Seeing the words “Amy Tan” emblazoned in gold on the cover was inspiring. Someday, she thought, she would have her own book too.
Tan would go on to achieve those dreams. In 2022, her debut short-story collection “Lake Malibu and Other Stories” was published, and was nominated in the 2022 Queensland Literary Awards that year.
Of course, you can’t have two Amy Tans on a bookshelf, which is why Tan uses her Chinese name instead!
Now, she has gone on to write her first full-length novel: “Katie Goes to KL”, published by Penguin Random House Southeast Asia: a gripping young-adult tale of love, belonging and cultural reconnection.
“This book is inspired by my children who moved to Melbourne when they were very young. I always wondered how they would view Malaysia if they went back.
“How would they fit in, how would they see things?” said Tan, a copywriter whose children are aged 15, 13 and five.
Her book tells the story of Katie Chen, a 16-year-old Asian-Australian girl whose biggest concern is whether the boy she likes will ask her to the spring dance. Things are upended, however, after a death in the family means she must head to Malaysia, a place she hasn’t been to since she was six.
There, Katie meets various colourful relatives and friends and discovers all the peculiarities of Malaysian life, from the hot weather to everyone eating all the time. She even encounters an exciting underground music scene and finds a bit of romance!
But not everything she encounters is so charming. Katie discovers that her mother, whom she’d thought was long dead, is really still alive. Malaysia has also changed since the last time she was here, and thorny issues such as religious fundamentalism now simmer below the surface.
After crossing paths with an extremist movement led by the charismatic Tun Said, Katie finds herself caught up in a cultural clash, which leads her to question her identity and beliefs. And this clash could have major repercussions on the lives of the people she knows.
“’Katie Goes to KL’ is an ode to the multicultural childhood I had in Malaysia, where friendship and common interests can unite people of different backgrounds,” Tan told FMT Lifestyle. “What is special about this country to me is this unique blend of multiculturalism, it’s what makes it home.”
In her view, such multicultural experiences are less common these days, as many people she knows have few friends from beyond their cultural circles. “They live in a very different Malaysia from the one I grew up in,” Tan opined wistfully.
On a deeper level, her novel is about a search for identity.
“In Australia, Katie feels a little displaced because she is Asian. But when she goes back to Malaysia, she feels even more out of place. The book was an opportunity to explore Malaysian identity and politics through the eyes of an outsider,” Tan explained.
She is already hard at work on a new novel: this next one, she shared, would be set in 1955 during the communist insurgency in Malaya.
Would there be a sequel to “Katie Goes to KL”? Great idea, Tan replied – she even had an idea for the title already! But revealing this would give away the ending of the first book, she teased.
Ultimately, Tan hopes readers will enjoy her take on the complex idiosyncrasies of modern Malaysian society, as seen through the eyes of her protagonist.
“If they’re not Malaysian, I hope they get a flavour of what Malaysia is like through the eyes of Katie. If they are Malaysian, I hope they enjoy the story and seeing familiar characters and places in contemporary English literature.”
‘Katie Goes To KL’ is available in major bookstores.