Interview with Fan Wu on the Sunday Times (Singapore), September 10, 2006

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Other

Chinese author Fan Wu wrote her first novel in her second language and then translated it for the Chinese market.

China-born writer Fan Wu says that at her first class in Stanford University in 1997, she understood only about 10 per cent of what her teacher was saying.

"My English was very bad. I was very nervous for that first quarter and was crying a lot. I really didn't think I would survive," says the 33-year old, laughing. She was doing a one-year master's degree in media studies on a scholarship from the university.

"In China, we started learning English in middle school, but it was only two classes a week, and the teacher's English was terrible. But when you have to survive, you learn fast."

Well, she learnt fast enough to writer a novel in her second language.

February Flowers, about the friendship between two girls in a Guangzhou university in the early 1990s, is the first book released by Picador Asia. This new imprint of Pan Macmillan publishes original writing in English from the region, and translations of contemporary books.

The book is now available at major bookstores here, and will be published in Britain, Canada, Italy and France next year.

Wu also translated February Flowers for the Chinese market earlier this year, and several publishers in China have expressed interest.

The writer, who was in Singapore for two days last week on the tail-end of a two-week book tour of Melbourne, Sydney, Beijing and Hong Kong, says that language was not the greatest obstacle she faced in getting to the United States.

"It was very difficult to get a visa. I had to wait outside the embassy in Guangzhou for two days and two nights," she recalls.

"Out of 600 people, fewer than 20 got a visa. I was lucky to have an acceptance letter from Stanford. I wouldn't even have gotten a passport without it."

Wu, who studied Chinese literature as an undergraduate in Guangzhou and now works full time as an editor with Internet search engine Yahoo! in the US, says she wanted to leave China as she was curious about the world outside.

Now, however, she wants to be back in her homeland. She is trying to persuade her Swedish boyfriend, a manager with an outsourcing firm, to get a job there so they can relocate from San Jose, California, where they live.

"Living in the US for nine years has been an interesting eye-opener, but as a writer I'm curious about what China is going through now," she says.

She considers Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province, her home. That is where her parents live. Her teacher father and her biologist mother had been exiled to a farm in the province during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s. She has four older brothers. Three of them live in Guangzhou and the fourth in Canada.

"In other countries, nothing much happens in 10 years. But in China, rapid changes are happening in a short period. I want to be in touch with all the changes and all the new thinking in China right now."

Her experiences in the US have also made her want to write about China.

"Before I moved here, I thought Americans were open-minded and knew a lot about other cultures. So I was disappointed that many I met were self-centred and not interested in anything happening outside the US.

"I want to show that we are individuals, not products of a government. So I wrote this book for myself and my friends, about the frustration of growing up. In China, we had little understanding of who we were, and never got a chance to understand sexuality."

She says that the erotic tension between her two main female characters developed naturally. "At first, I only wanted to write about a lost friendship, but later, these two characters took me in new directions, and it became more of a coming-of-age novel."

Readers looking for a racy read a la 2001 novel Shanghai Baby by Wei Hui will be disappointed though.

"An American friend read a draft and was serious when he suggested I add some sex," Wu says.

"He said without sex, my book would never get published. I said I couldn't, that if I did that, then this book was no longer my book."

She stresses that the novel was not autobiographical, saying that the events were not drawn from her own life.

"I understand why people would think that, as it is a first book with vivid details," she says, laughing. "I lent Ming a lot of my background. But our experiences are totally different."

It took her three years from 2002 to write February Flowers, and she took 2004 off work to edit it.

"I would have liked to stop working earlier, but I had to get my green card so I couldn't quit," she says.

She also spent the year off writing short stories, two of which will be published by prestigious American journals Granta and The Missouri Review next month.

Wu says that when she returns to China, she hopes to become a full-time writer. She has been signed on by Picador Asia for another book, due at the end of next year.

She is already working on this second novel, which unlike her previous works, will be in Chinese.

"English is my lover but Chinese is my husband, and I don't want to divorce my husband."

Though she declines to say what the book is about, she says that the scope is much larger, and will involve China, the US and other countries.

"I'm very interested in writing about the new generation of Chinese, but to do this, you must write about the past. China is a country burdened with history. No one can really be free of the past."

- Stephanie Yap (ysteph@sph.com.sg)

'I still see myself as Chinese. My boyfriend is Swedish, and I want to show him China. I think if he didn't understand China, he would never understand me.'
- On wanting to return to China

'The language is the easiest part, the most difficult in the mindset. You have to understand a culture in order to write in its language'
- On switching between English and Chinese

'I thought about going to graduate school in China to study journalism or political science. But these are all programmed by the government, and you can't see the real China'
- On why she went abroad for her graduate studies