"The Future Barrister": The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

In the mid-80s I was standing outside Komtar in Penang, Malaysia at the bus stop, a rather seedy, smelly, low-lit area, late at night, when a young Indian man started in a one-sided conversation about his studying to be a barrister in the UK. He had this Clark Gable look about him, with a neatly trimmed moustache and sideburns. He was handsome and he knew it and he also had this way of winking as he talked, as if he was letting you in on a secret. He was also full of contradictions.

In the middle of our conversation, an attractive woman approached him and tried to pick him up. She totally ignored me. He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. I’m thinking, this guy is a real character! As soon as I got on the bus, I started making notes to turn him into a story. I even used one of his lines to open the story, “There are seven hundred barristers in Penang, and I will be number seven hundred and one!”

I changed the location of the story from a bus stop to a pub, 20 Leith Street, and I had him invite an American to join him at his table. I used the American as a minor first person viewpoint character merely as a witness to give the Future Barrister and his story credibility. I purposely didn’t give the American or the Future Barrister a name, though I referred to him as Clark Gable. Near the end of the story, I even say, “I was glad that I didn’t know his name.”

The biggest problem when I began to write it was the backstory, his relating about what had happened to him in the UK, why he was back in Malaysia and not continuing his studies. He mentioned he had run out of money and that there was a girl involved, Sarah. (I don’t remember if that was her actual name or if that was merely the name that I gave her in the story.) I had a feeling he was not telling me the real reason, as if he was hiding something, and that something was sinister, a skeleton in the closet. Maybe it was my imagination or the way he kept winking at me. So I needed to fill in the gaps and create a believable backstory.

Also I needed to break up his monologue into smaller chunks with descriptions that could showcase his character. I wanted to show how he interacted with the American and the other patrons, including a boy selling newspapers, dismissing him, as he did the woman at the bus stop, with a disdainful wave of his hand. I also wanted to show the irony, that he had become like the British Raj to his own people, a racist and a snob.

I entered this story in the 1987 Star/Nestle Short Story Awards here in Malaysia, but the contest got cancelled when the newspaper got cancelled for political reasons. Fortunate­ly, the newspaper got reinstated the following year, so when they announced the 1988 contest, I reworked the story – glad for the opportunity to do so. It won third place and was published in The Star.

Despite the early success of the story and it being published in Malaysia, India and Australia, I felt it needed something more. The random numbers on the lottery ticket didn’t seem all that confusing, even when drunk, so I changed them to 5355353, whereby the 3s and 5s, if published close together, could blur into one another. It was recently pointed out to me that there are a couple of thousand barristers in Penang, but that’s nearly twenty years later, so I kept the original quote.

While revisiting the story for Lovers and Strangers Revisited, I introduced a minor subplot with the American being interested in an Indian woman sitting at the next table who reminded him of his ex-wife, but who later rebuffed him. In contrast, I also added an attractive Western woman who walked into the pub with several friends, and she caught the Future Barrister’s eye. Later, he asked her to dance and she accepted. Of course, this gets him talking more about his ex-girlfriend in the UK, so more of the story, the truth, comes out.

Still the story never sat well with me. I couldn’t put my finger on it. By then I had been experimenting with the present tense in a novel that I was working on, and it seemed to solve some problems. I tried it out on “The Future Barrister” and it felt right, so for this latest MPH collection, I rewrote the story in the present tense. This was then published by Descant in Canada in 2010.

This is the fifth time that one of my short stories from Lovers and Strangers Revisited was published in the USA or Canada twenty years after I first wrote it. So the lesson here is, never give up on your stories, especially if you have been revising them all along.

As a footnote, the story and the interview of me in The Star proved to be a catalyst when I met another Penang character, an expat, shortly thereafter, and later wrote a lengthy non-fiction piece about him as a tribute to someone who had died alone in a far away land in my book Tropical Affairs: Episodes from an Expat’s Life in Malaysia. (MPH 2009) For me, “The Future Barrister” and this expat will always be intertwined in a way I could never have imagined.

In case you’re wondering, do I always write about people I meet? No, but when a good character walks into your life, take plenty of notes, especially if the character is a story waiting to happen. By the way, I never did bump into the Future Barrister again, though I feel he would have been pleased with the story. After all, it was all about him.

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

Here is a review in The Star  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 

“Neighbours”: Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Hearing some persistent moaning coming from a neighbor’s house two doors away, I went to investigate. With the help of another neighbor, we took the Chinese man, in his mid-fifties, to the Penang General Hospital, where he eventually died. He had drunk the weed killer Paraquat.

For me the story began when I returned to the man's house and found several neighbors gossiping. I was fascinated by all of the comments the neighbors were making, the wild speculations about the family and why the man had taken his life. Some of the things they had said were mean and spiteful. Later, when the man’s wife and daughter returned home, they quickly dispersed, so I was left with the task of having to inform them about the man’s death.

This was the story that fascinated me. The story I wanted to tell was not a first person narrative of my finding this man and all that took place that day (although later I will write about it). Instead, I chose to write about the neighbors themselves and what they said about this family in the aftermath of the suicide. When I began to write the story, after some years had passed, all the details were fresh inside my journal, including details that had completely slipped my memory. This is one of the reasons I insist that my writing students keep a diary/journal.

In writing the story, I decided to leave me, as a character, out of the story. I felt the story would be better without a Westerner or a mat salleh in it. I wanted the dialogue to be natural, spontaneous, and an expat present would alter the dynamics of the group, including the dialogue. My goal was to show how self-centered everyone was, and despite all the bad stuff being said about the man, I wanted the sympathy to shift back to him.

I purposely wrote the story in a neutral tone with the viewpoint of an observer, to avoid racial bias, so no one race in this multiracial society is talking down to another, which became crucial twenty years later when it began to be taught in SPM literature in schools throughout Malaysia. I also wanted to make the story universal, so readers around the world could relate to the characters and also learn about Malaysia, where different races freely mix and socialize, and yes, gossip.

Initially, too many people were coming and going and it was difficult to get a fix on any one character. There were far too many for a short story, so I merged a few characters to make it less cumbersome. I also slowed down the pacing by balancing it out with descriptions and even added a dog, a Pomeranian Spitz (which, I just noticed, was misspelled in the first collection!).

The original title of the story was “Aftermath” and it first appeared in Commentary, a Journal of the National University of Singapore Society, in 1990 and then in Northern Perspective in Australia. By the time the first collection Lovers and Strangers came out, I changed the title to “Neighbors”, which is what the story is about.

Over the years, I changed the names of several of the characters. Sometimes you need to trust your instincts as to whether the name is appropriate for your character. Other times, you try the name on for size and if it doesn’t fit, try another. It’s a not unlike naming your children, but in stories we usually know their character, their traits in advance so that helps.

The story originally began with a paragraph or two of description, to help set the scene, but after revisiting the story for Lovers and Strangers Revisited for the second collection, I opened the story with dialogue: “I suppose there’s a mess in the back seat!” This sets the tone of the story and pulls the reader in quicker. This is the version that was accepted to be part of the 6th cycle for SPM literature (Big L) to be taught throughout Malaysia 2008-2112.   (*Link to the story, revised after French translation.)

For the latest MPH collection, I still had some difficulty getting that initial description of their arrival from the hospital and where the neighbors lived just right, so I kept working on it. I also experimented with the present tense. I liked the effect this created and it seemed to solve some problems, too and it gave the story, and the neighbors, a timeless quality. In 2008, this was published in Thema, in the US, 20 years after I first wrote it.

For students and teachers, MELTA (Malaysia English Language Teaching Association) created an on-line discussion for "Neighbours" on their forum for literature, which had over 20,500 hits and 30 pages of comments before it was archived.

Here's also a link to Denis Harry's article on Mrs Koh in NST 28 August 2010! Comment: Are you a Mrs Koh?

Also, I’ve adapted “Neighbors” into a play, turning a tragedy into a comedy titled, “One Drink Too Many”, which had been play read twice by Penang Players. I then made a 10-page version of that, "Back from Heaven", ideal for schools or competitions. At least one school had a good run with it. Just contact me via my website (below) or Facebook if you want a copy. A good story can be expressed in many different ways.

*Here is link to a recent Google Meet with students at UiTM-Penang during a Q-and-A session about "Neighbours" and the motivation of the various characters and why I ended the story where I did. 

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

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

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

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

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

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

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

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a review in The Star 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 

“Sister’s Room”: The Story Behind the Story of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

This is the third story in Lovers and Strangers Revisited to earn me money after it placed third in the National Writers Association short story contest (USA) back in 1987. I started experimenting with a childlike tone for a short story, and the opening words came to me: “Mama is making chapattis and tea for breakfast. I’ll only get the chapattis – the small ones. Not the tea. Sister gets the tea and Mama doesn’t spare the sugar. Not for Sister. Mama doesn’t spare anything for Sister.”

It was this voice, this tone, this desire to capture the child’s innocence and then playing with the idea I had of sibling rivalry and child prostitution that pulled me through the story rather quickly. I knew I had something good in my hands, but maintaining that voice, that tone, and wondering where to break my sentences was giving me problems. Do I string them together with a bunch of “ands”, as I was initially doing, or break them up, staccato-like? Or find some happy balance? I was forever tinkering with this story through its various drafts. The story, essentially, remained the same from the beginning, but I was constantly tweaking it, nearly every other line it seemed, particularly during the fight scene, even in this final MPH version.

I admit I was having some qualms about the physical setting of the story, which is more Pakistan/India than Malaysia, though I could easily imagine how this could have been set in Malaysia not that many years ago, where bullock carts were still common (I had seen plenty in the early eighties and a few Chinese junks, too!) and ice men still brought large blocks of ice to various shops. The open fruit market and spice markets are readily found in Malaysia today. I did visit several little India sections in Malaysia and even took the trouble to visit several brothels, mostly in Penang and KL, including some in the poorer Indian sections of town for research for a novel that I was working on, as well as some sleazy restaurants cum nightclubs. Not a pleasant experience, but memorable. No, I did not partake!

From the opening voice, I knew this would be a first person, present tense story, the first I had ever written; again this was an experiment for me, since unlike “On Fridays” which I wrote several years later, I was writing from the viewpoint of an Indian female child. Also I purposely used descriptions that would take on larger symbolic meanings in the story, such as “Uncle pinches my cheeks and squeezes my shoulders and looks me over like he would a melon at the fruit market to see if it’s ripe.” In the previous scene the child was doing exactly that at the fruit market across the street, and now Uncle was sizing her up to be a prostitute, just like her sister.

Right away, I had a lot success with this story; it was published in Northern Perspective in Australia, Her World in Malaysia, and a couple of years later in India, France and Denmark.
When the Indian-American writer Bharati Mukherjee visited Penang, Malaysia, I met her and her husband and after I commented on several of her stories at a discussion, she agreed to read a couple of my short stories, including “Sister’s Room”. She felt the ending scene needed to be a “bigger moment,” that it should linger before I bring the story to an end, advice I gladly seized upon. So I expanded that moment, nearly doubling its length, and this was the version that Thema in the US accepted and published in 2005.

While I was revisiting the stories for the Silverfish collection, I changed the beginning of the story, at the last moment, by substituting “Amma” for Mama and “Appa” for Papa. I even called Child “Younger Sister.” Call it a moment of weakness. After it came out, I wished I hadn’t done that. So with the MPH version, I gladly changed it back to how I had it.

As a footnote, while I was in KL launching Lovers and Strangers Revisited for MPH, a woman told me that nearly twenty years ago when she was ten, her mother came across the story in Her World and thinking it was innocent story about children, asked her to read it. She was horrified to learn that the story was about child prostitution! She never did tell her mother.

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

Here is a review in The Star 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 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a review in The Star 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 

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

When I entered my room at The Station Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, I had this overwhelming feeling of déjà vu; I was sure that I had stayed there before, in the same room. I can’t actually recall ever staying at the hotel before that (although I may have), but I did transfer that strong feeling I had to my character Michele Yeap. (I gave her my groggy feeling of spending a night on the train, too!) Right away, I knew that the hotel would make a great setting for a short story and began taking photographs and describing everything inside the room.

My original characters were a married couple who had stayed there years before, but now their marriage was falling apart. The story wasn’t working. I hated the characters and tossed them out, but I kept the setting! So I brought in two more characters, one of whom had spend a night there en route to her honeymoon in Hong Kong; this time she’s here with her lover from Penang. She was only joking when she suggested they stay at The Station Hotel but the joke backfired.

Although my original working title was "The Station Hotel", I switched it to “Inevitable" and then to "The Joke” which was the title of this story when it appeared in Her World (Oct ‘89). Back then Michele’s last name was Loo. I changed the title again to “Joking” when it appeared in Northern Perspective (Australia, 1992) and kept it for the first Lovers and Strangers collection (but dropped the name Loo – it reminded me too much of a toilet! Names, and their connotations, are important.) Later, while revisiting the story for the Silverfish collection, I changed the title back to “The Station Hotel” (and added Yeap to Michele’s name).

This story was about contrasting moods and I was careful in choosing the details to highlight this: Michele’s mood when she first entered the hotel with her lover and then later, when she returned to the hotel that evening. It was the same physical place but she saw it all differently because her mood was totally different. Everything that she saw was no longer the same: the bell desk clerk, a young man eager to please, and then the grumpy old woman; the long, high-ceiling corridor, and then an endless tunnel; the spacious room and freshly painted bathroom, and then the dull, simple room and the poor paint job; a flock of swallows and palm trees, and then the cluster of cars and trash strewn everywhere).

To make the characters seem more real, I modeled Michele and Lee on a pair of friends from Penang, neither of whom were married. Recognizing themselves in the book, they brought it to my attention. They were ok with it, but felt odd – like, how in the world did I know so much about them? Several other friends thought I was writing about them, too, and I couldn’t convince them otherwise, so I must’ve done a really good job!

One couple thought I wrote about the husband because he wore glasses, hid behind his smile and his name was “Lee”. He’s American, and in the original version it was clearly stated that Lee was Chinese. (Later, I dropped the reference so readers could picture him as they wished.) The wife was quite upset with me (and suspicious of him!) until I dug up the original Her World story written years before I had met them (to the relief of the husband!). Another lady, whom I didn’t know very well, thought I was writing about her because she fit the general description and worked in the hotel line. So did another woman, also in the hotel line. Since this was a story about a woman having an affair with a married man, I kept wondering, oh, so who are you having an affair with?

While revisiting the stories for the Silverfish collection I had to go to KL for a book launch/reading at Silverfish, and I thought it might be interesting to stay at the refurbished (and renamed) The Heritage Station Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. I hadn’t touched the story, “The Station Hotel”, in a dozen years and was having some problems with it, so I brought along a working draft of the story. After wandering around the hotel and taking copious notes to give the story more depth, I began to edit it. There’s nothing like being at the physical setting of a story to get the juices flowing. In fact, the ideas were coming fast and I stayed up half the night scribbling away, adding all this new material.

I had always felt that the ending was rushed, and it needed to be a bigger moment. So I played with it and expanded the last two paragraphs to two and a half pages! Throughout the story, I added in more details about Michele’s first marriage to Barry. This was an important counterpoint to Lee, whom she was having an affair with. By the end the story, and rather ironically, Barry was becoming the solution. In order for this to be convincing, I needed to introduce a lot more backstory about this early marriage, how they had met, why they got married, why they separated and why they remained close friends. Prior to this, the marriage had merely been mentioned a couple of times in passing.

After I had given my reading at Silverfish, I woman came late and when she found out that I had already read, expressed her disappointment.

“I do have another story with me that I’ve been rewriting,” I said, but added that it’s full of handwritten notes. The others also wanted me to read it, so I did. I was taking a big risk because the story was getting to be rather long and my hand-written notes, squeezed in here and there, with arrows all over the place, were hard to read. Nevertheless, I persevered.

The reception was much better than I had imagined. In fact, one woman I didn’t know gushed, “Oh, I wish my friend was here. She stayed at the Station Hotel for six months and she would’ve loved it! Is this going to be in your book? I’ll make sure she gets a copy!”

I knew I was on the right track. With all these new additions, I ended up doubling the length of the original story. I was glad that I had decided to stay at The Station Hotel that first (and possibly second) time and definitely while revisiting the 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 in The Star  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. Here's a link to the French blog set up by the publisher Éditions GOPE.

Here is a review in The Star  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 

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

I was attending a Chinese funeral at someone’s house with several Malaysian Toastmaster friends, when my friends started swapping “death” stories. One lady told about the time that her father had died; for several days afterwards, out of habit, she would wait up for him to come home from work, only to remember that he was not coming home anymore.

In the back of my mind, I played with that idea.

Earlier that evening, I had been fascinated by a lionhead goldfish, having never seen one before, so I worked in some details about the fish into the story and added some additional details about another Toastmaster friend who, on another occasion, told me about the goldfish that he used to raise and sell as a boy.

Also, around the same time, there was a construction site close to where I was living and there was this constant metal hitting metal sound that was driving me crazy, so I incorporated that into the story as well.

Sometimes that’s all you need to get a story going: a few random details, a few elements of truth to anchor the story, and then you’re off...

Shortly after “Waiting” was written it was published in 1988 (the fastest that any of my stories had been published, except for maybe “The Stare”), not once but twice, in Her World in Malaysia and Hot in Singapore. It was published twice again in the 1990’s in the UK and Australia, and then twenty years after it was first written, it was published in the US, in Thema (Autumn 2008).

Maybe because it got published so fast, I didn’t make a lot of changes in the story, compared to all the others in this collection; some having undergone massive rewrites where I introduced new scenes, backstories, and totally revamped the endings by adding several additional pages! I did change the main character’s name, which started out as Miss Lai and remained so in the original Lovers and Strangers. Since she needed a suitable, “important” job, I made her a secretary for a legal firm.

An editor in the UK made a comment about the “Miss” part of the name, which he felt sounded a bit dated; however, it’s very common among the working class in Malaysia. Either way, I dropped it for Lovers and Strangers Revisited, since I was using Miss Valerie as a title of one of the stories. So I changed Miss Lai’s name to Agnes Chen.

I also revised the ending of “Waiting”, which hadn’t changed all that much from the Her World ending. Below is how it appeared in the original Lovers and Strangers collection:

Why doesn’t Dad come in? Why is he making her wait? Edward made her wait. Doesn’t dad know? Doesn’t he know she hates to be kept waiting?

When I revisited the story for Silverfish, I wanted to break up her thoughts with some action. I also wanted her to say exactly what she was thinking about Edward all along. I kept this same ending for MPH and also Thema:

Why doesn’t Dad come in? Doesn’t he know it’s raining? Agnes waited a little longer. She got up and went to the door, but Paul stopped her from opening it. “Sis, you have to accept this.” “But we made plans. We planned to get married. Edward promised me. He promised me!”

As a footnote, 21 years after I wrote “Waiting”, I got an email from a Toastmaster who, coincidentally, read my story at a recent Toastmaster meeting in Shah Alam as part of the Interpretive Reading module that she’s doing, thus bringing the story full circle. She also said, “The tingling tone of suspense and Agnes' helplessness and waiting in vain kept the audience focused on the story from start to finish.” For a writer that’s quite an honor to have someone (who I don't know) not only read your story but also to present it a way that I had never imagined.

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

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

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

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

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

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

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

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new ending thus became:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a review in: The Star 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 

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

The original title for “Lovers and Strangers” was “Miss Valerie”, but while trying to come up with a unifying title for the collection I came up with Lovers and Strangers since some stories were about lovers and others about strangers. I then went through each story and worked in either the word “lover” or “stranger”. For this particular story I worked in the dialogue between Glasgow and Valerie that produced the line, “Last night we made love, so we’re lovers and strangers,” thus linking it both to the story and the title of the collection.

I began the idea for the story “Lovers and Strangers” by playing ‘what-if.’ What if a Chinese woman found out that her husband was having an affair and to get back at him, she decided to have her own affair. So she set her sights on the unsuspecting writer, Jason Glasgow, an American based in Singapore. To add another level to the story I had him haunted by the suicide of a former Chinese lover, Rebecca, that he feels responsible for.

In the original version published in both Femina (India) and in the first collection, the story was told from Valerie’s point of view. When I revised it for Lovers and Strangers Revisited (Silverfish), I not only changed the title back to “Miss Valerie”, but also changed the viewpoint from Valerie to Glasgow. In doing so, I had to change the entire story from beginning to the end. I did keep a lot of the dialogue, particularly Valerie’s. Because of that, even though the viewpoint was Glasgow, someone I could identify with, the dialogue, as has been pointed out to me on numerous occasions, is very balanced. In fact, she gets all the best lines and really puts Glasgow, deservingy, in his place!

The story originally ended with Valerie being back in Penang and discovering that she was pregnant. For her this was pure delight since she’s always wanted to have a baby. It’s also the ultimate revenge on her philandering husband. But this time I wanted to push the story further. I wanted Valerie to follow in the footsteps of Rebecca, which was Glasgow’s worst fear. Then to add to that fear, he now had this baby that he didn’t want and was expected to raise.

To tie the new beginning to the new end, I played with the idea, or the imagery of a ghost. For Glasgow, when he first saw Valerie he thought he was seeing the ghost of Rebecca. Throughout the story, Valerie would tease him about this. She also vowed to come back to Singapore to “haunt” him. She even named their child, Rebecca.

The story also doubled in length and became the longest story in the collection, so I made it the final story, replacing “Mat Salleh”. I reshuffled the placement of most of the stories in Lovers and Strangers Revisited. Then I kept the order for the MPH version but then added the two new stories to the end.

For the MPH collection, at the urging of the editor, I did change the title “Miss Valerie” back to “Lovers and Strangers”. I also spent a lot of time rewriting the new ending, showing that it did take him some time to come around to the fact that he had this daughter living in Penang. But first he needed to reconcile himself with Valerie’s death; only then was he able to contemplate shifting his future from being a confirmed bachelor to a single father.

It has been suggested by several writer friends that I could turn this story into novel by starting with Glasgow’s first love affair with Rebecca. Perhaps, in the future I will do that.

As a note, a young lady from Iran who was doing her graduate work in Malaysia, was so taken with this story, identifying closely with Miss Valerie, that she was quite upset with her death, and she insisted on talking to me about this story at lenght, so we set an appointment. This was the second time that someone really, personally, took my story to heart, a great learning experience for me about the power writers have, so it's important to get the story just right, your readers depend on it.

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

Here is a review in The Star 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