July 5, 2016
When Matt asked me in late 2014 to help turn his tale of China misadventures into a novel, I initially hemmed and hawed. As a financial journalist based in China for five years, I had read about, heard of, or personally interviewed plenty of foreigners getting rich or getting screwed—or both. Many of the stories could be summed up in a few paragraphs of a feature article. So what experiences could a Singaporean in his mid-thirties offer that were extraordinary enough to fill a two-hundred-page book?
Nonetheless, I ploughed through his notes, with a colicky baby on one arm. When even a massive dollop of milk spit up all over my shirt at 2:00am failed to rouse me from my reading, I knew that this was a story that had to be told.
Matt had written a first-hand account of how a big deal—all seventy-seven million dollars of it—had gone spectacularly sour in China’s notoriously secretive private equity sector. Global interest in China’s elite financiers had spiked amid reports about the record private equity deals[1] in 2014, and the fascinating rise of princelings in private equity[2]. Still, it was very rare to unearth a detailed insider’s tale of how deals were forged or fell apart, how powerful—and surprisingly young—Chinese financiers played their cards, and how foreign funds got a run for their money in China during the post-2008 financial crisis period. What Matt offered was a treasure trove of insight.
I was surprised that he was even ready to spill the beans. Weren’t there confidentiality rules imposed on people directly involved in private equity deals? Would the Chinese characters, particularly the big guns, in Matt’s story skewer him if they felt that he had exposed details about them that were sensitive, or—horrors of horrors—made them lose face?
But Matt felt compelled to write it all out. He needed the cathartic process of recounting and processing his traumatic encounters. He was also driven by a desire to share his experiences with others who might find themselves ploughing through some of the same muck that he did.
But what form should his story take?
A memoir was not feasible, for the various reasons Matt cited in his own blog post “From Memoir to Realistic Fictions”. For instance, he was concerned about preserving confidentiality and protecting the identity of the people and companies involved, and took care to mask these details.
But there appeared to me to be another compelling reason for positioning the book as a novel: Matt was not an omniscient protagonist. The real-life Matt was blindsided by his nemesis. He only discovered a lot of facts on hindsight, and he was constrained by various factors during his quest to piece together clues to the mysterious affair. So his writings were his own interpretation of what happened. While his eye-witness account was undoubtedly authentic and realistic, it was almost impossible to determine whether it was accurate, unless we were to fact-check and interview every single person involved. That seemed highly unlikely to happen, because of the sensitivity of the issues and the dead weight of betrayal.
That was not to say I took everything he said at face value. I still couldn’t kick the journalistic habit of checking public records to see if I could verify parts of his tale, and to make sure the threads of his story hung together. For example, one of the key events in the plot—I won’t give it away for now—had made headlines in Asia, and was even described by some industry hands as a landmark case. I read every article I could dig up on that case, but found the information patchy. Matt’s behind-the-scenes account was the Rosetta stone that helped to decipher what really happened.
So I embarked on the job of rewriting Matt’s notes.
I felt little need to embellish the story significantly, because China’s reality was already so out of this world that spinning fictional tales about it seemed rather duoyu多余. Unnecessary. Superfluous, even. Respected Chinese author Ning Ken expounded on the emergence of Chinese “ultra-real” literature in his essay entitled “Modern China is so crazy that it needs a new literary genre[3]”. Observing wryly that “much of Chinese reality has seemed like a hallucination”, he argued that “some of the things that have actually happened have surpassed novels and movies in their inventiveness”.
Still, even a special China literary genre needs a structural girdle to whip all its craziness and excess, sound and fury into legible shape. A novel or movie adaptation may tie loose ends a little too neatly, over-simplify messy relationships, or try to squeeze oddly square characters into more conventional round holes. But that seemed like a fair trade-off for an “ultra-realist” like Young China Hand to keep it relevant to the general reader.
So I tried to reshape Matt’s stream-of-consciousness writing and disparate ideas using a clear plot structure and a logical framework. Inevitably, the novel also became infused with my own interpretation of what happened, and the nuances of Matt’s voice were sometimes obscured by my writing style. Occasionally, Matt would shake his head when reading a draft: “I wouldn’t talk like that. I wouldn’t even think of saying that.” Then I would change it to something that he was comfortable with.
Since our readers are very interested in what was “real” to Matt, and what is “ultra-real” in the book, here is a list (albeit not a comprehensive one):
Biggest change: Matt decided to replace the original industry with duck farming, and explained his rationale in his earlier post.
Characters: I took the artistic liberty of painting the characters with much more vivid detail that Matt’s notes had called for. Since I had interacted with Chinese people with a wide variety of backgrounds over the course of my reporting work, I could relate to most of the characters in Young China Hand . I tried to remain faithful to Matt’s depiction of the characters when fleshing them out.
Dialogue: Matt’s original draft was not heavy on dialogue. So part of my job was to dramatize situations in the story and create more interesting conversations between the characters. So if you’re curious about the flirtatious banter between Matt and Rebecca on the lake--yup, I made up parts of it. Spoiler: they didn’t end up together. (Attention ladies: he’s still single and very eligible.)
Context and plot: As mentioned earlier, there were gaps in Matt’s narrative that we could not bridge without making educated guesses. For fillers, I added more context about key China trends and social issues that took place between 2008 and 2013. Relevant hot topics were strategically weaved into the plot to shed light on the psychology of the characters and the possible motivations for their actions. These included: the en masse immigration of rich Chinese who invested huge sums in their new country of choice; the rise of Alibaba (whose founder Ma Yun was described in the book a role model for Chairman Zhou); the growing influence of state-linked, elite Chinese investors in the economy; so-called government “land encirclement” programs (which accounted for a few of the characters’ intense interest in a map of the Dominant Duck’s Beijing farm and the speculation that the land there may be much more valuable than previously thought). I also asked Matt to recall specific details about how these trends affected him and how they might shape the plot, to add another layer of authenticity.
To sum up, suffice it to say that everything in the book really happened in China’s “ultra-reality”, but not necessarily to Matt personally.
BY GRACE HSU
