About the Author:
Erick Setiawan grew up in Indonesia and moved to San Francisco as a teenager to learn English. He later attended Stanford. He is now writing fulltime, and OF BEES AND MIST is his first novel.
A Conversation with Erick Setiawan:
Q: OF BEES AND MIST is your debut novel. Where did the idea for this book come from?
A: The origin for this book came from the tales and legends that revolved around the women in my family. I was very shy as a child, and instead of playing with the neighbours’ kids, I would sit in my mother’s living room and observe her interact with my aunts and our family friends. They were always full of stories—the funny ones, the sad ones, the horrific and outrageous ones—and no subject was taboo among them (I learned the term “sex maniac” in kindergarten—from their discussion of an uncle’s appetite in the bedroom. Because I was so quiet, I suppose they often forgot that I was in the room). Their outlook on life, I realized later, was a curious mix of traditional Chinese values and Indonesian superstitions. Over the years, my mind became a sort of kitchen sink for these stories—all knotted and tangled up with no rhyme or reason. The book was my attempt to sort them (and by extension, my childhood) into some kind of order. I wanted the book to capture the joys and sorrows and intrigues that once pervaded the innermost worlds of these women.
Q: OF BEES AND MIST transcends reality. The story is set in a nameless town during a timeless era where magic, witchcraft, spirits and spells abound. How did the book’s mystical setting and fantastical elements come about?
A: The original early chapters of the book had none of the fantastical elements, and after a few months of tinkering with them, I realized that something was lacking. It was too straightforward, too constrained, too rooted in reality, but I had no idea how to fix it. And then my dad, who was visiting from Indonesia at the time, told me a story about a friend of his who was often kept up at nights by bees. I was confused, and asked him if his friend was a beekeeper. My dad laughed, and said that it was the friend’s wife who was depriving the poor man of sleep with her grievances, which sounded exactly like bees buzzing. The idea hit me like a bolt of lightning. The bees were the perfect physical manifestation of Eva’s disgruntlement, and at once I knew what the book had been lacking. I went back to the chapters I had already written, and slowly began to fashion a mystical setting that would uphold this kind of storytelling and also reflect my various cultural background—Chinese, Indonesian, American. I knew I couldn’t set it in a real city or a real country, since there is no place in the world where Chinese traditions and Indonesian occultism and American ideology coexist seamlessly side by side. The answer was the mythical town in the book, where the inexplicable and the supernatural exert as much influence and authority as logic and individual will. After the bees came the mists, the duelling flowers, the fireflies.
Q: You book explores the progression of love and loss across three generations of women. The main character Meridia is at the crux of this thirty year journey of hope and heartbreak. Who is Meridia based on? Do any of your other characters have a real-life inspiration?
A: Meridia as a character is wholly and entirely my invention, but her story up to her banishment from Orchard Road was my mother’s. Much like Meridia, my mother was also the product of a broken home, and she married my father at a young age partly because she wanted to get away from her family. Soon after the wedding, she discovered the duplicitous nature of her mother-in-law (my paternal grandmother, on whom Eva is based), and similar to what happens in the book, all hell broke loose. Here the similarity stops, and Meridia develops her own narrative. My paternal grandmother, on the other hand, continues to shadow Eva throughout the book. Filled with distrust and discontent, my grandmother had ten children whom she constantly set at odds so they would always rely on her for support and mediation. She treated her daughters-in-law with a scrutiny worthy of a jailer, was so quick to anger and impossible to pacify that my mother called her by many an unpleasant name. I took my grandmother’s darkest side and implanted it in Eva, but it was also foremost in my mind that Eva should be resourceful and irresistible, since I did not want a character with nothing good or redemptive about her. I will leave it to readers to determine whether or not I succeeded.
Another character who has a real-life inspiration is Gabriel, who is based on my maternal grandfather. Like Gabriel, my grandfather had both a mistress and a temper, and was often so tyrannical that his friends likened him to Mao Zedong. Thankfully, as is often the case with tyrants, he was nothing but the kindest soul to his grandchildren. For one, I never experienced any of Noah’s sweat-drenched paralysis when I was around him.
Q: In the book, you describe mysterious coloured mists that magically appear in the ether and sweep characters away. What is the significance of these mists? What are they supposed to represent?
A: I have always been fascinated by mist, and living in San Francisco with its endless reserves of fog has certainly intensified my interest. I think mist is romantic, enchanting, brooding, otherworldly, and mysterious at the same time. It implies secrecy, omissions, things hidden and never spoken. When I was writing about Gabriel’s infidelity, the different mists struck me as the perfect metaphor for his situation—they conceal him, carry him to a different world, protect his secret, hide his shame, and keep other people away from it. Whenever Gabriel plunges into those mists, he becomes another man. But you can only keep secrets for so long before they catch up with you. Hence the mists again become the perfect metaphor in the scene when all three appear together and settle their scores with Gabriel. Just like Eva and her bees, the mists seem to me a fitting physical representation of Gabriel’s—and later Daniel’s—inner turmoil.
Q: What do you hope readers will take away from reading OF BEES AND MIST?
A: I hope, for one, that after reading about Eva, they will be grateful for the families they have! I hope that they will derive enjoyment and inspiration from the story, and see themselves in one or more of the characters. I also hope that the book will allow them to escape for a few hours to a world away from their bills, their deadlines, or their screaming kids. What better way to counter the boss’s wrath than to find themselves transported into the Cave of Enchantment?
Q: You grew up in Jakarta to Chinese parents. The Chinese in Indonesia have been discriminated against for decades, acting as scapegoats in times of economic and political turmoil, often victims of violence and treated as second-class citizens. Did you experience this prejudice as a child? If so, how did it affect you and how did you cope with it?
A: My childhood in Jakarta was tense and uneasy, and even long after I moved to the U.S., I had no idea what it was like to live without fear. In Indonesia, I saw hate and prejudice everywhere around me. On the streets, the natives harassed and hurled invectives at us. Lawmakers denied our legal existence and exploited us to score favours with the masses. At school, many of my teachers routinely denounced the Chinese, exposing us to punishment and ridicule simply because of our race. Not even churches and temples were exempt from desecration. A story I heard from my mother that gave me frequent nightmares as a child had to do with my great-grandmother. One night, a mob broke into my great-grandmother’s house without warning, giving her just enough time to snatch one of her grandsons who happened to be with her and hide under the bed. The mob carried machetes and used them to destroy furniture and hunt for hidden jewellery by slashing mattresses, striking just inches from my great-grandmother’s head. My great-grandmother saw her life flashing before her, and the grandson wet himself out of fear. By luck, the mob either did not see them or decided to spare them. They dragged all the broken furniture and clothes and books and family pictures out to the street and torched them. A few hours later, my great-grandmother turned up dishevelled and disoriented at the house of her second eldest son, my grandfather (the inspiration for Gabriel). Normally strong and proud, she burst out sobbing as soon as she saw him. The only possessions she had left in the world were the clothes on her back. My mother, who was twelve at the time, saw her grandmother reduced to this state and told me the story many years later.
That story terrified me. In my childhood mind, I relived my great-grandmother’s horror again and again. I knew that it could happen to my family at any time, that a mob could break into our house and destroy all our possessions and harm us, and there would be nothing we could do to prevent them or bring them to justice. It frightened me to live in a society where such things were possible, and that there was no law or constitution that guaranteed our basic rights and freedom. Confronted with all this, I felt trapped and helpless; as an escape, I turned to books and withdrew into the world of my imagination. If I was quiet before, I became virtually mute. I did not know how to cope any other way. I told myself that as soon as I had the chance, I would leave the country and live elsewhere.
Q: You came to the U.S. at age sixteen, leaving your family in Indonesia and barely speaking English. What motivated you at such a young age to make such a drastic move?
A: Oppression and injustice is soul-crushing, and it makes you believe that you are worth less than others. I saw this happened with my own family. Because we were forbidden to speak Chinese or embrace any part of our heritage, we learned to associate shame and repulsion with being Chinese. Because we could not seek justice when we were wronged, we learned to take in defeat and humiliation and even convinced ourselves that we were at fault. When they spit on us, we were grateful that they didn’t beat us. When they beat us, we thanked our lucky stars that they didn’t kill us. Even our names were not our own—my last name, Setiawan, was something my dad picked out of thin air—because having a Chinese name came with its own list of difficulties. As their rights were taken away, many in my family accepted their condition as part of an immutable fate. They stopped fighting. They stopped asking questions. They accepted abuse as if it were set in stone. I refused. I believed that there was another life possible, a life in which I could embrace who I was and walk out my front door without fear, or without worrying that my slightest action would incite retribution. When I boarded that plane to America, I knew that the next time I returned to Indonesia, it would be as a tourist.
Q: You graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Computer Science. How did you go from a field that involves very little language to becoming a published author? What were some of your strongest inspirations for making such a transition?
A: At Stanford, I struggled with English for a long time, but because I was so quiet and perhaps looked calm, people thought I was more competent than I actually was. The challenges of learning a new language brought about a new kind of silence. I was ashamed of my English. I felt inferior to everyone in my class, and I remember shaking and stammering whenever my professors called on me (this was one of the reasons why I chose to study Computer Science—they didn’t require me to speak in class). I was very hard on myself then. Appalled by what I believed was my ineptitude, I took a greater refuge in the written word, and it was through novels that I began to see the power and beauty of the English language. When I wrote in Indonesian, I felt stifled, displaced, an impostor; in English, I could glimpse openings and opportunities I had never encountered before. It was my chance to break down that wall of silence, but I didn’t seize it right away. Riddled with doubt and an oft-crippling sense of inadequacy, I chose instead to work as a software engineer. Soon enough, I realized that I wasn’t cut out for that profession, and I began to write in my spare time. I wrote two novels before OF BEES AND MIST, and they were awful and they must have been rejected hundreds of times. But as soon as I finished Bees in December 2007 after working on it for almost four years, I knew this one was special. I signed with my agent three weeks after I sent it out. He sold the book about a month later and my dream of becoming a published author was suddenly a reality.
Q: What is your next project?
A: I’m working on another novel and I’m very excited about it. I don’t want to say too much because I’m superstitious, but it draws on my cultural background and experiences even more than OF BEES AND MIST and has a similar tone, as well as a gripping—I hope!—family mystery at its heart. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into it.
To find out more about Erick Setiawan go to www.ofbeesandmist.com
