Secret Passion To Write
Results in First Novel
By M. D. Drysdale

Tinling Choong of Randolph will have her first novel published by the Nan Talese imprint of Doubleday on Jan. 23. It tells the story of eight asian women. Here, she goes over galley sheets at "her" table at theThree Bean Caf‚ in Randolph.

TinlingChoong's secret passion is about to go public.

On Jan. 23 her first novel, "Fire Wife," tracing the lives of eight Asian women, will be published by Doubleday Books. That event will be followed by readings scheduled in New Haven, Houston, Boston, and California—and at the Cover-to-Cover Bookshop in Randolph.

A native of Malaysia with a bright smile and ready laugh, Choong came to Randolph when her husband, Tseming Yang, took a teaching position at Vermont Law School in 2000. The couple lives on Crabapple Ridge with their 19-month-old daughter Gwen-Zoe Choong Yang.

It was her husband who told her a couple of years ago that she just had to do something with the collection of stories she had been writing on the side. She had been feeling a bit sad and down, she related last week in a Herald interview, when Tseming suggested she try to find an agent.

She already had reason to believe that what she had written was pretty special. Her teacher at an evening class at Berkeley, Calif. had taken one look at her first story and told her, "Get an agent!"

She didn't, but she kept writing. Years later (again to cheer herself up) she sent four of the stories to magazines. Three were immediately snapped up by the Sun, the Minnesota Review, and the Literary Review.

So when Tseming made his suggestion, she agreed, sending out three chapters of the collected stories to agents. She hoped for the best but wasn't prepared for what happened on her husband's birthday a couple of weeks later.

Birthday Surprise

On that day she found a voice message on her phone: "I really like your chapters. Call me and we'll see what we can do together."

It was from the agent of the successful Asian-American writer Amy Tan, who wanted to meet her in New York.

"I was jumping and jumping for an hour," Choong recalled, her eyes alight with animation. "Just leaping and leaping. I'd only read about this in books, but it was happening to me."

And it kept happening. At the meeting in New York, the agent offered her a contract then and there. Within two weeks, the agent had nailed down a two-book contract with prestigious Doubleday, under its Nan Talese label. (She had begun work on a second novel at this point.)

"I have to tell you it was a life-changing experience for me," she said of those few weeks, that all would-be authors dream about.

Raised in Maylasia

Raised in Malaysia by Chinese parents, Tinling Choong first moved to this country to attend Wellesley College. She later moved to Berkeley where she met Tseming, worked at a consulting job—and decided to take that creative writing course.

"I always loved to write; it was a secret passion," she confessed.

Choong doesn't use that word lightly. "Fire Wife" began to take shape when she saw a photograph in a book portraying a naked woman in a restaurant, whose body was being used as a table, or a platter, as four men sat around, munching on sushi.

"I was very shocked and angry," she said. "I was so affected."

The next day, after class, she began to write. Suddenly she could see the sushi woman's life and experience in her mind and began to write about her.

"Something carried me," she related. "I felt like she was channeling through me. I could not stop."

The result was the story that so impressed her teacher.

Ever since then, she has lived in awe of that experience.

"It has happened a few times in 15 years," she said. "I don't know how to invite it to come. I can't say, 'Feeling, come back!'

"But when it comes I do my best work."

Seeing a child prostitute in Bankok, Thailand, brought it back. She felt she could see through the child's eyes.

Those experiences led her to write "stories about women in the world," and over several years what would be the novel took shape.

"Fire Wife" has eight characters, she explained, all Asian women. There's a photographer and six photographic subjects. There's also a "girl traveling between lives." The stories are separate; but the photographer is in all of them, and knows all the other women.

"I feel like I'm giving them voices," she said. "I feel I can set them free. They don't have a voice in our world."

"Fire Wife" could be considered a feminist book, she says, but quickly adds "But I actually love men a LOT."

Next on the Agenda

Meanwhile, Choong is pursuing a PhD in Chinese literature at Yale. Her her dissertation is taking "FOREVER" but she has good excuses—"you know, the novel, the baby …"

Her dissertation is about the Chinese literary passion for fictional life triangles during the 20s and 30s, stories she considers allegories of the "ambivalences" in people's lives amid enormous cultural shifts.

"It's human to be vacillating" between different lives and loves, she reflected. "It's a human condition."

The photographer in "Fire Wife" is in a bit of the same position. She's left her regular job to embark on "a voyage of discovery" with her camera.

"She's taking a leave of absence from her regular life," Choong explained.

And how about Tinling Choong and her own "secret passion." Is her fiction writing a similar "leave of absence from her regular life"? Is it her own personal voyge of discovery?

That bright smile flashes again.

Just maybe, she admitts.

The second novel is due at Doubleday in June.

"I don't know how it ends," she confides.