W

oohoo! I met one of my idols. Your humble narrator spent a weekend in Shanghai hanging out with superstar author Amy Tan, also known as Maxine Hong Kingston. No, wait. They’re two different people. Or are they?

Sexy luscious Amy tells me that all Chinese-American female authors are considered 100 percent interchangeable. Margaret Thatcher once went on at great length about “how courageous” her book was, she told me.

Amy was baffled until the British leader added: “I was so moved when I read Wild Swans.” Amy replied: ‘Yes, didn’t Jung Chang do a wonderful job?’ Without batting an eyelid, the Iron Lady continued: “Yes, she did.”

In other words, they did the British thing and elegantly skated over the embarrassing social error. Had they not done this, Thatcher would have had to kill herself in the traditional British way (falling onto a sharpened umbrella, eating British food, etc).

Amy said she was regularly mistaken for all the other writers of Chinese-American sagas, Jung Chang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Iris Chang and even Lisa See, which surprised me. (Lisa is pretty much an all-American blonde.)

Sitting opposite us at breakfast was Matt Groening, genius behind The Simpsons. He said all cartoonists were also considered interchangeable: “One guy came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you’re a cartoonist? Wow, can you draw Garfield for me?’”

I told him that I go on book tours to places in Asia where people don’t get the concept of authors signing books. People rush up to me with Harry Potter books to autograph. I sign them. Why not?

Not only do authors get confused with each other, we get mixed up with our characters. In the detective novels I write, my character Wong is working on his own book. I regularly get letters saying: “I don’t like your writing, but I like Wong’s. Where can I buy his book?”

This happens all the time to Matt. If you look up “quotes from Matt Groening” on the Internet, most of the results are Homer Simpson quotes written by TV scriptwriters.

Shortly before this breakfast, all three of us had been interviewed by a Shanghai magazine which said
it would run features on us in which our quotes would alternate with quotes from characters in our stories.

While we were having this conversation, Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe appeared on TV sharing a similar story about his recent tour of Asia. He said someone rushed up to him in Japan with a photograph of Lord of the Rings star Elijah Wood. Radcliffe tried to explain that it wasn’t a picture of him, but the autograph hunter spoke no English. So Radcliffe signed the photo with the words: “Look, I am not Elijah Wood, Okay?”

By the end of the weekend, the Shanghai magazine came out. I picked it up. Yes, they’d mixed up the quotes from me and my fictional character.

The weird thing is that sometimes authors become characters in each others’ work. Amy told me she once appeared as a cartoon character in an episode of The Simpsons. “That was the one time I didn’t mind being depicted as ‘yellow-skinned’,” she laughed.


The writer is a columnist and journalist