My friend and former Yahoo! colleague Cindy Wu is better known as the novelist Fan Wu, and like her characters, she moves between two names, two worlds, two cultures. She is author of the acclaimed February Flowers (2006), the story of an unlikely friendship between two very different girls, who meet at a university in a city in provincial China in the nineteen-nineties, and how they come to lead new lives in the United States.
Fan Wu writes in English, although she was born and raised in the Chinese countryside. In the nineteen-nineties, a scholarship took her to Stanford for a graduate degree, and in 1999 she came to work at Yahoo!, and that is how we met. We’d talk over coffee about writing and American literature. At the time, I was writing Yahoo! Picks of the Week and error messages. I was in love with the Internet, the explosive growth of the web, the early emergence of blogs. She wasn’t interested in talking about websites, though. She was reading Raymond Carver and Joseph Conrad and wondering how to become a writer. Fast forward ten years: Fan Wu’s second novel, Beautiful as Yesterday, was published earlier this month. Cindy and I met again for coffee, and she gave me her book to read.
In its bold red book jacket, Beautiful as Yesterday is a lyrical, well-told story about two very different sisters, about mothers and daughters, about the meeting of east and west, and about how history is made of people and becomes an invisible motif in family lives.
rss
twitter
