Nothing is wasted

A lone red poppy growing in a field

With many fingers and toes crossed, I’m hoping you’ll get a chance to read my new novel next  year.

It’s been a while since my last – Happy Families ­– was published. Although I’ve been writing about imaginary characters and situations for years, during most of that time my brain was always working on the novel that became Happy Families. There were digressions with other stories where I thought I should write something more ‘publish-able’ (whatever that means) but in the end, it was the story close to my heart that made it.

 I wanted to keep writing about a community populated by the unexpected so I knew my next book would follow a character glimpsed only briefly in that first novel. I sniffed around and waited to see who would beckon me over.

Novel writing, like romance, involves having your head turned by the wrong person. It turns out I spent the best part of a year and thirty thousand words, completely focused on one character, desperate to understand what she wanted, prepared to put up with her (many) flaws and hoped she would live happily ever after. But it was not to be.

Reader, we broke up.

Had I wasted my time and my efforts? Well yes and no. I’d written a lot that nobody is ever going to read but I’d also met some new people (characters), learnt some new things (about house clearances) and discovered how it feels to write yourself into a dead end (not great).

I went on to find the characters for my next novel but I had to go on many other ‘dates’ with other plots and storylines. Some of them I will save for another day but I want to write about one of them now, in this blog, in early November when our thoughts turn to 11th November and Remembrance Sunday. Or perhaps I should refer to it by its American name – Veterans Day.

My original inspiration was the knowledge that the beaches of south Wales so resembled the beaches of Northern France that American GIs arrived here en masse to prepare for D-Day. Among them were several Chinese-American GIs who must have been quite astonished to discover my grandfather and his seven children nestled here in the Welsh countryside. As was usual in those days, if you met someone else from the old country, you invited them into your home and so, the GIs visited my grandfather’s house regularly until they left for Normandy.

Research can take you off onto all sorts of tangents and one of them led me to the story of Private Hoy You Lim who was a Chinese-American GI stationed in England. That’s his photo, you can see, black and white, grainy, a man hurrying out of shot on the right-hand side – a young Chinese man who decided to fight for his adopted country even though it had an active policy called the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That’s pretty much what it says on the tin, in case you were wondering. Nevertheless, he signed up and got shipped to England where he was stationed before being killed in action crossing a bridge in France, aged twenty-six.

Photo of Hoy You Lim, a young Chinese-American soldier smiling against a barracks backdrop.

Look at that smile though.

You can read more of his story and how he was almost forgotten except for a good friend and comrade who kept his memory alive here.  

Ultimately, I realised I could not tell the story of Chinese-American GIs in the UK myself. I wouldn’t be able to do it justice. I’d be thrilled if someone else took up the baton and I get to read about them in an as-yet unwritten novel.

 You see, nothing is wasted. AJ Wong wrote the above blog three years ago. Her grandfather wrote about his wartime experiences in England over seventy years ago. I’m writing about them both right here in Remembrance Week 2023.

Who knows where it will all might lead?