OUR FRIENDS IN SHANGHAI
A Q&A with Tony Parsons on My Favourite Wife

My Favourite Wife is set almost exclusively in Shanghai - what's the appeal of that city?

TP: It's a gold rush city - people go there to get rich, or for the chance of a new life or just as a way out of poverty. You feel it everywhere - that hunger, that passion. It gives Shanghai an incredible energy that is like nowhere else on earth. You sense it among the businessmen, and among the beggars, and among the crowds in the bars and clubs. Everyone is there to strike gold and to change their life. That's all very appealing to a writer.

What was the starting point for book?

TP: All books begin with a hunch - just this vague feeling that some half-baked idea you have might work as a novel. I had the idea of a man falling in love with a rich man's mistress. I'd seen that situation in real life once or twice and it really fascinated me - the different value that human beings place on each other. For one man, this woman is - to be brutal - a bit on the side. But to the other man, she's the love of his life. It's the same woman, but these two men value her in completely different ways. And when I heard about this area in Shanghai - New Gubei Area, where JinJin Li lives in My Favourite Wife - it all started falling into place. I had known for a long time that I wanted to write a book set in Asia. And Shanghai formalizes that relationship of the rich man and his mistress like nowhere else. Essentially it is a revival of the concubine system. And I knew that the protagonist of the book would come stumbling into the middle of it and blow it all apart. And that is Bill Holden.

Is My Favourite Wife a big departure for you?

TP: I don't see it as a major departure. Becca, Bill and Holly could have appeared in Man and Boy. Essentially what I write about are modern men and women and the struggles they go through. Bringing up children, watching parents age, keeping relationships together, keeping the romance alive, recognizing the love that exists between you, the highs and lows of the working world - I write about the kind of stuff that anyone can identify with, because we all go through the same things. Bill and Becca go through recognizably modern trials and traumas - they move to a new city, the husband gets left alone and a friendship between him and a neglected woman grows into something more. And then everything is on the line for all the characters - for Bill, for Becca, for JinJin. They all have hard choices to make. The only thing that makes My Favourite Wife different from my other books is that it's set in Shanghai, but I think the story works there in a way that it wouldn't have if it had been based in London or New York or even Tokyo.

Why is that?

TP: If you spend any time at all in Shanghai then what you notice most about the place is the brutal inequality. I have nothing but admiration for the Chinese people and I applaud all the economic advances that China has made in recent years. But that economic miracle is largely built on having an inexhaustible supply of poor people. And I see JinJin Li as being as much a part of that hard reality as some former farmer working in a factory. She's living in Paradise Mansions as a second wife because she has a family to support. If she had been earning more than peanuts in her old job as a teacher then she would not have been there. And that's the dilemma that Bill is confronted by - despite the feelings that grow between him and JinJin Li, there is still that feeling of unfairness, of injustice, of economic imbalance. He is in Paradise Mansions because he is a highly paid, hotshot young lawyer. And she is in Paradise Mansions because she is young, good looking and poor. Shanghai is not a fair place - it can be incredibly cruel, like any city.

Becca is the strongest woman character you have ever written.

TP: Thank you. Like many women, she is really the force that holds that little family together. And she is the instigator for much of what happens. She's the one who is unhappy with their life in London; she wants to move to Shanghai - and it's incredibly seductive, to go from a rather dowdy middle class existence in the West to a place where it is considered perfectly natural to have servants. Colonial luxury is more addictive than heroin. And ultimately Becca is the one who has to decide if the Holden family survives or not.

How accurate is the portrait of twenty-first century China in My Favourite Wife?

TP: A number of Shanghainese have said to me - you got it, that's exactly what it's like, and that's good enough for me. I have attempted to depict Shanghai - and China - in all its complexity. At this point in Chinese history, people have never been freer, more affluent, and more optimistic. I mean - never. They truly have never had it so good. But at the same time, China has incredible problems - corruption and pollution on an unimaginable scale. You get a sense of that in the book. More than a sense, I hope. Because it is real. But at the same time, it is incredible what is happening in China - the change, and the speed of change. It's like watching the Industrial Revolution on fast forward.

Did you know Shanghai well before your started My Favourite Wife?

TP: I knew the old Shanghai. I first went to China almost twenty years ago. All over - Shanghai and Beijing, but also up north in Dalian and Shenyang, and down south in Guilin. I went down the Yangtze river before they built the dam, saw Chongqing and Wuhan. A lot of the places that feature in the book. And of course Hong Kong, before and after British rule. I felt I knew China, but I didn't know Shanghai particularly well. It held me back from starting the book, to tell you the truth - but my friends in Hong Kong and Shanghai told me to go ahead; that my experiences of getting to know the city would mirror Bill Holden's changing feelings about Shanghai. And they were right. So I spent a lot of time there while I was writing the book. With friends, but also alone. You have more fun when you are with someone, but there is nothing like being alone in a city to really teach you about it.

At the end of My Favourite Wife, I wondered what happened to them - to Bill and to Becca, and to JinJin too.

TP: Yes, me too!! But that's when you know a story works; when you care about the characters to the degree that you are wondering how things will work out for them.

Is it a love story?

TP: It is absolutely a love story. But you never really know if it's about the love between Bill and Becca or Bill and JinJin, or both. And of course it is also about the love that Becca and Bill feel for their daughter, Holly. In a way, that's the love that decides their fates.

Can you talk a bit about the other marriages in the book? I am thinking of Shane and Rosalita, and the Devlins.

TP: The Devlins have this very successful partnership, but it is essentially an economic relationship. They have built a unit where they have children, build careers, go to social functions and so on. It is a very pragmatic concept of marriage. Shane's marriage is different. He's a great guy, a big roaring Australian, but he reaches the limits of promiscuity and gets married as a way of escaping his old life. He marries Rosalita, and they are both desperately miserable. He tries to graft a marriage onto his life, and it ends in tragedy. Bill and Becca, despite all the troubles that come from his affair with JinJin Li, have the most successful marriage in the book. They always love each other, and they are best friends. Then suddenly it is not enough, and that's where the drama comes from.

Although this is the first of your books to be set in Asia, that continent has featured in all your previous novels. What is it with you and Asia?

TP: As Kipling said, when you have heard the East calling, you will never hear anything else. I don't know - I think it is because I have so many strong bonds with Asia. My wife, Yuriko, is Japanese. Our daughter is fluent in Japanese and turns into a little Japanese girl after a summer in Japan. A lot of my oldest friends have been in Hong Kong for over twenty years, including David Morrison, who is really more like a brother than a friend. And I think also our lives are becoming more global - we work and fall in love and travel all over the planet. We all belong to the world now.

Going back to the very beginning, where does it come from? The urge to write?

TP: For me it comes from my mother. She left school when she was fourteen, but she was very creative. A self-taught piano player, she wrote poems. And her attitude to creativity was very matter-of-fact, very natural - art was something that people did, not something you put in a museum. When I was little, she read to me all the time. My parents tried for ten years to have me, and this was the Fifties when there was no IVF or fertility drugs. They desperately wanted children and they couldn't have any. And then little Tony came along, after they had given up and had decided to ride their motorbike through Italy. So I wasn't just an only child, I was this little miracle. Consequently I spent hours and hours on her lap, discovering how stories can transport you, and entertain you, and explain your world. That's where the writing comes from - long afternoons listening to stories about Rupert the Bear.

So you blame Rupert the Bear?

TP: He certainly has a lot to answer for, doesn't he?