Hello out there!

I’m guest blogger this week, so I guess I should introduce myself. I’ve loved reading and writing since I was in elementary school. I wrote my first novel for Orca, The Reunion, in 2002. My sixth novel, Manga Touch, is hot off the press. Coincidentally, both these novels include elements of Japanese culture. The first one takes place in Canada partly during WW II, while the new book follows a modern Canadian girl on a trip to Japan.

People often ask where writers get their ideas. The Reunion started with an old photograph. As a university student in the early 1980s, I had a summer job for a non-profit organization called the Cowichan Valley Intercultural and Immigrant Aid Society. A woman there was doing an oral history project, interviewing people of Japanese ancestry who’d lived in a nearby town called Paldi (on Vancouver Island). One morning I walked into the main work room and saw several photographs spread out over a big table. They were all old black and white photos taken in Paldi in the 1940s. I picked up a school photo from 1944. Some of the kids looked Japanese, some looked East Indian, some looked European – a real cultural mix. My eye was immediately caught by a smiling girl seated in the front row. She looked just like a friend of mine. But the photo was taken about 20 years before my friend was born. I picked up another school photo. This one, dated 1946, had no Japanese faces. The Japanese kids were gone.

Tomoko, the woman working on the history project, explained how Paldi had been a sawmill town where people of different cultures lived and worked together and became friends – pretty remarkable at a time when there was a lot of prejudice in places outside of Paldi. Then, during World War Two, the outside prejudices touched Paldi. Canada was at war with Japan, and there was fear that people of Japanese ancestry might be spies. The government decided that the Japanese people (even if they were born in Canada) should be sent to live in internment camps in the B.C. interior. So, the Japanese kids I’d seen in the first photo, along with all their families, disappeared from Paldi.

I found out later that the girl I’d noticed in the first photo was my friend’s mom and that she’d grown up in Paldi, celebrating Sikh festivals with her own family, who came from India, and celebrating Japanese festivals, such as New Year, with her Japanese friends. I wondered what it felt like when her friends were taken away.

I went on to finish university and do other things, but I never forgot the faces of those kids in the old Paldi photos, and I never lost the urge to find out more about them and to share their story with other people. When I finally began work on writing a story about Paldi, I started with research. Not a lot was written about Paldi, so I read through old newspaper stories about the war and the Japanese internment, I visited an internment camp that is now a museum, and I interviewed people. And the first person I interviewed was my friend’s mom. As I sat at her kitchen table looking once more at old Paldi photographs and listening to my friend’s mom talk about her childhood in Paldi, my story began to take shape.

Next, I’ll tell you about how the novel, Manga Touch, started with a fortune telling…

Posted under Guest Author Blog