Ovidia Yu's fresh chance for fame at 52

At an age when some might give up on their dreams, Singaporean writer Ovidia Yu, 52, has found a fresh chance for fame.

International publisher William Morrow has just brought out her new mystery novel and took her on a promotional tour in the United States.

Aunty Lee's Delights, about a Peranakan cook with a nose for spices and justice, is her third novel to be published overseas in two years. Last year, her book about a young Singaporean girl coming to terms with her heritage, The Mudskipper, was published by Scholastic India, just as her 1989 first mystery novel, Miss Moorthy Investigates, was acquired and republished by India's Westland-Tata group.

The William Morrow deal puts her in the rarefied ranks of Singaporean writers established overseas, such as Catherine Lim (Orion Books), Shamini Flint (Little, Brown) and US-based Kevin Kwan, author of this year's best-selling ode to bling, Crazy Rich Asians (Doubleday).

Yu is seeing the payoff from a 20-year slog since she won Singapore's first major award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1993 with the play, The Woman In A Tree On A Hill, followed by a National Arts Council's Young Artist Award three years later.

Acclaimed in local theatrical circles for hard-hitting feminist plays, she paid the bills by writing corporate training manuals. And she could have been a doctor - she gave up a place in the National University of Singapore because she refused to experiment on animals.

When she turned 50, she gave up corporate gigs to concentrate on fiction.

"When I hit 50, it was now or never," she says in conversations held before and after her recent US book tour. The gamble worked - Aunty Lee's Delights is being hailed by the influential Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus Reviews as "engaging" and "buoyant".

The book has already sold close to 900 copies in Singapore since it was launched three weeks ago. This is a substantial achievement given that sales of 2,000 copies annually can put an author on local bestseller lists.

No wonder then that at our most recent meeting, two Saturdays ago, the writer bubbles with delight. It is just after the conclusion of her overseas book tour and the day she launches the novel in Singapore at Books Kinokuniya in Ngee Ann City.

She speaks breathlessly of seeing her book sell out at Barnes & Noble, the last copy gone as soon as she autographed it.

She has hob-nobbed with best-selling crime writers such as Louise Penny, Sue Grafton and Tess Gerritsen at a fiction convention Bouchercon in Albany, New York, and has been invited to speak at next year's event.

"I was one of two Asian authors there. I was not Tess Gerritsen, I was the other one," she says with a laugh, donning a kebaya-style blouse in honour of her titular character. She is not Peranakan - her China-born father is Hokkien and her late Singapore-born mother was descended from Shanghainese immigrants.

Still, Yu loves the spicy Nonya cuisine, even though as a vegan of many years, she no longer helps herself to chicken dishes such as ayam buah keluak. "Food is the thing that unites Singapore."

Indeed, Ms Rachel Kahan, who bought the book for publisher William Morrow, says the spices and recipes in the text hooked her. "Who doesn't love home cooking? Home cooking is the glue that holds entire societies together. We've had so much interest in this novel here in North America, particularly among the independent booksellers who are tastemakers in our literary world."

Yu understands her audience, and better yet, in her works, helps audiences understand themselves. In his introduction to her collection Eight Plays, published in 2011 by Epigram Books, academic and critic K.K. Seet calls her "Singapore's first truly feminist writer and unabashed chronicler of all things female".

Her forthright observations of gender issues became plays with provocative titles, from Breast Issues (1997) to Hitting (On) Women (2007). The more abstract, The Woman In A Tree On A Hill, united the Biblical Noah with a Chinese female deity Nuwa and was chosen from more than 1,000 works 20 years ago for a rare Scotsman Fringe First Award for new productions.

In 1987, her first play Dead On Cue, won the NUS-Shell Short Play Competition and was performed by Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma before they founded iconic theatre troupe The Necessary Stage.

"She is good at balancing humour and serious moments," says Tan, 50. "Hopefully, she continues writing more plays."

Yu's dramatic portfolio has been championed by other theatre stalwarts such as TheatreWorks' Ong Keng Sen and Wild Rice founder Ivan Heng. Heng took The Woman In A Tree On A Hill overseas, first to Glasgow, to introduce Singapore-style theatre to his teachers at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. Following a rousing reception there, he restaged it at a tiny space in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, with a paddling pool and a ladder to represent the Biblical flood and titular tree.

"The first performance, maybe we had 10 people, but by the end of the first week, all the reviews that came out were giving it five stars," Heng, 50, recalls. "In the second week, we won the Scotsman Fringe First award, and after that, people just thronged."

He adds: "Her voice as a playwright is so special, full of irony, firmly tongue- in-cheek. It works so beautifully in the theatre."

Perhaps the best praise yet comes from her father, noted pathologist Moses Yu, 79, who retired two decades ago as the Ministry of Health's assistant director of medical services (support services division). "She used to be known as my daughter, but now I'm known as her father," he says, while looking through old photo albums at his house off Dunearn Road.

Ovidia Yu and her husband, civil servant Richard Chan, 52, live in a condominium in the West, but decline to be visited because of their pets - turtles, and two dogs rescued from abusive homes. The canines do not take kindly to visitors yet.

Mr Chan also declines to be interviewed. They met while studying in Anglo-Chinese Junior College and have been married for 26 years.

Dr Yu, on the other hand, is full of stories about his daughter's childhood, including how she learnt to read before she was three because he and his late wife, also named Ovidia, had no idea how else to keep her occupied.

Faded colour photographs and slides show his daughter rapt in a book every Christmas morning, while brother Peter, five years younger, unwraps other presents. Her love of animals - she used to volunteer at the Singapore Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals before her current pets took all her time - also ensured a steady stream of rabbits, guinea pigs and dogs in the family home.

A student at Methodist Girls' School, where her mother taught for more than 40 years until her death in 2009, Yu decided early that she wanted to do arts. Then she found that none of her friends were taking arts for A levels, so she continued in the science stream at junior college.

Her father was thrilled, especially when she next won a place to study medicine at NUS. "I had it all ready. I bought all these books, I ordered a skeleton from India" to help her study anatomy. It cost $250, he recalls.

But Yu was beginning to rethink a medical career, especially when faced with lessons that involved cutting up live animals.

She began bringing home baby chicks or turtles from laboratory experiments. "We had chicks everywhere. Finally, we had to donate them to the zoo," Dr Yu says. "She had nightmares about some of the animals being hurt and woke up crying."

Yu says in a separate interview: "I got into medicine because it was the hardest course, so I wanted to get in. Then I woke up and realised what it meant."

She dropped out of medicine in the first year and applied for a place in the arts stream. After a year, she got into the department of English language and literature and graduated with a master's degree in English. "I think my parents were just glad I continued in university," she says.

Dr Yu smiles when asked to comment. "At least she does what she wants. She makes herself happy, that's the main thing."

He proudly points out the trophy she won in 1984 for a short story competition run by AsiaWeek magazine, and recalls with fondness the 1988 play Round And Round The Dining Table, which was screened on television - with the Yus' dining table appropriated for shooting.

While gaining recognition in local theatrical circles, Yu paid the bills with freelance jobs, sometimes scripting training videos for corporate clients or writing manuals for machinery. She says: "The ones that don't give you credit pay the most, they give you money instead."

She has no problem with being anonymous, saying that a solid reputation as a playwright actually worked against her when she decided to move into commercial fiction.

A few years ago, a literary agent got in touch with the editor of a local anthology featuring some of Yu's fiction. The editor "told her I wouldn't be interested, without asking me, and mentioned it to me only when we met by chance months later", she recalls.

Similarly, when she approached local publishers with an early draft of Aunty Lee's Delights, she received only rejections.

"One Singapore publisher asked me to write textbooks. One wanted erotic fiction. One said: 'It won't sell, only horror fiction sells here,'" she recalls with a laugh.

Her next move was to approach the Singapore arm of Jacaranda Literary Agency, which landed the deals for her mystery novels.

Separately, Yu's first venture into children's fiction, The Mudskipper, was chosen for publication because it was a runner-up for the $10,000 Scholastic Asian Book Prize, run by the publishing house of the same name.

Ms Priya Doraswamy, 43, formerly from Jacaranda, now represents Yu through Lotus Lane Literary. She says Yu's next mystery for adults is already receiving offers from overseas.

"Ovidia's ability to understand human nature, her sharp sense of humour, her ability to create character, plot and dialogue is very sophisticated," she says. "She writes about Singapore from a true Singaporean perspective, which is intriguing to a reader who doesn't know much about Singapore, but at the same time, very insightful to a reader who knows the country."

Yu's new writing career might eventually make her a tidy sum, and if it does, she will rejoice because money in hand means more time to sit down and write. A new mystery novel is set in the early 20th century in Singapore, while there is also likely to be a sequel to Aunty Lee's Delights.

"I like the clean ending of detective fiction," she says. "I'm looking forward to writing more books. I would like people outside of Singapore to get to know something of the Singapore I love, like how I love Venice because of Donna Leon or Canada because of Louise Penny or India because of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar or the Botswana of Alexander McCall Smith.

"I hope I get lots and lots of royalties, but there's no reason to retire when I'm already doing what I love to do most - reading and writing."

akshitan@sph.com.sg

Aunty Lee's Delights is available at major bookstores for $24.61.

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