Lucy Tan’s debut novel What We Were Promised is a deftly constructed multiple-perspective work that tells the story of the Zhen household. After attaining educations and building careers in the United States, Wei and Lina return to Shanghai with their daughter, Karen, where they find themselves a part of a new generation of urban elites. Quite suddenly, Wei is tasked with dramatically expanding his business while Lina finds herself part of an upper-crust previously unimaginable to her. As a taitai (an educated housewife who doesn’t do housework), Lina finds herself adrift in the new, glimmering version of the city she’d left so many years before.
After a treasured keepsake goes missing, the Zhens find themselves dealing with a buried past even as they struggle to adjust to life in their new city and country. I recently emailed with Lucy Tan to ask about the novel’s origins and about the unprecedented growth of Shanghai, the glittering city at the heart of this remarkable novel.
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Nate Brown: First, let me tell you how much I enjoyed the book. Can you tell me a bit about the novel’s origins, when you began writing it, and how you came to finish it and find it a home at Little, Brown?
Lucy Tan: Thank you, Nate! After graduating college in 2010, I spent two years living and working in Shanghai. It was there that I had many of the experiences that allowed me to begin writing What We Were Promised. However, I wouldn’t begin working on the project until four years later, during the first semester of my MFA program. It started as a short story about a housekeeper under suspicion of stealing a bracelet from a wealthy tenant. From there, it grew into a full-length novel that I workshopped in class. After I finished my first draft, I sent it out to agents and signed with Rebecca Gradinger during the final semester of my program. With Rebecca’s smart edits, the draft grew stronger, and we submitted it to publishers that fall. I’m lucky that it landed with Judy Clain and her wonderful team at Little, Brown, who have helped bring it to completion.
NB: Wow! That’s sort of a publishing fairy tale, but more than what sounds like the relative ease of bringing the book to readers, I find it striking that this started as a short story. Having seen how expansive the novel is, I’m curious to know if there were any difficulties in expanding that initial story into the novel it’s become. What came easily and what came with difficulty during the drafting of the book?
LT: You’re right, it was like a fairy tale, and like all fairy tales, it was only made possible by bending the rules of the real world. I have the University of Wisconsin to thank for that. The Creative Writing Program there provided me with the time, support, and focus necessary to write a novel. I wouldn’t have been able to do it if I’d been working full-time.
Technically speaking, the most difficult part of writing What We Were Promised was creating many different individual story arcs that eventually braided together into a larger, joint narrative. It was a lot to keep in my head at once, and in each draft I completed, I concentrated on fleshing out only one or two characters’ storylines at a time. But generally speaking, the most difficult part of my writing process was keeping alive the belief that something good would come of the pages and pages of under-developed writing I produced in the beginning. I think that’s probably true for most writers, and I have yet to come across a solution for it. What came more naturally than I expected was the chapter-to-chapter structure of the book. I didn’t think too hard about which character’s point of view should come next—that felt instinctual.
NB: The book has so much to say about the inescapability of the past. That’s particularly stark here, given that the novel is set in Shanghai, a city that has more than tripled in population since 1990, when Shanghai had roughly the same population as New York City. It’s a rich setting, and it’s a city that means something different for each of the novel’s characters. For Sunny, Shanghai represents economic opportunity and a way out of her home city; for Wei, it’s similarly ripe with opportunity, though it’s opportunity rife with risk; for Lina, Shanghai is, at first, an alien sort of prison where she finds herself quite suddenly a taitai, or wealthy housewife. What does Shanghai represent to you? What is a city that you’d wanted to write about, or is the setting incidental to the story you set out to tell?
LT: Shanghai is at the heart of this story, and definitely something I wanted to write about. The city has changed so much over the past couple decades, and I wanted to capture it as I had experienced it in 2010. Skyscrapers disappearing into the smog. Mandarin and English spoken in the streets alongside Shanghainese, to accommodate an increasingly diverse mix of international residents. There was a restlessness there that I wanted to capture. Class divisions were forming, and no one was really fitting in. For the family at the center of this story, Shanghai represents both opportunity and loss—loss of the old way of life and the pressure for each person to reconsider their roles, whether in the workplace or at home. In a way, the novel is a love letter to a city in a state of constant change. There is both nostalgia for what China once was and excitement for what it can become.
NB: I won’t give too much away, but the novel has much to say about the complicated ways that people and families are intertwined. While the novel is naturalistic, there’s an abiding sense in the book’s first half that something isn’t quite right between Lina, her husband, Wei, and her brother-in-law, Qiang. For a wealthy, relatively settled forty-three-year-old woman, Lina very quickly finds herself reassessing what her life has amounted to. I found myself necessarily wondering what her life looks like after the events of the novel have taken place. This is a massively unfair question in some ways, but do you find yourself thinking about Lina and Wei, Sunny and Rose? Have you or do you think you’ll return to them in future pieces of fiction?
LT: I love this question! I wanted to end things at a point when the family is heading toward a state of (relative) equilibrium. By the end of the book, they have gained knowledge—of themselves and of each other—that they didn’t have at the beginning, and this gives them a certain kind of stability. And so I don’t feel anxious for them when I think about their lives. I think that gradually, they’ll grow stronger as a family.
It’s unlikely that I’ll write about the Zhens again anytime soon, but I do sometimes wonder what will become of Sunny and Karen, who have inner growth and potential that isn’t fully explored in these pages. I have a feeling Sunny won’t be an ayi forever, though I’m not sure what she’ll do in the future. I’m interested, too, in the young woman Karen will become–what her relationship with “home” will look like as China and America both continue to change.
NB: Much has been made in recent years about the likability of characters. In your novel, not every character acts with pure intentions, but there are no pure monsters either, nor are there purely virtuous figures. I found myself feeling warmly towards most of them; Qiang, in particular, but Lina, too, and even Wei. Did you find yourself thinking about each figure’s relative likability as you composed the book?
LT: For the most part, I don’t think about likability when I’m writing. My goal is just what you describe—to write toward a place in which each character has faced difficulties and reacted to those difficulties as humanly as possible. Some characters are capable of fundamental change and others are not, but I think it’s in their attempts to be better (whatever “better” means to them) that we as readers can find empathy, and I do try to make all my characters empathetic. When the writing is going well, I am just as enamored of/frightened by/exasperated with the characters in my story as I would like readers to be. I certainly wouldn’t be friends with all my characters. But I don’t like everyone in real life either, do I? In fact, it’s some of the people I dislike most in real life that I find to be the most interesting.
One of the secret thrills I have is hearing readers’ opinions about my characters. Some love Sunny and dislike Lina; for others, it’s the opposite. Some can sympathize with Qiang completely; others think he’s a selfish, no-good delinquent. I love all these responses because it means that at some point, these characters have felt real to readers as they have felt real to me.
NB: This is your first novel, and I’m curious to know how it feels having it out in the world? Have there been surprises—good or bad—along the way?
LT: It has felt like a great release. For years, this story sat in my head and on my computer, and now it’s a real thing people can interact with. It’s made me feel vulnerable but also thrilled. I started out being very nervous about people’s reactions—critics’ reviews, responses from friends and strangers, et cetera. But now I don’t feel as shaken by them anymore. What’s left is the incredible feeling of disbelief every time I see that someone has read my book. I can’t help but think, You really read it? When you could have been reading other things? When you could have been eating food or petting your dog or scrolling through Twitter? I feel so flattered and grateful every time. That hasn’t gotten old and I don’t know if it ever will.
NB: Here’s the real jerky question that every writer gets asked just after having published a book: what are you working on now? OR, what do you think you’ll be working on next?
LT: Not jerky at all! But if my project totally capsizes, I’m going to know who to blame. I’m working on a second novel set Wisconsin and New York about three women in the theater world. So far, it explores themes centered around art, friendship, and female ambition.
Lucy Tan grew up in New Jersey and has spent much of her adult life in New York and Shanghai. She received her B.A. from New York University and her M.F.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was awarded the 2016 August Derleth Prize. Her fiction has been published in journals such as Asia Literary Review and Ploughshares, where she was winner of the 2015 Emerging Writer’s Contest.