The Storm We Made: An interview with Vanessa Chan (MFA ’21) and an excerpt from her debut novel

interview by LIT Book Editor Jonathan Kesh

Vanessa Chan’s debut novel The Storm We Made is an intense work of historical fiction built on personal family histories, with a few aspects of spy drama thrown in. 

Set during the brutal Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II, the story follows the Alcantara family as they struggle to stay together under this new regime. We quickly learn the family’s matriarch, Cecily, had collaborated in secret with Japanese forces, driven by a desire to see her country freed from British rule alongside a growing fascination with an enigmatic spy named Fujiwara. Her efforts are thankless on both fronts once the invasion arrives, and Cecily suffers by herself with that gnawing guilt of complicity while her three children find themselves nearly broken by the war in their own ways.

The story never strays from that brutality of imperialism, but what drives it forward is an underlying current of gentleness — the Alcantara family finds odd allies in unexpected places, and even antagonistic forces can sometimes be persuaded to offer strange, fleeting moments of peace. They’re small comforts, but they offer insights into the many complex ways a person can get through their day and stay alive during an invasion.

Vanessa Chan’s debut novel came out in January from Marysue Ricci Books. Shortly before its release, she spoke to LIT about old family stories and the tricky act of undertaking an elaborate research project during a global pandemic.

LIT: So when you first began writing The Storm We Made — which I think was during the COVID-19 lockdown, if I remember correctly — what was your original vision for what you wanted this book to be? How did that evolve while you were working on it?

Vanessa Chan: So this ties back to the New School really well. I was a student and I had just started writing a bunch of short stories. I didn’t really know if I would ever, you know, write a novel. I didn’t know if I had that length of work in me. But then I did a class with Marie-Helene Bertino. At the time, she did a seminar I was in that was really instrumental. The final project was this short story prompt that she had us write, which was, write someone who does something on a loop or something repetitively.

And so I did. I’ll admit, I was like “the semester’s over, it’s my first semester of grad school, it’s the final project. I’m just going to put minimal effort into this just to get through and be like, we’re done.” But then I sat down to write it and 5,000 words flowed out of me and I was like, whoa, what is this? It was about a girl running through a series of checkpoints trying to get home and thinking about her life during the war. When I handed it in, Marie’s comments to me were really, really inspirational because she said — I actually have the notes somewhere, she handwrote it — she said, “you know, all the air left the room when I read this. And I think what you have here is the beginnings of a very well-faceted novel.” And I was like, a novel? What do I know about novels, right?

But then the pandemic happened and everything shut down. And so I just started writing and I kept writing and that chapter — an edited down version of it that I wrote as a short story — became chapter three or four in the book now. It’s the first chapter of the teenage girl. And that’s kind of how it came together. So I did not intend to write a novel, but it happened. It turns out that it was much longer than a short story, which actually, I think you hear very often with writers: you start writing something, it’s a short story and then it’s way too long.

LIT: Since this is historical fiction, I’m curious about your research process while you were writing the novel. A lot of this is based on stories you heard from your family. What parts of the story came from those family histories, and what came from outside research or elsewhere?

VC: It’s so funny, I was just thinking about this because I’m writing an essay about research. A lot of people have a really cohesive and methodical way of doing historical research; a lot of historical fiction novelists like Min Jin Lee have a really strong process. My process was very different partly because, as a book born in the pandemic, I didn’t have a ton of access to libraries or archives. Like nothing was open, right? There was no way to get to it. And partly because the history of occupation in Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia and Singapore, is really not very well documented.

And then I did have some family stories that were percolating at the back of my mind and when I was ready to write, I started with those stories. But I had to rejigger my brain to think about the fact that, because there isn’t as much out there for traditional archival research or traditional interviews, I had to rely a lot more on oral history and on memory — both mine and some of my family’s that may have been a little bit shaky. It was like a family event, actually putting this all together. So some of these stories are stories that I heard from my grandmother growing up. My father, who’s a big history buff, helped to fact-check it. My father’s one of those guys who watches a television show set in the 1950s and gets like really mad that the car is like not of the era and starts yelling at the TV. So I’m like, let us put your insane detail-oriented-ness and annoying-ness to good use and you can help me fact-check my novel. My uncle sent me a book of photographs from the time and then I just sort of put it all together.

Of course, I did rely on more traditional research for the dates of battles and things like that. But I think at the end of the day, when you’re writing histories that aren’t well-recorded, mostly anything can be a source.

LIT: While you were getting immersed in this time period, was there anything that surprised you, that you weren’t expecting to come across in your research or the stories you heard?

VC: Right now, people always ask me what’s true and what isn’t. They ask me, “Oh, this has to be made up, right?” Because I think these events are so horrific and so shocking that people are like, how could that possibly have happened? One example, not to give away a spoiler, but in the book there’s a boy who makes a record of his life at a concentration camp by using paint brushes made from human hair, his own human hair, and then he uses fruit sap and cuts himself to make ink from blood, right? And someone asked me, “Is that something from your imagination?” I’m like, “No, that’s true. That’s true.” People also always ask me if there’s a spy in my family because the book is about a spy. And as far as I know, there’s no spy in my family, but I mean, I wouldn’t know.

But then there are other things that are true. There are some anecdotes that I got from my grandmother. “How you avoid an airstrike” was something she would just tell me over tea in the afternoon. And at the time Malaysia was peaceful, so it wasn’t something I thought I would ever need to know.

LIT: From what you’re saying, it sounds like the family’s eldest daughter, Jujube, was the first character you created. Was she the easiest character to write? Or, out of these four different POVs you have, was there another character whose voice felt more intuitive?

VC: I think Jujube was definitely the easiest to write just because she is a teenage girl. And I remember the rage of being a teenage girl. So that was easy to access.

But on the flip side, I would say that Cecily, the mother who is a spy, was hardest to write because I am neither a mother nor a spy. So that required a lot more imagination. She was also a character — although she became the main glue which holds the book together — that I wrote in later. When this novel first started, it was about three sad children living through a war. And there’s nothing wrong with three sad children living through a war; there needs to be space for novels that are sad, and war is often a place where people don’t have a lot of agency and three sad children have no agency. But because I was writing it during the pandemic where I also had no agency because I was stuck in an apartment, couldn’t go anywhere, I needed to give myself an adult who could go around and do bad things. And just have a bunch of agency that I didn’t have. So I gave myself Cecily, the mother who ended up being the main character.

But character-wise, Jujube was the easiest to write just because I could access her mentally and she stayed in one place. She didn’t have the logistics of movement in the way that the others did, because they were always like running about and being lost. But they were all fun to write. The mother was especially fun to write. Again, I just had my imagination. I didn’t know anything about spying.

LIT: That’s interesting, because Cecily and Fujiwara’s complicated relationship is one of the main plot lines of the book. So if Cecily came in later, how did the antagonist Fujiwara come into being while you were writing?

VC: The character Fujiwara was already mentioned here and there because he’s based on a real life historical figure, a general who was in Malaya at the time. But the nuances of the more romantic and obsessive relationship between Cecily and Fujiwara came only as a result of me writing Cecily in. You know, I think I was writing these three children and I was like, I need to give myself more fun. And I realized the common thread is that they have this mom, right? They have an adult who’s worried about them. And I started wondering why, aside from the war, would she be so worried about them and I built off of that.

I also just like early spy stuff. Like, really bad spy TV. I used to watch — this is going to date me — but I used to really watch Alias really religiously, which is about a double agent. Jennifer Garner wears bad wigs and then runs about the world. It’s absolutely ridiculous, makes no sense. Really, I just like stupid spy stuff. And so I was like, I’m just going to write a spy who may or may not be very good, may or may not even be doing that cool of spy stuff. But let’s see what happens. And then as novels do, it became a thing.

LIT: I also have a question about the youngest daughter, Jasmin. She’s a very young child who seems to have this talent for reading people, but otherwise has a very distorted view of the harsh reality around her just because of her age. How did you decide what was important to a small child in the middle of an imperial occupation?

VC: To back up a little bit, obviously the book is about, as you say, an imperial occupation. But I’ve always been curious about what people do in their day-to-day lives, regardless of their circumstances. And again, because this is a book born of the pandemic, I felt like we — then and even now — are living through the worst thing that could possibly happen to the world, a global pandemic. But we still have ridiculous, inane minutiae that we’re obsessed with, like who do we have a crush on? Who are we obsessed with? Who are we having an argument with? Why is our sibling being so annoying? All of those things do not go away. They just take on a different, maybe a heightened sense, depending on the circumstances you’re living through. Like an imperial occupation or a pandemic where you can’t go anywhere.

Because that was my primary and has always been my primary occupation, I think Jasmin, the youngest character, is obsessed with all the things that an eight year old would be obsessed with: a new friend, new toys. You know, being able to run about. It’s just that the circumstances dictated that she maybe couldn’t run about as much as she wanted. She shouldn’t trust strange people who try to be her friend. And her family, whom she loves and wants to play with and have a good time with is perhaps a lot more testy than a normal family would be. And so I wanted to play around with how a child would react to having the same impulses a child normally has, but under slightly different circumstances.

With Jasmin I was also interested in writing a character where you, the reader, know much more about what’s going on than the character and how that would feel to a reader. Which is different than some of the other characters who have a better sense of what’s going on because they’re grown, and maybe have an equal or close to equal amount of information as the reader. But a child inherently will know much less than the reader, because a child’s innocent. So even if the child is supposed to be joyful in the book, the reader is filled with a sense of gloom or at least doom. At least I hope they were, because you’re always worried about the child while the child is like “La la la, I’m playing.”

LIT: Morality is presented as this very complicated subject in the book. Most of the Alcantara family has moments where they’re driven to do terrible things. On the other hand, a lot of the Imperial Japanese characters such as Fujiwara have these moments where their morality is ambiguous. In the middle of all of that, you have this quote, “Isn’t every man a good man and a bad man?” that comes up pretty early. How  were you thinking about morality while you were writing this?

VC: This is so funny, actually, because I was at an event some months ago in the UK. One thing I said which I thought was a throwaway comment, ended up being pretty controversial. Not like in a bad way, but it raised a lot of eyebrows with the audience. And it was this: I said that a character, a protagonist that is 100 percent good does not make a good character.

And people were like, what? And they were really shocked by this. I thought this was a given because to me, I’m always writing characters and I’m always interested in characters who sort of tread the line between good and bad. Because I think morality, for human beings in general, is very much dependent on circumstances. Morality, loyalty, and the ability to be good and bad is very much dependent on how are you living, where are you living in, and what your situation is. And so I always try to thread that needle in my writing. That’s just something I’m interested in. It’s an easy way to create conflict because it’s a conflict within the person.

But that statement that I made. A bunch of people raised their eyebrows and there some shocked gasps in the audience of like a couple hundred people. And I was like, oh, I guess maybe I’m a minority here in looking for characters that don’t always sit on just good or evil. I like characters who could be both because I think human beings are both.

LIT: You have an upcoming short story collection called The Ugliest Babies in the World that’s coming out next. Do you feel like you’re exploring similar themes to The Storm We Made in those stories, or does it feel like it’s a completely different work?

VC: It’s similar and different, I think. The timeframe is different. A lot of the stories are more contemporary or in the early 2000s. I think maybe the furthest one would go back like to the late 90s, but it’s really not that far back. I think something qualifies as historical fiction if it’s 50 years in the past? But this is not historical fiction. But it does explore similar themes of girlhood, the intersection of girlhood with colonialism — perhaps a more modern definition of colonialism that’s more cultural, dealing with how Western standards have impacted young girls, teenagers, and women in Malaysia and in Asia.

I was a short story writer first. Short stories are my first love. And I love stories and I’m so excited to be able to work on a collection. Collections are harder to sell, they’re harder to entice people to read, but they are so fun to write and I’m so excited to write my collection.

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The following excerpt is from THE STORM WE MADE: A Novel. Copyright © 2024, Vanessa Chan. Reproduced by permission of Marysue Rucci Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE

CECILY

Bintang, Kuala Lumpur
February 1945
Japanese-occupied Malaya

Teenage boys had begun to disappear.
The first boy Cecily heard of was one of the Chin brothers, the middle of five hulking boys with narrow foreheads and broad shoulders—they were Boon Hock, Boon Lam, Boon Khong, Boon Hee, and Boon Wai, but their mother called them all Ah Boon, and it was up to the boys to know which one she was calling for. Throughout British rule, the Chin boys were known for being rich and cruel. It was common to see them crowding in a circle behind the Chins’ gaudy brown-and-gold house. They’d be standing over a servant, one of the boys with a switch in his hand and all the boys with glints of excitement in their eyes as the switch made contact with the servant’s skin. When the Japanese arrived before Christmas 1941, the boys were defiant: they glared at the patrolling Kenpeitai soldiers, spat at the ones who chose to approach. It was the middle boy, Boon Khong, who disappeared, just vanished one day as though he had never existed. Just like that, the five Chin brothers were four.

Cecily’s neighbors wondered what had happened to the boy. Mrs. Tan speculated that he had just run away. Puan Azreen, always a cloud of gloom, worried that the boy had gotten into a fight and was lying in a drain somewhere, which made the neighbors peek fearfully into drains as they went about their errands, unsure what they would find. Other mothers shook their head; that’s what hap- pens to bullies, they said, maybe someone had simply had enough. Cecily watched the Chin boys’ mother, curious to see if Mrs. Chin was stationed by the door waiting for news, or if she performed the hysterics of the terrified mother, but Mrs. Chin and the rest of the Chin family kept to themselves. On the rare occasion they left their house, the four boys surrounded their gray-faced parents in an enormous wall of sinew and muscle, keeping them out of sight.

Only once did Cecily encounter Mrs. Chin, very early in the morning at the sundry shop. Mrs. Chin was staring at a bag of squid snacks, face glistening with tears. Cecily marveled at the quietness of it all, no sobs, no shaking, just bright, damp cheeks and wet eyes.

“She ’s been like that for five minutes now,” said Aunty Mui, the shop owner’s wife, delighting in being able to share her discovery with someone else.

After a few weeks, because there were no further public displays of anguish, no other gossip to be gleaned, people stopped wondering about the Chin boys. Soon the neighbors even forgot which Chin brother was missing.

The next few disappearances came in quick succession. The thin boy who worked as a sweeper at the graveyard, who Cecily was convinced stole the flowers that families left on gravestones and sold them at the market. The plump boy behind the sundry shop who smudged his face with dirt and pretended to be lame by tying up the bottom of his pants leg, to beg passersby for coins. The ghoul-eyed boy who had been caught trying to peep into the toilets at the girls’ school. Bad boys, Cecily and her neighbors murmured. Maybe they got what they deserved.

But by the middle of the year, sons of people whom Cecily knew also began to disappear. The nephew of the couple who lived in the house next to Cecily, a boy with an enviable baritone who won all the oratory contests at school. The son of the town’s doctor, a quiet boy who carried a small chessboard with him everywhere and would set it up to play with anyone who asked. The laundry lady’s boy, a diligent teenager who laundered all the Japanese soldiers’ uniforms, and whose mother was now forced to take over because the Japanese did not have the time for bereavements.

With only one major road bisecting the town, one chemist, one sundry shop, one school for boys and one for girls, Bintang was a town small enough for worry to mutate. The whispers began again, pointed glances at the families of the missing boys, lowered voices wondering about their fate. In fact, the boys’ disappearances were discreet, as though they had sneaked away, afraid to offend. This bothered Cecily because teenage boys made the most noise when they moved—they bumped into things, they stomped when they walked, they shifted uncomfortably even when standing still, unable to con- trol the new power in their physique, the new length in their limbs.

“Is it not enough that they starve us and beat us and take away our schools and our lives? Must they come for our children too?” hissed old Uncle Chong, who owned Chong Sin Kee ’s sundry shop, the local store in the middle of Bintang where everyone bought sup- plies, from spices and herbs to rice to raw soap. His wife, Aunty Mui, slapped his mouth. Those were treasonous words, and the Chongs had a son too.

It had not always been this way. When the Japanese first arrived three-ish years before, Cecily, her husband, and their three children had been one of the families to line up outside their house and wave at the military convoy, a welcome party. Cecily remembered the blos- soming in her chest as she pointed out the bald, squat Japanese gen- eral, Shigeru Fujiwara, at the front of the parade. “That’s the Tiger of Malaya!” she told her children.

General Fujiwara had brought the British forces to their knees in under seven weeks, orchestrating a brilliant and unexpected land invasion, cycling in on bicycles from the north where Malaya bor- dered Thailand, across rough, hot jungle terrain, while the British Navy, anticipating a sea attack, pointed their guns and cannons south and east toward Singapore and the South China Sea. To Cecily, it had felt like a dawn of a new age. But her hope for a better colonizer was short-lived. Within months of the Japanese arrival, schools began to shut down and soldiers made their presence felt on the streets. The Japanese occupiers killed more people in three years than the British colonizers had in fifty. The brutality shocked the quiet population of Malaya, accustomed by then to the stiff upper lip and bored disinterest of the British, who mostly stayed away from the locals as long as the tin-mining and rubber-tapping quotas were reached.

Fearful of what was to come, Cecily started doing a roll call every evening to make sure each of her three children had made it home. “Jujube,” she would call over the din of dinner preparations. “Jasmin! Abel!”

And every evening they answered—Jujube irritably, face twisted in the seriousness of an eldest child, Jasmin cheerily, small feet skit- tering across the ground like a puppy’s. And her middle boy, Abel, who worried her the most, who would shout, “Ma, of course I’m here!” careening toward her with a big, loping hug.

For a while the system seemed to work. Evening after evening as the sun set and the mosquitoes began their nightly chorus, she called for her children, and they replied. The family would gather at the scratched dining table and tell each other about their day, and for a few minutes, listening to Jasmin snort-laughing at one of Abel’s theatrical jokes, watching as Jujube pulled at her short curls that looked so like Cecily’s own, Cecily could forget the severity of their circumstances, the terror of the war, the barrenness of their lives.

But then, on his fifteenth birthday, on the fifteenth of February, Abel—who had light brown hair so unlike the rest of the siblings, Abel who was ravenous all the time because of the food rationing, Abel who had grown six inches the previous year and was now taller than everyone in the family—had not answered her call, had not made it home from the store. And as the waxy birthday candle melted into Abel’s dry birthday cake, Cecily knew. Bad things happened to bad people; and she was exactly that—a bad person.

The truth was, for the last couple of years, Cecily found she could not hide the distinct fear that controlled her existence; the knowledge that all the things she had done would come for her, that retribution was always a day away. This fear manifested in her anxious, twisting fingers, in the way her eyes darted over her children, in the distrust with which she greeted anyone unfamiliar. Now that the catastrophe had come to pass, she felt every piece of taut energy in her body simply give way. Jujube told her later that she had released one long howl, low and anguished, then sunk into the rattan chair without further sound, her expression calm, her body motionless.

Around her, the family was a hive of activity. Her husband, Gordon, paced, shouting to himself or perhaps to her, at the top of his lungs: “Maybe he went to the shop; maybe he got stuck at a police checkpoint; maybe, maybe, maybe.” Jasmin held on to her older sister’s thumb, her face too stoic for seven years old. Jujube, ever practical, had sprung into action. She extricated herself from Jasmin and ran to the back of the house, called over the fence to the neighbors on both sides: “Have you seen my brother? Can you help me find my brother?” But it was past the eight o’clock curfew, and none of the neighbors dared respond, even if their heart broke at the sound of Jujube ’s cries.

Cecily said nothing. For a few minutes before the guilt took hold of her, it was a relief to see her terror realized. It had finally come to pass, and this was all her fault.
She had caused this, all of it.

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The morning after Abel’s disappearance, Cecily’s neighbors swung into action. The Alcantaras were a respectable family, and respect- able families did not deserve tragedies this monumental. The men organized daytime search parties, carrying signs and roaming around hollering Abel’s name. They looked in storerooms behind houses, they looked in the corners of Abel’s favorite shops, they looked in playgrounds and in abandoned factories. They looked but didn’t enter the old school that had been turned into a Japanese interroga- tion center. The men stayed in small groups, bent their heads low when the Kenpeitai soldiers in muddy-green uniforms looked their way, but felt a secret smugness because there was safety in numbers, and this search for the boy felt like their own tiny revolution, a small uprising against the Japanese. The women treated the incident like a birth or a death, bringing over an endless supply of food and con- solations to the Alcantara house. They assured Cecily that all would be well—that Abel was just a careless boy and had probably fallen asleep somewhere and would find his way home soon, that Abel had lost track of time and was staying with one of his friends, that boys like Abel—so handsome, so charming, and with so much promise— didn’t just disappear.

Cecily, the other women thought, was surprisingly ungrateful. She did not say thank you when they delivered the food, she did not make them tea when they waited at the door to be invited in, she did not cry or confide or collapse in the way that would be understand- able. All she did was look so terribly alert, eyes darting everywhere, as though ready to pounce. On what? They didn’t know. Of course, they felt for her, they whispered to one another, but Cecily really took things too far sometimes. Remember the terrible stories she used to tell her children?

“The one about the man who was forced to drink soapy water till his stomach hung out from his body, then the Japanese soldiers balanced a wooden beam on him and jumped on either side of the beam like a seesaw till he burst? That one?” said Mrs. Chua.

“Aiya, do you really need to repeat that awful story? Yes, that one!” said Mrs. Tan. “It gave my children nightmares for weeks!”

Sometimes, they thought, Cecily really didn’t know how to act right. They were all mothers; they knew how mothers should act. And when a mother loses a son, she should cry, she should collapse, she should seek comfort in other mothers. She should not just hold her pain as a shield, act so prickly that everyone was afraid to come near.

Still, they reminded themselves, they needed to be good neigh- bors. Mrs. Tan continued to send steaming bowls of soupy noodles to the Alcantara house and tried not to be offended when she saw the bowls standing in the exact place outside the gate when she passed by the next day. Mrs. Chua offered to watch Jujube and Jasmin so Cecily could get a break. Puan Azreen, who loved the dramatic, told stories about everyone she ’d ever heard, who’d gone missing, but she couldn’t resist adding a sheen of horror to her tales—people coming home absent limbs or with disfigured faces.

To the neighbors, at least Gordon, Cecily’s husband, seemed grateful enough. He tramped through town with the other men, called for his son, slapped the backs of other husbands, thanked everyone for their time. He has become so much nicer now, the neighbors told one another. Of course you don’t want such a thing to happen to anyone, of course not, they tsk-tsked, but they preferred this iteration of Gordon Alcantara, taken down a peg, without the pompousness they had disliked about him in the before times, when the British were in charge and Gordon was an administrator who fancied himself better than all of them.

The days of Abel’s absence stretched into weeks. Daily searches by the men became sporadic, and the house visits from the women began to dwindle. As more and more boys began to disappear, the neighbors stayed home, hid their own sons away from the barbed glares of the Kenpeitai soldiers. The brief joy of revolt died down, and the neighbors remembered once again that during a war, the only priority was one’s own family. They could not waste their time on the missing children of others.

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A week before he disappeared, Abel had come home with an armful of ugly, weedy-looking flowers that he ’d clearly plucked off the side of the road. But he had been so proud, that Cecily had put them in a vase and pretended they were the most beautiful flowers she had ever seen. In the weeks after he disappeared, the weeds became dry and brittle, but still, Cecily couldn’t bring herself to throw them out. Then, one afternoon, she forgot to close her bedroom window during a thunderstorm, one of the noisy, wall-rattling tropical storms that Malaya was known for. The room became misty with rain, and the wind knocked everything over, shattering the vase of Abel’s dried weeds. That evening after the storm subsided, Gordon found Cecily bleeding from her fingers as she tried to glue the pieces of the vase back together, tried to arrange the broken weeds to stand as tall as a boy. But, as with the pieces she had set in motion ten years before, there was no fixing to be done. There was no coming back from this.

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