Right.

Oh, I think at that point it was like seven years or something.

And I just really felt like my life had dead ended in a way that I didn't expect.

And that I was like, because when you go from like immigrant families and Asian families, everybody knows that writing is just like a really bad idea.

You shouldn't do it.

Like one thing I find really common with like East Asian writers is they usually say, oh, yes, I I wanted to write, but my parents said absolutely not.

So they go and they get like a law job or something that pays bills and then they write once they have money.

absolutely sometimes i say yes to the gig right yeah so um with them with the book eaters then which was your debut like full-length novel which is a wonderful read um talk to me about where that kind of came up conceptually for you what was the origin of that was it was it just uh the nugget of an idea of what would it be like in a world where people ate books or what was the start of that for you

Please set up the story for us.

So The Girl With a Thousand Faces is sort of a story in two parts.

Uh, in one half you have Mercy Chan in 1975 Kowloon Walled City, which was a real place, and Mercy Chan is a ghost talker.

That means that she speaks to ghosts, and she encourages them to move on, and she works for the local Triad.

Uh, and the other half of the story is set in the 1940s during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong, and that follows a young girl called Suyen and her mother, who flee ahead of the incoming army to a very remote island, uh, which they think will keep them safe during the war.

And on that island, no one else lives except ghosts, which is why no one goes there.

And these two stories do sound very separate, but I promise they intersect and hopefully not in the way that you expect.

Where did the inspiration come from?

Um, so how do you balance that, and, like, what steps are you taking in those early stages?

Uh, so I started out by kind of using books I'd read that I felt like were doing this concept really well as a kind of loose template, so something like Where the Crawdads Sing or Last House on Neebler Street.

Uh, in fact, both of those books are really good examples because they show you a character being sympathetic, maybe a bit weird, but sympathetic.

And then, you know, either with different timelines or different points of view, it shows you something about the character that kind of casts doubt on, on what you're seeing.

Um, so Where the Crawdads Sing, you start out, this woman is on trial.

She killed a man.

And then it goes back in time to her childhood, which is so sad and traumatic, and you feel bad for her, and then it goes back to the, you know, future.

I mean, do you think that, A, is even true, and B, should authors feel obligated to use more, I guess, simplistic language to make their stories more accessible to readers?

... how did it kind of evolve until it became what it is today?

Yeah.

There were, there were many others, and some were worse than others, but all were quite bad for as far as titles.

Uh, it basically started because after I handed Book Eaters in, my editor was like, "So what else are you writing next?" And I was...

I kind of gave her this list of things.

It was like, "Oh, these are projects I tried to start and didn't go anywhere." And she was like, "Why don't you write something completely new, um, completely from scratch?" That she wanted me to, like, gen- like, basically brainstorm and generate.

And as a result of that, I kind of went through some ideas, and we kind of settled on something in Hong Kong 'cause I wanted to honor that, that region as well.

So tell me more about [laughs] just, like, your fascination in general with the supernatural and how folklore and mytho- mythology kind of informed the creatures in your story, and, and how did you kind of go about putting your personal spin on those older tales?