Roselle Lim: How to taste life in another community

Waterford author Roselle Lim.

Dick Bourgeois-Doyle

ADVOCATING FOR AUTHORS

Sometimes when we tell a favourite story to new friends or strangers, it falls flat. Maybe it leans too heavily on an inside joke, a quirky relative no one else knows, or a “you-had-to-be-there” moment.

Skilled storytellers know how to overcome these hurdles. They have ways of sharing their experiences and their feelings without going into too much detail or spoiling the flow.

Waterford’s Roselle Lim has that ability. 

Lim writes novels that gracefully draw readers into a community and perspective many do not know firsthand. She does it through vivid imagery, the language of food, and just a touch of magic - always grounded in a resonating truth.

A Filipino-Chinese Canadian who emigrated from Quezon City as a child, Lim grew up surrounded by layered storytelling. Her grandmother read Filipino comics to her, and Lim herself began inventing stories to share with classmates after settling in Ontario. From an early age, she learned how to translate the experience of one world for audiences in another.

That experience became the foundation for fiction that feels richly specific but also warmly inviting. It’s a quality that has carried through Lim’s internationally acclaimed novels such as Vanessa Yu’s Magical Paris Tea Shop, Sophie Go’s Lonely Hearts Club, and Night for Day. But it was already evident in her 2019 debut Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune.

That first novel follows a young woman’s return to San Francisco and her childhood neighbourhood after her mother’s death, burdened by grief and family obligation. On the surface, the story is steeped in Chinese traditions, immigrant experience, and associated multigenerational expectations. Yet readers far removed from that community quickly find their footing.

That comfort comes from the way Lim presents culture: not through lengthy explanation, but through action, memory, and emotion. We recognize ourselves in the longing, loss, and renewal her characters experience. Difference isn’t softened or simplified; it’s intertwined with experience that is vivid and human.

Much of this comes from Lim’s technical skill, especially her knack for metaphors that feel both novel and apt: “the strands of my long hair… flying like fluttering ribbons of black silk.”

Lim describes her approach as “painting with words,” which is evident in her visual, tactile, and carefully composed prose.

“For me, it helped that I could see things through an artist lens,” she says noting that the written word has surprisingly been a struggle for her. “Art is my first love and having that point of view has made the written language a lot more fun.”

That attention to image allows her to convey complex feelings without tipping into sentimentality and, often, to make readers smile. Her humour appears through observation, affection, and small gestures rather than declarations. Even that touch of magic in her work arrives so gently it feels like an extension of reality.

“If you think about it, every culture has their own superstitions and their beliefs,” Lim says, suggesting that magic itself can be a bridge, another way of sharing perspective.

Perhaps her most distinctive and welcoming technique is the one she places at the heart of her books: food.

“Food is the easiest way you can introduce someone to your culture,” she notes. “Food is its own language - if somebody is not feeling too good, you make chicken soup or some comfort food and they understand that you care.”

In Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune, the recipes, which are based on those favoured by Lim’s father, are never just lists of ingredients. They carry the stories of the hands that prepare them, the memories they hold, and the moments in which they are shared. Meals become markers of apology, grief, support, and reconciliation. The restaurant in Natalie Tan, for example, emerges as a sensory landscape of steam, colour, and sound. Even outside the kitchen, food imagery frames the world: “A gathering fog brewed at the base of the gate the way steam rises from a perfect bowl of noodle soup.”

What sustains this approach isn’t the culinary novelty, but emotional honesty. The themes running through Lim’s work - family bonds, cultural inheritance, community - draw directly from her Filipino-Chinese background. But at the same time, her ability to reach a broad audience may be shaped by where she writes today. Living in rural Ontario, Lim is also attuned to readers whose life experiences may be very different from her own.  

So, having bridged the space between worlds herself, Roselle Lim brings a practiced sense of translation to her novels.

For those of us reading her work and aspiring to write in Norfolk County, she offers a reminder: stories that, on the surface, seem distant, unfamiliar, and hard to understand can be shared when told with care, craft, and creativity.

Roselle Lim knows her community and its stories well, and she also knows how to invite new friends and strangers into it.

CELEBRATING AUTHORS

For the podcast interview with Roselle Lim and more on other local authors, check out https://doverwrites.blogspot.com/