My debut novel, Welcome to Sunny Town, was born from my experiences teaching abroad during the early aughts. In 2001, I moved to Japan on a whim with my boyfriend (who now happens to be my husband). I was twenty-three, we had both just completed undergraduate degrees in Fine Arts, and it was a common rite of passage after graduation for students to teach English abroad to pay off their school loans. Our friends lived in Kurashiki, a small city located along the Seto Inland Sea between Osaka and Hiroshima, and they invited us to live with them in their two-bedroom walk-up while we got established. There were other ESL teachers who lived in the apartment complex at the time, which made for a somewhat communal atmosphere among the foreigners. They shared kitchen utensils and gossip. No one locked their doors. Our friends assured us work would be easy to find, so we went without first securing jobs, which looking back was clearly a foolish decision. But aren’t foolish decisions an essential part of early adulthood? There weren’t many qualifications necessary to teach ESL in Japan: only an undergraduate degree in any discipline and one thousand dollars Canadian as a financial safety net for new arrivals. We landed at the end of August, a month of oppressive heat in the country, and quickly realized finding a job was going to be more difficult than we anticipated.
Only a couple of weeks after our arrival, while we tried to orient ourselves in this new country, the world around us was upended. Sitting on the floor of our friend’s bedroom, we watched two airplanes fly into the World Trade Center on a Japanese news channel. We couldn’t understand a word of the telecast and gathered in the apartment of a teacher next door who spoke enough Japanese to roughly translate what was happening on the other side of the world, though the scale of the attack was hard to grasp in any language. In the following days, we watched the news obsessively, and tensions rose in our living quarters as we remained unemployed, and our financial cushion dwindled. The stage was being set for the “War on Terror,” the invasion of Afghanistan, and the eventual Iraq War. A collective anxiety and distrust grew around the globe, and years later, I came to think of this as a defining period for our generation. As I prepared this book for publication, I was also aware of parallels that exist between the early aughts and our present moment in time. Once again, we’re standing at an uncertain threshold amid global instability. In 2001, we were also on the cusp of a technological turning point with smartphones and social media on the horizon. The looming risks of AI technology feel ominously familiar.
After a month of job hunting, my boyfriend and I finally secured work in the nearby city of Okayama where most of Welcome to Sunny Town is set. We moved out of our little foreigner commune and found our own apartment, but our time in Kurashiki never left my mind. The cramped, sweltering walk-up of precariously employed ESL teachers, trying to forge new identities during a time of worldwide turmoil, struck me as an ideal tinderbox backdrop for a coming-of-age novel. Setting often serves as an entry point for my writing. I’m interested in how time and place intersect to shape individuals and communities, and teaching in Japan became a curious framework for exploring the idiosyncrasies of the expat mindset and the more complicated realities of the ESL industry. While I worked on the characters for the novel, I often looked back on those feelings of impermanence I had while living abroad. Could that state of mind alter a person’s behaviour? Did it change the way they acted in relationships, or change their decision-making? Did it make people more reckless or lonely? Did they bond more quickly with friends because of shared circumstances? Did this temporary state of being create a sense of freedom impossible to replicate back home? The expat ecosystem became fertile territory for exploring early adulthood with all its personal reckonings. The characters in the novel struggle to assert selfhood, to find a sense of purpose. They suffer from disillusionment, or impractical ambitions, and the performative nature of the ESL industry only seems to amplify their circumstances.
At the centre of all these wayward foreigners is our narrator Maggie, whose internal compass is broken after a disorienting relationship with her drawing and painting professor. She’s lost her ability to paint, and thus her ability to know herself. Kerry Clare rightly describes Welcome to Sunny Town as a Künstlerroman, a novel centered around the development of artistic identity. Coming of age as a young artist is often marked by precarity and vulnerability, and I’ve always been particularly interested in the challenges young women face as they establish their artistic careers. This book explores all these tensions as Maggie navigates a new country and a series of destabilizing forces in search of artistic sovereignty. I hope you’ll come along and join her on the journey.
Photos from Théodora’s Time in Japan
Photo credit to Théodora Armstrong.
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Théodora Armstrong is a fiction writer, poet, and photographer. Her collection of short fiction, Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility (House of Anansi) was a finalist for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. She lives in North Vancouver with her husband and two children and teaches fiction at the School of Creative Writing at UBC.
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