The Loyal Daughter

Toronto lawyer and writer Nancy Lam talks to Debbie Bateman about her debut novel.

DB: Your novel in stories, The Loyal Daughter, follows three generations of a family of Chinese immigrants living in Ontario. We begin in the viewpoint of the grandmother who helped her family come to Canada, switch to the viewpoint of her daughter seeking to establish herself in a career, and move on to the viewpoint of her granddaughter growing up with a Chinese mother and an English father. Along the way, we come to understand not only the individuals, but the culture of the family. As you were writing the first draft, did you have a fairly clear sense of the aspects of the family you wanted to explore? Or, did the areas of focus emerge with more clarity as you revised?

NL: I had a high-level idea of what aspects of the main characters I wanted to explore, but as I wrote the strongest aspects organically emerged as the stories of the three generations unfolded. I found that with most of the characters, their instincts and reactions to the things that happened to them drove the exploration of the family aspects that most needed to be told. 

DB: The way in which each protagonist shares their world tells us a lot about who they are. The language they use, the tone of their communication, and simply what draws their attention—all of these elements help us understand their world view. How did the challenges of giving three protagonists a turn at telling the story affect your writing process? Were there any particular moments of discovery that helped you push forward?

NL: There were definitely scenes I was reluctant to cut but had to because they were not seen by the character currently telling the story. Originally, I wrote from the viewpoint of more than three characters, including a male character. But very early on, as I read and rewrote certain scenes, I saw the power of limiting the protagonists to three. It would have been too difficult and chaotic for me to dig deeply into more than three characters because I needed to “walk in the shoes” of each protagonist to do justice to their voice and the book as a whole. 

DB: You mention in your Afterword that this is a fictionalized memoir. The stories are based on the history of your family, but you have used elements of fiction to delve more deeply into truths. Did you learn things about using fiction to explore family history that you would like to share with our readers? How did you know when you’d touched upon deeper truths? Did you have to push the fiction elements to discover all that you wanted to share?

NL: Family histories exist beyond the limited stories or anecdotes that most people hear about—they exist within the political, geographical, and sociological circumstances of certain periods of time. These circumstances couch the family lore. I often found myself lost in research because an understanding of peripheral circumstances led me to a deeper understanding of the characters’ decisions or actions. From there, I assumed and fictionalized factors that led to the stories I created. 

I knew I’d touched upon deeper truths when the decisions and actions I’d heard about family members made more sense. I often pushed the fiction to make scenes fit together more tightly. But I’m not quite sure how much is fiction because my recollection of events and stories is so jumbled up with dreams and research, and my views are tainted by my feelings. I may have pushed the limits of fiction extensively to create the stories and situations that took on a life of their own as I wrote and edited.

DB: The novel resonates with questions about what it means to be a loyal daughter. How much should a daughter sacrifice to help her family? What part of herself can she claim for individual expression? These family questions echo larger societal questions about yearning to fit in with a different culture, but needing to preserve your own. As an immigration lawyer, I imagine you encounter many immigration stories. Would you like to share your thoughts on what it is like to be an immigrant in Canada, particularly within Chinese communities?

NL: I’m Canadian born so my thoughts on being an immigrant within the Chinese community are one step removed from a direct immigrant. I see pros and cons to the immigration experience. The pros include the benefits of leaving a country where one was unable to fully realize one’s dreams or goals, and settling in Canada where freedom and security exists. In Canada, the harder one works, the more one gets out of life, and there is security in knowing that the rule of law underlies the world one lives in. The cons include not fitting in physically and culturally, the inability to communicate in the national languages, the loss of independence as a result of the language barriers, and the hesitation to share one’s own cultural customs for fear of not fitting in. 

As an immigration lawyer, I have found that no matter what country the clients came from and despite the passage of time, these pros and cons remain factors which immigrants face. I organically found that the challenges my characters faced were universal immigrant truths, which hopefully I have accurately re-created and told in the stories. 

DB: The protagonists experience moments of discrimination and unfair treatment based on race. You deal with these moments with subtlety and nuance, adjusting the experience to the worldview of the current generation, and leaving the reader to examine the truth of what happened. How did the writing process contribute to your exploration of bullying, exclusion, and other forms of racial injustice? Did putting yourself inside the lives of your characters help you convey things that might have been hard to share by any other means?

NL: I focused on the characters’ challenges in order to examine the bullying, exclusion, and racial issues, but I didn’t want the stories to only be about those struggles. Mainly, I wanted to examine and better understand the characters’ decisions and actions. Sharing the feelings of the characters—their anguish, love, and self-doubt to name a few—felt less vulnerable than if I’d had to share such situations personally. Many of the topics in the book are not openly discussed by women (or men) because if one speaks aloud of such topics, one will be exposed to potential criticism and risk offending others. 

DB: Was there a specific incident that inspired this piece of work? 

NL: My mother’s death sparked my need to write this work. I started to write out of fear that she would be forgotten. Only as I wrote more, did I realize how important of a representative figure she is, not only for my family, but for all Canadian immigrant women.  

DB: With what other book will this work make a good comparison? Does the protagonist or indeed other main characters in the book remind you of main characters from another literary work? Are any ideas in this book related to ideas in a comparable work?

NL: I can only hope that my book marginally compares to Amy Tan’s, The Joy Luck Club. After reading that book as a teenager, it was always my dream to one day write a book about Chinese Canadians. I didn’t know in what form it would come until Mom died. 

The first protagonist in my book, the grandmother, reminds me of a mixture of Mia from Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, Eleanor Sung-Young from Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians, and parts of all the mothers in The Joy Luck Club. 

Amy, the daughter, reminds me of a mix of Alice Hale in Karma Brown’s Recipe for a Perfect Wife, and Jo March in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. 

Zoe, the granddaughter, reminds me of a mix of Trixie Belden, Nancy Drew, and Kate Wetherall from The Mysterious Benedict Society series. 

DB: As you moved through drafts, were you working mostly on the structure, the story world, aspects of style and language, or something else?

NL: I worked on content for the first few drafts, but as the novel in stories began to emerge, I edited the details of places and language for clarity. It wasn’t until I received some very high-level feedback from industry folk that I clearly saw how I could tie the stories together more strongly. From there, I found my first editor—Lara Hinchberger—who is absolutely one of the best editors in the world, and the book became for the most part what it is today. 

DB: In terms of sheer length, what did the book look like after the first draft? Did the length change?

NL: I recall being concerned that I didn’t have enough material for the book to be a novel and that I might have a novella instead, but in the end the length worked well as a novel in stories. Although I’d cut a lot of scenes during the editing because they were boring or dry, I also expanded numerous scenes for clarity, which is how the book came to be the length it is. 

DB: How would you like this book to be taught: as a historical document, socio-political document, or a document about a certain kind of taste in writing, aesthetic, genre, or literary style… or something else?

NL: I would like The Loyal Daughter to be taught as a part of Canadian English Literature. I loved the works we read in high school and the authors are inspirational—Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and Alice Munro to name a few. But I always wanted to read about characters and people that were more like me and my family, characters with whom I could more fully relate.