"The Storm We Made" by Vanessa Chan
The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan has everything that WWII fiction needs more of. As soon as I read it, I couldn’t wait to write about it.
TSWM is set in Malaya and alternates between the 1930s—when it was occupied by the British—and August 1945, in the waning days of the Japanese occupation. It follows the Alcantara family: the unhappily-married matriarch, Cecily and her three children.1 Jujube, the oldest, has to wait on their occupiers in a teahouse. Fifteen-year-old Abel is taken to a forced-labor camp with other teenage boys. Ten-year-old Jasmin befriends Yuki, a girl her own age who’s been kidnapped into sexual slavery.
But the heart of the story is 1945 Cecily’s guilt that haunts her for having helped a Japanese spy, Fujiwara, in the ‘30s—a choice that lay the groundwork for the occupation that’s torn her family apart.
The Three Questions:
Does the novel have diverse perspectives?
Yes. Cecily and her children are all Eurasian, and the British racism she and her family experience play a huge role in her decision to help Fujiwara.
Which character felt the realest?
Cecily’s the heartbeat of this story, and the novel’s at its most compelling when it explores why she did what she did in the ‘30s and the shame she feels about it in 1945. It’s a little more complicated than a desire to free Malaya—she was also unhappy in her marriage and seriously hot for Fujiwara.
Now, I’m a pretty-lapsed Catholic, so sex and shame are both guaranteed page-turners for me. But sex and shame are also universally human things that are also very tough to write well. If you give either too light a touch, you ignore the power they have in life. If you overdo it, it makes the reader feel uncomfortable—like we’re wallowing in something we ought not to wallow in.
But Cecily’s desire for Fujiwara in the ‘30s and her shame in 1945 strike the right balance. I can’t really get into how Chan writes about actual sex without giving away plot,2 but that’s not a huge deal because, TWSM is less about the sex and more about desire and repression and anticipation of it, and it’s written incredibly well. Cecily’s shame in 1945 at having helped Fujiwara is the unfortunate flip side of this desire, but it feels equally human. And her children’s perspectives—Jujube’s growing rage at a friendly Japanese patron, Abel’s suffering in the labor camp, and what we learn about Yuki’s life through Jasmin—underscore Cecily’s grief and guilt that her actions helped create that world.
Did the novel teach me something about WWII I didn’t already know?
This isn’t the first book I’ve read set in Japanese-occupied Asia in WWII, but it’s the first I’ve read about Malaysia’s wartime experience. Don’t skip Chan’s moving foreword about how her Malaysian grandparents never talked about their wartime experiences, and how little has been recorded about it. WWII fiction has long suffered from a Eurocentrism problem, even though the war was against fascism worldwide. TWSM was a long-overdue and welcome addition to my WWII reading.
Craft Highlight:
Early in the novel, Cecily and Fujiwara are to take on an assignment together. But before we get into the actual assignment—which is thrilling to read in its own right—the chapter sets it up by putting us in Cecily’s head at this point in time:
Not only is the prose vivid, it sets up—in a single paragraph—Cecily’s conflicting emotions about what she’s doing, all of which the chapter teases out as the action unfolds. But it does more than that: make you feel for a very different character by grounding them in a universal emotion. A charismatic man manipulating a woman into working for him is a familiar trope that’s especially well-worn in espionage narratives. (Pouring one out for Poor Martha on The Americans.)
But focusing on Cecily’s perspective—who we understand is neither stupid nor weak and understands Fujiwara might be manipulating her—is a brilliant strategy and this paragraph is just one example of how well Chan executes it.
Have you read it? Are there other books like this one you’d recommend? Please share in the comments.
The bumbling husband, Gordon, mostly just hangs around being doofy, which, I’m generally here for any novels where that’s what the straight male characters are doing.
Historical fiction also has a pretty poor track record when it comes to sex writing, especially good sex writing from the perspective of anyone who isn’t a straight man—but that’s a post for another day.