The Silk Merchant's Daughter (33 page)

BOOK: The Silk Merchant's Daughter

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So that was the end. Or was it the start? Perhaps, as O-Lan so wisely said, it was both. Nicole could never have imagined what had happened to her sister. The ground had shifted beneath their feet and their relationship had changed. But an image came back of being together when she was about five and Sylvie must have been ten. Sylvie was holding her hand as they dipped their bare feet in the cool river. All her life Nicole had felt the loneliness of being different, but now she knew Sylvie, in her way, had been desperately lonely too. It was the terrible agony of isolation she’d seen in her sister’s eyes when they were on board the ship.

After Mark parked the car – they had some shopping to do before leaving for the south – the three of them walked along the narrow Parisian street. Mark and Celeste went into a
patisserie but Nicole stopped outside and opened her sister’s journal. Then she took a deep breath and read the first sentence.

I am Sylvie Duval. This is the story of me and my little sister, Nicole.

She knew she and Sylvie would always be connected in the way that sisters were, but couldn’t read any more and felt her eyes brimming with tears as she closed the book. There were always two sides to every story, but she would have to save Sylvie’s for another day.

How I wrote
The Silk Merchant’s Daughter

When I’m thinking about a new book my first task is to choose a location. The settings and location are significant, not only because I love to bring a landscape to life and transport my reader to another time and place, but also because the place itself has to impact on the characters. Because I was born in the East, I am constantly drawn to explore the countries of that region: the Indian sub-continent, South East Asia, the Far East. It’s a powerful drive inside me, partly due to the fact that after nine years in Malaya, we came to live in England and I missed my childhood home terribly. So far I’ve written
The Separation
, set in Malaysia, and
The Tea Planter’s Wife
, set in Sri Lanka when it was Ceylon.

For
The Silk Merchant’s Daughter
, I chose French Vietnam as a setting because I wanted to write about the difficulties faced by a mixed-race character as she attempts to define her identity. I also wanted to explore a different colonialism; one that wasn’t British. In the early 1950s Vietnam was caught in a struggle between the French, determined to hold on to their hugely profitable colony with its abundant raw materials and agricultural products, and the equally desperate Vietminh, in their bid to achieve independence. The French defined their purpose in Indochina as a ‘civilizing mission’ and, like the British and other colonial powers, they did build schools, hospitals and roads but, as far as I can tell, colonialism was always really about profit. So my main character, half-French half-Vietnamese Nicole, has a foot in both sides of what was to become a war. A war that almost rips her apart and that, against all the odds, the Vietminh win.

The Silk Merchant’s Daughter
wasn’t an easy book to write, firstly because the history of Vietnam is incredibly complex around the time frame I was contemplating. My aim was to explore the way Nicole is pulled in different directions, so I needed a time when that was most likely to occur. I learnt that the period between the end of the Second World War and 1954 (when the French eventually lost the final battle with the humiliating defeat at Dien Bien Phu) was a time when being mixed race was less accepted. After the terrible Japanese invasion during the Second World War, both French and Vietnamese became more suspicious and less tolerant.

After choosing the place, the next challenge is to read up on the history and make copious notes. I enjoy researching a period of history that’s new to me, but the real test is to determine the best way to bring my chosen period alive. I want to give my readers a cultural and atmospheric read but also a gripping story. Everything I uncover at this stage will add to the book’s authenticity, and I enjoyed reading about the history, the food, the fashions and, perhaps most of all, the architecture. But I must never forget that the story has to take precedence.

After that I’ll outline a plot for the entire novel. I don’t go into great detail at this stage, but I start putting myself in my main character’s shoes. As the process of writing continues I want to know more and more about Nicole: what she feels, what she fears, what she loves and what she hopes for. She doesn’t know where she belongs and neither did I when I came to live in England all those years ago, so it wasn’t difficult to empathize with her plight. Once I have an idea of who she is, I then create the cast around her, particularly the Duval family and the tensions within it, heightened by the world they live in; a world where the French are losing their grip on Indochina.

I like to visit the country I’m writing about if I can and Vietnam was no exception. I had never imagined that I would go to Vietnam but, once I’d decided I would, it was enormously exciting. I still
hadn’t clarified a story plan when we stepped on the plane and I was hoping that the country itself would provide me with answers.

In fact, it didn’t prove to be quite so simple. We started off in a dreadfully cold and damp Hanoi. I had chosen not to go in the hot season, but I hadn’t expected a chill so profound that it seeped into my bones. I barely slept that first night. The next day I’d hoped to find evidence of the French colonial era: the graceful buildings, wide avenues and smart hotels. Some of it was still visible but much of French Hanoi had been built over, sometimes literally. Hanoi was such a fragmented hotchpotch that at first I found it frustrating. But gradually I found what I was looking for and began to see evidence of the past everywhere. The most beautiful avenue of unspoilt French villas was where the Communist Party leaders lived. You were not allowed to stop the car or even to take pictures, though I did so discreetly, using my phone through the car windows. I also took tons of photos at the Museum of the Revolution, including some of the methods of torture the French regime had used. Unfortunately, while trying to climb some railings to obtain a better shot of a faded French villa, I got stuck and dropped my phone on the other side of the railings. My husband was dispatched to find a handy branch to hook it back out while I kept watch. The Communist Party are everywhere, or so they’d like you to think. Anyway, the phone was damaged and I lost all my photos so I got my just desserts.

After Hanoi we went to Hoi An – a UNESCO world heritage site – but so touristy that it was deeply disappointing. It is actually a wonderfully preserved village and I had thought to use it as a location in my book but the crowds put me off. The old cultured and formal Vietnam was still there but only in isolated pockets.

Which left me with Huế and a gorgeous restored hotel overlooking the Perfume River where we stayed. I loved it. This is where the Duval family come from and I found it beautiful and mystical. The hotel had once been the mansion of the French Resident for that province. We had views across the Perfume River, which we
crossed by boat, and we visited the Forbidden Purple City where the Emperor had held court until it was burnt down in 1945, though now extensively restored. After a wonderful car ride, up and over a mountain, including visits to tiny rural villages and a terrific view of the countryside, I’d seen enough to make a real start on the book as soon as I got back home. At least the sights and smells of Vietnam were firmly in my head, if not in my photographs!

Finally, I reached the end of the novel. It was the end for the French, too. They never believed they would lose the war with the Vietminh but, like the Americans after them, they got that wrong. Looking back, it seems to me that it was inevitable that Indochina – like India, Ceylon and Malaysia – would achieve independence. And that leads me to my next stop: India, where my next novel will be set.

For me, finally bringing a novel to completion and seeing it on the shelves is the most satisfying experience of all, and I hope you have enjoyed reading the result in this novel about Nicole, the silk merchant’s daughter.

Dinah Jefferies

Acknowledgements

Once again I’d like to thank my agent Caroline Hardman. Her brilliance has made my entire writing adventure possible, from her clever editorial suggestions to her support on all other matters, large and small. She introduced me to my terrific editor and publisher, Venetia Butterfield, and I couldn’t have asked for better. Venetia has maintained her faith in my writing from the start, but I’m also indebted to the entire team at Penguin who have been super fantastic as they always are. My publicist, Anna Ridley, accompanies me on trips to the BBC, making the whole thing fun instead of terrifying, Celeste Ward-Best and Stephenie Naulls show me the way on social media, and Lee Motley makes the covers look beautiful. But I also want to thank the sales, distribution and rights teams who have all worked so tirelessly. The one thing I’ve come to realize, above all else, is that bringing a book to publication and beyond takes a whole raft of people. I am grateful to every single person who has contributed to this process, and to all the wonderful bloggers who carry on such sterling work. I also want to mention the people who have bought my books. Thank you so much. Experience Travel organized a great tailor-made research trip to Vietnam and I have to thank Nick Clark for that. Finally, I really do have to applaud my husband, Richard, who gets me through the up and downs of writing a novel with endless cups of tea, good ideas, technological support and delicious meals. He has been preparing me for my next adventure – in India – by increasing the use of chilli! I feel
very lucky indeed to have his, and my much loved family’s, support.

These are some of the books I found useful during my research:

A Dragon Apparent
, Norman Lewis, Jonathan Cape, 1951

Daughters of the River Huong
, Uyen Nicole Duong, Ravensyard Publishing, 2005

Derailed in Uncle Ho’s Victory Garden
, Tim Page, Touchstone, 1995

Hanoi: Biography of a City
, William S. Logan, University of New South Wales Press, 2000

Hanoi: Traces of the Old Days
, Phuong Dong Publishing House, 2010

Indochine Style
, Barbara Walker, Marshall Cavendish International (Asia), 2011

Paradise of the Blind
, Duong Thu Huong, US edition, William Morrow & Co., 1993

The Sacred Willow
, Duong Van Mai Elliott, Oxford University Press, 1999

Uniquely Vietnamese
, James Edward Goodman, The Gioi Publishers, 2005