Confucius and spoke no Cantonese or Putonghua

but “spent years studying the

western canon and had learned to conjugate

irregular French verbs”.

Not finding the novel with the female

protagonist she sought, Keltner decided

to write her own. First came

the third-generation San Franciscan

Lindsay Owyang, falls “in like” with a

white co-worker and has her eyes opened

to her grandmother’s history when the

two travel to China together.

The sequel,

“forced to wake up and smell the

bock-fa oil” as she confronts her Chinese

identity head on. Lindsay is spunky,

sharp-tongued and “fairly clever” despite

her choosing to veer off the model minority

professional career track to work in

“wage slave” jobs.

No surprise then that Keltner too rejected

“the whole doctor-lawyer-MBA

route with no regrets”. On her close resemblance

to her main character, Keltner,

36, says: “Sure, the book began semi-autobiographically.

Like any writer, I draw a lot

upon my own experiences and observations

in shaping characters. But at a certain

point you realise the things that happened

to you aren’t as interesting as you

thought they were – in my case, at least.”

Like her protagonist, Keltner attended

the University of California at Berkeley, but

took jobs such as office manager and shop

assistant. She too attended Chinese school

after day school for years, but can’t string

together a sentence in Chinese. Both have

grandparents who ran a travel agency in

Chinatown and assimilated parents who

fed them Spaghetti-Os and TV dinners instead

of home-cooked Chinese food.

Both have dated Caucasians but, paradoxically,

share the same revulsion of

“Hoarders of All Things Asian” – that is,

“creepy” and “geeky” white guys who

“trawled the land in search of Asian flesh”

and whose pick-up lines are variations of

“Konichiwa, Chinese princess”.

But unlike her protagonist, Keltner is

married – and to a white man. Her husband,

Rolf Keltner, a Californian of Norwegian

descent, watches over their twoyear-

old daughter, Lucy, for the duration

of her mother’s interview. She met Keltner,

a speech therapist with the San Francisco

public schools, in a class on Chaucer,

at university. Her first words to her

husband-to-be were “Come with me if

you want to live” (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s

line from

Keltner with an outstretched hand after a

fierce discussion of

“Of course, not all Caucasian men are

‘hoarders’,” she says. “But white males obsessed

with Asian women are a definite social

phenomenon. They’re everywhere – in

cafes, park benches and bookstores. After a

while you learn to spot them. They’re usually

wearing tan jeans and beigey colours

and have bland personalities to match.

They’re what I call stealth predators.

“I feel a kinship with Asian-American

women. When I give readings I’m always

surprised to see quite young girls – perhaps

10 or 12 – sitting in the audience. I

think back to when I was that young and

know that if I had seen a youngish Asian-

American woman reading from her book

that would have changed things for me. It

would have told me that becoming a writer

or artist was not such a left-field thing

for me to do.”

For Chinese-American readers, one of

the delights of Keltner’s novels is the

familiarity of her terrain: from her description

of the merchandise to be found in a

certain type of Chinatown grocery store to

her observation that the reluctance of Chinese

families to talk about their feelings is

just one symptom of a general “cultural

despondence” and her hilarious musing

that the creativity is sucked out of the Chinese

when young by an “invisible Chinese

math vortex”, leaving them “more interested

in making money than art”.

“It was important for me for my books

to be relevant to Chinese-American readers,

so there’s lots of material in the book,

including inside jokes, that can only be

understood by Chinese,” Keltner says.

“But then I also want the novels to be accessible

to the general reader so the poor

Chinese reader has to put up with a description,

say, of a lion dance because

westerners haven’t been bored to tears by

seeing the same spectacle umpteen

times. Sometimes I feel like I’m working

both sides of the fence when I’m wondering

if a certain passage will bore the Chinese

reader but interest everyone else –

and vice versa.”

Keltner wrote

office manager, preschool teacher and a

telephone customer service rep. Although

she had always wanted to become a writer,

she eschewed the common route of

studying a master of fine arts programme

in writing as a warm-up. “In my experience

writers and artists who go to graduate

school for MFAs become blocked and

lose track of their own ideas because

they’re so busy listening to other people’s

opinions of their work,” says Keltner.

“People go into MFA programmes because

they want a certain kind of recognition

that they’re working hard on a creative

endeavour. I wrote the book for myself

and told myself it was going to be the

best book I could make it. I didn’t want

anyone else’s opinion.”

Keltner kept her writing life a secret

until the day her agent snagged a contract.

Then, when friends inquired what she

was up to, Keltner could reply: “Oh, nothing

much. I’ve just got a book coming out

from HarperCollins.”

In writing a funny and upbeat novel

with a Chinese-American protagonist,

Keltner breaks new ground. Most fiction

by Chinese-Americans Keltner has encountered

emphasise hardship, discrimination

and sadness, she says. “Obviously,

there is a lot of sorrow in immigration culture

and in Chinese stories, but it’s not as

if we’re all walking around 24/7 thinking

about how horrible our grandparents had

it. I know lots of people who are really funny

and happen to be Asian. We’re regular

people who like to laugh.”

She says she has her tortured side but

considers herself a “happy and cheerful

person”. Indeed, she traces her positive

disposition to being Chinese. “My mother,

even though she was born here and

completely assimilated, has what I call the

‘Chinese no pity’ attitude. It’s this idea,

which I consider an ingrained part of Chinese

culture, that you don’t show your

sadness or admit you’re depressed.

“And if you’re planning to do something

that’s important to you, you don’t sit

around whining and moaning about it,

you just do it. That’s why I didn’t tell my

family I was writing a novel or that I wanted

to be a writer. I knew their response

would have been ‘Well, why are you telling

us this? Go do it. Show me instead of

sitting around whining and acting crazy.’”

For the same reason, says Keltner, “I

never introduced any boyfriend to my

family until I was seeing Rolf because I

didn’t want to bother them with anything

that wouldn’t come to anything. The ‘no

pity, no excuses’ part of being Chinese is

definitely part of me.

“At some point, you have to realise that

this is your life, that no one’s going to

make you feel good if you don’t do it yourself.

You’re the only one suffering. Nobody

else cares. So get happy.”

“At some point,

you have to

realise that

this is your life,

that no one’s

going to make

you feel good

if you don’t do

it yourself”

GET

HAPPY

Kim Wong Keltner employs humour to shatter some myths about Chinese-Americans, she tells Stella Dong

review of the week

by Geling Yan

“Completely haunting, recreating the

old San Francisco Chinatown

with brilliance.”

“I hate to admit to liking anything

English for their screwed-up, colonial

past, but Shakespeare was a genius

when it came to human nature.”

“It takes seriously that a young person

can be a real writer, and inspired me

as a child.”

by Truman Capote

“A simple and perfect story, very

different from the movie.”

editor and socialite)

“Fantastic, bizarre language from an

exceptional person whose experiences

had one foot in the old world and one in

the modern.”

AUTHOR’S

BOOKSHELF

All Things

about my next writing project, but

it’s a novel set in San Francisco in

1983, a coming-of-age tale about a

14-year-old girl who works in a

Chinese restaurant.”

preschool teacher, telephone

customer service representative

is unabashedly sassy and biting in

her take on race and love, and the

result is both refreshing and smart.”

– Publishers Weekly