The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Howard Webster

The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Howard Webster

Summary: Sue thought that Canton Elegy: A Father's Letter of Sacrifice, Survival and Love by Stephen Jin-Nom Lee and Howard Webster was compelling and life-affirming reading. She had quite a few questions for co-author Howard Webster.

Date: 6 November 2013

Interviewer: Sue Magee

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Sue thought that Canton Elegy: A Father's Letter of Sacrifice, Survival and Love by Stephen Jin-Nom Lee and Howard Webster was compelling and life-affirming reading. She had quite a few questions for co-author Howard Webster.

• Bookbag: When you close your eyes and imagine your readers, who do you see?

Howard Webster: When I close my eyes I only see four faces, Amy, Huey, Rudy and Yvonne, Stephen Jin Nom Lee's four children. Lee drafted the manuscript that later became Canton Elegy specifically for them in 1955. He wrote it for a time in the future when he would be just a memory and his children would be facing the end of their own lives. Even though he knew he would be long dead Lee wanted to reach out across time to give his 'little ones' the courage they would need to face that final and certain question we all must face. Lee wanted to remind them of the extraordinary lives they shared and to tell them what they had meant to him. He knew that Canton Elegy would be his final, and perhaps most important, act as parent. To assure his children that they had always been, and still were, loved by their father.

Lee's manuscript is deeply personal, yet at the same time the story it tells is one everyone relates to. The world we live in today is blindingly complex and more often brutal than kind. Real hope is something that is in very short supply today. This, I believe, is one of the main reasons that Lee's story connects with readers.

There is no clearer statement of this that the chapter where Lee's remarkable wife, Belle Bo King Lee, is trapped in Hong Kong after the Japanese invade and she is forced to go on a 300 mile march through enemy lines with their four children. The children, all of whom were under ten years old, refuse to give up despite the deprivation, unimaginable horror and odds they faced because all they wanted from life was to see their father again and run into his open arms. There is a saying that, 'a truly rich man is one whose children run into his arms when his hands are empty,' and by this standard Stephen Jin Nom Lee was one of the richest men that has ever lived.

The other reader I see when I close my eyes is me. As a relatively new father I find great comfort that a quiet, insightful voice like Stephen Jin Nom Lee's can survive six decades and still be heard even after the clamour, conflict and noise of the last sixty years of human history has died down. The next time a gale blows across England I will forever, because of Canton Elegy, be listening out for those quietly spoken words that are whispered in the midst of the howling fury letting me know that everything is going to be all right in the end.

• BB: I struggle to think of another example of a person born in China looking at what subsequently happened in the country through the filter of an American education - the closest is perhaps Jung Chang, who studied in the UK when she was considerably older than Ah Nom. How did you feel when you began to read the manuscript? I shudder to think of the possibility that it might have remained hidden in the attic.

HW: There have been quite a few 'female' led books about China from this period, Wild Swans being the head of the pack. Canton Elegy is unique because we simply haven't heard a male voice like Stephen Jin Nom Lee's before. Especially so when you understand just how reserved Chinese men of that generation were. Canton Elegy allows you glimpse beneath that facade and discover the beating heart of a poet and a deeply feeling man talking about 'love' and 'fatherhood.' Reading the manuscript was simply breathtaking for me. I knew within the first two paragraphs of Stephen's opening letter to his four children that this was special. The words 'I want my heart to have a voice so I can love you louder' struck me like a sledgehammer. I had just become a new father and they summed up everything I was feeling at that time. I knew that Stephen Lee had died believing he was a failure. He was an educated man who had been a banker, a professor of economics and a Colonel in the Canton Airforce, yet he ended his life as a grocer in California because of the racism of the time.

As I read his manuscript I remember thinking, 'not on my watch.' I was determined that this man's remarkable story and wisdom would not be lost to a world that, in my opinion, so badly needed to hear them. So I put everything else I was doing to one side and worked on Canton Elegy – not because I believed there was a publishing deal to be done, or some financial gain, but because I believed that some small corner of the world would be made better because Stephen Jin Nom Lee's voice could still be heard there. There is plenty of literature that deals with and dwells exclusively on the dark heart of the human condition – this was an authentic voice that proved, unequivocally, of the existence of light.

• BB: As I read the book I could sense the movie playing before my eyes - the word epic kept springing to mind - dare we hope that it will happen?

HW: It is a question that keeps coming up every time someone seems to read the book. Because of the scale of events the book deals with it truly would need to be epic movie or a major TV event mini-series.. The flooding scene in the town that Amy (Lee's eldest daughter) escapes from is an entire disaster movie in itself.

The very latest news on this front is that the movie & TV rights are now represented by top Hollywood agent, Nick Reed. Reed has been behind some of the biggest movies and TV shows in the last decade or so and told me that he believes there are only nine people in Hollywood who have the clout and vision to get something like Canton Elegy made.

Of course, one likes to day dream, and when I think of directors who could bring this to the screen you obviously are drawn to names like Ang Lee and the Wong Kar Wai, but I don't see why a Western director like Clint Eastwood, Ridley Scott, Peter Jackson or a Spielberg couldn't take on the challenge. In terms of actors I am a huge fan of Chinese superstar actor, Tony Leung. He would be sensational playing Stephen. For Stephen's wife Belle Bo King Lee a dream cast could comprise Zhang Ziyi, Gong Li or even my good friend, the American Chinese actress, Michelle Krusiec.

I guess we will simply have to wait and see and let Canton Elegy find its way to the right person who falls in love with its story and wants to see it made into a movie.

• BB: Your wife is a descendant of Stephen Jin-Nom Lee. Could you give us the details of the relationship?

HW: My wife, Julianne Lee, is Stephen Jin Nom Lee's granddaughter. Her father is Huey Lee, Stephen's eldest son. She was born after her grandfather died of cancer over 40 years ago, yet he remained a pivotal part of her childhood. She calls Stephen, as do all his other grandchildren, Ba-Em. Whilst Ba-Em's grandchildren were aware of some of the sacrifices both he and his wife Belle made so they could have the chance of a better life in America, I believe it took Canton Elegy being published for them to truly understood quite how large a debt of gratitude they owed their grandfather and grandmother.

• BB: You are the father of twins. In the book there are occasions when survival comes about through brutality. What would you do if you were faced with similar decisions and the lives of your children were at risk?

HW: If you asked any father that question – I think the answer would be the same. My life and personal well-being is and would always be of secondary importance to the happiness and safety of my children. If there is anything truly remarkable about Stephen Jin Nom Lee's story is the fact that this family faced starvation and death and yet managed to retain their humanity and compassion in the face of unspeakable horror. One of the things that keeps coming up in the narrative is the emphasis on small kindnesses that Lee highlights. He shows us how a simple bowl of rice, given with compassion by a stranger, can imbue even the most despairing heart with hope and provide the will to continue fighting. This says quite a lot about the human spirit – that in order to crush us there needs to be a devastating array of external circumstances – yet all of that can be swept away and rendered to nothing by a simple bowl of rice given with grace. An encouraging thought if ever there was one.

• BB: Stephen returned to China when he was faced with the racism which he met in America. To what extent has that changed in the intervening decades?

HW: America is a country I have loved since I first read Robert Frost and Walt Whitman and watched all those John Hughes comedies in the 80s. Yet, as an Englishman married to an American girl, I believe it is a country beset by contradictions. It is a place where the word 'Freedom' in enshrined in its constitution yet it is a country that began with a brutal subjugation of indigenous peoples and the colonization of their land. Yet, the America I care about and champion is the one that stood, fought and bled in the fight against fascism in World War II, the one that put a man on the moon, the one that gave birth to jazz music, Martin Luther King and voted in Barack Obama twice. The beginnings of a country do not necessarily define its future and, I believe, that Stephen Jin Nom Lee could see past the America of the 1950s and knew that the 'idea of America' was ultimately stronger than that the reality he faced. He believed that America was the place where his children and grandchildren had a real chance of a future. With different decades come different debates and argument over what 'freedom' actually means in practice and the price you have to pay for it in this interconnected and complex world is a very current one for American voters – yet I am a firm believer that the 'idea of America' that Lee was foresighted enough to see and was drawn to is the one that will prevail.

• BB: If you could have met Stephen Jin-Nom Lee what would have been the first question which you asked him?

HW: What do you think of the book?

• BB: You've got one wish. What's it to be?

HW: The safety, health and happiness of my wife, children and family.

• BB: What's next for Howard Webster?

HW: I am currently working on a new book based on a semi-biographical column I used to write called Meet Pursuit Delange. The column was often described as a male Bridget Jones but I prefer Woody Allen meets Withnail & I.

• BB: Exciting times, Howard - I hope that you get all you wish for and thanks for chatting to us.

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