The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street

Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho joins the podcast to talk about her bestselling memoir The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street. Born in Taiwan, Wiley moved to Canada with her family when she was nine. At age 12, Wiley and her siblings were left behind while her parents returned to Taiwan to work. We talk about neighbourhood haunts, Duran Duran, and the liminal spaces between places, cultures, languages, identities and selves. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Definitely had some parties. Um where, you know, a lot of underage drinking, a lot of uh yeah, like you know, watching shows we're not supposed to watch, staying up all night, literally all night till dawn, until basically we just fell asleep over um junk food. Um yeah, it was fun. And I would say, you know, it sounds heavy and sad, but I hope that both I try to inject some of the reality of it, which was like some of it was ridiculously hilarious, too.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Welcome back to the Red Fern Book Review. I am your host, Amy Tyler, and today I have author Wiley Wei Chung-ho on the podcast, and she's here to talk about her new book. It's called The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street. And I'm super excited to share this interview with you for several reasons. But one of the main reasons is I really love the opportunity to share new and different authors that you may not have heard of. Um, Wiley's book is a runaway hit uh here in Vancouver, and it's the number two book in the province. But if you don't live around here, you might not have heard about um her or the book. So I think um you're gonna enjoy that. And I wanted to tell you a little bit about her before we I move over and talk with her. Um, Wiley is she's been published in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies, but this is her first um full book. She was born in Taiwan, and um, she's the youngest of five children, and her family moved to Canada when she was nine years old in 1979. And she her parents remained here for a few years, and then they returned to Taiwan um so they could find work. And she was left here alone with her siblings beginning at the age of 12. So that's where the story starts, and let's move over and talk with Wiley. Hello, Wiley. Welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Hi, Amy. Thank you very much for having me on Redfern.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

Um, I'm really excited today for many reasons. But um one, this is to me a hyper-local story. It's gonna um apply to a lot of people, but I actually raised my children in the very neighborhood, like two blocks away. I don't know where you uh spent your kind of middle middle uh years, like your teen years and high school years. So I knew every like when you would say go to Mac's uh for a drink and then go to the Dunbar Library, and you want to go to the eatery. So that was really fun, fun as a reader.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

So I really yeah. I've had other readers tell me that they they know exactly the streetscape that I was trying to describe, and you know, walking down the the wide Dunbar street, and then well, back in the 80s it wasn't um as developed as it is today. So, you know, there were a few shops and those shops really stood out, I guess, and they've been around for a long time. Like Lawrence's Books has been around for a long time.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Lawrence's Books, which is for those who don't know it, I I always have thought it's sort of a front for something because it's just it's a giant bookstore, used bookstore, and it is hardly ever open. It's never open, it's always in disrepair. And I've actually gone in to try and um get books and and or bring in books, and you don't ever leave with any money, you just the only option really is to leave the books because they don't pay you like they'll pay you like 50 cents or something.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

So it's a fun little, it's a quirky but I love that it's still there, and I know some people once in a while will wander in and and you know pick up an an old uh an old book.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Um, okay, so let's start. The first thing I wanted to ask you about was the title of your book, um, The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street. Can you explain to people the term astronaut children?

SPEAKER_00 4:59

Sure. Um, so the term was coined by a sociologist anthropologist named Dr. Iwa Ong, and she's out of UC Berkeley. I believe she's retired now, so she'd be Professor Emeritus. But um, she coined the phrase in 1999 to describe a phenomenon where one or both parents are working in Asia while their children grow up in places like Vancouver. Um, this was very prevalent in the 80s and 90s, just before the Hong Kong take um handover, and then as well for um families like mine from Taiwan trying to escape the threat of a communist uh invasion or possible invasion. And so this happened in you know tens of thousands. That there's no specific immigration statistic on this, but there are many, many of us in mostly in places like Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand. Okay. So yeah, the term is actually, I think, I mean, it's a it's a sociological term now, but it's also, I think, very evocative if you think of you know astronauts being floating, not quite tethered to Earth and just sort of hovering above. And so that's the way I think of my family actually growing up, that we we sort of orbited each other without actually being together much of the time, ever since uh the age of 12. Well, my parents reverse migrated and returned to Taiwan in order to work and support us. So they left us in Canada and they went back to Taiwan to work.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

So tell people a general summary. Can you give a little setup about your life in Taiwan prior to um your migration or immigration and then the setup for the book with your parents leaving? Explain, explain what happened there.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Sure. So my family has been many generations in Taiwan. Um, I would say we were a very you know privileged middle upper class family. My my um my grandfather started this private hospital in a small town called Zhutong. It's south of Taipei, and he was like one of the first um Western trained doctors, and he brought a surgery to the town and saved many, many lives and birthed many, many children. And then my father took over the practice, and it was just a very thriving practice. We were one of these established families in the community, and we I think my parents enjoyed a great deal of esteem and respect, and you know, they were they were right in there. So I grew up in that, and it was in a big multi-generational household. So there were aunts and uncles, cousins everywhere, and we had um, as was very typical, we had a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny, like it it was a bustling household and also with lots of domestic help. Then in 1979, when uh uh Washington switched diplomatic ties from the Republic of China, which is which was the government in Taiwan, to Beijing and basically consigned Taiwan to like ambiguity because it doesn't mention Taiwan at all. It just says there's a one China policy and it's Beijing. And so then the question of Taiwan was up in the air, and my parents really, really were scared that they thought that the uh the mainland would come and invade Taiwan and take it over. And of course, that's still kind of a a threat. Uh, but in 1979 it was very acute because my my brother was turning uh the age of conscription. He was 16, 17 at the time, and he would have had to go into military service, and they thought if there was war coming, um he would be on the front lines. So they packed everything up and and moved us overseas. It took a while to get to Canada because of course Taiwan didn't have uh didn't enjoy uh an easy relationship with with the rest of the world. So it was really hard for them to move. And so they they said goodbye to all that was, you know, like what I was describing, this this really wonderful community life to coming to Vancouver where they only knew my uncle and aunt, and nobody else knew them, and they couldn't find a job worse than that. That was suitable for you know my dad's um background. He was at the College of Surgeons and Physicians at the time, didn't recognize his credentials and said he could go back to medical school. And he was nearing 50 at the time, and he just said, No, I can't, I can't do that. Um how was he gonna support five kids and mom and himself? So they decided after three years of being in Vancouver, just trying to make it work, they couldn't make it work. Uh they packed up again and returned to Taiwan um to work and resume the medical practice, and then they sent money to us in Vancouver. So that was the way I grew up. And when they left, I was 12 years old. So I was the youngest of five. So technically, you know, it was legal because my my eldest brother was um uh 21, and he was in charge of unfortunately for him, four younger sisters who didn't want to listen to him. So it was uh quite a chaotic and dysfunctional household.

SPEAKER_01 11:09

This book took you eight years to write, and I'm very interested to hear about how you tried to write it a number of different ways and landed finally on writing it as a memoir. So can you talk about that process and what wasn't working in the other genres and how did you end up with a memoir?

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Yes, that is a good question for all the writers and who are listening. Um, I think memoir is one of those genres that you think, oh, it should be easy. You're you're writing what you already know, you're writing your own story. But in it turns out it's I think one of the hardest things to do well. Um and when I first started, I I really didn't want to write memoir because I thought it's I don't know, it always feels super close. It is very, very close. Um, and I started writing short stories, kind of funny little anecdotes. The very first story I wrote was Um Camping for New Canadians. And in that version that I wrote as a as a fictional story, this the tent, uh the tent was like featured very large, loomed very large in in the story, and it was kind of you know, very, very comical. It became this kind of buffoonish kind of story. And I got a few laughs when I shared it with friends, and they they thought it was kind of funny, but the backdrop of it was, you know, not mentioned, which was that my parents were about to return to Taiwan, and they wanted to leave us with this nice uh Canadian experience of camping as a family. And it without getting into it, it turns into a bit of a debacle. And um yeah, I I wrote about the debacle part, but not the backdrop and and and you know the deeper emotions. And so I just kept going in that vein. I just collected a bunch of short stories, and then um then I thought, oh, I could turn this into a travel, uh almost like a travel story, because of course uh the family is back and forth between Taiwan and Canada, and I thought we could talk about that. Then uh I even wrote it as a mystery at one point because I I love that. Yeah, because I know I always it haunted me that my parents would do anything for us, but you know, stay with us, like because they couldn't. And I think growing up that that really bothered me and we we couldn't talk about it, and so it became a bit of a mystery in my head, and so I thought, oh, I could frame it as a mystery, and then basically I tried everything except poetry or romance or fantasy. Um, but in the end, I chose memoir because I think really at the heart of this whole project is reclamation. It's that reclamation project for a childhood that I didn't know how to um grapple with. This idea of like parents working so hard for us, but not being with us. And I was very young, I was the youngest of five, so I think I was the most affected. And I was 12 when they left, like I said. And so as an adolescent, I was, you know, really resentful, I was really angry, I was lonely, all of those things, but I really didn't know how to reconcile the two. Like here we are living in, you know, Dunbar neighborhood, Vancouver, West Side Vancouver. It's is it, you know, it's privileged, it's safe, it's all these things. And we we hadn't we had a nice house, um five siblings. We each had our our own rooms. Um, you know, we had cars to drive, my parents saved for us so that we none of us had to worry about university tuition, like all of those privileges. But then I couldn't, I just couldn't really be grateful for them, even my parents are always like, you should be grateful, you know, other kids would kill for this. Um, but I always thought, well, yeah, but other kids have parents. Like I always felt in a way like we were being bought, you know, bought off or something. And so I I just yeah, I just really grappled with this idea of privilege and also deprivation. And then I realized that it had to be memoir because I that's what I was really, really dealing with, and to fictionalize that would have been yet another separation. So I think it had to be, I had to own my own story as hard as it was to tell. I feel like it that's what memoir does. It it you know unites you with your difficult past. And I think um probably that's why so many people write memoir, is uh is trying to reconcile something that that was very difficult in their in their past.

SPEAKER_01 16:06

So let's talk about memoir itself. And you have an author's note where you sort of define what it is or what it is for you, and you mentioned there are like when you read the book, I'm always amazed when people can r recall those feelings from so long ago. And as we all know, when you're children, everything just seems more, and you have that ability through you know, the smells, the sounds, the you you it's like we're there, but I'm sure you can't remember everything. You say that, and you there's some people you probably think you want to protect. And so, how you talk about collapsing timelines a bit. Talk about what were your kind of internal guidelines and how did you how did you do that?

SPEAKER_00 16:59

Sure. Um, so memoir is considered creative nonfiction, not just straight nonfiction, which I believe, like say autobiography would be straight nonfiction. Um, so creative nonfiction does give you a little bit of license to fill in the gaps where you your memory fails. Um, for example, all the dialogue I've had to recreate um based on um stories that I remember, stories that my my siblings told, and I've kept a journal, or back then I called it my diary, Dear Diary, from the age of about 11. I've I have boxes and boxes of diaries that I consulted. But it's interesting, Amy, when you say that, you know, how do you remember? Because when you're a kid, um what I write is just the facts of things, you know, like, oh mom and dad left today, um, feeling sad, the house is quiet. Like stuff like this. It it was very superficial. So I didn't really get into how I was feeling, and probably I was in a bit of denial anyway. Um, so I've had to reimagine some of that stuff or like reading between the lines of what I actually wrote. Um and then yeah, piecing it together with photographs and with uh other like my siblings' accounts and that kind of thing. And then to get at the real sensory details, I actually went to a hypnotherapist. Um yeah, it was very helpful for accessing some of those more, I would say, more hidden memories. Um and it was safer to do so, I would say, because you're guided to remember and then guided back out so that you're not hopefully re-traumatizing yourself or getting stuck in that trauma. And so I did a few of those sessions for certain scenes that I really needed, like that scene at the airport where my parents are leaving the first time. And I just remember like I remembered suitcases, but I couldn't remember much of the rest. And so anyway, that was an instance of where it helped to try and access some of the more embedded, like the deeper memories. Um and as for guiding what I chose to write about and didn't write about, I think I like to say this that I have the book would be a lot thicker if I had kept everything in. But in the end, I pulled out three chapters and they were really juicy chapters. They're probably ones that would have, you know, gotten me. Um, but I I decided that they weren't actually my stories to tell. They really, those three chapters really centered, then they're very dramatic, but the the centers of them were my siblings. And I didn't feel like that was right for me to tell. Um, in fact, my litmus paper test was when I asked them, you know, what what do you remember of this incident or this situation? And they were like, hell no, I don't want to even remember it. So you know, clues like that, I realized, no, that's too that's too much. Um so I guess maybe for other people writing memoir, I would say the question is, you know, if your sibling were to ask you about writing this story, whatever story it is, and you say, hell no, I don't want that out there, then that should be a clue that you shouldn't write about it. So either get permission, and if everyone's cool, that's great. But I would say the more the really, really difficult, the really dramatic stories are the ones that are are hard for people. And like I say, I didn't I wrote about some dramatic things in the story, but they centered me. I I think I was very much at the center of the story. Um, whereas the the three chapters that I stripped really centered other people. And so I didn't feel like that those were mine to tell, unfortunately. But that's that's memoir for you, right? You you it's a difficult, it's it's very fuzzy that line between what's ours to tell and what's really other people's stories.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

Your siblings think about the book.

SPEAKER_00 21:22

Okay, so I have four siblings, and the two older ones, um, I think they had their own serious challenges. So they're they may not read the book. They're quite supportive of the fact that I'm right that I've written this book, uh, but they have only, I think, reviewed it, you know, briefly. And they seem content that I haven't thrown anybody under the bus. But I don't know that they want to read all the details. They said they lived it, they survived it. Why would they need to revisit it? Uh, the two, the two younger siblings, closer to me in age. Um, Uh, they love it. They think it's wonderful that I've, you know, kind of memorialized what we lived and what we survived. And um I think they get they really understand the spirit of it, which is like it's a a tribute to the family in many ways. Uh in terms of them not being uh you know it's not complimentary in in every chapter, that's absolutely true. And I really wanted to be as truthful as possible. And I think as memoir writers, if your intention is to treat your subject matter with love and care, I think the reader understands that it's not meant to be, you know, uh salacious or mean or any other.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

So it comes across as like a it it's like a typical sibling relationship. You do it. I'm not getting that. Forget it. Like, you know, or yeah, that too.

SPEAKER_00 22:59

But I I think, yeah, I think you have to write the full person. So the full person is never like lovely and nor are they truly evil if you understand their motivations. So I think that's what I've tried to do.

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Okay. Um so I wanted to ask you about speaking of that, about your parents, because I thought you did a really good job. You were at turns compassionate with them, but you didn't totally let them off the hook because it was clear that I mean they needed to make money, but they also lost a lot. Like status, friends, language. They so do you think that they did the right thing for your family?

SPEAKER_00 23:50

Hmm. I yeah, I I think about that a lot. Um, because my parents were very traditional and you know, they were the parents and we were the children, and so they were supposed to lead us. Um and so they never talked about whether they made mistakes or not. But I do know that they felt regretful at moments, so I know that they had a hard time with it too. Um did they make the right decision for us? I I can't really say, 'cause they could have stayed, but then we would have been probably in poverty because they would have had to take uh, you know, sort of uh probably labored jobs, which is uh admirable for sure. But um with a family of seven, it would have been really uh quite a struggle because in the 80s too, there was this terrible recession. I think it was the worst recession in 1983. It w like interest rates were just as an example, like 17%. So my parents were thinking about starting a business, but the it was just prohibitively expensive. So then they would have had to, you know, take any job, I think. Because the language barrier for my mom and my dad's credentials weren't recognized. So anyway, um the decision to leave was hard, but then they I think they put everything into that and made sure that they were very successful, made sure that we were then very well taken care of. So from that angle of like financial security, they did a great job. And I think they really focused on that. So when which is which was probably what made it so difficult for us to relate as a family, because anytime we talked about the things that weren't working, i.e. our relationships, because we became more and more like strangers. Um I think I think that was something they couldn't address, right? Like they couldn't go back and and fix it. And so um they didn't want to talk about it. And they they kept thinking that that was the best choice that they could have made. From my vantage point, um I think it's I don't know, it was just a terrible situation. I don't know what I would have done in their shoes. And now I realize into writing the story and of course revising it and everything, I realized how difficult it must have been. Like I was reading my journal entries from when they were now younger than I am currently, and I I realized they were they must have been confused, they must have been scared, but they they had to like just guess. And I it's funny because as a kid, and I think I tried to show that in the book, like as a from my kids, the child's perspective, all the way to an adult, all the way to being a mother, I tried to show the evolution of how I saw my parents, and as a kid, you just see them as these like authority figures, like these like monoliths almost, right? And then as a parent looking at them as parents, I I realized that all parents don't know what they're doing. No, and you you're just doing the best you can in the moment, and there's always uncertainty. So I yeah, that's the kind of compassion I was trying to bring throughout the book was how could they have known? And um yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:12

Um, okay, a couple of fun questions. One, you do reference the movie Home Alone, and obviously most of what you went through was it's very tragic. But was there a part of you like what was something kind of fun about? I mean, isn't that what everyone would dream of? Is like a we're the same age, but like an 80s teen movie where the parents aren't around. Isn't that what everybody wants? Yeah, do you have any like kind of fun? Could you recall something that's fun?

SPEAKER_00 27:43

Absolutely. Um, that's not in the book, but we definitely had some parties um where you know, a lot of underage drinking, a lot of uh yeah, like you know, watching shows we're not supposed to watch, staying up all night, literally all night till dawn, until basically we just fell asleep over um junk food. Um yeah, it was fun. And I would say, you know, it sounds heavy and sad, but I hope the book I try to inject some of the reality of it, which was like some of it was ridiculously hilarious, too. Yeah, like the the cultural clashes and then the fact that I grew up, you know, here and my parents were in Taiwan, so the reference points were totally different. Um, there's a scene where, you know, I've I'm like 15 and I've I've fallen in love with Duran Duran's lead singer, Son Rai Vaughan, and and I like plastered my walls with his image and my parents coming back and just going, like, who the heck is this kid? Um and so yeah, there was like funny moments for sure, and I would say it wasn't all bad. I would say that it actually taught me a lot of independence, it had to be right, and like no parents hovering meant you had to figure shit out for yourself, sorry, you had to figure stuff out for yourself, and so um I don't think it was all bad at all. And like, yes, there were definitely tremendous emotional difficulties that I think uh you know counseling helped, but um in terms of giving me a lot of freedom to figure stuff out for myself and to actually rely on myself is the they're in some ways extreme big gifts, I think. Some some kids today I see are like helped in every way, and when they're up against adversity, they turn to their parents to solve their problems. Well, that wasn't available to me, so I had to solve my problems, and I would say I'm pretty good in crisis situations to this very day. I can handle it. So I would say it wasn't all bad.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

What about um the people closest to you today? How we all bring forward our childhood. Um how how does what happened to you uh impact how you love?

SPEAKER_00 30:14

That's that's a very fair question. And I think uh that's yeah, I mentioned counseling. I would definitely say that kids who grew up in the way I did, as astronaut kids, as sometimes called parachute kids, when the kids are just dropped here in homestay families or with relatives and no parents at all. Uh uh I think we all need counseling. So sorry to anyone who thinks otherwise, but I think you need some um it's just really hard when you're a kid, you you don't understand the circumstances, so you just feel the rage and the the upsetness. And I think it takes a long time to deal with that. And having counseling really helps. And in in terms of how it affected my relationships, I would say that I always felt the need to run anytime I saw someone about to leave for whatever reason, like you know, kids um in school, uh, there would I get close to some kids, but then they'd move away. And I would just feel intense betrayal. Uh that was unwarranted by the circumstance. Then when I first well, then when I started dating, it was the same. Like anytime there was an argument and I felt like, oh, that you know, he's gonna break up with me, I would be the first, like I was never dumped. I was not gonna be the one left behind. Um, so I think it it definitely like what is that abandonment issues, right? So I would say I've really had to confront those that issue, and I've dealt with it, or I'm dealing with it still, I would say. Um, I still have that feeling. Anytime I have a disagreement with friends, it feels a little threatening rather than just well, you know, we can agree to disagree. I feel a little bit like I wonder if they're going to leave. So it it does leave a mark. Um but I'm very conscious of it.

SPEAKER_01 32:18

Now, this is a really fun story. So we met at the self-publishing agency, they do an annual writer writers' conference, and we met the second annual one, and you were then a presenter the year before. And so this is a really so I work for the self-publishing agency, and then you were a moderator the first year, and it's kind of a place for people in the industry uh in all aspects of publishing can go and learn about trends and network and that kind of thing. Anyway, you were out on the deck and you had sort of a Cinderella meeting. So tell talk about how you got your book deal and how quickly, because just so for those who don't know, a book is is not magical, it does not come into the world typically very quickly. It can be years. So what happened in your case?

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Yeah, typically I understand is two to three years from acquisition of the manuscript. Uh, my case was very different. Um, I don't know. It's it it I still I am still stunned by how it all happened. So last year, as you mentioned, I volunteered to be a moderator for a publishing panel, like a panel of experts. And I, of course, hadn't published a book and I felt very much like an imposter, but I thought, okay, well, how bad can it be? I'm just gonna ask them some questions, they have the answers. And sure enough, you know, it was um my publisher, um, and then which is Douglas and McIntyre, and then uh Penguin Random House was represented, and the self-publishing agency was represented by the CEO, uh Megan Williams. And so they were powerhouse panel, and they answered questions brilliantly. And then I thought, who, okay, I got away with that. Then we went on the deck after the panel, and I just struck up a conversation with the Douglas and McIntyre publisher. Her name's Anna Comfort O'Keefe, lovely, lovely person. And she just asked, as you would at a publishing conference, um, what are you working on? And I thought, oh, should I tell her? So I did. I told her I have this manuscript that I've been working on for a long, long time. It's a memoir, blah, blah, blah. And it's about an astronaut family. And she goes, Oh, do tell. And she was very interested because it turns out that her sister, uh, growing up, her sister's best friend was an astronaut kid, and she thought, wow, this kid never goes home. Why is she always at our house? So she's been very interested in this like astronaut family stories for a long time, but nobody has written about it in memoir. There are a few novels, but nobody writes about it because it's, I guess, such a strange thing to grow up in. So anyway, she invited me to send in a couple of chapters, and I did, thinking, okay, well, nothing's gonna happen because nothing ever happens from these things. Or it'll be months out. And I knew that I had two, you know, pretty polished chapters. I had one had been uh published in a magazine and another had won an award. So I thought, okay, I'll give her the two best. And then meanwhile, I'll polish up the rest. But within like I think it was 24 hours or 28 hours, I get an email. Love it, send me the whole thing. I'm like, I freaked out. I freaked out, you know, but I thought, okay, well, every whoever's listening, every you're probably laughing because everybody's got you know two excellent polished chapters, but you know, there's the mushy middle, there's the ending that doesn't want to end. That's what I had. It was like a bit of a a messy manuscript. And I really hemmed and hawed and I bugged my husband to death. I'm like, should I, shouldn't I, should I, shouldn't I? Because you can only get one shot with a publisher. And then I thought, well, okay, well, I should go for broke, right? Because how often do you get invited to send a manuscript? And if I wait, uh, you know, if I wait another year, she'll forget me. So I decided to go for it with like a lot of language around, you know, I can polish it, I can do other things. Um and the second so I sent her the whole thing, and then within two days of that, I get an invitation for repres like for publishing the deal. She said it needs some editing, but it's great, and here's a chance. And then the reason it came to market so quickly was because there was uh someone had uh broken their memoir contract, and so um Douglas and McIntyre already had a slot open for April 2026 release.

SPEAKER_01 37:18

Okay, I didn't totally understand that.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Okay, yeah, so that's why it came like so the whole thing came together in less than a year um from acquisition. And she said, if you're willing to give up your summer, so this was last year, right? Last June 2025, she said, Yeah, go if you if you're interested, we'll we'll assign you an editor. You'll have to give up your summer because there's some stuff that you'll have to uh you know, change, revise, and add. Um but we would need the final manuscript before Christmas. And it was when I said yes, of course I said yes, it was like go. And I basically lived in my uh house coat all summer and saw no friends. I, you know, barely spoke with anyone, it was except for my editor. And a few times I thought I wasn't gonna make it, but I I did. So I guess in sum, I had been working on my book for uh about seven years up to the point that I met Anna. Uh so it does look like a Cinderella story, but I had been working on it for a long time before that. And what did they say? How does the saying go? Uh, luck favors the prepared. So I think I got lucky, but I was also kind of in way ready. Yeah. So that's how that came to be.

SPEAKER_01 38:48

And what your book, um locally, regionally for sure, is getting a lot of buzz. It's one of the top books in the province.

SPEAKER_00 38:56

Yeah, it's number two on the best sellers list this week. And it's just like 18th consecutive week, which is pretty amazing. It's been getting lots of great coverage, and I think it it is a local story. It's been like CBC, uh, the BC uh summer list. It's on that, it's on um the Tai Best Summer Reads. Yeah, just and and like some local stuff as well. So I'm hoping to bust out east of the Rockies. I'm heading to yeah, I'm heading to Ontario and uh Montreal in the fall, and then I have a whole bunch of festivals as well coming up.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

That's great. Um, are you gonna be part of the Vancouver Writers Festival? Are you doing that?

SPEAKER_00 39:43

Yes, I'm part part of the Sunshine Coast uh Festival of the Liter the Written Arts in August first, and then I will be at the Vancouver Writers Festival in October, the Whistler Writers Festival in November, and then I'm heading overseas because I've been invited to the Georgetown Literary Festival in Penang, Malaysia. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I'm going to festival it up. I just finished my audiobook for the astronaut children of Dunbar Street, which turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. Yes. Apparently, narrating your own work is hard.

SPEAKER_01 40:21

So when you did when you talked like your mother's talking, do you change your cadence and do you that's hard? It was so difficult. Did you get coaching for that? Or yes.

SPEAKER_00 40:33

So I'll be being a novice. I I um I signed with uh a company that has a sound engineer in the adjacent booth listening to every every word. I think he was really bored because we had to stop and start so many times because I was I'm a novice, so yeah, I would make what's called mouth sounds that would pick up by the mic, uh, rustling when I crossed and recrossed my legs, all those kinds of things I didn't know about. Uh and then yeah, the hardest part were doing the character voices. And I have a fresh respect for uh voice actors because they're amazing. If you listen to, you know, the the pros do it, they can they really can master all these different voices. I had a tough time, especially with my mother's voice, because I realize, of course, I write in English, but she only spoke to me in Mandarin and Hakka and Holo, so all the Chinese languages, but not in English. And so I couldn't get her voice right until until I said a few things in Mandarin to get the voice in my head, and then I would do the English dialogue. So some of that got captured in the recording, and I'm hoping it stays because I think it'll be kind of interesting for the listener. If there are any listeners who are in book clubs who might be interested, I am happy to uh join a Zoom call or to visit in person. I've already done a whole bunch of uh library events, and I'm really I love meeting my readers, so yeah. And I also have a book club kit uh on my on my website, I think. Uh I've forgotten which page, but it's on my website, wileywaitronho.com. And if you're part of a book club, you can check out it's a pretty fun kit. It's got uh music, it's got the playlist, uh, it's got a recipe, it's got some snack suggestions. Oh, I love that discussion. Yeah, yeah, it was really fun making it with the publisher. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 42:38

Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. And I had a great time reading the book, and well, it wasn't all happy, but it was just it was very I loved it, and I loved talking with you today. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 42:52

Thank you, Amy.

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Okay, bye. Thank you, bye. So thanks so much uh to Wiley for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our talk. Um, I feel like there's a universal nature in the things that she spoke about in overcoming obstacles and really difficult things, not being bitter and going on and having a great life. So I hope everyone picks up the book and um and also take Wiley up on her um her offer to come to your book club. I think that's that's really fun and special to um be able to talk to an author um one-on-one. And I've done that once before in my book club, and I think it's a really worthwhile thing to do. So, anyway, thanks so much for listening.