San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Making family history into historical fiction
Every history has its gaps, especially in the context of war and occupation. Lives are lost, not only as casualties to tally but as little worlds snuffed out by violence.
And even though history can’t tell all those lost stories, historical fiction can try. In her debut novel, “The Storm We Made,” Malaysian author Vanessa Chan cuts a story of a family falling apart during the 1941-1945 Japanese occupation of Malaya (a region that became part of modern Malaysia) from archives and weaves in her own family’s memories and records.
Other works of historical fiction acted as “totems” for her own book, Chan said in an early December video interview with the Chronicle from her Brooklyn apartment. Works like Brit Bennett’s “The Vanishing Half ” and Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko,” which covers a similar period in Korea, helped Chan write her novel with confidence, and those around her took notice. In her testimony for “The Storm We Made,” Mira Jacob, author of “The Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing” and Chan’s mentor at her MFA program at the New School, called it “the summoning of a story buried so deeply in a nation that it could only surface with a talent great enough to do it justice.”
Chan wrote the book as an act of remembrance after her mother, uncle and grandmother died during the COVID pandemic. In her grief, she took the seeds of their stories and cultivated them against the famine of information about the occupation of the country.
“At the end of the day, remembering is how we love,” Chan wrote in “The Storm We Made” as a letter to readers.
The historical context of Japanese-occupied Malaya has rarely been written about, and that was partly what drew editor Marysue Rucci to acquire the book.
“This era is evergreen with World War II fiction, but this particular story was one that I had never read before,” said Rucci, who also edited the novel, in a separate phone interview.
“The Storm We Made” has two timelines, set on tracks that converge at the conclusion of the book. One follows Cecily Alcantara and her three children — Abel, Jujube and Jasmin — as they survive in the dusk of Japanese-occupied Malaya at the end of World War II. Artfully alternated with this main narrative is the second thread, which follows Cecily 10 years earlier in British-occupied Malaya. All four characters have their own arcs through the difficulty of Japan’s brutal occupation, but Cecily’s actions before Japan’s arrival are what foretell the disastrous events of 1945.
In the second narrative starting in 1935, Cecily is an informant, working with a Japanese spy and war general to overthrow the British. She even contributes key military tactics in the invasion and heralds Japanese rule. However, in the main timeline, Japanese occupation tears the Alcantara family apart. Cecily clutches at her disappearing and dying family while being racked with guilt from her actions that helped create Japanese rule.
The Bay Area was instrumental in developing “The Storm We Made,” Chan said. While a college student at UC Berkeley, where she graduated in 2009, through her time as Facebook’s director of corporate and financial communications from 2014 to 2019, Chan immersed herself in the local literary community through the Writers Grotto and the Ruby, an arts collective for women and nonbinary folks, before moving to New York to enroll at the New School.
She began writing the novel in earnest in the early days of the pandemic when it interrupted her MFA program.
“I was writing about home without being able to go home,” she said, looking at the walls that cooped her up during quarantine.
Chan scoured historical archives during her research for her novel but found more information about Europeans in Malaysia than Malaysians themselves, so she leaned on her family’s memories, in particular stories from her grandmother. The latter was difficult to collect; whenever she would ask her grandmother about the war, she would shut Chan’s questions down.
“‘Mind your own business. Do your chores. Please sauté the onions. Leave me alone,’ ” Chan recalled her grandmother telling her. “But … if I just waited, the stories would come.”
Those stories worked their way into the warp and weft of the book. For instance, Chan’s grandmother told her she couldn’t understand the boba tea craze because they mixed tapioca to stretch the rice rations instead of putting tapioca pearls in drinks. In the book, the Alcantaras also mix rice with tapioca. And she described how she would sneak out through a hole in the fence to go dancing, much in the way the novel’s Jasmin sneaks out at night to play.
She also made sure Chan knew the difference between the Japanese imperial army and Japanese civilians. Chan’s grandmother spoke of a Japanese civil servant who worked on the railways with her and her sisters and wrote letters to them until he died. He looked for them after the war and burst into tears when he saw they had survived.
“She was always very careful to delineate between him and the people that were starving her,” Chan said.
Though Chan deals with gaps in history in “The Storm We Made,” it is what Chan chooses to place in those gaps — loving characters and rich relationships — that is notable. Each of Chan’s characters has friends, and sometimes lovers, on different sides of the war, whether it’s Jujube connecting with a Japanese schoolteacher or Jasmin huddling with another child who is forced to work at a local comfort station for Japanese soldiers.
“I think I wanted to write little love stories, and I wrote four of them,” Chan said. “They don’t always end the way you expect them to, but I wanted to show that there are all these different kinds of ways to love people.”