Asian Mist
Imagine a house of glass and steel perched on a hill. Stone steps lead to the front door in front of which an ivory mist perpetually swirls. Inside, it’s dusky and freezing cold, even during summer. A spiral staircase shortens and lengthens at random. Strange apparitions appear in mirrors.
This is the haunted house in which Meridia, the central character of Erick Setiawan’s enchanting debut novel, Of Bees and Mist, was born and raised. Her parents are so bitter — to each other and the outside world — that Meridia elopes with an 18-year-old boy whom she loves. They marry, and Meridia moves into her husband’s family home in the hope of escaping to a calm future. But her new home is just as bewitched. It swarms with angry bees and has its own perverse history of feuds and treachery.
Of Bees and Mist is a deeply inventive tale set in no particular time and place. But the narrative is steeped in at least three cultures — Chinese, Indonesian and American — that have influenced its young San Francisco-based author. “There is simply no place in the world where Chinese culture and Indonesian superstitions and American ideology coexist side by side, at least not in harmony, so I had to imagine that place completely,” he says.
Setiawan’s novel has been aptly described as an adult fairy tale and a stunning accomplishment for a debut novelist. It’s the kind of story that forces readers to discard preconceived notions and ideas — “to meet the characters without any previous biases,” as the author puts it, “and then evaluate them based on what they do, not on where they live in the world or what the colour of their skin is.”
Born in Indonesia and of Chinese heritage, Setiawan emigrated to the United States in 1991 at the age of 16 and went on to study at the prestigious Stanford University. Like Meridia, he was driven from home by a sense of acute unhappiness. “I was going to this very strict all-boy Catholic school where the teachers were allowed to kick you and hit you, sometimes for no reason at all,” he explains.
Setiawan saw his school as a microcosm of Indonesia in which the powerful preyed on the defenseless. “On a larger scale, I realized that my unhappiness had to do with Indonesia as a country,” he recalls. “I was a Chinese minority — a persecuted race in Indonesia — and I saw a lot of injustice and discrimination.”
Although Setiawan has not visited Indonesia since 1996, its folklore and mythology exert a powerful pull on him — and it shows in his writing. “When you live in a country like Indonesia, there is a palpable connection to the supernatural,” he says. “People accept the idea that not everything can be explained, that there are invisible forces at work, and that ghosts and paranormal phenomena are also part of everyday life.”
As a child, recalls Setiawan, he was “thrilled, scared, amused, terrified.” He spent many a night bathed in sweat, convinced that a demon was hiding under his bed. “When I moved to America, I took some of those beliefs and superstitions with me, and they still resonate with me to this day,” he says.
Setiawan began writing stories in his mid-20s as a form of escape from his work as a software engineer in San Francisco. His first story was about a mute boy trying to communicate with the world around him. “It wasn’t until later that I realized how much that story reflected my life at the time,” he recalls. “Back then, I was also struggling to express myself in a new medium, English, which is my second language.”
Most mornings, says Setiawan, he wakes up “not knowing if I’m Chinese, Indonesian, or American — and yet I don’t think that I’m all three either.” What he does know for sure is that he has a passion for telling dramatic stories. “I grew up hearing about Indonesian folk tales and mythology, and at the same time, I was also exposed to Chinese culture and traditions, along with its superstitions, which play a significant role in the book,” he says.
Setiawan was also inspired by his large extended family. His father, a businessman in Jakarta, had nine siblings, a source of constant drama and amusement for him as a child. “This week this aunt was not speaking to that uncle, and the next week, another uncle was caught cheating on his wife, etc., etc.,” says Seitwan. “My family really taught me how to pick up on the smallest signs, because those often turned out to be the most important things in life.”
Since the success of his first novel, Setiawan has been writing full-time. It hasn’t been easy. “I’m a terribly slow writer, and my goal is to write a page a day,” he says. “Sometimes I finish this in a couple of hours and I’m happy, but more often than not, it’s midnight and I still don’t have that page.” It’s then that his Chinese heritage asserts itself. “I get down on myself and think I’m not only an impostor but a big failure to boot,” he says. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this.”
Setiawan is currently working on his second novel. Unabashedly superstitious, he won’t say what it’s about until it’s finished. After all, he wrote Of Bees and Mist in complete secrecy for four years — not even his parents knew about it. All that this talented novelist will say for now is that his next novel will have a broader canvas than the previous one. “It will also have a gripping family mystery at its heart.”
About the Author
Alison Gee is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in People, InStyle, the International Herald Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She is a former editor of Asiaweek magazine and is presently writing an India-based literary memoir, The Peacock Sings for Rain (St. Martin’s Press, 2009).
