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Trip Fiction - #TalkingLocationWith... Felicia Nay
https:/www.tripfiction.com/talking-location-with-author-felicia-nay-hong-kong/

Writers on Location guest post on Isabel Costello’s Literary Sofa book blog
https://literarysofa.com/2020/04/02/writers-on-location-felicia-nay-on-hong-kong/

Guest post on Asian Books Blog
http://www.asianbooksblog.com/search/label/Guest%20post

Felicia Nay is the author of the novel Red Affairs, White Affairs (Cinnamon Press 2020). She was born in Germany and spent part of her childhood in Spain. Later, she studied in China and worked in Hong Kong. She now lives again in Germany.●

Felicia Nay about her novel Red Affairs, White Affairs
 
What are ‘red affairs’? Why did you choose this particular title?
The title borrows a Cantonese phrase. ‘Red affairs’ are lucky celebrations such as weddings and birth announcements. ‘White affairs’ are funerals and other matters related to death. And since both terminal illness and the quest for romantic fulfilment propel the storyline, the expression captures important aspects of my book. Spanning the width of human experience from birth to death, it also points to the wider worldview that informs the characters and their motivations.
 
What sparked your writing of this novel?
An encounter with a Cantonese friend left a deep impression at the time, but then went into hibernation. One day, rather without warning, she revealed that her mother was ill with cancer, and continued to make a very personal remark about religion. Without wanting to give away too much–for me it was a haunting moment, disquieting. The moment passed, and, while I continued to ruminate about it, I did not write about it straight away.  

Years later in Germany, I found myself in a creative writing class. The teacher asked us to write about an aha moment, an epiphany in the Joycean sense. And so, I began to digest this haunting moment and started to spin it into a story…
 
What were some of the difficulties you encountered when writing this novel?
The novel contains many themes: cross-cultural friendship, the life of single women in their thirties, how grown-up children relate to their parents, migration, the fate of domestic workers in Hong Kong… These elements emerged unbidden, and my task was to weave them together in a meaningful way.

On a deeper level, this also is a book about Cantonese cosmology and religion, and how they shape, or used to shape, anything from flat decoration to mate choice. I wanted to write about religion–the narrator’s ‘bleached out Catholic convictions’ and the Cantonese folk religious practices around her–, but I did not want to preach. As a result, I was constantly on the lookout for contemporary novels that address religious questions. It turned out that there are some wonderful examples around–even if you’ll rarely find them on the bestseller lists. One such book that did make it onto the bestseller lists is, of course, The Secret Life of Bees. But there are other exciting examples. For a more demanding read, check out Neil Griffith’s As a God Might Be. I personally love Leila Aboulela’s novels for the Muslim perspective they offer, and David Guterson’s Our Lady of the Forest.

On a more technical level, the linguistic diversity of Hong Kong had to be reflected. Some of the scenes would really have unfolded in Cantonese, but I had to write them in English. What is more, few of the English-speaking characters in the novel are native speakers, and the native speakers that appear use different varieties of English. I had to do justice to the setting and my characters without making them appear stupid or being jarring. Perhaps I, as a native German speaker, am particularly attuned to this kind of problem. ●