She rejected her Chinese heritage as a child. Now, she leans into it through her novels

Growing up in the suburbs of Glasgow as one of only two Chinese children in her primary school, Eliza Chan rarely questioned her identity. Although her thick Scottish accent is the first thing you would notice about her, she says it was simply “normal” to be stopped on the street in her small town and asked where she was really from. “It was one of those childhoods where I don’t think I realised what I wasn’t until other people told me,” she recalls. Chan, 41, admits that this caused her to go through a phase of rejecting her Chinese heritage entirely – wanting only to be like her Scottish friends, bristling at the “weird” Chinese language and turning her nose up at the food. At university, something shifted. Surrounded by students from Hong Kong and Malaysia at the University of Edinburgh, she was ambushed by regret: a wish that she could speak more Cantonese, an ache at being unable to read the characters well enough to join a karaoke session. “I am who I am,” she says now. “It doesn’t make me less of either side. It just makes me different, and that’s OK.” Merging that duality is what fuels her writing now. The success of her debut Fathomfolk, released in 2024, is Chan’s debut novel and the opening book of The Drowned World duology set in Tiankawi, a semi-submerged city where humans occupy the shining towers and aerial walkways above, while the “fathomfolk” – a collective of mythical water creatures including sirens, sea witches, kelpies and kappas – are forced to live in the toxic, polluted waters below. Drawing on East Asian and Southeast Asian mythology, as well as Scottish folklore, Chan builds a world where curry fish balls are eaten in street markets, and monsters need work permits, inspired by the layered, multicultural density of places like Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. “Asian fiction authors in the Western space were very hard to find for me when I was growing up,” she says. “I knew Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and a few others, but I had never, in real life, met anyone who was Asian who wrote fantasy. “And there started to be some people that were coming up in the genre, like Ken Liu, Fonda Lee, Rebecca Kuang and all that lot. And I was like, ‘Oh, wait a minute. Maybe, maybe I should, maybe I could.’” Fathomfolk became a Sunday Times bestseller, and its sequel, Tideborn, followed in 2025. Now, Chan returns with a new series that trades an entirely invented fantasy city for something closer to the bone: a mid-19th century Hong Kong that feels at once vividly real and alive with monsters. ‘A love letter to Chinese and British folk beliefs’ Titled Harbour of Hungry Ghosts, the new two-part series is set in the uneasy decades between the two opium wars, following the Au family – hereditary demon hunters and exorcists who bless shrines – after British colonists disrupt a Hungry Ghost festival ritual, and they are faced with a strange new monster. Chan describes it as “Babel meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a love letter to Chinese and British folk beliefs” that brings together British fables brought by colonists with Chinese myths and monsters, particularly the jiangshi – or geung si in Cantonese – hopping vampires made famous by 1980s Hong Kong cinema. Chan spent months researching the opium wars and wants to open a door for readers who may never have encountered this history. “Growing up in Britain, the poppy was Remembrance Day,” she says. “My husband – who grew up in Hong Kong – told me it made him deeply uncomfortable. For him, it only meant the opium wars. Our education system never talked about that. “It’s a way to give readers a bit of background and hopefully inspire them to learn more about this incredibly important and rich part of history.” The novel’s supernatural bestiary draws directly from Cantonese folk tradition: hopping vampires in Qing dynasty uniforms, the demon exorcising ladies and the wronged-female ghosts known as lui guai – a trope Chan said she wanted to “unpick” for its misogynistic undertones. Understanding her mother’s experience The book is a homecoming of sorts. Chan’s parents were part of a wave of Hong Kong immigrants who made their way to Scotland in the mid-20th century, drawn by word of mouth promises of opportunity and pulled by a chain of familiar faces. Her mother, who worked in a Chinese takeaway, came from a rural village in Tai Po, in the New Territories, and filled Chan’s childhood with stories that felt like myths. The life she had left was elemental in its simplicity: no electricity and a single water buffalo shared by the entire community. Her mother had been 16 when she was put on an aeroplane alone, copying the eating motions of the passenger beside her, having never encountered a Western meal or a knife and fork. “I can’t fathom how different that is,” Chan shares. “I always wanted to understand that experience.” This curiosity fuelled her decision to move to Japan after graduating from the University of Glasgow, where she studied English Literature and History – and that came only after she deliberately sabotaged her medical degree in Edinburgh. “It’s the Chinese stereotype,” she says. “My parents were always like, ‘You’ve got the grades, you need to be the doctor of the family,’ but I realised that’s not what I want to be. I really wanted to do English, you know? So I messed up my final exams on purpose.” After teaching English for three years in Japan – partly for adventure, partly to replicate something of her mother’s dislocation – Chan felt the pull of “needing a proper career” and retrained as a speech and language therapist in London. All the while, she was writing short stories in the evenings and visiting Hong Kong with her family every couple of years. A novel attempted at 16 had been, by her own admission, “terrible”. She sent it to three literary agents and was roundly rejected. For two decades, she found reasons not to try again. “There was this fear: if I write it and it’s another bad book, maybe that dream just has to be put aside,” she says. So she gave herself a protective mantra: I need more life experience. The breakthrough came, in part, via social media, where Chan found other Asian writers working in fantasy and, crucially, a British-Chinese children’s author named Maisie Chan, who became her mentor, and ultimately led to her current career as a full-time writer. Parenthood has sharpened her appreciation of how much has changed. “He already has more than five picture books with Asian kids on the front – making the perfect bao, celebrating Chinese New Year, fitting in at school,” she says of her five-year-old son. “We never had that. “I hope readers feel the nostalgia of the old hopping vampire films, or recognise a building or street name and laugh at the Cantonese idioms in an English book.”

She rejected her Chinese heritage as a child. Now, she leans into it through her novels

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Scottish-born Eliza Chan, who once dropped out of medical school, is a fantasy writer who marries Eastern myths with Western folklore

Scottish-born Eliza Chan, who once dropped out of medical school, is a fantasy writer who marries Eastern myths with Western folklore