Archive for the 'Fusion Stories' Category

We continue our Fusion Stories series with the first Fusion View podcast where I interview Dishad Husain, the British-Asian director, about making his award-winning short film “Holly Bolly”.

You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the embedded player below.

Alternatively, you can listen to this and other Fusion View podcasts by clicking here.

The links to Dishad’s films and projects mentioned in the podcast are:

• www.imotion.com
• BBC Film Network, “Holly Bolly” page

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To read or listen to more Fusion Stories, go to the sidebar in the far right of the Fusion View homepage and click on the Category “Fusion Stories”.

Do you have a fusion story to tell? Do you have cross-cultural experiences in your life you would like to share? Find out how you can tell your story on Fusion View by going to the Announcements section in the middle sidebar of the Fusion View homepage and clicking on “Tell Us Your Fusion Story.”

Following my Open Invitation to my readers to tell me your fusion stories, I am delighted to post a Guest Blog from Alex Smit, telling us her fusion story of being a South African in Germany.

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I’m Alexandra, born and bred African, who decided at the ripe ole’ age of 30-something to make a grand move to Germany, taking my eclectic writer/musician husband, Martin Barbee, daughter, Nicolette (then 7) and our black street cat.

After 10-odd years as a newspaper journalist for various Johannesburg publishing houses, I felt it was time "for more."

We moved to Hannover where my brother had a little flat and for the first month or two, huddled in one room, cat causing mayhem as she scratched my brother’s girlfriend’s furniture.

My daughter redid the first year of school. We were lucky her headmistress admitted her, considering she only knew the colours in German. The law has since changed and no child will be admitted without first doing a language test!

She’s done remarkably well. Her friends are fellow ,Ausländer’ (foreigners) and both teachers she’s had, always preface parents’ evening seminars with, "Despite not being a native speaker…"

Finding a job is not easy. I packed bread in a factory with the other foreigners and learnt how emigrants take the jobs locals find are beneath them. Of my team of about 20, one was German and he hailed from the East which is almost as bad as being a foreigner.

Having lived the birth of our new democracy makes South Africans tolerant of others. It’s strange as an ,outsider’ to see how subtle intolerance is par for the course in Germany. My grandparents and parents are German so, according to German law, I am German but a Turk born in Germany, who speaks fluent German and knows the culture is a Turk, because of his/her parents. That is just nonsense!

At the same time, there are misconceptions about Germans -  people automatically think Germans have no sense of humour and that’s way wrong. My new work colleagues hosted a tongue-in-cheek German party in America, with beer and the usual cliches and their visitors were not sure how to take it. Many believed they were being serious :).

The country is clean, intrinsically democratic and a great place to live. Bigotry is not allowed (they are very aware of their Nazi heritage and never want to go there again) and that makes it like a small slice of the new South Africa. As much as I’m inherently African, this is my home. I’m a half-breed, part African, part German and that makes for an interesting addition to this beautiful country.

On the practical side, we love how cheap it is in Germany, from the cheeses and yoghurts and pasta to CDs and DVDs which we are passionate about. Moving back to South Africa is not an option.

Written by Fusion View Guest Blogger: Alex Smit

Photo: Tell us Your Story - from flickr.com, by linda manymuses

On Fusion View, I have been writing stories about my experiences of being from the East and living in the West - take a look in the Category “Fusion Stories” in the sidebar on the far right. Talking to my friends and wider family, I realised that I know many people who live “fusion lives”, or cross-cultural lives - or who travel widely around the world and are interested in cross-cultural living. One friend is a German who has studied in San Francisco and is now an English-qualified lawyer in the UK - he is married to a Greek art expert who travels regularly round the globe. Another friend taught English in Hong Kong and then cycled across China and Europe home to Somerset in the UK. Through this blog, I have also met many cross-cultural bloggers such as Sharon Bakar, a Brit who has made Malaysia her home.

So I thought: Wouldn’t it be great to hear more “fusion stories” from around the world?

I am issuing an Open Invitation to all my readers - and anyone who happens upon this blog by chance - to write a post for Fusion View about any cross-cultural aspects in your life. I would love to build this blog into a community blog or forum and I hope that you will take part and share your stories.

I would love to hear your story if your family or you have migrated from East to West or West to East - or in fact, any place that is culturally different from your country of origin (so South Africa to Germany counts as would New York to Toulouse etc).

What is your experience of moving your life across the world? What have you loved about your new life? What helped to get you through the tough times?

Or maybe you are living and working in the medium- to long- term in another country. What cultural curiosities have you noticed?

The questions I’ve mentioned are meant just to start you off and are not specific requirements. The content of your blog post is up to you - but your post must be relevant to
the topic I’ve described and in keeping with the aims of Fusion View, which is to celebrate fusion lives and diversity.

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Our first fusion story by a guest blogger will be posted on Thursday 22 June 2006 after 08.30am so come by then and check it out.

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Your fusion story should be no more than 1000 words. Please read my Guest Blogging Submission Guidelines here - or see the Announcements section of the sidebar on the near right.

You can submit your posts anytime starting now. If I like them and they are suitable, they will be posted onto Fusion View as soon I have approved them. This Open Invitation will close by midnight on 31 August 2006.

You can submit your fusion story to me by using the form below.

When I was a child in Malaysia, my father would sometimes take us to the Club for Sunday lunch. The Club was an old, low slung wooden building in central Kuala Lumpur, with a long verandah and cane easy chairs. It used to belong to the British, a cross between a gentlemen’s club and a cricket pavilion. You could sit on the verandah with your gin sling and watch the chaps on the padang (the green) in their cricket whites bowling and making runs. The Moorish-style court and government buildings stretched across the green, a backdrop to the game. To the left was the small white Anglican chapel, in the shade of the raintrees. For the British, it must have been home away from home, laid out like any Engligh village - the town hall, church and pub around a village green.

My father would take us to the dining room, where the doors opened out onto the verandah. I remember white table cloths and side plates and knives and forks. There would be curled pats of cold butter in a small plate, gathering dew in the heat. We got soft, white rolls to start. It was all very Western and strange. My mother showed us how to tear the rolls and smear on a dab of butter, keeping the side plate on the side at all times.

I always had Chicken a la King - dainty pieces of skinless chicken breast in a white sauce with red peppers, served with buttered rice. The waiter would come round with a two trayed dish, the rice in one hollow and the chicken in the other. He would painstakingly dish the rice onto my plate with a spoon and fork held in one hand and then painstakingly dish the creamy meat onto the rice. It seemed to me a very inefficent way to serve the meal - why didn’t they just put it all onto my plate in the kitchen and bring it out to me? Or, as the Chinese would do, plonk a bowl of rice and a bowl of chicken on the table and I could help myself?

They served Chicken a la King in two other ex-colonial places, the Golf Club and the Coq D’Or. My father didn’t play golf but we kids loved the huge swimming pools at the Golf Club. The Coq D’Or was in an old Chinese-style mansion and seemed to my childish eyes the height of smart back then in the ’sixties. These were the sorts of places where the waiters wore white jackets and people drank aperitifs and wine. So, Chicken a la King seemed to me the epitome of Englishness.

When I came to England later, no restaurants served Chicken a la King. No English person I met had ever heard of it. How could this be? I was mystified and felt cheated. How could England be England without Chicken a la King?

And then I met my partner. I was in my thirties by now. We were coming up to the end of the millenium and soon, London would be gearing up for its grand New Year celebrations. Angie is from South Africa and when I told her about our Sunday lunches at the old colonial club where Chicken a la King was my favourite meal, she cried, "My father used to take us to the club on Sundays as well. And they had Chicken a la King there!"

In damp, drizzly London we compared notes from our childhoods. There I was in the heavy, close heat of the tropics and there she was in the dry, dusty African heat, both sitting at linen-clad tables with doors that opened out onto the verandah. A Chinese or Malay waiter with caramel skin spooned my meal while a dark Indian spooned hers. Both wore white jackets. Out in the sun, thousands of miles a part, men in white played cricket. Her father had been a young Englishman from Blackpool who had gone out to Africa to find a new life in the colonies. There in Durban, he could belong to a club, own a big house, be someone. My father was just starting out as a lawyer in newly Independent Malaya. With the British gone, he now could belong to the club that had once excluded him, own a big house, be someone.

Angie is also the only other person I know in England who likes evaporated milk in her tea and coffee - and who has ever had canned peaches in evaporated milk. Tins of Carnation milk. They must have been stock supplies for the British out in their far flung colonies. In countries where dairy products are rare because of the heat, Carnation milk must have been for the British the taste of home. And our creamy favourite Chicken a la King was probably originally made with evaporated milk. It strikes me that my generation is probably the last that will remember the quirks of the Empire.

So, for future generations, here is the recipe for Chicken a la King (adapted for cooking in the UK):

1. Boil skinless chicken breasts until cooked. One breast per person.
2. Remove cooked breasts from water. Do not throw away the water - we will use it to cook the rice. Cut the breasts into small pieces eg one inch cubes.
3. Cook white rice as you would normally, using the stock from the boiled chicken instead of water. (If there’s not enough stock, top it up with water).
4. Fry chopped garlic and chopped red peppers in butter until soft. Remove from frying pan.
5. Pour a large pot of double cream into the frying pan and heat slowly. When it starts to bubble, simmer until the quantity has been reduced to about half the original volume.
6. Put the fried garlic, red peppers and cooked chicken pieces into the reduced cream. Add salt and pepper and a dash of sherry. Cook for a few minutes to let the flavours settle into each other.
7. When the rice is cooked, stir into it a knob of butter.
8. Serve the rice with the chicken. Singing "Rule Britannia" before tucking in is not obligatory.

pic from flickr by Kenneth Kiffer; non-commercial use only.

[View of the administrative building across the padang from the Club]

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

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

“>The Day Without An Immigrant earlier this month made me think about how migration has shaped my family.

Our family history can be traced back the furthest on my mother’s side. It goes back four generations to China, when - so the story goes - a young man ran away from bandits and took a junk to Malaya, paying his way be becoming an indentured labourer. Over the years in the thick tropical heat, he worked off his debt and made a life and home in his new country.

My Grandma grew up in pre-revolution China, the eldest daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She used to tell us stories of playing in the rice fields with her cousins and helping her mother to make broth on cold winter nights. Her father was sent as a missionary to Singapore and so, that branch of the family arrived in the Malay archipelago.

My Grandfather, the grandson of the runaway boy, met Grandma when they were studying to be doctors at Singapore University in the 1930s.

Looking back over the generations on both sides of my family, it seems they thrived in Malaya and came to call it home. Grandfather was involved in politics and helped to shape the nation of Malaysia after independence from the British in the 1960s. From copies of his speeches I found recently, I know that he saw Malaysia as his home and felt passionately about its future.

Then in the 1970s, there was a general wave of migration from Malaysia to the Anglo-Saxon countries (UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) by young professionals and their families. These "Western" countries were looking for doctors and engineers and many of my uncles and aunts fit the bill and they saw new and exciting opportunities. My parets are now the only ones of their siblings still based in Malaysia where my father continues to enjoy his work and lifestyle there.

So when we all meet up, my uncles and aunts and cousins and my siblings and me, it is like an international convention. Among us are Brits, Malaysians, Americans, Canadians and Australians - oh, and Dutch. My uncles and aunts have settled comfortably in their new countries but still retain a strong emotioal bond to the country where they were born. For my cousins and siblings and me, however, we are westernised in our values, thinking and outlook and consider our new countries to be home. Yet, Malaysia is in our blood as we are in each other’s blood and although we may be British or Australian or Canadian or American by law, I think we still have Malaysia inside us.

I will be writing more about the individual immigrant stories in my family in future posts.