Novelist Chet Nairene helps me wrap up the week by chatting about his new travel adventure, PACIFIC DASH: From Asia Vagabond to Casino King.
Bio:
Chet Nairene is an American writer who truly qualifies for the honorary title of “Old Asia Hand,” having resided in Southeast Asia nearly three decades. During that time he ran barges and tankers up the coasts of Malaysia and directed supply chains and national retail businesses in the Philippines, Malaysia, S. Korea, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Before all that, fresh from college, his first job was working as a journalist at a Midwestern USA daily newspaper.
Welcome, Chet. Please tell us about your current release.
PACIFIC DASH is a travel adventure novel that tracks the vagabond life of a young American over decades as he roams the beaches, vice dens and casinos of the Far East in pursuit of thrills and truth. This novel is a vivid work of fiction that will transport readers to colorful, exotic places and satisfy all fans of armchair global travel, adventure fiction or romance.
In 1968, a job transfer catapults the family of young Dashiell Bonaventure across the globe, from the cornfields of Illinois to scintillating, far-flung Hong Kong. Dash, in his youthful innocence, presumes his expatriate high school adventure represents just a temporary life detour, but he is mistaken. For thus begins a lifelong odyssey that sees him drifting between continents and crisscrossing Asia. For several decades, he roams across Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Thailand, Myanmar and more. Eccentric and flamboyant personalities roll through his life while he explores the jungles, beaches, and cities of the Southeast Asia.
Along the way, he falls desperately in love while also making bitter enemies. He saves lives and nearly loses his own while backpacking and motorcycling across Indonesia. One day, while staying in Bali at a losmen (a cheap homestay), a charming Malaysian businessman named Little Fatty hooks Dash up with a job in the illegal floating casino business in the Straits of Malacca.
And that’s where things really take off.
PACIFIC DASH is the next best thing to taking one’s own journey down the colorful back alleys of Asia. Sparkling with anecdotes and color, this story charms readers by parachuting them into the festivals, culture, and vice dens of the Far East. Exhaustively researched and historically accurate, this book was written by a veteran “Old Asia Hand” and is an education in itself as to cultural practices and many awesome sites of SE Asia.
Readers experience life amongst Asia’s elite, the young princesses and princelings at the international high school in 1960s Hong Kong. They hang out with Aussie surfer dudes in Bali and go tromping down the 1970s hippie trail to Afghanistan, Nepal and beyond. They thrill to illegal high-stakes baccarat tables on the high seas and gorge on spicy foods eaten by hand off banana leaves. And they fall in love with the gorgeous Fiona Lo Ting-Ting and make friends with intriguing characters like Snakehead Goh, PY (Little Fatty) Lee, Chickie Schmidt and Jackson Toh.
This karma-laced tale is akin to a mash-up between a Paul Theroux travel narrative and Alex Garland’s ‘The Beach’ … with a pinch of Forrest Gump tossed in, too — the latter because amazing, truly unexpected adventures just keep happening to good old Dash. Many readers liken it to the infamous “Flashman” series by George MacDonald Fraser.
What inspired you to write this book?
It’s funny, but during my career as an expatriate executive in Asia, friends often said (usually after a few too many beers and colorful stories), “You really ought to write a novel.” Yeah, right, someday. But upon retiring I started to think, hey, why not?
My primary goal is to entertain and transport readers to exotic places, crammed with interesting people, odd experiences and cultural nuggets. I wanted to share so many of the things I love about Asia – the wonderful people, the food and spirituality, the bars and temples, beaches and even gambling. So, what better way to introduce all that than through the eyes of a young foreigner who is totally unprepared for what he’s about to encounter
What exciting project are you working on next?
I like to write stories about Westerners adrift in other cultures, and mine those collisions for color, humor and philosophical learnings.
So right now I am completing PACIFIC MAZE, a new novel about a Western tech superstar who unintentionally becomes involved with mystical forces from the Far East, sort of a mashup between Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” and the movie “Poltergeist”.
In order to save his company from horrible business problems, New Yorker Lew Clarke is forced to travel to a tiny, little-known, remote hermit kingdom called ‘Amazia,’ deep inside Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle. He soon learns all his Western knowledge and modern understandings are inoperable there. Essentially useless. And his journey then evolves from business trip to a struggle for meaning and his own worth as a human being.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
During college, I had envisioned myself, after university, becoming a foreign correspondent for the International Herald Tribune or Christian Science Monitor. Paris? Yes, please. That sounded good. But after graduating with an MS from The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern, I found myself at a Wisconsin newspaper writing obituaries and doing business feature articles on local shoe store anniversaries. I remember on about a guy who sawed chestnuts into slices and then glued them together to form unique baskets. Great stuff like that. Well five years of that cured me of my journalistic ambitions. So I quit, backpacked Asia for a year and then went back to school. An international MBA from The Wharton School launched my successful career in Southeast Asia where, for three decades, I ran national companies for my multinational employer.
A side note: I spent the summer of my MBA studies writing world’s worst Asian action-adventure novel … unpublished, of course. So even back then, the fiction-writing itch was already tickling me but then went dormant until resurfacing more recently.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
Every morning – once the coffee has kicked in and I’ve finished a good hour in the gym — I write for about two hours, without fail. At that point, I feel fantastic and my creative juices are flowing like Niagara. The output comes clean and easy. But trying to push on past that amount of time tends to be counter-productive, like a baseball player (not on PEDs) hanging around past his prime. After two hours at the keyboard, I find myself writing too many strikeouts and not hitting enough home runs.
But once a story is underway, I find I am totally involved and my subconscious seems continually at work on it. I find myself punching short memos into my phone or grabbing scraps of paper to jot down new plot twists or fun bits of dialogue. More than once I’ve awakened in the middle of the night after realizing a fatal flaw in the manuscript that needed rectification the next morning.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I tend to write and rewrite my novels as many as eight to ten times, start to finish, in their entirety. No exaggeration. Upon completing a draft, I go right back to the beginning and start again, rewriting all the way through. I repeat that, over and over again, and each time through, I find fewer internal inconsistencies to fix and fewer scenes that need punching up. After eight or more trips through the story, that flywheel eventually stops spinning and I know I have the finished product.
Once I am close to the end of that process, one of the revisions is done on my IPad Pro, where I can view the manuscript as written double-spaced on typewriter paper. I go through and mark it up in red ink, line by line, with my Apple Pencil … just like back in my copyediting days at the Wisconsin newspaper.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
My uncles and aunts used to think it was a hilarious party stunt. “Hey, ask Chet what he wants to be when he grows up!” But by second grade, I was totally certain and would tell anyone who asked that I wanted to grow up to become a garbage man. I mean, how could anyone not want that? They commanded those great, big noisy trucks, got to throw around metal garbage cans and rode on those little platforms that hung off the side of their vehicles. Seemed to a seven-year-old boy the coolest guys on earth. I mean, wow, what could be better? After that my youthful career choices progressed from priest to journalist to businessman.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
We’ve all read books that were so good that we didn’t want them to end. Among my favorites are many by my hero, Paul Theroux, all set in far-away lands. In many ways, PT inspired me in life and now, as a writer. My goal is to utterly delight my readers and take full advantage of the many astounding things I’ve witnessed during my long stay in Asia. I want to immerse my readers within alien experiences in exotic lands and always keep the fascination level high. Here’s hoping readers all enjoy PACIFIC DASH, and the amazing travels across Asia by intrepid young Dash Bonaventure!
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