Canadian novelist Camilla Gibb was well on her way to a career in academia when a chance encounter set her on a completely different path.
It was 1997 and Gibb was working in administration at the University of Toronto while completing a PhD in social anthropology at Oxford University.
But she wasn\'t happy.
"I used to sit in the courtyard at University College and contemplate my sad life and think... I am so not where I want to be," Gibb, 42, said in a recent interview in her publisher\'s office in downtown Toronto.
One day an acquaintance she described as a successful and cynical businessman sat down beside her.
"You always look so unhappy," he said. "What would make you happy?"
She confided that her dream was to write fiction. He asked what it would take, and Gibb, who\'d already written a few short stories, said she\'d need a chunk of time to apply herself — about six months and $6,000 to live on.
Shortly afterward, a cardboard box holding $6,000 in cash appeared, with a note that said "no strings attached."
The money gave Gibb the means to work on her craft and figure out once and for all if she could be a writer.
Four novels and 13 years later, life is very different for Gibb. She is both resplendently pregnant with her first child (her due date is Sept. 3) and insightful about her latest novel.
"The Beauty of Humanity Movement" — which comes out Tuesday — takes place in Hanoi, Vietnam and explores the country\'s recent past and present through the eyes of an elderly street vendor, Old Man Hung, and the people in his life.
Like her previous novels, such as "Sweetness in the Belly" which made the Scotiabank Giller Prize short list, the book looks at issues of otherness and belonging.
Tu, a young tour guide, straddles the new and old Vietnam, where entrepreneurial spirit and a love of Western culture is balanced with old world family values and tradition.
Another character, Maggie, is a Vietnamese-American curator who\'s grown up in the U.S. but finds herself searching for clues about her father, a visual artist who was tortured and then killed by Vietnamese soldiers.
Though she looks Vietnamese, Maggie is a perpetual outsider because of the way she speaks and where she\'s grown up.
A sense of displacement and being caught between worlds are themes in Gibb\'s work.
"I think everything I\'ve written has had that thrust to it, that immigrant narrative."
"Wherever you come from as an immigrant you\'re living a kind of pioneering life. Everything you encounter, you\'re encountering for the first time and it\'s what you make of it."
Gibb was born in London, England and came to Canada when she was four years old. Even though she immigrated from a culture that has a strong connection to Canada, she said she\'s always had a sense that her roots and history come from elsewhere.
She makes her home in Toronto and is scheduled to go on a Canada-wide book tour in October with her soon-to-be-born baby daughter, just the first of what may be many travels for mother and child.
Gibb has begun to think about delving into a non-fiction work that touches on childhood and parenthood across cultures and will involve travel for research.
"I\'m thinking a bit in anthropological terms too, just the differences and similarities in terms of the way we do it around the world," she said.
As for the university life she left behind, Gibb said she sometimes misses the intellectual rigour of academia.
"I miss the feeling of the complexity and the difficulty of seeing your way through an intellectual problem," she said.
"Novels... are not intellectual exercises and I think you have to be really mindful of that."
Rather, fiction for Gibb is about compassion and falling in love with her characters, as well as finding a way to "show" rather than "tell".
Vietnam proved to be an inspiring place for Gibb. The idea for Old Man Hung came from a man she\'d heard of in Hanoi who roamed the streets selling pho, a popular soup that many Vietnamese eat for breakfast, from a cart.
Vietnam also gave Gibb an opportunity to pay forward the gift she was given all those years ago by her anonymous benefactor.
While researching the novel in Hanoi she befriended Phuong, a tour guide who told her his dream was to open his own pho restaurant. Much like her own benefactor so many years ago, Gibb gave Phuong US$6,000. The restaurant opened in 2008 and business is good.
Gibb has kept the identity of her anonymous donor a secret at his request and said they don\'t maintain a friendship. She has no idea if he\'s ever read any of her books, or if he even likes her work.
He does, however, come to every one of her book launches.
"I hope he knows... that he profoundly changed my life with a gift that was not simply a gift, it was a kick."
Source: The Canadian Press