Archive for the 'Culture & Society' Category

I’m not reading books anymore - I’m trying to “go shelfless”. With the technology available these days, it seemed to us likely that you could abandon all shelving with the consequential enlargement of your living space. That’s an attractive idea, especially if, like me, your home is already jam-packed with books, CDS and papers that have taken up all the shelving space available already - what do you do as you buy new items?

One friend is very efficient at monetizing her acquisitions - once she’s finished reading her books, she sells them off again on Ebay. She used to rip the music of CDS and then sell the discs on Ebay too. She also gets rid of old clothes and other items the same way.

I’ve been wondering if one could minimise the clutter at an earlier point ie at the acquisition point - by going virtual or electronic.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about taking virtual notes using Evernote, which has so far been a great way to cut back on the bits of paper and physical notebooks that I would normally use. I “write” notes on my mobile phone-PDA using the letter recognizer function so it feels just like scribbling in a physical notebook or on the back of an envelope and zap it across to my online account.

I’ve recently discovered audiobooks via Audible.co.uk, which is a subsidiary of the US-based company Audible.com. So I’m not reading books but I’m listening to them. With Audible, you pay for each book you download just like you might if you bought a physical book from Amazon. But you can also sign up an account and pay a monthly fee of around £8 - each month you can download one title. The latter option is good value as you can download a book that otherwise costs more at that £8 price. Once you’ve downloaded it, the audiobook is yours forever and you can stream it from the online site or download it as many times as you like. The only limitation is that you can only play it on up to 4 computers/ devices that you register with your account - this is to stop you sending an e-version to all your friends and doing Audible out of business.

I’m really enjoying my first two audiobooks. I can listen to them while gardening or sitting on the bus. It’s so much more time efficient being able to listen to a book and do something else at the same time. And activities that used to be boring and painful to do are now quite pleasurable. Also, lying in the garden staring up at the blue sky while someone reads to me in my ears is just delightful - I don’t have to strain my arms lifting the book to read it as I lie down or crick my neck to get the reading angle right. And the books don’t take up any physical space - although you can burn CD versions of them if you want to.

My only complaint about Audible UK is that they have only 18,000 titles compared to the US company which has 40,000 titles. Many of the UK titles are older titles and / or of the WH Smith variety ie non-intellectual easy reading (though there are a few exceptions). I tend to prefer Waterstones or Blackwells which have more academic selections - or Amazon where you can get the most obscure books so long as they are in print. I was very excited when I first discovered Audible.com, the US site, as it had loads of books I wanted. For example, the US company has Naomi Klein’s latest book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Stephen Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets. My excitement fizzled out when I came to the UK site - where none of these books are available. The UK site has lots on Churchill, how to make a million, chick lit and the latest popular non-fiction, which is fine if your tastes are limited to those topics.

So why don’t I just sign up for the US site? The frustrating thing is that if you try that from the UK, it refuses to allow you to do that and shoots you over to the UK site. Their support team explained to me, “The availability of certain book titles is linked the geographic digital download rights set by the publishers. A title can have different publishers in different countries and the rights are set on a country by country basis. Where possible, we try and secure rights on a world wide basis (for our US, UK, French and German sites) but there are times when this is either not possible or discussions are currently ongoing to secure the rights.” So I have to keep checking back to the UK site in the hope that the UK publishers will at some point issue the UK version of the audiobook.

Still, I have found a few books on the UK site that will keep me going for the next few months - hopefully as time passes more of the kinds of books that interest me will find their way onto the UK site and I won’t have to terminate my experiment with virtual books anytime soon.

Illustration: thanks to Drylcon from Flickr.com (CCL)

Mark Wu and I have been reading each others blogs for awhile now but we’ve never met. He blogs at OneInchPunch.net and is also very actively involved in the Chinese community here in the UK. When Mark invited me to be featured on his website VisibleChinese.com, I was very honoured. I’m delighted to to return the favour and introduce you to Mark here on Fusion View.

Mark writes:

Unofficially named “Mark Wu” (my Chinese name being my legal identifier), I’ve led a quite straight-forward life. My parents came to the UK when they were teenagers and met and married young. My brother, sister and I were subsequently born into the British Chinese culture which labels a generation of young Chinese people whose parents immigrated to the UK, and where the majority of families were involved in one way or another, in catering. With a talent for drawing, at an early age, I was “destined” for the arts and eventually found myself drawn to digital design.

In the last decade, I’ve spent most of my life focusing on working through my co-founded design company Kibook Interactive Design, which at its peak in the dot-com boom, grew to eight people plus freelancers. Aside from working quite alot, doing the company thing also meant meeting and working directly with a variety of clients and living a life that combined freedom (sort of) and choice with responsibility.

Some of our clients were British Chinese organisations such as Yellow Earth Theatre and The Pearl Foundation and that was great for me personally, to be able to tap into my own culture professionally. Working with them in the last five years or so, meant being involved with what I perceive to be an important time in the UK’s Chinese culture, with its growth and development being quite passive initially but which is now continually increasing in pace, encouraged by the Olympics in China this year.

Promoting Chinese culture in the UK is something I am passionate about and as a result, I am a Trustee of The Pearl Foundation, Interactive Associate of Yellow Earth Theatre and a core member of The British Chinese Project which is an organisation that works to help integrate more British Chinese people into politics.

Visible Chinese

Bringing together my passion for promoting British Chinese culture and design for the web, I also created another website which came about through a simple idea. The website is at VisibleChinese.com and it aims to become an Authoritative Independent Listing of Achievers within the UK’s Chinese Culture. Pretty much like a Who’s Who.

Visible Chinese is a site that is focused on profiling just individuals, as opposed to organisations, putting faces to names, as I insist on a photograph to accompany each profile. Profiles can be flexible in what they say, as long as they are biographical in some way. People can also outline what they do professionally and include links to their websites, so Visible Chinese serves as a great advertisement for their services and a useful tool for networking. I like to think of it as the sum of its parts being greater than the whole. Someone I met recently mentioned how it would be useful to see what people looked like in order to help recognise them at a future networking event.

The site doesn’t take long to maintain, and also doesn’t have the same pressure as a blog requiring constant (perhaps daily) updates, so all in all, the whole concept is a win-win situation for both the people featured, and for myself in gaining the satisfaction of creating something useful.

Not so silent minority

The Chinese community in London seems to be advancing and growing in voice and confidence, from the media labeled “silent minority” it began as. Traditionally, the visible aspects of Chinese culture seemed to consist of takeaways, large suburban supermarkets and the annual Chinese New Year event around the UK’s Chinatowns.

However, in recent years, there are signs that the next generation of young professionals are beginning to influence the community. Young professionals who have grown up in both Chinese and English cultures, and who are not just comfortable, but fluent in both.

As the British Chinese population increases, the diversity of talent also increases and is steadily gaining exposure. Take The Pearl Awards for instance. An annual event which will be in its fifth year in 2008. Each year saw the awards grow in profile and diversity with the fourth awards in 2007 set in the Royal Festival Hall, including HRH The Prince of Wales as one of its distinguished guests.

The British Chinese Project is also a significant initiative, founded by the prominent Chinese Solicitor, Christine Lee and which is supported by the UK Chinese Embassy, representatives from the House of Lords and the House of Commons, and a variety of different organisations and Chinese community groups. It aims to encourage more British Chinese to take an interest in politics, particularly the younger generations, but in itself, also counts a number of young professionals as members, the like of who are increasingly looking to play active roles in the community.

Go Croydon!

In the North-South London debate, I was a classic, born North Londoner who believes everything there is better, alas more expensive, than South London. A few years ago, I moved down to Croydon to my partner’s place and have been there ever since.

Croydon has a kind of stigma attached to it, but one which I think is over the years, being slowly eroded. It might be because of this, but everything in South London does seem to be cheaper than the North. Redevelopment in some areas is happening, and so I think the South is in someways, quite an exciting place to live. What I can’t fault is the convenience of being so close to shopping areas like North End, and the fast rail links into Central London - a bonus since I’ve been able to avoid getting on the claustrophobic tube to work.

Bruce Lee still inspires

I started my first blog One Inch Punch in December 2006 - during a quiet Christmas break, when I felt I really had no excuse not to. I had been working in the web industry for more than eight years and aside from a small portfolio site, had nothing of my own to show for it.

Building a blog was something that I wanted to do for awhile and it was also a good idea for several reasons. These included knowing the ins and outs of the process - which I could easily advise my clients on. “Walking the walk” as they say.

For almost a decade, I had been nurturing an idea for creating a large and complex East-Asian community website. Several visual designs came about, and the idea was refined, changed, amended and refined once more. I had never got beyond that, partly because of the time required and also due to lack of technical know-how required to get the idea made. However, in the last few years, blogging technology has improved massively - enough for me to fine tune my comprehensive ideas down to a simple (and practical!) East-Asian entertainment link site. Hence, OneInchPunch.net was born.

Comprehensive as the ideas were, keeping things simple inspired the name OneInchPunch. I basically wanted to aim for one post update a day, which would consist of a visual and a link. Something short but effective, which literally speaking, is basically what a One Inch Punch is. For those who don’t know, the “One Inch Punch” is a martial arts technique, made world famous by Bruce Lee, which unleashes explosive internal (as opposed to muscular) power² from a very short distance. So the name was not just dynamic-sounding, but also indirectly name checks probably the world’s most famous East-Asian.

Note: This article has also appeared on Dulwich OnView where I am the co-editor.

These days I usually buy a coffee on my way into work - and that means most days. It feels very extravagant to spend £1.50 most mornings on a drink I could so easily make myself at home or once I got into the office. But it feels invigorating to walk up to my desk with the steaming ‘tall’ paper cup and the aroma of fresh coffee wafting up to wake me up. It also makes me smile to exchange inconsequential banter with the baristas at the local café who are now familiar with my regular morning stop-off on my way in from the suburbs.

I would never have bought a cup of coffee so easily or so readily in England 10 years ago. Back then, the UK was still a staunchly tea drinking nation and it was a rare thing to be able to get a good cup of coffee anywhere. You would be served instant or some semblance of filter coffee that was stewed too long and sour or so weak that it was tasteless. Either way it was disgusting. One time, I ordered a coffee in Hay-on-Wye, booklovers capital of the UK, in a wannabe trendy café-bookshop which had one of those fancy Italian cappuccino-making machines. The coffee here should be good, I thought.

But here is how they served me: they poured some thick cold coffee ’stock’ which they had boiled down in a coffee filter pot into a cup and added hot water from a kettle. It was the most hideous concoction I had ever tasted. And they were a bit miffed when I demanded my money back.

And then along came the Seattle Coffee Company that made fresh coffee, latte, cappuccino and all the other varieties that we’ve become familiar with. It was bliss, walking into their slick, clean, minimalist outlets and ordering coffee exactly how you want it, with all the associated lingo: skinny, wet, dry… The company was soon taken over by Starbucks, which then proliferated all London and eventually throughout the UK. I hope there’s now one in Hay-on-Wye.

Many people complain that Starbucks, as a global chain, destroys the local economy and makes every high street look the same and have the same shops. For me the significance of Starbucks in the UK is that it has raised the standards of coffee everywhere. For awhile after they arrived, you still could not get a decent coffee in restaurants and cafes - they would stare at you blankly if you asked for an Americano or bring you a weak cafetiere coffee or slop some thick filter into a cup for you. But it wasn’t long before most places realised that they had to keep up with the times and invest in the big Italian coffee machine contraption that hisses and spurts steaming water and milk into freshly ground coffee. Nowadays, you can usually be assured of good coffee wherever you are in the UK - and it’s a delight.

Photo: thanks to Roberat on Flickr.com (CCL)

My father continues his series on Memories of Malaya with a response to my post about Doctors in the Family.

He writes:

Why do Chinese parents pressure their children to be doctors? The usual quick answer is that doctors make money and therefore that is the attraction. Looking more deeply into the question this may not be the only answer and is certainly not the most important answer. My remarks here on why parents pressure their children to be doctors are limited to my observations in Malaysia during the period starting about 1940s to the present day.

Most children who became doctors in the forties usually come from homes whose fathers were already doctors or members of the professional class like lawyers or engineers. So these children had come from reasonably comfortable homes and from their own experience these children knew that if they wanted to continue to have a comfortable life they should join one of the professions.

They would have seen and felt the respect given to their fathers as doctors and they also want to have that respect. Like most young people these children have a large dose of idealism too; they saw doctors doing good work with the sick and if the patients are poor, often, the doctors waived their fees and the cost of medication. Practising medicine had not become a business like the big private hospitals you have in the present day where you have to pay a deposit before you get to be seen by a doctor.

There are also children that come from poor homes who are idealistic and would want to serve the sick and who also want to be doctors but the medical course lasts for 6 to 7 years and their families could not wait for them for such a long time to contribute to the upkeep of the family. They could become lawyers or engineers but Malaysia in the forties did not have law or engineering schools which meant they had to go overseas and this the family could not afford; they would have to get a scholarship. A few did for engineering but there were no scholarships for a law degree.

All this is not to say that there was no father, who did not say to his son at the dinner table “Son/Daughter, you must study hard to become a doctor.” But by and large I believe a lot of people who became doctors have a large dose of idealism and humanity in them. The Chinese and their community have a great deal of respect for doctors because they know doctors have gone through a rigorous learning process and the Chinese instinctively respect learning and scholarship and also on the whole doctors have conducted themselves well in their community thereby earning its respect. Doctors, in my experience, are generally kindly, soft spoken, gentle and compassionate all qualities that appeal to the young idealistic and usually shy school boy. So there is little need for a father to exert a great deal of pressure to direct his son to read medicine if he is scholatiscally able.

Another reason for fathers wanting their children to take up medicine is this: in the history of the Chinese, the Chinese had always suffered the ravages and disasters from wars, civil wars and other local fighting from neighbouring warlords famines and floods. Any of these could occur at any time in the forties and before, especially, in China. So in the psyche of Chinese fathers their children must be able to move at short notice whenever any of these occurred, even from one part of the country to another in a vast country like China, or to move to another country and not only to move but to be able to earn a living in the new country. A doctor will often be accepted as an immigrant because he will not be a financial burden to the new country. (Actually being a scientist has this advantage too; Chinese children are also encouraged by their parents to take up science.) The recent generations are more relaxed about having to be prepared to suddenly drop everything and emigrate and then to earn a living. As a sign of this I have come across names of Chinese students from Singapore in the class lists of Greats in Oxford. It is well and good to want to do medicine as a safety net but it is also necessary to be able to pass the examinations. This requires concentration of the mind, attention to details and other intellectual abilities. The Chinese students appear to have enough of these mental requisites.

The new Chinese children now want to be rich in the quickest possible time when they grow up and being doctors do not bring in wealth quickly enough so they are going into studies in business, finance, banking, share brokering and such related subjects. Presently they can find employment in these sectors in their new country and in their own.

I have to declare my connection with the doctor profession. I am not a doctor but my Father and one of my siblings were, and my son and the wife of another sibling are. My wife’s Father was also a doctor and three of her siblings became doctors. My wife is the only one who is not and she is therefore regarded as a bit of a duffer by her family because she did not take a medical course but she did extremely well when she took up English literature instead. She is therefore not a duffer; she simply does not like to deal with blood and nasty sores and wounds and see people in pain.

Photo: thanks to laburbuja on flickr.com (CCL)

memmlya

I got a new mobile phone a few months ago and I’ve been slowly exploring all its functions - and in the process, I’m discovering a whole new mobilesphere (I have no idea if there is such a word but it seems an apt way to describe the world of mobile media in the way that blogosphere describes the world of blogs!). My new phone is also a mobile computer, running Windows Mobile and 80% of its front face is given over to the screen - the phone part of it has a virtual keypad for me to touch-type the phone number. It runs a mobile version of Word, Excel, Outlook and Internet Explorer. It has WiFi so so I can surf the internet as well as send and receive emails if there’s a WiFi service available - but I also splashed out and signed up for a monthly data plan so I could be connected wherever I am. With unlimited texting and a huge number of talk minutes on top of all that, the way I relate to my mobile phone has completely changed.

I used my old mobile phone solely for voice calls - and I did not use it a great deal as I don’t like shouting out my part of the conversation in public while I’m on the bus or in the street. I hated texting as I am not very nimble on using the telephone number keys to type out words. My new phone has a Qwerty keyboard (ie like a PC keyboard) as well as letter recognition on a touch-sensitive screen. Now I can email or SMS to my heart’s content in public - an excellent way to pass the time on the bus or wherever I am in transit!

Being a writer with this new writing tool to play with, naturally, I was curious when I came across an article about mobile phone novels. These are apparently huge in Japan. According to Wired magazine: “A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each.” The novelists tend to be young twenty-somethings or even teenagers who type their novels via their own cellphones. According to the writer interviewed by Wired, she can type faster on her phone than on a standard keyboard. There’s even a first mobile phone novel award - sponsored by the premier site that hosts these novels Magic iLand: might you call it the MoBooker?

There has been one author in the West who has written a novel on his mobile phone. According to a news report, “Italian writer Robert Bernocco took advantage of his idle time while commuting to and from work by train, writing his 384-page science fiction novel, Compagni di Viaggo (Fellow Travelers is the English translation), on his Nokia 6630 phone, using the phone’s T9 typing system.” The book has been published in traditional book form by Lulu.com.

I have to say, I admire the abilities of these two writers to master the mobile phone keypad. Even with the mini Qwerty keyboard and letter-recognition function of my new phone, I do not have the patience to write more than a few short text messages or emails on the fiddly thing!

It seems to me, in the West, there has not been any novel specially written for the mobile phone, as far as I know. I don’t think that the reason is necessarily the difficulty of writing on a mobile phone keypad - presumably, one could write it on a PC, blog-style, and then post it to whatever mobile phone novel site there is around. I wonder if Wester writers shouldn’t try this potential new genre. It would be a great way for a new writer starting out to write 500 words at a time. It’s great for readers as most of us have our mobile phones with us at all times - it’s a handy way to read short bite-sized chunks. Writing short, gripping prose is pretty hard, to be sure, and reading a lot of text on a tiny screen can be hard on the eyes. But I think these are excellent challenges for a writer to evolve a writing style exactly suited to this new medium - rather like writing poetry to the constraints of the sonnet form rather than just sticking a few lines together in the modern free-form style.

Would you read a novel on your mobile phone? Do you know of any writers in English who have a written mobile phone novel? Would you, as a writer, be tempted to try writing one? Add a comment or email me and share your views.

Photo: thanks to europe.htc.com

We’ve been re-watching that old series from the 1990s, Northern Exposure, where an urbane, young New York doctor finds himself stuck in small-town Alaska. It’s a classic fish-out-of-water story but with many twists and turns along the way as our expectations of the town and local people are confounded by surprises and moments of magic realism. I loved it when it first came out and I’ve been delighted to see that it has stood the test of time very well and still has us laughing out loud.

The one refrain of the hapless young protagonist, Joel Fleischman, is that he is the perfect catch for any girl in New York - he is a Jewish doctor from a good university and in his prime - and here he is stuck in the sticks where there are no women who appreciate his qualities. What is it about doctors that make them such a desired species in Jewish culture?

It’s like Chinese families - they have the same awe for doctors, too. Most sons get pushed into being doctors - and many daughters too. In my family, both my grandfathers were doctors and a number of uncles and aunts on both sides are doctors. There are lawyers, engineers, professors, too - but the pinnacle of ambition is being a doctor. What’s that all about?

I was under huge pressure to study medicine, notwithstanding that bodily fluids and signs of pain make me weak and wobbly. At school, we had to do an experiment about amino acids or something and the biology teacher and lab assistant had prepared for us beakers full of their saliva. I almost threw up on the spot. No way was I going to survive medical school - yet, for a time, I kidded myself - and my extended family - that I would study hard and get the science grades necessary to do a medical degree.

Well, that lasted all of five minutes.

I ended up reading English Lit before going to law school.

I am respected for being a lawyer, and a writer. But it’s not the same kind of awe that is reserved for doctors. For the Chinese, and also the Jewish community, having a doctor in the family is the ultimate achievement, it seems to me. It’s as much about the quality of the family as it is about the individual’s personal achievement - there is that sense of reflected glory that comes with being able to say, “My son is a doctor, you know.” And I have a sense it’s similar for Asian communities - I’m reminded of the Asian comedy sketch show Goodness Gracious Me where the two elderly Asian women sit and compete about their sons’ achievements. It seems to me these three communities value doctors much more highly than Anglo-Saxon communities. Why is that?

Is it about the healing magic? The money? The brains that it takes to get through medical school?

What’s your take on this cultural phenomenon?

Photo: thanks to happysnappr from flickr.com (CCL)

I didn’t manage to post anything earlier this week because I was struck down by a bout of mini-flu. It wasn’t as bad and debilitating as the virus that had me knocked out for a couple of weeks in November but it was enough to confine me to my sick bed for a couple of days.

I’m not very good at being ill. I get frustrated and fed up and bored. When I’m sleeping it’s fine, of course, cos then I don’t notice a thing - and sleep is the best thing for you when you’re ill. But it’s those times in between when you’ve slept too much but you’re still not well enough to walk around or do anything useful.

Back in the old days (5 years ago?), I would have been languishing in front of the telly, turning my brain to mush with day time TV. But these days, it’s podcasts that help me make it through the dreaded influenza. If you choose the good ones, you can be educated, entertained and amused - all without leaving your bed.

Here are just a handful of the podcasts that have kept me sane during the last few days:

The Spirit of Things - Australian radio’s spiritual discussion podcast, whose presenter Rachel Kohn has the most sooting voice I’ve ever heard.

This American Life - an award winning US series that takes a literary look at true stories about ordinary people. Their episode about Testosterone had me laughing out loud - especially, the story about the woman who took a double dose of the hormone and began to lust after sports cars and to understand physics as well as what happened when the radio station team had themselves tested to see who had the most testosterone.

The Politics of Culture - another intelligent and in-depth US program looking at “the intersection where the world of politics and culture meet and sometimes collide”. I really enjoyed the interview with the author of the book “Starbucked” - did you know that Starbucks in the US deliberately built stores on the right hand side of the road as you commute from the suburbs to the city to make it easier for commuters to stop and buy a coffee?

The BBC World Service also has many great documentary podcasts but they are generally very earnest and keen to tell you all the troubles of the world. So, when I am feeling fragile, it’s not the best time to listen to documentaries that begin “I was nine years old when the soldiers came to the village and killed everyone…” or “Every year, 10,000 women die of [insert terrible disease]….” - or anything that refers to “Iraq”, “Jihad”, “Israel”, “political prisoners”, “genocide”, “famine”, “war” etc etc etc! That sort of thing would just make me even iller!

What are your favourite podcasts? Do you listen to different types of podcasts for different activities? Please add a comment and let me know.

We met up with some friends recently whom we had not seen for almost 18 months even though they live in London. That’s part of the London thing - everyone is so busy that it’s difficult to make time to meet up and before you know it, several months - and even years - have passed. For this meet-up, we had to put it in our diaries almost 4 months in advance as it was a matter of co-ordinating 4 diaries and different work patterns and commitments.

We were all so delighted when we finally did meet for a meal last week at Carluccio’s. We talked non-stop, catching up on what we’d all been doing and letting the conversation flow whichever way it fancied - writing, literature, social media, karate, running, health, throwing out old clothes… At the end of the evening, we promised not to leave it so long next time and planned to meet again before too long. I really hope that we will stick to our good intentions as I really enjoy the company of these friends.

I’ve been blogging about “friends” for a couple of weeks now, especially in the context of Facebook and meeting up with these real friends made me think about how my friendships in recent years have evolved since the arrival of social media into my life.

One of the reasons we had not been much in contact with these friends we met at Carluccio’s was that they are not very wired - we’ve exchanged a few emails over time but mainly to do with arranging when we next meet. One of them does not have a working email address. They are both too busy to spend much time online.

In contrast, Angie and I both love emailing, Skype, instant messaging, reading and writing blogs and do spend some time of Facebook even though we’re not great fans of it. Consequently, we have tended to keep up with those friends who are easy to connect with in these digital spaces. More than that, these digital connections have strengthened many relationships which might not have otherwise thrived. I’ve got to know my cousin who lives in Bath so much better in the last two years than in the 40+ years that we’ve been cousins - she and her husband are the most wired couple we know and as a result of Twittering, blogging and Skyping, we come across each other’s daily inconsequentials. Because of her tweets, I know when she takes the kids to the pool and what she’s making for dinner: not the most exciting news but it’s the kind of thing that if she were in my neighbourhood, we might natter about over the garden fence. It’s the small things that can nurture long friendships as much as the deep conversations about life, the universe and everything.

With my non-wired friends, I make a conscious effort to phone them, especially those who live in the Midlands or Yorkshire or Wales or elsewhere far from London, and it’s great to have a long chat over the phone. But it takes a lot of conscious effort - it has to be in the evening after work but not during dinner time and also not too late (I’ve never been sure when “too late” is - 10pm and after?). You also have to hope that you are both on good form so you can have a good conversation - long silences and flat exchanges over the phone are just too awkward. And then after you’ve psyched yourself up for all this, you get the answermachine and you have to leave a message and then it’s up to them to call you back and hopefully, they won’t get your answermachine - and so the game of telephone tag goes on until you both are home at the same time. Whew, exhausting!

Or worse. They don’t call you back. Uh-oh. Does that mean they are snubbing you? They are too busy to call back? They meant to but they’ve forgotten? They are in the throes of a crisis and it’s not the right time for a chat? Or you left your message on someone else’s answermachine - after all it was that electronic lady’s voice on the voicemail and not your friend’s voice…? Do you call again? How many times should you call again before you become a friendship stalker?

You see, it’s all too fraught, this old-fashioned telephone thing, lovely though it is when we do manage to speak. I’d love to persuade these dear but unwired friends into the world of online connection but could I? What will bring them round to the digital way of doing things? Should I even try?

Photo: thanks to Rev Dan Catt from flickr.com (CCL)

Carol Major and Hilda Tam Hio Man are co-authoring a historical novel set in Hong Kong, inspired by a true love story in Carol’s family. Carol’s husband’s grandfather, a white Australian, secretly married a Chinese woman in the 1960s - but her existence did not come to light until after he died, although she had lived in his flat since the late 1960s. She must have been in her late teens or early twenties when they married. The grandfather would have been over 65. Following her discovery she disappeared.

Carol has been haunted by this story ever since - Who was this woman? Why did she agree to be hidden from the family for all of those years? And what became of her?

To answer these questions she turned to fiction, although a fiction that would be based on historical facts. She wanted to imagine the sorts of situations that would lead to such choices. Carol asked Hilda if she could assist from a Chinese point of view.

When Carol told me about this story, I wondered if the readers of Fusion View may be able to help her. I know that many of you love books and stories and have connections with the Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and Singapore. So I suggested to Carol that we might put a call for help up here on Fusion View and maybe some of you could help with this great project.

The authors need your help with the texture and detail of life in Hong Kong in the 1950s and 1960s to help them flesh out the historical details of their novel, inspired by this haunting love story.

Carol writes:

The story is about two little girls, Chloe and Yun, who emigrate from the mainland to Hong Kong in 1950. Chloe is an orphaned Eurasian. She is taken in by a British couple in Hong Kong and attends an Anglican school. Yun is Chinese. Her family had hoped to have a better life in Hong Kong but end up depending on the Triads for their livelihood.

Chloe hopes to make a successful life through hard work. Yun sees no way out of her situation but to marry a westerner who will take her overseas. Events come to a climax when a British official who has been involved in corruption becomes an embarrassment for both the Triads and the British administration. He is banished to Australia with a minder to ensure that he does not tell his story. The minder is Yun.

The women continue to correspond with one another as they try to make sense of where fortune has taken them.

What help we need

We are looking for texture and detail. Did any of our readers live on the Peak in the late 1950s, early 1960s? Did their parents? What would be the response to a little Eurasian girl attending an Anglican school? How would she be treated by the other girls?

We will create a fictional school but need historical details to colour it. Can our readers describe the layout of classrooms, the daily routine, the food in the cafeteria, clique behaviour, summer vacations and so on?

Most of the dwellings that existed on the Peak during that time have been torn down and replaced by high rises. Does anyone have photos of the smaller bungalows? What were the interiors like and so on?

How did people travel up and down to the city in those days? I took the peak tram and also walked up using the escalator. Might Chloe have taken the same route to visit Yun?

Does anyone know what the border at Shenzhen looked like in the 1950s, and the entry process? It has been completely done over now.

Are their any stories or thoughts that run parallel with the plotline that might inform it and add colour? We would love to hear them.

Research so far

We have read much history from general sources and spent time in the Museum of History in Hong Kong gathering information about the time period in question. Articles appearing in the Royal Asiatic Society Journals have also helped. We have also read Elsie Tu’s books about Colonial Hong Kong. A contact who worked with an intelligence service is providing de-identified material on the operations of the Triads and the British Administration. Another contact whose father was involved with the Colonial Office is providing additional detail.

We have found that it is the personal experiences of real people that make the difference. Hilda has asked students to collect stories from their parents and grandparents. It would be fantastic to have more stories about those who came from the mainland in the 1950s—their dreams and what they left behind.

If you can help, please contact Carol (carol.major[at]advancednarrative.com) or Hilda (da_tam[at]yahoo.com). Please also mention Fusion View in your email to them.

More about the Authors

Carol Major was born in Scotland, immigrated to Canada as a girl and settled in Australia in her late twenties. She has been a professional writer for over twenty years with numerous articles published in the health care and social policy field. She is a principal of Advanced Narrative www.advancednarrative.com, a company that specialises in using story telling techniques. She completed both a Master and Doctorate of Arts Degree (Creative Writing) at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, during which time she completed two novels. Her short stories have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and Australia, and on the performance website 1001 Nights Cast.

Hilda Tam Hio Man lives in Macau. Her first novel Ah Xun¡’s 5 Destinies was published by Association of Stories in Macao (ASM) in 2006. Hilda’s poetry and translations have recently appeared in Jacket, Segue, Cipher Journal, Poesia Sino-Occidental and The Drunken Boat. A collaborative volume of translations of the Tang poet Meng Jiao was published by ASM last year. Hilda is now working on the translations of classical poems by women poets of the Song dynasty and writing a novel with Carol. She holds a Master of Arts in English Studies from the University of Macau.

My top priority during my visit to Barcelona a couple of weeks back was to look at the buildings created by Gaudi. It is astonishing that his strange, swirly, hallucinatory architecture was built during the late 19th century and the early 20th century - they seem so modern, surreal and fresh today. Even in our present time, with London’s Gherkin, the humping turtles of the Sydney Opera House and the desert-inspired buildings of Zaha Hadid vying for eye-grabbing attention, Gaudi’s buildings from over a hundred years ago still pack a punch.

We tend to assume Gaudi set out to be radical and anti-establishment in his designs just because they were so unconventional alongside the traditional classic architecture of the 19th century. But in fact he was a staunch and conservative Catholic, appears to have taken his inspiration from nature. An article in The Age quotes:

“Nothing is art if it does not come from nature, as from nature come the most beautiful and extraordinary shapes,'’ he said. “Furthermore, nature is the masterpiece of the Creator.'’

This accounts for the curved lines of his designs and the a-symmetry that characterizes his work. His furniture looks like its been shaped out of vines. His rooftop chimneys look like rocks eroded by the timeless wind. The pillars of the Sagrada Familia Temple are palm trees. Tiles are shaped to give the sense of water.

Click on the photo below to view a slideshow of some photos from our Gaudi journey:

Like many geniuses, Gaudi was not always appreciated in his lifetime. Not many people understood his work and if not for the wealthy industrialist Eusebi Guell who became his patron, Gaudi might have sunk into obscurity. George Orwell famously “thought the Sagrada Familia was “the most hideous building in the world'’ and thought the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up during the Civil War when they had the chance.” Even Guell apparently did not like Gaudi’s designs - according to Wikipedia:

Reportedly on one occasion Gaudí said to Güell, “Sometimes I think we are the only people who like this architecture.” Güell replied, “I don’t like your architecture, I respect it.”

For me, it was the trip we did to Montserrat up in the craggy mountains that really brought home Gaudi’s creative inspirations. We saw the mountains from a distance as the train chugs across the plains outside Barcelona. Within an hour, we were in the foothills, taking the funicular train up to the ancient monastery built up against the rocky face of the steep mountain. Erosion had shaped the rocks into standing figures and we could imagine them as aliens or fat man or angry warriors. Walking high up on dusty paths above the man-made buildings, heading towards the ruins of ancient hermitages, we saw rock figures tower above us and craggy sentinels line the spur down the side of the mountain, passed the bare branches of gnarled trees blasted by wind. This was Gaudi in all his glory.