Sarah Rose Smiley
Tan will return to Madison this fall as part of the UW-Madison faculty.
Lucy Tan’s ambitious debut novel, What We Were Promised, grew out of a short story she penned while she was a part of UW-Madison’s prestigious master’s program in fiction writing.
Tan first came to Madison in 2014 and began a story about a servant who works for a Chinese couple that spent 20 years studying, working and raising a daughter in the U.S. before returning to a radically transformed Shanghai. The story grew, with the encouragement of her professor, Judith Claire Mitchell (A Reunion of Ghosts, 2015), into her lovely, elegiac novel, published July 10 by Little, Brown. It is already longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize.
When the Zhen family’s fragile façade of wealth and comfort is disrupted by a missing bracelet and the return of a long-lost family member, buried secrets threaten to bring the past crashing down around their luxuriously appointed apartment. An examination of class, identity and alienation, What We Were Promised describes an extended family in flux. It has plenty of literary heft and timely social commentary, but it’s also a thoroughly enthralling and deeply moving novel populated by flawed and fumbling humans caught in the disorienting winds of a shifting global economy.
Before moving to Madison, Tan, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, spent a decade moving between New Jersey, Shanghai and New York City. She has worked at a software company and a digital media advertising company and as an actor (including performing with Madison’s Forward Theater Company), and seems well placed to capture this state of living between cultures, roles and social structures.
Since graduating from the MFA program in 2016, Tan has split her time between NYC and Shanghai, but she’ll be back in Madison this fall as part of the UW-Madison faculty; she has been selected as this year’s James C. McCreight fiction fellow. She corresponded with Isthmus by email about what it means to her to return to Madison just as the novel that was born here makes its arrival into the world.
“I think of it as my creative home,” says Tan. “There’s such a strong literary community in Madison and at UW; being here during my graduate school years allowed me to focus on writing as I never had before.”
Tan says her novel was shaped in some ways on her own experience of living in Shanghai as the Western-educated daughter of Chinese immigrants. “My ability to communicate verbally is such a strong part of my identity — not only as a writer, but as a person,” says Tan, adding that not being fluent in Chinese contributed to a feeling of alienation. “But I think all writers feel alienated to some degree. In a way, it’s a blessing because when you can’t speak, you listen, and I’ve found that listening is generally more rewarding than speaking when you’re in a foreign place. You could say that alienation makes way for observation.”
Having spent the last few months gearing up for the novel’s release, Tan says she’s eager to return to writing fiction. “I’ve started a second novel, which I intend to work on during my fellowship year. It doesn’t have a title yet, but it’s partly inspired by my experience studying under Patricia Boyette in UW’s theater program and my time acting in Madison’s Forward Theater Company.”
Tan will be reading from What We Were Promised on Oct. 12 as part of the Wisconsin Book Festival.
