“Only in Malaysia”: The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

“Only In Malaysia” is one of the two new stories that I added to the MPH version of Lovers and Strangers Revisited. It was written around the same time as the others. When the story came out in Silverfish New Writing 7 (2008), I decided to include it into Lovers and Strangers Revisited since MPH had requested that I add a couple more stories to make it different and not just a reissue of the Silverfish collection.

Written in 1989, “Only in Malaysia” was loosely based on my experiences while I was advising at the Malaysian-American Commission of Educational Exchange. One day after coming out of work I was crossing the street when I nearly got run over by a car. That incident certainly got me thinking on many different levels. I combined that with a cross-cultural experience I had while traveling in Italy where I befriended an Indian woman named Moni who was doing her graduate studies there. I then added in the loneliness that expats have for their own culture, something that I was in the midst of experiencing. I knew I had a story and the start of something bigger on my hands.

In fact I conceived “Only in Malaysia” as the first story in a collection of inter-related stories, titled Life on Hold. I wrote three or four more stories but then got bogged down in one of them. Around that time, while traveling near Ipoh I left inside a taxi my notebook with about 150 pages of notes and sketches of several other stories and plans to tie them together. With the whole project stalled, I moved onto compiling the stories for the original collection of Lovers and Strangers. (Recently I revived two other stories from that aborted collection, one of which was runner-up in the 2007 Faulkner-Wisdom Short Story Contest.)

From the years working at MACEE, I was able to tap into my firsthand experience of advising students, many whom like the characters Nora and Zainal, would go on to study in the US and even return to Malaysia with an American spouse, so I was familiar with the problems that it sometimes caused, as highlighted with the conversation with Miss Ooi.

When the story was first published in Her World in 1992 a well-meaning friend from KL called me up to express concern about the state of my marriage. I had a good laugh over it. Our marriage was fine. I was not writing about me and my wife, only using the knowledge of our cross-cultural marriage to root the story in reality. Yet while revising the story before it was accepted by Mattoid (1998 Australia), I knew where our marriage was heading. Ten years after first writing the story, we did get a divorce so perhaps the joke was on me.

For Mattoid, I made the story chronological. I shifted the near accident where the story originally began to after the conversation with Miss Ooi, so I wasn’t going back and forth several times in the story. This seemed more natural and less confusing, plus it showed that the character was preoccupied while crossing the road. I also changed the cat’s name from Sadie, which was the name of my brother’s cat, to Kalie, after Kalamazoo where he and his wife met. (I had met my ex-wife in Madison, which is why we had that name for our cat in “Dark Blue Thread”.)

For the Silverfish New Writing 7 (2008) version, I expanded the story by adding a lot more backstory about Ross’s reasons for being in Malaysia, his reasons for non-writing, and how he had lost his two younger brothers who had drowned. Although I had referred to Ross’s estranged wife many times, I felt I needed a scene with her in it, other than the flashback near the end. So I added the pivotal scene at the elevator at Komtar where he bumps into her, which shows his frazzled, desperate state of mind.

Other than some minor editing, this is also the version that I used for MPH, glad that it found a new home, though now and then, I still think about that other collection of stories that might have been; in fact, I'm thinking about reviving the second chapter, the title story...

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie. Here's a link to the French blog set up by the publisher Éditions GOPE.

Here is a review of Lovers and Strangers Revisited: The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

“Dark Blue Thread”: The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers

For “Dark Blue Thread” I thought what if an expat writer found out that his Malay wife was cheating on him? Although my ex-wife, whom I loosely based my character on, as far as I know never cheated on me, the idea stuck. The story went on to be published four times (while we were still married), under its original title, “The Watermark”.

I used the Penang terrace house that I was living in back then as the setting, which made it easy since it was familiar territory. When it first appeared in The Her World Annual 92, the main character’s name was Dennis. A year later, when it was published in Singapore, I had changed the name to Eric, then to Eric Heywood in the first Lovers and Strangers collection, and back to Eric in London Magazine (January 1995). Although I liked the name Eric, I felt that the name Alan better suited the character, so I took the opportunity to change the name once again for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

Alan’s wife also went through several name changes. She started out as Fatimah, then Sheela, and finally Salina in the original collection. Thankfully, Madison, our cat’s real name, remained the same.

The story was first published in the present tense, but soon afterwards I switched to past tense, which I felt worked better for this story. The biggest change was the ending. After cutting back on the various excesses in the early versions, for Lovers and Strangers, I settled on:

“Although he knew it was time to ask her about the letters, he was afraid of the answers. Afraid she might leave him. His crying woke Madison and she began to stir. He tried to hold her back, but she bounded over him and rushed for the opened door.”

While I was revisiting the story, I felt I needed a final confrontation with the wife. So I had her return to the house on the pretense that she had forgotten her office desk key. To set up this final confrontation, I added a lot more details about their backstory, their life in Malaysia, the financial sacrifices he had made, and the options that he was now facing.

It was becoming clear to me that the story wasn’t so much about “the watermark”; it was the dark blue thread, the main symbol of the story, too, which I felt would make a better, less confusing title. In Malaysia, bond paper isn’t all that common. The thread had also served as a constant reminder as to how fragile his life had become. Once he severed the thread with that knife, he was ready to face reality, no matter the consequences.

When the wife did come back, I had him slap her, which had not only surprised him, but also me as the writer. Until that very moment, I never thought he’d slap her. It was not something I was capable of doing, or would do, but for Alan, it was something he had to do. He had to make a point, even if that point backfired by losing his wife for good. But he had to take that risk. At stake was his very existence in Malaysia. Then in that final dialogue, he finally said what he had been holding back for the past two weeks.

The new ending thus became:

“He walked past [Madison] and went up to his office. He grabbed the paper. He didn’t care which way the watermark went. It really didn’t matter.”

With the expanded ending and all the additions I made, the story nearly doubled in length. For the MPH version, I added a couple more lines at the ending. I didn’t want the emphasis to fall on the watermark, but on him, as the writer and on his marriage:

“He began to type, but when he came to the letter p, he paused. Who in the hell was this P? Was it someone he knew? He decided right there and then that he didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter. He wanted to put these last two weeks behind him. He typed some more. Tears began to fall, but he kept on typing.”

This was the effect I was going for; he didn’t know what was going to happen to their marriage, now that she knew that he knew. It would all depend on her. She may leave him for this other man, or she way give up her lover and stay with her husband, and somehow they would work things out, whether returning to America or remained in Malaysia.

Note, I had now written in that final paragraph “It didn’t matter,” twice, knowing full well, the opposite was true.

As a footnote, I saw hope in this story. Hope in my own marriage, too, but alas that too came to an end, and it was time to move on. Unlike the character in the story, who was contemplating returning to America, that was never one of my options. I had decided to stay put in Malaysia. In real life, we had another factor to consider, a child, who came after the story was written. After our divorce, we shared raising our son (I had him during the week and she had him during the weekends) until my new job took me to Sarawak. My ex-wife got Madison, who was seventeen when she passed away, but in “Dark Blue Thread”, she still lives on, waiting to be fed.

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited


Here is a review of Lovers and Strangers Revisited: The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

“Mat Salleh”: The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

If I have a favorite story in Lovers and Strangers Revisited it would have to be “Mat Salleh” for sentimental reasons. It’s my first short story, written back in 1984 while still living in the US, my first published story (in the New Straits Times, January 28, 1986), my first story published overseas (My Weekly, May 23 1987, in the UK, with color photographs of my first wedding!), plus it’s fine memory meeting my former in-laws and extended family for the first time, with a surprise wedding.

The original title was “Mat Salleh: A Malaysian Encounter”, and I didn’t even know the story was published until a relative contacted us the following week. I had to go from house to house asking if any of my neighbors had the NST! In the UK, the editor changed the title to “Meeting the Family – The Malaysian Way”. By the time it appeared in Lovers and Strangers (Heinemann Asia, 1993) I had shortened it to “Mat Salleh”.

“Mat Salleh” is a non-fiction narrative that I crafted into a short story; however, I kept to the truth thus making it a non-fiction short story, the only one in the collection. This story has remained a favorite for a lot of readers, particularly the Malays, as well as those married to Malaysians, or even those who have a Western relative in their family and have shared a similar experience of everyone in the family coming out to meet the new mat salleh for the first time.

I first wrote “Mat Salleh” while still living in the US after I took a correspondence course, on writing the short story from Writer’s Digest, so a lot of the initial details were fuzzy. The photographs I took and the diary I kept were a big help. Once I moved to Malaysia and visited the kampong again, I was able to add in more ambiance and some details I had overlooked, as well as finetune the rest, making the descriptions less general and more specific to the kampong and to Parit, Perak. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, being at the physical location does wonders for the writer.

By beginning the story on the drive to the kampong, I was able to work in a little backstory and contrast not only the climate and scenery but also my former wife’s first visit to the US to meet her in-laws, and also our reasons for coming back (her father’s lingering illness) so by the time we arrived, the story is ready to move forward. One of the problems I had initially was there were two many immediate relatives involved, three elder brothers and elder sister and their respective spouses plus several uncles and aunts who lived nearby or even across the street, and all those nieces and nephews! So I focused only on a handful necessary to the story.

In the original published story I added an epilogue stating that my father-in-law had passed away two months after I had left and that a year and a half later, we had moved to Malaysia. In Lovers and Strangers, I worked the fact that he had passed away into the final sentence, by saying “Although he died shortly after…” In the Silverfish version, I left that out, because in an earlier paragraph it was implied that he would soon die, when I stated, “I knew he would never get a chance to spend…” so I felt that would be sufficient. I didn’t want the story to end on a negative note. Instead I focused on his positive reaction to my small monetary gift and my feeling like one of the family, which was the thrust of the story.

By the time I revisited the story in 2005, I had been divorced from my ex-wife for seven years and remarried to someone else from Sarawak for three years, so revisiting all the kampong-based stories were a bittersweet experience, especially “Mat Salleh”. As I wrote in the forward to Lovers and Strangers Revisited, “Still, I kept faithful to the original story and to the other stories, recalling how I felt back when I first created them. I came to appreciate these memories, particularly the kampong visits to my then mother-in-law’s house, as privileged experiences.”

I expanded the kitchen scene by including the monitor lizard and Yati reminiscing about the time she and her brother had killed a cobra. I felt, however, that I needed a new scene, a transition after the wedding, something that would show my efforts of trying to fit into the family. While thumbing through the photographs of that first visit, I came upon a photograph of me holding a long bamboo pole. Then I remembered the time that I learned how to cut down a coconut with the nieces and nephews, who played an important part in the story. This would also show another side to them, as well.

The actual wedding itself was on Christmas Day, which made the event for me even more memorable. Ask me the one Christmas that I would never forget, and it would have to be this non-Christmas event in a Muslim country that I wrote about in “Mat Salleh”.

As a footnote, one of my former nieces that I wrote about all those years ago, recently contacted me out of the blue, after having come across my website. I’m sure she’s going to love this story, and perhaps share it with her own children about that time her uncle from America came to visit the family, a memory that goes all the way back to 1983.

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here is a review of Lovers and Strangers Revisited: The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

“The Stare”: The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Every Hari Raya the Malays would visit the family graves, clear them of debris, and say their prayers. After that first kampong Hari Raya, I thought, what a great location for a story! Later I attended a funeral of an uncle and was fascinated by how the body was wrapped in white cloth and turned sideways (without a casket) to face Mecca. The Malays bury the dead fast, often the very next day. For relatives living outstation, including sons and daughters who have to travel by buses and trains, many don’t make it home in time for the burial.

The kampong graveyard in Parit, Perak (and the path from the road that led to it) was often overgrown and you would have no idea you were in one until it was too late since many of the graves were scattered among the shrubbery and trees. The older graves were even harder to find unless you stumbled on a large rock from the river or an inverted bottle, often used for the head and foot markers during the Japanese Occupation, when money was scarce.

After the prayers I would linger, make notes and ask questions: Who digs the graves? Whose land does this belong to? Who gets the fruit from the trees? Why were the graves with rocks or inverted bottles never replaced with proper minarets, even the simple, inexpensive ones?

My imagination would then take over as I search for a story. I pictured in my mind a lonely old woman, reminiscent of my former mother-in-law. I didn’t actually describe her as such. It just helps me to get a fix on a character, especially when I’m fumbling my way through an early draft trying to put disparate pieces and ideas together. I thought, what if this woman was the daughter of the man who lived in the adjacent property, someone who would help to dig the graves, and what if she were blind?

“What-if” questions, by the way, are a great way to get the creative juices flowing. So I tried to picture this woman sitting at her mother’s grave, running her hands over the coarse minaret headstone, wondering why her own mother had to die so she could be born.

To make this story effective I had to rely heavily on sensory details. Since I had no other characters other than her father in flashbacks, I had to put myself in Matemah’s shoes, imagining I was old and blind, and all I had to work with was what I heard, smelled, felt and tasted – plus the cemetery and the nearby river, which I could hear only if I came closer to it. Or was that my imagination giving me an idea, a possible ending, too, rare for me. The story itself, through the writing process, usually dictates an ending, which is often revealed at the last moment as I work my way through the story. But this idea stuck – and it gave me a goal to work toward.

“The Stare” was the second story from Lovers and Strangers Revisited published (though the fourth one written), back in 1986 after it won a consolation prize in The Star/Nestle contest and appeared in The Star. It's also the only story that I wrote that got published the very same year that I wrote it. Despite being published three times I was talked into leaving it out of the original Lovers and Strangers collection by an editor in favor of a new story, “Moments”. Later in 2005, while revisiting the stories, I had assumed all along that “The Stare” was in the collection, so I ended up dropping “Moments” and putting back “The Stare” as I had originally planned.

In the early versions, the main character was named Rubiah, but after consulting with a proofreader before sending it in for the Silverfish collection, the proofreader felt the name wasn’t appropriate (either it wasn’t pure Malay or it was too modern); she felt an older, more traditional name would be better. After giving me several options to choose from, I settled on Matemah because of how it sounded. This was critical to the ending of the story.

The arrangement of the paragraphs had always troubled me. Maybe it was because I was jumping back and forth to various flashbacks. Either way, it was affecting the flow, as well as the pacing, of the story. I needed to move the present action of the story along and get to the actual stare in the story and Matemah’s reaction to it sooner, to help break up all the flashback and backstory that this story required.

I didn’t notice until after I began to re-edit the stories for the MPH collection that something wasn’t right in the Silverfish version of Lovers and Strangers Revisited. Several paragraphs that were supposed to have been shifted a lot sooner, didn’t get moved. This was an oversight by the publisher, but admittedly this was a late change in the proofs, which I got while I was on vacation in the US. We were rushing to get the stories out in time so they could be used at USM where the collection was being taught (and we had to beat the Chinese New Year when everything shuts down in Malaysia for two weeks).

I then reversed paragraphs three and four so it would be a better transition for these now shifted paragraphs and smoothed out the rest of the transitions, too. Some writers actually use scissors and cut out all the paragraphs in strips to try and find the most effective arrangement. That never made much sense to me until I came to “The Stare.”

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited


Here is a reviews of Lovers and Strangers Revisited in The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

“Home for Hari Raya”: The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

After experiencing Hari Raya several times in Malaysia, I decided to write a short story about it, so I took my writing notebook with me to Parit, Perak and immediately started taking notes, describing all that I could, and observing my relatives, particularly my nieces and nephews. Since there were nineteen of them, spread between two houses across the street from each other, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t know what the story was going to be about; I just wanted to capture the whole experience, the essence of a traditional kampong-based Hari Raya. I also wanted to leave me completely out of the story (though years later, after a request from a magazine, I was asked to write about my own personal Hari Raya experience).

Then I got the idea to focus the story on three sisters, the elder two loosely based on my nieces, who were in fact cousins, and at the time, none of them were married. The younger, Ida, who I made the viewpoint character, would be a USM student where I taught creative writing. I made her embittered over the fact that her father, who had recently passed away, had taken a second wife. This was the heart of the story, an unresolved issue among the sisters that was threatening to tear the family apart.

I wanted to show how the three sisters viewed their father differently, and how the youngest, know-it-all-Ida couldn’t accept her sister’s views, let alone her mother’s complacency with the whole situation. Since Hari Raya is a time for asking for forgiveness, I knew this would play an integral part in the story and in its resolution.

In my ex-wife’s immediate family there were no one (at least not verified) who had more than one wife, although when my ex-wife was in primary school, another girl saw a picture of her father and told her, that was her father, too, and this deeply disturbed her. She also told me about a neighbor, who would bicycle back and forth between his two wives, and her classmates whose father’s had taken more than one wife. Among Malays, who are Muslim, this is quite common, an acceptable fact of life, but still problematic and often leads to divorce. My ex-wife, who was a reporter, was often involved in court cases and women forums, and she would tell me what was going on in these-multiple-marriage-gone-wrong cases.

Having a setting that I was already familiar with, and having first hand personal experience helping with the chores of cleaning up the house and the various rituals of preparing for Hari Raya year after year was a bonus. Also it’s an advantage to have real people to act as models, like my describing the antics of my nephews who were a lot younger than my nieces and who would go out of their way to irritate the girls. The scene with the three sisters on the motorcycles and bicycle happened, though I had no idea what they were discussing since they spoke in Malay. I felt the scene would work in the story by showing another side of their character, that although all three were young ladies, they were still close to being children.

After the story was originally published in Her World, but before it came out in Lovers and Strangers, I switched the names of the two elder sisters. I felt the name Sharifah seemed more mature than Mira, who at times in the story acted immature.

Later, while revisiting the story for the Silverfish collection, I showed it to a lecturer at USM who was the second wife of my colleague and, after she read the story, agreed to answer my questions as to why she decided to be a second wife. Her answers were quite helpful and gave me the confidence that I was on the right track.

It was important for Ida, as a strong-willed, independent, modern university student, to keep bringing up the unfairness of men taking a second wife. But the other sisters didn’t see it that way and I wanted their views known, too, to give the story balance. In the original version, Sharifah said, “Lots of men take second wives.” This I expanded in the first revisited version by adding, “It’s a fact of life. It’s better than them sneaking around and having affairs or visiting prostitutes, isn’t it? At least you know where they are.”

This only makes Ida more frustrated, who saw nothing except the men’s double standards. In the MPH version, I added in her mother’s typical kampong view, which I’ve personally heard countless times over the years. As if to defend her husband, she reminded Ida that Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him, had four wives. But Ida quickly countered, that it was only after his first wife had died.

A pivotal scene was having this second wife visit them during Hari Raya. This was a big moment, but I didn’t want to overdo it. What I was trying to avoid was a come-to-realize-that-the-second-wife-wasn’t-a-bad-person-after all end to the story. I needed a stronger, more emotional ending, a bonding among all three sisters which I was able to achieve in the revised story, where I purposely underplayed it.

I tried different versions before I settled on just the right ending. Since the story is about asking for forgiveness, it was important for Ida to go to the graveyard to be at her father’s grave, an important part of Hari Raya, which she had refused to do earlier in the story. She wanted to sneak off on her own, but she needed her sister’s car, so she reluctantly agreed to let her sisters join her. Putting their differences behind them, at least for now, Ida instinctively reached out for sister’s hands. From the comments I got from readers, including expats, it works.

In May 2011, "Home for Hari Raya" was published in Istanbul Literary Review.  By then I had already changed Ida’s name to Rina; it seemed to fit her better, after meeting some outspoken Rina’s while teaching and several quiet Ida’s.  In December 2011, Frederick Lewis, professor of film/video at Ohio University contacted me about turning “Homefor Hari Raya” into a film.  Initially, he was interested in “Mat Salleh” because one thing he was looking for was a strong Muslim female.  Thinking of the Rina/Ida character, I suggested “Home for Hari Raya” and sent him the Istanbul Literary Review link since his reference was the 1993 Heinemann Asia version of Lovers and Strangers.   

His team loved the story and after they got the financing approved by the university, they began putting together a screenplay.  In December 2012, Lewis led a team of 14 students to Malaysia who liaised with the Faculty of Film, Theatre and Animation at UiTM Shah Alam to turn "Home for Hari Raya" into a film.   

I find it fascinating that a short story I wrote over twenty years ago and first published in the May 1993 issue of Her World about three Malay sisters is now being turned into a film.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

"Symmetry": The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

The idea for “Symmetry”, my shortest story at 950 words and the second story that I wrote for this collection, began when I went upstairs to work and found a dead cockroach in a cup of tea that I had forgotten from the previous evening. Once I got over my initial disgust, I became fascinated by the symmetry of the cockroach, with its three pairs of legs of varying lengths spread out and the antennae fanned in opposite directions around the contour of the cup.

The writer in me saw the potential, so I put myself into the viewpoint of a female Malay child, who overcomes her initial fear and becomes fascinated by this dead cockroach “floating in someone’s neglected tea”.

For the setting of the story, I used the kitchen of my former in-laws kampong house in Parit, Perak since I knew it so well. In fact, I used this setting in several of my kampong stories like “Smooth Stones”, “Home for Hari Raya” and “Mat Salleh”.

In order to capture the child’s innocence while she observes the cockroach inside the cup I had to become an actor and acted out the part so I could physically describe her. I tried out several positions before I settled on the final version:

“The child pulls up on her batik sarong and sinks into a squat before setting the plate down next to the cup and saucer. She hugs her knees – chin nestled on top, arms braced underneath – and rocks back and forth in a slow rhythmic movement, her large brown eyes opened as wide as possible. She draws in her breath and takes another peek. Not satisfied, she leans closer. Finally she hunches her body forward, knees and palms to the floor, her long black hair, held back at the top by a purple plastic barrette, flows like twin waterfalls against the sides of her face. With her head now directly above, mere inches from the rim, she peers into the cup.”

In the first version that was published by Teenage in Singapore in 1991, I did not give the plastic barrette a color, but by the time it was published two years later in Plaza (in both English and Japanese) and Foolscap in the UK, I added the color blue. I changed the color to purple for the MPH edition of Lovers and Strangers Revisited. Subconsciously, perhaps, I saw her as wounded by her father’s absence (which I also added in the final version); thus the color purple is symbolic of the purple-heart given to American soldiers wounded in action; in fact, her brother even threatens her with a knife.

For me, this story has always been about lost innocence. The brother’s violent use of the knife to taunt her and to chop the dead cockroach underscores this. This child will never be the same. (She will always be afraid of cockroaches, too, but that’s a minor point.)

When I revisited the story for the Silverfish edition of Lovers and Strangers Revisited, I began to play with the wording to make it more specific, thus in the opening sentence, “dishes” became “plates and saucers” and “wood” became “plank”. I also changed the story from past to present tense.

For the final edition, after some prompting by my editor at MPH, I added a new element to the story to make it fit better with the themes of the other stories in the collection. In the opening paragraph I wrote, “unlike in the past when her father was still living with them…” Then a couple of pages later, I made another reference about the father’s absence, “[the brother] would only boss her around or torment her, which he has been doing ever since their father went to live with that other woman.”

I also mention that the brother is having disciplinary problems at school. In an effort to calm down the crying child near the end of the story, “[mother] even assures her that her father will return home and that everything will be just like it was before.”

We know that is not likely to happen. It’s too late. Her innocence is lost. She, too, no doubt, will develop disciplinary problems at school as she faces a brother who’ll become more brutal at home while living in a harsher, fatherless world.

Ah, it's so nice to have an editor who pushes you to improve a story in unexpected ways!

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie. Here's a link to the French blog set up by the publisher Éditions GOPE.

Here is a review in The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

"Smooth Stones": The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

I had been contemplating writing a story about the power of faith, the power of belief, when I came across a brief article in the New Straits Times in Malaysia about a man being conned over some “moon” stones. I had read similar accounts before, so I played with this idea. I envisioned a desperate woman wanting to save her husband from dying (she needed a strong enticement) who buys the stones from a friendly man, a Haji, who happens to stop by her kampong house.

The questions I wanted to raise in the reader’s mind, are the smooth stones merely stones from the river or do they come from Mecca and have special healing powers? Is Rosmah being conned out of her money, or being instructed on how to save her husband from dying? Does her husband, in fact, get better?

I wrote the story from Rosmah’s point of view and I guess I got it right because when I read an early draft for a workshop conducted by K.S. Maniam in Kuala Lumpur the two previous winners of The Star contest thought “Smooth Stones” would win. I was surprised when it didn’t even win a consolation prize, though two other stories from Lovers and Strangers Revisited did win, including “The Future Barrister”, which won third prize.

At the award ceremony the judge, a celebrated Malaysian author, approached me and said he and the other judges tossed out “Smooth Stones” because they thought I had plagiarized it. They felt that a Westerner, a male “mat salleh”, couldn’t write such a “Malay” story about bomohs from a woman’s point of view! I wished they had consulted me first! I guess you could call this a backhanded compliment!

To make the story seem as real as possible I had created a “real” setting and brought in “real” characters. For the setting I used two actual locations and blended them into one. I used my former in-laws kampong house in Parit, Perak that I was very familiar with and for the surrounding area, a kampong in Kedah, where I spend a weekend attending a wedding. Since the house was full of people, the bathing area was converted into a clothes-washing room. In order to bathe, I had to wear a sarong and hike down to the river like everyone else. I remember coming back along this path that bisected a field and this water buffalo gave me a look of reproach, as if I were intruding. I used that detail in the story for good effect.

I based the character Rosmah on my former mother-in-law. Her husband, at the time that I met him, was dying from cancer. (See the nonfiction story “Mat Salleh”, or the story behind that story.) For Haji Abdullah, I borrowed one of my ex-wife’s uncles. He had such a serene face with sparkles in his eyes; there didn’t seem to be a dishonest bone in his body. While writing the story, I kept a photograph of him handy, which made the character all the more real to me, since I actually knew him.

Usually I don’t outline stories in advance, but this story I did. I had five or six set scenes in mind and that kept me focused until the very end. In two hours I had the first draft of the story written. Usually when I start a story, I like to add some real details to anchor the story. In this case, I too had sat on an embedded-in-sand fishing boat. I had also, on another occasion, watched fishermen standing in the water with their fishing net while someone beat the water with a bamboo pole.

Because of the subject matter, I used a lot of symbolism. The men fishing with their nets symbolize Rosmah’s desperation, her willingness to cast out a net to “catch” anything that could save her dying husband. Hadn’t she already tried to catch “doctors and bomohs”? Fishing, by the way, is itself a trial, a test of manhood for her son Hasri, who now has to take over his father’s role as a fisherman, not as a “boy” but as a “man.”

Another symbol was the sarong that belongs to Yusof, which represents Yusof himself and is used to wrap the coconut containing the smooth stones, to protect it – to protect Yusof’s very life. Then of course there’s the smooth stones themselves, a symbol of faith, or the power of belief. The ordinary stones from the river that Siti’s son has are used to contrast the extra-ordinary, or “extraordinary” stones brought back from Mecca.

Throughout the story I purposely used references to religion as a symbol of faith, a powerful symbol of God from antiquity to our present day. For example, I mention that Abdullah as being a Haji, that he is holding a Quranic book, and produces Quranic verses, and also Mecca – all powerful religions symbols to a Muslim.

By mentioning that this man is a Haji, I invoke the religious performance – that he has performed the Haj, a requirement or goal of all Muslim. The title “Haji” itself connotes respect for someone who had performed this very act, someone who is knowledgeable about the world (has traveled far away from home) and had obtained “religious wisdom” from Mecca. The fact that he says to Rosmah, “I have come from Mecca” speaks volumes. It implies that he has come directly from Mecca with special healing powers, power to heal her dying husband.

Again, the religious symbolism in Mecca is powerful to a Muslim. It would be akin to a Christian bringing back “Holy water” from Jerusalem. It’s the faith that this water, from the Holy Land is somehow closer to God than ordinary water. Therefore the Mecca stones are more powerful than “river stones”. Again, it’s about faith, the power to believe that this is a “fact”. “Mecca” stones must be “powerful” because the stones come from Mecca. Rosmah has no way of knowing if such stones could even be found in Mecca or maybe she’s thinking that the stones were “blessed” in Mecca. It’s that association with Mecca that convinces her that the smooth stones can truly save her husband.

I also needed to make Haji Abdullah convincing as a salesman. Notice his selling pitch – she had to buy two stones – not one – because they only work in “pairs”. It was only after she reluctantly admitted that she had money in the Post Office, that he brought up the most powerful (and most expensive) stone of all, the black one – and naturally it wouldn’t work without the other two. Had he mentioned that black one early on, she may have balked at price and not have taken the bait. A good salesman, like a good fisherman, learns to entice the fish to his hook with bait. If they nibble you don’t jerk the line, or you lose them for good. Only after they bite (after mentioning the post office money), then you reel them in.

When Rosmah vacillates over the two white stones, Haji Abdullah plays on her emotions like some salesman do. He asks, “Was your husband a good man? Did he treat you and your family fairly?” Then later, when referring to the black stone, he asks, “Maybe this is what you need to save your husband from dying.”

I also had him insist, on numerous occasions, that Rosmah “believe”, which eventually she does. Later, Yusof tells Azman, “Only Rosmah believed I would get better.”

This is one of those rare stories for me that was easy to write the first time around, maybe because I had put so much thought into the story, into the characters, into the setting before I even wrote it. No doubt that outline worked, too! It quickly got published in Singapore, UK, and Australia. Editing over the years has been minor, mostly cosmetic, even when I revisited it for Lovers and Strangers Revisited. One editor suggested that the ending was “too predictable”, yet a critic presenting a paper on Lovers and Strangers Revisited for a short story conference in the UK stated that “the ending gave him goose bumps”. When I tried to revise the ending for the latest MPH version, the editor I was working with, overruled me, and insisted I go back to how I had it, so I did. She too had faith in the story.

The story recently came close to being accepted in the US, though in the end, in the final round of judging I was told, they opted for another story from this collection, “Waiting”, which again surprised me. Then another US editor really liked the story and they requested a rewrite, so my fingers are crossed.

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited



Here is a review in The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

"On Fridays": The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Over the years, I’ve often been asked about the short stories in Lovers and Strangers Revisited (MPH 2008), previously published by Silverfish (2005), and originally  as Lovers and Strangers (Heinemann Asia 1993). Where I got the ideas? How I wrote them? Why I revise them even after they’ve been published! And are the stories true?

In the preface to the original collection I wrote, “There’s a lot of truth in all fiction and a lot of fiction in all truth, so what may seem real may, in fact, be made up, and what may seem made up could very well be based on fact. The characters in this collection only exist in the author’s and the reader’s mind and if they bear a resemblance to anyone you know, then it’s merely a coincidence.”

As we all know there’s a blurry line between truth and fiction. Some stories that I wrote started out based on fact and got changed along the way to make it a better story. Others started out as pure fiction but some truth got added in to make the story seem more realistic. I tried to make all the stories seem real, as if they had happened. Maybe that’s why these 15 – now 17 stories – have been published, at last count, 83 times in twelve countries (updated, August 2024), taught in numerous Malaysian universities, private colleges, in SPM literature, and even a high school in Canada.

So with the new version of Lovers and Strangers Revisited published by MPH, I thought I would do a series of blogs on the stories – the story behind the story – which I hope will answer these questions about truth and fiction and also, perhaps, inspire some of you who write to take another look at your own story ideas, to see if you can make them resonate with the reader, and perhaps even break you from your own truth, which often gets in the way of a good short story.

Already I can hear protests, “But that’s the way it really happened!” Yes, no doubt, but to get to the essential story, the “real” story, sometimes you need to take a step back from your truth and ask yourself, does your truth serve the story, or does it hamper it? Of course, I’m referring to writing fiction not a memoir. And by making the necessary changes, you never know where you’re story will take you. For example, I started a story about a man riding in a taxi and it ended up being published 13 times, and now it’s the lead story in this collection.

The original idea for “On Fridays” came when I was part-time adviser for MACEE, Malaysian American Commission on Educational Exchange. Every Friday I would take a sixteen kilometer taxi ride into George Town. It was a share taxi, whereby we share it with other passengers, who get on and off at various locations.

I saw this taxi as a metaphor for multiracial Malaysia, where people of various races live and work in close proximity and in relative harmony. So I added an unnamed Westerner, an expat, who becomes interested in a Malay woman sitting beside him in a taxi, yet because of the other passengers, he feels too self-conscious to act.

Although I normally write in the third person, I chose to write this story in the first person at the expense of people assuming that it’s autobiographical. As many of you know, when you use the first person “I” as the narrator, people naturally assume it’s the author or in this case, it’s “me”. Unlike the character, by the way, I don’t paint, and the character taught English years before I ever did.

The effect I was going for, I felt, would be better served using “I”, because I wanted the reader to closely identify with the narrator, to see himself in this, or in a similar situation, and think about what he or she would do - to make the story more personal. From the comments I got in the past – it works. This was the one story from my collection that people would bring up and then relate a similar experience of their own.

Another choice I made was not using the past tense and opting for the present tense, because I felt it would give the story more immediacy, and hopefully a timeless quality. And perhaps make it linger, as does the ending, so it would seem that this just happened.

Also from the hundreds of taxi rides I took while living in Penang, I chose to “create” one that was representative of all those rides. By using the senses – see, hear, feel, taste and smell – I tried to make this one taxi ride as realistic as possible by putting the reader in that taxi with me. If they believe in that taxi ride, then they’ll believe in the story. That it’s the “truth”; that it “happened”; that there really was “a girl”; and that I’m still “searching” for her....When my creative writing students read this story, they inevitably ask me, “Have you found her yet?”

When I first wrote the story I had a lot of details describing the sights along the way. An editor from the UK made the comment that it read too much like a travelogue. So I cut out the descriptions that weren’t necessary. It was also suggested that I make the character single. His being married raised some moral issues – like is he cheating on his wife? Good advice, which I took, and an example of how "facts" or "truth" can have unforeseen consequences in your fiction. This is the version that first got published in Female in Singapore, Plaza in Japan and Going Down Swinging Australia.

A reader, unfamiliar with Malaysia, asked me what’s the big deal if he does touch her in the taxi, so while revisiting the story for Lovers and Strangers Revisited, I worked in the character’s concerns about being arrested for “outraging her modesty” since he’s an expat in a Muslim country, something that many people outside of Malaysia who are not familiar with Muslim countries would know. As a writer, you can't always assume that overseas readers, if that is who you also want to reach, will "get it".

Then I got to thinking, why doesn't he get out of the taxi at the jetty and follow her (I would!), and if he does, I would also need to make it clear why he has to return to the taxi, for fear of losing his job, something difficult for an expat to get without a work permit. So I added this new scene to the story.

A US editor suggested that I lop off the final paragraph. I didn’t like his suggestion, yet I felt he had a point, so we compromised by rearranging a couple of paragraphs at the end, to make the story more effective, so the focus wasn’t on the man’s loneliness, but on his obsession. This became the version that was published simultaneously, as a joint-venture, between a literary magazine in France, Frank, and The Literary Review in the US, and with some minor editing, this MPH collection, and now Cha: An Asian Literary Review and Thema (due out in 2025) as reprints.

Lovers and Strangers Revisited is now getting translated into French as Trois autres Malaisie.

Here is a review in The Star (MPH) and a link to the other story behind the stories for Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited 

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I