First edition
By Nicky Pellegrino - Herald on Sunday Sep 5, 2010
Inexperience hasn't stopped Alison Wong from winning literary gold, writes Nicky Pellegrino.

Author photo - Michelle Hyslop

Wong never expected her debut novel, As The Earth Turns Silver, to make the shortlist for the fiction prize, let alone win it, and her acceptance speech at the gala awards dinner was short but emotionally charged, with the author too overwhelmed to speak after acknowledging her late father, Henry Wong.
Even now the Hawke's Bay-born poet's voice wobbles as she mentions him. "My father died very suddenly the year after I started on the book, so he never saw me achieve anything with my writing. He's the person this would have mattered to the most."

Family is important to Wong and in a way it's what sowed the seed for her first work of fiction. In 1996, she was at a reunion to celebrate the 100th anniversary of her paternal great-grandfather's arrival in New Zealand when she was shocked to learn her ancestor had been brutally murdered and the case never solved. Later, as she learned more about attitudes to Chinese immigrants early last century, her plot slowly came together.

Set mostly in Wellington in the 1920s, As The Earth Turns Silver is a cross-cultural love story told against a backdrop of racial prejudice and violence. Yung, a Chinese fruiterer, falls for Katherine, a Pakeha widow, and the pair embark on a fraught affair.

The story is rigorously researched, incorporating real events and characters from the period, and illuminating a dark part of our history rarely touched on in fiction. The NZ Post judges praised it for bringing new themes to New Zealand fiction and "opening new windows on the development of our nation".

Says Wong: "It felt like it was a real risk when I started because I had no idea what the Chinese community would think ... The old Chinese who have been here a long time went through such hard times they didn't like to draw attention to themselves. I thought there might be people who still thought it best not to say anything. But so far everyone has been hugely supportive."

Later, while she's being photographed, Wong tells me she feels as though she's living life in reverse. She started out a shy, responsible child studying maths and going on to forge a career in the IT industry. Then, in her 30s, she threw it all away to follow her far less lucrative dream of writing poetry and fiction.
Read Nicky Pellegrino's full piece at The NZH online.

Footnote:
Nicky Pellegrino, a succcesful author of popular fiction, (The Italian Wedding was published in May 2009 while her latest, Recipe for Life was published by Orion in April, 2010), is also the Books Editor of the Herald on Sunday where the above piece was first published on 5 September, 2010.

Read an earlier review on Beattie's Book Blog.