A Final Farewell to a Tango Dancer

I originally wrote this article “Farewell to a Tango Dancer” in 2003 for a farewell dinner for Anni Nordmann before she left Penang, Malaysia where I first met her, and later published a revised version for Tropical Affairs.  Having learned that she had recently passed away due to cancer, I thought I would post the article as a final tribute to Anni.

                                                                   Joelle, Robert, Anni

If expats are good at one thing it’s saying goodbye because we do it so often—to expats leaving and those staying behind.  Expats come in two types:  those who come to a country for a year or two before moving onto the next country, and those who come to one country and stay put.  Anni Nordmann was both.  She had been an expat in eight countries—South Africa, Zimbabwe, Switzerland, Gabon, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Singa­pore—before arriving in Penang, Malaysia where she ended up staying for sixteen years.  

After being away from the United States for 28 years, she’s finally returning home.  Like other long-stayers-in-one-country expats like myself, I was wondering, how do you say goodbye to a fellow expat whom you thought would never leave?

Like Anni, when I came to Malaysia 20 years ago, the intention was never to stay for very long, but as years went by, I became settled.  Initially I was awed by those long-time expats who had been here for ten or twelve years, and thought, how do they stay that long?  Don’t they miss their families and friends back home?  But as the years went by, as we started our own families here, this becomes home,             

Although I moved to Penang in 1985, Anni came in 1987 with her Swiss husband and three-year old son, Chris.  Later we discovered that before we met, our paths had crossed several times.  Anni was living in Holiday Inn, where her husband was the general manager, and I had been to the Holiday Inn on many occasions, attending various func­tions, including a Thanks­giving dinner for Americans where she was also present.  My ex-wife and I were close to Stella, Holiday Inn’s guest relations officer, and attended her wedding, as did Anni.  In 1991, after four years, after Anni had already left Holiday Inn, after her husband had moved away to another hotel in another country, we finally met.

  

During the filming of Indochine, starring Catherine Deneuve and Vincent Perez, which won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, the director decided to do a day shoot instead of a night shoot for the Christmas Dinner scene, thus several male expats had to back out as guests and tango dancers.  So the casting people called me as one of the replacements.

Before the actual filming of the scene, all eight tango dancers met in Hotel Equatorial with the film’s choreo­grapher.  In walked Anni, a classy looking Ameri­can who played polo and taught horseback riding.  Anni, however, was not fated to be my dancing partner.  Instead it was her good friend Joelle Saint-Arnoult, another longtime expat from France.  For one week we learned how to dance and turn and dip to perfection.

 

 

Our Christmas Dinner scene in the old Crag Hotel atop Penang Hill took four days to shoot.  Elegantly dressed in period outfits from the 1930s, Anni sat directly across from me, so we had plenty of time to get to know one another.  A few weeks later, Anni, Joelle and I were invited to take part in the racing boat scene in Parit, Perak.

with Lind Dan Pham 

After Indochine, all three of us were extras in Beyond Rangoon—also set in Penang—di­rected by John Boorman, starring Patricia Arquette and Francis McDormand, and Paradise Road, directed by Bruce Beresford, starring Glenn Close and Cate Blanchett.  In Beyond Rangoon, Anni and I worked a few days in wardrobe when they needed extra help to deal with 2000 extras, where we gained a whole new perspective into movie making.

In 1992, Anni, Joelle and I were asked by Angela Clark another tango dancer from Indochine, to help  revive Penang Players after a twelve years hiatus.  Our first play was Admirable Crichton where Joelle and Anni had small acting parts.  Anni’s big part was sound effects, and I was stage manager.  Our behind-the-scenes roles continued for several produc­tions including, Gosforth’s Fete, Between Mouthfuls, The Mousetrap, and Dick Whittington and Wonder Cat.  Joelle played the Wonder Cat and Anni’s son Chris, then age 10, played Dick Whittington.

During this time, Anni and I shared other adventures, too.  She helped to dress me up as Santa Claus for St. Christopher’s School, where her son Chris was attend­ing.  Thanks to Indochine, we became models for Hotel Equatorial, City Bayview, and Bacchus, a French restaurant owned by Joelle and her husband.  We were then hired to dress up as Colonial Officers and their spouses at the E & O Hotel for 200 French Lotto winners. 

For the Penang Heritage Trust’s Twenties Revival at the former Runnymede Hotel, we were asked to reprise our roles as tango dancers from Indochine and put on a performance.  By then, the eight tango dancers in Penang had dwindled to five.

          

Anni and I shared a penchant for visiting places where we didn’t belong, like the remnants of a house in Batu Ferringhi where another long-term expat-cum hermit named Bill McVeigh was still living out the remainder of his life before he passed away.  We snuck into several abandoned bungalows, including one where we were chased by bats, and another time, I tore my shirt slipping through a hole in a fence. 

 There were sad moments too, like giving blood to a fellow Penang Player who later died of cancer; although he was from Penang, he was a long-term expat in France.  Anni, at her own personal risk, once helped another expat flee Penang from an abusive husband. 

In the last five years, Anni devoted herself to “The Farm” at Lone Pine Hotel, where she taught horseback riding, resurfacing now and then to do the sound for yet another Penang Players’ production.  Meanwhile I settled to a life teaching creative writing at USM, went through a divorce, and eventually met someone wonderful from Sarawak and remarried. 

While I concen­trated on teaching and my own writing, Anni offered to read an early draft of my novel and gave helpful feedback.  Over the years she had edited two more of my novels and some short stories.  Extreme­ly supportive of my writing, she, Joelle and others from Penang Players volunteered to launch my collection of Malaysian-set short stories, Lovers and Strangers.  Later they did again for the revised version, Lovers and Strangers Revisited.  By then Anni had left, although I acknowledged her in the book.

When Joelle first told me that Anni was leaving Penang, I contacted her and we quickly caught up with each other’s lives, reminiscing about all the adventures we had shared in Penang, as well as airing each other’s concerns about her returning to the US and her future life as a former expat whose heart will always be in Malaysia where she had spent a third of her life.  When I was going through a difficult custody battle for my son, she gave me the timely advice to “keep your head high”.  I know she will be do the same no matter what happens in the US where many fellow Americans have never traveled out of the US, other than weekend trips to Mexico or Canada, and have no desire to do so.

Like many other short- and long-term expats in Penang, as well as hordes of local friends, especially those in Penang Players or from The Lone Pine—we will miss Anni, particularly Joelle and I, who will remain behind in Penang as the last two tango dancers.

*Later, in 2006, I left Penang for Sarawak on the island of Borneo in East Malaysia where I still reside as an expat. Joelle remains in Penang.

Esquire-Malaysia publishes “Seeing the Dead Man”, excerpt from A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit

 

My short story, “Seeing the Dead Man”, an excerpt from my Penang-based novel A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit, has been published in the November 2015 issue of Esquire Malaysia.  *This is the ninth time, and the fourth story from three chapters (in four countries) that have been published from the former finalist, 2012, and short-list finalist, 2014, of the Faulkner-Wisdom Novel Awards. 

*Originally I posted eight times in three countries but after double checking my records I discovered another story, under a different title, published in India.  (Australia, India, Malaysia, USA)  

A Perfect Day for an Expat Exit (83,950 words)

Expatriates don’t always make smart decisions, especially if they own a gun.

“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 with an ex-boyfriend, American business­man Steve Bos­ton flees from freezing Wisconsin to the tropical island of Penang, off the west coast of Malay­sia.  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 linked to the enigmatic expatriate Michael Graver, who seems to know ev­ery­body’s personal secrets, and his anti-American, opium-addicted British wife, Amanda.

Until he met Graver, Boston merely thought of expatriates as some kind of my­stical creature – a shapeshifter capa­ble of abandoning one culture for another, often living in the sha­dows for the sake of survival; either hiding from their troubled past, seeking some self-indul­gent pleasure, or search­ing for a lost treasure.  Or a little of each as in Graver’s case.

Graver’s life begins to unravel as his past catches up with him.  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.

The follow up to this novel Girl in the Bathtub was a finalist in the 2015 Falkner Wisdom. 

—Borneo Expat Writer

Life & Style - Personality of the Week

Here's the link to my first online interview that came out today in Life & Style.  Eight questions are asked and the answers are kept short, and I tried to make sure each one is quotable. They did a nice job with this, using a black backdrop, and putting my two book covers side by side. Notice the titles of the book are reflected upside down on the table for a cool effect!

I'm sure there's a way to copy and paste this website page into the blog, but every way I tried it seemed to backfire and created additional problems, forcing me to shut down the computer a couple of times. Then there's the possible matter of copyright infringement, so I thought it's best to leave it as it is. By the way, not a bad follow-up to yesterday's post on "Getting known through the media or anyway that you can".

And as a follow up to that, just want to add that when you’re being interviewed, keep a reminder list of what to include, in case you forget, like your website address or book titles or key points that you want to make. I also keep some reminders to cut down on what you have to say because usually there's space requirement and if they have to cut it themselves, they may cut out the wrong stuff, and leave the lesser important stuff, or they may overlook a good quote and choose instead a poor one. This was great advice that I received from Daphne Lee of the Star when she asked several opened ended questions and I had a field day answering them. I'm glad she did a great job editing it! Also, I remind myself not to be flippant with any of my answers. It might be my gut reaction, or something off the top of my head, or I'm merely having fun, but being flippant rarely helps you in the long run and you may miss an opportunity with some further probing to come up with something rather poignant, even quotable. In fact, try to make everything you say, quotable, so if they randomly choose a quote you can live with it!

Of course this is hard to do when you get a phone interview, so now I prefer email interviews. They may take far too much time (several hours!), but the writer in me will make sure all the answers are good, error free, by going over them again and again, plus it's going to be pretty hard to misquote me, and I can feel comfortable with the interview and stick it on my website under the media section. On phone and face-to-face interviews, I have to keep my fingers crossed and hopefully sigh in relief once I see it in print. But in most cases, I cringe, and some important facts invariably come out wrong, or worse the interview with some horrible or totally wrong quotes serves no purpose and I can’t even use it, a missed opportunity!

*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 

Being Re-blogged, Psychoanalyzed, and Nominated!

After I completed my The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited blog series, I decided to edit and repost all 17, for easy referral, under the new blog, The Story Behind the Story… I also posted them in reverse order, so they’ll appear on the blog in order, starting with the first story “On Fridays”. Otherwise, in the future, finding them would be difficult since they’ll all be archived in different months spread over a year, a frustrating process if you’re looking for one particular entry! Here they’ll be together in the same month and even listed on the sidebar, so it would be easy for anyone – a writer, a teacher, a student or an interested reader – to find The Story Behind the Story they want.

Back in 2006, the Silverfish version of Lovers and Strangers Revisited was critiqued and analyzed and its findings were presented at a short story conference in Lancaster, UK. Quite an honor for a writer based in Malaysia, writing about Malaysia, and with a Malaysian publisher! (Is this a first for a writer from or living in Malaysia?) Of course anytime your work is reviewed, or critiqued, it’s out of your hands, and it’s open to interpretation.

If you’re a critic and you’re looking for symbols, phallic or otherwise, you’re going to find them! Whether they’re true symbols, consciously or subconsciously placed by the writer, or the critic groping at straws to support his preconceived theories is anyone’s guess. No doubt it’s somewhere in between. Also, there will be lots of assumptions made (some right, most wrong) about the author (and his personal life) for writing such-a-such story or book in the first place! Yet, bear in mind, what’s at stake are both the reputation of the one doing the critique and the one being critiqued! So I still have some qualms about this, three years later…

Presenting your findings at a major international conference on short story collections is not for the feint hearted because you’ll be bombarded with questions from writers and literature academics who know their stuff! I didn’t see the actual paper or even the title until after it was presented. Yet once I saw the title, I knew my ego was going to be in turbulent waters so I held on for the emotional ride until the end:

Masculinised (American) Eyes, Feminised (Malaysian) Dreams? A Psychoanalytic Study of Robert Raymer’s Collection of Short Stories in Lovers and Strangers Revisited.

Although I questioned some conclusions – is an umbrella used on a rainy day, as in “On Fridays”, a phallic symbol or merely an umbrella used on a rainy day? Or is a cockroach, like in “Symmetry”, remotely sexual? – I had an enjoyable banter with the critic who gamely responded to my queries and even criticisms, which I was grateful for. I still consider Jem a friend and a former colleague at USM, and I do feel honored that he took the trouble to choose my work (he could’ve chosen someone else) and to analyze it and to present it in the UK. He even passed copies of the book to several prominent people in the publishing industry.!

The reason I’m bringing this up here, nearly three later, is because while doing a recent Google check this popped up. So it’s out there on the Web, and if you’re interested or curious have a look (but please read the book first so you can judge for yourself, because next time you could be on the receiving end!). Also, there’s no need to attack me as the writer (I told you so!) or the critic (how dare he insinuate that!).

If you’re a writer, and you want your work to be taken seriously, it’s time to start thickening your skin, because once your work is out there for the public, even on your own blog, it really is out of your hands, and if you want to defend yourself and your work to the death you’ll only give yourself an ulcer. Just accept that others have different views from your own. It’s rarely personal; either they liked what you wrote, or they didn’t like it, or maybe they were affected by their own mood when they read it (and hopefully they’ll reread it in a better mood). Just move on to your next piece of writing. In the long run, what really stands out is the actual writing itself.

For the MPH collection, as noted in the Story Behind the Story series, I did revise all the stories once again and then worked with an editor at MPH and made sure any minor slips as pointed out in this paper, were duly corrected. I was also glad that all the reviews I’ve received so far have been overwhelming positive.

Now for an update, Lovers and Strangers Revisited won the Popular Reader’s Choice Awards 2009.

Although I’ve had work that has done relatively well in contests both in Malaysia and in the US, this is the first time my work as ever been nominated for an award, so I feel quite proud. It’s not a big, international prize that will thrust me in the world limelight, but it’s a step in the right direction and will mentally prepare me for when that day does arrive. Again, I feel proud being nominated!

If you have yet to get a copy of the book, this also means Lovers and Strangers Revisited (and all the nominated books) will be 20% off at all Popular Bookstores. The books will be voted by readers and decided in August in time for the Bookfest @ Malaysia 2009. Announcements should be made soon in The Star and other media outlets within Malaysia. Keep an eye out for it and if you don’t mind, cast a vote my way!

In the meantime, so my head doesn’t swell too much, the proofs just arrived for my fourth book (and second from MPH), Tropical Affairs: Episodes from an Expat’s Life in Malaysia, due out this year, and I really need to go through it and catch any mistakes and rewrite that introduction! Other work is piling up too and that's good if you want to be a writer…

* Here's an update of the Psychoanalyzed part after it got published in 2011.

**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 

“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 

“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 

“Teh-O in K.L.”: The Story Behind The Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

“Teh-O in K.L.” was my first piece of writing (to my knowledge) that had an impact on someone’s life when it first came out in Her World (Oct 1992), six months before the publication of the original Lovers and Strangers. A British woman who had read the story, unaware that I was a writer since we had just met, told me that she had insisted that her Malay husband read it, so he would understand what she had been going through as a Western woman married to a Malaysian living in Malaysia. When she told me what the story was about, I had this strong feeling of déjà vu.

“I wrote that,” I said, and she gave me this look: No-way!

The teh-o in the title is tea without condensed milk and K.L., of course, is Kuala Lumpur. The story, which is more of a vignette, is based on a true incident. I was trying to capture what I had been feeling as a Westerner in Malaysia, this fish-out-of-water experience, whereby opposites do attract, yet there is this sense of longing, a yearning, as an expat, to be with someone from your own culture. Too often we try to deny this, or even go out of our way to avoid other expats, especially those of us married to Malaysians, who (rightly or wrongly) see ourselves outside the typical expat community who come and go.

I wrote this story in the present tense, one of three in the original collection, and chose to use Jeya’s actual name (with her permission). She was quite thrilled! At the time that I met her, she was in an unhappy marriage to a much-older Indian national, whom she later divorced and then married a Brit and moved to the UK where she now lives with four children.

“Do you miss being around whites?” This was Jeya’s real-life blunt question about race that prompted me to think that there’s a story here, especially after the entrance of two Western women, backpackers, “wearing sleeveless loose tops, short shorts and no bras” that suddenly attracted every male’s attention, including my own. Jeya quickly noted this, thus catching me in a white lie about my missing being around “whites”, or white women in particular.

Despite “Teh-O in K.L.” being published six times in five countries and translated into Japanese, the editor for Silverfish didn’t think I should include it. Then I remembered that encounter with the Brit as well as other expats, particularly women, who often cited this story as one of their favorites since they can strongly relate to it. It was even published in The Expat (Feb. 2004), so I argued for its inclusion. I also agreed to do another overhaul of the story (while on vacation in the US), whereby I flushed out more of the details and heightened some of the contrasts that I was going after. For the MPH version I toned down some of the excesses since they had been written in a rush.

An editor in the US, who had read an early version of the story, mentioned that they all really liked the line “…stir the thick white milk into her dark tea until the opposing colors become one.” From the beginning this was story of opposites, and that was reflected in the opening paragraph, which didn’t change other than deleting one needless fragment.

“Call it a black and white thing, though Jeya isn’t black. Not African black. She’s Ceylonese, but born in Malaysia. Yet her skin in blacker than the night.”

What did change the most was the ending. The original version focused on Jeya and me, on our new friendship, and on our respective spouses. This seemed to drag out over several paragraphs and away from the story itself. When I revisited the story in 2005, I opted to focus on the two women who had just left, on the race issue, on this sense of longing, and on the tea itself, all compacted into one paragraph.

“As I look down at my tea, I’m wishing they’re still here, so I’m not the only white person left. Jeya is saying something, but I’m no longer listening. For a long moment, I’m wishing I were back in my own country with someone from my own race. But then the moment passes, and I finish my tea.”

Recently a French expat living in Sarawak, emailed me and said that "Teh-O in KL" was one of her favorite stories “because it touches me personally and because it tells me that we both feel the same beyond the gender ‘thing’.”

So I’m glad I left the story in the collection.

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 ia 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