Born in China, raised in Japan, educated in America and now based in India, former Kyodo News reporter Ma has seen much of the world. She brings that insight in her debut novel, Excess Baggage, which chronicles two Chinese sisters, one raised in China during the Cultural Revolution, the other who lives in Japan during the height of bubble capitalism. When they reunite in Tokyo in the early 90s, the sisters must overcome cultural dislocation and family estrangement caused by decades of separation.
Welcome back to China. Where were your born and what was it like living as a writer and journalist here?
I was born in Qingdao, but was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. I lived in Beijing between late 2003 till late 2008 and was lucky enough to be surrounded by some like-minded writers who helped me in many ways with my writing. One of the great things about Beijing is that there are so many journalists and writers based here, and you can't helped but get inspired by their ideas and ambitions. Sometimes it gets a little competitive, but it's a good thing.
Also, the world is still very interested in China, so it creates a lot of writing opportunities for writers and journalists alike, whether you're a seasoned writer or a beginner. So it's wonderful to be back here again.
You're now based in India where you have created a Chinese language curriculum for middle school students. How did you end up getting involved in education and how has the response been? Is there a big interest in learning Mandarin in India?
I was based in India for about five years until the end of 2013. One thing that shocked me about New Delhi is that there are very few Chinese, much less a China town. There isn't even a Chinese grocer to speak of in the capital, though there were some Chinese restaurants. Learning Chinese as a foreign language in this kind of environment, needless to say, is difficult, even though I sense that more and more Indians, particularly the young business types, are interested in learning the language. It's a reflection of the sad state of the Sino-India relationship. There's still so much work to be done about this.
At the American Embassy School (AES) of New Delhi, where our children went to school, they didn't offer Chinese as a foreign language, though many parents were eager for the school to add the language to their world language program. The school finally came to the decision that it needed to add a Chinese program to stay competitive, and they were having difficulties filling the position because there were so few candidates to choose from locally, and hiring an overseas teacher was not an option at the time. I found out about this and applied for the position because I thought it was important that the school should get this program started sooner rather than later.
The school took me on because I have a post-graduate degree in Chinese literature and language and had taught Chinese both in Japan and the U.S. before at the university level. We weren't sure what to expect at first, but much to our relief, the program went really well because after a year, we saw an increase of 30 percent in student enrollments. Needless to say, I'm very pleased about the outcome, and about the fact that I was able to make a contribution when the school really needed someone to step forward. Thus far, I think AES is the only K-12 school in New Delhi that offers a full Chinese program.
What is the literary and arts scene like in India?
In New Delhi where I was based, I didn’t encounter a lot of working/beginning writers. I think the hub for such writers is more in Mumbai. But having said that, New Delhi does have a vibrant scene for established writers. In any given month I’d receive two or three invitations for book launches, all of which are free.
Then there is the famous Jaipur Literary Festival, which happens every January. It’s a free event and touted as the world’s largest literary festival. Every year the organizers invite very big name authors, which is why the event has become very successful. At the most recent festival they invited Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen as well as Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri and the iconic feminist author Gloria Steinem. But the event did become a bit too successful for its own good because now it’s on the tourist map - in 2012, some 100,000 attended the event, with many being short-stay tourists.
Your novel, Excess Baggage takes place in China and Japan during some really intense periods. How did you get the idea for the novel and what was the process like in writing it?
Actually, the novel is loosely based on my family’s experience of living in Japan as Chinese immigrants. I wanted to write this novel because I haven’t seen much literature in English that relates to the Asian immigration experience in an Asian setting, and I wanted to fill this gap.
The writing part of it wasn’t easy, and it took me ten years. One reason was that I was attempting the task of writing not one Asian culture in English, but two. Writing about an Asian culture for a Western audience in English already poses inherent challenges because unlike between two Western cultures where there is a sharing of history, tradition and religion, the East-West divide tends to be vast.
I was a bit naïve in the beginning trying to write about the subtle clashes of two Asian cultures, assuming that everyone knew what I was talking about. I forgot that people in the West with limited experiences in the Far East tend to put Asians in one little basket called “Orientals.”
I didn’t fully appreciate how challenging a task I was attempting until I sent my third draft to a couple of trusted writer friends. One friend came back and told me to forget about it because I was too ambitious in trying to write in English about not one but two exotic foreign cultures. In other words, he thought it was impossible for me to write about Chinese and Japanese cultures without losing readers — the foreign elements in the book would prove too overwhelming. Like the inter-Asian cultural divide I was trying to convey in English would require the Western reader to be an Asia expert to understand what I was talking about. He suggested that I should translate my manuscript into Chinese or Japanese and target one or both of those markets.
But I was determined to make the story work because I felt strongly that English readers needed to hear this story, that they needed to have a deeper understanding of the inter-Asian cultural conflicts related to the struggles of Asian immigrants in non-Western settings. Besides, I think the world has evolved for many English readers to understand and appreciate the tale in my book. So, I decided to add in a lot more history and background. That meant rewriting my manuscript again and again, and sending it out to more readers for feedback. This took a lot of time.
The cultural divide between the two sisters are so vast. Do you have any particular memories of culture shock in your life and how do you convey that feeling in a book?
I think my first real shock was when I was Japan and realized I was not readily accepted as ‘one of them’ and never will. In Japan, there’s this very acute sense of being either an “insider” or an “outsider” in terms of personal relationships. It was a bit devastating to realize, after having lived 15 plus years in a society, that I could never be fully accepted. Many foreigners in Japan experience this sense of rejection; but this non-acceptance is not just extended to foreigners, but also to the so-called “returnees” - Japanese who have returned to live in the nation after a long stay overseas.
But in Japan, being an Asian also means that you have another strike against you. I recall as a college student, I applied for a job as a part-time sales girl at a small department store selling Japanese food and the shop owner, a lady in her sixties, asked if I was Korean. When I said I was from Hong Kong, she lit up and told me that if I were Korean she would have said no right away because she thought Koreans were dishonest. She added that the Chinese were okay, because “we borrowed quite a few cultural things from China in the past.”But she let me go after a couple of days although she never explained why. Again, this kind of treatment is not typical, and things are seldom that blatant, but you can pick up on little hints here and there that being an Asian in Japan can be a disadvantage.
I’ve based a lot of the writing on my 15-plus years of living in Japan and my personal observations about the society. I worked as a journalist in Tokyo, and this allowed me to meet and interview a lot of people. I listened carefully to their stories and many of them ended up in my novel.
China has changed so much even within the two years I've lived here. What do you think has been some of the most encouraging changes in the country and where are some areas it can improve in?
I’m really encouraged by the government’s recent decision to relax the one-child policy, allowing more people to have a second child, as well as the elimination of the so-called ‘laojiao’ detention sentences. The efforts show an encouraging evolution in this fast-changing society and are a welcome change.
Air pollution, food safety and industrial contamination of farmland are critical problems that, it seems to me, a growing number of Chinese people are increasingly concerned with and look to the government to solve, but so far with limited results. This ties in with the broader question of what sacrifices a society is willing to make and what are the costs of a wholesale focus on economic growth.
Is there anything you'd like to add?
One focal point of my novel is the unrealistic expectations many people left behind in the old world (not necessarily Chinese) still feel about family members that departed and made it in the new world. The stereotype about overseas immigrants is that they are invariably wealthy and successful. But this is far from the truth.
In my story, Pei, the older sister left behind in China, continues to hold on to this die-hard image that all overseas Chinese including her family must be rich and wealthy. That’s why, when she finally meets up with them in Japan, she’s set herself up for huge disappointment, having imagined for decades that they’d shower her with their riches. What she doesn’t expect is that her overseas family is dysfunctional, with her breadwinner father having run off with another woman and her mother now working menial jobs to make ends meet. These destroyed expectations fuel the tension and unhappiness between her and her younger sister, who cannot understand why Pei would give up a good job in China and abandon her family to migrate to Japan and become a second-class citizen. The crux of the story is about expectation gaps and cultural clashes within the family.
There are so many immigrants who are failures in their newly adopted countries, yet we don’t hear about their stories. I wanted to fill this gap by writing about these people in Excess Baggage.
// Mar 14, 12pm, RMB188. Crystal Room, 7/F, No. 5 Guangdong Lu, by Zhongshan Dong Yi Lu 外滩5号7楼广东路口 (6350 9988)
0 User Comments