Backstory

Jamie Ford’s Backstory

On a foggy February morning in 1983, fourteen people were gunned down at the Wah Mee club in Maynard Alley, just shy of South King Street in Seattle's Chinatown. It was the worst mass-murder in Washington State history.

 

The Wah Mee was actually a back-room gambling parlor, like the smoke-filled poker room romanticized in the movie Rounders, only nicer––an establishment that had been tolerated, even patronized, by local officials for decades. It was also where my grandparents first met, a lifetime before the “Wah Mee Massacre.” My grandfather had been a croupier and my grandmother was a coat-check girl. Those were the economic realities of the time, so I’d been told growing up. An “Oriental” had three job options in the 30’s: restaurant, laundry, or a gambling parlor. Take your pick.

 

In the months following the massacre, the shooters were captured and convicted. Families tried to heal. But Chinatown itself began to wither as if on life support. It was as though the shooters had murdered an entire community.

 

Almost overnight, Chinatown had become a scurrilous place where “decent people” didn’t go—not for dim sum or tea, not for sightseeing, not on your life.

 

Three teens were murdered on the well-heeled Bainbridge Island, just across the water, in what appeared to be a botched drug deal. It made the national press, even tabloid shows like A Current Affair ran the story of the mysterious killings that to this day remain unsolved. But did that stop the development of million dollar homes? Hardly.

 

It was as if the murders in Chinatown validated a hidden belief, perhaps a leftover prejudice from forty years earlier. I’m not sure of the real reason, that’s for sociologists to figure out. All I can tell you is that I watched Chinatown fall into decay over the next fifteen years. It’s vibrancy, its pulse, seemed to slow down, mirroring the decline of my grandparents. And when they died, I wondered if Chinatown would just die along with them. Businesses had failed and buildings began to take on that gaunt, unoccupied look. Chinatown had become scar tissue on the glorious body of Seattle, now brimming with nouveau riche, courtesy of Microsoft and Amazon. I felt as though my childhood memories had been cremated and scattered.

 

My debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet delves into the Japanese Internment set in the 1940s, but half of the narrative is set in Chinatown in the mid-80s, listing heavily to one side and desperate to keep afloat. Perhaps as an unintended metaphor for the emotional state of my main character, but selfishly, I wanted to shine a light on a place that was once the cultural heart of Seattle––from Japantown, to Chinatown, to the once famous jazz clubs of South Jackson. I hoped that in some small way, I might draw attention to this slice of history before it was completely paved over––before my favorite Chinese bakery turned into a Starbucks. They might try to sell mooncakes with their lattes, but somehow it wouldn’t be the same.

 

Despite my melancholy, the International District keeps fighting. If you visit the Emerald City anytime soon, you’ll see that a few businesses are growing. Reinventing in a good way. Embracing the future, without running from the past. You can see it in Uwajimaya Village and in the new Wing Luke Asian Museum. Even at the tearoom of the Panama Hotel, which is quite lovely.

 

But the Wah Mee is still there, boarded up and untouched. You can find it if you know where to look. There’s a wall in the alley made of frosted glass blocks but one is clear enough to peer inside. Nothing has changed; the club is still there, waiting for someone to chase away the ghosts.

 

Visit Jamie Ford’s website to learn more about his work. (www.jamieford.com)

 

Elissa Elliot's Backstory

     One spring day in the spring of 2006, I received a short e-mail from my agent Dan Lazar.  A simple question: "What about Eve?"

    Well, of course, my first thought was that Eve must have been done already.  I mean, come on, we're centuries removed from her, and with historical fiction being as big as it is, I would have thought someone would have already told her story.  But after a quick search, I realized that only three books of note existed—two were comedies and the last was told mainly in Cain, Abel, and Adam's voices.  And that, I decided, had to change.  Something had to be done. 

  Throughout the rest of that spring and summer, I read every book I could about Eve, then realized what a hole I might be digging for myself.  People, like myself, already know the story, and they don't want it tampered with.  The fruit is an apple.  The serpent is Satan.  The fig leaves are fig leaves.  Eve was made from Adam's rib.  The problem: none of those things are translatable, meaning Hebrew scholars don't know what to make of those words.  They've simply made an educated guess.

   To make things more complicated, I had read the various ancient Creation myths and had become convinced that the Hebrew account was culled from those accounts.  This would make sense, because Adam means "earth."  It's a general catchall name for the first living man.  The scribes (there were two, according to scholars) changed the account in two ways.  They changed the many-gods reference to one-god.  And they made the story moral, so it taught a lesson.

   Then the clincher: I learned that archaeologists were in agreement that humankind existed, year-wise, much earlier than Eve.  [We know, approximately, where to place Adam in history, because of the generational lists in Genesis…it's somewhere around 4000 B.C.]  Evidence for humans comes from as far back as 10,000 to 25,000 years ago.  Oh, my.  Now I would be claiming that Eve and Adam might not be the first human beings.  So, for the novel, I added a group of people who settle down and build a city next to Adam and Eve.  Blasphemy!  Sacrilege!

   What it ultimately came down to is that I desperately wanted to tell the story of a woman who experienced the same range of emotions that we, as women, go through today.  Why would Eve be any different?  I wanted her daughters (none of whom are mentioned in the Biblical or Torah accounts) to have a voice, too.  What would they have been like—a teenaged girl, a crippled girl, and a wee one?  I wanted a truthful, earthy-gritty telling of women going through life cycles, women in relationships to each other and their men.  I wanted to tell of Eve, a woman who didn't understand why she was thrown out of a beautiful Garden and why this would cause friction between her and the love of her life.  How could she have assimilated all those feelings?

Just as we do.  I'm sure of it.  One day at a time, with the same lows and highs.  And that made me love her and her daughters even more.    

Please visit Elissa Elliot's website to learn more about her.

A New Day for the United States

Barack Obama, 47, the son of a black Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas will take his oath today, January 20, 2009, as the 44th president and the first African American president of the United States.  Born in Hawaii, Obama graduated from Columbia University and then Harvard Law school, where he was the first African-American president of the Harvard law Review. Obama will place his hand on a Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his first inauguration in 1861.

 

Laura Benedict's Backstory

Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts

    I’ve given birth to two children by scheduled Cesarean section, so I never had to spend a moment in actual labor. Is it true that many women forget the painful hours they spent in natural childbirth? I read somewhere that nature created some mechanism in us by which women do, indeed, forget so that we’ll be willing to have more than one child. If it’s true, I think I could compare the writing of Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts to a kind of natural childbirth. Sometimes I look at that tidy book with its dark, evocative cover and wonder just how in the heck it got here.

 

There were so many disparate ideas that contributed to the novel: a storyline on a soap opera about a young woman experiencing a false pregnancy; a friend from my childhood who practiced a sort of witchcraft; a character from an Alfred Hitchcock film; Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. For me, novel writing is a kind of alchemy, a process that seems almost magical. I have no idea of how the words and ideas will come together when I sit down to write.

 

But there is one thing I know for sure about Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts: I couldn’t have set it anywhere except the city of Cincinnati.

 

Years ago, I took a graduate writing workshop about writing from place. Before my experience with the class, my stories might have occurred anywhere. They were nebulous that way, my characters tied to no particular location or background. They were lost. Now, my stories are so solidly a part of their settings that I couldn’t move them if I tried.

 

I was born in Cincinnati and lived there until I was seven years old. So many of my memories of my time there (I do go back frequently) live as shadows in my mind and in my work. What I hope I retained for the novel was the sense of mystery and wonder I felt about my surroundings.

 

Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts is the creaking floors and dim recesses of my grandparents’ small Oakley house, the bare trees in the small park not far from the house. It’s the square in Hyde Park, with its gracious shops and restaurants, and the large, equally gracious homes in the area that seemed so grand and inaccessible to my childish self. It’s the neighborhood catholic schools that my mother and aunt attended. It is St. Cecilia, the beautiful stone-hewn church where my parents were married, I was baptized, and out of which my grandmother was buried. Not one of these exact locations is in the novel, but they are there just the same.

 

When the adult Alice (we first meet her at thirteen when the novel opens)--distraught after a brutal argument with her faithless husband--is lying alone in her bed, listening to the traffic pass her house, she is living one of my favorite summer memories. I would lie on the couch in my grandmother’s solarium and drift off to sleep as my family stayed up late on the back porch listening to the Reds’ game on the radio. The cars and trucks passed on the road outside the front windows, noisy because of the grooves cut in the road to slow them on the hill. Like Alice, I was lulled into my dreams and fantasies by the road’s constant hum. (Unlike Alice, I wasn’t thinking of a lover, of course, but of walking out into the night, exploring the neighborhood, or even the stars overhead.)
I do know the geography of Cincinnati passably well, but in the novel I play with the names of locations within the city to suit my purposes. (I apologize for my liberties on the Acknowledgments page.) Grounding the story in bricks and mortar would put it at odds with its own fantastic nature. I prefer it tethered lightly like a child’s balloon, so that it might drift and soar and float through the reader’s imagination.

To learn more about Laura Benedict's work, please visit her website.