Archive for the 'MyWeek' Category

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!

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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

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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

Carmen Stavrositu from Pennsylvania State University contacted me to ask me to take part in a survey last week. Her email said:

“Dear Yang-May

I am contacting you regarding a blog survey I am conducting. I am a Ph.D.
candidate in Mass Communication at Penn State and my dissertation project
consists of a survey that looks at women bloggers’ perceived motivations
for and effects of their blogging.

I am sending the survey to a number of bloggers, and I would like to invite
you to participate in it as well. Participation should take approximately 15
minutes of your time. I would appreciate it tremendously if you would be
willing to take the survey. If you decide to do so, please follow the link
below:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/cds205/blog/signin.htm

I would be very happy to share the findings of my study with you once it is
completed!

If you have any questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to contact
me!

Thank you in advance,

Carmen”

I took the survey and it was all about what my purpose or objective is in blogging and what were the outcomes of blogging for me personally eg did I feel connected to a wider community? Did I feel more assertive? Overall, my answers showed me that I really enjoy blogging and part of the fun of it is sharing my thoughts and ideas as well as connecting with other bloggers and also hearing what they have to share in response to what I’ve written. My life has been enhanced by blogging in that I’ve met a lot of interesting and generous people through online conversations (by emails and comments) and in some cases, I’ve met them in person through live events that have come out of blogging (eg my KL Book Events). It has also made me feel more connected to a wider, global community, making me think more beyond my local environment. At the same time, I’m also interested in my local environment more as it offers me ideas for posts to share with others who are from another culture or a distant country.

Carmen is keen to for more women bloggers to take part in her survey so do click on the link above to get involved - it’s entirely anonymous apart from having to give your gender and age. If you’d like to share your reactions to taking the survey, do come back and leave a comment or email me. Or write about it on your own blog and link back here.

Photo of researcher: thanks to ucdmc.ucdavis.edu

Marina Mahathir, the internationally respected Malaysian writer and journalist, circulated an email to Malaysian bloggers for International Womens Day. She writes, “March 8 is International Women’s Day. In solidarity with women all over the world, we would like to invite all Malaysian women bloggers ( and pro-women men bloggers) to celebrate this special day by appending the attached IWD logo and linking your blogsite to the IWD website (this is a condition of using the logo) at http://www.internationalwomensday.com. We would also like you to dedicate a post (or more) to yourself, the women in your lives or simply to ruminate on the state of women today. Let’s do it collectively and simultaneously on March 8.”

This post is dedicated to the eldest daughters who came before me.

My Grandma, my Mum’s mother, had always been for me a strong, dignified presence in the family. We did not always see eye to eye and as a girl, I sulked whenever she tried to correct my posture whenever I slouched. But I always loved and respected her and loved to hear the stories she would tell about her childhood in China, the clever eldest daughter of a Presbyterian minister. She passed on that love of storytelling to my Mum, her eldest daughter, who also filled my childhood with stories about her own childhood, about our family and also about the books she had read and the films she had seen.

I did not know my Great-Grandmother very well although she lived till I was a young teenager. She spoke Teochew, a dialect of Chinese that I did not speak and I was most comfortable communicating in English. The strongest image I have of her is the story that Grandma told me of how her mother was a young girl washing clothes in a river in China when my Great-Grandfather, a young man studying at the nearby seminary, came upon her while on a walk with his friends. Their eyes met across the dancing waters and well, here we all are, generations later.

I found this photo below of the four eldest daughters. On the far left is my mother, aged 24 at the time. Next to her is my Great-Grandmother, Grandma’s mother, who would have been around 80 then. Then there’s Grandma in the polka dot cheong sam, aged 49. Finally, there is me - just under 1 year old then. Today, I am not far off the age Grandma was at the time of the photo - but still slouching, I’m afraid.

Grandma loved this photo of us all and she would often look at it with me over the years. She would say to me, “You are the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter.” It makes me feel proud still.

Here are some pics from the Readings event on the Saturday afternoon, when I had the privilege of reading my work alongside talented, local writers.

Pic 4: With Sharanya Mannivanan, poet, and Eric Forbes
Pic 5: With Wong Pui Nam, celebrated playwright; Shan Mughalingam, well-known writer and his friend Christina
Pic 6: With Ted Mahsun, writer and blogger and his friend, Amina
Pic 7: With Mike, journalist for The Star and blogger
Pic 8: With Sharon Bakar, literary hub of the KL writing scene and Chet, writer
Pic 9: Reading from my work in progress

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I’m now back in London after a week in Kuala Lumpur and most importantly, I’m back at my computer and able to do fun things like upload photos and blog in writing about my whirlwind visit to my hometown.

Breakfast with Litbloggers

I will start off my series of written posts about my KL trip with a recap of the book events I was invited to in KL last Saturday. In the morning, I spoke at the inaugural meeting of the Breakfast with Litbloggers series organised by booksellers and book publishers, MPH. You can listen to my phoneblog (episode 6) about the event here. It seemed that anyone who was anyone in the blogging world was there - and I was thrilled that the latest UK-published Malaysian-writer Tan Twan Eng was also there. You can also read Sharon Bakar’s write up of the event over at her blog in her post Litbloggers Breakie and Yang-May for Breakfast - she also has some great photos, some of which I’ve reproduced below.

Pic 1: The Breakfast Club at MPH
Pic 2: With Eric Forbes, editor at MPH Publications
Pic 3: With Tan Twan Eng, author of The Gift of Rain

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While I am in Malaysia in the next 10 days or so, I will be having a go at Phone Blogging. The player below will be updated with a new episode every time I report by phone on my Malaysian trip. This page will headline Fusion View until Monday 05 March 07.00 am GMT.

Why Phone Blogging? Because I will be staying with my parents and the most up to date technology they have is an electric typewriter… So, I will not be able to update this blog using text.

I won’t be able to do any editing to the phone blog so it will essentially be like a live podcast from my phone

Also, I won’t be able to add any written notes to my phone report so the player will show only Episode 4*, Episode 5* etc. You can listen to each episode by clicking on the relevant episode in the player below. I will aim to record a report every other day so check back from time to time to hear the latest episode.

I hope you enjoy this experiment!

Alternatively, to launch a standalone version of the player, click on the button below.

* It starts with Episode 4 - I used up the previous episodes with “testing, testing”!

Photo: thanks to makinasu from flickr.com