Archive for April, 2006

An article in The Guardian (18 April 2006, Technology) reports on a finding in a technology study that bloggers are becoming a strong influence on society by dominating public conversations and creating business trends. Bloggers can wreak havoc for companies by raising awareness and campaigning against the corporations or their products. They can also become independent sources of news and opinion outside of the usual media multinationals or (in some countries) government-controlled press.

It made me think about how we perceive the wider world we live in. We get our news usually from the radio, TV and papers. We go to see films and plays and buy CDs that we’ve read rave reviews about. We choose freely to go to or buy what interests us. Or do we?

Have you noticed how many traditional media sources suddenly have nothing but Tom Cruise in them, or the latest Harry Potter, or the new Madonna album? And after a week or so, it’s as if they never existed and we’re reading about the next big thing to go and see/ listen to. Why is that? It’s because this kind of news is driven by the marketing people with the biggest budget to spend - like the person with the loudest voice in the room, they drown out everyone else.

Look at the recent Academy Awards. The Academy members vote for the best film and so on. The production companies that sent out DVDs of their film to all the members got more votes in general than those that didn’t. It’s only natural of course that the members would be more likely to vote for a film that they’ve seen - and that was easy for them to see. It seems to me that it’s the same for the print and TV/ radio media - their time is limited and they have to sell copy in a competitive environment: if the big thing that they are being sold by a publisher’s marketing team is Harry Potter, they cannot risk losing out by not reporting it.

It’s like when I travel - I like to hunt out an obscure restaurant or cafe with great food and ambience that only the locals know, rather than go to what’s been recommended by all the tourist books where all I’ll get is the tourist experience with other tourists. The risk is that I might end up in some dive with horrible food and an unpleasant evening - but that’s a risk you run even with a so-called recommended restaurant. But the reward might be a treasured memory forever and that feeling of real exploration that is so difficult to attain in our ordered, modern world.

I feel a similar sense of exploration seeking out interesting blogs. The thing about bloggers is that on the whole they are not paid to blog. They do it out of passion - so you can get quirky, off-beat or unusual information from them or alternative views that are not dependent on selling the morning’s paper. You can also hear the individual voice and heart of the writer. They’ll tell you about a book or film they love because they love it and not because they’ve been sold on it in a press pack by clever marketing people. The downside, though, is that there is no editorial control so you may need to wade through a lot of self-indulgent verbage before you get to the gem. And there is no guarantee of the journalistic truth or integrity - so you shouldn’t always believe everything you read. I still read the solid news media like The Guardian or Newseek, but when I want a change from the same-old, same-old being told what to read and see and think, exploring the blogosphere can be fun and strange and curious.

If reading my blog is an early foray into the world of blogs for you and you’d like to explore other blogs, here are some ways you can do that:

At the top of this page, there is a button in the banner that will take you to the "Next Blog". This will randomly shoot you into another blog. It’s always a different one every time. Once, when I was exploring I came across this amazingly beautiful site: http://ingehulman.blogspot.com/.

Go to Google and type in a topic of your choice followed by "blog" and see what comes up eg music blog, malaysia blog etc

Go to http://del.icio.us (there’s no "www") and type in a "tag" (ie any keyword) in the Search box and see who/ what appears.

Please do come back and leave a comment to let me know what you’ve discovered.

If you’re a regular web traveller and all this is a bit old hat for you, I’d love it if you could leave a comment and share some of your "travelogues" on the net and recommend any blogs that might be interesting for me - and the other readers - to visit.

[Summary: Are films and shows colour blind at last?]

I was intrigued by the recent furore over the casting of Chinese actors in Memoirs of a Geisha. The argument went something like this: the story is about a geisha in Japan and a geisha is a particularly Japanese construct so the actors should be Japanese. Our very own Malaysian superstar, Michelle Yeoh was grilled in many interviews about this. Her response, quoted in many publications, was that no-one complains when Americans play Germans or Brits play Italians. Indeed, Meryl Streep has played just about every Caucasion nationality under the sun. Though, to be fair to those who criticised Geisha, Meryl never has tried to play an Oriental. (Fortunately, the custom of white actors "blacking" up to play black or other non-white characters is now very much unacceptable.)

A website that’s been around for awhile came to prominence during this controversy. Set up by Dyske Suematsu, an Asian-American, it asks: do all Japanese, Chinese and Koreans look the same - as some Westerners might say. You can do an online quiz and see your results instantaneously. I thought I would be pretty good at telling each of these groups apart but scored only about half! It’s fun and challenges one to really look at one’s preconceptions about racial stereotypes. Have a look at it at www.alllooksame.com.

Looking beyond stereotypes in the movies, it has been heartening to see Oriental actors taking on more and more mainstream roles where the emphasis has not been on kung-fu high kicks or hard-done-by bound-feet woman. Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan have been significant in raising the profile of Chinese actors on the international screen. But Chow Yan-Fat has taken things to the next level, playing in thrillers where he’s more comfortable wielding a gun than high-kicking (The Replacement Killer) and in romantic movies as the male lead (Anna and the King). He is tall for a Chinese man and that probably helps get him into the A-list! Ling in the Ally MacBeal series, as played by Lucy Liu, is fascinating and charismatic for being tough, sexy, and smart - not for being Chinese. The role had been written as a minor part without race in mind and when Liu auditioned, she was so good, they hired her long term and expanded the character.

In Under a Tuscan Sun, we notice Sandra Oh as the heroine’s best friend - it’s great to see an Oriental in a regular role in a regular drama where all the characters could just as easily be Caucasian. And oh yes, her character is also lesbian. The beauty of this subtle film is that it just takes all that in its stride and what shines through is the friendship between the characters. On her website www.sandraoh.com, the Canadian actress is quoted as saying, "If there’s another f@*#^*g show or movie about New York and everyone’s white, I’m gonna f*#@!*g die. That is so unacceptable."

On the UK stage recently, a young Chinese lad, Matthew Koon made history as the first Chinese Billy Elliot. An Asian and a black boy have also got the lead role in this musical, based on the film. The director of the show is quoted as saying that it was important to him to be colour blind in casting for the role - what mattered was the talent of the boys. In Malaysia, of course, stage productions of Western dramsa have always had a mix of races in the cast, reflecting the ethnic mix of the country so this news may not be such a big deal in that context. But in the UK, I feel that this is a huge leap forward for a Britain moving towards an acceptance of itself as a multi-cultural country.

And to really befuddle us all, the recent movie TransAmerica has a woman, Felicity Huffman, playing a man who wants to be a woman. In a now infamous scene, the actress wears prosthetic male genitals in her role as the man who would rather not have those genitals. Now how confusing is that?

But all this just goes to show that we really all look the same - Caucasian or Asian/ Oriental; male or female. What looks the same under all the stereotyping and outward accessories of gender is a common humanity and these films and shows challenge us to go beyond first impressions to look at the person before us. So in years to come, when my hair goes completely white, I shall not wear purple - as the poem goes - but I shall become blonde and no-one had better dare say that I look weird.

[Summary: The judge in the Da Vinci Code plagiarism case has inserted a code into his judgement that has got the world reading legal texts for fun at last]

The Guardian reported today (27 April 2006) that Mr Justice Peter Smith, the judge in the plagiarism case brought by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG) against Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, has apparently inserted a code into his 71 page judgement on the case. Brown was vindicated by the judgement which ruled that he had not plagiarised HBHG.

The lawyers reviewing the judgement, living up to lawyers’ reputation for ‘having a keen eye for detail’, noticed odd italicisation in the text that they first thought was typographical errors (typical: blame the secretaries!). But then they worked out that the first few letters spelt ‘Smithy code’. Hmm, I wonder how they are going to record the time they spent puzzling over that one - chargeable or non-chargeable?

The lawyer who broke the first snippet of code, Dan Tench, has apparently been offered a front page spread in The New York Times if he breaks the code. So no doubt the race is on among fans - or hopeful celebrities - to beat him to it and get their 15 minutes worth of fame.

You can read the full Guardian article by clicking on this link: http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1762351,00.html

Do you want to have a go? You can get it at http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2006/719.html*. I expect that you’ll need to drink lots of coffee and pinch yourself regularly to stay awake - my own experience of legal texts is that they are not usually edge-of-the-seat stuff!

Personally, I think all this is a conspiracy to get more people to train as lawyers and judges by selling them on the idea that writing legal papers is just like writing thrillers.

*Thanks to Lee-Anne for her great detective work in finding this link for me.

You may enjoy exploring the wide world of bloggers out there so from time to time, I will be sharing links to the blogs that I read.

Simon World - A blog by an Australian living in Hong Kong. He catches curious news in Hong Kong, China and Asia - a good round-up of what’s happening down in the streets.

/Summary: Dan Brown wins the plagiarism case brought by some of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG). The verdict: he did not steal their ideas. So what does this mean for me and for writers generally?/

• Well, we all heave a huge sigh of relief. The HBHG authors bringing the case claimed that Dan Brown stole their core ideas for The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown contended that he had merely used their book for research and in any case, had credited their book in his acknowledgements. The judge ruled that you cannot steal ideas under copyright law and ruled in favour of Dan Brown.

• Most writers read widely when researching the background for a book. We absorb ideas and stories and characters, let the whole mixture cook for awhile and then create something of our own out of the raw material. I watch films, listen to music, talk to people, see what’s in the news and just watch the world go by as well as reading books.

• The idea for The Flame Tree came out of a strange mix of raw ingredients. I had been writing a rather turgid "bound feet" family saga of the Amy Tan genre and had got very stuck - the writing was difficult to read and morbid, the plot was non-existent, the characters were mawkish. What to do? I took a break and read John Grisham’s The Firm.

• I was in my parents’ house in KL in Malaysia and it rained a lot so I was stuck indoors, glued to The Firm, turning the pages like I’d never turned the pages of a book before. It was a great read and unputdownable.

• The rains were causing a lot of landslides all over Malaysia. Also in the news, a big new residential tower block collapsed, killing many people.

• On the radio, I heard the song Where do you go to, my lovely? by Peter Sarstedt. It’s about a beautiful, glamourous woman who hides a secret past in the slums and who has cut off her true childhood love for the sake of making it in the world of fast cars and riches.

• A flame tree grew in the front garden and for all of my childhood it had never flowered. I looked out at it in the rain and I remembered that almost by magic, when I was twenty eight, its branches had been thick with bright red flowers - rich and luxuriant, flaming red like a beacon over our neighbourhood. I asked my mother why it had never flowered before. She told me she had planted that tree when I was a child and flame trees take up to twenty years or more to bloom. I was moved by the faith that it takes to wait so long for one’s hope to come to fruition. What Mrs Fung tells Jasmine in The Flame Tree is almost word for word what my mother told me that day.

• All these elements came together suddenly. I still remember that day - I was lying in my childhood bed in KL and it was raining. The character of Jasmine, her relationship with her mother and childhood friend Luke and the conspiracy behind the building of the university project that she becomes involved in - it was all just there in my mind. I gave up on the family saga I had been writing. I started making new notes and soon, I sat down at my laptop and typed out the title page: The Flame Tree by Yang-May Ooi.

• So, it makes me wonder, if the HBHG authors had won, would I be sued by John Grisham, Peter Sarstedt, the newspapers reporting the landslides and tower disaster - and my mum?!

• But, fortunately, Dan Brown won - and whatever you might think of his book or the theories in it, as a writer I celebrate his victory. As for the authors of HBHG, they need to see the abundance of the world - one person’s success need not mean another’s failure: The Da Vinci Code had already been boosting sales of HBHG even before the case and now both books are up there in the bestseller list. For writers generally, we can explore in our writing a myriad of ideas and stories, however they come to us, without fear of being sued. And the lawyers for both parties haven’t done too badly either….!

• It’s win-win all round. Look, The Times (London) has reported that the case might have been a marketing conspiracy to raise the sales of both books. What a great idea for a story! Someone should write a book about it. Someone probably already is …

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• The Evening Standard, a daily paper in London, reported on a list, just published, of the world’s best restaurants. The top 50 show a strong European and American bias, with a couple of entries from antipodean Australia and South Africa. There was only one entry each for Asia (India) and South America (Brazil). Among them are the fanciest restaurants that you see talked about in the society pages of the style and fashion magazines like Vogue etc.

• What? No mention of Malaysia where food is a passion for all of us? I have to ask, what do these fancy restaurant critics know!

• Now, let me tell you about the best restaurants on my list - where you get great food, never mind whether the surroundings are fancy or not or whether you get the top vintage of wine served with your meal. I’m talking about real food for real people who love real food.

• There are great places to eat in London but the ones I pine for, needless to say, are all in KL, Malaysia - except one.

• First of all, there used to be Imperial Room on the edge of Chinatown down a dark, narrow alleyway. They served the best dish in the whole world - eels stewed in thick dark soy sauce and garlic. My grandparents used to take us to its previous incarnation at a fancier location in the 1960s where Ah Lan was the head waitress. Then she took it over and ran it with her husband in its last location. Everyone in my extended family loved the food here and even though many of us now live in England, America, Australia and Canada, every time we went home to KL, we had to go to Ah Lan to eat eels. Tragically, Imperial Room isn’t there any more and I have been depressed ever since.

• Then, there’s Hakka Restaurant near my old school, Bukit Bintang Girls School, which does the best stewed belly pork with salted greens. You can sit outside in the open air and if it rains, they roll out the sliding roof. Again, plain surroundings with the emphasis on the food and being with your family.

• And Sakura on Imbi Road, which does a great laksa - whether lemak or Penang. Their chicken rice is also pretty good. Now, Sakura is a bit fancy because it has aircon and smoked glass in the front. But a little luxury now and then doesn’t necessarily spell disaster for the quality of the food!

• Near Sakura there’s a coffee shop that does amazing fried kway teow. I have no idea what the name is - but it’s on a corner and I know it when I see it. They only do kway teow at lunch time, it’s always crowded and the parking is hideous but we will always set off mid-morning and do whatever it takes to make sure we get there and get a table!

• As for places to eat in Taiping, my family’s home town, well, I could go on forever. But I will only mention one place today - my second cousin Meng-Huat and his wife Wee-Lee took us there one evening. It’s a small hut, really, under a big tree somewhere outside town near Air Kuning. It does the most delicious fresh seafood I have ever tasted. The fish and shellfish splash around in big tubs of water and you choose the one you want. Within minutes, it’s on your plate fried in ginger and spring onion and chilli.

• If you have an off-beat restaurant on your list that you’d like to tell me - and the other readers - about, why not add a comment to this post? It can be anywhere in the world - the only criteria is that it must not be the kind of place that turns up in guidebooks or official lists and it has absolutely got to serve great food!

• It’s a peculiarly English thing: making a special trip to go and wander round someone else’s garden - and paying good money for it. To be fair, the gardens are usually several hundred years old, run to many, many acres and owned by a duke or even the Queen. Still, it’s taken me a number of decades in the UK to get my head around this odd passtime.

• When I first came to England, one of the first school outings was to Sheffield Park Gardens where we were left for several hours to wander around by ourselves. It’s a historic landscaped garden owned by the National Trust. I didn’t really get the concept - it was so boring looking at trees and shrubs and flowers. I couldn’t understand why they hadn’t taken us to a shopping mall instead. But the English girls were quite happy pottering about, chatting. (Some girls did set about hunting down any hunky groundsmen, but that’s another story).

• Chatting. That’s a very English skill. In the good old Asian tradition that children should only speak if spoken to, my conversational repertoire at that time was "It’s okay,", "I dunno" and a shrug. Today, my 11-year-old nephew - who was born and brought up in England - loves nothing more than a good chat. For me, that afternoon of numbing boredom in a landscaped garden, started to nourish my ability to chat. You start off with a comment about something innocuous - famously, the weather, or that lovely flower, or the beautiful manor house over there. You must always end it with a question mark eg "Gorgeous day, isn’t it?" or "What a pretty flower, do you know what it is?". The question mark tosses the ball to the other player and away you go. Before long, you may never know each other’s names but you’ve sussed that the other person is a decent sort and you’re the firmest of friends.

• But I digress (which is partly what chatting is all about). In my late twenties, I suddenly understood the joy of the English garden. Fittingly, it was at the most celebrated of gardens: Sissinghurst, the home of Vita Sackville-West, gardener, novelist and one of Virginia Woolf’s great loves. I was on a cycling tour of Sussex and Kent with a friend in early summer. We arrived, hot and sweaty, legs wobbly from the ride. We had a wander round - chatting of course - and then came into the white garden. It was in full bloom - every flower in it white and the perfume was intoxicating. I had never seen a garden so beautiful.

• Every summer, ordinary people open their gardens to the public under the National Gardens Scheme. In the grand tradition of garden visiting, you have to pay to get in but all proceeds go to charity. You can visit private squares in Central London that are otherwise never open to the public. There are a number of houses in my little suburb where they let the masses in on Sundays in May and June to traipse across their lawns and buy pot plants and seedlings. They lay out home-made cakes and cups of tea. Some of these houses and their grounds are quite grand but others in the scheme are little flats with a patio or garden the size of a welcome mat. The only condition for being included in the scheme is that the garden is lovely. Check out http://www.ngs.org.uk/.

• In Malaysia, up in the hill stations where it is cool and often misty, the British have left behind English gardens with roses and bedding plants amid the tropical ferns. We used to take family holidays up in Frasers Hill, Cameron Highlands and Maxwell Hill, dressing up in woolly cardigans and lighting the fires in the rest houses to play at being English. These hill resorts had been renamed after Independence - Maxwell is now Bukit Larut - but the old colonial names linger on from my parents’ generation. Now, I hear, the old English houses and gardens are falling into disrepair as Malaysians go abroad for their holidays or prefer more action-packed hill sites such as Genting Highlands, famous for its casino.

• One of my favourite public gardens in Malaysia is Taiping Lake Gardens. It was first laid out by the British, I believe, cleverly masquerading the wasteland that was left after tin-mining. Over the lakes there are pretty bridges and walkways with pagodas. Lotus pads cover the surface of the still waters. There are hillocks and mounds planted with fragipani trees and long views towards the hills. Sadly, I’ve been told, the bridges are now looking derelict and the lakes are silting up.

• These days, I’m happy to pay to look at a garden and eat cake and chat - to paraphrase that old ’80s song, "I think I’m turning English, I really think so". But I haven’t quite gone all the way - I’m not submitting my garden to the National Gardens Scheme: that would involve mowing the lawn and weeding and someone still has to convince me of the joys of those activities!

• Take part:

• Could any of my Malaysian readers update us on what’s happened to the old English gardens in the hill resorts? Can anyone in Taiping tell us about the Lake Gardens? Add your comment to this post to give us the latest reports.

• For all my readers: what’s your favourite garden? Is it your own garden, your grandma’s or maybe you think there’s a better National Trust garden than Sissinghurst? Singaporeans - what great gardens are there in the garden city? Why not add a comment and let me - and the other readers - know?

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