 Good afternoon, folks. Welcome to San Francisco Public Library. I'm Michelle Jeffers with the library. Before we begin tonight's program, this afternoon's program, I'd like to begin with a land acknowledgment. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homelands of the Romitushelonese peoples. We benefit from living and working on their traditional land, and as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples that we wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Romitush community. Again, welcome to the Coret Auditorium today for a book talk with Julia Flunziler and Catherine Ma about Catherine's new book, The Chinese Groove. I'm delighted to welcome them. They're two of my favorites, and I also had the pleasure of working with them for a long time with LitQuik. Let me give you their brief bios, and then we'll join us on stage. Catherine is the author of the widely praised novel, The Year She Left Us, which was named New York Times Editor's Choice and an NPR Great Read. Her short story collection, which I love all that work and still know boys, was named a San Francisco Chronicle notable book. She is a recipient of the David Meyerson Prize for fiction and has twice been named a San Francisco Library Laureate. Her new novel, The Chinese Groove, has been praised by such esteemed organizations as The New York Times, Oprah Daily, People Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among many others, and was chosen as an indie next pick by the American Booksellers Association. As I said, she'll be joined by Julia Flunziler, who is an award-winning author and journalist. Her most recent book was The White Devil's Daughter, The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco's Chinatown. It was the New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a finalist for the California Book Award. She is also the author of the best-selling nonfiction books, Lost Kingdom, Hawaii's Last Queen, The Sugar Kings, and America's First Imperial Adventure, and The House of Mondavi, the rise and fall of an American wine dynasty. Please join me in welcoming them to the stage and please note, our booksellers, Folio Books in the back of the room from Noe Valley, they'll be selling books for tonight's event, and I hope you take advantage of that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Michelle, so much. So much fun to be here with you. We're here on a super great day to be here because if you open up your New York Times this morning, you will see that Catherine's wonderful book, The Chinese Groove, was a New York Times editor's pick. So I'm really happy for you and it's so well-deserved, so. Thank you, Julie. Thank you, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. Yay. Okay, thanks for coming, everybody. So I really love this book and I can't wait to talk about it with you. It's a book that celebrates Chinese American culture and the joy and resilience of community. And it's funny, it's tender-hearted. It's got a lot of heart, just to repeat myself here a little bit. It's got a level of sadness to it too, which is very powerful. And I think that makes it especially poignant book. And I think that's why so many places have responded in such a wonderful way to your book, The New York Times, but indeed next pick, Amazon editor's choice, People Magazine book choice. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the book and then we'll launch into a conversation. The Chinese Groove is a novel. It's a story of a young man from Yunnan, China, nicknamed Shelley, and he comes to San Francisco with very big dreams. And he soon realizes once he arrives here that the aunt and uncle who he will be staying with aren't exactly who he thought they would be. And in fact had suffered a very terrible personal loss. He finds a Yi or a grandfather named Henry and he discovers a lot about himself along the way. Shelley is his name, that's his nickname, our hero. He seems to be naive, he's extremely likable, and I think most striking he has an irresistible voice, comic, touching, surprising, sometimes a little more self aware than we might give him credit for at first. So I was hoping, Catherine, that you might like to read a little bit and we can get a taste of Shelley's voice. Thank you, Julie, thank you for those lovely remarks about the book. And again, welcome to everyone. I'm really pleased to be here and it's especially wonderful to be introduced and in conversation with my dear friend, Julie. I'm going to read from the very opening of the book. So as Julie said, the book is narrated by Shelley. He's 18 years old and he's from Southwest China, from Yunnan Province, China. So now you need to imagine me as an 18 year old young man. The relatives treated me rudely, beating me and calling me names. And so on my 18th birthday, my father buried his head in his hands and cried until the bottle was empty and his tears were spent and he was at last decided. It was time to let me go. Grubs, like us, didn't get many chances and he'd promised mother before she died that he'd send me, their son and only child away from this unhappy life and into a brighter world. There was an uncle, he said, conveniently rich, living in San Francisco. I should leave our home in Guizhou, Yunnan Province, the most beautiful realm in all of China and move in with uncle and figure out from there, foot in the door and student visa and green card and a score of other words my father called out in the weeks that followed. As I cleaned our shoes and boiled our broth and swept our single room, words that made no sense to me but ladled not an ounce of care into my black haired head. I was all for the plan, bathed in mother's dream for me. I'd been waiting for years to depart. I didn't wanna be like my friends who are lined up to work at the World Crafts Tin Factory. There's wasn't the fate for me. My future lay outside those gates. For where in a factory could I become the man I intended to be which was a cool guy and a poet? I told my father, yes. The relatives hated me for ancestor reasons which you might think unfair but I well understood because I was born into the despised branch of the family. My great grandfather, a handsome devil, was known to all as the wayward son of his father's third wife, a gambler and an opium addict. The son, not the wife though, who knows? Maybe the third wife ate the flower too. In the photo my father has of her, she's really skinny. As far as the aunties were concerned, father and I were lodged on the lowest rung of the family ladder and nothing we could do would lift us from the mud. From where I stood and proud good Joe, tin capital of China but lousy with kicking cousins, I couldn't quit soon enough. I'd hold father in a warm embrace and promise to make him proud. Then I'd soar straight to uncle's house where my new family was waiting. As some of you may know, there were a bunch of poets here just before us and I can't tell you how much I love Shelly's ambition to become a poet in this book which is, and he thinks that poets are very well reimbursed in American life which is very funny too. He has a cousin who's rather dastardly who tells them the poets are extremely well paid. We love our poets, it's true. So tell me, where did the inspiration for Shelly's voice come from? Yeah, this is one of the great mysteries that we face as writers. Where do the voices come from? There are a number of points of origin for the story and I will say the story, one of the important things to the story is my father's own story. My dad was born in this area of China. He's not from the same hometown as Shelly but he is from Yunnan province and I was really lucky to be able to go with my parents on a trip that they were making. My father was returning to his hometown for the first time in decades. He hadn't been permitted for many years because he grew up pretty close to the border of Vietnam and that area of China was sort of off limits to Westerners even after China had reopened in the 1970s. But here we were in the late 90s, we're taking this trip and I went with my dad and my brother and we met a lot of relatives. By then my father's family had perished, his siblings and his parents had all died. So it was profoundly sad for my dad in some ways but also very joyful because he had a lot of nieces and nephews, the children of his siblings and there were a lot of cousins and I was just trying to keep them all straight. I mean, there were many, many relatives as anyone who has returned to the family fold probably people have had similar experiences where you go, you don't really speak the language and it's a little bewildering but it's also exciting and there was an older gentleman there of my dad's generation and he was seated at the table of honor with my parents but no one would talk to him. He was inside the family but clearly on the outs with the family and I couldn't get a story from my dad later about who this man was and why he was in disfavor with the family. My mom told me that he was the son of a concubine wife but that alone wasn't really the reason I think why he was getting the cold shoulder because that wasn't unusual in that generation in those days for people to have children by multiple wives. So that gentleman stayed in my mind and I wanted somehow I thought this is interesting and maybe in some ways it's an analogy to being an immigrant, being the child of immigrants, the whole notion, the whole theme of immigration and migration are, you know, it's been a huge part of my life. It's been the defining feature of my life I'd say and so I wanted to write about it but I wanted to come at it somewhat differently and so I thought of this, you know, when I began writing this book I thought of this gentleman who'd been at the table but it was invisible to the rest of the family. I thought about how immigrants come into a nation and they might take part in the economy of a new country, they might, you know, be part of the community but they're sort of invisible maybe in some ways they are not fully visible shall we say to the rest of the community and I thought I want to try to write about that. How can I get into that story? And somehow this idea of the young man came to me. Okay, maybe, I mean one of the things I've always been interested in immigration but I have not been interested in just telling my parents' stories. I think we saw early on when more writers of color, more writers from immigrant backgrounds began to be published, they were really, many of them were telling the stories of the earlier part in the 20th century, they're essentially telling their parents' stories but I wasn't so interested in doing that. I wanted to find a new way in. And so I thought, okay, I'll make him a young man. Now I'll just add one other little story which was sort of confusing and embarrassing to me which is I had a conversation just like what you and I are doing today, Julie, with my daughter, my daughter Hannah, who is a writer living in New York and I had a book event in New York and Hannah agreed to be my partner in conversation. And one of the first questions she asked me was, well, Shelly, I mean you chose to write about a young man because you were really writing about grandpa, right? You were writing about your father. And I thought, oh, was I, it hadn't really occurred to me. So I think that the other writers in the audience will know this, perhaps you have had this experience, Julie, sometimes the writer is the last to know what we've done. I think that's so true. And the light bulb goes off, questions like Hannah or, did I, was that the reason? But just to take a step back, in a sense you found a wonderful precipitating event. You found the son of a black sheep of a family in China who because of the nature of his father's situation and his really had to make, wanted to make a fresh start. That said, Shelly is extraordinarily positive and hopeful and he is a marvelously naive character as he makes his way into America, unlike his dad who's a bit beaten down in China. And so I thought that that precipitating event was really wonderful. And part of what I so enjoyed was the way you layered a story on top of that. And that's the story of Peach Blossom Forest or Peach Blossom Land. Could you tell us a little bit about the idea of Peach Blossom Land and how that affected Shelly's decision and his experience immigrating? Yes, there's a legend in China, many centuries old called the legend of the Peach Blossom Forest. And I think many cultures, many countries have a similar tale because it's a story of a fisherman who goes out and he stumbles upon a magical land. That's a sort of beautiful, harmonious place. Like we have the idea of a Shangri-La or a Brigadoon that's time and place apart from the real world. And Shelly's father is a storyteller in the book. And storytelling is a theme that runs throughout the book because I think we fundamentally do relate to one another very much on the level of tellers of stories and audiences of stories and we change those roles. Sometimes we're the teller of a story, sometimes we're the receiver of a story. And this idea of a kind of perfect place where you can go and there'll be opportunity and there'll be peace and there'll be harmony really attracts Shelly's father and he passes that onto his son and says, if you go to San Francisco you're gonna find a better land, a better place. It's a place of great diversity. People live together of all different stripes and they live together peacefully and beautifully and Shelly loves this idea. So the Peach Blossom Forest San Francisco kind of represents that land for Shelly. I first heard this tale when I went to see a play a number of years ago in Ashland, Oregon. I love to go to the playhouses and I love to go to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. They do a lot of plays that are not Shakespeare and they did a play by a Taiwanese playwright, Stan Lai, who wrote this play based on the Peach Blossom Forest legend. And I was fascinated by this legend and I asked my mom later after I'd seen the play, have you ever heard of this story, the Peach Blossom Forest? And she looked at me like I was nuts. It would be like one of my children coming to me at age 50 and saying, have you ever heard of this story, Cinderella? I mean, it was so fundamental to my mother's education and childhood. She was so surprised that I never heard of it. So I understood like, this is something kids in China grow up with. So Shelly would have learned that from an early age. And I wanted to use it as a kind of through line through line for the tale. But I just wanted to add one thing, Julie, because you asked me early on about, in particular about Shelly's voice. And I will say, you alluded to the fact that Shelly has, he has nothing. He has no prospects. He has no money. He has no job. He's coming to San Francisco. He's got some distant American relatives. He's gonna impose himself on them. And, you know, his great naivete and boundless optimism. He believes that they're gonna give him a job and set him up with housing and give him money. And he's gonna be A-okay. And so his optimism infuses his language. He has a really, it was a great, fun voice to write. He's narrating it with great verb. He does speak English. He studied English for years. And he loves language. He loves word play. So a lot of the text of the book is Shelly just loving to hear himself talk, which makes for a very fun character to write. It does make it for a very fun character. So Peach Blossomland set in San Francisco are more specifically set in the Outer Sunset. Tell us about the decision to focus so much of the book on the Outer Sunset. Yeah, anybody here from the Outer Sunset neighborhood? It's a neighborhood that I really, I really love. You know, it's kind of a forgotten quarter of San Francisco or it certainly was before housing got even tighter and people began to turn to perhaps some of the neighborhoods that are a little less desirable or they were less desirable in terms of weather and housing stock, you know, in earlier decades. That's where Shelly's uncle and aunt live. And Shelly is shocked when he gets there because he's imagined him for himself that his relatives live in some big American palace and he's gonna have his own bedroom and you know, and live it in the lap of luxury. But he gets to the Outer Sunset and he's surprised, he's surprised by the fog. He's surprised that all the homes are small and modest and of uniform style. And I wanted to set the book there for a couple of reasons. First of all, I grew up in houses like that. I didn't grow up in San Francisco but when I was first born my parents who as I said had emigrated from China they lived in Pennsylvania. My dad worked in the steel industry as an engineer and they lived in Pennsylvania and they brought me home to Levittown, Levittown, Pennsylvania like Levittown, New York. It was a place that sort of in some ways was sort of like the Outer Sunset District. You know, developers had come in in the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and built very modest uniform then fairly affordable housing and it gave people an opportunity to get a foothold in the American economy and that's how my parents, I mean they were renters at that time but they were beginning to try to make their way in the US and that's what the Outer Sunset represents to me a kind of land of opportunity, as modest as it seemed to Shelly it is a sort of land of opportunity and here in San Francisco it is a neighborhood where a number of Chinese residents whose lives or whose families, generations first took root in Chinatown when they were ready to leave Chinatown when they had the economic wherewithal and they were ready to make that big move quite a few of them moved to the Outer Sunset. At first they weren't allowed there. There were restrictive covenants that kept out people of color kept out Jews, it was written into the deeds of homes that they were not allowed to purchase but eventually some of the deeds still contain them but it's no longer enforceable because state law changed, federal law changed and I wanted to consider what it was to migrate within a city so we have the transnational immigration we have Shelly leaving China and coming to a new country but within San Francisco we have other parts of his family, his relatives the aunt and uncle who live there some of that family came originally from Guangzhou province, went to Chinatown and then made the great migration all the way from Stockton Street out to the Outer Sunset which in some ways is as big a change as crossing the borders of countries. I love the pivoting up the scenes between Chinatown and the sunset and Shelly going back and exploring what Chinatown was like a little bit. My last book was 19th century Chinatown but the house that I wrote about Cameron House is still standing at 920 Sacramento Street and when there are community gatherings a lot of the people who are supporting Cameron House are coming from the sunset, the Outer Sunset. I used Julie's book, Julie's wonderful non-fiction book, deeply researched and beautifully reported called The White Devil White Devil's Daughters, pardon me The White Devil's Daughters and I've studied the history of San Francisco's Chinatown as a kind of preparation to begin working on this book and to understand you know when you write a novel you come up with a set of characters and you want to really know them well and you create complex backstories for them it probably never hits the page of the actual novel there's a lot in my head about who these people are and the family members but I created pretty complex histories and I studied your book and other historians about San Francisco's Chinatown and then we have a wonderful museum here in San Francisco, a wonderful society called the Chinese Historical Society of America and they did a special exhibit right when I was working on the book called Chinese in the Sunset it was like a gift, a gift to me because I went to the exhibit and both at Chinese Historical Society's building in Chinatown but they also had a traveling segment of it come to the community center in the Outer Sunset so I went there and I met a number of residents of the Outer Sunset and other parts of the Bay Area who had come to visit and I was able to do some oral histories and that went into the research and there's a detail in the book where Shelley's an earlier generation of relatives have set up a little store in the Outer Sunset and at first they're living, they're not allowed to buy a home in the sunset they can't find rental, they can't get a home and they're just living in the back of the store that came from one of those oral histories that I did visiting that exhibit Chinese in the Sunset and now the Historical Society is gathering information for a new exhibit they're about to do Chinese in the Richmond so I encourage anybody who's interested to take your oral histories to the Chinese Historical Society and help them learn a little bit more and because I'm really looking forward to that exhibit. I can't, that sounds great and I love local histories so wonderful. So tell us, the title of your book is The Chinese Groove. What is The Chinese Groove? Yeah, The Chinese Groove is a Shelleyism. I said earlier that Shelley loves to play with language, he loves words, he loves messing with words, he has a lot of made up phrases and sometimes made up words which he takes great delight in and The Chinese Groove is something that he comes up with and he has this idea that I am not alone in the world, like I know I have no prospects, I'm making this big leap of faith, I'm gonna follow this dream of coming to the United States but there are unspoken bonds between fellow countrymen he calls them, they're unspoken bonds between other people who have preceded me, who come from China and they're gonna help me out, they're gonna lend a hand and he calls that The Chinese Groove. He thinks that there are connections between people of the same background, the same country that are gonna be a kind of safety net for him and he puts a lot of hope into this and it actually turns out to be kind of troublesome for him because he makes a lot of mistakes too, he is naive, he's not a fool, he's not a fool and that begins to dawn on us as the book goes on, he starts out making so many mistakes that we think, oh, this kid is really gonna be in bad trouble but actually we begin to see that he does have some shall we just say street smarts and The Chinese Groove at first, it lets him down, he thinks that any Chinaman that he meets, any countryman that he meets, anybody from his home country is gonna do right by him and starting with his cousin, starting with his first cousin whom he puts great faith in to his detriment, shall we say and we learned that early in the book not to trust that cousin but the book sort of plays with this idea, is there a kind of unspoken connection? Can we, do we have a sort of vibe with people who are from our strongest sense of identity? I don't think it's something that is unique to the Chinese population, I think other groups, whether it's your faith or your ethnicity or maybe it's your geography, I mean, how many times have you been to a concert where the performer's out there and says, anybody here from Cleveland and you hear this big shout go up from the back of the auditorium? I think people have identities and we gather strength from those identities and sometimes they serve us and sometimes they let us down. I described your book last night over dinner to a friend and I said, it's a picaresque novel. I'm wondering if you would agree with that, the idea that this is a, it's almost a coming of age tale in which there are a series of memorable rogues that our hero encounters in a way and misadventures and picaresque course comes from Spanish literature and Don Quixote. Do you think there's elements of the picaresque novel in the Chinese group? There are and that was intentional but it started like this. One of the things, because he was coming to San Francisco, one of the things I really wanted to do was to press hard on our challenges here in this city and in many cities in the US on the shortage of housing. So, because this is a big problem for us, a big challenge for us and Shelley as a new arrival with no job and no resources, he has to find a place to live. And so one of my early thoughts about the book was I'm gonna have Shelley experience a variety of different housing situations. And that's why we see at the beginning of the book he's moving from situation to situation so that we can kind of get just a little glimpse into what the many different options, good options and maybe not so good options are for housing in San Francisco. So that alone gave the book a kind of moving from place to place. And then I thought, oh, this is kind of turning into a picaresque. Shelley is kind of on the road, if you will. It's not a long journey across the country but he is in motion, he is in motion. And one of the books I had in the back of my mind as I began writing the book was Voltaire's Candid. I did have Candid, that hapless hero in that classic by Voltaire. It's somewhat argue that Candid isn't really a novel. It's a very fierce satire of society. And my book has satirical elements. It's perhaps not quite as mean as, yeah, I don't treat Shelley as harshly as Voltaire. Treat it as common though. Peach blossom forest and the best of all possible worlds, right? Yes, he does say best of all possible worlds in there. But nobody loses half a buttock like they do in Candid. So I thought the, I don't wanna give anything away. So I'll try not to do that. But you did allude to the different housing situations that Shelley experienced. And that makes it so topical, so much on point for a young man his age and his circumstances. And perhaps the most harrowing part of your book for me was when our hero Shelley lands in Golden Gate Park for a little bit. And I was wondering if you felt that way as writing that and as the mother of children, you know, how did you feel about that portion? Cause that really hit me in the gut when he was there. Shelley does, Shelley ends up sleeping in Golden Gate Park. He's unhoused for a while. You know, it was difficult to write those scenes. I, at first I sort of glossed over them. And there was a lot of business around the scenes, things happening in the park and all. And then I realized, no, I actually have to go down and look at that and really write the bleakness of that, of being in that situation. And you were talking earlier, Julie, about the sadness in the book. One of the things that's important to me in reading, I'm a big reader, as you might imagine. And in my own fiction and my own writing is to also contemplate the sadness and the grief of life. There's no life that's not shadowed by sadness and grief in some way. And so Shelley does, he runs into trouble and it's somewhat comical. But there's also, there are long shadows of family sorrows that are following him in this book. He's lost his mother at an early age. We learned that within the first couple of pages at the opening of the book. The relatives that he's visiting in America, they have their own sorrow. So the book tries to do both things. To be funny, to be comical, to bring Shelley into the present day age with a kind of optimism and buoyancy as only a teenager can bring. His teenagers have that natural verb for life, but also to introduce him to sadness and difficulty so that he matures and he takes a different kind of journey, a more metaphorical journey, a more emotional journey throughout the course of the book. It's very, very effective, the bitter and the sweet together and just in case you're wondering, it really is an uplifting book at the end. But there are a few kind of very, very sad points. Now we are sitting in the marvelous San Francisco Public Library. I love this place. I've spent so much time in the fifth floor, San Francisco History Room, which is a treasure of our city. And I know Catherine, your mother was a librarian and I just was wondering if you wanted to talk a little bit about the importance of reading and writing in your own life. You touched on being a big reader. Was that because of your mom? Yeah, my mom was a librarian, although my mother's path to becoming a librarian was very convoluted, but she had a huge influence on my life. And I think it was her love of knowledge, her love of education and her love of books. My mom had trained first as a scientist because those were the jobs that were really available to new immigrants to the country. And so she had changed as a chemist, but then she met my dad when they were in school here in the U.S. They both came out of China when they were in their 20s and they both became scientists. And then they met in the U.S. And sometimes people talk about romantic, like Shelley is a very romantic thinker. Sometimes people say to me, oh, your parents, they escaped hardship and war in China. And I say, no, they met in Columbus, Ohio. They get very sad when they realize it's just an ordinary American story. But my mom, after she and my dad married and she, and they had, they started a family, my mom decided to go back to school and become a librarian. And she was a science librarian. And she made me come work for her one summer. I recently published an essay about this in a literary journal. She made me come work for her because she needed clerical help and she just for a few weeks and I was kicking around and it was in high school. And she was like, you're coming to work for me. And it was very illuminating to watch my mom at work. First of all, I mean, you know, it's just so interesting to, we have take your daughter to work day, but that's like one day, right? I was with my mom for a number of weeks and it was so interesting to realize, oh, she has a life outside the home. She has a life outside the family. She does important work. There are people who rely on her and then to see the way she moved about, she was working in a science research and development company and they had a small library and just to see the way she moved about the materials, how she handled information, how she knew how to go look for answers. You know, I just, wow, that opened my eyes. I didn't myself have a real interest in library science, but information science as it was called then began to be, it was beginning to be called in those times, but I had a real respect for it. The main thing my mom gave me was, she took me to the library all the time as a kid and she never directed what I should read. I mean, I mean, I think about that. Look what we're going through now with so much turmoil around teachers and libraries and what materials they're allowed to have in their classrooms and what can be made available to children, to minors. It's such a contrast to the way my mother approached my development as a reader. She never suggested a book to me or put any limits on what I read. So if I pulled the book off of my parents' bookshelf, fine. If I chose a book in the library, I have a searing memory of being in third grade and being in school. You know how you'd go to the library, you'd have library period. And we went up, but my third grade class went up to the library for library period and I chose a book and I brought to have it checked out with the big rubber stamp and the librarian said to me, no, I think this book is too hard for you. I don't want you to check it out. And I was so shocked because my mom had never questioned anything that I wanted to take out. I mean, I think the librarian was just trying to be careful with me, but I said, I want this book, please. And she said, well, you have to read from it for me. And she opened the book and I read the first paragraph and I said the word Chicago and she closed the book and she said, okay. And she, I read the word Chicago. I remember that so clearly. She said, okay, you can take this book home. That's an amazing memory. Thanks for sharing. It's so, you know, it's so important to me because I, I don't know. I'm just, I support librarians and teachers in all ways and making materials accessible to children and to all populations. And I'm really proud of the work the American Libraries Association is doing to make sure that materials are available to readers of all ages. Amen. I totally agree on that. So one of your, speaking of a literary character, one of your foils in the Chinese groove is the slick talking Huntington. I particularly like the choice of the name, very San Francisco. And I was reading about Huntington who liked his nice clothes and was up to all kinds of things. And it really struck me that Huntington could have come straight out of Jane Austen novel. Could have been, could have been perhaps George Wickham. You never know. Are you an Austenite? You can tell me. It's okay. It's only a few of us here. Does anybody do irony better than Jane Austen? She was so funny. I mean, she, you know, people sometimes I think, think of her as carving her bits of ivory and just being comedy of manner. She's actually huge worlds are described in her books and she takes on so many subjects including economic issues, political issues, and you know, way beyond just ladies' concerns. And I don't, you know, I'm an Austen fan. I'm not, I don't, you know, my reading taste doesn't begin and end with Austen. There are more modern writers that I think I've been influenced by but it was a lot of fun to write Huntington. There's so many San Francisco politicians who've behaved badly, you know, who've let us down. It was delicious. When a Chinese American politician is a ne'er-do-well, it really hurts my feelings. I don't know. I think there is a sort of pride that takes place, you know, a sort of swelling of the chest when it was like, oh, one of our community has, you know, become someone of influence or power within my community. And then when they let us down, it, yeah, it's a big disappointment. So Huntington was a great, a fun character, a fun character to write. He was delicious to read, absolutely good fun. Now, you had a whole nother career before you became a writer. Could you tell us about your, what you did before and your leap into the writing world? Yes. I didn't know Julia was gonna ask me about this. Ha ha ha. Got a, got a, got a, got a, got a, yeah, got a summon the steel in my spine to own up to the fact that I, I floundered a lot in my, I have floundered a lot in my life, trying to find my path. I, I practiced law, I was a lawyer and practiced law for a number of years. And I, you know, I was talking about being the child of immigrants and how that's shaped my life so much, how that's defined me. And I think the expectations were high on me that I would, that I would have a career that was practical, that was stable, that was secure. And I did not have the brain or the gifts to follow my parents into the sciences. One summer in my mother's science library that convinced me of that. I was like, oh God, I'm never gonna be a chemist. And so I was somebody who read a lot. I was, I love words. I like rearranging words into sentences. So I thought, well, I'll be a lawyer. And I practiced law for quite a few years. And I really enjoyed it. But there were a few times during that career as a lawyer when I found myself starting to write fiction. There was one day I remember I was sitting in the library, again the library, I always gravitate to the libraries wherever I am, sitting in the law library. And I was supposed to be writing a brief that was due in a couple of days. And instead I wrote a short story. And I submitted it to a contest just on a lark. And it won a prize. Took me like another 10 years to work up the courage to leave my law practice and start to become a writer. But it was just enough of a little signal like, okay, maybe you could do this. And it took me way too long really to try to imagine something different for myself. But I'm so happy that I did. I've had the support of my family. And that's been wonderful. And I'm so happy to bring this book out because gosh, now it's been out for about two months. And I've heard from a lot of readers now. I mean, in the beginning you're waiting breathlessly to see what the critics say. But now I'm starting to hear from the most important people, which are the readers. And people are telling me how much they enjoyed it and what pleasure it's given them to read it. And I thought, I never felt this way as a lawyer. Like I could help people and clients sort of one at a time. But to actually put something out in the world that seems to be really reaching a wider community, wow, that's really something. I mean, I'm proud of my earlier books, but there's something about this book which is, I think maybe we, who knew when I was writing it? It took me years to write. Who knew we'd be in a period of time when we'd really reach for maybe something with a little bit more of an optimistic hero? But people seem to be responding to that. And I'm very grateful for that. An optimistic hero, but I'd also argue your book is touching people because you explore themes of how to repair a broken family and how to build a new family. And I think that's something that every single person can identify with and can feel. We all have, being part of a family is not easy all the time, we all know that. And you handle that so delicately in such a nuanced way. And I'm also so struck by how much of a California book this is. It's multi-cultural California, including a Jewish Chinese couple and a wonderful jaunt to what's essentially a caboose in Southern California. And I wonder, does it reflect your life and your experience of living in San Francisco? I mean, San Francisco, it has such wonderful diversity and it's something that I'm so proud of. And it's a reason why I love San Francisco. The book is, in many ways, a love letter to California and into San Francisco. But it makes fun of San Francisco on that score too because sometimes we like to think of ourselves, perhaps, as a peach blossom land. Oh, we're so progressive and we're so accepting of difference and change, but it's messy. It's messy to be in a very diverse society. It's important to try for it. It's important to work for it, but it's not as easy as it might seem on the surface. And Shelly's very baffled by it. He gets here and he's like, wow, all these mixed racial couples and he's meeting a lesbian couple. He's meeting people from all different walks of life. It's not something he's encountered before. And he's expected that everything will be harmonious and he's finding out that his family is very fractured and he has to find a way to navigate. So yeah, I wanted to really bring the lens onto that aspect of Bay Area life that is very diverse and very, both proud of it, proud of our diversity, the way in which we're proud of our diversity, but also we have to recognize that we have our own struggles with it and we need to keep working on it. And the key to that is communicating with each other and how hard it is to communicate with each other. And that's why storytelling is a theme of the book because I find that if we can tell stories to one another, if we can listen to one another's stories, maybe that is the best way after all to communicate. Sometimes just straight ahead, trying to tell each other what's in our hearts or what we're feeling doesn't really work, especially in families. It's always seemed, talk about irony, it's always seemed very ironic to me that the people whom we love the most and the people who love us the most, maybe those are the people that we have the hardest time communicating with. So true. I read it as a love letter to San Francisco and California and it really struck home. It seemed like a lot of the families I know and I think other people must be reading it that way as well. Now a couple, we're running out of time and I wanna leave enough time for questions, but I've got all these, I just wanna touch on one other aspect which is this amazing cover, which captures the energy, captures Shelly's, walk through life and what's the backstory of this cover? I loved it. Yeah, I love the cover, I love the cover. Well, covers are tricky and first of all, covers decided by the publisher, they might ask an author for input, but generally speaking, the publisher has final say. So that always makes, you always start like this, like, ah, what's gonna go on the cover? But they did ask me, I've had a wonderful experience working with Counterpoint Press and my editor there, Dan Lopez and they did ask what ideas you have for the cover and I said, just please no tea cups, no fans, no headless women in manner in color dresses. I just, we've kind of moved beyond that, right? We've kind of moved beyond that. And they sent me quite a few options and this one was just extraordinary and one of the things that I loved and my agent loved is that the figure who's bounding up the stairs is airborne and we said, that's our Shelly, he's airborne. And after we had given our input and I told them how much I love this cover, then they shared with me the fact that the cover is done by this extraordinary cover artist, book designer and artist whose name is Nakim and she has designed the covers for many books that you all would know, including the wonderful memoir Crying in H Mart. You know, and that, so you can see that. Now that you know that, once they told me that I could see that, because her style sometimes is very bold, it's very modern, it's very graphic. She doesn't, she's just surprising. Well, in a different language, it captures the energy of your book beautifully. Thank you. And then so I showed my kids, and their only comment was, mom, your name is really big. I don't know what they thought of that. Oh, that's funny. That's leaving it to your own family too. A little too big. Reminds you of something like that. Thank you. Your family, yeah. You and your kids, they do a good job. They do a good job. Ringing you back down there. Ringing you down to earth. But Shelly is airborne and that's my favorite part of the cover. That's just so great. So let's turn it to questions. Do we have any questions for Catherine? I really enjoyed the book, by the way. Really enjoyed it. I'm wondering if you, without, I don't want to give anything away, but did you consider an alternative ending? How did you struggle with the ending at all? Did I consider an alternative? Did you think of other ways to end the novel? That's first one question. The other question is you mentioned you're influenced by more modern authors. I'd love to hear what some of them are, some of them they might be. Excellent follow up question. I'll take the first part. First, the ending was a surprise to me, certainly. Yeah, I don't outline my books. I do have a sense of what kind of feeling I want to leave the reader with. I mean, when I'm working on a book, I am that writer who is the cave explorer, right? I can only see a few feet in front of me. I don't outline a book all the way to the end. I just build it scene by scene. And maybe two thirds of the way through the book, I realized what the ending was gonna be and I was surprised. But I didn't really waver from it, from the final action of the book. But as I wrote the final chapter, I was still surprising myself. There were still a few little things, that little closions of action that happened in the final chapter that surprised me. So that's the delight of writing. If you leave yourself open to serendipity, you can keep yourself entertained all the way through to the last word. So that was a surprise to me. I love beginnings. I love writing endings. If you've done your job as a writer, the ending seems to gather itself up and deliver itself to you. Middles are darn hard. I think middles are the hard part because you're really trying to keep the pace. You wanna keep up a reader's interest. You really need to go deep down into the characters and find out who they are and what kind of choices they're gonna make. So yeah, the ending was pretty clear to me most of the way through the book. I didn't know what it would be, but when it came, I felt it, that's it. Modern writers who have inspired me. I really love reading the British women writers who are funny and complicated family stories, and the Canadian writers, Margaret Atwood, Margaret Drabble, Shirley Hazard, I love, she's Australian American, but her books are so, I love the people whose language is really precise. I mean, I admire a big, bold novel that has kind of unusual language or really colorful language, but I think my taste, my excitement is mostly to people who can really wield that pen like a weapon. Jane Knight, referring to Jane Austen. Okay, she's not modern. Any other questions? Oh, I see one. I have yet to read your book, but does Shelley have a Chinese name? He does, he does. And do you already have it in the book? Yeah, it's in the book. It's in the book. And he, so Shelley has a, his mother, before she died when he was very young, his mother really wanted him to learn English because she thought English is gonna be his ticket to a success in the world. And she made his father promise that he would become a fluent in English. And his father finds him a teacher when he's in high school, who happens to be a woman who's British and she loves poetry. And her favorite poet is the poet Shelley. So she gives her student this name, Shelley. And those of you who speak Chinese know that oftentimes a Western name is given that sort of phonetically similar to a Chinese name. So you might have a Chinese name of multiple characters, but then someone will choose a Western name for you or you'll choose it for yourself that's a little bit similar sounding. So his Chinese name is given in the book. But when he's in the US, he does go by this Western nickname. So my second question is about your Chinese name. Parents take a lot of time in choosing the Chinese name and especially the character. And I'm discovering it only in my later life right now. So do you have one and have you become that Chinese name? I do have a Chinese name. It's very precious to me because my mother gave us each Chinese name. Ma is my last name and Yichun is my Chinese name. It means, well, I use the word precious just now. It means like precious jewels or precious gems. So have I become that name? I suppose I was born as a precious thing to my mom. So she gave me that name. I don't know that I've become more of a treasure to her as I've gotten older. But I was very, very happy that my mother, before she passed, she knew all of my children and she gave each of my children their Chinese names. And now the next generation is having their children my children's generation is having their children, the older set of cousins and my oldest child now have kids and my mom has passed. So who's to give them their Chinese names? There are some in our family who speak much better Mandarin than I do. But that matriarchal figure is gone. Who could, as you say, it's very important what name you choose. Just as in Western tradition, that name is gonna it may have a huge influence over that person's life. And so we were a little stumped for a number of years about what are we gonna do with this new generation? Cause the matriarch is gone. But as it turned out, my younger brother, he decided he speaks fluent Mandarin. He studied it very diligently all through high school, college and graduate school. And he decided, he and his wife decided they wanted to move to China and raise their children there. So they moved and they lived for quite a few years in Shanghai and Pudong. And their children are like basically native speakers. So they have now taken on the sacred duty of giving Chinese names to the next generation. And they've come up with beautiful names. And that's, and I love that that it's passed over. It skipped over my, you know, the job of assigning Chinese names, skipped over the Boomer generation, cause we're sort of adults, but the younger generation has picked up the, has picked up the job with great grace. Thank you for asking that. Well, I think that's it. And I would like to say that I think both you and your book are precious gems. I couldn't resist that. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thank you both for coming. And again, Folio Books is in the back of the room and the authors will both be signing their books. Thank you.