Na’s award-winning YA novel A Step from Heaven. Like A Step from Heaven, Dragon Chica is told in chronological vignettes that end with the Asian-American protagonist about to leave for college after a series of crises that threaten to divide her family forever.

Dragon Chica doesn’t begin in the old country, however, but in Dallas, Texas in the 1980’s, where then-12-year-old Nea’s mother has abruptly taken the family and from where they will leave just as abruptly. Nea’s mother is accustomed to fleeing under cover of night. The family—including Nea, her older sister, her younger brother, and younger twin sisters—have escaped Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge for asylum in the United States following the death of the children’s father in the camps. Leaving Dallas, the family arrives in Nebraska, where Nea’s aunt and uncle own a struggling Chinese restaurant. Once prosperous, Aunt and Uncle have found few customers and much prejudice in their small town. Ultimately, Uncle will sell both the restaurant and Nea’s older sister’s hand in marriage to a wealthy and somewhat sketchy former business associate who is establishing a chain of Chinese restaurants in the Midwest.

In contrast to her submissive older sister, Nea quickly embraces the ways of the United States and of every place she has lived—hence the tough “Dragon Chica” image (and Spanish accent) she has adopted from her months in Dallas. She chafes against a family that sees her only for the labor she can provide and a community that refuses to accept her as an equal. She wonders why her mother, aunt, and uncle don’t treat her the same way that they treat her siblings, but her memories of the dark days of the Khmer Rouge and her life before are dim and reflect the trauma of having survived the genocide.

Dragon Chica is a powerful and gripping story that offers a model of strength and survival to young people going through difficult times. Nea is far from a stereotypical “good girl” and her toughness and willingness to stand up to injustice add to her appeal. Although published as an adult title—and certainly of interest to adult readers—Dragon Chica belongs in teen collections. It is a story that transcends age, ethnicity, and immigration experience to cast light on all of us struggling against the forces that constrain our lives.

Tags: adult fiction, Cambodian Americans, crossover, immigration, reviews

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Dragon Chica, Liberation, and the Sequel

“How liberated were you by the title ‘Dragon Chica‘?” a student asked me recently.

Young man who asked question is in back row, 2nd from left

Let me just say that is one of the best questions I’ve ever been asked about any of my books. Ever.

I was visiting Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, California for Women’s History Month and had been talking about my novel. This question really thrilled me.

“Liberated” is exactly how I felt when choosing this title. I just never thought of it as “liberating” until this wonderful community college student, Colin Madondo, thought to phrase his question this way!

So for everyone who’s written to me and asked about the title, here’s my answer:

anna may wong 1932 - by otto dyer

I chose the title Dragon Chica to address a number of issues I felt strongly about. 1) I wanted to drive a stake through the heart of the old stereotyped notion of the “Dragon Lady,” a term used in America to deride Asian women historically. In the 1930s and 40s, it often was used to characterize an Asian femme fatale who used her feminine wiles to seduce some hapless white man and then tried to harm or even kill him. (The wonderful Anna May Wong was obliged to play many such roles in her Hollywood film career, for example.) I thought the term had died out long ago, but then it showed up again in an obit for Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Soong May-ling) in the Washington Post! As I was working on the manuscript that would become Dragon Chica at that time, I decided to let my protagonist Nea take on the “dragon lady” term and trope. (If you’ve read the book, you know it’s explicitly referenced in Chapter 14.)

Soong May-ling with her husband Chiang Kai-shek and US General Joseph Stilwell

2) The title also refers specifically to part of the plot that develops Nea’s experiences in America. When she first starts school in a very small town in Texas, she is put in an ESL class for Spanish speakers. There was no ESL class with Khmer-English instruction as her family was the only Cambodian family in the town! So her introduction to America is in a mix of Spanish and English, and her first language becomes a kind of Spanglish. I liked this metaphor for the mix of cultures in the U.S. I also felt it dovetailed nicely with the plot as it reflects the ironies many Cambodian refugee children faced when entering the American school system. Schools had no experience teaching Cambodians, they didn’t have Cambodian language teachers, they didn’t have the resources available when refugees from the Khmer Rouge came to America beginning in the 1980s, and so many kids had to learn to adjust to this new American culture with very little guidance.

3) Lou Dobbs and his constant rant about Mexicans in America were driving me nuts. Many students I’ve met don’t remember him anymore (blessedly), but he was a constant fixture on CNN during the past decade (when I was working on the novel) and he made it his niche to rail about “illegal Mexicans” and about Spanish being spoken in the U.S., as though English and English-speakers were literally under siege. I thought, “This is ridiculous. There have been Mexicans in America well before many states became part of the U.S. Spanish doesn’t threaten English.” So for my title, I liked the idea of mixing English and Spanish with an overt Asian theme. That mix seems very American to me!

4) I thought Dragon Chica sounds cool. I noticed when I was teaching at various colleges that many young women of all ethnicities now refer to themselves and their friends as “chicas.” In some places the term has almost become as ubiquitous as “guys” has become  for young men and boys. I liked that.

I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to campus and discussion with sixty some students, all of whom have read Dragon Chica in Prof. Scott Lankford’s English literature and writing classes. Dr. Lankford is himself an author, and I am a huge fan of his nonfiction book Tahoe Beneath the Surface. Even if you’ve never been to California’s Lake Tahoe, this book weaves together fascinating stories from American history using Lake Tahoe as the touchstone for topics as diverse as how California almost became a slave state, the first victims of the Donner Party, the (mis)treatment of Chinese laborers, the discovery of prehistoric fossilized trees at the bottom of Lake Tahoe, Mark Twain, Marilyn Monroe, mobsters and even the Kennedy assassination.

I can tell Dr. Lankford, in addition to being a wonderful writer, is also a great teacher by the thoughtful responses of his students.

Another question that took me by surprise was “Will there be a sequel?”

I asked the students if they’d liked to read one. And the overwhelming answer was “Yes!”

In fact, I’ve had a hard time leaving Nea and her family. I still think of them as though they were real people and not characters in a novel. And I often think about what would happen to them after the events in Dragon Chica. In fact, I was working on a number of short stories about the future lives of the characters, not because anyone asked me to, but just because I myself wanted to explore possible trajectories for the characters.

I happened to mention to my publisher that Foothill students had asked me if I would write a sequel and that I was very happy to hear they liked the novel that much. My publisher, to my surprise, immediately emailed me that the Board for GemmaMedia also had wondered if there was going to be a sequel and had been asking for it!

So guess what? I’m going to write that sequel!

I’d like to especially thank Aigerim Zholmurzayeva, Emily Romanko, Vivian Reed, Elizabeth Jug, and Ksenia S., who went out of their way after the event was over to urge me to write a sequel to Dragon Chica.

Events like this one both humble and inspire me. Writing can be a lonely process and an act of faith. There’s no way to know in advance that what I write will ever mean anything to anyone but me. Thus, it is always a joyful experience for me (and I dare say most writers) to discover OTHER PEOPLE actually like the stories and characters we’ve created!

Finally, the students at Foothill College truly inspired me with their intelligence, humanity, brilliant questions and insight. I was blown away by them. (And thank you, Shervin Nakhjavani, for your comments about a Dragon Chica movie. That would be cool indeed!)

with Scott Lankford and Debra Lew

I don’t have time at this moment to write about all the issues they brought up with their questions and comments (about Nea’s use of “cutting” to deal with her inner pain, the theme of dreams, the character of “the Witch,” the particular difficulties Nea’s brother Sam must negotiate as a male and an immigrant male, the long-term effects of the escalation and spread of war from Vietnam and America to include Laos and Cambodia and the impact upon all of Southeast Asia, etc.), so maybe I will have to write a sequel to this blog post, too.

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Dragon Chica in Australia

Australian author, Walter Mason (Destination Saigon, 2010), posted the most beautiful review of Dragon Chica today. I was deeply moved by his insights and his lovely prose. This kind of profound reading is what makes all the years of writing and working on a novel worth the effort!

Dragon Chica

Posted by Walter Mason

Labels: Americans, asian experience, books, cambodia, may-lee chai, reviews

The fascinating American writer May-lee Chai, one of my most treasured Twitter-friends, has recently published a Young Adult novel, called Dragon Chica, about the experience of a Cambodian-Chinese family settling into small-town America.
It so happens that I am at the moment working on my own book about Cambodia, so I was doubly fascinated to read Dragon Chica. And I was not disappointed. Based on a brief experience in her own life, when as a youngster she met an exotic family of Cambodian-Chinese running a restaurant in a rural district of America, May-lee Chai has been working on Dragon Chica for the best part of 10 years, and the care and time taken seems definitely to have paid off. It is a beautifully nuanced work of enormous appeal, not just to its intended Young Adult audience, but to anyone interested in the themes of race, belonging and the mysterious dynamics of family. It is also an exploration of outsider-ship, that meta-theme of all young adult fiction. And while specifically (and masterfully) dealing with questions of racism and ethnic identity, it is ultimately much more universal in its story. It is about the great pain and torment of all adult awakening: the struggles with sexual identity, the search for a more strongly (and separately) identified self and the enormous resentment at family strictures and eccentricities. One of the themes that spoke strongly to me as someone who grew up in a regional area (as did May-lee Chai) was the fury at being isolated at a point in life when experience and glamour seem to be the very most important elements of existence. The dullness of a provincial teenage existence and the constant thwarting of adolescent fantasy are brought to life in the pages of Dragon Chica in a way that brought constant smiles of recognition (and occasional pangs of long-forgotten angst) to my reading face.

The characters are rich and complex in a way that would be enormously attractive to a YA reader. What it also does, with great sophistication and lightness of touch, is bring to life the rich, complex and shifting cultures of the Chinese diaspora, and the special (and harrowing) historical circumstances of the Cambodian-Chinese in particular. There is a magic in Chai’s treatment of legend, folklore and superstition, and the characters – especially the older ones- occasionally lapse into a kind of dream-world of memory that is at turns whimsical and harrowing. There is, too, an exquisite and subtly-played symbolism to these stories, as when the hapless Uncle, the family’s struggling patriarch, reflects on his experience of the Buddhist tradition of releasing caged birds to cultivate merit. He recalls his wife’s words in the face of his scepticism about the project:

“Maybe they like to fly in the air for a day? Even if they return at night, how do you know they don’t enjoy their freedom during the day?”

All this in the context of his own horribly caged existence, limited, ironically, by that same wife’s tenuous grasp on reality and her inability to overcome the tragedy of her past.

Of course, mine is a particularly adult reading, one especially interested in the nuances of remembering and the play of culture and tradition in the narrative. I mustn’t ignore the main part of the book, which is the journey of the lovely Sourdi, the big sister charged with caring not just for her siblings but for her impossible mother; and the novel’s true heroine, the gutsy and terribly real teenaged girl Nea, who isn’t even that interested any more in any identity that isn’t her own. It is Nea’s growth into adulthood that is the novel’s central story.

Chai’s intention with this book seems to have been an ambitious one, describing the tensions of race and identity that are a unique part of multicultural societies – tensions which are not necessarily resolved till several generations have passed, and which are frequently played out, as in Dragon Chica, among the more aware and more socially equipped generation of migrant’s children. The ambition has, in my opinion, been rewarded. Dragon Chica is a beautifully written, clever and perfectly crafted novel, one that succeeds at every level without ever falling into the embarrassing and cringe-making didacticism that can frequently plague the “issues” novel, particularly one directed at young people. Chai speaks perfectly to her young readers, trusting in their intelligence, their sensitivity and their great desire for subtlety.

For me the most intriguing character was the tragic, scarred and monstrously selfish Auntie. She is almost an archetype, and a figure that is easy to recognise if anyone has had anything to do with migrant families. Auntie’s is the life that is lived on the knife-edge of tragedy; she is the one who bears the pain of exile, lost forever in the old stories the others can’t afford to recall. Neurotic, spiteful and attention-seeking, Auntie is both the family’s matriarch and its ultimate betrayer. She uses her health and her fragility to manipulate those around her:

“She insisted that we take her back to the house even though it was a busy night…she had to go home immediately. She couldn’t wait . She’d forgotten her medicine. There was no telling what would happen if she delayed.”

It is May-lee Chai’s genius that she delivers such a familiar figure so sensitively and, I should add, with a wonderful dose of mystery and intrigue that has the reader guessing right to the very end. The author’s sympathy for the outsider is palpable, and allows each of the characters to be fully human in their greater or lesser alienation.

I adored this book, and would recommend it to any young person, particularly those with an interest in Asia and the Asian immigrant experience. May-lee Chai deserves to be better known in Australia, and Dragon Chica is the kind of book that almost any young Australian could identify with.

****

[Note: You can follow Walter Mason on Twitter: @walterm and read about his nonfiction book, Destination Saigon, which was named one of the top ten travel books by the Sydney Morning Herald (see: The Couch Potato\’s Getaway), and follow his travel tweets @DestSaigon. Walter is an accomplished writer, world traveler, scholar (he speaks and reads many languages, including fluent Vietnamese), and blogger: www.waltermason.com]

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Sweet Home Alabama

I had great fun visiting with the students at an English class at Jefferson State Community College in Alabama recently. No, I didn’t actually get to go to Alabama, alas, but we all were able to talk using whiteboard’s “chat” app, thanks to Prof. Sharon DeVaney-Lovinguth, who set it all up.

Jefferson State Community College students

The class is reading my short story “Saving Sourdi” and had a lot of questions about the characters, the plot, writing process, etc.

Because I get emails from a lot of students who read this story for school, I’m going to give you some of the questions and my responses (as best I can remember). I know that if one person had that question, somebody else out there probably did, too.

One question was “Is the baby in the picture supposed to be Duke’s? When Duke says ‘It looks just like–‘ and trails off, is that because he thinks it looks like him?”

Me: Wow! I was really surprised by this question because I never imagined in a million years that people would think the baby in the picture was fathered by Duke. My answer is therefore, No. Too much time has passed for the baby to have possibly been Duke’s (and everyone would have figured it out if the baby were born just a few months after Sourdi got married). Also if the baby looked mixed-race, that would have been something the family would have remarked upon. When I wrote that line, I imagined that Duke was thinking to himself that the baby looks just like Sourdi and that he misses Sourdi.

Another question came from Prof. Lovinguth. She asked about the scene where Duke takes Sourdi and Nea to the field with the hollow in the ground where the rest of the world seems to disappear because they can no longer see it.

Me: The scene shows how our point of view affects how we see the world. To Duke, the field is normal and beautiful, but to Sourdi, the field reminds her of war when she had to walk over barren fields filled with dead bodies and bones. So what is beautiful to Duke is terrifying to Sourdi (in this instance) because of their different perspectives and experiences.  As for the hollow in the ground, I wanted that to represent our individual perspective and point of view. The rest of the world–the town, the trees, the road–become invisible when you’re standing in the hollow. Seeing from the point of each individual character is like standing in that hollow. We all only see the world from our own point of view, which means other things are blocked out.

Some other questions were about my new novel Dragon Chica, which continues the story of the characters from “Saving Sourdi.”

Me: Dragon Chica gives you the full story of Nea, Ma, Sourdi, Nea’s younger siblings (whom you don’t get to meet in the short story) as well as Nea’s Auntie and Uncle. The novel begins before the events of “Saving Sourdi” when the family has been living in America only a few years then continues onward until Nea is 18. There are also flashbacks to the family’s life in Cambodia before the war as well as during the Khmer Rouge-era. There are a few changes in the timeline and locations, but overall you will recognize the same characters (including Duke!).

There were many other questions (as well as comments about the World Series, of course), but I’ll end here so I can get this post up today.

And I want to give a big thanks to Prof. Lovinguth and her students for showing me some genuine Southern hospitality! Thank you all for inviting me into your class!

(And this lovely picture is of Prof. Sharon DeVaney-Lovinguth with her son.)

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Music and Writing

Much thanks to www.LargeHeartedBoy.com, the amazing music and book blog, for featuring my new novel! Here’s my essay on the musical playlist (w/ links to the actual music) that I imagined the characters would listen to and that inspired me as I was writing Dragon Chica!

Book Notes – May-lee Chai (“Dragon Chica”)

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.

In a year filled with moving coming-of-age novels, May-lee Chai’s Dragon Chica stands apart with its gripping story of the young Chinese-Cambodian girl, Nea. Her tale of facing bigotry as an immigrant to the United States after surviving the Cambodian civil war and Khmer Rouge is skillfully told and enlightening.

Dragon Chica is an important book both teens and adults will find fascinating, especially if they read (and discuss) it together.

Robert Olen Butler wrote of the book:

“It is very rare that a coming of age novel transcends its inherent limitations and attains the complex emotional resonance of adult fiction. Dragon Chica does this with great aplomb. The book explores with subtlety and depth the mature, universal issues of identity and connection, but it also retains its direct appeal to younger readers. May-lee Chai has performed a remarkable act of literary magic.”

In her own words, here is May-lee Chai’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel, Dragon Chica:
When I first started writing my novel Dragon Chica, I knew music would play an important part in the life of the narrator, Nea Chhim. She comes to the U.S. as a young child, a refugee and survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime. Music (except for a few propaganda songs) was banned by the Khmer Rouge, so music will be a complete revelation to Nea. While many experiences about adapting to a new culture and a new language are painful, I know music would be like the American Dream wrapped up in a bow. Better than candy. Better than Christmas and New Year’s combined. Music unleashes the power of the soul to feel again, and Nea’s soul needs a lot of healing after all that she has been through.

At one point Nea’s mother berates her: “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded, and then before I could reply, she listed my sins herself: I wanted to be an American, I talked back to my mother, I never obeyed, I thought of myself before my family, I sang their songs, I danced around just like them.

But to Nea there is no “us” versus “them”: Music is for everyone. And that is precisely why regimes like the Khmer Rouge ban music. . . because totalitarian regimes fear the fundamentally democratic, rebellious, uncontrollable power of music.

As I wrote Dragon Chica, different songs came to mind for different scenes and different characters. Some of them ended up in the book, some still play only in my head as I read the passages to myself.

Here’s my Dragon Chica playlist:
“Surfin’ USA” by the Beach Boys

What could be a more quintessentially American song? In my mind, Nea hears this song late at night on the radio on a Golden Oldies program as she tries but fails to sleep in her family’s too-hot trailer in their first American home in Texas. She can’t make out the words yet, but she loves the optimistic, almost silly beat, the simple rhymes, the carefree sound of this song. Will her life ever feel as happy as this song? She hopes so.
“La Llarona” by Lila Downs

Since Nea’s family first ends up in Texas, it makes sense she’ll hear Spanish-language music on the radio. In fact, her introduction to “American” is a mix of Spanish and English words (hence the title of the book, Dragon Chica). Nea won’t understand the words of “La Llarona” when she first hears them, but I imagine that later in life, when she revisits this song, with its tale of a beautiful woman whose ghost haunts the river banks where her children drowned, it will have a new poignancy, as it will recall her own family’s losses to war, the sacrifices of the women in her life, and the children who did and did not survive.
“Jolene” by Dolly Parton
(This video is of a live performance with Dolly and Mindy Smith)

By the time Nea moves with her mother and siblings to Nebraska in the early 1980s, the music scene changes dramatically. Here country/Western dominates the radio waves. Even though “Jolene” was written a decade earlier, it’s a song that has an eternal quality, as its many covers show. How could Nea not hear and like this song? Although the song at first seems like a plaintive lament from a woman with no confidence, Dolly’s subversive qualities—her outsize appearance, personality, and amazing voice—enable the listener to imagine a woman who may be in fact warning her rival to back off. There is steel behind Dolly’s lilting soprano. The song’s not in the book, but I bet you can hear it in the back of your mind as you read.
In the Mood for Love, Movie Soundtrack by various artists

As I was writing the novel, I thought of the music on this CD every time I wrote about Nea’s mysterious and once wealthy Uncle. He is ethnically Chinese and the embodiment of a tragic, romantic hero from a different era, one of prosperity, urbanity, and a sophisticated mix of many cultures. Now transplanted to running a Chinese restaurant in a small town in the Midwest, Uncle is too old and too injured to resemble the actor Tony Leung from the movie In the Mood for Love… except for his beautiful, sad eyes.

“The moon always reminds me,” Uncle says at one point, thinking of a lost child, a lost love, a lost way of life.
“Ces petits riens” by Serge Gainsbourg

This is the kind of sophisticated, French pop music that Uncle and Auntie would have listened to in Phnom Penh before the wars destroyed their life together.
“Glass of Wine” by Ros Sereysothea

Nea gets to hear only one Khmer pop song that Auntie has on an old cassette that she bought off a family who immigrated from Cambodia years earlier. Nea doesn’t recognize the song or the singer, but she is transported by its mix of electric guitar, go-go drums, and the soft voice of a woman singing about love. For me the song has to be by Ros Sereysothea, one of the most successful Khmer pop singers from the 1960s and early 70s. She was brutally murdered by the Khmer Rouge, but her music lives on…in the soundtrack CD to the movie City of Ghosts, in online homages, and in covers by contemporary American bands like Dengue Fever and The Like Me’s.
“Walk This Way” by Run DMC

As rap music gains in popularity, in the late 80s even in Nea’s small town, this song will herald a turning point in Nea’s life, a moment when she must decide to save her beloved older sister, Sourdi, even though it means betraying her mother’s trust. On a symbolic level, the song shows the tug of war within Nea’s heart because ultimately she can’t follow in anyone else’s steps anymore; she must forge her own path.
“Lucky Star” by Madonna

As Nea drives in a borrowed pickup truck down an icy highway in the middle of the night, this song is playing on the radio. Yet all she can think of as the moonlight glints eerily off the patches of snow on the sides of the road is how the minefields in Cambodia looked at night as her sister, Sourdi, carried Nea as a child on her back. Sourdi stepped on the bones of the dead because she knew it was safer that way; after all, the dead had already exploded the mines that lay hidden in the ground. “Lucky Star” cannot seem farther away at this point in Nea’s life.
Chanting by Buddhist Monks

This type of music isn’t played on the radio, but it plays an important part in Nea’s life as she reaches adulthood. Visiting the Cambodian Buddhist temple in Des Moines, Iowa, as the monks chant, Nea is suddenly able to remember her father’s face. But what does this memory mean? As more revelations follow, Nea must decide if her heart has grown strong enough to forgive.
May-lee Chai and Dragon Chica links:

the author’s blog

Chien Route review
Librarian of Doom’s Chaos Lounge review
The Lost Entwife review
Marjoleinbookblog review
Medeia Sharif review
Paper Adventures review

Medeia Sharif interview with the author

also at Largehearted Boy:

other Book Notes playlists (authors create music playlists for their book)

52 Books, 52 Weeks (weekly book reviews)
Antiheroines (interviews with up and coming female comics artists)
Atomic Books Comics Preview (weekly comics highlights)
Daily Downloads (free and legal daily mp3 downloads)
guest book reviews
Largehearted Word (weekly new book highlights)
musician/author interviews
Note Books (musicians discuss literature)
Shorties (daily music, literature, and pop culture links)
Soundtracked (composers and directors discuss their film’s soundtracks)
Try It Before You Buy It (mp3s and full album streams from the week’s CD releases)
weekly music & DVD release lists

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Dragon Chica Launch Party!

We had an amazing launch party for my novel Dragon Chica co-sponsored by Books Inc. and the publisher GemmaMedia. San Francisco, live music by the Asian American band The Like Me’s, dim sum, a little talk by me about the book, and time to mingle with friends! I feel truly blessed.

 

photo by Jeni Fong/Grace Image Photography

 

For everyone who couldn’t be there in person, I’m putting up photos and videos from the event so you can check it out!

Here’s my photo album: Facebook Fan Page \”Dragon Chica Launch Album\”. (I’ll put up more photos periodically. This is all I had time to post right after the launch.)

We had a wonderful turnout. I will be posting the Q&A, but for now you can watch the videos for the Introductions, my discussion of how I came to write Dragon Chica including my involvement with Cambodian refugees in America since I was 15 years old, and the amazing acoustic version of The Like Me’s hit “Monkey, Dance Monkey.”

 

My dad took the videos! 🙂

 

I chose to read the excerpt from Dragon Chica that I thought would give everybody a strong sense of the personality of the protagonist, Nea.

It was great to see so many friends, including the writer Gwynn Gacosta and her husband Dustin Gordon, George Lew, writer Miki Garcia, Denise Kitt, Jeni Fong, Howard Wong, Madeline Tam (and her charming husband), Claudia Villalon, Dr. Herena Kim, Trish O’Hare, and many new friends!

 

Writer Gwynn Gacosta, me, Dustin Gordon

 

 

With Sandra Sengdara Siharath (founder of http://www.Seachampa.org)

 

It’s always great to see Sandra Sengdara Siharath, who founded the Southeast Asian Cultural Heritage and Musical Performing Arts Center of Oakland, California! You can check out her arts center, which offers classes in SE Asian dance, cooking, music and other cultural activities here: www.seachampa.org

And of course, we had an amazing live set of songs performed by the Bay Area’s own musical group The Like Me’s:

(I’ll be posting more of The Like Me’s songs in the coming weeks, so keep checking back!)

 

Laura Mam, lead singer of The Like Me's

 

You can follow Laura Mam and The Like Me’s online: www.thelikemes.com.

And last but not least, here is my amazing publisher, Trish O’Hare of GemmaMedia:

Dragon Chica is now available in bookstores (you can ask your local independent bookstore to order a copy if they don’t have one in store), online,  and on Kindle.

And be on the lookout for upcoming readings at EastWind Books of Berkeley on November 13 at 3pm, the Tattered Cover in Denver, CO, on November 18 at 7:30 pm, and City Lights back in San Francisco in the spring!

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