Dundurn | Discover a new story

Four years ago, my husband, Chris Wong, and I were awoken by a phone call in the wee hours of the morning. It was his father’s housekeeper calling from Hong Kong, in a panic, to say Chris’s father had keeled over and been rushed to hospital and into surgery. Chris, his sister, and I caught the first flight from Toronto to Hong Kong. So began a very stressful period, as we watched this formidable, self-made man — still intimidating at age ninety-four — fight to hang on while in a state of protracted decline.

As a writer of memoir, I’ve experienced the dominoes of fear; fear of starting, fear of failure, fear of telling the whole truth, fear of hurting others. In the big picture of life, I am no stranger to feeling fear and taking action anyhow. I had reached the jumping off point where telling my story felt more important than avoiding my fear of the dark places that could lead.

For me the hardest part about writing literary fiction is having something to work with. Once you have a full draft it’s only a matter of time before it becomes what it is. But building out that first draft, in the face of everything that it could be, that it will not be, that you want it to be—that’s difficult.