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TI: And so as you, as you were starting to write the book, I mean, what was the process? You mentioned how the first chapter was pretty much written when you were in graduate school.

JO: Uh-huh.

TI: And then you wrote the other, what, four chapters. I mean, how, how long did it take you to do this, where did you do it?

JO: I wrote it all in my neighborhood cafe, pretty much. It took me about five and a half years, and I made it up as I went along. And I didn't realize, I think, until I finished the second story that the first and second, what are now the first and second chapters of the book might be the beginnings of a much larger piece. So it, the book sort of crept up on me slowly. It was clearly stuff that I had to write about. I mean, that first story just came out of -- actually, it started with a visual image, just a woman standing on the street reading the evacuation notice, that's all that I had to start with. And I just tried to imagine what she would do after reading that sign. And so that, that was really just, that was the seed of the story, it was just this image of a woman looking at the sign, what would you do?

And the third chapter, which is the long chapter that's set in the camp, it was definitely the hardest to write, and I spent about nine months writing and rewriting the first paragraph of that story and I just couldn't, I was getting very discouraged; it just wouldn't work. And then I had this week in New York in which I... I was sitting at the cafe one day, and I looked up and my brother, David, who lives in San Francisco, I saw him walking towards me. And so I looked up and I waved and, and it turns out it wasn't my brother and I was smiling and waving at a complete stranger. And then a couple days later, the kid in the gym, he was collecting IDs, well, he reminded me of my brother, too. And then a couple days after that, I saw a guy who was a dead ringer for my brother on street, and I thought, "Well, that's what happens when you really miss somebody, is that you suddenly see them everywhere." And that was my, my "aha" moment for the right beginning for that third chapter. I thought, okay, there's a young boy, he misses his father terribly, he's in the camp, and everyone in the camp looks vaguely like... they have black hair, ethnically, you know, small eyes, everyone, so he suddenly mistakes every man for being his father. And that, so that just came to me just sort of out of the blue. So who knows, I mean, I think writing is, it's a mysterious process. You don't know where things come from and you don't know what's going to be a trigger for the story. But once I had that, that thought, then I began to write and I could, you know, I could go, get beyond the first paragraph. But that, and I just hammered it out, just section by section and it was just, I think it took me, it might have taken me two years to write that. It took a long time.

And I had, when you're writing historical fiction, it's really important that you get the historical facts right. And so there are just so many details, but the details had to be right. Like the mountains did have to be in this direction and, you know, the news that they're hearing has to be accurate, and actually, at one point, my father is very interested in the stars and in astronomy and when I was doing my fact-checking afterwards, like, I had to know was there actually a full moon on that day and so he found a, a formula that somewhere, maybe in Sky and Telescope magazine, somewhere that you can calculate, you can go back in time and figure out, at what phase of the moon was on any day in the past hundred years. So he figured out and actually, one day there was a full moon on the day in which I said there was a full moon, but that was a coincidence. But, yeah, 'cause there's just a massive amount of information that I had to put into my head before I could begin to tell that middle chapter.

TI: And so as you write these sections, did you, did you send them out for review so people could do fact checking or things like that?

JO: Not 'til, well, the first chapter of the novel was, it was published in the Scribner's Best of the Fiction Workshops anthology. And after it appeared there, there was another woman who was also in that anthology and she, she sent me, she said, "You know, I think my agent might be interested in your work." She was a fellow classmate at Columbia, and so that was how I got in touch with my, my now-agent and I, by the time I talked to her, she, I had written the first and second chapters and I sent them to her. And so, and my advisor had also seen the second chapter and really liked it and had seen part of the third chapter. And then when I finished writing the third chapter I sent it to my agent and then fourth and fifth also. But it wasn't fact checked 'til after it was accepted for publication. Then the fact checkers at the publishing house also checked, but really, I feel like I did all of my own fact checking, but still there are some things that you're going to get wrong.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.