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" Once upon a time, Janice Lee was an editorial assistant at ELLE, schlepping coffee for the senior editors. Now, 11 years later, she&amp;#039;s literary royalty. Yes, Stylista viewers, fairy tales don&amp;#039;t begin just in the fashion closet; sometimes the Word People&amp;#039;s world (those dowdy laborers who produce articles) sows the seeds of future glamour, at least the sort for which young book lovers yearn.  Lee&amp;#039;s first novel, The Piano Teacher, a romance set in Hong Kong during and after World War II, hits bookstores January 13. The manuscript sparked a massive bidding war, with 19 countries buying foreign rights.  &amp;quot;As soon as I started reading it, I knew I had something special,&amp;quot; says Kathryn Court, the Penguin editor who bought The Piano Teacher for a high six figures. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t go after a huge number of books, only ones I really love,&amp;quot; says Court, a publishing industry doyenne with such authors as J. M. Coetzee and William Trevor on her roster. &amp;quot;Lee&amp;#039;s a natural storyteller.&amp;quot;  Lee is happily married to a successful financier (these still exist...). She met her husband, Joe Bae, on their first day at Harvard; they sensibly recognized they were soul mates and got married soon after college. But while Lee might not have had to wait for her prince to come, she did have to wait for something arguably more precious for an aspiring fiction writer: her plot.  After working her way up to book editor, she quit, afraid she&amp;#039;d never write her own novel while steeped in other people&amp;#039;s, and got an MFA under the tutelage of Chang-Rae Lee at Hunter College. &amp;quot;There were many years where you&amp;#039;re just working, working, working and nothing happens,&amp;quot; Lee says. She had a short story published in The Atlantic online and another in the small journal Image, but mostly she toiled haunted by the fear that, while she had the characters, a novel-sustaining plot eluded her.  But during her first pregnancy, Lee had one of those mythic-maternity miracles, in which what she couldn&amp;#039;t do with all the time in the world suddenly became doable. By the time she moved to Hong Kong from New York City three years ago for her husband&amp;#039;s job, she had two sons and half her book done. After her third pregnancy, with\u2014gasp!\u2014twins, she kicked into even higher gear. &amp;quot;I wrote seven hours a day,&amp;quot; she says.  The riveting narrative follows Claire, a conventional, middle-class British girl, as she moves to Hong Kong in the 1950s with her civil servant husband and is transformed, E. M. Forster style, by the freedom of an exotic place. Claire&amp;#039;s life becomes intertwined with a passionate love affair between Will Truesdale, a handsome Brit, and Trudy Liang, a Eurasian society beauty, that unravels tragically during the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong.   The book has an incredibly escapist pull, not least because Lee renders Hong Kong&amp;#039;s midcentury, languorous expat scene in CinemaScope. She grew up in the city with her Korean family before attend- ing boarding school in New Hampshire and thus has both an insider&amp;#039;s and outsider&amp;#039;s vantage point. If you can&amp;#039;t actually get to Hong Kong, reading The Piano Teacher is the perfect vicarious voyage. If you can, it serves as a wonderful travel guide.  Sadly, because so much of the old city is gone, Lee had to do most of her research using journals, archival photos, and period films, like Ang Lee&amp;#039;s under-sung Lust, Caution. &amp;quot;Every time someone visits me,&amp;quot; she laments, &amp;quot;we&amp;#039;re meeting in a mall.&amp;quot; But if you know where to look, you can still get lost in the places that make this book so dizzyingly atmospheric. The Helena May ladies&amp;#039; club, an institute set up in 1916 by the governor&amp;#039;s wife to keep new female arrivals from going astray, is still serving scones, though it&amp;#039;s now sandwiched between skyscrapers rather than bucolic gardens. And the Jockey Club, where Trudy takes Will on their first date, continues drawing in horse betters and hobnobbers. Meanwhile, the latest hot spots are trading on the city&amp;#039;s tradition, as seen at the moodily lit, meticulously designed The Pawn public house, in an old Chinese pawn shop. And in certain ways, Lee&amp;#039;s own life has an out-of-time quality\u2014she has baby nurses and a driver and belongs, like many in the international scene, to a club where children run on manicured lawns and grown-ups gossip as the hot days pass. Although Lee is more often in her air conditioned office, writing. To learn about the remaining pockets of colonial Hong Kong, click here "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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