Elaine Chiew is originally from Malaysia, but now lives in London with her husband and children. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Hiss Quarterly, Cezanne’s Carrot, Alimentum, Juked, The Summerset Review, In Posse Review, and Verbsap. Her story “Burning Bush,” published in In Posse Review, was a top ten finalist in storySouth’s 2006 Million Writer’s Award. Elaine was also a top 25 finalist in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers in 2005.

You’re currently working on three exciting projects. The first one is a psychological/historical/thriller. What else can you tell us about it?

Oh dear, once I put the genre lock on it, I begin to quiver. Will it be a psychological/historical/mystery? That sounds like it has to be a page-turner, a spy-thriller type-thingy.

Here’s what I know so far. It’s going to be a story about the psychology of twins, the dark side, the extreme jealousy side. It’s also going to be about the rise of communism during 1950s Malaya. (Communism was a major defining influence in the development of Malaysia – I remember getting my first passport and seeing China stamped in as a country Malaysians could not visit. That’s lifted now, of course.) It’s set on a tea plantation. It’s also about the crossroads of journalistic integrity, the need to uncover the “truth”, against a biographer’s “moral obligation” towards its subject.

I’ve done lots of research on that period of history for Malaya (this is its colonial name prior to its independence in 1957). Tea plantations are all concentrated on an area called Cameron Highlands, where the famous Jim Thompson, the magnate of the House of Thompson in Thailand, disappeared. It’s a beautiful region, very unlike the rest of Malaysia because of its milder temperatures, its rolling hills, its strawberry farms, colonial Swiss villas which serve scones and clotted cream for tea. At some point in my research, I’d like to spend four or five weeks actually living on a tea plantation, watching them pick and then process tealeaves.

Why tea, you may ask? It doesn’t have the romance of vineyards, but there’s something seductive about growing things out of soil. My father, when he was alive, was constantly producing miracles out of it – he bred this hybrid mango (with strains of coconut), and when I was growing up, our mango tree bore fruit the size of bowling balls. Should have patented it, we could have been rich.

You’re also doing research for another psychological thriller, about a brain chip that will cure depression. Can you give us any more details? What draws you to the psychological thriller genre?

It’s not the psych thriller genre per se; the inspiration came that way – a woman battling her own mind.

I don’t know that I can tell you more at this point about the brain chip that can cure depression (not without giving the whole game away). It’s a bit of sci-fi concoction on my part, and regardless of whether or not the technology for that is round the corner, there are so many legal, philosophical and moral arguments against invasive technology like that that I’m not sure it’ll ever become something real, you know?

Neuroscience for me is a fascinating subject. It’s a relatively new science, leaping in great strides when the technology like fMRIs etc. allowed us to finally peer into the microscopic sections of the brain, and decode its mysterious workings and processes.

Want to hear some cool brain research that’s been undertaken and that they’re doing now?

• At Duke University, scientists looking for ways to help amputees and paralytics have implanted electrodes in the brains of a group of monkeys. The monkeys can move mechanical arms just by thinking about it, as if those robots were parts of their bodies.

• In Lisbon, Portugal, there’s a group of blind men and women who can now see. In place of eyeglasses, they wear cameras connected to electrodes implanted in the visual area of their brains. Some of them had been blind for 20 years before their surgery. The technology that has given them sight can beam images from one person’s mind to another’s.

• One out of every ten people aged sixty-five or older in the United States has Alzheimer’s. NGF is a chemical that triggers the growth of neurons. In a series of studies, Mark Tuszynski and other researchers at the University of California at San Diego implanted genetically modified neurons into the brain of a 60-year old woman with Alzheimer’s. Earlier studies he’d done had shown that extra copies of the NGF-producing gene not only prevented this age-related shrinkage in the brains of mice and monkeys but could actually restore the neurons in old brains to their youthful size, shape and activity.

The third project you are undertaking is a set of stories all involving noodles in an important way. How far along in the venture are you? Have any of these stories been published?

Will anyone read a set of stories all featuring noodles? Hmm…I don’t know….it sounds too crazy, unless you’re a noodle maniac, like me.

I’m about four or five stories in. “Udon Lover” was picked up by Alimentum, but not out yet. There’s a story about a chef who got fired in the same week that his wife left him (although his wife left first, not because he was fired), and who then goes in search of the perfect bowl of ramen. Then, there’s the one about the illegal immigrant teenage girl who dreams of creating her own cartoon hero, the Noodle Warrior, but who has to learn a bit about love, marriage, and family loyalty before she gets there. Noodles wrap around these lives, and I hope at the end of it, a reader won’t be like, “This is a manifesto, this is noodle Marxism. Sheesh…” Well, there’s one non-noodle story involving a Thanksgiving where the turkey is stuffed with kung-pao chicken.

But it doesn’t matter even if nobody reads it – my stomach is very happy – I’m constantly eating noodles. There’s an ad for Wagamama – a noodle chain here in London – showing two hands grabbing a huge bowl, the face dwarfed behind it, buried, slurping away. That’s me.

You are from Malaysia, but now live in London. Tell us about living in Malaysia, and why you moved.

Growing up in Malaysia is very humdrum. Ipoh, my hometown, used to be a tin mining town (when plastic was invented, tin prices fell, a lot of the mines closed down). Now, it’s known for cement and Michelle Yeoh.

We lived in row housing, but what separates one house from the next is a paper-thin wall. So, growing up, you knew a lot about who among your neighbors were having an affair, whose kids were dunces and getting terrible academic results, and who had a sister-in-law whose husband went at her with a knife for gutting fish (true story!)

There’s a small patch of yard in front of the house, where my dad grew liana, bromeliads, talipot palms. It was a veritable jungle. His cacti –those that people put in pots on their kitchen windows? – were the size of male biceps.

Before all that planting, my Mom reared chickens. She had a chicken doctor she consulted, especially when her chickens got flu-ey. Growing up, I used to watch her slaughter chickens for Chinese New Year and other big festivals. I can tell you all about that but not here (you’ll think – what’s a nice girl like her doing recounting all this bloodletting?). Well, as you know, the Chinese eat every part of the chicken, even the blood!

I left Malaysia when I was 17 to go to college in the States. I haven’t lived there since. Instead, from then on, I’ve lived in Northern California, Eastern Massachusetts, Florida, a summer in Minnesota, Bangkok, Ho Chi Minh City, New York, Hong Kong, and now London.

Every year, I visit Malaysia. Every year I wonder: can I still call myself a Malaysian if I keep doing this deTocqueville thing – make observations as only foreigners will? Something that strikes me as extraordinary – a family of four squished onto a Vespa traveling along the interstate at snail’s pace – is quite an ordinary sight. Or large numbers of families hanging out at Giant– no one is really shopping but just milling around, and the two kiddie playgrounds built for the convenience of shoppers are swamped to the gills.

Wow! That’s quite the eclectic mix of places! Which was your favorite? Where do you consider home?

Favorite – hands down New York City (because it takes everyone – no one cares where you’re from and there’s a kind of freedom in that). Home is where my family is – my husband and my two kids. It’s got to be that way when you’ve bounced around so much. You collect knowledge and slices of different personalities like other people collect…collectibles.

English is your second language. How hard was it to learn? Say something in Cantonese, your native language.

I’m linguistically screwed-up, grew up in a hodge-podge Cantonese-Malay-English vying for dominance fashion. I learned English in First Grade. The medium of instruction was Malay. I don’t know how to write Cantonese. Someone once said to me: the language you dream in is your most versatile language. Well, occasionally, I still have dreams in Malay, but usually the language is a kind of gibberish only intelligible to the characters therein.

Hmm…something in Cantonese. Mo yuk ngo geh chee..zie…Don’t move my cheese (although in Malaysia, it’s more likely: Don’t touch my Ma-See-Dee (Mercedes)).

You used to work as a lawyer, and only started writing in 2004. Why the career switch? Do you consider writing a career, or do you think of it as a hobby?

I was a corporate securities lawyer, and the hours were insane. When I decided to have a family, I realized I couldn’t pull those same hours, not unless someone else was raising my kids. And that just didn’t seem right to me. So I gave up the career.

I’ve always written the short story here and there. They were awful, but I liked doing it. I began to take it very seriously in December 2004, imposing a discipline on myself, approaching it like a job, almost. First, it was fifteen hours a week, ten of them spent procrastinating (changing from first POV to third, changing from past to present tense – it’s amazing how productive you feel when you do that, even if you end up changing it all back again!), surfing the internet, checking out Zoetrope stories & chatting on zmail. But gradually, things have changed. If I know I have a four-hour window between dropping the kiddo off at nursery and picking her up, it’s amazing how quickly I get down to business.

Can I call it a career? I don’t know. I’ve made like peanuts. And I’m still a fledgling at this. But it’s not just a hobby, call it a passion. If I don’t write in a given week, I’m freaking constipated. I’m impossible to deal with. I’m the worst Grinch there is – until I take some mild laxative in the form of reading a novel or a short story, and get seized by some wired-up inspiration like caffeine drip, and write.

What have you been reading this summer?

Alice Munro, Alice Munro, Alice Munro. (It’s funny, I didn’t care for any of her stories when I read them prior to this summer. I’m not quite sure what happened, but I fell in love with them – so quiet, so resonant, no verbal pyrotechnics but with a dagger-to-the-heart honesty about the delicate nuances of human emotion.)

And a sprinkling of John Banville, Markus Zusak, Zoe Heller, Dave Eggers, Michael Chabon, Marissa Pessl and Tao Lin (who is unique!).

What are your favorite foods?

Sashimi. Smoked salmon on a bagel. Linguini alla vongole. And what else…noodles, of course!