Amy Tan calls the just-released memoir of today’s guest, Jenny Bowen, “Both heartrending and victoriously uplifting,” and goes on to say “Wish You Happy Forever, begins with empty nesters Jenny and Richard Bowen’s simple pledge to provide love to one Chinese orphan…” A former screenwriter and independent filmmaker, Jenny also founded Half the Sky Foundation in order to give something back to her adopted Chinese daughters’ home country and to the many orphaned and abandoned children then languishing behind institutional walls. Jenny shares below a lovely bit about how the memoir came about. Enjoy it, and Jenny’s moving memoir. – Meg
Unlike just about everything else in my life, the opportunity to write Wish You Happy Forever was handed to me on a silver platter. HarperOne and the Skoll Foundation were about to collaborate on a series of books about or by people like me. The offer came not only with the promise that I could write my story exactly as I pleased, but also with the promise that it would be promoted with trumpets blaring. So far, it all seems to be happening just as advertised.
If you’re reading this and you’re struggling with getting your first book out there, right about now you’d probably like to pop me one. I probably would too. But there’s more to the story, of course.
In 1996 I was eking my living as an independent filmmaker and screenwriter for hire. A story in the New York Times about “dying rooms” in China, places where abandoned baby girls were left to starve, changed everything. My husband and I brought home a malnourished vacant-eyed toddler. We cuddled and kissed her, sang and played with her nonstop that first year. Our little girl was transformed. And so was I.
I walked away from Hollywood and took everything I’d learned about making movies – about making something from nothing – and I went to China. I started Half the Sky, an organization committed to bringing a loving, caring adult into the life of every orphaned and abandoned child. Half the Sky now partners with the Chinese government, and together we are reimagining China’s entire child welfare system.
I had my story. I’d been writing it in my head for 15 years. I locked myself away from Half the Sky for a month and structured a memoir, then wrote in bits and pieces, whenever I could steal time – usually around 3 or 4 in the morning. Nine months later, I turned in my first draft. I was feeling pretty terrific.
My editor called and said, “Where are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“In the story. It’s all about your work. All about the kids.”
“Right! It is.”
“But nobody’s going to care if you’re not in there. It’s you they need to care about first. Where’s your arc?”
Screenwriters know all about arcs. But they don’t necessarily know how to write about themselves or that they even have an arc. In fact, for the past 15 years I’d been writing nonstop about Half the Sky and about our hardworking team in China and, most of all, about those extraordinary children we serve. All this time and I’m still in awe of them.
So I pouted for a couple of weeks and then I went to the Skoll World Forum in Oxford. It’s a gathering place for “social entrepreneurs” like myself. Over a few too many glasses of wine, I told a fellow game-changer, Molly Melching of Tostan, and the subject of the first book in the series (However Long the Night, by Aimee Malloy) about the editor’s notes.
“Exactly what happened to me,” she said. “I just wanted to talk about the work. Honor those tremendous women we work with.”
“That’s the story!” I said.
“But then when they explained why it was also about me, I heard them. Maybe it was time to own my past. So I talked. Now women come up to me and say, ‘What’s in your book … that happened to me.’ Now I understand why I had to connect with people in order to reach them.”
I left Oxford. I stewed for two weeks. And then I wrote. From a completely different place. I wrote things I didn’t know I knew.
I am now incapable of standing back from my first book. I can’t size it up from a comfortable distance. I’ve lost all opinions about whether it will be welcomed or ignored. But, without a doubt, I’m in there this time. – Jenny
