Arlene Chai – Accidental writer

Visiting writer Arlene J. Chai gave a talk at the Australia Center last Tuesday, and another at the Filipinas Heritage Library the following day, with Rina Jimenez-David and I serving as reactors (the latter on the strength of a dubious claim to be an expert on Pinoy expat writing).

Billed as "An Afternoon Program with Arlene J. Chai," the Wednesday activity was sponsored by the Asia Society Philippines Foundation, Inc. as part of its Filipino and Proud Series Programs. Offering the welcome remarks and introduction was the Society’s executive director, Sonia P. Ner.

Here’s what the indefatigable Roli Inocencio of the Australia Centre had posted about our most welcome guest:

"Arlene Chai was born and educated in Manila and received her college degree from Maryknoll College. She worked in the advertising industry as copywriter, migrated to Sydney in 1982 and published her first novel, The Last Time I Saw Mother, in 1995. The novel, largely set in Manila, received instant critical acclaim. Says Amy Tan: ‘A remarkable first novel filled with family secrets and the intersection of personal and world histories... told through mesmerizing voices.’

"Arlene’s next novels, Eating Fire and Drinking Water and On the Goddess Rock, demonstrate her extraordinary talent for revealing the intricacies and secrets of family relations. Her latest novel, Black Hearts, is a compelling psychological thrller that has also firmly established her as one of Australia’s most popular writers.

"Last Time and Eating Fire are sold in local bookstores. The embassy is making arrangements with Dymocks Booksellers (located at Robinson’s Place) to make Goddess Rock and Black Hearts available..."

I understand from Anvil Publishing’s Karina Bolasco, recently back from a New York jaunt to push our Filipiniana titles (and to make tsismis over coffee with our expat friends Eric Gamalinda, Luis Francia and Danton Remoto, among others), that the local franchise for Dymocks is under the care of a brother of Vince Rafael, our Rockefeller grantee of an author-academic who’s based in La Jolla, CA. Must run in the family, this passion for books.

Didn’t have a chance though to check out the Dymocks table at FHL. Had to rush off soon after the affair, just as the sweet-looking, sweet-speaking Arlene started signing copies of her books. So I’ll have to content myself with telling y’all to at least pick up a copy of Eating Fire.

This novel I can vouch for, after speedreading through the absorbing if complex orchestration of "narrative streams" and a motley cast of character-protagonists in Marcos-era Manila of the early 80s.

Enthused by the presence of Maryknollers, including her former mentors Sonia Ner and Nieves Roldan Confesor, Arlene recalled how she had never imagined herself entering her current career.

Throughout her talk, she took pains to explain why she still considers herself an "accidental writer." In Sydney she had simply followed up on her advertising experience in Manila. ("She was with our group," confided another guest, McCann Ericson’s Joey Valenzuela.)

"But after 16 years of advertising work I got sick of it, and decided I needed a change, so I had a year off work. I told myself I wasn’t going to do anything but explore possibilities." The year of exploration initially involved sailing and white-water rafting, studying Italian and trying to get into the Australian television scene. One day she heard from friends about how "so-and-so was writing a book, and so was so-and-so."

Realizing that she still had nine months of leave, she recalls telling herself, "Well, I have nothing to do, so maybe I’ll write a book. I’ll start on Monday. And that’s how I got into this, pretty much the same way I got into advertising. Everything seems to be like an accident."

Arlene Chai’s recollection of how her four novels came to be was all earnestness, honesty and modesty. But her talk was significant in its recounting of an inevitably authentic process, that of turning into a writer while enjoying physical and aesthetic distance from the source of one’s material.

Here’s sharing part of Arlene Chai’s wonderful account, which should prove instructive to all hopeful writers. Yes, all aspiring writers, whether they’re thinking of migration or staying put, in all hopefulness or helplessness.

"I’ve always said I would never have become a writer if I hadn’t left Manila. That’s not to say something negative about the country, but about how I am as a person. When I lived here, there was little thinking time. I had a huge social life... It’s such a lively, frenetic kind of lifestyle that we have here in Manila. But that changed when I went to Sydney. It’s quiet, and huge, and my sense of space changed. The landscape changed as well; everything was in a larger scale. But my social life had shrunk to the size of a pea. I didn’t have friends; I had to start all over again. I also began looking back.

"That happens, I’d say, to just about every migrant. You look back. Time and distance afford you a kind of perspective that you don’t have when you’re very busy living your life. And I didn’t have that life anymore. I was missing it, and trying very much to superimpose Manila on Sydney. And it was a very ill-fitting thing. You know, it just wouldn’t fit, I couldn’t tranform one city into another. And so I looked back, and looked back. I must have been doing it subconsciously for years, until I quit advertising and had a lot of time to think. And when I decided I was going to write, there was this wealth of material that was just there...

"I guess life is half providence and half of you pushing. Half of it is perseverance, and half of it is luck. You meet the right person at the right time, you’re in the right place at the right time, even if you didn’t know it at the start – and I was like that. I didn’t know it. I didn’t want to be in Sydney, it was my father’s big idea, not mine. I met a writer who was just at the start of his writing career. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him, but he’s actually Australia’s Number One author. His name is Bryce Courtenay, and Bryce became my creative director when I was working at Patterson’s. And in the three years that I worked with him, he would tell me, ‘Write, write! You come from such a fascinating background, you know, all those cultural mixes. Even the political situation in the country that you come from is all grist for the mill. Come on, write!’

"And I used to say to him, I don’t have anything to write about. I just felt that my life was very very ordinary... There was nothing special about it... But that was one of the things I eventually learned – that what to most are ordinary lives are actually quite extraordinary... Every human life lived is actually filled with what might seem deceptively as little decisions, but actually require great acts of courage and determination.

"In that process of looking back, I started recalling stories my mother told me, which is why my first book to a great extent is made up of tidbits from my mother’s life. It’s a work of fiction, but it’s inspired by scenes that she described to me, like her father’s funeral, or the Japanese occupation of the Philippines. Or stories my uncle told me about the war, how he saw this guy running after a bombing incident, and this guy was just so determined to live. He was running with his stomach ripped open by shrapnel, and he was tucking all his... well, his insides had spilled out, and he gathered it all and pushed it back in and continued to run. And part of that is shock, and part of that is also the will to survive. I don’t know what happened to the man, but scenes like that just stayed here (indicating her head).

"And I just never realized that they would one day end up in a book, that they would actually feed my imagination. Of course it helped that – as my sister said – I have a memory like a mousetrap. I just tend to remember things, I remember names, incidents, I remember what people told me 20 years ago. My earliest memory is of being about the age of two, lying in a crib, looking up, and my father was looking down. And I can tell you that the crib was pink. It’s very bizarre, but I have memories like that. And so all of that has come back and I’ve been able to use them, not so much consciously, but I find that when I’m writing, they just come...

"I was working 12-to-16-hour days on The Last Time I Saw Mother, partly because I gave myself a deadline, and partly because the story took over, and I was very very obsessed by it. I was extremely exhausted. But one of the thoughts that kept going through my head was who on earth would want to read this, about four women that belonged to another culture? I had to reassure myself and console myself, and calm myself constantly. Every day it was a continuing battle, when I was just riddled with doubt, you know? Maybe I was wasting my time...

"There were mornings when I would wake up and I’d feel confident and positive. That would last an hour or two. Then the doubts would come back. There were crazy days when I’d sit there and say, look, just write. A thousand dollars a word. How many words is this now? Ten. Ten thousand bucks! Keep going, keep going! (laughing)

"No, it dosn’t pay that well. The other thing I’d do is walk into a bookstore, and bookstores in Sydney are so huge, some of them might stock a hundred thousand titles. And I’d stand there, and depending on my state of mind, I’d find it a source of inspiration. And I would say, look at all these books. Can’t be that hard getting published. But on a really bad day, I would stand in the bookshop and say, well, who needs another book?

"So, I was always swinging from one end of the pendulum to the other – this constant swinging – and I lived with that for a long time. Until I finished the manuscript and gave it to my friends to read, and I decided, okay, I’m gonna get on with my life. I fixed it up some more, based on their remarks, and I sent it off. I just did one big mail-out. I sent a parcel off to Harper Collins in New York. It came back two weeks later, unopened, unread. That was, like, really... it gives you the tremors. You think, oh no, I’ve wasted all these months.

"And then a friend rang me and said, oh for Chrissakes, who told you that your first manuscript is the first one that’s going to get published? Just keep writing. So I thought, okay, fine. So I started the second one, and just as well, because otherwise the rejection letters that started coming would have discouraged me tremendously.

"But by then I was obsessed with this character I had, this woman who had a stigmata, and I didn’t know why she had a stigmata. That was the beginning of Drinking Fire and Eating Water. It started with a woman with a stigmata. And then I thought about other characters. I didn’t know how to connect them. All I knew was that I was interested in them, and a part of me was saying, well, give it a go. You know, just write, just give it a go. What is it anyway, they’re just words, so write. I was just writing paragraphs, setting them aside, a few pages for each character. And then it became a question of, can I link them, is there a way of linking them? So I started thinking about that.

"That’s when thoughts of Manila started coming back. And I remembered the street I grew up in, Buenos Aires St. in Sta. Mesa, and at the corner was a sari-sari store run by a Chinese storekeeper called Charlie. I put Charlie in the story, and in the end that became a meeting point. Different characters ended up in that particular sari-sari store And before I knew it, I had a story

"A lot of coincidences occurred. Like, I was walking through a market place – every third Saturday of the month there’s the Manly market – and I was rummaging around piles of secondhand books. And I came across a book with a fascinating title, All the Wrong Places, by an English journalist named James Fenton. I flipped through the book. He’d been in all the wrong places. Just when governments were about to be toppled over, he’d pop in. And he was there when the people pushed through the gates of Malacañang. And I was so fascinated by this. I thought, I gotta have this book. It was four dollars. I took it home. I read it and read it. I thought, hmmm, I can set this story in that period.

"So, if any of you thought that I wanted to write a story to make a point about the political situation in Manila, and that was a conscious effort, it wasn’t. A lot of writing is by accident. A lot of my writing, anyway, just happens by accident. The story evolves.

"It’s like what Tolkien said when he wrote Lord of the Rings – ‘the tale grew in the telling.’ From that woman who had the stigmata I ended up with a cast of characters – about 38 or 39 people. And the challenge in writing that book was holding on to the separate narrative strands. Because each character held one strand, and how do you make them meet, how do you separate them, how do you bring them together again?

"Each book teaches you a particular skill or a particular way of writing. And not every lesson that you learn can be applied to the next book. Every book brings its own challenges. Helen Gardner – quite a famous Australian writer – she said that everytime she writes a new book, she feels like a child learning to walk again. And that’s true.

"Experience doesn’t make things better. It doesn’t. In fact I’ve found that with every book it has been more and more difficult to write. Inspite of the difficulties, writing actually gives you gifts. You learn about yourself as a person.

"Last night there was a young guy from UST, who was thinking of becoming a writer, and he said to me, what is the lesson that you have learned from writing, what has it taught you? I said it has taught me about trust. Writing is an exercise in trust. Because you often start with something, but you don’t know if you have a book. But you trust and you just keep going. Half the time you don’t know where something is heading, but you trust. And sometimes you end up with ten separate bits – do they fit in, are they connected, will they ever make sense? You trust that the subconscious mind is actually going to make it make sense, that your subconscious mind knows far better than you do. "And that’s a huge lesson for someone like me. I don’t know about you, but I’m a control freak. I try to control everything in my life, and I’ve often learned the hard way, that it doesn’t go the way you want it.

"And writing reinforces that. Characters take over. They have a mind of their own. An example in Eating Fire... is – I think it was in Chapter 26, when Clara Perez was hiding in the Convent of Sta. Clara, and she had Luis Bayani with her, and the soldiers were after him. There was this knock on the door where he was hidden, and she was expecting soldiers to come in. And so did I. I’m the writer. I wanted the soldiers to come in. Except that when she opened the door, it was her father, it was Don Miguel Pellicer. I didn’t know that. But the character wanted to be there.

"So, strange things happen when you’re writing. And I’ve learned to let it happen. I don’t fight it. I wait for those moments when my characters surprise me, because those are the magic moments, those are the things you can’t control as a writer, but they happen. And they’re a sign that the book has taken on a life of its own. And you’re on the right track. You really are on the right track when that happens."