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If the Shoe Fits...

A Jewish Bostonian finds revolution and redemption in Louisa Ermelino
the world of Chinese shoe factory workers

pencer Wise is the heir to a shoe-manufacturing
dynasty that began five generations ago in New
England. Today the family business is about pro-
ducing goods in China, and, though Wise knows all
Sabout shoes, he’s chosen not to make them but to
write about them.
I first heard about Wise’s debut novel, The Emperor of Shoes, in
the PW offices. And if you’ve followed me at all, you know that
a novel set outside of my world, on a subject about which I know
nothing (making shoes is not buying shoes—there I have great
expertise) is going to get my attention. The Emperor of Shoes is
the story of a young Jewish American man, Alex Cohen, who
takes over his father’s shoe factory in Guangdong and encounters
the culture, the country, and Ivy, an activist seamstress who
wants to unionize the workers being exploited under a corrupt
system.
Boston is Wise’s hometown, and his father ran the family shoe
factory in Amesbury until the 1962 Trade Expansion Act sent
manufacturing overseas. Closing the factory in 1972 sent Wise’s
father overseas as well and began Wise’s obsession with his
father’s travels to Brazil, China, Taiwan, and Yugoslavia. Wise
says that he always knew he wanted to write a book that com-
bined the elements that dominated his upbringing. So in 2013
he went to work in the shoe factory in southern China that his
father had contracts with. “I lived in the factory, I worked on
the line—it was a real apprenticeship.”
Wise says he knows how to make a shoe from scratch, and in
one of the novel’s early drafts, which he showed to Robert Olen
Butler, his mentor at Florida State University, he had a 40-page
section explaining the process. Butler had a clear opinion:
“What makes you think anyone cares?” Wise explained that he
was “channeling Melville—that passage in Moby-Dick where he
describes building a ship?” But he cut the shoe making bit.
What Wise brings to a story of hot-button issues is a light
hand, a mix of sensitive characters, a propulsive plot, and humor.
From top: Spencer Wise in China, factory assembly line
When Alex comes to meet Ivy’s grandmother, he brings her “the
hopelessly lame present of espadrille heels from the factory,” but Wise had come to Florida State, where he’s a visiting lecturer,
realizes, “Better I should have given her a head of cabbage.” especially to work with Butler, and fortunately, Wise says, “he
For Wise, 2013 was about writing, researching, and inter- liked my writing.” More than that, when the manuscript for
viewing people in China. “They accepted me because I was Emperor was finished in early 2016, Butler asked around about
legitimately interested in the culture, and also I think they liked young agents looking for new clients. One of them was Duvall
that I was Jewish,” he says. “They associate being Jewish with Osteen at Nicole Aragi, an agency with an impressive and
being hard working and successful, and the Chinese find this diverse list of authors; one of three agents at the agency, Osteen
admirable.” had started six years ago as Nicole Aragi’s assistant. Butler called

22 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ JANU AR Y 22, 2018