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TCK TALENT: Wendy Laura Belcher, best-selling author, memoirist, and distinguished scholar of her adopted cultures

3 Comments Posted by The Displaced Nation Team on October 22, 2013

Welcome to the third installment of “TCK Talent,” Elizabeth (Lisa) Liang’s monthly column about adult Third Culture Kids who work in creative fields. As some readers may recall, Lisa—a Guatemalan-American of Chinese-Spanish-Irish-French-German-English descent—has written and performed a one-woman show about being a Third Culture Kid, or TCK. It debuted in LA in the spring, and I had the pleasure of seeing it during its too-short run in New York City last month. It was stupendous!

—ML Awanohara

Greetings, readers, and thanks, ML, for that vote of confidence in my work. But it cannot compare to the output of today’s guest, a woman of extraordinary talents. Wendy Laura Belcher is a professor of African literature at Princeton University as well as a published memoirist, produced playwright, popular workshop leader, and author of the best-selling Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success.

Wendy grew up in Ethiopia, Ghana, and the USA, and has been a writer since childhood. Her most recent book, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson: Ethiopian Thought on the Making of an English Author, is a finalist for the African Studies Association’s 2013 Ogot Award (to be announced in Baltimore at the end of next month).

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Welcome to The Displaced Nation, Wendy, and thank you for joining us. I’ve known you for years and yet don’t know as much as I should about your TCK childhood, so am happy to take this opportunity to learn more. You are the daughter of an American dad and a Canadian mom. What’s the story behind why your family moved to Ethiopia and Ghana?
My father is a physician and my mother always loved to travel, so she convinced him to move to Ethiopia. Her idea was that he would teach and do clinical work at a public health college in Gondar, and she would be the college librarian. My first memories are of Ethiopia. I moved back to the US when I was 14. But my specific geographical trajectory is as follows: Philadelphia (birth), Boston, Seattle, Gondar (Ethiopia), Seattle, Accra (Ghana), Seattle, and South Hadley (Massachusetts). After that I lived in Tamale (Ghana). Then back to Washington DC, Accra, Los Angeles, Princeton, Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), and now Princeton again.

That’s an impressively peripatetic life! When and where were you happiest while growing up?
As a child, I loved Ethiopia the best, perhaps because it was the first place my family went and perhaps because, as a child who loved reading, it seemed like a magical place. There was a castle in my backyard as well as oxen threshing grain like in the Bible. On the throne was a descendant of King David. From a child’s perspective, it was like living in a book.

How did you find your first “repatriation” to the United States, at age 14?
I never got used to Seattle, it was very parochial in the 1970s when we moved there, and the weather was too gloomy for someone who had spent a significant part of her childhood in the tropics.

At home, but without a role, in Africa

Has your relationship to Africa evolved as an adult?
As an adult, I settled in the US and not Africa, returning to Africa only a few times until 1997, after which I started going every third year or so. Since 2009, I’ve gone every year to Ethiopia. I thought I might settle in Africa, but as an adult my relationship with Africa was more vexed.

That is, what could my role in Africa be as a white American woman?

I wasn’t particularly interested in “helping,” as it seemed to me that Africans were perfectly adept at solving their own problems and only didn’t do so because of all the “help” they received from the West.

But also, I was in a bind. In the US I often didn’t feel a strong sense of calling in my work, but I felt more satisfied emotionally. In Africa, I felt a strong sense of calling in my work, but I was often lonely.

The problem for me as an adult in Africa as a single woman without children was the lack of female friendships. In the 1980s and 1990s I found it difficult to find in Africa other career women like myself with whom I would have something in common.

One of the reasons I’ve found it easier to return to Ethiopia and have done so regularly in the recent past is that I’ve found some good Ethiopian female friends.

Where do you think of as “home” these days?
My mother always thought that my father never really had a sense of home as a particular place, because he had an identical twin brother. It was the presence of one other human being from the beginning that meant home was someone to him, not somewhere. He didn’t really know what loneliness was, she thought.

I may be somewhat similar albeit for different reasons. I don’t think of anywhere as home.

I lived in Los Angeles for 20 years and loved many things about it, but I mostly think of it as a place where my network of affection is. It isn’t the place so much but the people who make it a kind of home.

At the same time, I still have good friends in Seattle, and my family of origin is still there, so it is also a kind of home.

Are you like many TCKs in finding yourself drawn to people of similar backgrounds?
Almost all my friends are people who live straddling some boundary: either geographically, being from elsewhere or spending significant time outside the US, or racially (growing up as minorities). I am almost never in a room with people who mostly look like me.

Writing calls from an early age

I often wonder if TCKs who pursue writing careers do so because the story is entirely in their hands as opposed to the experienced upheaval of their itinerant childhoods. Did your TCK upbringing influence a) your desire to be a writer and b) what you wrote about?
Growing up in Africa, I was surrounded by literary culture. In Ethiopia, a country with a 3,000-year-old written civilization, people read illuminated manuscripts on sheepskin bound with wood. In Ghana, hand-written epigrams adorned most vehicles, and my father’s Ghanaian colleagues traded bon mots in Latin. At school, I would pick a promising library shelf and work my way through it from left to right. I wrote my first novel when I was nine, titled Shipwrecked at Silver Lagoon. I had set myself the task of writing the best title for a book ever and, after I came up with this, decided it was too good to go unwritten. It was about two English girls in the 17th century who, after their ship is wrecked off the American coast, go on to discover what happened to the disappeared colony of Roanoke: it had moved into an underground, underwater kingdom. The book ground to a halt on page 40, perhaps because, as I tried to articulate issues that were all too real to me (the loss of home and the entry into the hybrid colonial world), my imagination foundered on the demands of the adventure form.

After that, I wrote for my middle school and high school newspapers, where I was the editor.

I was shy, partly due to all the moving and not being sure how to fit in, so I spent most of my time reading. Reading allowed me to immerse myself in a world where I could watch and not be watched (or judged). It also allowed me to develop skills in “reading” people and situations, which is essential to surviving so much moving.

Tell us what drew you to write your memoir, Honey from the Lion: An African Journey, when you were in your twenties.
I had enough credits to graduate from Mount Holyoke in three years so I spent my junior year back in Ghana. While working for a nonprofit organization that was spreading literacy and translating the Bible into local languages, I spent a weekend in a village with an Irish Bible translator. A series of events transpired, the impact of which was so powerful I decided I wanted to write about it. It was a gift: the story was so fascinating that I didn’t worry about writing it. Even if I wrote it poorly, I thought people would find it compelling.

Do you ever go back to the memoir now, and if so, does it resonate very differently due to the passage of time?
I can’t bring myself to read the book now. It seems like a different self wrote it—someone who was more religious for one.

Congratulations on Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson being selected as a finalist for a prestigious academic award. Please tell us what inspired you to write the book.
In 2002, I was talking with an Ethiopian friend about reading Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, an eighteenth-century fiction he wrote about an Ethiopian prince. This Ethiopian friend surprised me by saying that he had read the book and quite liked it. When I asked him why, he said the book was “very Ethiopian.” I started to correct him, but then I began to wonder if he could be right, if a book written by a European could be African—in particular, if it could be animated by African discourse. It’s my hope that my book will be convince others about the importance of African thought to the European canon.

From offering TCK courses at Princeton to helping junior faculty

At Princeton you teach courses that I wish had been offered when I was in college, like “Growing Up Global: Novels and Memoirs of Transnational Childhoods” and “Model Memoirs: The Life Stories of International Fashion Models.” You also teach workshops around the world to aid faculty in publishing academic articles. Please tell us the countries in which you’ve taught the workshops.
The workshops have taken place in Norway, Sudan, Malawi, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Canada and all over the USA.

What led you to teach academics about how to write for publication?

I did two master’s degrees in the early nineties and I struggled in writing my classroom papers. What did these professors want and why did some papers succeed and others didn’t? I decided not to go on for a doctorate and when people asked me why, I said I just didn’t feel like I got the hang of being a graduate student and in particular about how to write in graduate school.

To my surprise, I found that most other graduate students felt the same way and were as confused and uncertain as I had been. Then UCLA Extension asked me to teach a writing class. I had always sworn I would never teach, but I think you grow when you do things you are terrified of, so I agreed and found that three of my first six students were academics looking for help with their writing.

UCLA Extension agreed to let me restructure the next class around writing for academic journals. The restructured class was a massive success and changed my life.

Within a few years I was teaching “Writing and Publishing the Academic Article” twice a year at UCLA to graduate students, where the class was in great demand, as well as at other universities and institutes around the world. I wrote the workbook Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success for people who could not take the workshop.

Turning back to your writing, can you tell us what you are working on at present?
I have several writing and translation projects; here are the top three:
1) The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Translation of the Earliest African Biography of an African Woman. Thirty years after the death of a revered African religious leader who led a successful nonviolent movement against European incursions, her Ethiopian disciples (many of whom were women) wrote this vivid book, full of dialogue and drama. The original text, which was written in 1672 by Africans for Africans in an African language, is unknown in the United States (Walatta Petros does not have a Wikipedia entry, for instance). Thanks to the Fulbright US Scholar Award that I held during my third year at Princeton, I was able to spend ten months in Ethiopia devoting myself to archival research. I worked on the translation with Michael Kleiner, a leading scholar and translator of Ge’ez. We believe it will electrify the fields of early modern and gender studies.
2) The Black Queen of Sheba: A Global History of an Ethiopian Idea. Those familiar with the sixth century BCE biblical tale of the Queen of Sheba’s visit to King Solomon may be surprised to hear that there is also an Ethiopian version, variations on which have in fact circulated for centuries, far beyond the Ethiopian highlands. According to the medieval text Kəbrä Nägäśt, the biblical Queen of Sheba was an Ethiopian woman—the wisest, the wealthiest, and the most powerful woman in the world. Tricked by Solomon into sleeping with him, she gives birth to their biracial son, who later takes the Ark of the Covenant to Ethiopia forever. My book traces how the Ethiopian tale came about and the impact it had on not just literature but the world. The emergence of the religion of Rastafari is one of its most far-reaching effects…
3) A Wardrobe of Selves: The Literature of Transnational Childhoods. Based on my life experiences, observing those of my TCK friends, and reading lots of memoirs, I am thinking of writing a book about memoirs by those who have spent their childhood crossing boundaries (in terms of culture, nation, state, language, gender, school, etc.). It would attend to how the narrators like Barack Obama, John McCain, Edward Said, Eva Hoffman, Gloria Anzaldua, Diana Abu-Jaber, Alice Kaplan, Gene Luen Yang, and Mohsin Hamid construct meaningful identities through narrative. These writers—usually considered separately, as part of American ethnic literatures like Arab American, African American, Asian American, or Latino—often negotiate the intricacies of identity in similar ways and should be considered together. That is, this would be a broad comparative project on diasporic memoir in the context of American ethnic literature.

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Thanks, Wendy! You are so prolific, it’s an inspiration to all of us creatives! If we could accomplish just a fraction of what you’ve already done, what a life we’d be leading! Readers, any questions or comments for the amazing Wendy? Please leave them below. And…see you next month!

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, when we hear from an international traveler who has started up her own business in New York City, catering to expats.

If you enjoyed this post, we invite you to register for The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation, with seasonal recipes, book giveaways and other extras. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

Images: Wendy Belcher; Wendy with her brother in front of a castle in Gondar, Ethiopia; detail from the cover of Wendy’s latest book, Abyssinia’s Samuel Johnson.

Cool Columns, TCK Talent Africa, Classic Displaced Writing, Displaced Hall of Fame, Ethiopia, Europe, Ghana, Los Angeles, Memoir | Travel | Food Writers, Seattle, TCK, Third Culture Kid, UK, US, USA, Writers we love

FOOTLOOSE & FANCIFUL: Margaret Drabble’s “The Red Queen”

Leave a comment Posted by ML Awanohara on October 11, 2013

Welcome to Footloose & Fanciful, an occasional series of posts where we talk about books, films or other art forms that have inspired us to travel to new places or appraise familiar places with fresh eyes.

I’m probably not the best person to kick off this series. As much as I adore fiction, I’m not one to travel on a whim, because of something I read in a book. Especially not these days, when my expat years, spent in England and Japan, are behind me and I have to take time off from work. Typically, I arrive at my destination and collapse in a heap of exhaustion. It’s not until I’ve had a good rest that I am able to take in my surroundings. I peer out the window and say: “Really, I’m in xxx?!”

At that point I go to the other extreme, manically trying to find out as much as possible about where I’ve landed, visiting bookstores with an English-language section to stock up on translated novels, expat memoirs, the lot…

The second time I went to Seoul, South Korea, though, was different, and I’ll make that the subject of today’s post. That trip marked a rare time when a book had piqued my interest in a country to the point of influencing what I wanted to do and see and talk about during my stay.

Finding the soul of Seoul

I said my second visit to Seoul. The first had occurred a few years before. It followed the typical pattern. I arrived tired and unprepared, although on that occasion, I got an immediate lesson in the local culture.

Just as my husband and I were landing in Incheon International Airport, the news was breaking that Dr. Hwang Woo Suk—a veterinary researcher who had achieved world fame by cloning an Afghan hound named Snuppy—had falsified his latest results to make it look as though he’d made advances in human cloning.

“It’s a very Korean story,” some Korean friends of my husband’s informed us. I wasn’t sure what they meant, but little by little, I pieced it together. The Korean government, desperate to project a modern, high-tech face to the world, had turned Dr. Hwang into a national hero. He appeared in many of their promotional campaigns. The post office sold stamps to commemorate his research, and Dr and Mrs Hwang enjoyed a decade of first-class tickets on Korea Air, because of his status as “national treasure.”

Interestingly, our Korean friends were reluctant to condemn him outright. He’d been under a phenomenal amount of pressure to produce results and bring his country greater glory. If you were under that much pressure, you’d probably be tempted to skip a few rounds of clinical trials, too, they seemed to be saying.

I had to think about that for a while. Already, I was inclined to feel sorry for the Koreans because I knew how they’d suffered under Japanese rule. They are the Central Europeans of Asia, if you will. Just as the Hungarians, Poles and Czechs have had to put up with Germany and Russia, the Koreans, due to being sandwiched between China and Japan, have had to put up with incursions from both.

Gradually, I came round to the Korean point of view. My thought process went something like this:

Okay, the Koreans have been victims of some bad geography. But then why do they make things so much worse for themselves by setting such impossibly high standards? What Dr. Hwang did was wrong, a violation of ethical standards in medical research. But, okay, if I can feel sorry for all the Korean schoolchildren cramming like crazy for exams, I guess I can spare a bit of sympathy for Snuppy’s creator…

After arriving home from that trip, I was eager to read more about the country (I hadn’t found much in translation in Seoul’s bookstores).

That was when I happened upon the novel The Red Queen, by Margaret Drabble.

Seeing Korea in shades of red

A novel on Korean history by one of the writers I’d most admired when living in the UK: what could be a more perfect bridge between the two parts of my expat life?

The Red Queen of the book’s title refers to Lady Hyegyong, a Korean woman who lived in the 18th and early 19th centuries. She was plucked from obscurity to marry the Crown Prince of Korea, Sado, who turned out to be…a HOMICIDAL MANIAC, I kid you not.

The reason we know all of this is that Lady Hyegyong left behind a diary, and Part 1 of the novel is Drabble’s version of that document, which she based on JaHyun Kim Haboush’s translation of The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea.

In Part 1, the Crown Princess tells us about what it was like to live with a husband and in a court where daily, several dead bodies would be carried out of the palace (whenever Sado felt agitated or depressed, he would seek relief by murdering his servants) or reports would arrive of another court lady being raped. After he murders his concubine, he starts harassing his own sister, too.

At about this point, I concluded that the only thing worse than discovering you’re married to psychopath would be to find out you’re confined with him in a palace, from which there’s no escape. Terror within a claustrophobic setting must be the worst kind there is!

The story has a further twist. The Crown Prince’s father, King Yongjo, turns out to have been deeply Confucian. He is the kind of Korean parent who sets impossibly high standards for his son, which—it is hinted in the Crown Princess’s diaries—may be part of what triggers the son’s madness.

In the end, the cruel father proves more than the psycho son’s match. On a hot day in July 1762, he summons Sado and orders him to get into a heavy wooden chest, ordinarily used for storing rice or grain. The lid is shut and locked, and Sado is left to starve. It takes eight days.

The Crown Princess is traumatized all over again at witnessing her father-in-law execute her husband in such a cruel manner.

In part 2 of the book, an Oxford academic travels to Seoul with the Crown Princess’s diary in hand (which has been sent to her anonymously via Amazon.com) and finds parallels between her own life and hers. Professor Halliwell feels that the Princess “has entered her, like an alien creature in a science-fiction movie.” She becomes possessed by her—just as I was by the end of the book, just as I’m sure Drabble was, which was what inspired her to create (in her words) this “transcultural tragi-comedy.”

GLOBAL FOOD GOSSIP: Keeping food real in Brazil

Leave a comment Posted by The Displaced Nation Team on October 8, 2013

Joanna Masters-Maggs, our resident repeat-expat Food Gossip and Creative Chef, is back with her column for like-minded food lovers, which includes pretty much every expat we’ve ever encountered. This month: Authenticity, Brazilian-style.

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“What’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen this morning?” I demanded of my husband as we arrived at our hotel on that first day in Brazil.

Was it something in my tone of voice that made my husband stick out his jaw? Having your wife positive about a new location is always a good thing. Any hint of wifely discontent can put the terrors into most expat husbands, even the most rufty-tufty oil field types.

“The favelas on either side of the motorway for the entire journey from the airport?” His voice had a slight tone of — could it be? — belligerence. He’d decided to meet head on what he feared was my Western European squeamishness over visible poverty. I’d agreed to come, after all; it wasn’t his doing that the favelas existed.

“Oh.” I felt a pin pricking my outrage. “Actually no. It was the model of the Statue of Liberty outside the shopping mall we passed, the one with the Hard Rock Café.”

Not the voice of a woman with a strong social conscience, then.

“Aren’t we in Brazil?” I asked lamely.

Living in the shadow of the USA

In my defense, I was afraid that this most exciting and culturally rich of countries appeared in thrall to the ego of a foreign superpower. Here, where Christ the Redeemer looks down calmly over Rio and Guanabara Bay, it distressed me that he was unable to turn his cheek from the abominable reproduction Liberty. Such are the drawbacks of being made of stone.

My frustration really hadn’t abated much by the time we left several years later, but it was tempered. Here was a country that had its own great music, landscape, history and food. Brazil’s son Santos Dumont’s first flight had been overshadowed by the earlier but aided take off of the Wright Brothers’ heavier than air plan.

But surely the same could not happen to Brazilian fast food – and at their own hands?

Coxinha — wins the Pepsi Challenge against the Chicken McNugget, any day

When I was in Brazil, workers could fill a canteen with beans, rice, a little meat and some pasta for 5 reais. A meal from McD costs four times that and cannot keep a belly as full for as long. Yet not only was there a Hard Rock Café, Dominos and McDonald’s, but the bloody Statue of Liberty to boot, holding her torch triumphantly aloft as if lighting the invasion of foreign fast food. (I know, I need to get over that tacky statue.)

Brazilian fast food choices, which can be grabbed on the run in a similar way to a hamburger, are extensive. Kibe consists of meat and bulgur wheat shaped into rugby balls and deep-fried. Empadhinas are little pastry pies often filled with palm hearts but options are endless. There are bollinhas de arroz (rice balls) and, a slightly more costly option these days, bollinhas de bacallao (salt cod).

Then there is the coxinha. Oooh, heaven. It is a pear-shaped, breadcrumb-coated, deep-fried confection of pulverized chicken, creamy catupiry cheese, and onion. I don’t want to be rude, but for heaven’s sake, Brazil — how could you choose a chicken nugget over that?

Please. It’s time for a Coxinhas R Brazil brand to sweep all before it.

Turn the milk sour with your grouse? Or simply dance the samba?

Brazilians probably have a greater openness and sense of fun than I do. They seem to tolerate kitschy statues and dodgy food for what it is, just a bit of fun not to be taken as a serious threat to national pride. There is a great deal of pride in being Brazilian and, I’m told, there are as many Americans trying to emigrate to Brazil as vice versa – it is a new land of opportunity.

Brazilians seem less sulky or passive aggressive than many in dealing with what they don’t like. One amusing example came in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 when America required passengers arriving on planes to America from Brazil to be subject to the same security searches, and delays, as planes coming from countries deemed a threat. Brazil has no history of terrorism and people were offended. However a cheerful approach was chosen. Officials simply decided to apply the same principle to American planes landing in Sao Paolo, Brazilian style. To ease the pain of the wait, passengers were treated to smiling samba bands and charming dancers. Nothing was ever going to change, but the point was made and relations not permanently soured.

A meal fit for a (Burger) King

Perhaps this non-confrontational approach is best. The invasion of American fast food is all-conquering everywhere. Its advance hasn’t been slowed by a thousand angry French farmers and restauranteurs, or by the Italian Slow Food movement. But its growth in Brazil alongside a rapidly emerging obesity crisis comes alongside economic improvements. According to a recent BBC Programme on the rise of obesity around the world and particularly in developing and BRIC countries, the answer is to be found less in the innate appeal of the food, but in the message that is sent out when you’re seen eating it. McDonald’s is an “aspirational food”.

(You might notice that I started a new paragraph rather suddenly. It was to give you a moment to recover from the shock of seeing the words “McDonalds” and “aspiration”, not only in the same sentence, but right next to each other. The idea of being proud to be seen eating fast food is a difficult one that takes time to absorb. I too enjoy the odd foray into the depths of culinary depravity, but I hide the bags – I admit hypocrisy right here. May I continue now?)

You might think you would aspire to a Wolf oven or even a Meile vacuum cleaner, but McDonald’s? No — bear with me. A Brazilian McDonald’s meal costs four times that of a plate of rice and beans. Its cost would buy you any number of coxinhas. It is impressive conspicuous consumption. You pay to eat a meal which won’t actually fill you and you will have to pay to eat again soon after, but the point is: you can.

It’s a fairly modest aspiration for the new middle class. Thousands of Brazilians have been lifted out of poverty over the last 10 years. But potential hunger is still a recent memory and the fear of slipping back must be strong for many. An outrageously priced Big Mac is still less expensive than a ritzy restaurant in Leblon and it’s certainly easier to avoid potentially embarrassing etiquette gaffes for those not yet accustomed to what is known in America as “fine dining”. This is what fast food companies can trade on, and before you know it, new habits are formed.

If you’re going to gain Brazilian pounds, make them worthwhile

Why get fat on this so-so food, though, when you can get gloriously fat on real cooking? You can easily pile on the pounds with Brazilian feijoida, Let the weight gain be a result of leisurely, indulgent meals and not sandwiches grabbed in plastic furnished, fluorescent lighted “restaurants” that are tiled like public lavatories.

I’d say the same to America. Ditch the McD and get fat on Southern and Soul Food, some of the most luscious food in the world. Wow, those Southerners know how to take a healthy low-calorie green vegetable and give it the cholesterol punch of cheesecake. My two personal favourites: collard greens cooked in fatty port cuts and sweet potatoes mashed with butter and topped with a crumble made of brown sugar pecans and a handful of marshmallows. Sounds appalling, but it is the closest thing to ambrosia since Zeus was a viable god to worship.

Both Brazilian and American Soul food has the opulence and indulgence to deaden and dazzle the senses at the same time. It has what a dried up hamburger and flabby white bun bread cannot hope to rival even with liberal dollops of ketchup.

Oh please. Get fat on real fat and be patriotic about that: your nation’s fat.

Make it worth your while.

Make it worth your money.

Aspire.

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Joanna was displaced from her native England 16 years ago, and has since attempted to re-place herself and blend into the USA, Holland, Brazil, Malaysia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and now France. She describes herself as a “food gossip”, saying: “I’ve always enjoyed cooking and trying out new recipes. Overseas, I am curious as to what people buy and from where. What is in the baskets of my fellow shoppers? What do they eat when they go home at night?”

Fellow Food Gossips, share your own stories with us!

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post!

LIBBY’S LIFE #85 – A trick of the light

13 Comments Posted by Kate Allison on October 3, 2013

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigialPhotos.net

Talk about déjà vu. January 2012 all over again.

I sit on an uncomfortable plastic chair on one side of a teacher’s desk. On the other side of the desk, in a larger, more padded chair, sits Patsy Traynor: Jack’s ex-preschool teacher and now kindergarten teacher. Behind her is an expansive window, west-facing, and the afternoon sun blasts through the glass, forcing me to squint if I want to read her expression. This is a little intimidation trick of hers that I’ve encountered once before; although in this case forewarned doesn’t mean forearmed.

A hostile silence hovers between us as she opens a manila folder labeled “Jack Patrick” and runs a fingernail down the middle crease — her shell-pink nail varnish is chipped, I note with satisfaction — then picks out a sheet of paper with the heading “Behavioral Report”.

She looks up and smiles. I don’t smile back, because it’s not a friendly smile. It’s a smile of pleasurable anticipation, and the pleasure belongs only to her.

“Mrs. Patrick,” she says. No cosy first-names today, although she knows mine well enough. She looks down at the report in front of her. “Mrs Patrick. I asked you to meet me here today because—”

“I know why you asked me here,” I interrupt her. “Actually, the letter you sent home with Jack was addressed to both me and my husband, so if you don’t mind, we’ll wait until he arrives before we start.”

The smile falters a little, and she looks pointedly at the clock on the classroom wall.

“The appointment was for four p.m., and we are already running five minutes late.”

“Some people work full-time,” I say, and smirk to myself as Patsy swells up with indignation.

If you really want to piss off a teacher, simply insinuate that their workday finishes at three-thirty.

I fold my arms and sit back in my chair, waiting, avoiding catching Patsy’s eye. In the far corner of the room, inside an igloo-shaped tent, Jack is ordering around Beth and George. He’s trying to make them sit still and listen to his newfound skill of reading a Dr. Seuss book about dogs and cars. Beth and George aren’t impressed with his instructions to stay in the tent when there are so many exciting playthings outside it to scatter and destroy; George registers his disapproval with a determined “No!” (his current favourite word) while Beth lets out a high scream. There is the sound of a hard object hitting the floor with some force. After a pause, Jack’s voice cuts clearly across the room:

“If you don’t behave, I’m going to tell M and she will break your favourite toys.”

I feel rather than see Patsy’s smug moue, and I squeeze my eyes shut. It’s a defensive reaction, against both Patsy and the sunshine behind her that dazzles me.

Hurry up, Oliver. I need some backup here.

On cue, to my relief, the classroom door opens and Oliver strides across to the desk. He’s in his best suit, not for Patsy’s benefit but because he’s been meeting new customers today, and is still in professional work mode. He exudes brisk confidence and an air of brooking no nonsense.

I’ve never been so glad to see him in all my life, and that includes the time he was late for our own wedding because his best man was in the throes of an almighty hangover and drove to the wrong church. Oliver must also have had an almighty hangover, because the pair of them waited outside for half an hour before realising that a locked church, a lack of guests, and no vicar might be significant.

Oliver shakes hands with Patsy, introducing himself, then, before sitting down, he moves to Patsy’s side of the desk and twiddles with the venetian blind behind her chair, moving the slats so that the sun shines upwards instead of directly in my eyes.

“Better?” he asks me.

We exchange small, conspiratorial winks, and I bite my lip to stop myself laughing at Patsy’s expression. Her face is red and her eyes very wide, as if she can’t believe that someone has had the gall to do now what she should have done out of courtesy fifteen minutes ago.

She picks up Jack’s Behavioral Report again, although with not as much assurance as before. Oliver seems to have flustered her.

“I asked to speak to you both because of issues Jack is having in the classroom. He appears not to be able to differentiate between fact and fiction, and while we encourage strong, lively imaginations, we do try, at this point in child development, to make it clear to our students that the two viewpoints are separate.”

“So in other words, you’re saying Jack is a liar.” Oliver slices neatly through the spiel of edu-jargon.

Patsy’s face reddens further. “Not at all, but—”

“In that case, you must be saying that he’s telling the truth?”

“Not quite, but—”

“You must be saying one or the other. Which is it that he’s telling you? Fact or fiction?”

“Well—”

“Fact or fiction? Quick!”

Oliver’s not giving Patsy a chance to get a word in. He reminds me of Samuel L Jackson in Pulp Fiction: “Say ‘What’ again! I dare you! I double-dare you!”

“Imaginary friends are one thing!” Patsy bursts out. “But his obsession with this particular friend, whatever her name is—”

“Her name’s M,” Jacks voice says from inside the nylon igloo, and I stifle a giggle with my hand. “M, like the letter M.”

“—This obsession is out of hand. And I would like your permission to refer him to the school district’s educational psychologist for further assessment.”

Oliver stands up. “If that’s all you called us in for,” he says, “you might as well have phoned. Because the answer is No. Jack is not a liar, and he’s not a psycho either. You, on the other hand, I have always had my doubts about, and I’m not about to take child-rearing advice from someone who accepts bribes from parents. Come on Libs. Kids!” he shouts in the direction of the igloo. “Time to go home now. If we have to be in a madhouse, I prefer the homegrown type. No wonder homeschooling is so popular,” he adds to Patsy.

* * *

“And then what?” Maggie asks me the following day, when Jack is at school and I’ve taken the twins to see their adopted granny. Their adopted ex-grandpa, thank goodness, is busy in the back yard, splitting logs for Maggie’s wood-burning stove.

I shrug. “We went home, and Oliver sat down with Jack and lectured him long and hard about differentiating between fact and fiction.”

“So he was only standing up for Jack against Patsy at school. He doesn’t really believe the story that there is the ghost of a little girl in your house. Although you do?”

I think back to the day we found the shattered Dresden shepherdess. It was in the centre of the dining room floor, a long way from the shelf where I’d put it. To get to its final resting place, it would have had to jump seven or eight feet through the air. We don’t own a cat, and to my knowledge, there had been no freak earthquake that morning. And yet, all my life, I have pooh-poohed the idea of ghosts and ghouls.

In other words, I am having a crisis of faith.

“I believe there is something,” I say finally. “I just don’t know what, exactly. The china shepherdess broke in the dining room, which happens to be the room that won’t warm up, no matter what you do to it. And there’s Fergus — he wouldn’t come in the house at all. I’ve heard that dogs are sensitive to… things.” I shiver, despite the warm sunshine that is shining through Maggie’s living room windows. “It could just be circumstantial, of course. Logic tells me that it probably is, and everything can be explained by rational argument. But whenever I start to explain things away with logic, I come up against the biggest obstacle — that I honestly believe Jack thinks he is telling the truth.”

Maggie nods thoughtfully, and rocks back and forth in her rocking chair. Beth, who is sitting on her lap and playing with Maggie’s long string of amber beads, leans back, puts her thumb in her mouth, and closes her eyes.

“I remember Cathy saying that Chuck had an imaginary friend when he was a little boy,” she says at last. “In that very house.”

“So you said, in one of your emails. He grew out of it, though.”

Maggie wiggles her hand in a comme ci comme ça gesture. “He was very old to have a pretend friend. Eleven, twelve. And I don’t know, but… I got the impression that he said he’d grown out of it, to humour her. I remember visiting the house once, and he didn’t know I was there, and he was talking to someone – someone who wasn’t there. He’d have been about fifteen at the time.”

I sit still, turning over possibilities in my mind. George waddles over to me and puts his head on my knee. Any minute now, he will go to sleep, standing up where he is.

“He was very keen that I read the folder of old documents relating to the house. It’s full of papers to do with plumbing and roofs, but there’s also records of people who used to live there, a couple of hundred years ago. Perhaps I should read it more carefully.”

But later, in bright sunshine, when the house is full of real people and real laughter. Right now, I’m not very keen on going back to my silent, empty house with two sleepy toddlers.

“Does Jack’s friend have a name?” Maggie asks.

“He calls her M. Like the character in James Bond. Or Dial M for Murder.”

I shiver again., then notice that Maggie has stopped rocking in her chair and is rubbing her arms.

“Are you cold?” I ask. “I thought it was just me. Shall I turn the heat up?”

Maggie shakes her head, and I see that she has lost some colour from her cheeks.

“Chuck used to love the film The Wizard of Oz. Cathy said he’d named his imaginary friend after one of the characters.”

I laugh. “Like, Dorothy? Toto? Tin Man?”

Maggie is still shaking her head. “No. Cathy always thought it was an odd choice, but assumed it was because Cathy and her husband didn’t have any brothers or sisters. He named her after the aunt.”

I stare at Maggie, and start to rub my own arms which, like Maggie’s, have sprung a rash of goosepimples.

Aunt Em.

Em.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #86

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #84 – Stages of youth

Read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

Want to read more? Head on over to Kate Allison’s own site, where you can find out more about Libby and the characters of Woodhaven, and where you can buy Taking Flight, the first year of Libby’s Life — now available as an ebook.

STAY TUNED for next week’s posts!

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JACK THE HACK: Expat authors, let’s reopen that blogging can of worms (1/3)

9 Comments Posted by The Displaced Nation Team on October 2, 2013

A pressured existence in the UK led Jack Scott and his partner, Liam, to seek sanctuary in the Turkish port town of Bodrum. This expat experience was literally something to write home about (as in a book!), after which the pair returned to the UK, where they are living the life of Riley in Norwich.

We have invited Jack, now reinvented as Jack the Hack, to submit a monthly column targeted at those of you who are still displaced and hacking away at travelogues-cum-memoirs—or, in some cases, autobiographical novels. Warning to non-Brits: Don’t be put off by his wry sense of humo(u)r!

—ML Awanohara

As far as the book malarkey goes, unless you’re lucky enough to bag a big boy in the publishing world, you will carry the can to get the word out. These days, this means developing a strong and dynamic online presence.

To some, this seems like a step too far. I’ve worked with a number of new authors who just don’t have the time, skill or inclination to do what it takes.

“I wrote the damn book. Isn’t that enough?” I’ve been told.

Well, no, it isn’t, I’m afraid, not by a long chalk.

So I work with them to take the pain away. You see, it doesn’t need to be a can of worms. Those who regularly dip into Jack the Hack will know that I’m a passionate advocate of blogging—for fun and for glory. With a little effort and imagination, you really can make the Web work for you, and blogging is a very good place to start (cue Julie Andrews, the old Dame who tragically lost her fabulous soprano timbre).

Still not convinced?

Then let’s start at the very beginning…

So what is a blog?

The word is an abbreviation of “weblog”. Put simply, a blog is a journal where the entries (posts) are published online, with the most recent first (the reverse of a traditional hand-penned diary). A blog can take many forms and is a perfect vehicle to reflect our multi-media world of words, music, video and images.

Importantly, blogs differ from standard websites. They are dynamic (rather than static) and constantly evolving (assuming they are kept up to date).

Why do people blog?

It may sound grandiose, but blogging is an important democratizing force, giving a real voice to those who might otherwise not have one. It’s a great social leveler too—anyone can do it, no qualification required. There’s no editor to correct your flabby grammar and no one to censure your words (unless, of course, you live somewhere with lively Internet police).

While this means a fair amount of dross is floating round the crowded blogosphere, there are roses among the weeds—and you could be one of them.

Bloggers blog for all sorts of reasons and to continue the tenuous Sound of Music theme, here are a few of my favo(u)rite (things):

• Because they have something to say about an issue they care about (the campaigners and spleen-ventors);
• To tell their world what they’re up to and to keep in touch with friends and family (a common topic for expat blogs);
• To help others (health-related blogs are often written for this purpose);
• To be seen as an expert or influencer in a particular arena or place (the Arts, politics and travel leap to mind);
• To connect with like-minded people (this blog, The Displaced Nation, is a good example);
• To flog a service, brand or product (oh, like a book).

Most successful blogs tend to focus around a particular theme or niche. I know a blogger who writes about knitting patterns. It’s hugely popular, attracting thousands of hits a week.

Among the big hitters are travel, politics, food, family life and…ta-da! books and creative writing.
Blogs are a boundless, no-to-low-cost way to lay out your stall in a way an ordinary Website might not. Why so? Because Internet search engines like Google love content that’s new, fresh and frequently updated.

Even well-established businesses take blogging seriously these days. So why wouldn’t you?

Has Jack converted you to the cause? If you’re hooked, let him reel you next month with tips to launch your blog with bang.

BLOGGING TIP FOR EXPAT AUTHORS NO 1:

Blogging increases the chances of getting your mug shot on the first page of Google—and that just might sell a book or two.

* * *

Readers, any comments, further questions for Jack the Hack? He’ll be back next month with the second in his blogging advice trilogy…

Jack Scott’s debut book, Perking the Pansies—Jack and Liam move to Turkey, is a bitter-sweet tragi-comedy that recalls the first year of a British gay couple in a Muslim country. For more information on this and Jack’s other titles, go to his author site.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, another installment in the life of our fictional expat heroine, Libby. (What, not keeping up with Libby? Read the first three episodes of her expat adventures.)

Images: from top, clockwise: Hand with pen / MorgueFile.com; Boats in King’s Lynn, Norfolk / MorgueFile.com; Jack Scott, used with his permission; Turkish boats / MorgueFile.com

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And the September 2013 Alices go to … these 4 international creatives

Leave a comment Posted by The Displaced Nation Team on October 1, 2013

© Iamezan | Dreamstime.com
Used under license

If you are a subscriber to our weekly newsletter, Displaced Dispatch, you’re already in the know. But if you’re not (and why aren’t you? off with your head!), listen up. Every week, when that esteemed publication comes out, we present an “Alice Award” to a writer or other kind of creative person who we think has a special handle on the curious and unreal, who knows what it means to be truly displaced as a global resident or voyager. Not only that, but this person tries to use this state of befuddlement to their advantage, as a spur to greater creative heights.

Today’s post honors September’s four Alice recipients.

Starting with the most recent, and this time with annotations, they are (drumroll…):

1) SHERRY OTT, travel photographer and blogger

Source: “Photographing Vietnam’s Rainy Season,” on Everything Everywhere
Posted on: 20 September 2013
Snippet:

From a cultural experience and photography standpoint, inclement weather seasons are a wonderful opportunity to see how the locals really live in situations that we would deem less desirable. You get a true feel for the country and local culture and traditions through the “tough” times. On top of it you get introduced to a number of new products that are used in that inclement weather season that you probably never even dreamed of…

Citation: Sherry, we have to stop you there. Right now we are picturing Alice sloshing through her own tears:

As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, “and in that case I can go back by railway,” she said to herself.

But what interests us about you, Sherry—what’s curiouser and curiouser, as Alice might put it—is that, unlike her, you were not having a pool-of-tears moment. As you set foot in Saigon at the height of the monsoon season, your first thought was, my, how lucky I am to see “the skies open up and pour down their wrath on city streets.” And you know what, Sherry? We agree with you. Unlike Alice, who had no means of transport except possibly the train, you had your own motorbike. Also unlike her, you were privy to some unusual sights: double-headed ponchos and ponchos with headlight windows! Poor Alice, on the other hand, when she heard something splashing about in a pool a little ways off, thought she might encounter a walrus or hippopotamus, only to find … a mouse.

2) ALYSSA JAMES Canadian blogger, journalist, traveler

Source: “How fast can you slow travel?” on Matador Network
Posted on: 13 September 2013
Snippet:

Because of regulations on how long a truck driver is allowed to be on the road in a day, I was able to explore the city [of Chicago] for exactly 1 hour and 19 minutes.

In those 79 minutes, I was still able to slow travel. I visited the sculpture and centerpiece of Millennium Park known as the Bean (actually called Cloud Gate) and went to the Art Institute. More importantly, I talked with people who lived there. I received interesting insights about the place I wouldn’t have gathered otherwise, like where to get the most delicious Chicago-style pizza ever (Giordano’s deep-dish, double-crusted and stuffed deliciousness).

Citation: Alyssa, we appreciate that you were able to plumb the depths of the Windy City, the largest city in the Midwest, America’s third largest, in just over an hour (hey, that’s no mean feat given how deep the pizza is!). And all this without the benefit of the Queen’s insights in Through the Looking Glass:

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Our only question is, had you followed the Queen’s advice and run twice as fast, do you think you might have at least sampled the stuffed pizza? And of course, had you run twice as fast, you could have sampled it guilt-free! That’s a thought. Next time, perhaps?

3) ANNE COPELAND, founder and Executive Director of The Interchange Institute

Source: “Tiger Moms, Bébés, and Warm Eskimos” on FIGT blog
Posted on: 1 September 2013
Snippet:

[A]s an interculturalist, I’m at once fascinated, excited … and disappointed by these accounts of parenting in other cultures…. In each case, the message is roughly, “Here’s a new and superior way to raise your children; the result is better than what you’re doing; try it, you’ll like it.” But nowhere do they describe the deep values underlying the parenting choices, the ultimate goals for the kind of adult parents are trying to raise, or the cultural milieu into which the children will be expected to grow.

Citation: Anne, we feel certain that Alice could relate to your woes. She was, after all, rather discombobulated by what she saw of the Duchess’s parenting style. To quote from her account:

While the Duchess sang the second verse of the song, she kept tossing the baby violently up and down, and the poor little thing howled so, that Alice could hardly hear the words:—
“I speak severely to my boy,
I beat him when he sneezes;
For he can thoroughly enjoy
The pepper when he pleases!”

Just imagine, a child that enjoys unlimited amounts of pepper thanks to harsh parenting. It totally makes sense in the Wonderland context. Except…achoo! or should we say: hach-chu (Bengali), hāt-chī (Cantonese), atsjú (Hungarian), aatsjoo (Norwegian), or atchoum (French)? In any case, some sort of onomatopoeia must be required. Parenting may vary from place to place, but not sneezing! But wait, the Japanese say hakushon. Are they trying to stifle the sneeze while frantically searching for a face mask? (Anne, please tell us: will intercultural wonders ever cease?)

4) NIKKI HODGSON, blogger & traveler

Source: “What is lost (and gained) when the traveler settles down” on Matador Network
Posted on: 16 August 2013
Snippet:

“…Every day that passes separates me from the places I used to belong to, the places I learned to belong to. As I dig my roots deeper into the rocky Colorado soil, I must relinquish my grasp of the banks of the Neckar where I first studied abroad, the mountains of Grenoble that stood guard over me as I fell apart, the dusty hills of Bethlehem where I put myself back together.

And I know that I will never belong to these places the way I once did.”

Citation: Nikki, you put us in mind of Alice’s sister, who like you after your travels, was old and wise enough to know that Wonderland wouldn’t, couldn’t last. Here is the relevant passage:

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality—the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds…

Crazy Wonderland or dull reality? Or, in your case: dusty hills or rocky soil? That is THE expat question… Not much of a choice, is it?

* * *

So, readers, do you have a favorite from the above, or have you read any recent posts you think deserve an Alice Award? We’d love to hear your suggestions! And don’t miss out on these weekly sources of inspiration. Get on our subscription list now!

STAY TUNED for our next post!

Writers and other international creatives: If you want to know in advance whether you’re one of our Alice Award winners, sign up to receive The Displaced Dispatch, a round up of weekly posts from The Displaced Nation, with news of book giveaways, future posts, and of course, our weekly Alice Award!. Register for The Displaced Dispatch by clicking here!

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Mark Hillary delivers reality check to gringos who moan about Brazil, in self-published book (2/2)

3 Comments Posted by andy martin on September 24, 2013

In Part 1 of my interview with Mark Hillary, a fellow Brit and amigo in São Paulo, we learned about what spurred him to write a book called Reality Check: Life in BRAZIL through the eyes of a foreigner.

A lively discussion ensued about what makes Brazil such a contentious country for expats (short answer: it’s a country of extremes).

Today I’ll ask Mark about his decision to publish Reality Check as an e-book. As I mentioned last week, Mark is well published in his chosen field of technology and globalization. He is a HuffPo columnist and has also blogged for Reuters about British politics. But Reality Check represents his first venture into the Amazon e-book platform.

I was curious about why he chose this route and also had some questions about his reading and writing habits generally.

* * *

Mark, Reality Check isn’t the first book that you’ve written. Can you tell us something about your other books?
It’s actually my tenth book. I used to be quite a senior IT manager in a bank, managing people all over the world. I had already started contributing articles to technology magazines while I was at the bank, and eventually I was sent off to India to help the company build up a big new office in Bangalore. I was hiring hundreds of technical team members and then trying to sell their services bank to other sections of the bank. It was quite an experience, especially as it occurred right at the beginning of the big push to India by many technology companies.

I wrote a book about it all, which was published by the respected German publisher Springer and well received in journals and newspapers such as the FT.

After that I carried on writing about the connection between work, technology, and globalization.

It’s impressive that you can span the range from big IT questions to a foreigner’s take on life in Brazil.
I’m interested in many areas, which is probably why my three times at university have included courses on computer science, business and management, and psychology. My earlier work on outsourcing naturally led me to how companies are changing and globalization, and this has naturally led onto my writing about being an expat. If there’s a connecting thread, it’s work and the changing nature of work in our time. That said, I wouldn’t want to only ever comment on a single topic. Life is a lot more complex than that.

You decided to release Reality Check in the Amazon Kindle format. Why did you make that decision?
I’ve been asked that question a lot. Six of my books were published using traditional publishers, and three were self-published via Lulu. And now, with the Brazil book, I’ve used the Amazon Kindle format. I went into some detail on the pros and cons of each of these methods in a recent Huffington Post article, but in short the important thing to remember is how the publishing market is changing. Obviously there is still a lingering sense of kudos with the traditional publishers. A novel published by Penguin is still seen as “better” than something self-published, but it doesn’t have to be. The platform and process of publishing itself has just been democratized and made available to all.

If you know how to write and you can market your work to an audience, then it is much faster to publish with Amazon or Lulu. And, not only can you reach a global audience instantly—you earn a far greater percentage of the sale price.

In the case of Reality Check, I wanted it to be available around the world as quickly as possible, and Amazon has a great system for doing that. Plus you don’t actually need a Kindle: iPads and phones are all being used to read this book.

Do you think it helps that you already had a following through your writings and other books?
Reality Check has has been in the Amazon top 20 books about Brazil since publication on September 1st, and yesterday when I checked, it was the number one book about Brazil and number two book about South America. So people have been noticing it.

I think it does help if you already have a following. It used to be that publishers and agents acted as the gatekeeper, so readers could be confident a book that ended up in the shops was good. Now anyone can publish any old rubbish, so there is no longer that guarantee of a published book being any good.

The much-celebrated poet Seamus Heaney is a good example. He has been lauded as one of the greatest writers of the past century, and he had plenty of work published by traditional publishers. But he was self-publishing new work before his recent death.

Do you plan to make Reality Check anything other than an e-book?
I’m planning to also release a paper version of the book, but it will not be until the second edition—planned to come out just before the World Cup football competition in June next year.

Are you working on any other writing projects at the moment?
The present one is about my own experience of ghostwriting. I’ve written for ambassadors and company CEOs, and I once had to help astronaut Neil Armstrong add a few jokes to his standard Apollo 11 speech. The work I have written for others to be delivered in their name has often, but not always, gone down well, and I wanted to explore that. And in the tech area, I’m working on a book project that aims to be a graduates’ guide to how you get a job in a job market where nobody wants to pay you a salary.

10 Questions for Mark Hillary

Finally, I’d like to ask a series of questions that we’ve asked some of our other featured authors, about your reading and writing habits:

1. Last truly great book you read: I recently read all of Ira Levin’s novels back to back—all great; but I’ll go for Paul Trynka’s biography of David Bowie, which I just now finished.
2. Favorite literary genre: Dystopian novels: Burgess, Orwell, Ballard.
3. Reading habits on a plane: I read fiction and non-fiction and always carry my Kindle because it’s so much better for travel than lugging around a lot of books. This week I was on a plane and I read The Default Line, by Faisal Islam—about the financial crash of 2008 and what has happened since.
4. The one book you’d require David Cameron to read, and why: Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The new global revolutions, by Paul Mason. It’s a study of the various riots, uprisings and protests around the world, particularly in 2011. I think the UK has more unrest to come because living standards and earnings are in decline—the people are going to kick off again one day.
5. Favorite books as a child: Those by Roald Dahl, though everyone seems to think he was actually a nasty piece of work in real life.
6. Favorite heroine: Harper Lee. To Kill a Mockingbird was her only book and she never courted any publicity. It challenged racism over 50 years ago and still retains its power today.
7. The writer, alive or dead, you’d most like to meet: Oscar Wilde. He wrote 20th-century books and plays in the 19th century and despite his sad downfall, is still remembered and loved today.
8. Your reading habits: I mostly read in the evening. I don’t watch TV, other than for movies so that gives me more time. I tend to read one or two books a week unless I’m traveling a lot then it’s more just because of the endless time spent in airports or on buses.
9. The book you’d most like to see made as a film: The Drowned World, by J.G. Ballard. Life after the oceans have risen and the world we know now is flooded.
10. The book you plan to read next: Jesse Norman’s biography of Edmund Burke—already on the Kindle waiting for me.

* * *

Readers, any more questions for Mark? He may sound a bit intimidating, but in fact he’s very approachable and happy to answer any questions about e-publishing. (Though he doesn’t write fiction, he also has views on publishing platforms for novels.) Meanwhile, if you’re interested in Reality Check, you can purchase it on Amazon. I would also recommend becoming a fan of its Facebook page and following Mark on Twitter: @MarkHillary

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, by another Englishman who is also an expat albeit in California: Anthony Windram.

images: Mark Hillary surrounded by his traditional books and his e-book cover.

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Mark Hillary delivers reality check to gringos who moan about Brazil, in self-published book (1/2)

9 Comments Posted by andy martin on September 18, 2013

A little while ago I interviewed Megan Farrell, a fellow gringo in São Paulo, about the book she had written about “exbrat” life in the city. As far as I’m aware, Megan’s was the first book to be written about life in SP by a foreigner, although she seems to have started a new trend because within the last fortnight another has emerged: Reality Check: Life in BRAZIL through the eyes of a foreigner.

Reality Check is by Mark Hillary, a fellow Brit in São Paulo (he recently moved outside the city), who is an author, blogger, and advisor on technology and globalization. He has already published a number of books and is a contributor to Huffington Post, Reuters, The Guardian, and Computer Weekly.

Mark is also a friend of mine. We connected through Twitter just over a year ago. We eventually met at a local bar when—unsurprisingly, given his background in technology and social media—he organized a meet-up of gringos who had connected online but had yet to meet up in the flesh.

Since then he and I have continued to meet up, although less so since his move to the countryside. We had a particularly memorable trip in June to Rio to watch England play Brazil in football at the brand new Maracanã Stadium. (As anyone who follows my posts should recall, I’m a bit of a football geek.)

Over the past year Mark has written, in his column for the Huffington Post, a number of insightful articles about life as a foreigner in Brazil—most notably, “No HP Sauce, Endless Red Tape: Would You Want to Live in Brazil?, which responded to a gringo Facebook forum that had listed all the reasons why foreigners hated living in this country.

It was to my pleasant surprise, then, when Mark announced he had extended his account of life in Brazil and intended to publish it as an e-book.

Leaving aside my acquaintance with Mark (and the fact he gives a nod to my personal blog in the book!), I must say that I found Reality Check a very enjoyable read. It is a thoughtful and critical, yet balanced, account of his experiences in Brazil and of the country in general—and frankly, I’m rather annoyed that I haven’t written it myself.

Mark’s book also seems to be a good accompaniment to Megan’s. Whilst hers is a straightforward, step-by-step guide to life in São Paulo, his is a narrative providing a broad overview of gringo life. Either way, both books will be of use to those who are either moving to Brazil or perhaps are simply interested in finding out a bit more about South America’s largest and most populous country (it’s also the world’s fifth largest economy).

Anyway, enough of my wittering on. Let’s hear more from Mark himself.

* * *

Hi, Mark. Congratulations on your new book and thanks for agreeing to this interview. First off, can you say a little more about what inspired you to write it?
As you already mentioned, I wrote the book in large part as a reaction to the negative posts about Brazil in online gringo communities. Everyone has their own reasons for moving and living away from their home country, but the majority of the groups I’ve encountered online are full of complaints about Brazilian food, prices, bureaucracy… Anyone who reads the posts made in the Facebook group for Gringoes.com would think that the UK and US offer a utopian paradise that would be madness to ever leave.

As you said in your intro, I wrote an article for the Huffington Post where I tried to give a more balanced view on life in Brazil.

Then I thought that, as someone who has rented and bought a home, started a company, hired people, and married a Brazilian, I could probably give a more detailed opinion on the experience—hence the book.

So being married to a Brazilian was what brought you to Brazil?
Yes, we were living in London, but after the financial crash in 2008 my business was much slower than before. By 2010 it became clear that there were many more opportunities for me to build a research and publishing business in Brazil than in the UK and so we moved just before the end of that year, nearly four years ago.

We recently featured another book about expat life in Brazil: American Exbrat in São Paulo, by Megan Farrell. Megan’s focus was on the “exbrat” community in São Paulo—i.e., those who are transferred here for work by a large company. My impression is that your focus is less specific and more of a broad overview of life in Brazil as a foreigner.
I’m not really interested in the exbrats. If a big company transfers someone to Brazil and they have their home taken care of and a driver to ferry them around, and they only ever go for a drink in expat pubs, then I don’t think they are experiencing the real Brazil. I’m not suggesting that the only authentic Brazil experience is living in a favela, but there are other kinds of foreigners here—journalists, teachers, people from all walks of life—who are constantly looking for ways to explore their new home.

Did you have a specific audience in mind when you wrote the book?
I really set out to explore some of my own experiences, with the expectation that people investing in Brazil or looking for a job here might have an interest in the book.

The book has only just been published (2nd September) so I guess it is a little early to tell, but how has it been received so far?
It is very recent, but there is already a very positive review from a Brazilian reader on Amazon. I started my author Facebook page when I published the book, and that community is growing by around a hundred people every day—so people are noticing it. One of the biggest newspapers in Brazil (Folha de SP) has been in touch to interview me about the book—despite my not having done any press promotion for the book due to my traveling almost every day since the publication!

Did you connect with São Paulo and/or Brazil in any new ways whilst writing the book?
It made me more determined to plug areas outside of Rio, which has a lot of friends already. I’ve really enjoyed living in both São Paulo the city and interior—SP needs a few gringo fans to speak out and remind people that the city is not just about concrete and cops murdering civilians.

You recently moved to the countryside outside São Paulo—how and why did that come about?
We spent two years living in the centre of São Paulo and just wanted to find something a bit quieter. I love it where we are now. There is a great sense of community; the neighbours all know each other. There is none of the security paranoia you find in the city centre, and there is some fantastic scenery on our doorstep.

Do you miss SP at all?
I miss being able to go out to see my friends in the city, or go to concerts by international bands that will only ever play in major cities. But we are planning to get a very small apartment in SP soon, so we don’t completely lose touch with it.

You mentioned the “security paranoia” in SP. In my observation, most of us gringos carry a fear that is at odds with how our Brazilian partners and/or friends feel. I enjoyed reading the section of your book covering this perception gap. Do you think that more positive accounts of Brazil by writers/bloggers like you and myself can help to shift these perceptions?
If people like you and me can get visitors to realize that they can walk down Avenida Paulista or along Copacabana Beach without fearing for their life, that would help. On more than one occasion I have met business contacts who flew into town and then were shocked when I suggested meeting away from their hotel. Standard advice from American and European companies is often to stay inside when in Brazil because of all the street crime.

The Brazilians, too, should play a part in correcting this situation. I don’t think we have much influence because we are seen as outsiders, but as more Brazilians get exposed to alternative cultures through travel, I hope it can change a little.

Last year I brought my wife’s teenage cousin on a trip to the USA, just to show her what life is like outside of Brazil. She found it incredible that you could walk up to the front of so many celebrity homes in Los Angeles—that anyone could walk into Sylvester Stallone’s garden. That’s unimaginable in Brazil.

What are you thoughts on foreign media portrayals of Brazil? Do you feel, for example, that persistent foreign criticisms of Brazil’s preparations for the World Cup and Olympics have been fair?
Every World Cup and Olympic games gets this negative press, so I don’t know if it is any worse than the last time. Anyone from the UK should be able to recall how the London Games were going to be a disaster right up to the week of the Games—the attitude seemed to change only when everyone saw that spectacular opening ceremony.

All I know from personal experience is that when you and I went to the Brazil v England football game at the Maracanã in June, the organization was superb. The stadium looked good, the public transport all worked, and the volunteers helping the crowd were great. I couldn’t fault it—so I’m really looking forward to the World Cup.

From the way you write so passionately about Brazil it is clear that you love living here, but there must have been the odd difficult moment when you wondered whether you’d made the right decision in fleeing the economically stagnant UK for your wife’s native land. When have you felt most displaced?
Sometimes the bureaucracy in daily life does get perverse and goes beyond just the criticism of a foreigner claiming that it all works better in Europe. Examples include having to pay someone to get my car registered to a new address or being fined for not paying my stamp duty on the day I agreed a mortgage with the bank—even though I paid on the day I got the documents myself. Sometimes I wonder if there is ever going to be any government that sweeps away this nonsense. I also fear that the job cuts created by improved efficiency means we are stuck with much of this.

Conversely, when have been your least displaced moments, when it all seemed to make sense?
I live in a really beautiful place now surrounded by a lot of wonderful people. Every morning when I take my dog for a walk then start work for the day I know I’m lucky to be here.

* * *

Readers, I will be talking to Mark again on Tuesday of next week, when we focus on his decision to self-publish his book. Any further questions for him, meantime? And don’t forget, if you’re interested in Reality Check, you can purchase it on Amazon. I would also recommend becoming a fan of its Facebook page and following Mark on Twitter: @MarkHillary

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post, a new episode in our “Location, Locution” series, by JJ Marsh.

images: Mark Hillary’s author image and book cover

Features Brazil, Crosscultural marriage, Gothic tales, Memoir | Travel | Food Writers, New York City, Politics, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, South America, Travel guide, UK, USA, Writers we love

LIBBY’S LIFE #84 – Stages of youth

3 Comments Posted by Kate Allison on September 13, 2013

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigialPhotos.net

“No. For the last time, she can’t come to school with us,” I say to Jack, as I lock the front door behind us and start to hustle the three children into the car. “We’re already late. You want to meet your teacher today, ready for when school starts tomorrow, don’t you?”

Jack pouts. “But she wants to. M says she’ll be lonely if I go without her. She says she’ll break something in the house if we leave her on her own.”

You know, I’ve had just about enough of Jack’s overactive imagination and this pretend friend.

“M” has been an invisible fixture in the house for the last six weeks, and she’s a demanding little sod — worse than my own three, live, already demanding children. I have to lay an extra place for her at every mealtime, and recently I’ve been evicted from my favourite spot on the recliner chair in the living room because Jack says that M is already sitting there.

Now the brat is ready to smash my china if she doesn’t get her own way.

I could just play along with the game and say, “Of course M can come with us”, but that would precipitate the need for an extra car seat because M is not old enough to sit in the front seat, Jack says.

And the name. What sort of name for a girl is “M”, for crying out loud, unless you happen to be Judi Dench in a Bond film?

“She’s very upset,” Jack says, with the air of someone washing his hands of all blame for the consequences. “You’re going to be sorry.”

“I hope you’re not threatening me,” I say, as I make sure his seat belt is fastened properly. “Otherwise it won’t be me who is sorry. I promise you that.”

Jack is unrepentant.

“I was just telling you what she said.”

Thank goodness school starts properly tomorrow, is all I can say, when Jack will (I hope) make new, human friends and forget about the fictitious girl in our house. The same girl who now has the nerve to threaten vandalism if I don’t allow her to come along to kindergarten orientation with us. I mean, it’s obvious she can’t come. She isn’t even enrolled at the sch–

Oh, this is ridiculous.

It’s got to the point where I almost believe in her myself.

* * *

Before I take Jack to meet his new teacher, I drive to Maggie’s house on our old street. Maggie is looking after the twins while Jack and I go to school for the morning.

“So it’s not Jack’s first proper day of school today?” she asks. “It’s just a meet and greet with the teacher, find out where the sand box is, that kind of thing?”

“Breaking them in gently, that’s right.”

“Didn’t happen in my day,” a Southern, male voice chips in from Maggie’s armchair. “My mother stayed in bed and let me walk to school with the neighbour’s kid on my first day.”

Derek. Maggie’s ex who, if I’m not mistaken – and I hope to God I am mistaken — will shortly be her ex-ex.

He arrived in Boston with her on the flight from Miami nearly three weeks ago, and seems in no hurry to return to his home in Virginia, or Maryland, or Delaware, or whichever state he comes from. We met on the second day of his visit, and took an immediate dislike to each other.

“We Northerners must be made of softer stuff than you tough Southerners,” Maggie says in a sugary voice that’s quite unlike the acid tone this comment would elicit from her had it been made by anyone else.

I have no idea what witchcraft Maggie’s ex has spun on my friend, but in the four weeks she was in the Keys, Maggie changed. She’s never been one to show or act her age — “Age is but a number” she is fond of saying — but since she came back, she’s been nearer in mental age and outlook to Jack than to me.

I did wonder if she was starting to become prematurely senile, until I saw Maggie and Derek together one afternoon. Then I realised what had happened.

They’ve teleported themselves back forty years. She is behaving as she did when she was nineteen, and he thinks he’s the dashing young state trooper who stopped a redheaded English woman for speeding in a borrowed Corvette.

And it won’t work. You can’t be teenagers when you’re drawing a pension — at least, you can’t be the same teenagers that you used to be. By all means, have a second youth; but the key word there is “second”.

Reliving their first one will end in a pool of tears, I’m sure of it.

Maggie’s my best friend, and I don’t want to see her hurt. But what can I do?

* * *

At the elementary school, Dr Felix Roth, the Principal, is in his element as he greets all the parents in the foyer.

I tell a lie. He doesn’t greet all the parents. He greets the parents who know him well enough to call him by his first name because they’re on the PTA, and he gives a weak smile down his nose to all the others. I get my own back by pretending not to know who he is, and Jack and I make our way to Room 43, where Jack will be spending the next year with his kindergarten teacher, Mrs Healy. My friend Willow tells me that Mrs Healy is a plump, cosy, grandmotherly type, close to retirement age. A lucky class placement for Jack, says Willow.

Room 43 is heaving with babies, toddlers, and five-year-old children. Jack pushes his way into a group of boys who are playing in a nylon igloo tent, and I look around the room to see if I recognise anyone.

With a sigh and feeling of déjà vu, I see Jodee Addison, mother of Jack’s Valentine crush this year, Crystal. Then, to my absolute dismay, I see Caroline Michaels.

Caroline, the wife of Oliver’s boss, whose son Dominic was the catalyst for Jack’s defection from Patsy Traynor’s nursery school. I’d heard on the grapevine that Caroline was going back to England and divorcing her boss husband after the fiasco at the Christmas party last year, but her presence in the classroom suggests that she prefers the expat-married-to-a-slimeball lifestyle to the divorced-and-living-in-Milton Keynes version.

As the teacher doesn’t seem to have arrived yet, I move closer to Jodee and Caroline, who are venting their opinions on something, and eavesdrop shamelessly.

“It’s too bad,” Jodee is saying loudly. ” You’d think someone in her position of trust would look after her health better instead of eating saturated fat all day. Such a bad example for the children.”

“It’s not just her suffering because of her bad health choices,” Caroline says, her lips pursed self-righteously. “I mean, a heart attack? Really? Only herself to blame. Thoughtless, I call it.”

Jodee nods vigorously.

Wow. Some woman has had a heart attack and this is the sympathy these witches give her. I wonder who they’re talking about. Poor soul.

Caroline says: “There should be mandatory six-monthly physicals for teachers, and they should be made to diet down to an acceptable weight or lose their jobs. Having a heart attack in your late 50s, when it’s entirely preventable, is nothing short of selfish. And now our children have to suffer.”

Wait. Is she talking about Mrs Healy?

I’m about to turn and ask the mother next to me, who is also listening, jaw on the floor, to Caroline and Jodee, when the Principal enters the room.

In his high, squeaky voice, he tells the gathered parents that, as some of us may already know — here, Jodee and Caroline look smugly at each other — Mrs Healy sadly had a heart attack two days ago, and is still in the ICU at St Whatsit’s Hospital. Her condition is stable but critical, and she will not be coming back for the foreseeable future. With school starting tomorrow, parents will appreciate that time was of the essence, he says, and the school is extremely fortunate to have found a longterm substitute teacher with much experience, who comes with glowing recommendations.

“Someone who is probably known to many of you from pre-school,” he adds, with a smile that can only be described as arch. “May I introduce to you — “ he looks behind him, out into the corridor, and beckons to someone with his arm “– Mrs Patsy Traynor, who will be taking over the captain’s wheel of your child’s kindergarten ship until Mrs Healy is able to return to work.”

Patsy looks over the classroom, sees Jodee and Caroline, and beams broadly at them.

Then she sees me.

I wonder how easy it is for Jack to be transferred to another school.

* * *

Two hours later, back home, I unlock the front door and Jack races into the dining room.

“M! I’m back!” he shouts.

And then: “Mummy, I told you she wouldn’t like it if I went out.”

On the dining room floor, in shattered pieces, is the despised Dresden shepherdess that my mother’s aunt gave Oliver and me on our wedding day.

Well, I reflect with a shiver, as I sweep up the bits before Beth and George can toddle over them in their bare feet – everything is clear now.

And I suppose that, if we have to have a poltergeist in the house, at least this one appears to share my taste in internal decor.

Next post: LIBBY’S LIFE #85

Previous post: LIBBY’S LIFE #83 – Letters from afar

Read Libby’s Life from the first episode.

STAY TUNED for tomorrow’s post!

Image: Travel – Map of the World by Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigialPhotos.net; “Suitcase” © Tiff20 at Dreamstime.com – used under license; portrait from MorgueFile

Libby's Life, Serial Books Expat novelists, Fiction Writers, It's Fiction!, Libby's Life, UK, USA

GLOBAL FOOD GOSSIP: How (not) to feed a convalescent expat

3 Comments Posted by The Displaced Nation Team on September 11, 2013

Joanna Masters-Maggs, our resident Food Gossip, is back with her column for like-minded food gossips.

This month: The state of worldwide hospital food.

* * *

“The last thing you need on top of everything else when you are in hospital is red wee.”

So ended my husband’s texted tirade after a few days in an Abu Dhabi hospital following an emergency appendectomy which turned out to be less than straightforward. The indignities, pain, and discomfort could be handled with fortitude, but the food had caused the British stiff upper lip some serious challenges. Beetroot was served at every meal and in every conceivable form — none of which was remotely welcome to this convalescent.

Almost unbelievably, the day after my husband was admitted to a Middle Eastern hospital, my 9-year-old son was diagnosed with the same condition and admitted to Taunton Hospital, in Somerset, England, for the same operation. Patrick took it all in his stride, only threatening mutiny when a disposable bottle, apparently made of the same recycled cardboard as egg cartons, was proffered in response to his request to go to the loo. With furious determination he heaved himself upright and made his way to the bathrooms, wheeling his drip ahead of him and making my heart swell with maternal pride.

Several hours later, when wrinkled potato wedges and bright orange fish fingers confronted him, Patrick’s attitude was rather different. My husband’s texted complaint lacked the colour a human voice could give the words. My son’s anguished “Why, why, why?” however, provided a glimpse of The Husband’s state of mind when he composed his text. The pitch of “Why can’t I just have a tuna sandwich?” swung from already-stressed contralto to end-of-tether soprano.

KISS: Keep It Simple, Sandwich

This question is one I ask myself every time I face airline food. Why not a sandwich? A simple sandwich is perfect food for those on the go; ask any hill-walker. It is easily transported and eaten and requires little in the way of tableware. It certainly beats sub-standard wannabe home-cooking, or, more depressingly, wannabe gourmet cooking. KLM used to do a nice sandwich on granary, a little oatcake and a good cup of tea or coffee on their London to Schiphol shuttle. I have never enjoyed airborne eating as much. Flights since, even champagne-soaked upgrades, have never hit the spot as well.

Hospitals, like airlines, are susceptible to the curse of being the girl who tries too hard at parties and embarrasses everyone, for different reasons of course. Airlines because they feel they are part of the same package as the business trip or holiday and have to provide something special. Hospitals, being in the health business. feel under pressure to produce something healthy and balanced. Easy healthy and balanced is a lump of protein, a lump of carbohydrate and some boiled veg. Each element can be whatever is readily to hand in the locale. Obviously, beetroot is easy to come by in Abu Dhabi – who’d have thought?

A few years ago I found myself admitted with an unpleasant stomach bug to a hospital in Kuala Lumpur. During my recovery, meal after meal was placed in front of me, each consisting of overdone, indigestible chicken in glutinous sauce with rice and boiled vegetables. (Never talk to me again about English food.) Not appetizing at any time, but certainly not in the recovery period. At the end of day two I was begging for cream crackers and jelly. Even if I was unable to eat them, they were easier to tolerate the look of in the post-prandial two hours that the staff took to remove the debris.

The Victorians –now, they knew how to run a sickroom

When I’m sick I crave the ideal Victorian sickroom. I want chicken soup, broth, and little crustless sandwiches cut into triangles. I want food that makes me feel pampered and I want it in miniature form. What I don’t want is big hunks of meat that I have to take a hacksaw to. I don’t want to bother with a knife and fork. I’d like little sips of water, or tea and maybe the odd ginger biscuit. Some soft-boiled eggs and soldiers (fingers of toast) would be nice too. In short, give me the whole Victorian sickroom vibe complete with flowery china and a little vase of flowers. Do that and I’ll put on a white nighty, brush my hair and smarten up my convalescent act accordingly.

What explains this wanton disregard for dainty and light in preference for The Undigestibles? I suggest it is because hospitals the world over want us out, and want us out fast. In cash-strapped UK NHS land, beds are at a premium and waiting lists must be kept down. Make things too comfortable and delicious and who knows how long malingering patients will stay? I also imagine American insurance companies would like to minimize the number of nights their customers spend in hospitals which are often more costly than excellent hotels.

If you can’t keep it simple, keep it real

So, what’s my point talking about all this in our “displaced” world? I suppose it is simple, really. I want any experience that takes place outside of my own country to be distinctive and of that place. If a hospital cannot, or will not, convert its menu into something I might find in Little Women, I want to lose my appetite for something distinctive. If I have some indescribably unpleasant stomach complaint and find myself again in hospital in KL, I want to be unable to eat Malaysian food, truly Malaysian food. If I’m not eating, give me beef rendang to reject and not boiled chicken breasts. If I am in Rio, I want to lose my appetite for black beans and chiffonade of couve (actually, that will never happen) and if I ever end up in a Abu Dhabi hospital, I want to reject grated raw beetroot.

You see, be it Victorian pampered convalescent on a chaise longue, or expat overseas, I yearn to feel special when I am sick. Is that really too much to ask?

* * *

Fellow Food Gossips, share your own stories with us!

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LIBBY’S LIFE #85 – A trick of the light

And the September 2013 Alices go to … these 4 international creatives

1) SHERRY OTT, travel photographer and blogger

2) ALYSSA JAMES Canadian blogger, journalist, traveler

3) ANNE COPELAND, founder and Executive Director of The Interchange Institute

4) NIKKI HODGSON, blogger & traveler

Mark Hillary delivers reality check to gringos who moan about Brazil, in self-published book (2/2)

10 Questions for Mark Hillary

Mark Hillary delivers reality check to gringos who moan about Brazil, in self-published book (1/2)

LIBBY’S LIFE #84 – Stages of youth

GLOBAL FOOD GOSSIP: How (not) to feed a convalescent expat

KISS: Keep It Simple, Sandwich

The Victorians –now, they knew how to run a sickroom

If you can’t keep it simple, keep it real

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