With 'Rabbit Moon,' Jennifer Haigh chooses Shanghai as the backdrop to family tragedy
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Hey, it's Empire's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There's a bit of writing advice in today's interview. It's with novelist Jennifer Haig talking about her novel Rabbit Moon. It's a family drama centered around a young American woman living in Shanghai who gets into a car accident. And in this interview with here and now Scott Tong, Haig gets into how this affects her separated parents and her sister and the familial bond between them all.

And in talking about all of that, Haig drops this nugget of wisdom that for her, a novel begins, quote, with the moment after which nothing will ever be the same. Her interview is coming up after the break.

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Kids learn to earn, save, and spend wisely. And parents can rest easy knowing their kids are learning about money with guardrails in place. Try Greenlight risk-free today at greenlight.com slash NPR. The new novel Rapid Moon by Jennifer Haig starts with a hit-and-run accident pre-dawn in Shanghai. The story is largely about the pedestrian victim, an American college-age woman named Lindsay Litvak.

And then her parents, who are divorced, they hurry over from the States to the Chinese hospital where she's in a coma. Meantime, her younger sister is at a summer camp in the New England woods waiting for word. Lindsay's accident scars a family that is already fractured. Jennifer Haig is author of several acclaimed novels, including Mercy Street, which won the Mark Twain American Voice for Literature Award. And she joins us. Jennifer, good to have you. Good to be here, Scott.

Shanghai is the backdrop to this novel, this family tragedy you write about. You've lived there for a while as you worked on this, I gather. It's fun reading about a lot of familiar places as I spent several years there myself. What struck you about the place?

It is unlike any place I have ever spent time. Probably what sticks in my mind most is the pace of everything. It's a megacity. It's a city of 30 million people, and everything moves at this sort of accelerated pace. In the time I lived there, on a regular basis, I would see buildings being torn down that looked virtually new. And so these new buildings were torn down and replaced by newer buildings.

So quickly that it was really disorienting. It was hard to keep landmarks, in fact, because you could see the city remodeling before your eyes.

Yeah. When I first got there, and this goes back to 2006, an investor guy, it was one of the first people I met there, and he says, look around, you see the cranes in all directions. That's why the National Bird of China is the crane. But it's true, right? I mean, all of that is happening and it's moving so quickly. But you have a lot of Shanghai in the book, right?

the smells, its energy for the reader who will never go there. What are you trying to deliver about Shanghai to the reader? You know, the book is very much about the loneliness of travel, the kind of isolation you feel when you're in an unfamiliar environment. The main character, Lindsay, who is the victim of this hit-and-run accident, has been living in China for some time. She speaks the language. She is very much at home there. But

But after the accident, her parents do what any parents would do. They get on a plane and fly to China. And so here they are in this traumatic situation trying to navigate the health care system, which is hard in any culture in any language. And on top of it, they are acrimoniously divorced. So as a writer, I always feel that a novel begins with the moment after which nothing will ever be the same.

And for this family, that moment is the moment of the accident.

And the rest of the novel looks at the consequences of that accident and also a set of consequences that brought Lindsay to Shanghai in the first place. Yeah. And let me ask you a little bit about Lindsay, your protagonist, her situation, the idea of an American college-age young woman from the Boston area ending up in Shanghai's cosmopolitan high society life. How did the idea come to you?

You know, I am one of those people who did a junior year abroad years ago, and it was a life-changing experience for me. Rabbit Moon turns that idea of junior year abroad on its head because, in fact, Lindsay's not a student. She is dropped out of college. She's a pretty troubled young woman with a complicated history. And part of the reason she is in China to begin with is to flee her family.

It's something that I find remarkable about the era we live in. It's really easy to lie. It's easy to lie to your parents. You know, for a couple of years, Lindsay's parents have had no contact with her beyond phone calls and text. And she could be anywhere doing absolutely anything.

Well, her parents, as you described, they're divorced. Their relationship is very challenging. And you also write a lot about her younger sister who was born in China, adopted from China into this Massachusetts family. At different moments, you write from the point of view of each of them. Why?

Do you know, I think that writing a novel, like reading a novel, is an exercise in extreme empathy. And I know that is a word that has suddenly improbably become controversial in our culture, whether empathy is in fact a good thing. I firmly believe empathy is a good thing. And for me as a fiction writer, part of the experience of empathy is writing from different points of view. So at different times in the story, I spend time in each of these characters' heads and

Probably of all of them, I had the greatest affection for Grace, the younger sister, who is 11 years old when the story starts and is very, very attached to her older sister, Lindsay. The parents go to Shanghai to see what's happened to Lindsay. Grace is stuck at summer camp in New Hampshire and not happy to be there. And so the time I spend in Grace's point of view, it's a lot of her wondering what's happening to her family and why is nobody communicating with her?

Well, let's talk about Grace and her adoption. Lindsay, her older sister at one point, you know, describes this and she describes her mother as,

as being a naive American who sees herself as a white savior rescuing a poor Chinese girl. Of course, others argue international adoption may deprive a child of ancestral culture, may take a child from biological parents. How does Grace, in the end, think about her adoption?

Over the course of the novel, you see an evolution in the way Grace thinks about this. When we first meet her as an 11-year-old, she simply doesn't want to be adopted. And so she has really refused her parents' attempts to teach her about Chinese culture. Her parents have wanted her to take language lessons and calligraphy lessons and Chinese dance lessons, and Grace will have none of it.

because it makes her feel separate from this family she loves. She does not want to be different. And over the course of the story, her thinking about this changes. Yeah. And how did you kind of approach writing about adoption, Chinese adoption? I mean, it's a topic a lot of people discuss, debate, have different views on.

It's something I've been interested in for a long time because I have both friends and close family members who've adopted daughters from China. So I have seen up close. Including me. Yes, so I hear. So in each of these families, you know, I've gotten a different view of how this adoption can play out. And the adoption experience in Rabbit Moon is not meant to be typical. I realize there is no such thing.

It's a look at how this plays out in one particular family. And so this whole question of the rightness or wrongness of international adoption is actually tied up in the conflict within this mother-daughter relationship.

There is one peripheral character I want to ask you about, Sun. Mr. Sun is the property manager in the building in Shanghai where Lindsay lives. He's a widower, has no children. His parents are gone. This is a little window into Chinese history here, isn't it? Yes.

Yes. You know, I loved writing the character of Sun, and we get his point of view quite briefly. There's only one section that is from his point of view. But it's a lens on China that none of the other characters can possibly have. The other characters, by and large, are Americans. You know, part of the experience of being a foreigner is that you have this...

heightened ability to observe. You have fresh eyes because everything is new. But you don't always understand why things are the way they are. And Sun is there to provide that. Yeah. It's striking to read that and that like so many people of this generation are directly connected to the society-wide reality

disaster of the cultural revolution. And to me, that is what the Sun story kind of tells. Finally, Jennifer, toward the end of your book, you have this line, we live at the intersection of causality and chance. Tell me more about that. When I was writing this story, I thought a lot about how it might have unfolded differently.

And there is a passage about halfway through the book where Lindsay is visiting Shanghai for the first time. And she meets a woman named Mei who becomes very important to her story. And I thought about how if Lindsay had been sitting in the restaurant next door, everything that happened in her life from that point forward would have unfolded differently. When you're writing fiction, you are acutely aware of that.

That if you change just one variable, it's the butterfly effect. It changes the whole cascade of consequence that happens afterward. And it's a universal question, right? I mean, all of us who have lived more than a few minutes ask the version of this question. We've been talking to novelist Jennifer Haig. Her new book is called Rapid Moon. Jennifer, congratulations on the book and thanks for the time. Thank you, Scott. Thank you.

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