Opening up the past
Author and illustrator Sue Cheung took a step into the unknown when she sat down to write Chinglish – a YA tragicomedy and a very personal tale that lays bare a difficult childhood. Despite her initial reservations about revealing deeply-buried memories, Sue tells Pen&inc.’s Rob Green that the impact has been largely positive – including a win in the inaugural Diverse Book Awards.
SUE Cheung is an artist and author whose first published work was aimed at a younger audience, through picture books (Bob and Rob, When Angus Met Alvin, and Chill with Lil). When her agent suggested a departure into the realms of memoir for older readers she was quick to dismiss the idea. She is the daughter of first generation Hong Kong immigrants to the UK, and spent much of her early life living above their Chinese takeaway – working in the kitchen or serving behind the counter when she was old enough. Her home life was difficult – at times very difficult – and was a period of life that she was happy to have moved on from. However, a conversation with her agent changed her perspective.
She says: “When I was doing my picture books, my agent was Celia Catchpole and she semi-retired and passed things over to her son, James. He said to me ‘come and visit and we can have a chat’, because we had never met.
“We had this very long chat and he was asking about my childhood, and I told him about living above a takeaway and some of those things and he said ‘you should write a book about it’. Straight away I said ‘no way’, this isn’t a book anyone would want to read and the last thing I wanted to do was drag it all up again.
“But he was convinced that lots of people would want to hear about it, and
Spring-Summer 2021
that really shocked me because I really didn’t think it would be interesting. It was so horrible for me, so why would anyone else want to know about it.”
An honest account
Sue says she also had more personal reasons for not wanting to write it, saying: “I’d brushed it all under the carpet and was in denial about it. I never wanted to acknowledge that, and I had moved on.”
However, James persuaded Sue to at
least start the book and suggested she send over a couple of paragraphs. She began by jotting down some of the funnier incidents from her family life – an annual battle with a Lobster for Christmas dinner, a hamster being vacuumed up by Sue’s younger sister. “I thought it would just be a funny kids book,” says Sue, adding: “There were lots of crazy things that happened.”
So, Sue set about writing what she thought would be a fairly light middle grade book, but once again James her agent intervened. He suggested she “write a more honest account, including the bad things as well”. This version of Sue’s life was still not something she wanted to share, but she realised that an honest reckoning of those early days could help others who had been through similar experiences. When you read Chinglish it is understandable that she was reluctant to dredge up memories and commit them to paper – racism, domestic abuse, child abuse, bullying are just some of the themes Sue addresses. She says: “It was really painful for me, and I didn’t want to go there. But he said that there might be readers who have gone through this and it might help them. Half of me didn’t want to do this, but half of me thinks that I should because it might help other people. Something was making me want to write it.” And while it was a difficult process for
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