Inspired by Immigration

JANET TAY speaks to Canadian author JUDY FONG BATES about the Chinese diaspora in Canada and growing up as an immigrant child caught between two worlds

JUDY FONG BATES is the author of the critically acclaimed short-story collection, China Dog and Other Stories, and the novel, Midnight at the Dragon Café. Her family memoir, The Year of Finding Memory, was published in April 2010 by Random House of Canada. The Canadian author was in Kuala Lumpur in early 2012.


JUDY FONG BATES, the author of Midnight at the Dragon Café
and China Dog and Other Stories, at Kinokuniya KLCC


Tell us a little about growing up in Canada, what kind of neighbourhood you lived in and what life was like for you and your family.
I grew up in a small town in southern Ontario. We have four seasons with winters that are cold and long. My family was very poor and my father operated a hand laundry. For my parents, life didn’t change that much from one day to the next, because all they did was work. I went to school and played with my friends. My childhood didn’t feel all that different from what other Canadian children were experiencing. School was the focus of my life. It is only in retrospect that I realise that it was different. My parents did not speak English, we ate different food, we were separated by language and culture. There was no Chinese community in the small town where we lived. We were only an hour’s drive from Chinatown in the big city, but because we were poor and didn’t have a car, it might as well have been a thousand. For the first few years, I was the only Chinese child and my mother was the only Chinese woman in town.

Is the experience of an immigrant child easier than that of adults, your parents, for example, as there would be more ways in which you could be integrated into Canadian culture and society through school?
Absolutely, no doubt about that. Just by virtue of going to school, I soaked up Western culture like a sponge. Being far away from the influence of a Chinese community, my cultural reference points became white. I never saw myself reflected in the community around me, and was thus never really validated. In trying so hard to fit in, I became completely westernized.

Is it important to retain that culture?
The answer is both yes and no. I would never want to turn my back on my Chinese roots. That culture is at the heart of who I am. My parents grew up in China. I, however, am a product of a different environment. I grew up in a Chinese home, in a small Canadian town, surrounded by white people. I am a reflection of that situation. I became a hybrid. I was unlike my parents and the people in my town. Like most children I had no say in where I lived. There is no point in apologising for being a product of one’s childhood.

Identity crises must have had a prominent place in your life growing up. Do you think it is an issue that affects most immigrants? Did you have other immigrant friends who experienced this? Is it something that stays with you even in adulthood?
I don’t think I had an identity crisis while growing up, at least not in the sense of a meltdown. If I was questioning my identity it was occurring on a subconscious level. I have always been an outsider, even within my own family. But that realisation came slowly, something that I came to understand as an adult. While I was growing up, I was so busy trying to fit in, that I don’t think that I spent much time, at least consciously, [dwelling on] the fact that I was living in two worlds. It was my given and I accepted it. I cannot speak for other immigrants. However, my hunch is that identity is something that most immigrants struggle with, some more than others.

Do you feel it now?
I have two half-brothers and a half-sister in Canada. We left behind in China a half-brother and a half-sister. The sibling closest to me is eight years older, so I grew up, in a sense, as an only child. I am the only one of my siblings who has been completely educated in English. We are separated by age, language, culture and education. When I moved to Toronto as a young adult, I felt, again, like an outsider. Even though there was a Chinese community in the city, I didn’t feel connected to it. But then again, I think most writers are outsiders. It’s where I find my voice.

You say that had you not been an immigrant, you would probably not write. The theme of immigration and diaspora does feature prominently in all your books. Is this also true of your first book, China Dog, a collection of stories?
Yes, stories that take place in Toronto, in a small town and about the Chinese community. Some of them are funny, some of them deal with cultural clashes. Conflicts in these stories have to do with cultural as well as generational differences. The older generations arrived as young adults, and the younger generation arrived as children or are born there. So they have different points of view.

Is it more difficult to write a memoir than fiction? Hemingway often talks about the importance of honesty and of course there’s his famous “one true sentence” quote. It can be hard to be honest with even yourself when you put pen to paper. Did you have this problem when writing your memoir, The Year of Finding Memory?
I think that because you are dealing with people who are still alive, you have to be careful. Except for my husband, I did change the names of the people in the book to protect their privacy. I get asked that question a lot by creative writing students. As a writer, you have to ask yourself, what kind of truth are you aiming at when you write a memoir. Is it factual or emotional truth? In a memoir, there is a certain degree of what I call recreation. For instance, there are certain scenes in my childhood which I recall in great detail. Those may not be factually accurate to the last detail, but through recreating a particular scene I hope to convey an emotional truth to the reader.

What about difficult memories?
The most important question is whether I have a story. And yes, there are difficult memories, but the question always goes back to if those memories help to move the story forward. And if they do, then you have to find a way of including them. For another writer, that might not be so important, but for me it was.

You’ve seen Perak, Penang, Kuching, Kuala Lumpur and Malacca during your travels in Malaysia. Could you tell me briefly about your impression of each state and whether you have a favourite city?
Malaysia is one of the most fascinating countries I have ever visited. My impressions stem from the fact that the culture is a product of many generations of fusion. Although there are distinct groups, each group is influenced by the other. You see it especially in the food. The Chinese might hang on to the rituals of ancestor worship, the Tamils to their Hindu temples, but food always seems to find a way drifting over and adding another flavour, spice or ingredient. It is hard to choose a favourite city. It would be a toss-up between George Town and Kuching. George Town, for its food and historic architecture of Chinese shophouses. I loved the fact that although some of the buildings have been restored, you are still left with a sense of what the town looked like in its original form. Kuching, again, I loved for its food. It’s obvious where my passions lie. But Kuching also because of its proximity to so many wonderful places of natural beauty. In a single day my husband and I hiked in Bako National Park and saw proboscis monkeys, and returned in the afternoon to have dinner at our favourite seafood hawker stall. You can’t do much better than that.

What do you think is the biggest difference between the Chinese diaspora here and in Canada?
Age. The Chinese community in Malaysia is older and much more firmly rooted in the mainstream. The Chinese community in Canada is still relatively new. Even though the first Chinese arrived as labourers on the west coast at the end of the nineteenth century, the biggest influx across the country occurred after 1967 with changes in immigration laws. We are in a sense still “a work in progress,” working towards the mainstream.

How is multiculturalism here different from what exists in Canada?
The multiculturalism that I see in Malaysia is deeply ingrained. It feels like it has been there for a long time. The different groups seem to have a strong sense of belonging, that Malaysia is in fact their true home. Multiculturalism in Canada is relatively new. Before World War II, Canada was predominantly an Anglo culture, French in the province of Quebec. Immigrants didn’t start to arrive in large enough waves until after the war. Canada is very much a young country, one that is still evolving its multicultural identity.

Could you recommend some Canadian novels on the diaspora to our readers?
People from all over the world call Canada their home. The Canadian immigrant story has many different points of view. These are a few: Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, Denise Chong’s The Concubine’s Children, Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes, Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, Nino Ricci’s The Lives of the Saints, Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love, Antanas Sileika’s Buying on Time, Anita Rau Badami’s Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? and Austin Clarke’s The Origin of Waves.

June 2013 Highlights

Novels
1. The Quarry (Little, Brown, 2013) / Iain Banks
2. The Shining Girls (Mulholland Books, 2013) / Lauren Beukes
3. Apple Tree Yard (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Louise Doughty
4. The Ocean at the End of the Lane (William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2013) / Neil Gaiman
5. Last Friends (Little, Brown, 2013) / Jane Gardam
6. The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells (Ecco, 2013) / Andrew Sean Greer
7. Carnival (Penguin, 2013) / Rawi Hage
8. Children Are Diamonds (Arcade, 2013) / Edward Hoagland
9. Firefly (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Janette Jenkins
10. The Year of the Ladybird (Orion, 2013) / Graham Joyce

11. Death of a Dyer (Minotaur Books, 2013) / Eleanor Kuhns
12. TransAtlantic (Random House, 2013) / Colum McCann
13. The Emperor of Paris (Portobello Books) / C.S. Richardson
14. The Shadow Year (Orion, 2013) / Hannah Richell
15. The Professor of Truth (Hamish Hamilton, 2013) / James Robertson
16. Sparta (Farrar, Straus & Giroux/Sarah Crichton Books, 2013) / Roxana Robinson
17. Big Brother (Harper, 2013) / Lionel Shriver
18. Sisterland (Random House/Doubleday, 2013) / Curtis Sittenfeld
19. All the Birds, Singing (Jonathan Cape, 2013) / Evie Wyld

First Novels
1. In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (Soho Press, 2013) / Matt Bell
2. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls (Riverhead/Tinder Press, 2013) / Anton DiSclafani
3. The Story of Before (Corvus, 2013) / Susan Stairs
4. The Blood of Heaven (Grove, 2013) / Kent Wascom

Poetry
1. The Last Parade (Liveright, 2013) / Adam Fitzgerald

Nonfiction
1. The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh 1956-1958 (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Ronald Blythe
2. Careless People: Murder, Mayhem & the Invention of The Great Gatsby (Virago, 2013) / Sarah Churchwell
3. Modernity Britain: 1957-63 (Bloomsbury, 2013) / David Kynaston
4. Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo (W.W. Norton/Harvill Secker, 2013) / Tim Parks

Horror, heartache ... and hope

SHANTINI SUNTHARAJAH talks to Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist ADAM JOHNSON about the extraordinary life of an orphan in modern-day North Korea

Adam Johnson wins the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction
for his second novel, The Orphan Master’s Son

ADAM JOHNSON isn’t your average, run-of-the-mill writer. For one thing, he doesn’t reply email interviews in the conventional way. Instead of written answers and long anecdotes, he submits a ten-minute video of himself, sitting in his bright, red kitchen in San Francisco, California.

Johnson’s video reply is as candid as it is unusual. His answers are clear and precise, and he hardly hesitates and never second-guesses himself—a useful trait for an associate professor who teaches creative writing at Stanford University in California.

There’s a popular saying that goes, “those who do not do, teach” but if that is the rule, Johnson is clearly the exception. Other than showing bright young minds how best to shape words into worthy stories, Johnson also spends his time writing his own. He has won the Whiting Writers’ Award as well as the California Book Award for his first novel Parasites Like Us. He has also written a short-story collection called Emporium and his fiction has appeared in well-known publications such as Esquire, Harper’s, Paris Review, Tin House, Best American Short Stories and even Playboy.

People tend to imagine college professors as “serious” types and Johnson initially appears to fit this unsmiling, scholarly image. However, his quirky sense of humour and unusual train of thought emerge two minutes into his home-made video. In the midst of answering a question about his life, he suddenly smiles at the camera and says: “I live in California where people around me do dog acupuncture and do yoga with their dogs!”

Johnson’s personality is also refreshingly different. He is extremely modest and describes himself as a “pretty average guy”—completely sidestepping the fact that he’s an associate professor at a world-renowned university and that he’s a multiple award-winning author.

Despite his many accolades in the literary world, the South Dakota-born author doesn’t think writing ranks high on the list of pleasurable activities. “I don’t find it to be necessarily fun,” Johnson says with characteristic frankness. However, he is also the first to admit that writing is an extremely rewarding and satisfying pursuit and something he can’t live without. “If I don’t write for a while I get cranky,” he confides, with a wide grin.

Then, his expression turns serious as he reveals his personal philosophy about the art of putting pen to paper. “Writing allows you to be better than yourself. When someone takes the time to orchestrate a story all the way through, I think that, in some ways, it’s better than the person who created it.”

Johnson’s most recent novel, The Orphan Master’s Son, revolves around a North Korean boy who grows up and runs a brutal work camp for orphans during Dear Leader Kim Jong-Il’s horrific rule. The book is being hailed as a breakthrough novel that has provided the people of North Korea a much-needed voice.

Johnson says the idea for the book first took hold when he was moved to read about North Korea due to an ongoing fascination with propaganda. The notion that there would be one narrative for an entire country instead of a world in which every citizen would be the central character in his or her own life, shocked his sensibilities as much as it captivated his intellectual curiosity. “In North Korea, the state writes the national story, you’re told your role in it and if you don’t fulfil that role, it comes at your peril.”

Johnson says he conducted research for his book by reading stories of defectors who had barely escaped with their lives from North Korea’s soul-crushing regime. “Those stories were very moving and powerful. I read about people who had survived the gulags, had survived the famine, had survived the purges and brutality. Just the boring banality of factory or peasant labour, day in and day out ... without hope of anything different.”

Johnson believes that what’s happening in North Korea is the most cruel and absorbing psychological “experiment” on the planet and feels that literary fiction—a combination of imagination and research—would be the best way to frame a story that is set in a place about which very little is known.

Other less-dedicated writers might have been content to plug in their own version of events in places where they were unable to unveil the truth through pure research, but Johnson actually visited the country he was writing about. This undoubtedly required great courage as he intimately knows the dangers, horrors and the heartache of a land that has long been held in the grip of incredibly cruel, merciless leaders.

While there were many strange and haunting experiences about North Korea that remain embedded in his mind, Johnson says his “invisibility” was the strangest and possibly the saddest experience of all. “I’m a big American guy and I look different than the Korean people both in behaviour and appearance, but I noticed that they seemed not to notice me at all. I had the experience of feeling transparent, really,” he says with a shadow of sorrow clouding his expression.

The always-vigilant writer in him noticed that people were curious but no one had the courage to catch his eye. “They didn’t even dare look at me and look away. They ‘censored’ themselves before they even saw me.”

Johnson hopes Pak Jun Do, the fascinating and multi-faceted protagonist in The Orphan Master’s Son, will prove to be a beacon for the real people of North Korea. “Jun Do is a person who is longing for love, who wants to live his life his own way.” Jun Do starts out as a model citizen but eventually decides to carve out his own destiny. The author hopes his readers will come to understand that this innate desire to shape one’s own life—something the rest of the world takes for granted—is unimaginably difficult in North Korea.

Johnson says he took more than half a decade to write The Orphan Master’s Son. “I thought I was going crazy, being the only person writing a literary novel about North Korea. My friends thought I was embarking on a truly bananas project!” Writing the book was a long and often lonely journey but he persevered. “I felt a duty and a calling from the beginning. Hopefully, the book will cast a light on the true, cruel fates of all the people there,” he says.

Johnson’s book can at times be quite difficult to read. The broken limbs, forced lobotomies and torture scenes—as one reviewer put it—are enough to make a reader feel nauseous. Shockingly, Johnson says he actually downplayed the horrors of the gulag in his novel. “Some people think there’s a dark streak in there but I left the true dark streak out and had to approach it through metaphors instead.”

One of the most common pieces of advice given to writers is that they should write about what they know. It is indeed a testament to Johnson’s talent and skill as a wordsmith that he is able to handle topics that couldn’t be further removed from his peaceful, sunny, happy life in San Francisco, California. “I have a happy marriage, I have three kids, I try to write and I try to read. I think it’s pretty uninteresting other than that but those are all of the things I love in life so I wouldn’t want anything more.”

SHANTINI SUNTHARAJAH is a great Enid Blyton fan. She was inspired to become a writer after reading her mother’s early edition of The Famous Five: Five on a Treasure Island when she was nine. Life, however, had other plans for her, and she ended up an engineer, but the call of the written word proved too strong. Through circuitous and unexpected circumstances, she eventually became a journalist and then a freelance writer. She loves nothing more than to spend hours seeking out words that will perfectly convey what she wants to say. Suntharajah lives in Kuala Lumpur.

May 2013 Highlights

Novels
1. Americanah (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
2. Grace and Mary (Scepter, 2013) / Melvyn Bragg
3. A Delicate Truth (Viking, 2013) / John le Carré
4. Blood and Beauty (Virago, 2013) / Sarah Dunant
5. The Round House (Corsair, 2013) / Louise Erdrich
6. Fallen Land (Atlantic Books, 2013) / Patrick Flanery
7. King of Cuba (Scribner, 2013) / Cristina García
8. Flora (Bloomsbury USA, 2013) / Gail Godwin
9. Clever Girl (Jonathan Cape, 2013) / Tessa Hadley
10. The Humans (Canongate Books, 2013) / Matt Haig

11. Under the Radar (Faber & Faber, 2013) / James Hamilton-Paterson
12. The Asylum (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) / John Harwood
13. A Dual Inheritance (Ballantine Books, 2013) / Joanna Hershon
14. And the Mountains Echoed (Riverhead, 2013) / Khaled Hosseini
15. The Hundred Hearts (Thomas Allen Publishers, 2013) / William Kowalski
16. Questions of Travel (Little, Brown, 2013) / Michelle de Kretser
17. Is This Tomorrow (Algonquin Books, 2013) / Caroline Leavitt
18. Unwritten (Center Street, 2013) / Charles Martin
19. TransAtlantic (Bloomsbury, 2013) / Colum McCann
20. Constance (Bloomsbury Circus, 2013) / Patrick McGrath

21. The Woman Upstairs (Virago. 2013) / Claire Messud
22. The Son (Grove, 2013) / Philipp Meyer
23. On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf Press, 2013) / Ru Freeman
24. Big Brother (HarperCollins, 2013) / Lionel Shriver
25. Angelopolis (Viking, 2013) / Danielle Trussoni

First Novels
1. We Need New Names (Reagan Arthur Books, 2013) / NoViolet Bulawayo
2. Meeting the English (Picador, 2013) / Kate Clanchy
3. You Are One of Them (Penguin Press, 2013) / Elliott Holt
4. Coming in from the Sea (Headline Review, 2013) / Johanna Lane
5. A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (Hogarth, 2013) / Anthony Marra
6. Apology (Milkweed, 2013) / Jon Pineda
7. The Son (Tinder Press, 2013) / Michel Rostain
8. If I Close My Eyes Now (trans. from the Spanish by Nick Caistor) (Doubleday, 2013) / Edney Silvestre

Stories
1. A Guide to Being Born (Riverhead, 2013) / Ramona Ausubel
2. The Pre-War House and Other Stories (Salt Publishing, 2013) / Alison Moore
3. Between Friends (trans. from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverstein) (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Amos Oz
4. Fools (W.W. Norton, 2013) / Joan Silber

Poetry
1. Maggie & Me (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013) / Damian Barr
2. The Taken-down God (Carcanet Press, 2013) / Jorie Graham
3. Necessities (White Pine Press, 2013) / Christopher Merrill

Nonfiction
1. Deer Island (Little Toller Books, 2013) / Neil Ansell
2. How to Read Literature (Yale University Press, 2013) / Terry Eagleton
3. Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (Harper Perennial, 2013) / Peter Hessler
4. The Serpent’s Promise: The Bible Retold as Science (Little, Brown, 2013) / Steve Jones
5. Forty-One False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Janet Malcolm
6. The Cooked Seed (Bloomsbury USA, 2013) / Anchee Min
7. A Fort of Nine Towers (Picador, 2013) / Qais Akbar Omar
8. A Place in the Country (trans. from the German by Jo Catling) (Hamish Hamilton, 2013) / W.G. Sebald
9. The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/Hamish Hamilton, 2013) / Paul Theroux

The Constant Gardener



TAN TWAN ENG, the author of The Gift of Rain
and The Garden of Evening Mists

SHANTINI SUNTHARAJAH learns that the seed of Malaysian novelist TAN TWAN ENG’s writing career was planted early and well tended thereafter

TAN TWAN ENG is a straightforward sort of person. Beautiful, complex sentences are his forte on the printed page, but his answers for this piece is nothing if not brutally candid and clear-cut. When asked how he would describe himself, Tan states: “A person who finds answering a question like this self-indulgent. I’ll leave it to you to describe me—it’s your job after all.”

And when I ask him what he thinks his chances of winning the 2012 Man Booker Prize for Fiction are and what is the first thing he will do if he wins, he replies, “There are six shortlisted authors, so the odds of my winning are one in six. What’s the first thing I’ll do if I win? Walk up to the podium and accept the prize.”

Although the Malaysian novelist did not walk up to the podium to accept the prize (the winner was British novelist Hilary Mantel for Bring Up the Bodies, an ambitious and richly detailed historical novel about Thomas Cromwell and the treachery in the court of King Henry VIII), the fame and glory of being “merely” shortlisted is something nearly every other author around the world can only dream of. With The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan has become the first Malaysian to be shortlisted for the prestigious international literary prize. [In March 2013, Tan was declared the winner of the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize. He was shortlisted for the prize along with Jeet Thayil, Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk, Musharraf Ali Farooqi and Hiromi Kawakami.]

Tan, who grew up in Penang and later in Kuala Lumpur, says he had an idyllic, uneventful childhood. “I was fortunate to have parents who let me read anything I wanted to. No censorship at all, and I’ve always appreciated the trust they had in me.”

One of Tan’s earliest memories about books and writing goes all the way back to when he was just five or six years old. “I realised that I enjoyed reading a book of texts more than an illustrated book. It felt more fulfilling.” At the age of ten, he remembers thinking that writers had an easy life. “All I’d need to do was write a book and live off the royalties for the rest of my life. How completely wrong I’ve been proven!”

As it turned out, the ten-year-old would indeed grow up to become a writer but only after he had put in some time in law school. “I practised intellectual property law for about five years. I don’t miss it, but I miss the structure it gives to my days.”

Despite the lack of structure, Tan appears to be more than capable of following an organised routine. “I write from nine-thirty in the morning to five in the evening, sometimes later. I take a number of breaks in between. I work five days a week, but when I approach the completion of a novel I’m working on, the hours become much longer and I usually work on weekends, too.”

It seems that Tan adopts this regimented approach in other areas of his life as well. “Always be punctual for meetings,” which he says is his personal motto, comes across as an unusually dry maxim, coming from the fertile mind of a fiction writer, but it ties in perfectly with his disciplined mindset.

There must be something to this ordered outlook because Tan is one of a rare breed of writers who achieve great success from the very beginning of their writing careers. Tan’s début novel, The Gift of Rain, about a young man’s journey through wartime deceptions and loyalties, was critically acclaimed and longlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and of course his second published work, The Garden of Evening Mists, has earned him eternal bragging rights and a coveted spot alongside other writers who have made the shortlist over the years, such as Colm Tóibín, Sarah Waters, Zadie Smith, Anita Desai, David Mitchell and Rohinton Mistry, among others.

Set in Cameron Highlands in the 1950s, The Garden of Evening Mists tells the story of seventeen-year-old Teoh Yun Ling, the sole survivor of a Japanese internment camp, and her complex relationship with the self-exiled taciturn Nakamura Aritomo, the owner of the only Japanese garden in Malaya and once the gardener of Emperor Hirohito of Japan. Yun Ling hopes to create a Japanese garden in memory of her beloved older sister who died in the camp. It is a heart-wrenching tale of remembrance and forgiveness narrated in a strong yet quiet voice.

TAN TWAN ENG, winner of the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize
for his second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists

Tan says the ideas and central theme for the book came to him over time. “There wasn’t a single lightning-bolt moment; for me writing doesn’t work like that,” he says. “I had some of the ideas already and it was just a question of sitting down at my desk and struggling hard to get them all to cohere.”

Tan’s novel reveals remarkably well-researched details about Japanese culture and he admits that it grew out of his passion for aikido, a type of Japanese martial arts. “I practised aikido for ten years. I was obsessed by it. It’s one of the more traditional Japanese martial arts, and to improve your skills in it you have to understand its historical and cultural contexts. My knowledge was accumulated through reading and talking to visiting instructors.”


From left: Tan Twan Eng, Deborah Levy, Hilary Mantel,
Will Self, Alison Moore and Jeet Thayil

Despite his rigorous writing routine, Tan says it took him more than three years to complete The Garden of Evening Mists. He admits that he faced a few challenges during the early stages of the writing process. “Getting the structure and the balance right. For the novel to work, the sequence of chapters had to be carefully considered.”

Tan, who now lives in Cape Town, hopes his novel will prove to be a transformative experience for readers and change the way they look at things. He is confident that those who attempt a second read will be rewarded with fresh new aspects of the story. “If you reread it, you’ll view aspects of the book from a different angle. It’s similar to walking through the same garden you’ve already seen, but at different times of the day, or in another season of the year.”

For those keen on being a novelist, Tan’s advice is: “Read as much and as widely as you can. Be thankful if there’s someone in your life who can give you the harshest, most honest criticisms about your work. If you don’t have such a person, find one. You must be able to accept those brutally honest criticisms. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. A manuscript will never be perfect, but you should do everything possible to make it so. Find out everything you can about the publishing industry. Read the trade journals. If writing is to be your career, you should have a working knowledge of all its aspects.”

April 2013 Highlights

Novels
1. Harvard Square (W.W. Norton, 2013) / André Aciman
2. Americanah (Fourth Estate, 2013) / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3. The Blind Man’s Garden (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Nadeem Aslam
4. Life After Life (Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown, 2013) / Kate Atkinson
5. Tapestry of Fortunes (Random House, 2013) / Elizabeth Berg
6. This House is Haunted (Doubleday, 2013) / John Boyne
7. The House of Special Purpose (Other Press, 2013) / John Boyne
8. Six Years (Orion, 2013) / Harlan Coben
9. The Childhood of Jesus (Harvill Secker, 2013) / J.M. Coetzee
10. Paris Was the Place (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Susan Conley

11. The Sea of Innocence (Simon & Schuster, 2013) / Kishwar Desai
12. Last Friends (Europa Editions, 2013) / Jane Gardam
13. The Mothers (Scribner, 2013) / Jennifer Gilmore
14. Benediction (Picador, 2013) / Kent Haruf
15. Fever (Simon & Schuster, 2013) / Mary Beth Keane
16. Five Days (Atria Books, 2013) / Douglas Kennedy
17. A Man in Love: My Struggle: Book 2 (trans. from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett) (Harvill Secker, April 2013) / Karl Ove Knausgaard
18. The Flamethrowers (Scribner, 2013) / Rachel Kushner
19. The View from Penthouse B (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) / Elinor Lipman
20. Woke Up Lonely (Graywolf Press, 2013) / Fiona Maazel

21. The Dark Road (trans. from the Chinese by Flora Drew) (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Ma Jian
22. The Lost (Headline, 2013) / Claire McGowan
23. Constance (Bloomsbury USA, 2013) / Patrick McGrath
24. The Woman Upstairs (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Claire Messud
25. Odds Against Tomorrow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Nathaniel Rich
26. Paris (Doubleday, 2013) / Edward Rutherfurd
27. Orkney (Counterpoint, 2013) / Amy Sackville
28. All That Is (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / James Salter
29. The Edge of the Earth (Atria Books, 2013) / Christina Schwarz
30. The Hungry Ghosts (Doubleday Canada, 2013) / Shyam Selvadurai

31. The Accidental Apprentice (Simon & Schuster, 2013) / Vikas Swarup
32. Fear in the Sunlight (Harper, 2013) / Nicola Upson
33. The Interestings (Riverhead, 2013) / Meg Wolitzer
34. Sister Sister (Kwela Books, 2013) / Rachel Zadok

First Novels
1. The Movement of Stars (Riverhead, 2013) / Amy Brill
2. Idiopathy (Fourth Estate, 2013) / Sam Byers
3. Clapham Lights (Silvertail Books, 2013) / Tom Canty
4. The Gamal (Bloomsbury Circus, 2013) / Ciarán Collins
5. The Shock of the Fall (HarperCollins, 2013) / Nathan Filer
6. Ghost Moth (Bellevue Literary Press, 2013) / Michèle Forbes
7. Red Sky in Morning (Quercus, 2013) / Paul Lynch
8. The River of No Return (Dutton, 2013) / Bee Ridgway
9. Ghana Must Go (Viking, 2013) / Taiye Selasi
10. The Hope Factory (Tinder Press, 2013) / Lavanya Sankaran

11. The Rosie Project (Michael Joseph/Penguin USA, 2013) / Graeme Simsion
12. The View on the Way Down (Picador, 2013) / Rebecca Wait
13. The Golem and the Jinni (Harper, 2013) / Helen Wecker
14. The Third Son (Algonquin Books, 2013) / Julie Wu

Stories
1. Nothing Cold Can Stay (Canongate Books, 2013) / Ron Rash

Poetry
1. Metaphysical Dog (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Frank Bidart
2. Collected Poems (ed. Frederick Glaysher) (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2013) / Robert Hayden
3. Pluto (Picador, 2013) / Glyn Maxwell
4. Drysalter (Jonathan Cape, 2013) / Michael Symmons Roberts

Nonfiction
1. Levels of Life (Jonathan Cape, 2013) / Julian Barnes
2. She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Emma Brockes
3. The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / David Cannadine
4. The Return of a King: Shah Shuja and the First Battle for Afghanistan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / William Dalrymple
5. Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Philip F. Gura
6. Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (Harper Perennial, 2013) / Peter Hessler
7. I Can’t Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) / Elinor Lipman
8. Silence: A Christian History (Allen Lane, 2013) / Diarmaid MacCulloch
9. Country Girl (Little, Brown, 2013) / Edna O’Brien
10. A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Qais Akbar Omar

11. The Still Point of the Turning World (Two Roads, 2013) / Emily Rapp

March 2013 Highlights

Novels
1. Best Kept Secret (Macmillan, 2013) / Jeffrey Archer
2. Life After Life (Doubleday/Little, Brown, 2013) / Kate Atkinson
3. Six Years (Dutton, 2013) / Harlan Coben
4. The Gods of Heavenly Punishment (W.W. Norton, 2013) / Jennifer Cody Epstein
5. The Childhood of Jesus (Harvill Secker, 2013) / J.M. Coetzee
6. Harvest (Picador/Nan A. Talese, 2013) / Jim Crace
7. Home Fires (Bloomsbury, 2013) / Elizabeth Day
8. A Thousand Pardons (Random House, 2013) / Jonathan Dee
9. The Monster’s Lament (Doubleday, 2013) / Robert Edric
10. The Five Acts of Diego Leon (Random House, 2013) / Alex Espinoza

11. The Hired Man (Bloomsbury, 2013) / Aminatta Forna
12. Schroder (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Amity Gaige
13. Middle C (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / William H. Gass
14. The End of the Point (Harper, 2013) / Elizabeth Graver
15. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Hamish Hamilton/Riverhead Books, 2013) / Mohsin Hamid
16. Benediction (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Kent Haruf
17. The Obituary Writer (W.W. Norton, 2013) / Ann Hood
18. Ordinary Grace (Atria Books, 2013) / William Kent Krueger
19. The Thief of Words (Quantuck Lane Press, 2013) / Starling Lawrence
20. The Abundance (Metropolitan Books, 2013) / Amit Majmudar

21. Brief Loves That Live Forever (trans. from the French by Geoffrey Strachan) (MacLehose Press, 2013) / Andreï Makine
22. The Infatuations (trans. from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa) (Hamish Hamilton, 2013) / Javier Marías
23. Life After Life (A Shannon Ravenel Book/Algonquin Books, 2013) / Jill McCorkle
24. Jacob’s Folly (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Rebecca Miller
25. The Quickening (Hammer, 2013) / Julie Myerson
26. The Accursed (Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers, 2013) / Joyce Carol Oates
27. This Magnificent Desolation (Bloomsbury USA, 2013) / Thomas O’Malley
28. A Tale for the Time Being (Canongate Books/Viking, 2013) / Ruth Ozeki
29. The Mountain Shadow (Abacus/Little, Brown, 2013) / Gregory David Roberts
30. Where Tigers Are At Home (trans. from the French by Mike Mitchell) (Other Press, 2013) / Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès

31. Red Joan (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Jennie Rooney
32. Honor (Viking, 2013) / Elif Shafak
33. Mary Coin (Blue Rider Press, 2013) / Marisa Silver
34. The Silence and the Roar (trans. from the Arabic by Max Weiss) (Other Press, 2013) / Nihad Sirees
35. The Burgess Boys (Random House, 2013) / Elizabeth Strout
36. The City of Devi (Bloomsbury, 2013) / Manil Suri
37. Helsinki Blood (Putnam, 2013) / James Thompson
38. Secrecy (Granta Books, 2013) / Rupert Thomson
39. The Magic of Saida (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / M.G. Vassanji
40. The Retrospective (trans. from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) / A.B. Yehoshua

First Novels
1. Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (St. Martin’s Press, 2013) / Therese Anne Fowler
2. The Palace of Curiosities (HarperCollins, 2013) / Rosie Garland
3. Telling the Bees (Putnam, 2013) / Peggy Hesketh
4. The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (Viking, 2013 / Kristopher Jansma
5. Elysian Fields (Mid-City, 2013) / Mark LaFlaur
6. A Map of Tulsa (Penguin, 2013) / Benjamin Lytal
7. The Fields (Little, Brown, 2013) / Kevin Maher
8. Rage Against the Dying (Minotaur Books, 2013) / Becky Masterman
9. Elders (Hogarth, 2013) / Ryan McIlvain
10. Falling to Earth (Europa Editions, 2013) / Kate Southwood

Stories
1. Damage Control (St. Martin’s Press, 2013) / Amber Dermont
2. This Close (Graywolf Press, 2013) / Jessica Francis Kane
3. Any Deadly Thing (Dzanc Books, 2013) / Roy Kesey
4. The Fun Parts (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Sam Lipsyte
5. I Want To Show You More (Grove Press, 2013) / Jamie Quatro

Poetry
1. Recalculating (University of Chicago Press, 2013) / Charles Bernstein
2. Dear Boy (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Emily Berry
3. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (2nd Edition) (W.W. Norton, 2013) / Paul Hoover (ed.)
4. The Word on the Street (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Paul Muldoon
5. Selected and New Poems: 1962-2012 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) / Charles Simic
6. Anatomy of Melancholy and Other Poems (Penguin Books, 2013) / Robert Wrigley

Nonfiction
1. Confronting the Classics (Profile Books, 2013) / Mary Beard
2. She Left Me the Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me (Faber & Faber, March 2013) / Emma Brockes
3. The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences (Allen Lane, 2013) / David Cannadine
4. Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (Viking, 2013) / Paul Auster & J.M. Coetzee
5. The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013) / A.C. Grayling
6. The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Aleksandar Hemon
7. Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century (Little, Brown, 2013) / Eric Hobsbawn
8. Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent Self (Harvard University Press, 2013) / Gish Jen
9. The Science of Monsters (Constable, 2013) / Matt Kaplan
10. On Writing (Jonathan Cape, 2013) / A.L. Kennedy

11. Landscapes of the Metropolis: Reflections on Memory and Imagination (trans. by Ralph Mandel) (Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2013) / Otto Dov Kulka
12. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) / Megan Marshall
13. Trespassers (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Julia O’Faolain
14. The Still Point of the Turning World (Penguin USA, 2013) / Emily Rapp
15. O My America!: Second Acts in a New World (Jonathan Cape, 2013) / Sara Wheeler

Inking Success

Known for his intricate designs on coffee cups, CHEEMING BOEY, the author of When I Was a Kid, recently toured Malaysia and Singapore to share his passion and inspire young artists. ALYCIA LIM spoke to him in Singapore

WHEN his eight-and-a-half-year relationship ended in 2006, Cheeming Boey packed his bags and left for Thailand for a breath of fresh air. While looking for something to occupy his time with, he stumbled upon Scott Dikkers’s I Went to College and It Was Okay, and was immediately inspired by it. “Having just broken up with my girlfriend at that time, I thought perhaps I should start a blog, and one day she would read it and know that I had changed for the better,” he says.

Thirty-four-year-old Malaysian-born Boey decided that he would use a style similar to Dikkers for his new blog, where he would come up with a cartoon strip each day to document his daily life. “I also thought that, maybe, I’d become popular from my blog. And then it all happened. I mean, the most unlikely thing that I thought would happen, happened.”

As if based on a script, Boey’s life took an unexpected turn when he started drawing on Styrofoam cups around the same time. “When I first drew on a cup, I didn’t expect much from it. In fact, I didn’t expect anything. It was just something I did for fun. Then a friend asked me what I would do with them, and I told him that maybe I could sell them one day.”

It was only when that friend told him the cups wouldn’t sell that Boey decided to take his cup art seriously. “I wanted to prove him wrong. My friend told me no one would buy that ‘crap’, and that was what challenged me to seriously begin to promote and try to sell my cups.”

With lots of patience and determination plus a spirit of competitiveness, he eventually found an avenue to do so at a small arts fair. “The cups were never part of my game plan as I always wanted to do something with my blog first. However, when my cup art started going viral, people also began discovering my blog.”

Today, Boey’s coffee cup art has drawn the attention of artists and art enthusiasts from around the world. A piece of work can take anytime between one day and a month or longer to complete, but it’s always almost in black and white with minimal colours added. “Sometimes, less is more. When you put on too many colours, it can distract you from the drawing itself,” says Boey.

Despite the positive interest he has garnered for his delicate pieces of art, Boey remains steadfast in his daily blog updates. “I like storytelling. Each cup tells a story, but it’s not personal like the blog. I also have fans who have been following my blog for years, and it is important not to let them down.”

Remembering a time when he was close to giving it up entirely, Boey says he is glad he kept the blog going. “It takes me two to three hours a day just to come up with a simple blog post, and I don’t make any money out of it. But looking back, I’m glad I didn’t give it up because it’s the glue that holds everything I do right now.”

He recently published a book, When I Was a Kid, as a reflection of his childhood. Appearing on the bestseller lists in Malaysian bookstores recently, the book, says Boey, is a compilation of his memories as a child growing up in Johor and of his schooldays in Singapore. “The style of my book is very similar to my blog. The only difference is, the book revolves around stories of my childhood, instead of my current day-to-day life.”

Sharing memories of his childhood, the author admits he didn’t always have it easy. “I was a fat kid, and didn’t do very well academically. Six days into Junior College in Singapore, I dropped out and went to the US.”

He has been living in the US ever since. However, the alumnus of the Academy of Art University (AAU) in San Francisco still considers Malaysia and Singapore home. “I try to come back once every six months to visit my family and enjoy the food back home. I love this place, but I only wish there was more emphasis placed on the arts.”

In his tour around Malaysia and Singapore to promote When I Was a Kid, Boey explains that he has a greater purpose in mind. “I’ve always been interested in helping the art industry in Malaysia and Singapore get up to speed, and my books are not my main purpose for touring this part of the world. I want to share how animation is done overseas since that’s the industry I was in originally, and the importance of art.”

He advises aspiring artists and designers to work hard and believe in their work. “I’ve had failures, but I’ve always been willing to take risks because I learned to fail from a very young age. If you try something once and it doesn’t work out, try again.”

Asked if he currently has anything up his sleeve, Boey cheekily replies, “Well, I’m building a bicycle, but everything else is a secret for now.” He did, however, spill the beans about his second book. “My next book is going to be about my travels in the US, but the publication date has yet to be determined.”

With so much going on in his life right now, one can only wonder if this has always been a planned journey for Boey. “I think everyone wants to come out on their own eventually, but for me, it’s happening much earlier than I thought. I’m not complaining; it’s probably a good thing.”

At the end of the day, Boey’s biggest driver is the need to prove himself to others. “I want to make a statement with my work. If the world didn’t care and didn’t say anything about it, it cannot be a statement.”

Reproduced from the October-December 2012 issue of Quill magazine

Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2012: A Storytellers’ Soiree

ZHANG SU LI learned that the world is truly “Bumi Manusia” at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2012

PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER was one of Indonesia’s greatest contemporary writers. While subjected to hard labour, torture and deprivation as a political prisoner on the island prison of Buru in eastern Indonesia, he wrote a story set at the end of Dutch colonial rule. Without pen and paper, he did not actually “write” this story; he narrated it to his fellow prisoners, who then spread it to the other prisoners. This was how his story was preserved. Years later, when he was granted access to writing materials the story evolved into the epic, This Earth of Mankind (Bumi Manusia). The title of Pramoedya’s novel was the theme of this year’s Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (UWRF), celebrating the enduring power of storytelling. From October 3 to 7, 2012, a diverse group of 140 writers from 30 countries congregated in Ubud, the cultural heart of Bali, to share their stories.

ANURADHA ROY

Anuradha Roy, author of An Atlas of Impossible Longing
and The Folded Earth

I arrived at Samhita Garden, a lovely little resort on a quiet lane off the main road, on a Tuesday afternoon, one day before the festival. The familiar sounds of gamelan floating softly in the air, moss-covered stone frogs with mouths agape shooting thin streams of water into a pond, roosters crowing from a distant village, and a gardener greeting me with a smile and a “Selamat siang” transported me to a universe far away from the world of meetings and stressful deadlines. Here were stories of adventure and exploration, of joy and sadness, of courage and endurance, stories of the mind and of the heart. From their hotels all over Ubud, participants are brought to their first dinner together.

For me, this dinner is always a little exciting and daunting. One had to find somebody to talk to, a few to mingle with, or suffer the fate of standing in a corner with a drink in one hand and a canapé in another, hoping that someone would come over and start a conversation. A traditional Balinese dance started halfway through cocktails.

“What dance is that?” A lady with a northern Indian accent asked.

“It’s a traditional Balinese dance.” Of course it is, I thought. “But I do not know exactly what it’s called,” I continued.

She introduced herself as Anuradha Roy.

“Oh! I saw your name in the programme. At first glance I thought it was Arundhati Roy.” As soon as those words flew from my lips, I realised how offensive they were, especially to an author as accomplished as Anuradha Roy. The programme notes stated that she had won several awards for her novels.

“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “In fact, someone wrote on her blog that Arundhati Roy has a new book out!”

I immediately liked her. Over dinner, I learned that she and her husband live in a cottage in Ranikhet, north India, at the foot of the snow-capped Himalayas. She told me about how they first saw the derelict cottage, at the tip of a slope.

“We had to stand on tip-toes because the place was a soggy mess of plastic bags, warped shoes, dented tins and bottles. The cottage had broken windows blinded with sheets of newspaper browned with age. Inside, the floor was a mound of dank mud. Rotted sacking hung from a ruined false ceiling. Beams of wood sagged from it. And in one corner, stood a dog.” Anuradha’s face lit up. “Its eyes shone in its sooty face. Its peaked ears were the colour of copper, and its fringed tail waved slowly side to side, like a banner. Only a few things in life can be pinned to particular moments. And this was one: we knew immediately, my husband and I, that we would live there, in that cottage, on that hill.”

In the same year that they began restoring the cottage, they were also struggling to establish their publishing house. Being in a desolate place, with no Internet access or mobile phone lines, things naturally moved at a different pace. A tree fell onto a wire and they had no power for several days.

“Days passed,” she said, “weeks.”

The carpenter didn’t turn up because his fruit trees had been ravaged by monkeys. Not long after, the plumber went back to his village to tend to his sick buffalo.

“We waited.”

When he returned, he had nothing to do because the taps had not arrived—a landslide had blocked the road.

“We waited.”

Anuradha began planting lily bulbs and rose cuttings. An elderly lady herding goats approached her and said, “Everything happens in its own time. Flowers bloom in their own time.”

Anuradha’s first novel, An Atlas of Impossible Longing, was rejected sixteen times, but she persisted in sending out her manuscript. Weeks passed, months. She waited. When it was finally published a year later, it was translated into 15 languages across the world. Soon after, it was shortlisted for The Economist Crossword Award, longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and was named by World Literature Today as one of the 60 most essential books on modern India. Her second novel, The Folded Earth, was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize, and won The Economist Crossword Award for Fiction 2012.

Flowers bloom in their own time.

JANET STEELE

Janet Steele

The festival atmosphere started to gather momentum the following evening when the rest of the writers arrived. Small groups of people had already gathered on the streets just outside the entrance of the Ubud Palace where the opening festival was held.

An elegant lady dressed in a colourful tropical print halter-neck dress sat on the edge of a gazebo. I had met Janet Steele at the UWRF two years before, and was delighted to see her again.

I sat next to her and asked her what she had been up to. After telling me with child-like excitement about the Malaysian claypot egg tofu with fish roe that she experimented with recently (it turned out delicious), we moved on to the book on journalism and Islam in the Malay Archipelago that she’s currently working on.

I’ve always wondered what drew Steele to Asia. Originally from Florida, and now Associate Professor of Journalism at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, she has lectured on the theory and practice of journalism as a State Department Speaker and Specialist in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, East Timor, Taiwan, Burma, Sudan, Egypt and Bangladesh.

Based in Jakarta, she makes frequent visits to Kuala Lumpur where she works closely with Malaysiakini, Malaysia’s only independent news portal. Her Anglo-Saxon looks—golden hair and blue eyes—always causes a few surprised stares from strangers whenever she speaks Indonesian or Malay, and fluently too. “I’ve always had an interest in the intersection of news and culture,” Steele said when I asked her why she decided to write a book on journalism and Islam.

“I started working on the book after it occurred to me that although the values of good journalism—truth, balance, verification, independence from power—are universal, people the whole world over understand those values through the prisms of local culture.”

“So, what then,” I asked, “in your opinion, is good journalism?”

“Giving the people the information they need in order to make wise decisions in both their public and private lives,” she replied.

What could be nobler than that?

DR. NEAL HALL

The sound of the gong proclaimed that the festival had officially begun. The afternoon sun that felt like tiny pins on my skin earlier on had let up a little. There was even a cool breeze to announce the approaching evening. We headed to Casa Luna for dinner.

Dr. Neal Hall, a muscular man with jovial face and an extremely pleasant personality, joined us at our table. He earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell University where he achieved All Ivy, All East Coast, and All American Honors. He also has a medical degree from Michigan State University, and obtained his ophthalmology surgical subspecialty training at Harvard University.

In his anthology of poems, an introduction reads:

Christians speak of being born again.
The Buddhist speaks of enlightenment.
Not until I experienced
the Zenist’s satori,
this sudden awakening,
did I come to the realization that
despite all insurmountable obstacles
faced and overcome,
to white America,
I am a Nigger for Life

I asked Dr. Hall if the situation really was that bad.

“As a young boy, I was taught to believe Washington never told a lie, Lincoln freed the slaves, that the American dream was a reality well within the reach of every American,” he answered with a smile. “And that all I needed to do to make this dream a reality was apply self-motivation, discipline, hard work and education. After years of academic rigours, freshly minted from a Harvard ophthalmic medical and surgical subspecialty in tow, I discovered, painfully, that despite all my hard work, enthusiasm and drive, America does not deliver equally. Whether I work as an ophthalmologist or poet, my reality is clear-cut. In the eyes of ‘unspoken America’, I am a Nigger for Life.”

The next day I bumped into Dr. Hall again at Casa Luna, waiting for a shuttle van. A Caucasian couple was sitting at a table near the entrance. We took a table next to theirs. Soon after we sat down, the couple moved to another table. Hall took out his book—Nigger for Life, showed it to them and, with a big smile, pointed at himself. I didn’t turn to see how they responded, but we both chuckled with amusement.

DON GEORGE

Don George, editor of Better Than Fiction:
True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers

I shared the panel session, “Honest, I’m working”, with Don George, author of the bestselling Lonely Planet’s Guide to Travel Writing and editor of eight travel anthologies, including The Kindness of Strangers and Better Than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers. George is also editor-at-large for National Geographic Traveler.

We were each asked to share with the audience the most touching story from our years of travel. Many stories came to mind. I had to choose only one. So I told the one about the day I truly believed that my life was about to end in the most horrifying way.

“An auto-rickshaw driver took me to his friend’s restaurant for a ‘free and delicious’ dinner. While waiting for the food to arrive, Sunil gave me a glass of Indian gin, which he said was ‘very special’. I tried it, and after a few gulps, I felt dizzy and terribly uncomfortable. The room was spinning. I was close to passing out. I told Sunil to take me back to my hotel, but he insisted that we stayed on. After much insistence from me, he reluctantly agreed.

“Although I was almost unconscious, I realised that the route we were taking looked nothing like the one we took to get to the restaurant. We were in a jungle, on a narrow dirt path. We were in complete darkness, and all I could hear was the sound of bushes and twigs brushing against the sides of the auto-rickshaw. Even though it was clear to me that my life was fast reaching its end, and that my soul would take the trauma with it into my next existence, I did not panic. I was simply too ill to feel any fear. And besides, we were alone in a dark jungle. Nobody would hear me if I screamed.

“Half an hour later, we came to a halt. My eyes were closed, but I heard Sunil talking in Hindi to two men who dragged me out of the auto-rickshaw. Then I saw the lights of my hotel lobby. Sunil told me that he had instructed the men, who were the hotel staff, to take me as far as the door of my room, and that they were not to enter. “

The next day, Sunil came to check on me. For the next few days he took me to some magnificent places that hardly anyone knew about, let alone tourists. There was nobody in sight for miles, and I felt perfectly safe with him.”

George’s story was about a boy who suddenly appeared out of nowhere to help him. “I was lost in a crowded bazaar in Cairo. After hopelessly trying to get out of the maze-like market, I felt a small hand on mine. Turning round, I saw that it belonged to a little boy. The boy led me through the narrow snake-like lanes until we were out and facing the main road. I felt the boy release his hand. When I turned to look at him, he had disappeared. I’ve met many people like this little boy, who were like angels that suddenly turned up from nowhere when you needed help.”

*

These are just a few of the stories I heard at the UWRF. Everyone had one to tell. But every success story was preceded by a sad backstory—stories of rejection, horrible contracts, bad distribution, non-existent marketing and publicity, and a list of other miseries that often made them wish they had taken up law or accountancy instead. Yet it is these struggles that make them so human: humble, wise, light-hearted, full of life, and devoid of the feeling of self-importance—traits that all truly good writers seem to have.

And my story? I want to tell something to all those people who assume I lead a glamorous life, people who, after discovering I’m a writer, predictably exclaim, “Wow, that’s a dream life you’re living” or, “You must get a really good ‘advance’, right?” Or, “So, you have a cottage by the sea, or a villa in the highlands that gives you the peace and quiet you need to write?” I want to tell them that for five days in the year (provided I get invited to the festival), yes, I do lead a glamorous life!

February 2013 Highlights

Novels
1. The Blind Man’s Garden (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Nadeem Aslam
2. Five Star Billionaire (Fourth Estate/Spiegel & Grau, 2013) / Tash Aw
3. American Elsewhere (Orbit, 2013) / Robert Jackson Bennett
4. Ten White Geese (trans. from the Dutch by David Colmer) (Penguin USA, 2013) / Gerbrand Colmer
5. All the Beggars Riding (Faber & Faber, 2013) / Lucy Caldwell
6. All This Talk of Love (Algonquin Books, 2013) / Christopher Castellani
7. Worthless Men (Sceptre, 2013) / Andrew Cowan
8. Harvest (Picador/Nan A. Talese, 2013) / Jim Crace
9. Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles (Viking, 2013) / Ron Currie, Jr.
10. A Thousand Pardons (Random House, 2013) / Jonathan Dee

11. Little Exiles (HarperCollins, 2013) / Robert Dinsdale
12. A Hologram for the King (Hamish Hamilton, 2013) / Dave Eggers
13. Mimi (Bloomsbury Circus, 2013) / Lucy Ellmann
14. The Unknown Bridesmaid (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Margaret Forster
15. Schroder (Twelve, 2013) / Amity Gaige
16. As Sweet As Honey (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Indira Ganesan
17. Tirza (trans. from the Dutch by Sam Garrett) (Open Letter, 2013) / Arnon Grunberg
18. The Carrier (Hodder & Stoughton, 2013) / Sophie Hannah
19. White Masks (trans. from the Arabic by Maia Tabet) (MacLehose Press, 2013) / Elias Khoury
20. See Now Then (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Jamaica Kincaid

21. The Dinner (trans. from the Dutch by Sam Garrett) (Hogarth Press, 2013) / Herman Koch
22. The House of Trembling Leaves (Sandstone Press, 2013) / Julian Lees
23. Farewell, Dorothy Parker (Putnam, 2013) / Ellen Meister
24. The Comfort of Lies (Atria Books, 2013) / Randy Susan Meyers
25. Heartbreak Hotel (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Deborah Moggach
26. The Gospel According to Cane (Telegram Books, 2013) / Courttia Newland
27. Motherland (Quercus, 2013) / William Nicholson
28. Daddy Love (Head of Zeus, 2013) / Joyce Carol Oates
29. Instructions for a Heatwave (Tinder Press, 2013) / Maggie O’Farrell
30. This Magnificent Desolation (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013) / Thomas O’Malley

31. Orkney (Granta Books, 2013) / Amy Sackville
32. A Treacherous Likeness (Corsair, 2013) / Lynn Shepherd
33. The Light and the Dark (trans. from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield) (Quercus, 2013) / Mikhail Shishkin
34. Temple of a Thousand Faces (NAL Trade, 2013) / John Shors
35. The City of Devi (W.W. Norton, 2013) / Manil Suri
36. The Scent of Death (HarperCollins, 2013) / Andrew Taylor
37. The Bathing Women (trans. from the Chinese by Hongling Zhang & Jason Sommer) (Blue Door, 2013) / Tie Ning
38. The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (Free Press, 2013) / Teddy Wayne
39. The Fate of Mercy Alban (Hyperion, 2013) / Wendy Webb
40. Lenin’s Kisses (trans. from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas) (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Yan Lianke

41. The Retrospective (trans. from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman) (Halban Publishers, 2013) / A.B. Yehoshua

First Novels
1. Frances and Bernard (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) / Carlene Bauer
2. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (Hogarth, 2013) / Shani Boianjiu
3. Byron Easy (William Heinemann, 2013) / Jude Cook
4. Indiscretion (William Morrow, 2013) / Charles Dubow
5. The Night Rainbow (Bloomsbury, 2013) / Claire King
6. The Specimen (Canongate Books, 2013) / Martha Lea
7. The First Book of Calamity Leek (Hutchinson, 2013) / Paula Lichtarowicz
8. The Fields (Little, Brown, 2013) / Kevin Maher
9. Three Graves Full (Gallery Books, 2013) / Jamie Mason
10. Wise Men (Reagan Arthur Books, 2013) / Stuart Nadler

11. With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013) / Domenica Ruta
12. Autobiography of Us (Henry Holt, 2013) / Aria Beth Sloss
13. Little Known Facts (Bloomsbury USA, 2013) / Christine Sneed
14. The House on the Cliff (Macmillan, 2013) / Charlotte Williams
15. Wash (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2013) / Margaret Wrinkle

Stories
1. Middle Men (Simon & Schuster, 2013) / Jim Gavin
2. Black Vodka (And Other Stories, 2013) / Deborah Levy
3. Revenge (trans. from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder) (Harvill Secker, 2013) / Yoko Ogawa
4. Nothing Gold Can Stay (Ecco, 2013) / Ron Rash
5. Vampires in the Lemon Grove (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Karen Russell
6. Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (Bloomsbury USA, Nov 2010) / Christine Sneed
7. We Live in Water (Harper Perennial, 2013) / Jess Walter

Poetry
1. Just Saying (Wesleyan, 2013) / Rae Armantrout
2. The Children’s War and Other Poems (Salt Publishing, 2013) / Shaindel Beers
3. Poems 1962-2012 (Carcanet Press, 2013) / Louise Glück
4. The Oldest Word for Dawn: New and Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / Brad Leithauser
5. Hill of Doors (Picador, 2013) / Robin Robertson

Nonfiction
1. Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography (Liveright, 2013) / J.G. Ballard
2. Calcutta: Two Years in the City (Union Books/Aurum Press, 2013) / Amit Chaudhuri
3. Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013) / William Dalrymple
4. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013) / John Darwin
5. The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (Allen Lane, 2013) / John Gray
6. Making Love: A Memoir (New Island Books, 2013) / Tom Inglis
7. Is God Happy?: Selected Essays (Basic Books, 2013) / Leszek Kolakowski
8. Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (published in the UK as Give Me Everything You Have: Notes On a Crisis) (Jonathan Cape/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / James Lasdun
9. Portrait Inside My Head (Free Press, 2013) / Phillip Lopate
10. C.S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (Tyndale Press, 2013) / Alister McGrath

11. This Is Running for Your Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) / Michelle Orange
12. With or Without You (Spiegel & Grau, 2013) / Domenica Ruta
13. How Literature Saved My Life (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) / David Shields
14. Graven With Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt: Poet, Lover, Statesman, and Spy in the Court of Henry VIII (Steerforth Press, 2013) / Nicola Shulman
15. Far From The Tree: A Dozen Kinds of Love (Chatto & Windus, 2013) / Andrew Solomon
16. R.S. Thomas: Serial Obsessive (University of Wales Press, 2013) / M. Wynn Thomas
17. The Fun Stuff & Other Essays (Jonathan Cape, 2013) / James Wood