Vanessa Hua | Writers' Voices

Award-winning author, Vanessa Hua, joins us to discuss her bestselling, historical novel, Forbidden City. Set in 1960’s China, Forbidden City takes place in the time before, during, and after the Cultural Revolution, and is centered around Mei Xiang, a young villager, who is recruited to be a dancer for the Chinese Communist Party leader, Chairman Mao. “So the novel begins on the eve of the Cultural Revolution and my protagonist, Mei, is selected for a mysterious duty in the Capital, and when she leaves her village and arrives in the Capital that’s when she realizes that she’s part of this troupe that dances with the Chairman… but China itself was amid turmoil. Just a few years earlier, there’d been the Great Leap Forward, where Mao Zedong had hoped to rapidly industrialize the country, but this led to mass starvation, to famine, because of all these unproven agricultural techniques… At that time, Mao stepped back from daily governance… By the time my novel begins, the Chairman and his wife, Madam, are thinking, ‘What is going to be my legacy? It certainly can’t be the Great Leap Forward. How can I come back to power again?’ …So this is the fray that Mei steps into.”

When readers first meet Mei, she is a 15-year old, self-absorbed teenager with dreams of a life better than the one she’s always known. After leaving for Beijing and joining the dance troupe, the complexities of her character emerge and her actions can be seen as either heroic or villainous. As Mei spends more time with the Chairman, truths are unraveled and she realizes that the illustrious, new world that she becomes a part of is not quite as it seems. To further complicate matters, rivalries transpire and Hua takes readers into the dynamics that arise when oppositions occur and people compete for the same thing. She explained, “In a patriarchy where they don’t have much power, there’s limits to their power, what power they have they might use to turn on each other.”

Along with historical fiction, Hua, who is a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle, has also written in a variety of other genres, including short story, contemporary fiction, and journalism. For her, having experience in one genre has been beneficial when working within another. “I think each genre helps me excel at the other. My journalism taught me to write daily and on a deadline and be able to work with editors, so that’s great for fiction. With journalism, my fiction experience has taught me how to think about character, and setting, and narrative arc. Whereas my earliest attempts at journalism read like court transcripts. It was just a series of quotes and then it ended. Now, I’m much more likely to think about arc and to go at things more artfully. I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to work in all these genres.”