The first book by Denise Chong, The Concubine's Children: Portrait of a Family Divided (1994), was on the Globe and Mail's Canadian best-sellers list for almost two years - yet, because it lays bare the painful history of the author's family, the story nearly was never told.
For decades, Chong's mother refused to talk about the family's past. But as a child, Chong picked up on an aura of tragedy surrounding her maternal grandmother. Her curiosity was sparked when she found a photo of her mother with her two sisters, hidden in a dresser drawer. She'd never met the aunts and didn't know if they were still alive.
'My grandmother was a real beauty,' Chong says. 'But things went so badly wrong for her. I couldn't make sense of things and when she died. A guillotine came down on the past and my mother wouldn't talk about it.'
Chong, in town last week for the Man Hong Kong Literary Festival, had a successful career in economics, serving for four years as adviser to then Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau. She admits to a long suppressed desire to write, while dutifully making her career to please her parents. It was the unravelling of her family history after a visit to China, where her mother was unexpectedly reunited with her siblings, that drove Chong to quit politics and unearth her grandmother's story.
'The hardest moment and the biggest breakthrough was when I realised I was about to break the privacy my grandparents thought they had taken to the grave with them,' she says. 'Then I knew that the only way I could discharge the responsibility was to tell the truth in all its dimensions, and I got over the idea that I was somehow spilling secrets.'
The Concubine's Children tells the story of May-ying, who at 17 was sold, sight unseen, as a concubine to Chong's grand-father, Chan Sam, an immigrant in Vancouver's Chinatown. She worked as a tea waitress, her wages supporting Chan's wife and family back in China. Yet her contribution was never acknowledged. Two of the couple's three daughters were brought up in China, while Chong's mother was brought up in Vancouver by May-ying, who - lonely and unhappy - became an alcoholic and prostitute.
'It was painful, certainly, for my mother,' Chong says of the times she encouraged her mother to reminisce. 'I said, 'This book is an act of love to the family.''