In Only a Girl, three generations of Chinese women struggle for identity against a political backdrop of the World Depression, World War II, and the Indonesian Revolution. Nanna, the matriarch of the family, strives to preserve the familyÂ’s traditional Ch
I was born in Indonesia when this country was a Dutch colony known as the Netherlands East Indies. Bandung, a mountain city on the slopes of the Tangkuban Prahu in West Java, was my hometown.
As an only child, raised in a strict Chinese household during WW II and the Indonesian Revolution, I was not allowed to play in the street with neighbor children, who might have been Chinese attending the Dutch-Chinese school rather than the all-Dutch school I attended. Thus books and blank pages of notebooks became my best friends.
In their zeal to become Westernized, my family encouraged the Dutch habit of reading for pleasure and boasted about my early accomplishments in penmanship which came in the form of winning essay contests and having pieces published in the school paper and local newspaper.
The escalating political unrest of WWII followed by the Indonesian Revolution shifted my family's focus from making sure that I became an independent, professional woman, to making sure that I remained safe and honorable. This led to marriage and immigration to America as well as put a halt on my ambition to enter the workforce as a writer.
After living in a different country and speaking a different language for nearly four decades, I was able to revisit my dream only to discover I lost the ability to write in Dutch. I had to go back to school to study fiction writing.
While I wrote short stories, the characters of Only A Girl one by one stepped forward. I started to write about their lives; first as separate stories then weaving these together into the bigger work. Seven years and four revisions later, in June 2009, Only A Girl was published by Publish America.
In April 2010, the Indonesian translation and publishing rights were bought by PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama, the largest publisher in Indonesia. The translation, Menantang Phoenix, was published in October 2010.
Along with many SF Bay Area library systems, UC Berkeley and Cornell University have graced Only a Girl with the acquisition of the title for their South East Asian Collection. I am grateful for the many invitations I have received to give author's presentations. For more information, please visit my website at www.liangouw.com
Only a Girl recently changed publishers. It is now published by Dalang Publishing, distributed by Ingram, and available at amazon.com
