The Author: Vanessa Chan
The Book: The Storm We Made (S&S/ Marysue Rucci Books, 2024)
The Elevator Pitch: The Storm We Made is about the unlikeliest of spies, Cecily Alcantara, a discontented housewife in 1930s Malaya who becomes a spy for the Japanese and unwittingly ushers in a war.
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The Rumpus: Where did the idea of your book come from?
Vanessa Chan: It’s a combination of stories my grandmother told me, historical nuggets, and my love of a good spy narrative.
Rumpus: How long did it take to write the book?
Chan: Pen to paper it took about two years. But I always think that even if they are written quickly, most first books take a lifetime to conceive.
Rumpus: Is this the first book you’ve written? If not, what made it the first to be published?
Chan: When I was in my younger, angrier twenties, I wrote half a novel about how much I hated my job and my then-terrible coworkers. For obvious reasons, that novel remains unfinished and hidden away. It was only with The Storm We Made that I realized the things I cared about (vs. the things that made me mad). Anger may be a great motivator, but it’s not the best way to sustain a good story.
Rumpus: In submitting the book, how many no’s did you get before your yes?
Chan: This novel has actually had a dream journey—I had several options for agent representation and there was a competitive publisher auction before it was sold to S&S/Marysue Rucci Books, and in several other countries. But if the book’s path has been easy, my own has not. I’ve had to live a million lives, and make many sometimes painful sacrifices to get to the place I am now in. I have been entangled in struggles with immigration, with unrelenting misogyny and rape culture, with grief, with financial precarity. Most days I cannot believe I’m here and am so grateful to be.
Rumpus: Which authors/writers buoyed you along the way? How?
Chan: I have a remarkable group of writing friends and colleagues who keep me grounded and sane. They’re going to hate being called out but Jemimah Wei, Gina Chung, Grace Liew, Katie Devine, Temim Fruchter, Jenny Tinghui Zhang, Jami Nakamura Lin, Kate Tooley, just to name a few. We’re all very different but we’re all ready to knock reality into each other when needed, and to validate and hype each other up when needed as well!
Rumpus: How did your book change over the course of working on it?
Chan: When I first started writing The Storm We Made, it was a novel about three sad children aged 7–17 living through WWII in Malaya—which is a valid narrative—there should be space in the world for sad stories, and hard histories. Then my personal circumstances changed. The pandemic happened and I wasn’t able to travel to my family, including my mother who was very ill and eventually passed away. All libraries and archives were closed. Writing about home but being unable to go home seemed, at the time, like a tragic contradiction. In order to give myself some joy and agency, I created a woman spy who could run about and make decisions (both good and bad). This spy, the mother of the three sad children, eventually become the novel’s driving force, emotional core, and main character.
Rumpus: Before your first book, where has your work been published?
Chan: I was always a short story writer first. I’ve had stories published in Electric Lit, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Pidgeonholes, Conjunctions, and more. I love short stories.
Rumpus: What is the best advice someone gave you about publishing?
Chan: The novelist Crystal Hana Kim recently told me to remember not to keep moving the goal posts. It is natural, I suppose, to always want more—to keep chasing reviews, press, sales, prizes—and once you get one, you want another thing. Crystal’s advice was to remember the goals you started with, the person who you were. She’s right! I want to always remember the me who was so joyful at finishing my first short story—the girl who cried when she got her first story acceptance in Atticus Review (shoutout!). Ambition and achievement are great, but gratitude is the true source of joy.
Rumpus: Who’s the reader you’re writing to—or tell us about your target audience and how you cultivated or found it?
Chan: My late mother was one of the first people to read the earliest pages I scribbled. Before she died, she would read early paragraphs of this novel that I would post on Instagram Stories and shamefully delete one hour later. She learned how to screenshot so she could screenshot the paragraphs and enlarge them to read. When she could no longer see well due to her illness, she would make me read her passages by phone. I wrote this book to give myself and my family something to hold on to during a time of great personal loss.
Rumpus: What is one completely unexpected thing that surprised you about the process of getting your book published?
Chan: I don’t think this is unexpected per se, but you cannot go through the publishing journey alone, especially not as a writer of color. My community of writer friends sustains me and keeps me human. My family reminds me where I came from—I will always be a girl who grew up in Petaling Jaya five minutes from the Old Town market.
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Author photograph courtesy of Vanessa Chan
