“I had this idea for a woman who had gone through the war and had come out scarred and scathed…I did not know who I could put her against. She was alone and that was not very interesting. While I created her I had many elements coming into play; the location, the Malayan emergency... I could not think of a way of tying them all up together and it was at this reception party in South Africa where I was introduced to the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. He was in his mid-fifties. A very charming and friendly guy but he could not speak English and I cannot speak Japanese so lots of bowing and then he moved on…but his job description alone continued to resonate in my head…So I decided I wanted to use him,” says Tan Twang Eng, author of “The Garden of Evening Mists” and “The Gift of Rain”.
Eng had earlier said it had been difficult to put himself in the shoes of a woman and think like her, particularly because she was a woman of the 40s and 50s. “She could not go wherever she wanted. She lived with so many restrictions…it was all the more difficult…and because of all that she had been through…she would just not let me in…l could not get a grasp on her till almost the end of the book, when everything cracked open. Then I had to go back and do everything again, build her up again. After she related what happened to her at the camp…that was when I realized who she was. But before that it was really, really difficult for me to understand who she was. It came through in my first draft.” And then there were questions like, “What would be in her handbag? I spent a whole day thinking of that…”
Ladies take heart, if you spend a whole day searching for something in your bag, the author shortlisted for the Booker-2012, spent a whole day imagining what you could be putting into it!
Tan Twang Eng goes on to talk about how he devised his plot when he says, “It is interesting to see how we interpret, remember and revise memory…when you get a group together who have undergone an event, even something as mundane as a dinner party and they start talking about it a few weeks later, you get different ideas from different people and you have no idea what really happened. That is what interests me…it is very “mould-able”, you can shape it to whatever suits you the best and we do it without even realizing it, by yourself, by time, by your own personal growth…”
If that is how an ordinary occurrence becomes a story, Eng goes on to say, “My training as a lawyer makes me feel what I write has to be clear…” Eng’s method of research is interesting. “I use a lot of contemporary accounts but also a lot of photographs…description of the check points etc. I cut out a lot of research because my first readers say you have put too many things there. One of the toughest job as a writer is to decide how much research to put in there… “
The secret of turning into an Eng? “I never ever work in my pyjamas…I shower, shave, dress up and then sit to write. If you sit the whole day in your pyjamas, you feel sloppy and your thinking becomes sloppy as well. I take a lot of breaks…I know some writers who write in bed, but I can’t do that. I usually try to work from 9-5 or sometimes until 7. I do not work after dinner, I read then. When you work from home, people think you are free and assume you are doing nothing but watching TV!...Writing is very, very hard. If you do not do it well, it becomes laughable. ..”
Web link:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpwh_Y-LdcM
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXxf2St9a
