Archive for May, 2006

An English textbook is outselling The Da Vinci Code, according to the Times, London (15 May 2006). New Standard English has taken schools in China by storm, teaching English language and cultural habits, such as using a knife and fork instead of chopsticks. To the Chinese children, eating such implements is fascinating and exotic, as is pouring milk into tea.

It reminded me of how foreign and exotic England used to be to me. As a child in tropical Malaysia, I would listen to my parents’ stories of their university days in Cambridge and London. I watched The Avengers and The Saint avidly on TV. England, and London in the swinging sixties especially, seemed so glamourous and strange - and desirable.

My mother made it a point to make European meals every so often and show us how to eat them European style. We would go to European restaurants and learn how things were done. She would show us how to lay the table like they did in the West.

I’ve made a list of the habits she taught us in the heat of the tropics, preparing us for our exotic futures in cooler climates.

• When eating with a knife and fork, do not hold the knife like a pencil. The prongs of the fork should always face the plate except when you are finished. (I’ve still to work out how ou eat rice and peas that way. I see British people cheat and use the fork like a spoon so I do too!)
• Eat spaghettie with a fork and spoon, twirling the spaghetti onto the fork in your left hand. (What?! Surely, chopsticks make the most sense - especially as the Italians got spaghetti from Chinese noodles in the first place!)
• Eat cake with a fork but eat croissant by tearing it with your hands and buttering it with your knife. (I thought the English never picked up food with their hands at table. When I first arrived in England, I even saw someone frightfully smart eating a banana with a knife and fork! But then I guess croissants are French…)
• Use a spoon for soup, spooning outwards. Do not pick up the bowl and slurp the soup from the rim (which is perfectly acceptable by Chinese custom)
• Soup is a strange gluey thick gunge, not the thin consomme we know at home where we can pick out chunks of meat and vegetables.
• Your meal is served onto your plate and you each eat what’s on your own plate. Different meats are eaten linearly, not all at the same time laid out in communal bowls for you each to pick from.
• After dinner, you have cheese. (Oh my god, what is that hideous stench from that fungus-infested putrefying slab of… oh, it’s called stilton, is it?)

So, when I first came to school in England, I was not laughed at or humiliated when I sat down at a meal. I fitted in and that is everything when you are twelve…

pic from flickr by shanghai sky; non-commercial use only, no derivations

Entries for the prize draw to win one of three copies of The Flame Tree closes tonight at midnight (GMT +1).

I will be drawing winners from the list of email subscribers during the next week.

Subscribers for once-a-week email notifications are automatically entered into this draw and any future draws - to subscribe, see the Subscribe section of the sidebar on the right. Subscription is free and I will not use your email address for any other purpose.

For rules and more information, see "Win a copy of The Flame Tree" in the Announcement section of the sidebar.

I will notify the winners by email and post up an announcement on this site.

posted to Fusion View by: Yang-May Ooi

Lydia Teh is a journalist and contributes to The Star daily newspaper in Malaysia. Her blog Life’s Like That is at http://lydiateh.wordpress.com/ - it includes some her articles on Use of English and exclusive blog items on life in Malaysia as well as book reviews and discussions on writing and blogging. She writes very well and many of her posts have made me laugh. She was also a fan of Donny Osmond and writes about how she can still remember the lyrics of his songs after all these years - scarily, so can I!

It’s the Bank Holiday in the UK and they usually show big old blockbusters on TV. I found this hilarious parody of those old 1950s biblical epics starring Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner and a cast of thousands.

This mock trailer is not making fun of the Christian religion but rather the old epic films about Moses etc. It’s also a satiricial take on how we are conditioned to certain genres in movies eg you would expect a grand sweeping epic to have solemn grand music and profound dialogue. In this case, the grand epic footage is cut together in the trailer as if for a teen movie like American Pie or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and they’ve used only the shallowest bits of the dialogue.

A note of caution: the "f" word is used right at the very end.

Click on the play button on the screen below to play the video.

As an experiment in the blogging multimedia experience, I am showing short films on Mondays through June and July, starting on UK Bank Holiday Monday 29 May. They will be uploaded around 8.30 am GMT +1.

I’ve chosen the films because they make me laugh and that’s as a good a way as any to brighten up Mondays!

System Requirements

The films are streamed from YouTube.com and require a Flash Player. You need the latest version of Macromedia Flash installed - if you don’t have this, you can download it from Adobe.

If the film keeps stopping or stuttering, that’s to do with your connection. You will need broadband of at least 500+Kbps.

You will need the sound enabled on your PC and your speakers turned on, with the volume controls set above 0.

In general, you need to make sure you have the following:

• Macromedia Flash Player 7.0+ plug-in
• Windows 2000 or higher with latest updates installed
• Mac OS X 10.3 or higher
• Firefox 1.1+, IE 5.0+, or Safari 1.0+
• Broadband connection with 500+ Kbps

If you are using Firefox, there can sometimes be a problem hearing the sound so you may need to switch to Internet Explorer.

The films are shown by embedding them from YouTube.com - the above information is reproduced from that site’s Troubleshooting section. I have no other technical knowlege, I’m afraid. If you continue to have problems, please go to www.youtube.com and click on their "Help" section.

Fusion View Film Archive

You can watch films in the Fusion View Film Archive by going to the Category called "Film/ TV/ Live Performance" in the sidebar on the right of the page.

Having got you all enthused yesterday by my rallying cry to writers to get on and finish writing their books on their first step to getting published, I’m afraid I’ve come across more bad news for writers - which picks up the themes I blogged about in my post last week on Bimbo Publishing.

You don’t have to be an actual bona fide "bimbo" (ie celebrity) to get a fab book deal with lots of zeroes on the end of the cheque. You can hit the jackpot just by being related to one. The Yorkshire Post (22 May 2006) reports that the following hangers-on of celebrities have now got book deals - Wayne Rooney’s fiancee; Tom Parker Bowles (son of Camilla) and the mums of Boy George and Peter Doherty. Read the whole article here - http://www.yorkshiretoday.co.uk/ViewArticle2.aspx?SectionID=105&ArticleID=1517295.

And the next generation of would-be readers are no longer reading, according to The Scotsman. Only 25% of 12-13 year olds say they enjoy reading after school compared to 45% 10 years ago. The article is here - http://news.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=763312006. Kids these days prefer to go online or play computer games.

It all makes sense, though, in that freakonomics sort of way. Fewer people read "proper" books so there are going to be fewer "proper" books
and as the last of the dinosaurs (ie. people like me who grew up with pen and paper and books and dial telephones and spent our childhood without mobile phones - yes, kids, it is possible to not have mobile phones and survive…) die off and the new humanoids grow up, books might one day become those quaint things they put in museums in a glass case like the Rosetta Stone.

But there is hope for writers who truly love writing. Don’t blame the internet, embrace it. Writing a novel is hugely isolating and it takes years to get any feedback at all and your readers are just statistics on your royalty sheet - X thousand copies sold. I’m having great fun doing this blog and getting almost immediate feedback via comments, emails and other people mentioning my posts in their blogs. I enjoy the dialogue with my readers via this space and learning something about their writing or reading experiences and the things that are going on in their lives. I wanted to be a writer because I enjoy communicating and the internet has been a great medium for it. It has also kickstarted my creativity and writing again so I am working on my next books on the side. To nourish this, being a part of the new media revolution is vital for me -  writing blogs, sharing ideas, building reading and writing virtual communities: for me, it’s all part of the bigger picture of being a communicator and not just a writer.

pic from flickr by jamieca; non-commercial use only

A reader from Malaysia who is working on a novel has asked me how one gets published in the UK. This is a regular question I am asked by many people in the UK as well.  I thought it would be useful to share what I know* here on the blog for
all my writer-readers - and my readers who are non-writers, you may enjoy a look behind-the-scenes of writing and publishing.

So, this is the first in a series of weekly posts on Getting Published.

First things first. Write your novel. Finish it. Don’t even think about trying to get it published before you have typed out "The End". This is particularly important if you are a first-timer.

Why?

• Without a finished book,it’s like opening up a stall with only half-finished products for sale and saying to your customers, "Oh yeah, I’ll finish it if you want to buy it."
• What are you going to do when the agent you sent your first three chapters to says, "Yes, I love what you’ve written so far. Give me the rest of it tomorrow"?
• If you thought for too long about how convoluted and tough the process is from your first submission to seeing the book in the bookshops, how many hoops you’re going to have to jump through and how many hoops other people like your agent and editor and the whole publishing house team are going to jump through to get your novel published and on the bookshelves, you would never ever even think "Oh yes, I’d like to write a novel and see my name in print."
• Because of that process, your editor will want to know that you have the commitment and stamina it takes to finish a book. And then do several re-writes. And read through the manuscript again and again checking for typos and errors.
• If you start thinking about being published before you finish writing your novel, you’ll start thinking about what other people think about your work and, is it any good and, is it publishable and, will it sell and what will you say when you’re interviewed by Oprah and.. and.. And everything else apart from the story, the words, the characters, the book. So focus. If you don’t love your story and characters etc for long enough to stick with them to the end, then who else is going to love your book and buy it and read it?

I adapted the old Chinese saying to keep me going while I wrote The Flame Tree: the longest novel begins with a single word. And you just keep putting one word in front of the other until you have, in my case, 180,000 words. And when you get to write The End it is very very satisfying.

So keep going, word by word. Just do it. Keep writing and finish the thing.

Next week: What to do once you’ve finished the manuscript.

*PS. These tips are based on my own personal experience and research that I have done for these posts. If you are a writer or publishing industry professional and would like to share your views or add your tips, I would love to hear from you. Please add a comment or email me.

I’ve been experiencing some server / email problems so apologies to anyone who has tried to email me. Can I suggest that you re-send and also cc. yangmayooi@yahoo.co.uk?

Thanks

Yang-May

THE WOMAN

A homeless woman has been blogging about her life, living in her car in the UK at http://wanderingscribe.blogspot.com/ .

She has a law degree and writes about how she has tried to maintain her dignity while being homeless, making sure she showers when she can and dressing well in spite of her circumstances. She writes matter of factly and honestly. And there are moments of triumph and beauty to relieve the relentless struggle.

THE NEWS STORY

Her blog has been picked up by thousands of readers and also by the media - see an interview with the BBC at   http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4923488.stm

THE BOOK DEAL

She now has a book deal and I am sure many of her readers, like me, hope that this will be a positive step in getting her out of her desperate situation.

THE AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION

What has been curious has been the hundreds of comments by her readers, some of them apparently quite abusive, after the BBC told the world about her story. People criticized her for inconsistencies in her posts and passed judgement on her decisions - then more people rose to her defence and the comments section became a forum for heated debate between her defenders and her critics. And while she is struggling with her own tough circumstances, she has had to play arbiter and sort out their squabbles and deal with their judgements!

At the end of the day, she is just someone who has found herself in a dire place by a combination of error, bad choices or judgements and bad luck. She has weaknesses and uncertainties as well as courage and strengh - just like anyone else. She is alone in her car with no immediate support network of friends or partner or family that most of us rely on to help us through the tough times and to talk through decisions we make. She started the blog for herself, writing it in public libraries, and perhaps to reach out to others in her isolation.

Now, it is as if these readers who came to her via the BBC news story see her life and blog like just another reality TV show where they can give/ deduct points for her actions on some virtual scoreboard or vote her in or out of the game by calling/ writing in to her "show".

THE MONEY THING

One of her readers suggested she could ask for donations by readers via PayPal the online payment system. After some debate with herself, she decided to put a PayPal button on her blog. This seems to have been the trigger for all the ugly debate.

A lot of ordinary people (ie those with homes and lives like you and me) in America, Australia and elsewhere have blogs where they have a PayPal button. Readers are not forced to pay but if you like the blog and want to support the blogger, it’s up to you when and how much you drop in this virtual "tip jar". Not unlike dropping pennies into a busker’s hat. But some people felt that she was exploiting the news story about her plight to make a quick buck.

Um, hello? It’s OK for people to choose to go and make a public spectacle of themselves on reality TV and become celebrities and then make thousands, if not millions, in TV gigs and book deals but she’s judged for asking for a few pennies? It’s OK for writers to write books and be paid for it but it’s not OK for a homeless blogger to ask for voluntary donations? It’s OK for people with "hard luck" stories to earn huge sums for their memoirs so long as it’s in book form and it all happened in the past but it’s not OK for someone going through the tough time right now to ask for voluntary contributions to a live blog?

My take on it is: good on her for spotting a good business opportunity. That’s what we all do in our daily lives, isn’t it? Go for a better job, make that deal, switch to a cheaper mortgage, hunt out the best prices. That’s all about having more money left in our pockets and comes from the same instinct of survival.

It’s easy for us all to judge and pontificate - even as I am doing this now on my blog - while we have a home and live our own lives and read her blog out of curiosity, voyeurism, sympathy or whatever. Give the girl a break. She has to live her own life and work out the best thing to do for herself - just like we have to do for our own lives - notwithstanding the whole world putting in their tuppence worth (pun intended).

pic from flickr by b.e.n.; non commercial use only, no derivations

In my post At Home in the World, I wrote about my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side, the Runaway Boy who became the first ancestor that we can remember.

THE GRAVE

When I was a child, I remember being told that his grave was in an ancient Chinese cemtery up on a hill in the jungle outside Taiping,
Malaysia. He had died in Malaya, never seeing China, his homeland, since he ran away from the bandits who had captured him. Only a few men in the family knew how to find the grave in the jungle. No women could go and visit the grave because the jungle was too dangerous - and certainly I would not be alloed to go as a little girl. The location was handed down to my second cousins, however, father to son, man to boy.

THE RAID

One night, a hundred and fifty years ago, in Southern China, bandits raided my great-great-grandfather’s village. He was a boy and somehow, escaped the carnage. Some versions of the story in my family say the chief bandit felt pity for him and took him away with the bandit gant. Another version says that the gang rounded up the boys of the village to be their boot boys or to sell as slaves.

THE BANDITS

The boy spends many years with the bandits until he becomes a grown man. Some say the bandit chief took him as a son and groomed him to be his successor. Others say the boy never forgot the night of the raid and the murder of his family - he silently vowed vengeance and bided his time. Yet another sotry goes that the boy had been a prince and one day, somehow, he discovers his true identity while part of the bandit gang.

ESCAPE

In any event, when he was a grown man, he ran away from the bandit gant and made his way to a port on the coast. There, he boarded a junk to Malaya, paying his passage as an indentured labourer. One story says that he made his escape on his eighteenth birthday. Another says he killed the bandit chief to honour his vow of vengeance - even though he had come to love the chief as his father. And, well, the prince version is just to silly to even continue… Whatever the trigger, at any rate, he had to escape the country for fear of his life or to forever forget the tragedies of his past.

THE LEGACY

When I look at the generations of the family that came after this boy, the descendants of this bandit heir apparent, I do not see fighting men or thieves or murderers or soulds tortured by dark memories. My family are all responsible, sensible, law-abiding and well, rather boring citizens.

When I was twelve, I interviewed my grandfather, the grandson of the Runaway Boy, and he told the story into my tape recorder. His version is straightforward, without the glamourous embellishment. My grandfather died the next year and the tape is our only recording of his voice. I had had the intention at that time to write a book about the family. There is a handwritten exercise book with my childish version of the story, full of pawing horses and flames and screaming villagers. There is also another version, written in my twenties, that I abandoned just before writing The Flame Tree - fifteen years had passed and this version was still full of thundering horses hooves and a boy scooped up while running to hide in the fields.

The manuscript is still unfinished after thirty years. People tell me I should finish writing that book - Chinese family sagas have been all the rage; here’s my chance to launch my Wild Swans out into the world. But I think I like the myth - or the many myths - too much to bring myself to write the definitive story. The myths make us dark and glamourous - the lawyers and accountants and doctors and teachers that this boy’s DNA came to create. It’s cool to know, in my modern, city-bound life that if armageddon came I have inside me the genes to swash and buckle my way to survival and escape, bandit-style…

At any rate, whatever truth or otherwise lurks in those myths, they do tell us one true thing about my great-great-grandfather - whether he had really been a bandit or a prince or a murderer, he was certainly a heck of a storyteller.

pic courtesy of peter.macdonald @ flickr; no derivations permitted