Meeting Janice Lee - Author of The Piano Teacher
I got to meet best selling author Janice Lee.
She was the guest speaker at a women's writing group I belong to called Hong Kong Women in Publishing.
We meet monthly at the Foreign Correspondents Club and often invite successful authors, publishers and journalists to talk about their work.
Janice Lee was pregnant with twins while writing her novel The Piano Teacher.
Her story is one of those 'dreams do come true' tales that keep writers tapping away at their computer keyboards hoping for a similar miracle.
A Harvard grad Lee married her college sweetheart and worked as a fashion magazine book reviewer in New York.
She really wanted to write a novel though, so she went to back to school to earn a masters degree in creative writing.
Lee, whose family is from Korea, spent part of her childhood in Hong Kong.
She decided to set her first novel in that city.
The Piano Teacher takes place partially during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and describes how the British colonial community survived.
It then leaps ahead by a decade to show how a young woman's life is radically changed when she moves to Hong Kong and meets some of the people who experienced the Japanese occupation.
Janice Lee actually worked on her book for years, putting it on the shelf for long periods of time as she gave birth to two children.
She moved back to Hong Kong in 2006 when her financier husband was relocated here.
When she found out she was pregnant with twins she decided it was now or never.
She finished her novel.
Doctors advised complete rest for the last month of Lee's pregnancy so she revised her book while lying in bed with her laptop propped up on a pillow beside her.
Then after the miracle of her twins' birth another miracle! An editor at Penguin loved the book and offered Lee a six- figure deal.
A massive bidding war for foreign rights was sparked and the book is now available in 23 different languages.
Janice Lee readily admitted to her audience of female writers in Hong Kong that she has been lucky.
She had the opportunity to get a first class education.
She has a successful husband who supported their family financially while she wrote.
She lives in Hong Kong where it is so inexpensive to hire household help that she can leave much of the mundane work of parenting to maids, drivers and cleaners while she focuses on writing and building relationships with her kids.
Janice Lee says she chose to write about Hong Kong because it is a place where people from all over the world have decided to move so they could become something new, something different.
Perhaps even a successful writer.
She was the guest speaker at a women's writing group I belong to called Hong Kong Women in Publishing.
We meet monthly at the Foreign Correspondents Club and often invite successful authors, publishers and journalists to talk about their work.
Janice Lee was pregnant with twins while writing her novel The Piano Teacher.
Her story is one of those 'dreams do come true' tales that keep writers tapping away at their computer keyboards hoping for a similar miracle.
A Harvard grad Lee married her college sweetheart and worked as a fashion magazine book reviewer in New York.
She really wanted to write a novel though, so she went to back to school to earn a masters degree in creative writing.
Lee, whose family is from Korea, spent part of her childhood in Hong Kong.
She decided to set her first novel in that city.
The Piano Teacher takes place partially during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and describes how the British colonial community survived.
It then leaps ahead by a decade to show how a young woman's life is radically changed when she moves to Hong Kong and meets some of the people who experienced the Japanese occupation.
Janice Lee actually worked on her book for years, putting it on the shelf for long periods of time as she gave birth to two children.
She moved back to Hong Kong in 2006 when her financier husband was relocated here.
When she found out she was pregnant with twins she decided it was now or never.
She finished her novel.
Doctors advised complete rest for the last month of Lee's pregnancy so she revised her book while lying in bed with her laptop propped up on a pillow beside her.
Then after the miracle of her twins' birth another miracle! An editor at Penguin loved the book and offered Lee a six- figure deal.
A massive bidding war for foreign rights was sparked and the book is now available in 23 different languages.
Janice Lee readily admitted to her audience of female writers in Hong Kong that she has been lucky.
She had the opportunity to get a first class education.
She has a successful husband who supported their family financially while she wrote.
She lives in Hong Kong where it is so inexpensive to hire household help that she can leave much of the mundane work of parenting to maids, drivers and cleaners while she focuses on writing and building relationships with her kids.
Janice Lee says she chose to write about Hong Kong because it is a place where people from all over the world have decided to move so they could become something new, something different.
Perhaps even a successful writer.
