The House of Aunts — Author's Notes
The House of Aunts — Author's Notes
Of all my stories The House of Aunts is the one that people have responded to most strongly. There is fanfic. The audio magazine PodCastle departed from its usual guidelines on story length and did an audio version (read by my super talented friend Nina Shaharuddin). The Stanford Asian American Theater Project put on a stage adaptation. I've received enthusiastic feedback from all sorts of people, from Southeast Asian Chinese women who remember being girls with a surfeit of aunts (who are the sort of people you would expect to like it), to male Mat Salleh lawyers working in Hong Kong.
I've been touched and a little surprised by the reception of the story, and I guess that is for the same reason that it has elicited a strong reaction — it is very personal. It is the closest I have got so far in my work to honouring where I've come from. Which is funny, because the people on whom the characters are based would not be happy about being transformed into pontianak, which is why I haven't told any of them about it.
People ask whether the aunts are based on my aunts. No individual aunt in the story is based on any of my actual aunts, but all of the aunts are based on an aggregation of my aunts as a whole.
I am grateful to Ann Leckie for buying the story for GigaNotoSaurus, and for telling me to submit it to PodCastle.
Go to next story: One-Day Travelcard for Fairyland