Exotic Memories, or, Why I Write (Maybe)

Running late, excuse the mistakes and typos, I have to get back on the roof....)

For those who enjoy my books, it's probably obvious that I have a fascination for different cultures. I write about different countries and customs, hoping to capture a snapshot of the background that shapes my heros and heroines, even the bad guys (like Dilaver and his aunt, Greta).

Of course, the most familiar culture to me is that from my country, which celebrates four different new years annually: the traditional Western New Year, Chinese New Year (fifteen days starting from yesterday), the Hindu New Year, and the Muslim New Year. Each of these are national holidays in my old homeland, and many of us visit our different friends and their families during their new year celebrations.

It is from growing up with this background that shaped me: my beliefs and my outlook in life. Everything might look or taste different, but the feeling is the same. The different cultures celebrate the new years asking for hope and wishing luck and happiness to friends and families.

Thus it is with romance. The storyline may be exotic and the culture may feel alien, but the emotional pull of the story is familiar. My characters love and hate the same as any book set here, in familiar American territory.

Here is a quick snapshot of the Chinese New Year celebrations of my youth. It's a fifteen-day festival and most of us kids loved it because it is tradition for married and old people to give kids and those who are unmarried "red packets," or angpow, filled with lucky money. We always knew who the scrooge in the neighborhood was (she filled her packets with a 20 cent coin each, which was our equivalent of a quarter). Most of the packets would contain a new Malaysian dollar.

My parents, who were wealthy, filled theirs with $5 or $10 for visiting relatives. As you could imagine, one could get pretty poor during New Year if one was known for their generosity!

My siblings and I got quite rich during this time. Our red packet collection is like candy to American kids during Halloween. We wore our new clothes (and the colors had to be red or yellow or green to attract luck. No black or blue!) and we ate the traditional family meal at home, with noodles and sweet meats. The elders enjoyed a meal of wine with raw fish and rice noodles, which had always disgusted me.

On the second and third days, my grandmother would take us to the temples to pray and also give the gods big oranges and tangerines (which signified plentiful wealth) as well as burn incense. The temples in those days were run by old women who had nowhere else to go (just like medieval times when the ladies had to join the nunnery); they depended on the goodwill of the believers to help pay for their livelihood and the temple. As I matured, I grew to understand the limitations of being a woman in certain cultures and the different choices in aloneness that they faced. I'm not saying that these temple women weren't happy or disatisfied, but I wasn't happy or satisfied for them, if that made sense.

Outside the temple were the band of beggars. They traveled together and took care of each other. I still remember the man with no legs sitting on a piece of cloth that told his sad story. People dropped coins in his bucket while he mumbled his thanks, barely looking up. At the end of the day, one of the other beggars would come over to "carry" this man back to wherever their shelter was. As a kid, this group of people were like aliens to me; I wasn't emotionally affected yet.

As I grew older, I learned compassion from understanding the dilemma of trying to survive in a system with no social services help. I also learned that humans would find a way to survive; these beggars banded together into a community and did what they could for survival. I could even say that some of them were perfectly happy the way they were; I've had quite a few funny conversations with the drunken hobos who certainly taught me that humor could be found in anything.
Anyway, the temples would be filled with incense and people praying. The statues of the Goddess of Mercy and the King of Heaven would be draped with cloths of red and gold silk. To a small kid, looking up at them, they were ethereal and powerful beings, magical beings who could grant wishes if they felt like it. Most of the stuff my grandma made me ask for were boring, like good grades in school. I probably wasn't sincere enough in my prayers because my grades were never particularly wonderful.

But I did crawl under the table that the gods sat on. Kids doing that were promised that they would grow up tall, strong, and protected. Heck, at a puny 4 foot 2, I needed to be taller, so I crawled under that table A LOT. I remember shooting up six inches one year and catching up with some of my friends. I remember thinking that the gods must have known how sincerely desperate I was!

As I grew older, I would shuffle the I-Ching sticks that were in tall bamboo vases. The sticks were darkened by age and numbered according to the I-Ching. The ones that fell out were picked up and taken to the counter and one of the nuns would pull the yellow paper from the wall with that number on it. Because I wasn't literate in Chinese, she would read it out loud to me, very lyrical imagery about water in valleys and filling the cave, or desert awaiting rain, or music in the mountain.

I rarely understood what was told about my future but I was thoroughly fascinated with the words and the idea that words were so important to actions and choices (most people used the I-Ching to make a decision about something important or to query about the current state of a problem). As I grew older, I appreciated this tradition in a more celebral way, enjoying the objective interpretation of a problem using imagery. And heck, so much cheaper than a psychiatrist.

While walking anywhere in Chinatown or around my neighborhood, I would hear the rhythmic drums and firecrackers from different directions. The local taichi/kungfu houses would send out their best troupes to do the acrobatics in a traditional lion and dragon dance. The best lion dance I ever saw were dueling troupes hired by my father. They were rivals, so they were dancing their lion-tails off, moving the very heavy lion heads up and down while the other members somersaulted around them. They "crashed" heads, acting out a fight scene, showing off their kungfu. My mother, ever inventive, put the angpow money (their pay) on a pole and dangled it from the second balcony of our house. The acrobats had to work really hard, climbing on each other's shoulders, to get to their packets, but being that my family was rich, they knew their pay would be worthed it.

As a kid, I was told that the firecrackers, drums, and lion-dancing were meant to scare away evil and bad things from the house. All those painted masks were kind of scary, I suppose. But I was really fascinated with the lion's head with its blinking eyes. In my very fertile imagination, I was already making up a story about the magical lion that came alive every new year.

I wanted to be part of the lion dance and learned kungfu and be kickass. I wanted to do splits and jumped off from the shoulders of strong, muscular men. Alas, my parents quashed that ambition rather effectively. Young educated girls just didn't do things like that. You know, I could have been the next Michelle Yeoh, whom, by the way, I shared a school bus with once or twice. Not the Miss Malaysia part, because damn, I stopped crawling under the gods' table and didn't grow an inch taller, but the jumping off from cars and bridges part...I could have...if mom and dad hadn't told me I was a crazy idiot ;-) and should just go to school and study hard.

A trip down memory lane with Gennita couldn't end without her bemoaning about Chinese New Year food. My mother was a fabulous cook and could do all the New Year cakes and sweetmeats like a professional. Almost every year, she stayed up late making lin-ko (a gooey concoction that hardened into rock-like taffee), or chong-yuen, or kuih kapit. She told me I could help her because she shaved me bald when I was a kid. That's right. Shaven bald had something to do with the correct consistency of thickened coconut and steamed buns. I still think she was pulling my leg, but to this day, none of my sister could produce anything other than lumpy kaya, except for me. I had the "magic" touch, it seemed, when it came to smooth, sexy, and delicious Malaysian/Chinese sweetmeats.

That's why, when I post about a trip to New York Chinatown, you're always hearing me wax poetic about the food. I cannot explain to those of you how many different variety of foods that could be sampled in Malaysia without you having been there at least a year. With our four main cultures, one could just eat a different recipe a day for 365 days. So when you sit with me in a Malaysian restaurant in Chinatown, be aware that I usually would go a little (okay, a lot) crazy, and order enough food to feed a refugee family of ten. The waitresses would be staring, amused and somewhat bemused, as the feast keep coming, and you, my poor guest, would have to put up with a non-talking author whose mouth is very busy.

The further away I am from these memories, the more I want to write about them in my books. Not all of them, but little bits and pieces, hooking them somehow to the background of my characters and stories. There was a reason why I made Nikki enjoy food so much; her appetite for the past was huge and food was an immediate acknowledgment of her love of life. There was a reason why I wrote about the girls and the poor people in Vivi's surroundings. The culture of a people runs deep and change wasn't always necessary good. There was a reason why I gave my heroines certain choices and took away some; as a product of my culture, I see women very differently from the way you see them.

I've made certain choices that some of you never needed to, and that's part of the reason why I write about exotic cultures and women. Not that I'm exotic, you understand, although I'm probably weirder/more alien than I want to admit, but because underneath it all, I've wanted to show that love, humor, survival, and sisterhood are a common thread.

Okay, back to celebrating the New Year ;-). May there be heavenly lions to frighten away the bad vibes around you!

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