I was honoured to be one of the featured authors at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival in 2015. My event on November 5 Ghost Cave: Elsie Sze had a good turnout. The photos flashed on a big screen were a hit, including one of a stylised map of Borneo in Southeast Asia showing the location of Sarawak, setting of the novel, and captured the audience's attention. Those hitherto unfamiliar with Sarawak got to know more about its location and history by the end of session. I felt very much gratified and grateful that I was participating as a featured author in an international literary festival in my hometown Hong Kong, the city of my birth and formative years.
With moderator of my program Jason Ng at the International Literary Festival, Hong Kong, November, 2015
At my event Ghost Cave: Elsie Sze with moderator Jason Ng
What were the motivation and inspiration behind the writing of Ghost Cave: a novel of Sarawak?
My father left Borneo as a young man before the outbreak of the Second World War to study in Hong Kong, at St. Paul’s Coed Secondary School. Upon matriculation, he enrolled in the University of Hong Kong. Soon after the Japanese landed in Hong Kong in 1941, the same time Sarawak was also occupied by the Japanese, he left for the mainland of China and finished his university education in a remote town in Kwangtung Province, in what was known as Free China, the part of China not occupied by the Japanese. At the end of the War, he married my mother, a Hong Kong girl, whom he met in Hong Kong before the War. They settled down in Hong Kong where they raised their family. He never went back to Sarawak to live, only to visit his parents while they were alive.
I was born in Hong Kong and grew up here. Sarawak was to me a remote mysterious place I knew nothing about, until I was a teenager when my father took me and my mother and brother there the first time to visit my paternal grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. That was the summer of 1962. We went by boat, a cargo ship that accommodated a small number of passengers.
It was not until 44 years later, in 2006, that I was to visit Sarawak for the second time, from Canada. My husband Michael went with me. It was an emotional homecoming, my reconnecting with a family I had little association with in all those intervening years. It was on that trip in 2006 that I made up my mind my next novel would be about Sarawak. I would be writing the book for my father and for the family he left behind.
What are the themes of the novel?
Ghost Cave is a historical novel about migration, remembrance of ancestors, family values, and reconciliation. These are indeed values that transcend time and space, not just Asian values, but universal values, wherever people live and love, love enough to feel gratitude and love enough to forgive.
As I wrote this novel, I was walking a parallel line in reuniting with my father’s family, making up for forty some lost years when our relationship had dwindled to those annual greeting cards and occasional communications. My writing of the novel had come to mean on a personal level rediscovering my family this slice of the globe, paying respects to the ancestors who had long migrated to Sarawak and built a life for themselves and their descendants through sweat, toil and tears. It meant reconnecting with my present relations, and finding my paternal heritage.
There is also the theme of Homecoming. In a sense, the novel is about homecoming, homecoming for the characters in the story, and my homecoming to the land of my father’s birth, my roots.
How do I relate events in the novel to our present world?
The early immigrants to a new land set out to build a new and better life for themselves and their descendants. It is very hard in their own lifetimes. They run into all kinds of difficulties and impediments, some natural and some man-made. Most of first generation immigrants suffer a lot in the new land they settle in. Later generations are to reap the harvest of success and the good life from the seeds their ancestors have sown. This is the story I want to tell. The story of Ghost Cave is a microcosm of the bigger picture. This is not only a story of Chinese immigrants in a particular time and space, but a universal and timeless story of every ethnic group in the world, in the earlier centuries and now. Most of us are children of immigrants, no matter the ethnicity and colour of skin, no matter how long we have lived in a place, how long we have owned a place. Only the native, the indigenous people of any land, like the Dayaks of Sarawak, can really claim their home has always been their home, a home they have generously shared with people coming in from outside.
In this context, people of any country should let others in and not close their doors on them. They or their ancestors too were once immigrants looking for a haven to build a better and safer life.