"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 

“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 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a review 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