Jennie Liu is the author of the new young adult novel The Red Car to Hollywood. Her other books include Girls on the Line. She lives in North Carolina.
Q: What inspired you to write The Red Car to Hollywood, and how did you create your character Ruby?
A: When I was ready to start a new novel, it was early in the pandemic, so anti-Asian hate and racism was forefront on my mind.
Anna May Wong, who is generally known as the first Asian-American female movie star, was also pushing into my consciousness, so I began to think I could frame a story around her and the racism she faced in early Hollywood.
I ultimately decided to feature a more “ordinary” girl for relatability. Someone who doesn’t necessarily knows what she wants right away, who makes mistakes, and has bad judgement at times. But culturally her struggles were going to mirror those of Anna May’s.
Q: Can you say more about your decision not to have Anna May Wong be the protagonist?
A: Since I write for young adults, my story was always going to focus on a character’s teenage years. At 15-19 years old or so, Anna May Wong’s was really digging into the business and her star was certainly on the rise, but she was also romantically involved with a couple of much older men in the business.
This was an issue that I didn’t have the stomach to deeply explore on top of the other themes I wanted to address, and I couldn’t see how I could just ignore or gloss over those entaglements if I wanted the story to have authenticity.
But Anna May Wong seemed was such a supportive person to her family, community, and friends, I wanted to her to be part of the story.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: Because of the full-on shutdown, libraries were closed and traveling was out of the question for me. I ordered so many used books and old maps of LA from online sources. I viewed movie magazines and old photos on digital archives, watched period videos and silent movies on YouTube.
I also read novels written in the 1920s and 30s and novels set in California, trying to absorb the time period and location since I hadn’t visited Los Angeles in the more than a decade.
The surprising thing was how much I enjoyed immersing myself in learning the early history of the city. Specifically, it was so cool to learn how much the Old Chinatown of LA was used as background location in the early movie industry.
Q: The writer Rebecca Caprara called the book a “moving story of friendship, community, and honoring the past while forging a future of one's own.” What do you think of that description?
A: I love this description because it tells me that she really got the story!
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I am working on something, but it’s too early to talk about it what it is, because I don’t know if it’s going to work out. A terrible feeling!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Umm. No, not really.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment