The hardest part of writing first novel Midnight at the Dragon Caf? was the beginning, middle and the end, said Canadian writer Judy Fong Bates said, tongue-in-cheek.

?For me it was a long publication process because it was a first novel,? said Mrs. Bates in a telephone interview with . Mrs. Bates lives in Ontario, Canada.

Midnight at the Dragon Caf? chronicles the emotional struggles of a first-generation Chinese immigrant family running a restaurant in a small Canadian town in the 1960s. The main character is a little girl, Su-Jen, who is burdened down with the family secrets, including her mother?s passionate affair with Su-Jen?s half brother.

?It probably took about six years to write Midnight at the Dragon Caf?,? Mrs. Bates said. ?Some people say they find writing the beginning hardest; I found it all hard. There?s an old saying, ?writing is easy, just wait until till that bead of blood of forms on your forehead and start typing?.?

Like Amy Tan?s Joy Luck Club, it is very much a mother-daughter relationship novel. Unlike Joy Luck Club, Midnight at the Dragon Caf? stays almost entirely focused on Canada, rather than China.

?One of the reasons I haven?t been compared to Amy Tan, is that the pattern of her stories start in North America and then go backwards to China,? said Mrs. Bates. ?Then her novels come back to North America. My story really took place totally in North America. It is a North American story.?

Despite the Canadian focus, Mrs. Bates said her novels were actually slightly better received in the United States than in Canada, with newspapers such as the Washington Post giving her good reviews.

?With this being a first novel and being a Canadian writer, and not that well known I was very lucky,? she said. ?It is such a crap-shoot this whole business. Why do some people win prizes and others don?t?

?Some people get good reviews and others don?t and sometimes books are not well received by the literary community, but will be well received by the general reading public.

?Reading is very subjective. It is not a collective activity. It is not like the watching a movie where audience will egg each other on in their opinions.?

She said that she is not sure if she would have been able to sell the same book if she had started later.

?Since 9/11 there has been a real decrease in fiction,? she said. ?Publishers are more interested in non-fiction.?

Mrs. Bates said she did not know yet whether there would a sequel to Midnight at the Dragon Caf?.

?My muse told me that story,? she said. ?Whether I will be blessed with another one, I don?t know. I am not one of those people who is able to write a sequel upon the commission. It is not so much that I am tired of the characters because I cared about every single character deeply.

?It is just about whether the characters will release the story that follows to me or not.?

Although the story is fictional, Mrs. Bates shares a lot of similarities with her main character, Su-Jen.

?I grew up in a small town myself,? she said. ?I think that loneliness and isolation is something that has always interested me. My father operated a laundry in the town of Acton, Ontario.

?When my parents moved to Canada, I was the only Chinese child in the town, and my mother was the only Chinese woman. We might as well have been 200 miles from Toronto. That kind of childhood, in hind sight, gave me a very different prospective on life.?

She said that she didn?t necessarily have an unhappy childhood, but she grew up as the kid on the wrong side of the tracks.

As a child, Mrs. Bates wondered why her mother slept all the time. As an adult she has come to understand that her mother was probably suffering from depression.

?She helped my father, but she took every opportunity to sleep,? said Mrs. Bates. ?That is a classic sign of avoidance. I think that kind of lot in life was not uncommon to a lot of immigrant women in that time.

?It was particularly hard with Chinese women because they weren?t Western in their culture. They didn?t speak the language.

?At the time my father brought us over, my mother and I were allowed in because we were direct family members. At that time only direct family relatives could be brought in, but we weren?t allowed to bring an aunt or an uncle. I am not even sure if my father would have been able to bring a brother or sister.?

It wasn?t until 1967 that Canadian immigration laws were relaxed a little for the Chinese. Before that laws were based on post-Second World War policies.

?That is why places like Canada and US ended up with a bachelor society of men who lived without women. Men who were living in Canada would go back to China every six to ten years and would have children ten or 15 years apart in age.

?I?m the youngest of a number of children. The one who is closer to me is eight years older than me.?

Mrs. Bates came to Canada when she was five years old, and said she is very ?westernised?.

She chafes at having her writing classified as ?Chinese-immigrant? or ?ethnic? writing. She looks at herself more as a Canadian writer.

?I like to think that I am expressing another voice that is Canadian and adding to Canada?s story,? she said.