{"id":258660,"date":"2024-01-02T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-01-02T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=258660"},"modified":"2023-12-07T15:57:08","modified_gmt":"2023-12-07T20:57:08","slug":"vanessa-chan-interview-novel-the-storm-we-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/vanessa-chan-interview-novel-the-storm-we-made\/","title":{"rendered":"In “The Storm We Made,” A Malayan Housewife Becomes a Spy During WWII"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Set in World War II, Vanessa Chan\u2019s utterly gripping debut novel The Storm We Made<\/a><\/em> is the story of an unlikely spy and the consequences of her actions. When Cecily, a bored Malayan housewife in British-colonized Malaya, encounters the charismatic General Fujiwara, she is seduced not only by the force of his personality, but also his dreams of an \u201cAsia for Asians.\u201d Stifled by the narrow confines of her existence as the wife of a low-level bureaucrat, Cecily agrees to act as a spy for the general, unwittingly ushering in the most brutal occupation her people have ever known. <\/p>\n\n\n

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Ten years later, Cecily finds her nation and family on the precipice of destruction, and is determined to do anything she can to save them. Told from the perspectives of Cecily and her three children\u2014eldest daughter, Jujube, who serves tea to Japanese soldiers and develops an unexpected bond with one of them; fifteen-year-old Abel, who has disappeared; and the youngest, Jasmin, who spends her days locked in the basement to avoid being sent to a comfort station\u2014The Storm We Made <\/em>moves effortlessly through time, building to a thrilling crescendo. Filled with unforgettable characters and beautiful, vivid language, this is a novel of family, secrets, survival, and resilience during the darkest of times.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vanessa Chan is one of my closest friends and all-time favorite writers. I was lucky enough to be one of The Storm We Made<\/em>\u2019s first readers. We spoke over Zoom in the fall of 2023 about the journey of The Storm We Made<\/em>, how to approach research as a historical fiction writer, illuminating a deeply underexplored time in history, the fraught intimacies that can happen between colonizers and the colonized, and the power of charisma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gina Chung: The Storm We Made<\/em> takes place across a span of several years. You weave a very tight, propulsive plot while also grounding us in historical context. For many writers of color, I think there\u2019s this idea that we somehow need to \u201cexplain ourselves\u201d to a more mainstream audience when we\u2019re writing about places that we come from. Was this something you considered?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vanessa Chan:<\/strong> When I was writing it, I thought about how I would explain it to someone like me. It is true that the history of this time period in Malaysia is woefully underwritten\u2014it\u2019s almost not written. Southeast Asian history is really not covered by novelists or historians. I would explain things the way that the research I did through my family was told to me\u2014where there were important explanations about dates, places, what life was like during that time. But I also balanced that with not overexplaining things that you could get in context. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do think that history, if it\u2019s not written, does need to be explicated, because you cannot assume that people know things that they have never had access to. And it is the responsibility, I think, of the novelist and especially of the historical fiction novelist to explain what happened during that time, if no one else has any context. But at the same time, I think things like names of food or small phrases can just be gotten in context. So I wasn\u2019t purposely obfuscating in order to make a statement about the colonization of literature, but at the same time, I was also not trying to explain too much. I just talked about it the way that I would hear a story like this.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

GC: You give us a wide cast of characters in this novel, while also anchoring the story in the perspectives of Cecily, a mother, and her three children. Can you talk about how you created these characters?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n