It reads effortlessly, but did it require some planning? I see what works, what doesn’t, cut, write, add, edit.
Premise.
I so wish I could plan. After time in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and New York, I found myself moving back to Hong Kong in 2005, married, with two children.
I was born in Hong Kong, but the first part of my life in Hong Kong was not very American, save for the school I attended. PRH: The female characters in your book may each make many mistakes, and hurt themselves and each other, but the one aspect of each of their lives in which they are more often than not able to stay above water is in their role of mother. Did you have a character who you most enjoyed writing?
PRH: You write, “Everyone is stuck in their lives, thinking about what people are thinking about them, when actually nobody is thinking about them. I think getting out of your comfort zone is always a good thing. Both tales involve denizens of Hong Kong's monied expat community, though one takes place during the Second World War and the other 10 years later, when everyone (more or less) is a damaged survivor, having been complicitous in or self-destructively resistant to the events of 1941 and 1942. 493 likes. [10] They live in New York City with their four children.
Janice Y.K. Lee's debut novel is a tale of love and betrayal set in war-torn Hong Kong.
We are experiencing technical difficulties. The New York Times Book Review called Lee "[a] female, funny Henry James in Asia,"[7] and the San Francisco Chronicle praised her "talent for infusing much-needed moments of reflection into what could otherwise devolve into maudlin melodrama".
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE: What inspired you to write a novel about American expatriate women living in Hong Kong? I had grown up in Hong Kong the child of Korean expatriates but left for school in the U.S. when I was fifteen. Even for more itinerant types, the promise of a really good pizza, or bowl of noodles, or sushi, something to remind you of home, depending where you’re from, can be an intoxicating comfort. JL: This novel is based on my observations of the world I lived in for the past ten years but I always felt like I lived in it as an observer and not 100 percent as a citizen of it. LEE", "Nicole Kidman To Produce & Possibly Star In 'The Expatriates' TV Series Adaptation", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Janice_Y._K._Lee&oldid=951563731, BLP articles lacking sources from November 2015, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 17 April 2020, at 19:43. JL: I’m glad it seems seamless! Or have a plot in advance. Certain parts of all of them were very relatable: Mercy’s Korean identity, Margaret’s motherhood experience. Janice Y. K. Lee, author of "The Piano Teacher" / Credit: Gasper Tringale / FOR USE WITH BOOK REVIEW ONLY. [6], Both of Lee's novels have been published to critical acclaim.
For them, the desire to find a community among strangers in a strange land is completely normal.
If I had gone to an English or Chinese school, I imagine my life would have been wildly different. In 1942, Englishman Will Truesdale falls headlong into a passionate relationship with Trudy Liang, a beautiful Eurasian socialite.
PRH: The expatriate characters in your book cling to their national identities, continuing to consume American products, mingle with American people, and abide by American customs. Please try again later. Will is swept into the orbit of Trudy Liang, a vivacious, beautiful woman who alternately charms and appalls the fashionable society of which she is very much the center, even though, as a Eurasian, she is also a perpetual outsider. [2] Once published, The Piano Teacher, published in November 2009, was on the New York Times bestseller list for 19 weeks and was translated into 26 languages worldwide. Lee's story - though not an explicit detective story, like Ishiguro's - has plenty of mystery, providing surprises until its final pages, especially about the wartime events that occasion the puzzling relationships and behaviors of the characters during the 1950s. Hilary, Mercy, and Margaret are Americans but they’re all quite different. Lee. [1] Lee initially wrote The Piano Teacher as a short story and decided to expand the story into a novel length work.
Janice Y. K. Lee is a Hong Kong-born American author, known for her best-selling debut novel The Piano Teacher. JL: I think it is a common and completely understandable impulse to cling to the familiar, especially when thrust into the unknown. [3] The novel tells a sweeping tale of love and betrayal, set in Hong Kong during and after World War II. We all spend all this time and energy worrying about what people are thinking about us, when they simply aren’t. What does that mean for Bay Area winter?
Janice Y. K. Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong, the child of Korean expatriates.
I print out what I have, read it and edit it on the page. A decade later, Will encounters a very different but equally vivid creature, Claire Pendleton, an initially shy, rather naive wife of a British engineer.
It does suggest, however, that the desire for survival can make morality nearly impossible. The school I went to really directed the course of my life. If not, Janice Y.K. "It started as an accident," the novel opens. But just because they exist in a bubble doesn’t mean that devastation cannot reach them. I do write and rewrite a lot. Why do you think this is such a common response to living abroad? Does one read grand love stories in fiction anymore? Each page of Lee's novel is full of arresting details, whether the moment is of high or low drama. Isn’t it strange that almost all of us experience this, but almost none of us talk about it?
JL: As I get older and hopefully wiser, I realize the absolute truth of this statement: that no one is thinking about you. La Niña is here. The drama of Will's two affairs emerges in a braided narrative, sections from the early 1940s alternating with sections from the 1950s, and the point of view roaming from character to character but focusing primarily on the hearts and minds of Will and Claire. In her teens, she moved to America, but moved back to Hong Kong as a mother. The result is entirely engrossing, the material about the two romances dovetailing for the complex, dark story of the wartime experiences of Chinese collaborators, Japanese officials, imprisoned socialites and those allied civilians who worked a deal to keep themselves out of the Japanese internment camps. Janice Y. K. Lee is a Hong Kong-born American author, known for her best-selling debut novel The Piano Teacher.
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