5 Questions with Nina Wan
Nina Wan is a former journalist. She was born in Shanghai and moved to Australia as a child. The inspiration for The Albatross came from an inner-city golf course in Melbourne, where she once found unexpected joys at a time of formidable challenges.
No.1
In your bio, it says that the inspiration for your debut novel, The Albatross, came from an inner-city golf course in Melbourne, where you ‘once found unexpected joys at a time of formidable challenges’. I wonder if you can speak more to that—how did the novel take its shape following this realisation?
I never expected to find myself on a golf course, but that was where I came to be in the winter of 2018. I had been in a downward spiral ever since my husband’s cancer diagnosis the previous year, so angry with the world that simple daily tasks had become a struggle. One day, my husband, trying to be helpful, bought me a set of clubs and urged me to take up golf. The idea was preposterous, but no more so than anything else that was happening in my life.
So it was here that I found myself driving to the local golf course (then known as the Elsternwick Public Golf Course) in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton. It was a swampy place, with a drainage canal running through the middle and an old clubhouse enveloped by the noises of a busy highway. Hardly anyone was around. I bashed my way down the course alone and had a terrible time trying to get the ball to go anywhere I wanted it to. The whole thing was much harder than I expected.
But a strange feeling came over me that afternoon. After existing for more than a century, the course was weeks away from being shut down; the economics could no longer justify keeping it open. Being there gave me the sense that, somehow, we shared a common struggle when it came to questions of mortality.
In the weeks that followed, it became a comfort to be out there on the course, in all kinds of weather. I eventually came to realise two things: I was a terrible golfer, and that it was a profound relief to admit I was terrible, that I must give in to all the elements beyond my control which affected the path of the ball—everything down to direction of the wind, the way the rain was falling, or how each rock and twig laid on the ground. These were the unnegotiable uncertainties that all golfers understand well, encapsulated by the first rule in the golf book: you must play the course as you find it, and play the ball as it lies.
At some point, this translated to a larger realisation—that I could not change how the ball landed in life, that I must come to terms with all my unwanted realities as I continued walking forward. By the time I began to write The Albatross, it seemed only appropriate that the story of Primrose—a woman plagued by her own doubts and struggles—should begin on that golf course.
No.2
You’ve worked as a journalist at the Australian Financial Review in the past. In The Albatross, the protagonist Primrose Li also has a past as a financial journalist, and golf is a solace for her as well. Instead of asking that cliché question (which seems to be asked of writers of colour more often) about whether Primrose is based on ‘you’, I want to ask about your world-building process: what was it like synthesising personal experiences with imagination to produce a compelling work of fiction?
Fiction is always coloured, to some extent, by the author’s own realities. For me, many of my own experiences helped to inform the novel’s vision as I constructed the emotional universe of the characters, Primrose in particular. In the early writing stages, it was a spontaneous blending of reality and fiction, one which occurred almost subconsciously. As a result, many parts of the very first draft of The Albatross had a dense flavour of the autobiographical.
Through the countless drafts that followed, those sections were put through a kind of filter so that, where required, some elements were embellished and exaggerated, while others were eliminated as they no longer had a rational place in the story. When the story moves on from draft to draft, it becomes more interesting than the author herself; it begins to assert its own independence.
I love it when I hear readers talk about Primrose Li as a woman in her own right, because that is exactly who she is to me, with, perhaps, just an echo of myself.
No.3
The novel’s other main character, Peter, is also worthy of interest. A fifth-generation Chinese Australian, he carries himself very differently from Primrose, who is second-generation. It’s not often that contemporary novels explore this facet of diaspora, particularly through the lens of relationship outside the family. Can you speak more to this? What were you trying to express through this difference?
At a Senate committee hearing in October 2020, Senator Eric Abetz singled out the three Chinese Australians in attendance and demanded that they publicly denounce the Chinese Communist Party. It was a chilling moment, one which illustrated a nightmare scenario: no matter who you were, as long as you looked Chinese, the assumption would be that you were an enemy unless you specifically proved otherwise. It starkly demonstrated to me the challenge of being an Australian of Chinese heritage at this juncture in history, amid rising geopolitical tensions between the country of my birth and the country I call home.
In The Albatross, Primrose is forced to grapple with identity in the politically charged environment leading up to the pandemic. Her vulnerability and confusion reveal to us how the lives of ordinary people can be impacted by the macro-politics played out between countries. But I also wanted to offer an alternative to Primrose’s plight, because there is a multitude of ways in which people interpret their own existences within the diaspora. By contrast to Primrose, Peter is someone who feels no insecurities about his place in society; he is confident in himself, he firmly believes in his equality to others, and he sees no need to categorise himself based on race or any other attributes. In Peter’s character is a lesson that the insistence of who you are can come from within, that you can refuse to look in the mirror held up to you by others.
No.4
What would you say to an emerging Asian Australian writer who wants to write a novel?
Believe in the authenticity and validity of your own voice, and in the existence of an audience who wish to hear it.
No.5
What kept you buoyed while writing The Albatross? Who do you consider your writerly influences?
I’m a bit neurotic about finishing what I’ve begun, so I found it hard to rest until I had written the last word of The Albatross. I wrote the first draft during the COVID-19 lockdowns and, in many ways, it was the act of writing that actually kept me buoyed. It provided an escape from the chaos of the household, and gave me some much-needed periods of sanity throughout those long days and nights.
What I am most drawn to in other writers’ work is not so much the storyline, but the beauty and tempo of their sentences. In that regard, my favourite writers include J.M. Coetzee, Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway and—because my kids love him too—the incomparable Dr. Seuss.
From a sparkling new Australian voice, The Albatross is a bighearted, beautifully written and utterly engaging novel about first love, second chances and the most elusive shot in golf.
When Primrose makes an unplanned detour into a dilapidated suburban golf course called Whistles, she has no idea that the past will come rushing back at her, bringing every detail of her life into stark focus.
At 36, her marriage is teetering from illness and infidelity. A visit from her commanding brother-in-law looms ominously on the horizon. And by a twist of fate, Peter, the boy she loved twenty years ago, is now living across the street.
Primrose cannot escape the increasing demands to make a choice, between her first love and her marriage, duty and desire, fear and freedom. Slowly, the grounds of Whistles, and a sport she proves to be terrible at, become her meditation and cure.
Get it at Pan MacMillan here, or at all good bookstores.