Why Jean Chen Ho’s ‘Fiona and Jane’ takes you on a ride across Southern California’s suburbs

There’s a Southern Californian rite of passage that Jean Chen Ho captures in the story “Go Slow” from her debut “Fiona and Jane,” which hits bookstores Jan. 4.

The titular characters have just turned 16. Fiona saved up her money and bought a car. Jane has yet to pass her driver’s exam, but Fiona’s new ride means freedom for both as they crisscross suburbs between southern Los Angeles County and north Orange County. It’s a story that could certainly resonate with people who grew up on the outskirts of L.A., in neighborhoods and cities where the buses are few and far between, longing for adventures where you certainly could not ask your parents for a ride.

“When you get your driver’s license and first learn to drive, it’s just an incredible freedom that opens up,” says Los Feliz-based Ho on a recent phone call.

“Fiona and Jane,” which Ho describes as either a “linked story collection” or “a novel in stories,” spans roughly 20 years of friendship between two women: Jane, the U.S.-born daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, and Fiona, born in Taiwan and raised in Southern California. It’s in “Go Slow” that Ho digs into the geography of the region, as the girls head out in an old car named Shamu to places like Norwalk, Garden Grove, Seal Beach and Signal Hill. “There’s a lot of particular stories that come out of those places, and I wanted the girls to specifically have that experience in the book,” says Ho.

Ho herself was born in Taiwan and spent her later childhood and adolescence in Cerritos.

“Even though I don’t name Cerritos specifically, lots of the locales that I grew up around in L.A. and Orange County, and all the driving around that is very particular to living in the suburbs of L.A., land in the book,” she says.

“The book is not autobiographical,” Ho adds, “but I definitely drew a lot from impressions of my teenage years and coming into my own— leaving home and graduating high school — and then coming back to L.A. as an adult and being able to appreciate the city and the place where I grew up a lot more after having spent some few years away.”

The characters first came to the author as adults dealing with the aftermath of Fiona’s divorce in “The Movers,” which Ho had written as a one-off short story. “I had no idea I was actually writing a book,” Ho says, adding that a book seemed like a “pie in the sky” dream. At the time, she was writing multiple short stories, but “The Movers” made an impact on her.

“I was really curious about who these characters were or could be outside of this story,” she says.

Ho began to play around with their backstories and their family histories. “I wrote a couple of stories about them when they were teenagers. And then I wrote a story after that, that was them approaching their 40s,” she says. “I wrote this in a really nonlinear way in terms of exploring who these women were and then I really just gave myself the space to listen to them.”

Something that would emerge from this approach is not just Fiona and Jane’s friendship, but their individual relationships with their families, particularly their mothers. Early on in the process, Ho understood that Jane had “a really contentious relationship” with her mother. Fiona’s close-knit relationship with her mom developed as Ho delved into the character’s story of immigrating to the U.S. as a child.

“That informed a lot of how her relationship to her mom transpired and why they’re so close and why they’re so reliant on one another,” Ho explains, “and why, in a really sort of like unexpected way, Fiona feels like she has to just make a really clean break from her mother.”

With “Fiona and Jane,” Ho develops a rich world surrounding two women, their family and friends and the metropolis that’s their home. It’s the kind of book that leaves you wanting to know more about them. In fact, Ho says that there are other stories in this universe that didn’t make the final cut for the book. “I do think about those stories and whether I can continue working on them in the future,” she says.

“Maybe I’ll try to publish them as just one-offs after the book comes out, but I spent a long time with these women,” Ho adds, noting that she spent five years working on the book. “I paid so much close attention to them and their families, their lovers, other people in this universe, that maybe it’s good for me to take a little break from this world and work on something else for now.”