‘Keanu Reeves was all we had’: literary fantasy author Shelley Parker-Chan on growing up without role models as a queer Asian kid in Australia
- Identity was an issue for Shelley Parker-Chan growing up, and informs her debut novel, a ‘queer reimagining of the rise to power’ of China’s first Ming emperor’
- She’s always had a thing about monks, she confesses – which is why they loom large in a work that’s also a love letter to Chinese period television dramas
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, pub. Tor Books
Writers respond in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways to that classic question: where did you get the idea for your latest novel? But few responses can top the one offered by Shelley Parker-Chan about her brilliant debut, She Who Became the Sun.
“I was looking for a big sweeping story with high stakes and monks,” she announces from her home in Melbourne, Australia. “I am weirdly obsessed with monks. You are going to ask why?”
It seems rude not to. Why? “As a child I somehow latched onto this idea of the ascetic monk who is a good person because they do everything correctly. Obviously it is a fantasy and has nothing to do with the reality of monastic life. I have met a few nuns in my time, and they are very worldly.”
I usually describe the novel as a queer reimagining of the rise to power of the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty
As if to prove her point, Parker-Chan herself talks to me from a suitably monkish lockdown study (or “Harry Potter cave”) improvised beneath a staircase. Nevertheless, worldly monk is not a bad way to describe Zhu Chongba, her endlessly intriguing protagonist who finds sanctuary from a life of poverty, starvation and violence in a nearby Buddhist monastery.
