National Post Article

National Post Steve Whan reads his book The Emperor's Pendant with his daughters, Samantha (right) and Virginie, at their home in North Vancouver.

The cover of The Emperor's Pendant.: (Photo ran in all editions except Toronto.)

The cover of Bullets on the Bund.: (Photo ran in all editions except Toronto.)

When Steve Whan was a boy he read the Hardy Boys mystery series several times over and his wife, Danielle Soulodre, read the Nancy Drew books. Like most parents, Whan and Soulodre looked forward to sharing favourite things from their childhood, such as those books, with their own children. But when they adopted their daughter Samantha from China in 1998, they realized there were no stories that reflected her life as a Chinese girl with Canadian parents growing up in Vancouver.

"We were doing the paperwork to adopt our second daughter, Virginie, when I started to really think about this. Where are the stories for my daughters, I thought," says Whan, who works by day as a Web site designer. "That's when I got this idea to write a series based on a girl [adopted from China] who tries to solve mysteries with the help of her daydreams of Shanghai in the 1930s."

Whan has just published the second Autumn Jade Mystery, The Emperor's Pendant, which follows 12-year-old Autumn Jade and her friend Adam, an adopted Afro-American child from Atlanta, Ga., as they search for the pendant her parents bought for her in China and that was stolen by Chinese gang members in Vancouver's Chinatown. Autumn and Adam and their friend Vanessa learn martial arts from Mrs. Lee, an eccentric elderly Chinese woman who also explains to Autumn how she once had to abandon a child in China.

The Emperor's Pendant picks up the story from the first book, Bullets on the Bund, in which Autumn and Adam solve the mystery of disappearing dogs in their neighbourhood. Along the way, they run into evil dog trainers and a helpful ex-con. All the while, Autumn Jade daydreams about a woman in Shanghai who was forced to abandon her baby girl because her husband's family had wanted her to have a boy. The mother places a jade pendant around the baby's neck and leaves her in an obvious place in the International Settlement. The child is found and grows up as Qiu Yu, which means Autumn Jade and is, in fact, Samantha Whan's Chinese name.

"My initial target market was parents who had adopted children from China. I didn't expect that it would go beyond that group. But even young boys are enjoying it," says Whan. "I have made some school visits to talk about the books and one of the teachers said afterward that she saw a boy reading the book while he was walking down the hallway. The boys are probably enjoying the story because of the Adam character, but the response altogether has been much broader than I imagined."

Part of the appeal of the Autumn Jade books is the rich historical detail Whan has put into the Shanghai daydream chapters. He brings the place alive visually and culturally with such lines as: "The early morning mist rolled gently off the Whangpoo River and up onto the Bund, the main street of Shanghai's International Settlement. Ming found it amazing that clean, white mist could come off a river that was so yellow and filthy." Ming is on her way to abandon her one-day-old baby girl. Her husband's family had used fortune tellers to find a wife who would produce a baby boy, and the family was upset when a girl was born. "Perhaps the fortune had been poorly told, or perhaps she had encountered a peach ghost during her pregnancy," writes Whan.

In Vancouver, Autumn Jade wonders about her birth parents and communicates through her computer with a support group for adopted girls from China called the Sisters of China mailing list. Autumn frequently laments the fact that her parents chose to have her learn Mandarin rather than Cantonese because Cantonese is so much more common in Chinese communities in Canada. Whan says he and his wife agonized in the same way but decided to send their girls to Mandarin lessons every Saturday morning.

Just like in the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, Autumn Jade's parents are supportive but not intrusive. When Autumn Jade and her friends head off to confront the Chinese gang members who stole the pendant, Autumn's mother asks if she should be worried, but doesn't stop them from going on their adventure.

"My wife is one of my editors. There have been some scenes when she says, 'What? I would never let her do that.' She tries to bring some reality to the stories," says Whan. "But that's how you develop strong characters whom children enjoy."

The stories are action-packed and suspenseful. Whan certainly uses his experiences and observations as the father of girls adopted from China along with intensive research of old Shanghai, but he also uses his own sense of what was exciting to him as a child as his guide.

"I went to the library and took out samples of books for the age range I wanted [eight to 14]. I counted the number of words in the books and looked at the number of chapters and the type of language. So before I wrote anything, I researched what these books were like," he says. His Hardy Boys collection came in handy, too. "I've read those so many times I know the formula. In one chapter the character has a hobby and three chapters later that hobby saves the day."

One element Whan has hinted at in the first and second books, and that he thinks will emerge entirely by the fourth book, is the introduction of a younger sister for Autumn to be adopted from China. Where Autumn is based on Whan's daughter Samantha, the sister who will eventually become Autumn's sidekick will be based on Virginie.

Samantha is only five now and Virginie is three, so they're not yet reading the books. But Whan has read the first three chapters of the first book to them several times. "They have a hard time sitting through a book without pictures for too long. But Samantha fully comprehends the fact that I wrote the book for her, and she is very proud of that fact."

Whan intended the first book to be a gift for Samantha. When he was most of the way through writing it he sent it to a publisher who responded enthusiastically with some notes for improvements. He rewrote the book, taking into account the publisher's suggestions as well as incorporating suggestions from other readers, and sent it back.

"But it seems to have gone into a black hole. So I published it myself," says Whan.

He broke even with the first book by selling it through his Web site (www.autumnjade.com) and is now filling the advance sale orders that were made even before the second book was written. He wants to publish a book a year but he's already finding that he's writing faster as he works on the third book in the series.

"The whole Harry Potter series has opened up reading to younger children and that's an amazing thing," says Whan. "I've talked to Grade 3 classes where the teacher read the story to the children and they fully understand what's going on. Kids like the fact that they're not being talked down to, even if it's a challenge for some of them."

jmarshall@nationalpost.com

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