My first airplane ride was at nine months old, when I flew from Kimpo Airport in Seoul, South Korea, to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City. I have been on a journey ever since.
Born to a Korean woman and an American soldier, I became Alice Stephens when I was adopted into a white, American family living in Philadelphia. Not for long, however, for when I was four years old, shortly after I became an American citizen, our family moved to Gaborone, Botswana, where I spent an idyllic childhood. At the time, Gaborone had no traffic lights, no TV, no fast food restaurants. For the six years we lived there, I was allowed to wander freely and fearlessly. My family traveled the globe, camping in the teeming game reserves of Botswana, exploring other African nations from Tanzania to Lesotho, visiting Europe, and venturing to far flung destinations like Mauritius and Brazil. My parents taught me to be a citizen of the world, eager to explore new cultures and countries with an open mind and heart.
My parents also instilled in me a love of literature. Books abounded in our home; instead of Barbies, I got books for my birthday. From very early on, I had a reputation as a bookworm, always reading, sometimes preferring fictional companions to human ones. From this early proclivity came the first inklings of being a writer, encouraged by the gilt-edged diaries with tiny locks and keys my grandmother gave my sister and me for Christmas.
Our return to the US when I was ten years old came as somewhat of a shock. While I was a citizen of the world, I was sometimes made to feel an outsider in our white, suburban community of Washington, DC. I was the only Asian student in the 5th grade, perhaps in the entire school. I was confused by the way my classmates and neighbors stereotyped me. Why did they think I was any different than they were, different than my own family, even? While I had faced racism in Gaborone, where I was a novelty as one of the very few East Asians residing there, it was much more devastating when coming from those who were supposed to be my compatriots.
When I was in 7th grade, my family moved to Cairo, Egypt, returning to the DC area. My junior year of high school, I studied in Barcelona, and in college I spent a semester in Xi’an, China. After college, I lived in Istanbul.
Everywhere I went, I was met with assumptions people made about me. Even in China, where finally I was part of a sea of Asian faces, I was presumed to be an overseas Chinese, back for a visit to the homeland. My identity was fractured into many pieces, a fragile mosaic held together by a love of reading, a propensity to daydream, and a compulsion to write.
I attempted my first novel in my early twenties. It was terrible. Because I didn’t know who I was, I copied the books I loved. My protagonist was a white man! All the characters were white, except for one, lone Black man. There were no Asians.
When it finally sank in that my manuscript was a stinker, I put aside all writing except for letters and my journal. I had two sons and concentrated on family and career. But the itch to write, like the itch to travel, was always there.
My husband also had a peripatetic childhood, and loves to wander. When we were in our thirties, with two young children, we moved to Nagasaki, Japan, to teach English. As in China, I blended in with the population, instead of standing out as I usually did. Living in Japan was at once very easy and very hard. It was safe and clean, the locals were polite and friendly, the food and culture exquisite. But the language barrier was enormous, the adjustment to the Japanese style of living sometimes difficult, and the workplace spoken and unspoken rules hard to get used to. The Japanese are both ingratiating and inflexible, with a warm, welcoming exterior and a severe, rigid core.
My ancestry added a layer of complexity. Japan brutally colonized Korea from 1920 until the end of World War II, with decades of indirect rule before that. Japanese and Koreans look down upon each other to this day, and there is open prejudice against Koreans in Japan.
For the more than 200 years that Japan closed itself off from the rest of the world, Nagasaki was the only port where westerners were allowed to trade. After Japan was forced open in 1854, Nagasaki was one of the few cities where foreigners could live, and for a brief period of time it flourished as an international city. Adventurous westerners flocked there to make their fortune. One such man was Thomas B. Glover, a Scotsman who sold arms and other western technology to the Japanese, making him wealthy. With his riches, he built a western-style house that today is a major Nagasaki tourist attraction, Glover Garden. It was there I first met Thomas A. Glover, Glover’s “Eurasian” son, whose life coincided with the rise of and fall of Imperial Japan.
It was my husband who suggested there might be a story in Glover Garden I should write, and upon further reading about Thomas A. Glover, I felt a shock of recognition. Here was a mixed-race person like me, never fully accepted by his Japanese or European associates. No spoilers, but there were other echoes of his story in mine. The Nagasaki Prefectural Library very kindly allowed me access to his private papers. From this wealth of material—correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, receipts and other ephemera, and more—a story began to emerge. I started writing the novel by hand at the high school in Nagasaki where I taught, and continued writing it on my laptop when we moved back to America, rising early to get an hour of writing in before work.
The publication of The Twain is a whole odyssey in itself, one I will tell in numbers for the sake of brevity: It took me seven years to write, and was edited down from 389K words to 123K, represented by two agents, and rejected dozens of times. Even after publishing my debut novel, Famous Adopted People, I never stopped believing in my first manuscript. With themes of love and loyalty, identity and history, the human will and destiny, The Twain tells a story of historical importance that has only gained urgency as fascism is once again on the rise. It was the turning tide of world events that encouraged me to take my manuscript out of the drawer and submit it to Regal House Publishing, recommended to me by members of my literary community.
I am thrilled and gratified to have found a home for THE TWAIN with Regal House, 13 years after the completion of the manuscript, and 20 years since I handwrote the first line of the book, which has always remained the same: “I remember the last time I saw beauty.”
One journey has ended. Another has begun.
