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My partner Angie Macdonald is from South Africa and after watching me blog from the sidelines, she has been inspired to contribute this Fusion Story about her experiences of reverse migration:

It was only when I emigrated to England that I finally came to understand my father. As an Englishman in Africa, my father never
fitted in. He was conspicuous in his baggy safari suits and pale skin that blistered pink in the sun. His broad Lancashire accent with its clipped vowels contrasted starkly with the leisurely pace of Durban English and the rolling r’s and throat-scraping sounds of Afrikaans. As for Zulu, he never even attempted it.

In South Africa, men love sports, drinking beer and cooking meat on a braai. My father is a trainspotter, does not believe in exercise, and a strict vegetarian. He embraced conservatism and the politics of apartheid, but beyond that he has always been an outsider.

In England he would fit right in with the tea drinkers and people discussing the weather and obsessing about bowel movements. He would find many to share his hatred of Maggie Thatcher and his passion for trains. Yet, since leaving England over fifty years ago, my father has never returned to his roots. And I have never heard him speak of England as ‘home’.

Like my father, I always felt an outsider in South Africa. I rejected the role of a typical South African ‘lady’ and drank beer from a bottle, wore trousers instead of floral dresses, cropped my hair and rode a motorbike. I dressed in black and preferred women to men. Culturally, I longed to be in England, to see the bands I admired like The Cure and The Sisters of Mercy, to be able to go to the National Theatre and take my pick of bookshops on the Charing Cross Road. I was prepared to reject sub-tropical heat and eternal sunshine for the chance to wear a black trench coat and Doc Martin boots in the middle of an English winter.

I thought that when I came to England I would fit right in. I spoke the same language, had similar cultural references, English blood flowed through my veins. It would be like coming home.

I was wrong. Fourteen years later and I am still unsure where to call ‘home’. I speak of my past life ‘back home’ and yet I feel that my home is firmly in South London, with YM. For the first few years I was here, I suffered an identity crisis; I did not know where I belonged, nor did I feel any particular sense of belonging. In London, my accent marked me as an outsider. I had no shared past with anyone – I had not gone to school or university during the Thatcher years or experienced the bleakness of ‘70s Britain. No British TV programmes were shown in South Africa because of the Equity ban so there were no cultural references there. I had to get used to things like travelling on the underground, miles instead of kilometres, pounds and pence. Bank holidays and sandwich shops. And the fact that here I was one of many. There were no privileges because of the colour of my skin.

When I went back to Durban on holiday, I felt I no longer belonged there either. Being away meant that I had changed. I had experienced the challenges of starting life in a new country while my friends had continued with their lives as they were. And Durban had changed too. There were new roads, new shopping malls. Things that I had never been part of. My favourite restaurants, bars and clubs were no longer there and with them my history had vanished. Wiped out.

But I am gradually getting used to my new life. Now I pepper my speech with ‘i’n’it’ and say ‘all right?’ in place of ‘hello’. I indulge in long detailed conversations about the weather and enjoy gardening and listening to BBC Radio 4. I own a pair of wellies and numerous umbrellas. I have even eaten my sandwiches in the rain. In short, I think I am turning English.

And when I travel abroad I think of myself as a ‘Londoner’. I start missing winding cobbled streets, cosy pubs, ancient buildings and buses that run all night. I miss all the other people like me: the immigrants, with their different cuisines and exotic languages, and I become homesick.

Yet, there are still moments when I am at the seaside, or smell steak cooking on a BBQ and hear the life-affirming beat of the African Jazz Pioneers, when I long for my life in South Africa, for the sky and the sun and the sense of space and friends and the good times we shared. And with that comes sadness and nostalgia, and a deep knowing that, like my father, I have left that life behind. Forever.

Written by Guest Blogger Angie Macdonald

Since starting this blog, I’ve been exploring the world of blogs and new media and loving the connection that the internet is enabling between people from far flung corners of the world.

Through this blog, I have hooked up with writers in Malaysia, South America and the US as well as across the UK and I know from my site statistics that people I don’t know ranging from Japan to Australia to Africa and France are dropping by to sample my writing and podcasts and film clips. In my turn, I read blogs from all over the world, commenting and emailing some of the authors and merely passively dropping by once in a while on other’s sites. For me, it’s a fantastic opportunity to learn from and share our ideas and knowledge at a global level - from the comfort of my own home. I’ve drawn on discussions and styles from other bloggers and I know that other bloggers have taken some of my ideas and developed them for their own needs. It is as if creativity sparks more creativity that in turn sparks more creativity.

I am particularly fascinated by how video and audio is used on the web - with relatively cheap technology and easy to use software, there has been an explosion of short films and podcasts in the last year on the web. I love surfing to find a witty film (Where the Hell is Matt? and the Response to Where the Hell is Matt) or a clever mashup (Brokeback to the Future) or a video of people’s wild and daring antics (Don’t Try This at Home and a surfer riding a mountain of a wave coming up on Bank Holiday Monday (UK)). I’ve come across a lot of terrible stuff but also others that can only be described in that catch-all phrase of the moment: “awesome”. I am also impressed by the patience and meticulousness that some of these creative artists have to carry out their stunts - eg the dancing fountain made out of Diet Coke and Mentos pellets and the domino chain made from household items that will be coming up in the next few weeks.)

In the old days, people would collect stamps or build things out of meccano. No doubt, some people still do. Certainly, singing in choirs or taking part in amateur dramatics has always been around and will continue being around. Organising, filing, making prototypes, rehearsals, learning script by heart - it all takes effort and focus and time. It’s like work except that people do it for fun. The bloggers and filmmakers and young guys seemingly doing pointless but clever things with Coke bottles aren’t very different from these others - only the medium for their creativity and patience is different. And their audience isn’t just their mum and dad or the local village but a global headcount that can extend into millions.

Awesome.

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]

Jesus is among us. Or rather, Jesus is among us through his living heirs. That is the premise of the Da Vinci Code and I think that is one of the reasons for its sensational appeal.

In a post 9/11, secular and questioning world where the Church is in decline and fragmented with internal arguments about
sexuality and AIDs, among other things, the myth offered up by the Code resonates at many levels.

Jesus - The Human Story

The hallmark of modern Christianity is its questioning and seeking, ever since the days of Martin Luther. In the Anglo
Saxon Anglican countries, our modern emphasis on individuality and personal choice is a direct evolution out of the spiritual (an sometimes political) strugges that resulted in the Church of England itself and subsequently, denominations such as the Quakers, Methodists, Presbyterians and non-Conformists where the personal relationship with God is a strong focus. We in the West in
the 3rd millenium have now questioned ourselves out of a faith but the pull of spirituality is strong - many people may not go to church but they believe in "something out there" and some look to Buddhism, other religions and New Age
practices to fill the gap.

Then this myth comes along that Jesus the man fathered a child with Mary Magdalene, who, after his death on the cross and
bearing his child, was spirited away to a secret location in Provence. Here is a recognisable real man with his recognisable human desires for love and family. Here is a tragic human story of loss and survival that we can all relate to at a human level. And as for running away to start a new life in Provence - well, we can connect with that completely.

In today’s world, it is also easier to believe those events could have happened than to believe in the "rose from the dead and ascended into heaven" thing.

Euro-Jesus

For a myth to be successful like this one, it has to fall within the realms of plausibility - and if the events narrated also
could have been possible, that is even better. So far, so plausible and so possible. Add on a theme that picks up on the current zeitgeist and you have a true zinger.

So, let’s take the location. In this post 9/11 world, it is significant that the myth places Jesus’s bloodline in Europe and
away from the Middle East. He - through his purported descendants - become French: still foreign and exotic enough for English speakers and the rest of the world but not as foreign and unsettling as being Israeli or Arab. In the present climate, it claims Jesus for Europeans - and by extension for Western civilisation.

And fortunately, the French don’t have an official royalty any more so this myth comfortably blends with the other haunting legends of secret princes living among us. You can test the power of this construct by asking yourself this question: Would the myth work if Mary had run away to live in the Home Counties and it is revealed that Prince Charles is the Holy Blood incarnate?

Blood

In a time of HIV and AIDS and anxiety about disease, a secret founded around blood - royal and holy blood, no less - has a
contemporary resonance that builds on our primordial response to blood as family, sacrifice, honour and death. Against all our instincts, the Christian story tells us letting of blood brings life, not death and the duality for us in modern times is hauntingly hopeful.

Pilgrim Tours

Medieval pilgrims made their way to Jerusalem to seek expiation of their sins, collecting holy tokens and relics at significant
way stations along the route - here is the finger of St. Someone or Other; here, so-and-so saw a vision of the Virgin. Pilgrims today travel by Easyjet and bring home tokens of David Beckham from the World Cup. So the cult of Jesus that became Christianity comes full circle. We need to see for ourselves, touch for ourselves, come within the lingering aura - whether it is a celebrity’s sweaty football shirt or a holy bone of a saint or the shroud that wrapped Jesus himself. We can now travel around England and France and do the Da Vinci tour, seeking out the glamour of the book and the movie and at some level, reaching
out to the aura of Jesus himself.

Easyfaith

It is so much more beautiful and safe, picturing a nice European great-great grandson of God in France that one might bump into while sipping espresso at a lovely cafe. He might truly be one of us, a man yet God, that suave Frenchman at the next table. It’s easier for the Western world to connect with that than to think of Jesus, the icon of love and forgiveness, (with or without descendants) as part of the troubled and wartorn Jerusalem and rooted in the Middle East. A trip to France is so much more do-able than a visit to Israel. Playing puzzles and codes is so much safer than having any true faith. The myth gives us this short cut to Jesus, if only we can be clever enough to solve the riddles. In some ways, it’s salvation by Sudoku.

pic from flickr by rk catch; non commercial use; no derivations

David T K Wong has a refreshing take on the business side of writing. He is the benefactor behind the prestigious creative writing fellowship that bears his name at the University of East Anglia and the eponymous short story prize awarded by PEN.

I met him at a drinks part the other evening and he told me he had always wanted to write ever since he was a child. But he had had to focus on work and earning a living. He started out as a dishwasher in his native Hong Kong and later, was a ditchdigger. Eventually, he became a journalist and then entered the civil service before starting out in business for himself. His children are now grown and he realised that he had to do something for himself. In his middle age, he felt he had little time left to pursue his one lifetime passion - writing. He retired from his business life and moved to London - "because I don’t know anyone here. In Hong Kong, every day, someone calls me to go out, have dinner, do something. Here I can be alone to write."

During his working life, he would always be writing - short stories that have been published in Hong Kong, UK and US. After
he retired, he wrote his first novel The Evergreen Teahouse, published by Muse. Now, he writes every day and has little time for anything else.

He values the time he spent working. "It gave me experience of life so now I’ve got something to write about. It’s good to be working, being part of life."

On the business side of writing, he says he doesn’t have an agent. In that blunt way that Hong Kong folk can have, he says,
"Look, I’ve worked all my life. I don’t expect anyone to work for no money. I know my books won’t make money so if someone is working on a commission basis, they won’t earn anything. I write what I want to write because I want to write
it. I don’t care what critics or literary professors say about my work. I don’t need to sell my books. I write them for e."

His endowment of the fellowship at East Anglia University gives other writers a year away from the market place to be creative, to write and to be in the company of literary colleagues. He encouraged me to apply. "It buys you the time to write without worrying about having to produce something commercial that will sell. I’ve worked all my life and I know what a
luxury time is. I don’t have much time left in my life so I want to write as much as I can."

I must report that David does not look anywhere near death’s door. He is full of energy and a slight smile seems to be ever
present. His driven early years in the world of commerce have clearly paid off. He is evidently invigorated by his passion for writing and managed his life in a way that gives him the freedom to write to his own muse. The key seems to be that he has taken money out of the equation for his own writing - and beyond that, having himself lived the struggle of juggling work and writing, is helping
others do the same through his literary endowments.

Some useful links:

Some bio info on David - http://www.asia2000.com.hk/asia2000/authors/davidtkwong.shtml

David T K Wong Fellowship - http://www.uea.ac.uk/eas/fellowships/wong/wong.shtml

David T K Wong PEN Short Story Prize - http://www.englishpen.org/prizes/davidtkwongprize/

Poseidon, the recently released remake of the 1970s shipwreck disaster movie, is being dubbed "Only the Whites Survive". Out of a multiracial cast, only the white characters survive by the end of the film as the others are killed off one by one in the fashion of disaster films. Wolfgang Peterson, the film’s German director, was interviewed on BBC News 24 and challenged about this. he said that it was a coincidence and thaty they (he and the producers etc) did not think about it.

In multicultural Britain and multiracial US, it takes effort selectively to exclude non-whites from your thought. The mix of races and cultures is present almost everywhere - it’s difficult to miss.

When writing my books, which are set in Malaysia, I thought carefully about how to portray the mix of Malays, Indians and Chinese that make up Malaysia. It was important to me to show all the races represented in the book with some good characters and some bad characters in each of the groups. That is reality in a multiracial and multicultural society. In Mindgame, we start out trusting the white American Carson Dean but then we find out more about his agenda…and the issue of race and expectations based on race become part of the story.

Wolfgang Peterson got more defensive when pressed by the BBC interviewer and tried to dismiss the criticism as "political correctness". That phrase is easy to trot out when cornered. What Peterson was really being asked is: what do you think it feels like to be a non-white watching all the non-whites in a movie not have a chance at survival, merely because they are not white and you didn’t think about saving them? Unfortunately, his answer seems to have been: I don’t care.

“>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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted to Fusion View by Guest Blogger: Kiril Goring Siebert

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

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

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

posted to Fusion View by: Yang-May Ooi

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

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

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

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

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

"My Mum made it for me."

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

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

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