Archive for May, 2006

I have just arrived home in Sydney after spending 2 weeks overseas. One of the highlights was encountering a mammoth sized mechanical elephant and giant girl in London. I had been visiting the National Gallery at Trafalgar Square and was  
aking my way back to my hostel when I heard the sound of music playing a couple of streets away. I made a detour and wandered towards the music.

There were people standing on the street corner pointing and taking pictures. Around the corner of a building, I was shocked to see the giant puppet of a girl dressed in a green smock walking down the street towards me. Her head was peered into the windows on the first floor and I could see people leaning out of the upper stories to have a look at her.

She was operated by about 15 puppeteers. She was almost tripping over the crowds of people gathering around her. I was engulfed by the crowd and we followed her at a brisk pace to Horse guards - a large parade ground at the end of St James Park. We were stunned by the sight that met us there.

A huge mechanical elephant was standing in the square, its ears flapping and its trunk sniffing out the crowd. On the elephants back was perched a wooden house with decking and there were people in oriental costumes parading on the deck, observing the crowd as a tourist would. The crowd was mesmerized by the spectacle and I had never seen anything like it.

The giant girl approached the giant elephant and they greeted each other - the girl stroked the elephant’s head as its trunk felt her face. It was as though they had been lost from each other and were now reunited. The elephant trumpeted its joy across the city and pigeons flew startled from the rooftops.

The elephant and girl went on a parade through the streets of Central London followed by a huge crowd. The streets had been closed off to vehicles so people had the novel experience of walking in the middle of the normally congested roads. Some of the streets were eerily deserted as though the city had been evacuated. But turning a corner, I would come across a throng of people running towards the puppets as they moved, tall, amongst the buildings.

In the afternoon, the elephant and girl made their way to Trafalgar Square where a crowd had gathered. People had been awaiting their arrival for hours and they were not disappointed. The elephant walked into the top of the square in front of the Gallery and let out a deafening trumpet. Children covered their ears yet laughed. Adults had big grins and waved. It was one of the most memorable events Londoners would witness for many years.

I was to find out later that the visit of the Sultan’s elephant and the giant girl had been to commemorate Jules Verne and that these were characters in one of his short stories.

posted to Fusion View by Guest Blogger: Kiril Goring Siebert

I am delighted to tell you that a Fusion View subscriber, David Grantley, has had a micro short story posted on www.55fiction.com - the link is here http://www.55fiction.com/the-book/.

David was inspired to submit a 55 word story after reading my post Micro Short Stories. David lives in the UK and also writes poetry.

I love the story - it suits my macabre sense of humour! Well done, David! Lim would have been proud of you, too.

posted to Fusion View by: Yang-May Ooi

POISON

This month in Japan, the court sentenced the girl who poisoned her mother and blogged about it on her weblog. The report in the US-Japan news site CrissCross can be seen at http://www.crisscross.com/jp/news/371451.

The police have taken down her blog from the web but back when she was first arrested in 2005, The Times, London managed to get hold of some extracts. They make creepy reading - see - http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1854972,00.html

The girl was apparently inspired by the diaries of Anthony Holden, a British serial killer dubbed the Teacup Poisoner.

DIARIES

Writing a diary is a curious semi-private, semi-public act. A diary is often confessional, as if written to an intimate friend of the heart, and a record of the facts of one’s life. We might write things in our diaries we would never tell anyone. And at the same time, a diary threatens to expose us for the very fact that it is an object that may be discovered by others at any time.

I used to write intermittently in a diary. It was usually when I was down or depressed or lonely - as if in those times, no-one would understand me but the implacable empty page. It helped me churn through the angst. But at the same time, those rows of journals make me cringe with embarrassment, shame and humiliation when I think what fragility and sadness might be discovered in those pages.

When things are fine and I am engaged in the living of my life, I don’t have the time or the desire to coop myself up using up precious time in the recording of my life - so there are huge gaps and reams of blank pages. Any biographer sifting through my scrawl would only see the blue me and not the me that is chirpy and getting on with my life.

Other people write diaries for posterity and with the intention that they should be read by others some day.

Whether you write a diary for private use, like me, or for wider purposes, the eyes of others always hover in the background.

WEBLOGS

Weblogs (or blogs) started out as online journals. But the difference is that anyone can read them more or less in real time. There are many millions of blogs online at any given time now. Some people use them still as private diares. Others as diaries shared among a small group of friends. And others, like me, use it as an open letter to a large group of like-minded people.

The girl in Japan was found to have psychological problems. I wonder if her blog was a solace, a place where she could find comfort and understanding in a life that no-one else understood. Online, even as you sit in your private space, you bear your soul to millions of others who may happen upon your thoughts at any moment. Perhaps in the heart of loneliness, that can be a deep comfort: that she might be known and understand somewhere by someone, even if it is a stranger she will never meet or know.

What is love after all but to be truly, deeply known by another? And our need for love drives many of our actions.

LOVE

It’s interesting that the comments and debate on the forums arising from this case have focused on the inability in Japanese culture for people to say "I love you" to each other - see http://www.crisscross.com/jp/news/371238.

At an instinctive level, we all know that this - the need to be loved and also, to show our own love - lies at the heart of everything, in any culture and in any place in the world - and yet, why does it always seem so hard to remember just at the point that we need to make that connection?

So, it will not surprise me if we find more and more of such disconcerting confessionals or records on the web. In this digital age, the web is the place that many people already turn to first for many things - whether it’s finding a restaurant or someone to love. Its peculiar characteristic is to be both a public meeting place and a private inner space. And while there are troubled hearts in the real world, here on the web is where we will also find them.

  The web is a wonderful place. Whatever your passion, there is a community for you. Netrings are sites where bloggers with a shared interest can list their blog and join a virtual group of like-minded people. Metaxu Cafe, of which I am a member is such a community centre for writers - www.metaxucafe.com.

I came across a netring today for Knitters - http://boogaj.typepad.com/knitting_blogs/.

Members write about the knitting project that they are currently working on and share knitting patterns.

I don’t knit but my Mum and Grandma used to knit and I was always touched by the bond that it gave them. They would help each other with difficult stitches or go pattern-hunting together. The hobby also drew the family together as they knitted sweaters and scarves for each of us. We all became involved looking at patterns that we liked, asking them to adapt some to fit more to our tastes. They would call us from whatever we were doing to hold the strangely shaped bit of work against us, measure, make a note and send us off again. And then finally, there it would be - a beautiful jersey or rug or scarf. It felt like the only one in the world, made specially for just you.

Once I was walking down Victoria Street in London, wearing a navy jumper my Mum had knitted for me. It had three white kangaroos hopping across my torso. She had found the pattern on a trip to Sydney. A woman stopped me and said, "I love your sweater. Where can I get one?"

"My Mum made it for me."

She looked so disappointed. And envious. I felt so proud of my Mum!

So, if you knit - or know any knitters - do go check out the knitting bloggers or blogging knitters and / or tell us about your knitting!

Acknowlegements: photo courtesy of Sue McNamara, Ithaca, New York, USA at http://cloudheights.blogspot.com/

Chef Melissa de Leon’s blog at http://www.panamagourmet.blogs.com/ - From Panama: Delicious Original Tropical Creations and Cooking Adventures by International Chef Melissa De Leon. She posts recipes and blogs about everything to do with food. A wonderful, mouth-watering experience!

(Melissa noticed my humble recipe for Grandma’s Soy Sauce chicken and blogged about it in a round up for Global Voices Onling at http://www.globalvoicesonline.org. Now the whole world knows about Grandma’s recipe!)

For my readers with a Japanese connection, The Japan Times today (Thurs 11 May 2006) reports that Random House Kodansha is looking for unpublished literary works in Japanese:

Unpublished work sought

Random House Kodansha Co. has announced its first annual contest for unpublished literary works, which will include publication of the winning manuscript in both Japanese and English.

The Tokyo-based publisher will accept Japanese manuscripts of any genre and on any subject until next March 31 for the first award. The manuscript must be between 250 to 350 pages, at 400 characters per page.

There is no prize money, but the winning work, chosen by the publisher’s editors, will be published in its original Japanese and then released in English by the Random House group of the United States.

The winner will be announced on the company’s Web site in September 2007 and an award ceremony will be held in New York."

I blogged on the controversy over Memoirs of a Geisha a few weeks ago  - that it was enacted on film by Chinese actors instead of Japanese ones. The book was of course written by a Caucasion man. This competition is a great opportunity for Japanese writers to take back control over how Japanese are portrayed and by whom - and cross-over to a Western readership as much as to gain a profile in their home country!

The link to the Random House Kodansha site is http://66.249.93.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://randomhouse-kodansha.co. jp/award/invite/index.html&prev=/search%3Fq%3DRandom%2BHouse%2BKodansha% 26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26rls%3DGGLR,GGLR:2005-49,GGLR:en - it’s in Japanese but I managed to get an auto-translation into English, which makes weird reading if nothing else.

If any of you do submit something to the competition, please come back and let us know.

You may have experienced some problems accessing this site via http://www.fusionview.co.uk

  recently. I’m sorry for the inconvenience  - the server for this domain name has been down.

As an alternative, you can always access the blog easily via my main books website at http://www.yangmayooi.co.uk

  - click on the link to go straight to Fusion View or you can read the headlines on the Blog Headline page.

She used to be a domestic worker for rich families in Hong Kong, one of many faceless migrants from Indonesia to go overseas in order to earn a living to support her family. Now Sit Miriam Ghozali is a published novelist and has written poetry and short stories inspired by her own life and the lives of other migrant workers under her pen name is Maria Bo Niok.

The full story is in the Jakarta Post at http://www.thejakartapost.com/yesterdaydetail.asp?fileid=20060428.S02.

Her website is at http://geocities.com/gunkudus/mariam/ - her writing is in Indonesian so unfortunately, I have not been able to read them.

This is a wonderful personal story to come across, especially following on my post on Global Migrants last week. It’s easy to overlook the individual in those thousands of people gathered in the streets on May Day. It’s easy to forget that the people who do the hard, dirty work around us - domestic workers, road sweepers, office cleaners - are just like us, with their own hopes and dreams and personal struggles. Maria’s voice is a much needed addition to world writing which is often dominated by, well, people like me - middle-class and educated. And thanks to the internet, she can showcase her writing on the web and her story is more easily picked up by a global audience.

All that is needed is for her work to be translated into English to help the world to appreciate it.

/MyWeek is an occasional series of posts on what is going on in my day-to-day life./

You may have heard there’s a drought in the UK. Yes, in this country that’s known for its rain and cold and damp, there’s not enough water. And, of course, it’s still raining. It’s just the wrong kind of rain - ie. not in the places where the reservoirs are.

A hosepipe ban was imposed last month in London, among other places. While the weather was cool and still a bit damp, I wasn’t so worried for my garden. But in the last week, summer suddenly decided to come and all my soft planting is starting to shrivel.

We started with one watering can, tottering around the back garden. And then there’s the front garden to do as well. What I always used to think of as a medium-sized garden started to feel like the vast open savannahs of Africa.

The radio said that sales of watering cans have increased by thousands. There has also be a run on water-butts to collect rain of gutters. So this angst is all just part of the zeitgeist.

To increase efficiency, we added a bucket and started to work in relay. I am now beginning to feel like Gerard Depardieu in the film Jean de Florette, rushing desperately from the spring up the valley to his flowers - only without the donkeys.

So don’t ask me how my next novel is going, OK?! I’ve got more troubling things to worry about. "Excusez-mois, mes fleurs….!"

CHF Ladies Club at http://www.chfladiesclub.blogspot.com - the women’s chapter of the China History Forum in Singapore.

The founder "Mok" told me: "The purpose/objective of this club is to promote interest in and foster appreciation for Chinese history and culture. CHF is male-dominated and therefore mainly male-oriented, which is why some ladies feel a bit intimidated. I should know - I was one of the very few active female members for a long time!! With this club, I hope to provide an environment conducive for ladies to discuss all aspects of Chinese history and culture, especially those that guys don’t really care about. My own specialisation is the Sung and Qing dynasties, martial arts and the code of ethics, and famous women in Chinese history."