Jean Kwok is the best-selling author of four novels, including her latest, The Leftover Woman.
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Jean Kwok’s life story shows how a gifted person can rise from the most dire circumstances. Emigrating from Hong Kong to Brooklyn at the age of five, Jean’s family was “incredibly poor, so we lived in the slums of Brooklyn in an apartment that was overrun with roaches and rats.” New York winters were harsh for this family used to living in the tropics. “The only warmth we had was when we turned on the oven, and we left it on 24/7 during winter to create a small circle of heat in the kitchen, where the windows were broken, taped up with duct tape.”
But Jean got noticed by her teachers and ended up going to Hunter College High School, an elite public high school in New York City. “Somehow my principal at the public elementary school I was at figured out that I was struggling, and that I was smart,” and suggested that she apply to private schools. She was accepted to several schools, but realized that “I wanted to go to a public school with other kids that were bright, but diverse.” After high school, Jean went to Harvard, where she studied physics.
She had never considered writing, until, one day, “I was up late doing a problem set. I was scribbling notes as I was working, and I somehow wrote a poem. I was so shocked. I was so amazed. And then it dawned on me that nobody was going to make me go back to the factory with my Harvard degree, and that I could do what I really wanted to do, which was to become a writer. And from that moment on, writing was all I ever wanted to do.”
Writing would wait, however, as she became a professional ballroom dancer. She loved to dance, and, one day, “I saw an ad in the paper, and it said, ”Wanted, professional ballroom dancer. Will train.’ I was terrified to go to that audition … but I went, and I did get the job. So I wound up working for a couple of years as a professional ballroom dancer while I was trying to write at night."
Jean moved to the Netherlands, where she worked as a translator and wrote her first novel, Girl in Translation, which was successful and which led her to write three more. Her latest book, The Leftover Woman, “is about two worlds, two mothers and one impossible choice. It’s about what happens when a young woman in China, during the one-child policy, gives birth and is told shortly afterward that her baby has died. She finds out a few years later, however, that her daughter had not died, but had been placed for adoption by her no-good husband to a wealthy American couple. When the novel opens, she has followed her daughter to New York City to try to get her back.”
I asked Jean about the title of this novel. “There are millions more men in China today than women, and because of that, there’s a propaganda campaign to encourage Chinese women to have children. It shames you if you’re over 25 years old and you’re not having children. They say that you are a leftover woman because you are like a leftover on a plate being thrown away and not nourishing society the way you should be.”
Jean started using Scrivener with her second novel. She says “Scrivener was a huge revelation. I can have pieces of the document on the left [in the Binder] and the document in one straight line on the right. And for a complicated novel, I can look at the different points of view separately.” There are two point-of-view characters in The Leftover Woman, and Jean said, “I definitely did use Scrivener’s ability to choose only Rebecca’s point of view, for example, and then I read her all the way through.”
Jean also likes the way she can organize so much content in one Scrivener project. “When I started, my books were simpler. It was easier to deal with. But the truth is, you still have a 400-page manuscript, when you’re a professional writer, and if you’re me, you have 500 supporting files.”
Several of Jean’s books have been selected by celebrity book clubs. “I have been so grateful for support from different celebrities, and it’s wonderful because it brings your work to an audience that you might not have reached previously.” And several have been banned by school districts. I asked Jean if this was because of the content in the books or because of the way she looked. She said, “It is a huge mystery to me why Girl in Translation is on these challenge lists, but it is about an immigrant girl of color. It’s very much my story, one of my most autobiographical novels, about working in a sweatshop and being really poor and growing up in the US. People write to me all the time about how much it’s inspired them and helped them get through adversity.”
All four of her novels are in development for TV and movies, so we’ll be seeing a lot more of Jean Kwok’s work in the future.
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.