“On Fridays” published in Thema (USA) and translated into Bahasa Melayu

 

 

“On Fridays” was published as a reprint in the Summer 2025 issue of Thema.  This was the sixth time that Thema had published one of my Malaysian-set short stories, five from Lovers and Strangers Revisited.  Years ago, I pitched an idea to The Writer about the writing of “On Fridays” based on my Story Behind the Story series, and the editor agreed and requested I follow an established format:  The Work, The Problem, The Solution, Before and After.  It was put on hold for a couple of years (my last article took four years for them to publish).  Then a new editor took over and the project fell through the cracks.  It happens.  When Thema accepted the story last year, I updated what I wrote for The Writer and resubmitted it along with the previous editors acceptance and format suggestions.  Still waiting…

                                   

THE WORK: “On Fridays,” published in the Fall 2003 issue of The Literary Review (US) and Number 19 of Frank (France)—a joint venture on Expat Writing.  Published fourteen times in six countries, originally in Female (Singapore, March 1989), then later reprinted in Cha: An Asian Literary Review (Hong Kong, 2010) and Thema (summer 2025).

THE PROBLEM: The original idea for “On Fridays” came when I lived in Penang, Malaysia working part-time as an adviser for MACEE, Malaysian American Commission on Educational Exchange.  Every Friday I would take a sixteen-kilometer taxi ride into George Town—a shared taxi with other passengers getting on and off at various locations.

From the hundreds of taxi rides that I took, 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.... Invariably my students would ask, “Have you found her yet?”

I saw this taxi as a metaphor for multiracial Malaysia, where various races lived and worked together in relative harmony.  In the story, an expat, an unnamed Westerner, becomes interested in a Malay woman sitting beside him.  She is reading a letter and crying.  He wants to comfort her, but feels self-conscious because of the other two passengers and the Muslim taxi driver.

Normally I write in the past tense, third person but chose to write this story in the present tense to give the story an immediacy, and hopefully a timeless quality…and make it linger, especially the ending, so it would seem like it just happened.  I also wrote it the first person at the expense of people assuming it’s autobiographical.  Unlike the character, I don’t paint, and the character taught English years before I did.  The effect I was going for, I felt, would be better served 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.  This was the one story from my collection Lovers and Strangers Revisited that people would mention and relate a similar experience of their own.

When I first wrote the story, I had a lot of details describing the Malaysian sights along the way.  An editor from the UK made the comment that it read too much like a travelogue.  An editor in the US suggested that I lop off the final paragraph.  I didn’t like his suggestion, yet I felt he had a point.  Also, readers unfamiliar with living in Malaysia, a Muslim country, may question the expat’s motives, so that would need to be addressed without intrusion from the author.  Then a few matters of truth were getting in the way of the story.  Already I can hear protests, “But that’s the way it 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?  Truth often gets in the way of a good story.

THE SOLUTION:  I cut out most of the descriptions outside the taxi that weren’t essential to the story itself, just those that highlighted that it was miserable, raining day.  With that US editor, we agreed to compromise 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 in trying to find the girl.  It was also suggested that I make the expat character single.  Him being married (like me) raised some moral issues—is he cheating on his wife?  Good advice, which I took—an example of how “facts” or “truth” can have unforeseen consequences in your fiction.

A reader, unfamiliar with Malaysia, asked me what’s the big deal if he does touch the young Malay woman in the taxi, so I worked in the character’s concern about being arrested for “outraging her modesty” with three potential hostile witnesses.  As a writer, you can’t always assume that overseas readers will understand a local concern or what is at stake.

Then I got to thinking, why doesn't he get out of the taxi at the jetty and follow her after that yearning look that she gave him (I would), and if he does, I would 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.

BEFORE AND AFTER:  Although this story had already been published in five countries and included in a collection of short stories, this revised version was accepted by Frank, a literary magazine in France, whose editor, incidentally, was a guest editor for The Literary Review for a joint venture on Expat Writing.  For me, a double surprise.  As an American living in Malaysia, I submit a story to France and it gets published in the US and France!  Later, Lovers and Strangers Revisited was also translated into French.

Speaking of translation, I recently discovered by chance that “On Fridays,” had been translated in Bahasa Melayu and uploaded a year ago for a Universiti Teknologi Mara course, from College Sidekick, which, I gather, gathers material.  They claim that they are not sponsored or endorsed by any college or university.  Did they ask me or my previous publisher for permission to translate that story?  Did they even attempt to contact me?

Makes me wonder what other stories from that collection have been translated in Bahasa Melayu?  Or even the whole book.  At one time, I thought that would happen.  Maybe it has, and I’m just unaware.  Maybe it’s time I investigate, even look at the possibility of having the collection officially published into Bahasa Melayu.

            —Borneo Expat Writer

“On Fridays” UiTM Google Meet That I Almost Missed!

May of last year, I was up at 5:15 a.m. to get my son off to school.  Not feeling well (lack of sleep, perhaps), I went back to bed.  A phone notice woke me up, informing me that my story “On Fridays” from Lovers and Strangers Revisited, which I recently rewrote and blogged about, was being discussed in a Collaborative Teaching at Universiti Teknologi MARA or UiTM—Penang (Bertam campus), led by Associate Professor Dr. Mohamad Rashidi Pakri of USM (discussing the literary aspect of the story) and Nazima Versay Kudus of UiTM. 

Previously, during Covid lockdown, I had been invited by Nazima to join Google Meet to answer questions about my short story "Neighbours" also from Lovers and Strangers Revisited for her Faculty of Health Science students.  This time around, since it involved about sixty students from several classes from Health Science, who are learning about narrative writing, it was more practical to record and share the session among the students than to get them all together at one time, even online.

Surprisingly, I had not been forewarned, or was I a last-minute inclusion—hey, let’s wake up Robert to see if he’s available!  Either way, I was too late for the discussion, but I did manage to join the Q & A session.

 

“On Fridays,” the first story from Lovers and Strangers Revisited has been published over a dozen times in seven countries.  In 2003, it appeared in The Literary Review (USA) and Frank (France) in a joint publication.  I had sent the story to the editor of Frank, unaware that he had been asked to be the guest editor of The Literary Review, so he chose “On Fridays” for their joint issue on Expat Writing.  The story, about an expat living in Penang, Malaysia who sits beside a crying woman in a taxi, later appeared as a reprint for Cha: An Asian Literary Journal in 2010.  Since then, the story had been revised several times in my effort to finally get it right… 

I would like to have listened in the session, to hear what the students thought of the story since they would be freer to discuss it without the presence of the author—for fear of embarrassing themselves or offending him—so why did we have to read that stupid story in the first place?  It nearly put me to sleep!  Hopefully, no one said that or felt that way!

            

By the time I came on board, or online, (freshly showered and wide awake) some students may have already left (is he coming or not?)  The questions they did ask me were straight forward.  Why did he, the unnamed first-person character, feel com­pelled to hold her hand instead of just speaking, “Hi, how are you?”  Was it im­portant that she wore traditional clothes?  Did the story really take place?  Was it a true story?  More than once, in the past, I had been asked, “Have you found her?”  “Are you still looking for her?” Many of these ques­tions I had discussed in the Story Behind the Story (which I wrote for all seventeen stories for the MPH publication), about how the story came to be written, how the story evolved after its initial publication, what significant changes I made to the story (and why) that led to subsequent publications overseas… 

Having wrote the story in 1988 (first published in the March ’89 issue of Female in Singapore), I feel honored that the story “On Fridays” is still being taught in 2023, 35 years later, and it still resonates with university students who can identify with the characters, even a lonely expat inside a share taxi on a rainy day sitting beside a crying Malay woman reading a letter on blue paper…

       —Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with other Malaysian writers:

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, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 

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

Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens.

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit—Round Two of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit has made Round Two of the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award under the Mystery/Thriller category.  This is based solely on the 300-word pitch, which is what agents and editors see first when you pitch them, as I wrote in my Six Lessons Learned from entering the Amazon contest last year.

Round Two is based on the 5000-word excerpt and a shot at the Quarter-Finals (14 April).  A different novel, The Resurrection of Jonathan Brady made the Amazon Quarter-finals in 2012, beating out 95% of the completion.   

An earlier draft of A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit made the finals of the 2012 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Novel Competition, so I have some hope here, too.  One of the significant changes I made since then was turning this third person, present tense story into a first person, past tense novel, plus a ton of rewriting while reading the novel out loud.

While waiting for Quarter-Final announcements, it’ll back to rewriting A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit’s sequel, The Girl in the Bathtub, which was also a novel-in-progress finalist for Faulkner-Wisdom back in 2012. 

I’m hoping all the work I’ve done these last two years on these two novels will finally pay off.

Here’s the 300-word pitch (287 words actually) that got the novel through to Round Two:

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit

Having your fate hinged on the erratic behavior of a manipulative

American expatriate who has nothing left to live for cannot be good…

          “When living overseas as long as I have,” Michael Graver said from the com­forts of his decaying bungalow, “the question that you always have to ask yourself . . . is today a perfect day for an expat exit?”

Distraught over catching his wife making love to an ex-boyfriend, American business­man Steve Boston flees from his former life to the tropical island of Penang.  En route to the Eastern & Oriental Hotel, a colonial holdover, Boston comes to the aid of a mysterious Eura­sian whose com­plicated life has been made messier by her father’s body washing ashore.  His death is not only linked to the enigmatic expatriate Michael Graver, who seems to know ev­ery­body’s personal secrets, but also his anti-American, opium-addicted British wife, Amanda.

Until he met Graver, Boston had only read about expatriates as if they were some kind of mystical creature—a shapeshifter capa­ble of abandoning one culture for another or living in the shadows for the sake of survival; either hiding from their troubled past, seeking some self-indul­gent pleasure, or search­ing for a mythical treasure.  Or a little of each as in Michael Graver’s case.

Graver’s life, however, starts to unravel when his own well-kept secrets are uncovered. With little left to live for except an elusive treasure buried by the Japanese at the end of World War Two, Graver gamely manipulates those around him, including Steve Boston who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time until he’s caught smack in the middle with a gun aimed at his head. 

—Borneo Expat Writer  

Here are links to four 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