Aunty Lee's Delights (27 page)

Meet Ovidia Yu

O
VIDIA
Y
U
is one of Singapore’s best known and most acclaimed writers. Since dropping out of medical school to write for the theater, she has had more than thirty plays produced in Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, including the Edinburgh Fringe First Award–winning play
The Woman in a Tree on the Hill.

The author of a number of mysteries that have been published in Singapore and India, Ovidia Yu received a Fulbright Fellowship to attend the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, and has been a writing fellow at the National University of Singapore. She speaks frequently at literary festivals and writers’ conferences throughout Asia.

Despite her writing career, when she is recognized in Singapore it is usually because of her stint as a regular celebrity guest on Singapore’s version of the American television game show
Pyramid
.

http://ovidiahistorymystery.wordpress.com

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About the Book

A Conversation Between Ovidia Yu and Louise Penny

Louise Penny:
You’ve outed yourself as a lifelong Agatha Christie fan—does Rosie Lee owe her existence to Miss Marple, or any of Agatha Christie’s other sleuthing heroines?

Ovidia Yu:
I’m sure she does, not directly as an “old-lady detective” figure, but because I owe my existence as it is to Agatha Christie’s books. It was through her books that I first fell in love with reading, and I thought I was in love with the world she set her books in. For a long time I thought that “world” was English country villages . . . in the ’50s and gone forever. But then I got that same feeling—that people in terrible situations struggling to solve real problems were in spite of everything still trying to be human and good—from your books (sorry to drag you in—just in this one answer, I promise!) and realized it was a way of seeing the world that wasn’t found only in vintage England. That you could create that same magic in books set in contemporary Canada gave me “permission” (which I had not realized I’d been denying myself!) to write about Singapore. Actually, my lightbulb moment didn’t happen till after you visited Singapore with your husband. You were the first real-life writer I’d met—till then I’d thought some pact with the devil was necessary to succeed in writing; but I saw that you were as in love with life as with writing, and that’s when I decided to allow myself to write what I wanted to read—set in Singapore.

But to get back to Agatha Christie very quickly, Miss Marple isn’t my favorite lady sleuth. I think that would be a tie between Henrietta Savernake (
The Hollow
) and Lucy Eyelesbarrow (
4:50 from Paddington
). Henrietta is the artist I would love to be, or, failing that, love to create. She’s good with people, intelligent, artistic, knits well, and survives heartbreak: “Grief, in alabaster” . . . diehard Christie fans will know what I mean. Carla Saito owes something to her, I think. And Lucy Eyelesbarrow, who cooks fantastically, works for a living but sets aside private time for herself and solves mysteries with practical humor—I like to think Aunty Lee owes something of her genesis to Lucy Eyelesbarrow!

LP:
Thank you! Like Rosie Lee, you’re a native-born Singaporean and also Peranakan. Can you explain Peranakan culture to readers who might not have heard of it? Is Aunty Lee a typical Peranakan lady, or something of an iconoclast in her community?

OY:
Oh dear—I’m not a true Peranakan. My late mother was Shanghainese, not Straits born, but in Singapore once you accept yourself as Singaporean, that means having access to all the cultures here. Aunty Lee is a typical “Peranakan Aunty” because like so many of them (whether truly Peranakan or not) she is a great cook and very good at running her own business as well as everyone else’s. Peranakan aunties have very strong practical streaks and very strong wills. But they can also be flamboyant, funny, and fond of luxury.

LP:
Singapore has a reputation for being almost fantastically clean, well-run, cosmopolitan, and tourist-friendly. Are there hidden depths to its glossy exterior?

OY:
I hope so! Singapore reminds me of the house I grew up in. My parents had a carefully maintained foyer and lounge for visitors—designed to look good and be easy to clean—but our real “living” took place elsewhere, in the playroom or out back where there were rabbits and chickens. Singapore is a very, very small place and for those of us who live here it sometimes feels like it is getting smaller and smaller. But the clean, well-run side of things is the schoolroom side. The teachers running the schoolroom are a bit authoritarian at times, but I think as we grow up as a country and earn their trust, they will ease up on what is allowed and we’ll be able to draw on the roots in the “hidden depths” and grow wider and wilder branches in unhidden heights! Yes, there’s the side of us that’s clean, competitive, and cosmopolitan, but that’s just our on-show side.

LP:
Aunty Lee’s secret weapon seems to be her home cooking; is this based on your own love of cooking, or do you know aunties like her?

OY:
Sadly, I am a survival cook. But that just makes me love people who can cook all the more, and, yes, there are many, many “cooking aunties” in Singapore. My Aunty Lian, for example, is (in my humble opinion) one of the best cooks alive and single-handedly maintains harmonious family relationships thanks to her hosting of family dinners! As someone who loves to eat I’d say I owe these cooking aunties a lot. It’s not just the food they put on the table but all the preparation (and, yes, they will be only too happy to tell you about it!) that goes into it. If you want to test this, the next time you are in Singapore in the vicinity of a genuine Peranakan aunty, ask her how she prepares her Buah Keluak (Buah Keluak are a type of nut that are difficult to eat as well as to prepare, so you’ll have lots of time to listen to her answer). She will probably start talking about symptoms of cyanide poisoning and ash and banana leaves, and you’ll see how naturally the conjunction of cooking and murder occurs. But I love these nuts. They grow in mangrove swamps and are eaten by wild pigs but are poisonous to humans unless prepared perfectly. Sadly, Singapore has few mangrove swamps left and even fewer wild pigs, so I believe most of our nuts come from Indonesia now.

LP:
As a writer, I know that inspiration can come from many different places: a quote, a childhood experience—the sky is the limit. What inspired you to write this novel?

OY:
Actually, I started by wanting to write about Sentosa. People know Sentosa as a tourist attraction today, but it used to be called “Pulau Blakang Mati,” or island of unexpected death. When I was young we would spend our school holidays on these small offshore islands and I loved them. Much as I appreciate clean water and good sanitation, part of me misses the atmosphere of the old days. Remains of bodies thrown into the sea by the Japanese during the war used to wash up on Sentosa and that’s where I put the first murder victim in the book . . . everything else followed from there.

LP:
You set your novel in Singapore— do you think it will resonate with contemporary American audiences?

OY:
It didn’t occur to me till now that it might not, but I think we’ll have to wait and see! Contemporary America is such a big part of Singapore life because of television, movies, and, of course, the Internet that it’s easy to forget how different things here might appear to people in America. But having said that, most of the American visitors I’ve met here seem to adapt to Singapore quite easily. I think because we’re English speaking, they find us a good, safe spot from which to kick off an exploration of Asia. And I hope my writing will act as an introduction to Singapore and Asia too!

LP:
Can you explain the connection between a rather strict, safe country and delight in reading about murders?

OY:
I think we read to learn about ourselves as well as to escape from our everyday lives and for entertainment. I love reading murder stories. But if I were living in a dangerous place with murders happening on my street I don’t think I would—I would probably be reading Rumi!

LP:
You’ve written several well-received plays. What inspired you to write a novel?

OY:
A whole bunch of things actually. I’ve always loved reading novels, especially mysteries. But all the books I loved most were written by people who lived in England or America about people who lived in England or America, and without thinking about it I assumed it was out of reach for me. Then I joined an online group based on Julia Cameron’s book
The Artist’s Way
and I read some of Wayne Dyer’s books (which bizarrely made me return to Asian classic guides I had rejected while growing up) and I realized that instead of spending my life preparing to write books I should just start. And then I found the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and wrote the first draft of
Aunty Lee’s Delights
in a month. At that time it was titled
The Body on Sentosa
. It helped having so much online support because writing a play you get “support” from your director, your actors (“write me a part that I can play without losing weight but without calling me fat!”), and your producer (“we need a casting script by tomorrow and we can’t move the pipe organ out so write it in”), so compared to that writing every day on my own felt like a very lonely business.

LP:
On page 162 of
Aunty Lee’s Delights
, Aunty Lee says, “I feel responsible for the people I feed. Once my food has gone into them and become part of them and their lives, I become part of their lives. In a way I love them.” Do you believe that is true?

OY:
I believe that in a way we’re responsible to everyone who crosses our path. Either we can learn something from them or do something to help them, and just enjoying the meeting makes it a good encounter. If you’re like Aunty Lee and you nurture people with food, then it is true for you. I would certainly like it to be true of me, though only if I can find a way to feed people through my writing, because that would be safer for all concerned!

LP: Aunty Lee’s Delights
deals with visitors from Australia and America as well as ethnic Chinese, Indian, Malay, Eurasian, and Filipino residents. Was this an effort to reach out to an international audience?

OY:
Actually, that’s just how we are in Singapore. Here in my apartment block my neighbors are Chinese-speaking, and across the lobby there’s a German family and a Czech couple. But for Lunar New Year the Germans put up decorations and gave out good luck oranges like the Chinese, and the Czechs went on a getaway to Thailand like many Singaporeans, and my Chinese (though not Peranakan) aunty neighbor spent days cooking and fed us all on the results! I think because we are a nation of immigrants it’s both easier for outsiders to find a place here and harder for Singaporeans to define who and what we are. The main effort I’m making here is to figure out who we are—writing is my favorite way of working things out—but I want to figure that out for myself rather than for an audience!