THE WRITING LIFE ... Wena POON

FOXY STORIES
After the success of Lions in Winter, WENA POON is back with a new short-story collection, not to mention a sci-fi omnibus! TAN MAY LEE catches up with the feisty lawyer cum author

SINGAPORE-BORN American author Wena Poon created a stir in 2008 with her début, Lions in Winter, a collection of short stories on the migratory life of Singaporeans. Longlisted for the 2008 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, Poon was invited to read her stories at the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Festival in Cork, Ireland, after which international rights for the book were immediately bought by Salt Publishing in the UK. Poon is now back with another collection, The Proper Care of Foxes, which has even more dynamic and diverse characters. The Proper Care of Foxes will be one of the 10 books being launched at the 2009 Ubud Writers & Readers Festival. She also writes science-fiction and has self-published a sci-fi omnibus, Biophilia.

It’s been a while since we last met and since Lions in Winter. You’ve gone places since, including Ireland for the literary festival in Cork. What else have you been up to?
I practice law full time as a partner in a California law firm. Client and office matters keep me busy everyday. In the evenings, I review the proofs of my upcoming books and deal with editors, publishers, journalists and festival organisers. I travel a lot as a lawyer and writer. I was in Spain in July 2009 to meet a director friend of mine to work on a musical. Then I flew to the annual American Bar Association conference in Chicago, where I’m serving a two-year term as ambassador. This fall, I’m taking some time off work to go to Sweden, England, Singapore, Hong Kong and Ubud for literary events.

How can stories be versions of your own journeys?
I like stories that capture contemporary reality, yet acknowledge a solid intellectual debt to the past. In ‘Reuse, Recycle,’ one of the stories in the new collection, three siblings in a crumbling Victorian house in Texas sell off their dead mother’s things on eBay. In ‘Justin and the Cenotaph,’ an elderly Chinese Singaporean woman views the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on YouTube. These are not my own journeys. I create characters to illustrate my view of the world, but I take them down paths I’ve never taken to see what happens.

While Lions in Winter had very Singaporean characters and places, The Proper Care of Foxes travels far and wide. What binds the characters together in this collection?
They’re all part of the same universe. In college, I was influenced by writers like Voltaire and Antoine de Saint Exupéry. The Proper Care of Foxes is a book built around Voltaire’s famous yet enigmatic philosophy in Candide which is quoted at its beginning: “Il faut cultiver notre jardin” (we must cultivate our garden). I interpreted this to mean that we have to nurture and protect what E.M. Forster calls our “eternal springs,” but at the same time we have to work hard and constantly create in order to justify our existence.

Voltaire wrote that “l’homme n’est pas né pour le repos” (man was not born for rest). I believe in work ethics. But in the pursuit of work and of excellence, we must not forget to forge relationships and to love. This is the theme of the fox, which comes from Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince. In my mind, the fox fits nicely in the intellectual tradition of Voltaire’s garden.

‘The Proper Care of Foxes’ is about a Malaysian girl meeting an old friend in Somerset, so she could get laid before marrying a man she doesn’t love. How did the story come to you? Why did you choose it as the title story?
The unexpected love story of Edward and Meg came to me during a time when a lot of London bankers were laid off. I was reading The Financial Times on the plane. When people are fired in the UK, they call the notice period “garden leave.” Garden leave sounds appropriate for laid-off bankers and executives who finally have time to cultivate their soul and reflect on their life choices. I put down the newspaper and turned on my laptop. As Virginia Woolf said in the movie The Hours, “I have a first sentence.”

I began with the dialogue between Edward and his mother. In London, Edward calls his mum and says he’s been laid off. His mum tells him to visit her in Somerset. Edward’s been a busy banker all his life, so he hardly sees his mum. While visiting her, an email from Meg, an old classmate from Malaysia, hurtles like a blazing meteor into his life and changes it forever.

In my collection, I was keen to explore the forces shaping our contemporary morality, such as global recessions and the ubiquitous Internet. That’s why Edward’s story became the title story.

Your characters are flamboyant: an Asian sex tourist, a depressed transvestite, even the son of a Japanese man turns out to be Caucasian. What draws you to these characters?
I’m interested in taking Asian stereotypes and turning them on their head. In ‘Vanilla Five,’ a white baby is adopted by a Japanese couple in New York. In America, a lot of Asian babies are adopted by white couples, so what happens when it’s the other way around? I want to see what happens when you upset the applecart. It’s exciting for a writer to explore these roles. I hope it’s exciting for the reader as well.

The infamous “Are these stories based on people you know?” question: where did the colourful characters come from?
It’s easier to explain where the visual models for the characters come from. I don’t have a favourite character, but my readers love Siegfried, the cross-dressing hero of ‘Siegfried & the Avalanche.’ I have an old video of Brian Eno in Roxy Music and three trannies in Austin, Texas, to thank for the visual cues for Siegfried.

Apart from literary fiction, you also write science fiction. Tell us about the creation of Biophilia’s sci-fi universe and the female protagonist Imogen!
Biophilia is the summer blockbuster movie I have been waiting for. In action movies, women continue to be just the girlfriend or the mother. That’s not reflective of reality in America. Women are now running for President, leading multi-billion-dollar corporations and flying military airplanes. You can think of Biophilia as the new J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek movie, except that the leading role of Kirk is a woman, and the supportive role of Spock is a man. Imogen, the heroine, is impetuous, sassy, cool and brave. She’s not just a pinup—she actually fights. Kai, the hero, is like Q in James Bond—he builds machines for Imogen so that she can do her thing. The surprising thing is that both men and women love female action stars. Hollywood’s got it all wrong. I must fix it!

Reproduced from the Singapore Writers Festival 2009 issue of Quill magazine