1.       The Courtesan tells the fascinating story of real-life h

1.      The Courtesan tells the fascinating story of real-life historical figure, Sai Jinhua. How did you come across her story?

It was one of those chance-propelled moments that could so easily have slipped away—but didn’t. It was the last day of my first trip to China, and I was in the Yu Garden in Shanghai overlooking the famous Jiu Qu Bridge, that with its nine zig-zag turns was built to confuse evil spirits crossing the water. It was there that I overheard a tour guide make mention of the famous 19^th century Chinese courtesan who travelled to Europe as the wife of a diplomat. The guide spoke no more than three sentences about Sai Jinhua, but it was one of those visceral fascinations that grabbed me immediately. I said to my one-in-a-million husband, “If I were going to write a book—which I am not—this would be the story I would like to tell.” And he turned to me and said, “Well, why don’t you?” Such an improbable thing, really, that I was standing there and not elsewhere, that I was listening and not daydreaming, that I was married to this man who said go for it and not to someone else. Had all of these things not aligned, I feel sure that I would not have written this book, or for that matter any book.

2.      What was it that drew you to the courtesan’s story?

I was a young girl when my family moved to the other side of the world, to Singapore, which was at the time and still is a fascinating multi-cultural place with a population of Chinese, Malay, and Indian people. It is a busy place of tremendous population density, where life unfolds outside in the streets and in the markets and in sights, sounds, and smells that seep through the open windows of colonial era buildings. Arriving there gave me the thrill of my life. It was exotic and loud and pungent and delicious—and also alienating. People everywhere—all with faces not like mine. I felt as though I knew nothing and wanted more of everything—and at the same time I wanted to go back to what was familiar and safe.

So standing at the edge of the Jiu Qu Bridge, I remembered all of this. And I wondered—what was it like for a young women one hundred years earlier, to leave her home in China and go to a Europe that was strange and disorienting and fabulous—where people all had faces not like hers?

3.      You did very in-depth research to prepare for writing The Courtesan—were there any interesting anecdotes or facts that didn’t make it into the novel? What was the most helpful historical resource?

Oh, yes. Boatloads of material did not make the cut, not because it wasn’t interesting stuff, but because no one would read a two thousand-page novel that rambles through the lives of dozens of people. The missionaries of the time had fascinating stories, as did the Chinese imperial eunuchs, the brilliant English con man Edmund Backhouse, the much-maligned Chinese empress dowager, the fragile Austrian empress, Sisi, and Count Alfred von Waldersee’s manipulative American wife, Marie. In the context of this novel, I could only place hints about these people’s stories. I would have loved to do more.

As for Jinhua, the evolution of her legend was something that had no real place in the novel, but is a story unto itself. In the beginning, I could well imagine that she, herself, propagated the tale of her romance with first the diplomat, Hong Jun, and then Waldersee, as well as her role in the aftermath of the Boxer War. The tale would certainly have served the interests of her professional endeavors as a courtesan/madam, and it took hold quickly with several writers in China, first as a romantic poem and later as a series of allegorical narratives with diverse social and political implications. China was negotiating its way to the end of the decadent imperial era and the turbulent founding of the Republic of China, and it was a time of introspection among many Chinese intellectuals.  There were, therefore, renderings of Jinhua’s life that highlighted the depravity of late Qing society, as well as China’s humiliation at the hands of the West. Jinhua was portrayed in the literary treatments of this era as an unscrupulous, promiscuous figure, her husband, Hong Jun as an ineffectual and unenlightened bureaucrat. Later came the devastating war with Japan, and the standoff between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists, and the treatment of Jinhua’s story dating to the 1930’s recasts her as a patriot and heroine, who intervened with her lover, Waldersee, to stop the rape and pillage of China by the occupying forces after the Boxer War. She became a heroic figure and this treatment was used in oblique criticism of the Chinese Nationalist government’s impotence in defending China against the Japanese. Later still, during the Cultural Revolution, she was posthumously criticized for her treasonous “collaboration” with Waldersee and his cohorts.

4.      At its heart, The Courtesan is both a personal and a political novel—did you consciously set out to tell a political tale? How does the dynamic between East and West in the novel relate to our world today?

I began with a profound interest in Jinhua’s life and her experiences traversing the cultural boundaries between East and West at a time when East and West were largely unfamiliar, each with the other. I wanted to explore in a fictional way and a long ago context what I had experienced myself as a young girl moving to Asia from the West. So the novel began as a personal one both for me and in being the story of a woman’s life—and yet as I learned more about Jinhua, who she was and why her story is told today, the political context was, and is, an inextricable part of what needed to be in the novel. Without it, she would be just another woman who made a living in the sex trade and was forgotten.

I think that the dynamic between East and West that I have tried to illuminate (largely from the Chinese point of view) is a significant piece of the transition to the globalized world we live in, one in which China is a player with which to be reckoned.  We in the West tend to think of China primarily in terms of the dual narrative of economic might and political repression, and the age of imperialism as it relates to China is pretty remote to the western world view of today. Several of the events referenced in the novel, however, are very much a part of China’s own narrative regarding its history. They are part and parcel of what is known as “the hundred years of national humiliation,” which began with the First Opium War and ended with the establishment in 1949 of the People’s Republic of China. These hundred years, during which the Middle Kingdom was more or less continuously under siege from an assortment of European nations, America, and Japan, have not been forgotten in China.  They are a part of the backdrop to what one might call China’s “official nationalism.”

5.      Sai Jinhua has been portrayed as both a villain and a heroine throughout history. Do you find her to be an ultimately sympathetic character?

I really do need to distinguish here between Sai Jinhua the historical figure and “my” Sai Jinhua, and I would have to confess that it took me a long while to develop sympathy for her as a character. In the early days of writing I didn’t like her much. I found her to be a hard and opportunistic woman, which I suspect she ultimately was. But as I worked to give her a story, she became a quite different person. She became vulnerable in ways that I could understand. I fell in love with the notion of a young woman, injured, traumatized, telling herself stories for comfort, trying to believe in them as truth. It is something we all do in one way or another, even as adults—and the line between what is true and real and what is not becomes so readily blurred by the way in which our minds work. This happens to Jinhua, and for me it made her very human.

9.   A major theme in The Courtesan is the importance of female friendship—Sai Jinhua and Suyin’s special connection serves as a life-sustaining force for both of them. Where did you find the inspiration to write about this friendship?

Actually, my early vision for the story was a validation of the love affair between Sai Jinhua and Alfred von Waldersee. Suyin began as a transitional character who wasn’t meant to have much significance beyond the early brothel scenes. In my first draft, when I arrived at the Palais Kinsky I found myself missing her wisdom and friendship, and at the same time I felt a growing sense of disbelief that the love affair with Waldersee had ever happened. Jinhua, after all, was so very young—13 years old when she travelled to Europe, and Waldersee would at the time have been fifty-five years old. The gulf between them would have been enormous in many other respects, and I found myself believing that the affair was an infatuation on Jinhua’s part—the fantasy of an impressionable (and traumatized) child who looked to stories to sustain herself and very much wanted and needed an idealized hero, a Kavalier. It was at this point that I also realized that the person she really loved and needed was Suyin, who was wise, and damaged, and nurturing, and who loved Jinhua.

The inspiration for Jinhua’s relationship with Suyin came partly in a spontaneous way from listening to my characters, and from thinking about what was real and abiding in their lives. And then, of course, I found the resonance in my own life—in my relationship with  my sister—and in observing friendships between women and seeing how they evolve and deepen as we get older. I have seen this with my mother and her friends. I have seen it with my own.

10.   You have lived in Asia and speak several languages. How did this impact your writing and the language in The Courtesan?

Actually I dabble in more languages than I speak—but I will say that I found the various languages that make shadow appearances in the book a marvelous tool to evoke the ways in which the various cultures are different and yet the same. Borrowing idioms from the Chinese and German languages gave me fresh and authentic ways to talk about what my characters observed and felt. To talk about a moment in time being as brief as the time it takes to drink a sip of tea gives so much cultural context. And where a Chinese might call someone “as thin as a scallion,” an Austrian would say “hauchdünn,” which means as thin as a breath. What the British call “the black sheep of the family,” the Chinese call “the harmful horse of the herd.” It is wonderful stuff. It made my material so much richer—and it was all so much fun to think about.

11.   As a debut novelist, how did you find the publishing process? Any surprises?

I would have to say that I have found the experience to date both fascinating and very rewarding, and of course, there is a great deal still to come. The thing that perhaps has surprised me the most is the level of commitment to the effort of producing the novel in terms of editorial input, attention to story, willingness to share and listen and discuss. I was astounded at how carefully my agent, editors, and copy-editors read the manuscript—how diligent the copy-editors in particular were in fact-checking the smallest of details and helping me make sure that all was right. I would say, unequivocally, that The Courtesan is a much better book in every way for having been through this process, for having been in the hands of people who love books in a truly professional way.