"The Storm We Made" by Vanessa Chan
- James Bierre
- Dec 17, 2024
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made is a sweeping debut novel set in Malaya during World War II, exploring the devastating consequences of one woman’s choices. The story follows Cecily Alcantara, a mother who becomes entangled with Japanese intelligence, believing her actions will secure a better future for her family. Instead, her decisions unleash a storm of betrayal, occupation, and violence that tears through generations. Moving between perspectives and timelines, Chan reveals the hidden costs of war and colonialism, while illuminating the resilience of those caught in history’s upheaval.
Exploring Power, Betrayal, and Resilience in Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made
Vanessa Chan’s debut novel The Storm We Made unfolds in World War II-era Malaya, tracing how one woman’s choices ripple across her family and community under Japanese occupation. At its center is Cecily Alcantara, a mother who becomes entangled with Japanese intelligence, believing her actions will secure a better future. Instead, her decisions open the door to betrayal, violence, and the unraveling of everything she hoped to protect.
Chan’s narrative is both intimate and historical, grounding the devastation of empire and war in the daily lives of ordinary people. The novel grapples with the cost of survival, the shifting boundaries of loyalty, and the silence imposed by fear. Through Cecily’s moral compromises and the fallout faced by her children, Chan reveals how ambition and desperation collide in times of crisis. The result is a portrait of power and resilience that lingers long after the last page.
A Question of Moral Complexity
“Isn’t every man a good man and a bad man?” asks Cecily Alcantara, the conflicted center of Vanessa Chan’s The Storm We Made. The question reflects the novel’s core concern: morality rarely holds steady when war strips away certainty.
Set during Japan’s invasion and occupation of Malaya, now Malaysia, the novel shows how ordinary lives bend under the weight of empire and survival. Housewives take on the role of spies, protectors become exploiters, and families fracture under the strain of secrecy and betrayal.
For Cecily, the turning point comes when she agrees to work with Japanese intelligence, convinced that cooperation will shield her children from harm. This choice, born of fear and ambition, becomes the thread that unravels her family’s safety. Her eldest daughter, May, resents the silence and secrets that surround them, while her son, Abel, grows up in the shadow of suspicion and shame. Later, when Cecily witnesses the brutality inflicted on her neighbors by the very forces she aided, the cost of her decision becomes undeniable.
These moments sharpen the novel’s moral questions. Loyalty to family collides with betrayal of community, and survival requires choices that can never be undone. Chan uses Cecily’s compromises to reveal the fragile line between protector and traitor, showing how war corrodes even the deepest bonds.
A Family Torn Apart
The novel begins in 1945, with Japanese forces entrenched in Malaya and any hope for a softer colonial order extinguished. Boys are seized for labor camps, and girls are taken as “comfort women.” The Alcantara family breaks apart when fifteen-year-old Abel vanishes. Soon, the truth emerges: he has been conscripted to work on the brutal Burma Railway, a fate endured by tens of thousands under forced labor.
Chan traces the family’s unraveling through the voices of Abel’s sisters. Jujube takes work in a teahouse frequented by Japanese soldiers, her survival tied to compromise and danger. Jasmin, more sheltered, forms a secret bond with Yuki, a Japanese girl, their friendship a fragile act of humanity against the violence around them. These shifting perspectives reveal how war corrodes the bonds of family from within, turning daily existence into a quiet struggle for dignity.
The Alcantara family’s grief is rendered with precision. Chan writes of their home as if it were haunted: “Would their family continue to exist in the horrific silence of their present, creaking around like tired apparitions in their own home, weighed down by the footfalls of their sadness?” The line captures how sorrow permeates every corner, leaving the family together in body but fractured in spirit.
Cecily’s Secret Past
The novel’s present-day timeline unfolds alongside flashbacks that reveal Cecily’s role in enabling Japan’s invasion of Malaya. Dismissed by her British-employed husband and lured by promises of “an Asia for Asians,” Cecily agrees to work as an informant for General Fujiwara, a charismatic yet ruthless figure in the Japanese Imperial Army. What begins as a bid for recognition quickly entwines her with a cause that erodes the very foundations of her family’s safety.
Cecily’s motivations spring from longing as much as ideology. In a world that denies women authority, she discovers power in her ability to move unnoticed, what Chan describes as the “invisibility cloak of femininity.” By gathering intelligence, she convinces herself she is shaping history rather than standing on its margins. Yet the bargain collapses when she grasps how thoroughly Fujiwara has manipulated her. Her efforts to claim agency have left her complicit in the suffering of her neighbors and the downfall of her country.
As the past collides with the novel’s present, Cecily’s private guilt deepens into an almost unbearable weight. Her desperate attempts to hold her fractured family together become inseparable from the choices that once pulled them apart. Through seamless shifts in time, Chan binds the personal and the political into a single narrative, showing how Cecily’s betrayals echo across generations.
A Story of Power and Desire
At its core, The Storm We Made examines power—who claims it, who loses it, and the costs that follow. General Fujiwara maneuvers with calculated precision, turning loyalty into a weapon, while Abel struggles to endure the brutality of the Burma Railway, where survival itself becomes an act of defiance. Every figure in the novel is propelled by what Chan calls the “persistent gurgle of want,” a hunger that shapes choices and consequences alike.
For Cecily, the yearning for recognition and significance becomes her undoing. Her pursuit of validation blinds her to the destruction unfolding around her, showing how unchecked ambition corrodes intention and fractures families. Yet Chan pairs this darkness with a counterforce: the desire for hope. In one of the novel’s most poignant moments, a boy tells Abel, “I don’t think it’s a bad thing to hope,” before sketching faces in blood on scraps of toilet paper. The image is both fragile and enduring, a symbol of resistance against the erasure of human dignity.
Strengths and Nuances
The Storm We Made delivers a sweeping portrayal of war and its aftermath, yet at times the historical scaffolding shows through. The intersections of personal and political life are occasionally presented too neatly, and certain reflections on loyalty and betrayal are spelled out with more clarity than necessary. Chan’s research is thorough, but in some passages the depth of context overtakes the momentum of the narrative, leaving less space for readers to interpret meaning on their own.
What distinguishes the novel, however, is Chan’s sensitivity to detail in the lives of her characters. The story finds its emotional weight in quiet gestures and overlooked fragments of daily existence. A shared meal in the midst of scarcity, a whispered secret between friends, or a fleeting smile in a labor camp becomes as powerful as the broader sweep of history. These moments of tenderness counterbalance the violence and loss, reminding readers that resilience is often preserved in the smallest acts of connection.
The Power of Human Connection
The Storm We Made is above all a story about survival in the face of loss. Its characters endure betrayal, hunger, and separation, yet they cling to the fragile ties of family and friendship that keep them moving forward. Cecily’s compromises haunt her children, Abel suffers the brutality of the Burma Railway, and Jujube and Jasmin navigate lives reshaped by fear and silence. Still, moments of loyalty and small gestures of care cut through the violence, showing how connection holds even in the darkest conditions.
Vanessa Chan’s debut does not soften the realities of war or the damage caused by ambition. It draws its power from refusing to offer easy heroes or villains, instead portraying people trapped in choices with no good outcome. By anchoring history in the Alcantara family’s struggles, the novel makes the cost of occupation deeply personal. The result is a story that lingers not because of its scale, but because of the quiet insistence that even amid devastation, bonds between people matter.
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