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.