FOR YEARS KIM Wong Keltner cruised bookshops, looking for contemporary fiction featuring heroines with whose experiences she could identify. She saw countless books about young, well-educated women balancing work, family and romantic relationships. But none of the main characters were like Keltner - an American-born Chinese who 'could not quote a single Han dynasty proverb, but could recite entire dialogues from Brady Bunch episodes', who knew nothing of Confucius and spoke no Cantonese or Putonghua but 'spent years studying the western canon and had learned to conjugate irregular French verbs'. Not finding the novel with the female protagonist she sought, Keltner decided to write her own. First came The Dim Sum of All Things in which Keltner's alter ego, the third-generation San Franciscan Lindsay Owyang, falls 'in like' with a white co-worker and has her eyes opened to her grandmother's history when the two travel to China together. The sequel, Buddha Baby, finds Lindsay 'forced to wake up and smell the bock-fa oil' as she confronts her Chinese identity head on. Lindsay is spunky, sharp-tongued and 'fairly clever' despite her choosing to veer off the model minority professional career track to work in 'wage slave' jobs. No surprise then that Keltner too rejected 'the whole doctor-lawyer-MBA route with no regrets'. On her close resemblance to her main character, Keltner, 36, says: 'Sure, the book began semi-autobiographically. Like any writer, I draw a lot upon my own experiences and observations in shaping characters. But at a certain point you realise the things that happened to you aren't as interesting as you thought they were - in my case, at least.' Like her protagonist, Keltner attended the University of California at Berkeley, but took jobs such as office manager and shop assistant. She too attended Chinese school after day school for years, but can't string together a sentence in Chinese. Both have grandparents who ran a travel agency in Chinatown and assimilated parents who fed them Spaghetti-Os and TV dinners instead of home-cooked Chinese food. Both have dated Caucasians but, paradoxically, share the same revulsion of 'Hoarders of All Things Asian' - that is, 'creepy' and 'geeky' white guys who 'trawled the land in search of Asian flesh' and whose pick-up lines are variations of 'Konichiwa, Chinese princess'. But unlike her protagonist, Keltner is married - and to a white man. Her husband, Rolf Keltner, a Californian of Norwegian descent, watches over their two-year-old daughter, Lucy, for the duration of her mother's interview. She met Keltner, a speech therapist with the San Francisco public schools, in a class on Chaucer, at university. Her first words to her husband-to-be were 'Come with me if you want to live' (Arnold Schwarzenegger's line from Terminator), uttered by Keltner with an outstretched hand after a fierce discussion of The Wife of Bath, from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. 'Of course, not all Caucasian men are 'hoarders',' she says. 'But white males obsessed with Asian women are a definite social phenomenon. They're everywhere - in cafes, park benches and bookstores. After a while you learn to spot them. They're usually wearing tan jeans and beigey colours and have bland personalities to match. They're what I call stealth predators. 'I feel a kinship with Asian-American women. When I give readings I'm always surprised to see quite young girls - perhaps 10 or 12 - sitting in the audience. I think back to when I was that young and know that if I had seen a youngish Asian-American woman reading from her book that would have changed things for me. It would have told me that becoming a writer or artist was not such a left-field thing for me to do.' For Chinese-American readers, one of the delights of Keltner's novels is the familiarity of her terrain: from her description of the merchandise to be found in a certain type of Chinatown grocery store to her observation that the reluctance of Chinese families to talk about their feelings is just one symptom of a general 'cultural despondence' and her hilarious musing that the creativity is sucked out of the Chinese when young by an 'invisible Chinese math vortex', leaving them 'more interested in making money than art'. 'It was important for me for my books to be relevant to Chinese-American readers, so there's lots of material in the book, including inside jokes, that can only be understood by Chinese,' Keltner says. 'But then I also want the novels to be accessible to the general reader so the poor Chinese reader has to put up with a description, say, of a lion dance because westerners haven't been bored to tears by seeing the same spectacle umpteen times. Sometimes I feel like I'm working both sides of the fence when I'm wondering if a certain passage will bore the Chinese reader but interest everyone else - and vice versa.' Keltner wrote The Dim Sum of All Things on the quiet while working as an office manager, preschool teacher and a telephone customer service rep. Although she had always wanted to become a writer, she eschewed the common route of studying a master of fine arts programme in writing as a warm-up. 'In my experience writers and artists who go to graduate school for MFAs become blocked and lose track of their own ideas because they're so busy listening to other people's opinions of their work,' says Keltner. 'People go into MFA programmes because they want a certain kind of recognition that they're working hard on a creative endeavour. I wrote the book for myself and told myself it was going to be the best book I could make it. I didn't want anyone else's opinion.' Keltner kept her writing life a secret until the day her agent snagged a contract. Then, when friends inquired what she was up to, Keltner could reply: 'Oh, nothing much. I've just got a book coming out from HarperCollins.' In writing a funny and upbeat novel with a Chinese-American protagonist, Keltner breaks new ground. Most fiction by Chinese-Americans Keltner has encountered emphasise hardship, discrimination and sadness, she says. 'Obviously, there is a lot of sorrow in immigration culture and in Chinese stories, but it's not as if we're all walking around 24/7 thinking about how horrible our grandparents had it. I know lots of people who are really funny and happen to be Asian. We're regular people who like to laugh.' She says she has her tortured side but considers herself a 'happy and cheerful person'. Indeed, she traces her positive disposition to being Chinese. 'My mother, even though she was born here and completely assimilated, has what I call the 'Chinese no pity' attitude. It's this idea, which I consider an ingrained part of Chinese culture, that you don't show your sadness or admit you're depressed. 'And if you're planning to do something that's important to you, you don't sit around whining and moaning about it, you just do it. That's why I didn't tell my family I was writing a novel or that I wanted to be a writer. I knew their response would have been 'Well, why are you telling us this? Go do it. Show me instead of sitting around whining and acting crazy.'' For the same reason, says Keltner, 'I never introduced any boyfriend to my family until I was seeing Rolf because I didn't want to bother them with anything that wouldn't come to anything. The 'no pity, no excuses' part of being Chinese is definitely part of me. 'At some point, you have to realise that this is your life, that no one's going to make you feel good if you don't do it yourself. You're the only one suffering. Nobody else cares. So get happy.' author's bookshelf The Lost Daughter of Happiness by Geling Yan 'Completely haunting, recreating the old San Francisco Chinatown with brilliance.' The Complete Works of Shakespeare 'I hate to admit to liking anything English for their screwed-up, colonial past, but Shakespeare was a genius when it came to human nature.' Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh 'It takes seriously that a young person can be a real writer, and inspired me as a child.' Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote 'A simple and perfect story, very different from the movie.' DV by Diana Vreeland (the late fashion editor and socialite) 'Fantastic, bizarre language from an exceptional person whose experiences had one foot in the old world and one in the modern.' WRITER'S NOTES Genre Contemporary fiction Latest book Buddha Baby Age 36 Born and lives In San Francisco Other works The Dim Sum of All Things Next project 'I'm pretty hush-hush about my next writing project, but it's a novel set in San Francisco in 1983, a coming-of-age tale about a 14-year-old girl who works in a Chinese restaurant.' Other jobs Office manager, preschool teacher, telephone customer service representative What the papers say 'Wong Keltner is unabashedly sassy and biting in her take on race and love, and the result is both refreshing and smart.' - Publishers Weekly