Archive for the 'MyWeek' Category

Last Sunday morning, I had a conference call with my sister (in London) and my parents (in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) using Skype. My sister and I were using Skype on our computers on the voice call, occassionally exchanging short chat messages when the sound quality warped. My parents were on speakerphone in KL and I had conferenced them in using SkypeOut (they don’t have a computer). The sound quality was patchy at times and the whole conversation took a longer because we had to repeat ourselves from time to time.

But it was brilliant to be able to have all of us on the call at the same time. And it cost be about 30-40p altogether for the SkypeOut part of the call.

It made me think about how difficult it used to be to speak to my family from England when I first came over. Mobile phones had not been invented yet and all we had at school was a call box in the cold, dark cubby hole under the stairs. The school discouraged us from calling home more than once a week - in case the contact with home made us more homesick and unhappy with our lot at school. So once a week, the girls would queue up on the stairs to call home.

I don’t think I called home once a week because of the cost of the call. It was a coin-operated phone which we had to feed with a ton of coins. The only way to do it was to call reverse-charge and back in those days, reverse charge calls were even more expensive. I’d queue up and call my uncle in London instead. It was nice to chat to him as a family contact but it wasn’t the same as speaking to my mummy. (I was 12.)

Later on, after I went to university, I think overseas calls got a bit cheaper and I’d call once a month or something like that - reverse charge - from my digs in Oxford. We had one payphone that we all shared. I don’t remember using the phone much with my friends - we used the “pigeon post” system where we could send written notes on bits of paper to students in other colleges via the University’s internal mail system, or we would just turn up at someone’s room or at their digs and hope they’d be in. (The mobile phone still hadn’t been invented then).

When I started work and had my own place, I remember being careful about making non-essential calls after lunch or in the evenings as calls in the morning were more expensive. I was the first among my friends, being a techhy type even then, to get an answering machine. It was at least a year or more before some of my friends could even get over the strangeness of it and leave a message. And when I got a fax machine, I’d say, “Fax me the directions of how to get to your place” and they’d just laugh at me. (And yes, we were still waiting for the mobile phone to be invented).

I went off on a cycling holiday in Spain in the late 1980s with a three other friends - back in those days without mobile phones - and at one stage, we had to split into two pairs because of illness and bicycle problems. One friend and I would cycle the rest of the way and the other two would take the train. We pulled out our maps and poring over the route, we agreed that we’d meet again at our end destination, Santiago de Compostela. I made a list of the three hotels in our guidebook and we would aim to meet at the one at the top of the list first. If the other pair was not there, we’d work our way down to the other two. And if we came to the end of the list and we couldn’t find each other? That option never crossed our minds. I can’t imagine doing that trip now without at least texting or Twittering each other every hour!

These days, we text and Twitter and Skype and chat online and call without a second thought. I’ve got my mum signed up to receive my tweets on her mobile phone and she’s getting the hang of texting. On some call plans, it’s actually now cheaper to call her in Malaysia than to call a UK landline. I’m now looking into signing us all up on Jajah.com to get free landline conference calling this coming Sunday - hey, why spend 30-40p if we can do it for nothing…

Photo: thanks to porticus.org

I discovered A Whiff of Lemongrass, a Malaysian food blog via my cousin Pey. Lyrical Lemongrass, the food blogger, is an accountant who seems to travel the length and breadth of Malaysia eating divine food, which she photographs first in exquisite detail! I am drooling already.

When Pey came to stay last weekend, we thought we’d try to emulate the food bloggers of Malaysia who all seem to carry huge cameras around with them to photograph food. But we ate the food before we managed to take a photo of it. We were happy and stuffed but would never make great food bloggers…

Some food posts on Fusion View and food blogs I like to whet your appetite on Friday:

Global Cakes

Lemon Meringue Pie

The Cooking Diva Blog

If you can recommend any great food blogs from Malaysia or anywhere around the world, please do add a link via the comments to this post.

Cousin Pey came to visit today from Bath and arrived to torrential rain and flooding. When she called me on her mobile, I was watching the sheets of rain storming down to the drama of thunder and lightning in the dark sky. Rivers of water poured down the street. She was drenched by torrents of water streaming through the roof of Victoria Station and the concourse was awash. Trains were being cancelled all around her.

But miraculously, she found the one train that got her to my suburban station in South London and the rain eased.

By the time we finished lunch, the sun was shining. We went for a walk in the park in our T-shirts, squinting in the bright light. In all respects, it was a pleasant, sunny summer’s afternoon.

It was only this evening when Pey spoke to her husband on the phone that we realised that the rest of London and the rest of the country had not had such a normal afternoon. We rushed online to see the floods that had brought large parts of the rest of London to a standstill (click on the photo for a link to the BBC site with loads more pics of flooding):

The question is: with all trains cancelled between London and Bath, how is she going to get home tomorrow?

Photos: from bbc.co.uk/london

It was just after 7 in the morning and I was on my way to work on the bus. At that time in the morning, I’m usually a bit dozy. I was woken up by the voice of the man sitting behind me. It was a loud, confident public school sort of a voice. A little bit sergeant-major-ish. He was on his mobile phone.

I could see part of his leg along the aisle. He was in jeans.

“Oh, sorry,” he bawled out to his friend on the phone. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you…. My phone went off by itself… yes, it dialled the last number … You see, my trousers are too tight… it set the phone off…”

Eeeeww. I’m not sure all of us on the bus needed to know that.

PS. There’s no photo to illustrate this post as I didn’t think I needed to make all of you feel even iller…

DSC00063.JPG, originally uploaded by MacOoi.

We passed Haymarket this morning on our way to the Mac shop in Regent Street and I took this photo with my cameraphone. The ranks of cameras and journalists were clustered at the edge of the police cordon, shooting footage of Haymarket - which was cleared of traffic and strangely silent and still. There were lots of tourists milling around with the reporters shooting the empty street, too, with their digital cameras and handycams.

As you may know, Haymarket was the site where the unexploded car bomb was found early this morning and a potential bomb attack in Central London was foiled.

We were approached by a Canadian reporter, Trista Kelly, who writes for Bloomberg News (online) wanting our reaction to this event. My response was that this was bound to happen at some time - we are always being warned that London is a target for attack that sooner or later, it is not so surprising that something will happen. London has always been a target for attack for as long as I’ve been in the UK - since the 1970s. At that time, it was the IRA and now it’s Al-Qaeda.

Fortunately, this time, the attack was stopped in time and no one was hurt. In this light, the incident became another one of those inconveniences that Londoners always have to put up with - like tube strikes and road works. For me, it felt like something annoying that I had to work around in the busy day that I had planned.

It seemed that most Londoners had a similar approach, judging from the traffic chaos. Everyone was trying to get to work or wherever they had to get to. No-one was staying home because of fear or anxiety.

And as if to prove this, just round the corner - literally - in Trafalgar Square, the Canada Day celebrations were in full swing a bit later on today. There were maple leaf flags and balloons, Canadians playing hockey, marquees with stalls promoting all things Canadian. People were strolling along, laughing, taking photos. Wandering around, you would not know that just a few streets away there had been a car packed with explosives.

We were all getting on with our business. London always does.

PS. To all my Canadian readers: Happy Canada Day!

Fusion View is being featured on the BBC Radio 5 programme Pods & Blogs on Monday 25 June night (actually 02am on Tuesday 26 June) when it will go out over the airwaves to around half a million AM listeners and half a million FM listeners. The programme will also be available online for ONE WEEK on their website but unfortunately not as a podcast so if you’d like to catch it, you need to go to the site and listen during this coming week. (The Fusion View piece is at around 30 mins into the show, after the news and sport.)

I met Chris Vallance, the presenter, for lunch a few weeks ago at Hayes Galleria by London Bridge and we had a wide-ranging discussion about blogs, podcasts, the Chinese in the UK, cross-cultural issues, globalisation, Malaysian bloggers and much more. It was great to get his perspective as a blogs and pods watcher as well as sharing mine with him as a blogger and podcaster.

He only pulled out his recording equipment after lunch and we wandered around trying to find a quiet corner for him to record the interview. We ended up standing in an alleyway, not far from a white van where a couple of builders were having their sarnies and thermos of tea. Having had a good old chat over lunch, the moment Chris thrust his fancy microphone towards me, I went completely blank and started stammering and dithering - we had to start again several times before I hit my stride and could even say anything sensible about who I was and what Fusion View is all about! I’ve interviewed a number of people on my podcasts and I have to say, it’s utterly different being on the other end of the mike - I have even greater respect now for my Fusion View interviewees in that they never had to do any re-takes and just started chatting with confidence and panache.

The interview was only 10 minutes and we ended up focusing on my novels rather more than on Fusion View. After we finished, I realised I hadn’t had a chance to talk about the various themes of my blog such as:

# Fusion Stories - personal stories of people who live cross-cultural lives eg a Welsh-Iranian student, a South African living in Germany, a Caucasian-American who writes fiction in Mandarin.
# How switching between my “two voices“, speaking “proper” English and heavily accented Malaysian-English, affects my personality and identity
# Podcast interviews with Lucy Luck, a literary agent and Terry Bailey, a lecturer in screenwriting
# Curious Legacies - Recipes and other legacies from people who have influenced my life eg my first boyfriend’s recipe for Hairdryer Duck and my grandmother’s recipe for Soy Sauce Chicken.
# Legacy Blogging: stories from my family eg a recording from 1976 of my late grandfather telling the story of the “first ancestor” from China and my father’s Memories of Malaya during the Japanese occupation.

Chris also wanted me to explain to the world the equipment I use to do my podcasts. I had described it to him over lunch and he thought it was worthwhile for other potential podcasters to know that the equipment didn’t have to be too fancy or expensive - although I have to say, I was rather impressed by his equipment: the professional big flash drive; the robust noise-cancelling microphone and all those buttons. In the end, they didn’t use that bit of the interview in the piece they broadcast but anyway, here’s a picture of my home-made podcasting gear.

That’s a wooden kitchen roll holder and slotted into it is an old leather mobile phone case. The digital recorder sits snugly in the leather case. Ideally, I sit at a table with my interviewee with the equipment sort of in the middle on the table between us. I point the recorder at them when they speak. When it’s my turn to speak, I swivel it towards me by turning the base gently, ask my question and then swivel it back to them. The advantage is that my arm doesn’t get tired holding the recorder up and it also sits a sufficient distance away from our mouths to avoid explosive “PPPs” and “TTTs”. I’m tickled that Chris, the professional BBC journalist, has given it his seal of approval!

.

The variety and fun of this blog would not have been possible without all the people who contributed to it through writing guest pieces, agreeing to be interviewed, adding comments or emailing me in response to posts - and also all those offline who sparked ideas for posts through our conversations over coffee and dinner. So thanks to everyone who has been part of the Fusion View community is some way or other!

My interview with Rob Mackenzie has been picked up by poet Andrew Philip on his blog TongueFire in a post called “What is Scottish Poetry?”. There is a lively discussion in the comments to that post about Scottish identity, which I’ve added to, asking what would the identity of a Chinese poet writing in Scotland be.

Andrew has responded with some interesting points:

There’s a poem called “Young, Chinese and Scottish” written in the voice of a young, Chinese-Scottish woman by Kevin Macneil, an obviously male Gaelic and English-language writer. How’s that for complex identity politics!

Googling the poem (which I can’t find online), I’ve just come across an online essay “Infinite Diversity in New Scottish Writing”, by the Scottish-Pakistani writer Suhayl Saadi, who was born in Yorkshire. I’ve not read it, but it might well be enlightening.

Thanks to Andrew, we have some really juicy diversity writing to go and explore!

I am reminded of the early days when I first came to the UK. Back then, I clumped all white people from the UK together as “the English”. When speaking to an Irish/ Scottish/ Welsh person, I sometimes referred to them as “English” - imagine their outrage! It was then that I started to see the differences between the various tribes that make up the UK. It still fascinates me and I feel I have a lot to learn.

While in Slovenia, I was chatting to one of the other IABC (International Association of Business Communicators) delegates who was from Doncaster. She has a mild but noticeable northern accent. She recounted a rather disturbing story that shows the boundaries that exist even between the tribes of England, let alone between the English and Welsh/ Scottish etc.

At Uni, she heard about a party that a group of friends was going to. “Great,” she said to the host, “Where is it?” He replied in stiff, Southern tones, “You don’t have the right accent to come.”

Wow.

But to end on a lighter note, my colleague told another more amusing story of the North-South divide. She was setting up a meeting room in her company’s sleek offices in Soho recently. The technical assistant was an East End bloke who asked her if she wanted “sand” for the meeting.

“Sand?” She couldn’t work out why she’d need sand in the room.

“Yeah, d’you want me to set up the sand system?”

“Ah, sound!” She cried, understanding at last….

Photo: thanks to Hamed Sabir from flickr.com

This is a cross-post from my social media blog ZenGuide, in case you’d like to see my pics of Slovenia and the IABC crew.

I have uploaded my photos of my trip to Slovenia for the IABC Leadership Institute on a new ZenGuide Flickr account. The collection of photos shows the speakers at the conference as well as some of the delegates and some snaps of the gorgeous capital city Ljubljana.

Ljubljana is perfectly set along the banks of a small meandering river, with cobbled streets and baroque (?) architecture that reminded me of Austria. There were cafes and restaurants spilling out into the streets and people strolling and cycling at a leisurely pace. The Slovenian Tourist Board describes their country as the place where Germanic efficiency and order meets the Mediterranean good life and Ljubljana definitely seems to fit that description.

To see the photos, go to http://www.flickr.com/photos/zenguide/tags/iabcslovenia/ or click on the photo below.

This is a cross-post from my social media blog ZenGuide

I was recently profiled in the journal of the International Association of Business Communicators, Communication World, about how I have evolved from a novelist into a blogger - dowload “A Novel Approach” pdf article here . It started me thinking about how my love affair with blogging started and how, at the start of my venture into the online world, I had no idea that it would lead me to develop a valuable expertise that would become the foundation for my social media consultancy here at ZenGuide.

After publishing two novels, I stopped and started a number of third novels only to stumble into the doldrums after the first few chapters. I found that I did not have the inclination any more to sit quietly by myself and my imaginary characters, engaging in an imaginary landscape. The real world and all its real activities and people seemed much more interesting. I was also finding myself intrigued by developments in technology and in particular web-based technologies.

For those who have read my two legal thrillers, they will know that technology and gadgets play a critical role in the stories. In my first novel, The Flame Tree, the hero Luke does something clever with his mobile phone so he can secretly record a dangerous meeting with the bad guy and the heroine Jasmine dials in to listen to the message from her office phone - only to find that it cuts off just at the point that gunshots ring out. In Mindgame, Sam encrypts secret files into the code of digital photographs before destroying the original CDs and computer hard drive and the whole plot revolves around mind control using drugs and computer-generated imagery (CGI) in real time. So it was only a small step for me to move from being an author to a geek, checking out all the clever Web 2.0 gadgetry that is changing the way that we all communicate and relate to each other.

I started blogging to try and kickstart my enthusiasm for writing. I started out at www.yangmayooi.blogspot.com with Yang-May Ooi’s LitBlog, playing around with the HTML code to semi-personalise the standard template. I wrote a few posts and had a go and connecting with other bloggers and networks. The blog was picked up fairly quickly by Global Voices Online, the site that watches and comments on bridge blogs ie blogs that bridge cultures.

After a month or so, I realised that there was huge potential to use blogging as a marketing tool for my books and to share my experience as a published novelist in an increasingly competitive publishing market. My home-made site looked a bit tacky and lame in my eyes so I commissioned web designers to re-design the site - it was not cheap but, looking back, it was the best investment I have made in my life. The new site Fusion View has a confident, professional feel to it and many people have commented to me how much they like the look of it. For my books website, the designers retained the same design but tweaked it in different colours, thereby giving me two sites that sat well together within a branded identity. I was also then able to have the same designers create the look for ZenGuide many months later, within the same branded identity.

And as I blogged and explored the online world, concepts like “new media” and “social media” began to emerge. It seemed I was one of the new communicators. When I started blogging in April 2006, I had 200 unique visitors a month. Last month (May 2007), Fusion View clocked just over 8,000 unique visitors. People were starting to ask me for advice about how to use blogging in a business context. As I approach social media from the point of view of a communicator and writer rather than as a programmer or web developer, I can help my clients focus on developing quality content. Clients have also appreciated my experience in the legal and business worlds so that we can discuss in-depth how social media fits in with their marketing and business strategies. So, it made sense to start up a new blog and website for this specialist consultancy service so that all the technology- and social media- related information could sit in a distinct place from the cross-cultural arts and writing posts that make up Fusion View.

I’m having a fun time with this social media consultancy. It combines online activities like blogging with offline activities like meeting with clients, giving seminars and networking - which for me feels much more rounded than sitting alone in a fantasy world of fiction. I’ve learnt a great deal about social networks and online communications tools and I’m learning more every day in this ever-moving sector. I’ve also met some interesting and dynamic people on this journey so far and I’m looking forward to meeting many more - online and offline.

Photo: thanks to tandtinc.om

As a child in Malaysia, I used to read everything I could find about the Ancient Romans and Greeks. I knew all the stories of daring heroes and jealous gods, beautiful women and powerful goddesses - Theseus and the Minotaur, Diana the huntress, Zeus and his desire for women, Helen of Troy. Their world, in my mind, was one of craggy mountains and turquoise seas, bright meadows and dark caves; these humans and gods glowing with bronzed skin against white tunics. There was also something about the idea of long-gone civilizations that was haunting to me back then as a child - and is still haunting to me now as an adult. I could not imagine back then how it could be that great cities that had once flourished and thronged with people could somehow be forgotten and lie undiscovered for centuries - and even millenia. Looking around at the city I lived in then, it seemed impossible that it might one day crumble to dust and be erased from memory.

We spent a week on Crete recently and all these haunting thoughts came back to me during our holiday on this bright Mediterranean island, once the crossroads at the centre of the Ancient World. Today, it is part of Greece, one of the newest members of the European Union and also among its poorer nations. For much of the last century, it was primarily an agricultural economy and while many coastal villages and towns are thriving from tourism as seaside resorts, it is still relatively unspoilt inland and retains its rural charm. In contrast to the wealthier First World European regions like the UK, Germany and France, Crete felt like a step back into the Third World. Whole families ride around on one scooter, the kids jammed between their parents; food is very cheap; decor is plain and simple; traffic is chaotic; buildings and houses look tatty and laid-back. There are still many sleepy villages surrounded by olive groves and orange trees where herds of sheep are shepherded down the main street and may wander into your garden to eat the geraniums.

Crete is also the home of Knossos, the home of the legendary King Minos who is said to have kept the Minotaur in the labyrinth beneath the palace - the hero Theseus slayed the monster with the help of the King’s daughter Ariadne and escaped with her to Naxos. The palace and its surrounding city was at its height 3,000 years ago and was an astonishingly beautiful multi-storyed complex of courtyards and decorated rooms. At the opposite end of the island, near where we were staying, was the thriving commercial city of Aptera, a busy urban centre with Roman baths and bustling streets. Both now lie in ruins, undiscovered for thousands of years, their stones taken by locals to be used in building houses and other structures.

Wandering around Aptera, with its amazing view over Souda Bay in one direction and a vista of the mountains in the other, I was struck by the poppies and wildflowers fluttering in the wind amid the empty stones. This is all that is left of a nation that was once the most powerful and wealthy in the Western world, its heirs now among the poorest Europe. We came across the remains of a villa, just a handful of stone pillars now. We sat down for a rest and had a drink from our water bottles. I noticed a carved pattern on one of the pillars and wondered who the man was who carved it those thousands of years ago - I pictured him on a particular day at a particular time, just doing his job, perhaps thinking of his family or telling a joke to his fellow artisans as he worked. For him, that city he lived in would have seemed as infinite and permanent as I feel London and Kuala Lumpur is today. I wondered who lived in this villa with its stunning view of the mountains and how that family might have stood out on its terrace and looked at the ageless hills as I was looking out at them now. Perhaps they too felt how life was good, as I did in that moment - how fortunate they were to have this villa and the riches of their lives.

I thought of Shelley’s poem Ozymandias:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

For me, that moment by the villa made me somewhat melancholy but it also heightened my appreciation of our week’s holiday - and the fullness of all that I had to enjoy in my life. I think that’s why the Romantics kept a skull on their desk and built fake ruins in the gardens of their estates - to be reminded that “nothing beside remains” and so to feel more keenly the sensations of being alive. There’s nothing like a touch of mortality to wake one up to the vibrancy of life.

Photo 1: ruins of villa, Aptera

Photo 2: detail of carved pillar

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

For more on Ozymandias, see http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/shelley/section2.rhtml

For more on Aptera, see http://www.greekisland.co.uk/wcrete/aptera.htm