Words At Large

The Vancouver author Jen Sookfong Lee has been a writer for most of her 30 years. She wrote her first short story when she was seven. By the time she was ten, she had decided that she was better suited to writing than firefighting, her other dream job.

Until recently, though, most of her writing has been in short form. Her debut novel, The End of East, actually began life as a long poem. Published in 2007 as part of Random House’s New Faces of Fiction series, it’s a tale of family conflicts set against the backdrop of Vancouver’s Chinatown – a city within a city where dreams are shattered as quickly as they’re built, and where history repeats itself through the generations.

The narrator, Sammy Chan, was sure she’d escaped her family obligations when she fled Vancouver six years ago, but with her sister’s upcoming marriage, it's her turn to care for their aging mother. Abandoned by all four of her older sisters, jobless and stuck in a city she resents, Sammy finds herself cobbling together a makeshift family history, delving into stories that date back to 1913, when her grandfather, Seid Quan, then eighteen years old, came to Canada.

In CBC Radio’s Studio One Bookclub, Jen Sookfong Lee talks about the evolution of this story from poem to novel and relates other frank and funny anecdotes about her writing. Click on the Words at Large podcast to hear that conversation.

On the horizon
If you're going to be in the Vancouver area on April 14, enter to win tickets to the next CBC Radio Studio One Bookclub. Jen Sookfong Lee will be Sheryl MacKay's guest co-host in a conversation with Alberta writer Padma Viswanathan about her debut novel, The Toss of A Lemon. It's being published this month as part of Random House's 2008 New Faces of Fiction program. For more information, go to the website.