Julia Wong: "In Vil·la Joana, among wild boars and yellow butterflies, there is the best story you want to tell"

Daughter of Chinese immigrants settled in Peru, author of fourteen books of poetry and a novel, Julia Wong Kcomt did a literary residency at the MUHBA Vil·la Joana between June 19 and July 10, with the aim of making progress in the writing of a novel whose protagonist is her cousin. “My book is a fictional story based on a real-life character. My older cousin’s name was Jesús, a name that is written in huge letters in one of the rooms of the Vil·la Joana museum. She was a woman who broke patterns in her time, one of the first female PhD students in Spain at the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo and rector of the Universidad Privada del Norte – La Libertad Perú”. And what made Wong decide to make her cousin the protagonist of her new novel? “She was a deep, complex, Hispanic, legal, loyal, real character. An incomparable human being with dozens of qualities and terrible dark sides. My admiration and affection were overflowing, but at some point turned into rejection by the demands. The book is about her and our relationship. She trained me as a human being, she gave me almost unattainable values and guidelines, but she taught me not to give up in pursuit of a goal. The least I could do was to dedicate a book to her existence and legacy. I started it before she died. The stay at the Vil·la helped me structure it better”.

She defines her stay in Barcelona as a “multifaceted experience” and “full of surprises”, and considers Vil·la Joana as an ideal framework in which to develop her project: “The book has a lot to do with art, architecture, words, hierarchies social issues, search for economic equity, dialogue with nature… and the residency helped me to answer a large part of the questions I had, although it also opened up new ones!”. In this sense, she advises any author who is thinking about doing a literary residency in Vil·la Joana not to hesitate: “There, among wild boars and yellow butterflies, is the best story you want to tell.”

Wong took advantage of the residency to hold two events presenting her book La tercera guerra lunar, and explains that she felt “very welcome in Barcelona in general, and seeing the hospitality both in the Vil·la and in the programmed spaces was very rewarding”. Regarding her immediate projects, she tells us that this year she will publish a book of stories with Cocodrilo Editores, and that she is preparing an anthology of five Portuguese poets translated into Spanish, designed especially for Peruvian universities.

More information about the residences at MUHBA Vil·la Joana, on this link.