Published in 2023, this is by Jesse Sutanto. She's Chinese-Indonesian, was born in Indonesia, moved to Singapore at the age of seven, and went to England to do her Master's degree. She considers all these places home, although she now lives back in Jakarta with her English husband. Her books focus on the vagaries of families, and with 42 first cousins and 30 aunts and uncles, "many of whom live just down the road", she's certainly well qualified to write on this area.

Vera Wong was recommended as an audioboook by a Five Books contributor, and it's true that Eunice Wong narrates it absolutely flawlessly, with a wonderful array of voices and accents at her disposal.


I've seen various cover designs. The one that pops up with my audiobook is my least favourite

This is not so much cosy crime as comedy crime. It's not a genre I'm generally at home with, but I have to say it proved to be ideal listening for a somewhat difficult week.

Vera Wong is a great character. The classic older Asian auntie, she's loud, bossy, and often very annoying; and she's a confirmed busy-body, who is convinced she knows best about everyone's life. But she has a heart of gold. And, to continue the metaphor, she has a golden touch in terms of bringing out the best in the people she encounters -- once, that is, they get over their surprised resentment of her interference, and force themselves to cough up the truth.

Vera -- now widowed, with a lawyer son who has moved out, and remains distressingly unmarried -- runs a rather down-at-heel tea house in San Francisco. Her orderly if slightly dull life is interrupted when she finds a dead body in her shop. Unimpressed by how coolly the cops are taking everything, she decides she'll do a bit of sleuthing on her own account.

We soon learn that the victim, Marshall Chen, is a nasty piece of work, who has done considerable harm to the four people who eventually turn up at the tea house in response to the obituary Vera has officiously put in the newspaper. There's Marshall's wife, Julia (and their somewhat difficult toddler daughter, Emma); there's Oliver, the dead man's twin brother; there's Riki, a young Indonesian saving to bring his gifted brother to the US; and there's Sana, a would-be artist burdened by a mother who's a successful writer.

They're all suspects, of course. But they're all also damaged human beings, and Vera sees it as her first duty to get them back on their feet. Which she does, through a mixture of a listening ear, a good line in pep talks, and an infinite ability to conjure up delicious Chineses food and situation-appropriate tea.

Vera starts out a bit too abrasive to be likeable. But she rapidly grows on you. And the scene in which everything goes wrong, and she slinks home feeling an utter failure is really moving.

I actually guessed who was the killer (although not the full scenario), and I was ahead of the game on a couple of other plot points, too. There's a large degree of implausibility in the whole thing, and the characters are all somewhat larger than life, but neither of these elements looms sufficiently large to make you want to give up. There's plenty of humour, and the book doesn't take itself too seriously.

It's a feel-good story, with a happy ending for most of the characters, and a built-in reminder of the obvious truth that we all thrive on being loved and encouraged, as opposed to criticized and hounded.


San Francisco, 2001

A couple of points to note:

AGE

Vera is often referred to as an "old woman". She's actually just 60, and the descriptions seem more appropriate to a much older person. I guess that's because I'm up there myself... To the author, who -- I think -- is in her 30s, she probably seems ancient.

The character is modelled on Sutanto's mother: "I told my mom from the very beginning, 'Vera is you -- just turn the dial up to 100.' I was really nervous to have her read it, but she was like, 'I love it. I read it in two days. This one is good. I’m gonna give this one out to all of my friends and tell them to read it.' Because she’s not shy about telling me which of my books she doesn’t like."

Sutanto's mum is obviously not too bothered about this depiction of a sextagenarian. And Sutanto, dealing with an online forum questioner who thought Vera sounded as though she was about 85, and wondered whether the author would want to be referred to as old when she reached 60, responded a little tartly: "Yes I will, because in my culture, same as Vera's, the older you are, the more respect you garner, therefore to be seen as old is a sign of respect." So there...

It's true, though. If I put my pride aside, and recognize that people do see me as old, and there's nothing I can do about it, I have to admit that it's more dignified being old in an Asian environment than in a "Western" one...

And it's also true that I'm probably hopelessly out of date in many areas. Reading this comment by young Maxi Duncan, for example -- who takes issue with the book's pop-culture references and "cringe-worthy" slang, and points out that "most of Sutanto’s references have already gone out of style, ultimately aging the book itself" -- I find myself feeling a complete dinosaur, as I have no idea what's out of style and what's not...



LANGUAGE

This book fits nicely into my newest theme: Authors Writing in a Language Not Their Own. Admittedly, Vera Wong is not the first exponent of this tricky art to be featured in these pages. We've already had Joseph Conrad (whose native language was Polish, but who chose to write in English); Nino Haratischwili (whose mother tongue is Georgian, but who opted for German as her literary language); and Andrea Wulf (who first spoke German, but writes in English). But Sutanto's novel is the first exponent since the category formally defined itself.

Re variants of language, she has a really insightful article in Cosmo, which merits a lengthy quote:

"I have a confession to make: I prefer writing in present tense because I don’t really know my tenses. I did learn English when I moved to Singapore at the age of 7, but since I moved back to Indonesia seven years ago, I feel my grasp of the language slipping. Plus, the other two languages that I speak (very badly, I might add), Indonesian and Mandarin, don’t have tenses. So I find myself always speaking in present tense, which gets a bit confusing... and embarrassing.

"I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with languages, which is ironic because I’m a writer. But this conflicted relationship is something I’m sure many people from immigrant families can relate to. In Singapore, we speak Singlish -- English that’s heavily mixed with Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Malay, and Tamil -- and it’s the language I’m most comfortable speaking. When you run out of words in English, you just pluck one out of any of the aforementioned languages and keep plowing ahead. It’s glorious! But when I've spoken Singlish outside of Asia… oh my gosh. I still cringe remembering the reactions of shock, giggles, and wide-eyed disdain."

She aptly skewers the sharp disparity between the praise showered on foreigners who attempt Indonesian or Chinese, and the opprobrium that anglophone environments often reserve for speakers of other languages when they make mistakes or speak accented English. That's so true. I've witnessed it myself. It's embarrassing.

Speaking of her second novel, Dial A for Aunties, she goes on: "The aunties in my novel speak the same kind of broken English that my parents and many of my own relatives do, the same English that receives ridicule from native English speakers. I wanted to show that behind the halting sentences, there are highly intelligent people, people whose words flow out of them in their own language...

"I keep expecting people to call me out for being a fraud, someone who isn’t even 100 percent comfortable with the English language. But throughout every part of the publishing process, I was never once ridiculed for my accent or the occasional awkward phrase that betrays me as a non-native speaker. It feels, finally, like I have come full circle and been accepted as a writer, broken English and all."

I'm not sure Sutanto will be a repeat author for me, but it was a pleasure to spend a few hours in the redoubtable Vera's company.