American-born, but Singapore-based, author Alison Jean Lester
has just published Lillian on Life, a wonderful novel, one that I urge you to read. It is a funny, wise, honest, and
moving exploration of one woman’s life, her loves and losses, and her thoughts on
everything from sex, to English as a foreign language – indeed, the whole novel
is constructed out of short reflections, On
Getting To Sex, On English As A Foreign
Language, etc.
Alison Jean Lester came
to Singapore from Tokyo in 1999 as a trailing spouse, with two little children
in tow. When she and her husband separated two years later, and then divorced, neither
of them wanted to leave.
Alison says: “Singapore proved to be a very good place for us. We could
pursue our working goals and raise our children in a supportive environment
without many of the stresses we would have experienced in other major cities.
There were certainly times when I would have liked to leave, but it made the best
sense to stay, and I was rewarded by meeting my second husband here.”
So: questions and answers with Alison Jean Lester
If you want to set up shop as a professional writer, writing
in English, do you think it is a disadvantage to live far from the
international centres of English language publishing in New York, London, and
Sydney? If so, why? If not, why not?
When I started
regularly sending my writing out to editors in the US from my home in Japan, I
did feel the disadvantage because everything was done by surface mail then. Not
only did it take a long time for my work to reach the publication, to be read,
and for the (usually) rejection letter to come back, I couldn’t send a self-addressed
stamped envelope (SASE) because I didn’t have any American stamps, so I also
had to buy vouchers for the editors to use at the US Post Office to pay for the
stamps they needed.
It’s interesting that
some literary magazine and contest editors still require submissions to be
printed and sent by mail with a SASE. I don’t think this is a bad thing, and
writers needn’t feel that it slows things down too much. Email has given us the
idea that the process should be much more rapid now. It isn’t. You can email a
submission from just outside New York and you can email a submission from
10,000 miles away, and they’ll get to it when they get to it, and it will
usually take around three months either way. I think you need to
live where you are able and stimulated to write, and not worry about the distance
or the time zones.
Do you feel professionally isolated in Asia? Do you regret
not having a large pool of fellow writers on hand, or not?
Not at all, but
that’s because I wouldn’t necessarily have sought out a pool of writers to talk
to even if I’d lived in New York. As it turned out, one of the people who was
most helpful to me at the beginning of my more successful fiction-writing
endeavours lived in New York. We communicated by phone and email, and sent
stories back and forth in the mail with writing all over them. It’s very
important to show your work to people, but they have to be the right people,
and now it’s easier to find them in the world. You don't have to be able to
touch them.
You wrote about the experience of expats in Asia in your
first collection of short stories, Locked
Out: Stories far from Home, and
Lillian too was an expat, although in Europe.
What interests you about expats?
I’m sure it will be a
long time before I don’t write about rolling stones. I’ve lived in so many
places, and have now been in Asia for half my life. My mother was conceived in Barbados,
born in the UK, and returned to Barbados and then Jamaica, until she was ten
years old. She left the UK for Canada and then the US when she was 21. My
father taught psychology in Munich when he was in his late 20s. My brother has
lived in France, Arab East Jerusalem, and Yemen. It’s interesting to think
about how I’ve dealt with living in different places, and to observe how others
react. Beyond that, I think that just about everything we do is an effort to
see if the roots we poke into the soil can thrive there, be it in a new
country, a new city, a new job, or a new marriage. In any relationship, we
start out foreign. I wonder so often what makes a home, what makes a root.
Do you think other expats writing in English in Asia have a
better chance of international publication if they set their novels and stories
in the West? Is it sensible to ignore the fact you live in Asia if you are an
expat here, and you want to be published in the West?
I don’t think it’s
sensible at all to turn your back on Asia if you live here and want to be
published in the West. I also don’t think it’s sensible not to set your stories
in the West if that’s where you feel inclined to set them. Write what you feel
compelled to write. Write what you feel you can best write, or what you want to
get better at writing.
If expats living here do set their stories here, do you
think they should for any reason restrict themselves to writing from the points
of view of other expats, and not of Asians?
If so, why? If not, why not?
I do think a certain
amount of time needs to pass before we dare to write in an Asian voice or point
of view, but I don’t think we have to restrict ourselves to our own voices. We
allow ourselves to write from the points of view of old characters when we’re
not old, heterosexual characters if we’re not heterosexual, so if we feel we’ve
gained an understanding of at least one person in the foreign culture, of
course we must allow ourselves to give them a voice. As a beautiful example of this
I would point to Robert Olen Butler’s book of short stories called A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.
All the stories are in the voices of Vietnamese people. I read it when it was
lent to me by a Vietnamese friend who said when she handed it to me: “When I
read this, I hear my father.” It can be done. Just don’t do it too early.
Have you written from the point of view of an Asian
character?
I have. One of the
stories in Locked Out: Stories far from
Home is in the voice of a young Japanese woman dying of cancer. The story
was inspired by the fact that one of my best Japanese friends died soon after I
arrived in Singapore (after eight years in Japan), and I wanted to honour her
with a story. We had been friends for many years, and I felt I’d absorbed
enough of her point of view to be able to imagine what the end of life was like
for the character I created in her memory. I wouldn’t shy away from creating an
Asian character that was unlike anyone I’d ever met, though. It’s fiction. It’s
okay to give it a go.
Have you faced any practical difficulties dealing with international
publishers from Singapore? If so, can you give details? If not, what has made the process smooth and
easy?
Given that all my
communication with international publishers has taken place from abroad, I
can’t really compare it with what it’s like to be in the same country. The
13-hour time difference between here and New York makes for a lot of waiting. I
wake up to emails I’d like to address right away, but even if I write back
immediately, I won’t have a response from them until nearly bedtime. That’s a
little bit difficult, but it hasn’t been an impediment.
What about publicity?
Has it been hard to promote Lillian
from here? Did you travel to the US / UK
for publication? If so, do you think you
could have got away without going? If
not, do you wish you could have gone?
Publishing houses
don’t often fork out for a debut author to do any sort of promotional tour at
publication time. You’re an unknown. Who would show up? The publicity
departments have focused on getting the book reviewed and mentioned, and that
hasn’t required anything from me. Social media offer the chance to develop a
Facebook or Twitter following and promote the book from afar, so you can really
do as much self-directed publicity as you like. As a result, I haven’t worried
about not being there, and am glad to have avoided the jet lag.
Do you mind saying a little bit about what you are working
on now?
The novel I’m working
on now concerns a much younger woman than Lillian, and looks more closely at
family dynamics and what is ‘normal’ between parents and between parents and
children. The first part of the book takes place in the early 1980s in
Massachusetts, and the second part in the early 1990s in Japan (unless I
reorganize it again!).
Do you have any message for other English-language writers
in Asia, whether expat or Asian?
Yes. Find helpful
readers. My experience is that I’ve thought my work has been ready before it’s
actually been ready, and other people often know that better than we do
ourselves. If you have contact with writers you admire, ask them to read for
you. If you have friends who admire the writers you admire, ask them to read
for you. Sift through their feedback and take it seriously, but not as gospel.
Strive to improve.
Do you have any message for your readers in Asia?
Yes! Hello! And thank you!
I read Lillian on Life
in the American edition, published by Putnam, in hardback, but depending where
you live, you may also come across the UK edition, published by John
Murray. Both editions priced in local
currencies.
Book of the Lunar Year
Please vote in the poll to find Asian Books Blog's Book of the Lunar Year. See here for details. Currently, two titles are tied in the lead, Bamboo Heart, and A Madras Miasma.Likewise, two titles are currently tied for second: Capital, and The Book of Sins.
