Why I Love Setting as Character by Kim Fay, The Map of Lost Memories

In the early 1930s, my grandpa joined the Navy and set off to see the world. Before the age of twenty he had sailed to Japan, the Philippines, China and Hong Kong. He took photos. He kept a scrapbook. And forty years later when he would stay with my family, he shared all of this with my sister and me as he told us stories about the exotic places he had once visited. Before we were teenagers, we knew how it felt to be knocked unconscious and nearly thrown overboard in a monsoon, and then wake as the only (very surprised) man in a maternity ward in Manila. Our grandpa actually blushed when he told this, even though he also enlightened us on the effects of a lively Saturday night in Shanghai, finishing one such tale of good times by tipping his head toward the grizzled, bleary-eyed, obviously-hung-over ceramic sailor on the wall of his trailer.For as long as I can remember, Asia and my grandpa’s youth have been intertwined, and I give this credit for my attraction to books in which the setting is as important as the characters and the plot. Even when I read Harlequin romances as a teenager, I chose them not for the sexy love scenes, but rather for their exotic locales. I still have my copy of Under the Stars of Paris, which first introduced me to The City of Light.

It’s one type of pleasure for me to read National Geographic, poring over the facts and images. But when a place takes on a life of its own in a novel, there is no greater journey I want to take. Add in a historical aspect, and I’m hooked! I was mesmerized by Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale as New York became a living, breathing creature. And could Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky have taken place anywhere other than the alienating landscapes of post-colonial North Africa? I consider Graham Greene the master of imbuing a setting with singular human qualities. Mexico (The Power and the Glory), the Congo (A Burnt-Out Case), Cuba (Our Man in Havana) and Vietnam (The Quiet American)—so entwined with the plot and character are these places that they could never be interchangeable with other destinations.

My novel, The Map of Lost Memories, takes place in Asia in 1925. It’s the story of a young American woman on a quest for a treasure believed to contain the lost history of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer people. Granted, the Cambodian setting is crucial, because that’s where Cambodian temples reside! But the first 150 pages take place in Shanghai and Saigon, both of which were chosen because of their ability to enrich the story with their own unique attributes.

I could have easily set the book’s first scenes in Hong Kong or Manila, if I simply wanted an exotic Asian setting. But those cities did not have Shanghai’s blatant lawlessness at the time. Shanghai in the 1920s was immoral and amoral, complex and confused, all qualities that both reflect those of the book’s characters. As for Saigon, I needed it for its defiant entrenchment in the colonial lifestyle … and for its heat. You cannot have a certain type of languor in a cold country, just as a certain type of clear-headedness can be a debilitating struggle in a tropical land. Overheated Saigon was the perfect setting for my characters to lose their grip on their certainties (much as the French were just beginning to lose the certainty of their stand in Indochina) and for the story to twist slowly (is there any other way in humidity?) in a new direction.

We are all affected by where we are from: the geography, the weather, the sense of history (or lack of it) that defines the place. We are equally affected by where we live as adults. The settings of our everyday activities play a significant role in defining who we are. When this fact of life is folded into the pages of fiction, when characters interact not only with each other but with their surroundings, and when they are irrevocably affected by the inherent nature of a place, a novel for me takes on depth that I find impossible to resist.

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Born in Seattle and raised throughout Washington State, I lived in Vietnam for four years and still travel to Southeast Asia frequently. A former independent bookseller, I am the author of the historical novel The Map of Lost Memories and Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam, winner of the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards’ Best Asian Cuisine Book in the United States. I am also the creator/editor of the To Asia With Love guidebook series. I now live in Los Angeles. I am represented by Alexandra Machinist of Janklow & Nesbit.

Books of a Lifetime by Kim Fay, The Map of Lost Memories

I love novelists, and I devour information about them the way many others follow celebrities. I want to know their methods, their madnesses, their inspirations. I am awed when I discover that one of my favorites read Great Expectations at the age of twelve, or that another credits teenage years spent reading Willa Cather with shaping her literary career. I am also fascinated because my experience was very different. So different that I bemoaned my devoid-of-literary-notables adolescence to a friend, when asking her who I should mention if ever questioned about it.

“Lie,” my friend told me.

I have considered it. It’s not that I didn’t read as a child. In fact, I read voraciously from the moment I could hold a book, and I loved all the usual suspects: Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Carolyn Keene. Like every budding writer, I was mad about Jo March. And my passion for Betty Cavanna ran so deep that I actually absorbed her writing into my own without realizing it until my sister gave me a vintage copy of Cavanna’s Mystery of the Emerald Buddha last year, to celebrate my novel being accepted for publication. In this book there is a dinner party conversation about the ethics of taking artifacts from the Angkor Wat temples out of Cambodia. As I reread this section, I was astonished, since that exact issue plays a crucial role in my historical adventure novel, The Map of Lost Memories.

As I left grade school, I was on the path to becoming one of those teenagers who discovers Virginia Woolf and George Eliot and Ayn Rand and so on. Instead, I took a turn and found myself in the land of teen romances, which led me into the land of Harlequin romances, where I was drawn not to the love stories but to the exotic locales: Hong Kong, Greece and Paris first came alive for me on the pages of romance novels, which were the only books I read for years, with one exception.

In the seventh grade I somehow got my hands on a copy of Gone with the Wind. I don’t remember if I bought it myself or if someone gave it to me; what I do remember is that I was captivated from the first line: Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. I bolted it down, all 1,024 pages of it, in less than a week, absorbed by the history, Scarlett’s determination, and a romance on an epic scale. When I was done, I immediately flipped it over and started reading it again, and I read it half a dozen more times (at least) before I graduated from high school. It sat by my side as I typed away on my own novels, a faithful companion urging me on. I loved that book so much that when I attended my twenty-year reunion, a former classmate commented on how “Kim used to carry a ratty old copy of Gone with the Wind around with her all the time.”

That ratty old copy happens to still be sitting on my bookshelf, held together (just barely) with layers of tape.

As I entered college and took advanced English courses, studying writers ranging from Henry James to Joan Didion, the romances drifted out of my life. And once I started working at The Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle, I entered a whole new realm of reading: Margaret Drabble, Anita Brookner, Muriel Spark, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov, Katherine Anne Porter, Laurie Colwin … the list truly is endless, for there were times when I was reading a book a day. In the five years I worked at that indie bookstore, Michael Ondaatje taught me the poetry to be found in prose, Penelope Lively taught me how to layer a plot, and Graham Greene taught me the art of literary suspense. But as for my beloved Margaret Mitchell, she taught me the greatest thing of all: how to tell a story and keep a reader turning the page.

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Born in Seattle and raised throughout Washington State, I lived in Vietnam for four years and still travel to Southeast Asia frequently. A former independent bookseller, I am the author of the historical novel The Map of Lost Memories and Communion: A Culinary Journey Through Vietnam, winner of the World Gourmand Cookbook Awards’ Best Asian Cuisine Book in the United States. I am also the creator/editor of the To Asia With Love guidebook series. I now live in Los Angeles. I am represented by Alexandra Machinist of Janklow & Nesbit.

Synopsis:

Suspense and secrets are woven together in this engrossing fiction debut by Kim Fay.The Map of Lost Memories takes readers on a daring expedition to a remote land, where the search for an elusive treasure becomes a journey into the darkest recesses of the mind and heart.

In 1925, the international treasure-hunting scene is a man’s world, and no woman knows this better than Irene Blum, who is passed over for the coveted curator position at Seattle’s renowned Brooke Museum. But she is not ready to accept defeat. Skilled at acquiring priceless, often illicitly trafficked artifacts, Irene is given a rare map believed to lead to a set of copper scrolls that chronicle the lost history of Cambodia’s ancient Khmer civilization. Such a find would not only restore her reputation, it would be the greatest archaeological discovery of the century.

As Irene travels from Seattle to Shanghai to the Cambodian jungles, she will encounter several equally determined companions, including a communist temple robber and a dashing nightclub owner with a complicated past. As she and her fellow adventurers sweep across borders and make startling discoveries, their quest becomes increasingly dangerous. Everyone who comes to this part of the world “has something to hide,” Irene is told—and she learns just how true this is. What she and her accomplices bring to light will do more than change history. It will ultimately solve the mysteries of their own lives.