Jan Alexander

 

Jan Alexander worked as a journalist in Hong Kong throughout the 1990s. Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Far Eastern Economic Review, Newsweek, Money, Worth, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, and Frigatezine.com. With Lottie Da she co-authored the book Bad Girls of the Silver Screen, a look at Hollywood’s depiction of prostitutes. Getting to Lamma, her first novel, was first published in Hong Kong by Asia 2000. Visit Jan online at www.JanAlexander.com

 

"Jan Alexander balances many themes and characters with consummate grace — family, lovers, politics, Hong Kong, Shanghai, New York — in one compelling story. It’s a delight." Robert Abel, Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award winner

"Jan Alexander exposes the realities behind the glamorous facade of Hong Kong ex-pat life in a lively and richly realized novel of West meets East. Her spunky protagonist Madeleine Fox (journalist, teacher, and latter-day Marco Polo) trains a highly observant gaze on the fascinating hybrid nature of Asia in the nineties...." Patricia Eakins, author of The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, The Hungry Girls and Other Stories

"…Madeleine's search for independence, compassion and real love offers a powerful vision for all women of the new millennium." Maudy Benz, author of Oh, Jackie!

Pageonelit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Jan Alexander: I lived in Chicago until I was 14, then my family moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, then to Toronto. I had a nomadic childhood even before we started moving - my only real sense of roots was in the South rather than Chicago. My mother came from Norfolk, Virginia, and we visited the family there every year…I think of myself as the first in a 200-year line to have been born north of the Mason Dixon line, and that's pretty Southern, although my mother rebelled and married a Jew from New York.

The exotic travel part of my education definitely came from reading. When I read Somerset Maugham's stories in high school all I could think was "don't women get to do that?" But I'd say my very earliest influences came from Louisa May Alcott and Shakespeare - might as well learn from the master. There was a period when my parents eliminated television from our lives and we would read take turns reading Shakespeare aloud after dinner. I was too young to realize how nerdy this was and I loved it. My father told me that Shakespeare wrote some light plays to make money - the equivalent of writing for television today, he said, and somehow that made the idea of being a writer seem accessible to me, to hear that even an immortal was occupied with material concerns. Whether that's really true is beside the point. Some of the most meaningful anecdotes I've heard have come from liars.

 

Pageonelit.com: Why do you write?

Jan Alexander: Is there any better reason to get up in the morning? I'm not sure how anyone gets through life without thinking about how to turn it into a story. I'm sure it's healthier to just live life for life's sake, but I don't quite see the point if I can't write about it.

 

Pageonelit.com: Your main character Madeleine goes to Lamma - You have a lot going on in GETTING TO LAMMA -- It's a journey story (inward and outward). Let us briefly examine your main character - From page one we find Madeleine on a plane landing in Hong Kong. She is running away from her ex-husband. She even says, "I was running from Tim..." What is she running toward? What is she searching for?

Jan Alexander: I think she's trying to call just about everyone's bluff. She's heard all these crazy "mysteries of the Orient" ideas from her Southern belle marxist mother and her roving-eyed father. Then there's the foreign correspondent old boyfriend, Steve, who's been teasing her with tales of living a Somerset Maugham-ish life there. The easiest way to feel smart and enlightened is to imagine that you understand the ways of some more spiritually or philosophically or sexually evolved land on the other side of the planet. Going to this mysterious land for a long term stay is Madeleine's quest for reality.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: You have done work as a travel guidebook writer in Hong Kong and China. Was this novel inspired by the things you didn't write in your guidebook? Can you tell us of an experience you had there that did not make it in GETTING TO LAMMA?

Jan Alexander: Partly yes. But it was little unrelated incidents that most inspired the novel. I was studying in Shanghai while I was in graduate school, and my roommate had a bicycle accident, and then another student decided to marry a guy who rather spontaneously decided to defect. What made me think there was a novel in these moments? The imagery. The swarming chaos of bicycle traffic, and the way your heart stops when the Shanghai police lock you in the library and interrogate you while pouring tea. I started with imagery.

I crammed in a lot of what I saw and heard and lived through - the illegal alien status and the millionaire cleaning lady in Hong Kong, the mosquito netting over eight-to-a-room bunkbeds and noodle soup rations that Chinese students lived with in the 1990s and still do.

But of course there were experiences that didn't fit into this book. A friend and I took a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou and then across the length of China to Xinjiang province in the Northwest. We made friends with Turkic Uighur revolutionaries who want to secede from China. We tried to get across the border to Kirghiztan but were held there overnight, with our passports confiscated. In the morning we drank Chinese vodka for breakfast with a customs inspector, then were thrown onto a truck headed back to China. The border guards there told us we couldn't come back in and held us there another 24 hours before they finally decided they'd had their fun with us.

 

Pageonelit.com: What did you like most about living in Hong Kong?

Jan Alexander: In fact, one of the things I liked most was that as an ex-pat there you could have travel adventures as a more or less daily occurrence. In the 1990s when I lived there, Hong Kong was full of people who were always going somewhere…you bump into a friend and at least one of you is frantically shopping for travel gear and limping from immunization shots, and when you get back you have an audience of friends who genuinely want to hear about your adventures and even look at your photos.

Something I loved about Hong Kong that was more indigenous was the gambling nature. For a while I rented an apartment there from a nice young Chinese couple with two small children, and the husband was a gambler - I mean all he did day and night was bet on horses and go to Macau to play blackjack. The Hong Kong Chinese as a general cultural stereotype are fond of horse races and mah jong and the stock market, but what I mean is that to live there is to exist on a roller coaster. It's not unusual to be living on a fishing boat one day and a mansion the next, then lose your shirt the day after. As a foreigner there, you have a sense that you can try anything because tomorrow is immaterial.

 

Pageonelit.com: Where is Lamma and what makes Lamma special? Why Lamma?

Jan Alexander: Hong Kong is an archipelago of 237 islands, most of them uninhabitable, and Lamma is one of the inhabitable ones. It's also truly exotic. Chinese rice farmers live side by side with the artsy-fartsies of the ex-pat community, and once you move there you seem to absorb by osmosis exotic habits like wearing madras - granted, not originally a Chinese fabric - and smoking opium. My cousin Jane from Atlanta came to visit and travel around Southeast Asia with me when I was living in Hong Kong, and when we went traipsing through some wild plantain groves on Lamma island she quipped, "Is this our training for the jungle in Vietnam?"

In my book, Madeleine has always been tempted by the fantasy of living on a tropical island. So she gets her island. What's foremost on her mind at the time,though, is that Hong Kong real estate is the most expensive in the world but Lamma has houses she can afford. Isn't every life story about real estate, after all? (See "What is Lamma?" on my website)

 

Pageonelit.com: Which is more difficult to write - Fiction or nonfiction and why?

Jan Alexander: The conventional wisdom is that there's nothing more difficult that writing a novel, and there was a time when I would echoed that sentiment, unequivocally.

But I'm not sure you bother to write fiction unless you have a knack for the art of lying. Not that I'm going to applaud the husband who says he's going on a business trip when he's actually having an affair … but there is another kind of lying to entertain people and offer them options they'd never otherwise dream of. You take an inch of cotton and spin it into a yard of silk, and if I may indulge the metaphor a bit further, fiction is a wonderful kind of lie that involves weaving a perfect tapestry from images and experiences and imagination.

Lillian Hellman's wonderful memoirs turned out to be three volumes of fabrication, and I read an essay about her once that said maybe she just couldn't stop herself from writing drama. When you write what is supposed to be non-fiction, you might find that the facts get in the way of a good tale. (I was about to say "a good yarn" but enough already.)

More dangerous with non-fiction and any kind of serious reporting about the state of the world, though, is the temptation to jump to conclusions either based on your own deeply-ingrained beliefs or resulting from a limited comprehension of all the complexities that give rise to any one event. If you've seen Rashomon you know that life is always like that - take any four people recalling any one incident and each one will tell you a completely different story. Complexities are so random and so infinite that writing a really meaningful non-fiction story is like trying to scoop up all the stars in space with your bare hand. How much easier to play the god of your own small fiction universe.

 

Pageonelit.com: What has been your feedback from readers? What do they say to you about their interpretations of your book?

Jan Alexander: Well…I'll quote a review that said "realistic descriptions." People have generally said nice things about the descriptions of China and Hong Kong, which gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, but response has been about evenly divided over whether Madeleine is a likable character or not. I didn't know until the rejection letters began coming that a narrator has to be sympathetic from page one….She starts out narcissistic and insecure and gradually emerges from her Woody-Allen-movie of a life through her adventures.

Some people have appreciated the sexual politics in the book, but some have been offended, particularly by the running theme of Western men seeking some kind of fantasy fulfillment from Asian women. What can I say….this is my way of saying lock horns with life and enjoy it in spite of dysfunctional relationships, your own and those for which your boyfriend has dumped you.

What is absolutely the most gratifying feedback, however, is when people tell me they think the book is funny. Once at a reading a good friend shouted to me from the audience, "Read the frog part!" So I read the passage about sitting down to a dinner of steamed skinned frogs in Shanghai, and heard lots of laughing - granted, not from an audience of PETA members. God, what I'd give to be a successful standup comedian.

 

Pageonelit.com: Who are your favorite writers and why?

Jan Alexander: This is a question I usually hate to answer because we live in a world of too many choices, which is tough for an obsessive personality…. But when I think of writers I like to read because every sentence is a symphony, because the characters speak to me years later in the most unexpected places, Virginia Woolf and WiIliam Faulkner leap to mind. I once had a conversation in my rudimentary Mandarin with a Chinese writer who told me he loved Wo Le Ma Fo Ka Na. It took a minute, but I realized that was the transliteration for Faulkner. What a great work of art that is in itself, to translate Southern prose so murky you can practically smell the swampwater into something that resonates universally.

 

Pageonelit.com: What's next?

Jan Alexander: A novel about a utopia. A utopia is a dark and disturbing place because who is the one to say that this place is perfect, and of course you can justify anything in the name of making it perfect. It's a challenge to conjure up characters who WANT to live in a perfect place and figure out how their own needs are what make things go wrong.

 

Pageonelit.com: What was the last book you read?

Jan Alexander: I mentioned translations and I just finished reading the amazing translation of Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain. It left me breathless - I felt as if I were wandering through a Chinese brush-painting of a landscape shrouded in mist, with shamans and spirits popping up on every mountain peak.

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing.

Jan Alexander: Like collecting stamps or bird-watching? No, I've never been a hobby person; I develop obsessions instead. Studying China, going there, going places where I felt uncomfortable was an obsession for a long time, mostly because I wanted to write about such things.

Places tend inspire me more than activities per se. I had to get away from the South to appreciate it, but there's a gold mine of stories there, including one about a notorious ancestor in my own family. I met Mr. Right when I was back on the Upper West Side of New York, after looking all over the world, and my husband and I have been spending our summers in a part of the Catskills where coyotes howl at night and bears sometimes dart out of the woods. I've started though not yet finished a few short stories set there. At home on the Upper West Side seems to be the only place where I can take a breather…it gives me such sensory overload that I sometimes shut down. Just recently I saw a woman pushing a dog in a baby stroller, I heard about two estranged childhood friends who bumped into each other in an elevator when they were in their 70's…but 24-hour days are the enemy of writers everywhere.