Surviving the US corporate road

Helen Wan's book has received growing positive response in the United States. [Photo provided to China Daily]

"That was advice that I did not take for a very, very long time, because I was a full-time associate at Paul Weiss and I was thinking, 'Oh my goodness, it took me so long to put together 100 pages of non-fiction, how on earth am I going to find time to turn it into fiction?!'" she says.

But she did. Now it was about a young Chinese-American lawyer called Ingrid Yung, and the feedback fell into two categories. Agents wanted Wan to make the book much more ethnically-focused than it was, or she had to take out the her character's ethnicity.

"They said to me, 'We don't get it. Is this supposed to be an ethnic novel? If so, the book needs to be much more 'Chinese-y'," Wan says. "Or, they said, 'If you can't make it more ethnic, take the ethnicity out. Can you just make it about a white woman?'"

Wan, who grew up in the suburbs of Washington, says she wasn't willing to write about her protagonist getting sent to Beijing - "having all these crazy, exotic adventures" - and rewriting it from the point of view of a blonde woman was not an alternative she wanted either.

"This is a uniquely American story. It's a uniquely American Dream story," she says. "My whole purpose was that there were not enough books out there - particularly novels - featuring strong Chinese-American female protagonists, and that was a very important goal in getting this book published."

Wan's The Partner Track is a fictional account of how a female Chinese-American lawyer tries to navigate the world of corporate culture at a time when company diversity meant having "Dumpling Day" in the company cafeteria. The main character, Yung, is on her way to becoming a partner at the firm she works at - the first minority to do so - and dealing with how being on the "partner track" reveals much about the lack of resources available to women, and particularly women of color.

Diversity at the fictional law firm where Yung works is never a problem until a culturally insensitive skit makes its way to a company party, and a diversity committee is set up at the firm to solve the problem.

In her 15 years of practicing the law, Wan says that diversity has gotten better and companies trying to diversify didn't resort to token solutions like bringing on a diversity committee. But she admitted that "change is very slow coming".

After working at Paul Weiss, she spent seven years at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz before becoming associate general counsel at Time Inc in 2007.

"I actually think the scenes that take place in the novel could very well still happen today, and do, by the way," she says. "They happen with less frequency, but still do happen."