Expat Harem Talk, Candida's International Bookstore, Washington D.C.

We were pleased to be joined by journalists, travelers, culture hounds and artists including: Liz Gracon and Danielle Monosson, friends we met in Istanbul during their posting to the U.S. Consulate there; Kay McCarty, whose daughter has worked in Diyarbakir and Mardin, Turkey (a fan of Expat Harem, Kay bought her 9th, 10th, and 11th copies of the book at Candida's!); traveling an hour from Baltimore was Jeannette Belliveau, the author of soon-to-be-released Romance on the Road, a book documenting the controversial 'sex pilgrim' movement which Anastasia reviews (from an opposite stance) in the upcoming July/August issue of Perceptive Travel; Dawn, two-time visitor to Turkey for classes in the art of glasswork at the Cam Ocagi /Glass Furnace (inspired by EH contributor Diane Caldwell, Dawn may soon find herself relocating to Turkey); and Kirin Kalia, an editor at Migration Policy Institute, who brought the Bryn Mawr alumnae count on this tour to 10.

Expat Harem Are Women On The Brink

This is the introduction Jennifer Gokmen and I wrote to the book Tales From The Expat Harem:

If there were ever a place tailor-made to play host to wanderers, travelers and those pursuing lives outside their original territory, surely Turkey is that place.

The perpetual evolution that travel and cultural assimilation visits upon the foreign born women in this collection echoes the continuous transformation that envelops the entire country. Threshold to worlds East or West depending on which way one faces, Turkey is itself a unique metaphor for transition.

Forming a geographic bridge between the continents of Europe and Asia and a philosophical link between the spheres of Occident and Orient, Turkey is neither one of the places it connects.  Similarly, foreign women on Turkish soil are neither what nor who they used to be, yet not fully transformed by their brush with Turkey.

Our Expat Harem women are on the brink of reclassifying themselves, challenged to redefine their lives, to rethink their definitions of spirituality, femininity, sensuality and self.

Aligned in their ever-shifting contexts, both Turkey and the expatriate share a bond of constant metamorphosis.

• Delirious with influenza, a friendless Australian realizes the value of misafır perverlik, traditional Turkish hospitality, when she’s rescued from her freezing rental by unknown Anatolian neighbors bearing food and medicinal tea;
• a pregnant and introverted Irishwoman faces the challenge of finding her place in a large Black Sea family;
• a Peace Corps volunteer in remote Eastern Turkey realizes how the taboos of her own culture color her perceptions;
• and a liberated New York single questions the gallant rules of engagement on the İstanbul dating scene, wondering whether being treated like a lady makes her less a feminist.

These are among the Tales from the Expat Harem.

The titillating, anachronistic title acknowledges erroneous yet prevalent Western stereotypes about Asia Minor and the entire Muslim world, while also declaring that our storytellers share a common bond with the denizens of a traditional Turkish harem.

Much like the imported brides of the Seraglio, İstanbul’s 15th century palatial seat of the Ottoman sultanate, our writers are inextricably wedded to Turkish culture, embedded in it even, yet alien nonetheless.

If a harem in the time of the sultans was once a confined community of women, a setting steeped in the feminine culture of its era, then today’s Expat Harem surely follows in its tradition.

Virtual and mainly of mindset, this newly coined community of expatriate women in modern Turkey is conjured by the shared circumstance of being foreign-born and female in a land laced with the history of the harem.

Like the insular life in the Seraglio of the past, foreign women in today’s Turkey can often be a self-restricting and isolated coterie, newcomers initially limited in independence and social interaction due to language barriers, cultural naiveté and a resilient ethnocentricity.

Tales from the Expat Harem reveal both the personal cultural prison of the initiate and the peer-filled refuge of those assimilated. Our harem is a source of foreign female wisdom, a metaphoric primer for novices and a refresher for old hands.

Our Scheherazades, modern day counterparts of that historic Arabian Nights harem storyteller, are drawn from a worldwide diaspora of women whose lives have been touched by Turkey.

When our call for stories reached them, through networks of people and computers, we heard from a multitude of expatriates in West Africa to Southeast Asia to America’s Pacific Northwest, all desiring to be counted and to recount their sagas.

By telephone from her home in California, an artist who studied illuminated manuscripts at Topkapı Sarayı was the first to admit the precious affliction she shares with many of her harem sisters: “Turkey gets into your blood. I’m an addict now.”

As editors we faced the delicate task of administrating the Expat Harem’s stories, preparing womanly wisdom for safekeeping. Managing the epic enterprise with its ticklish spectrum of cultural appreciation and feminine self-portraiture, our nights were nearly as sleepless as Scheherazade’s!

For months we coaxed diplomats, nurses, chefs and others to explore and express their truths about Turkey in a culturally balanced tone.

Some were not professional writers and some were unable to commit their tale to paper. Of those who did, only a fraction survived the editing process.

But affinities emerged as each woman divulged her internal journey and lasting emotional connection to the place and its people. Systems engineers and hoteliers, missionaries and clothing producers, artists, journalists, and others each share a fierce affection for Turkey.

Revealing what Turkish culture has yielded in their lives, they unspool humorous and poignant adventures at weddings in cobbled Byzantine streets, Ottoman bathhouses, and boisterous bazaars along the Silk Road.

In atmospheric travelogue through a countryside still echoing the old ways, through Giresun and Göreme, they transport us on emotional journeys of assimilation into friendship, neighborhood, wifehood, and motherhood.

Modern women in the real world, they take us along on their quests for national identity, business ownership and property possession.

What follows is a literary version of the virtual, modern harem’s never-ending gathering of women, day melting into night, a relaxed feast while delighting in each other’s diverse company, acting out scenes of cultural contrast and discovery.

The country rewards seekers, a veiled place insisting on being uncovered. In the process of discovering Turkey, contemporary women of the Expat Harem unmask themselves as well.

In narratives illuminating imperfect human nature and the fullest possible cultural embrace, our Scheherazades wrestle urges to overly-exoticize the unfamiliar and strive to balance self preservation with the fresh expectations placed on them by Turkish culture.

Some delve deep into interiors of country and psyche, like the shy teacher transformed by the full frontal impact of a 13th century Central Anatolian hamam.

Others teeter on the comic edge of a cultural divide, like the archaeologist who sparks hilarity in the trenches at Troy before language skills supplant vaudevillian pantomime.

In attempting to reconcile countless episodes of unconditional native generosity, expatriate women of the harem learn to accept a new emotional calculus.

A mid-life dancer mincing her way through the alleys of İstanbul’s bohemian Beyoğlu district to the beat of a darbuka drum invokes Mary Oliver’s poetic revelation, one that echoes in every tale from the Expat Harem:

“I was a bride married to amazement."

Expat Harem, The Book

Scroll down for images related to five years of book events... FIND A COPY You can get this book as a Seal Press paperback through Amazon here, numerous online retailers and actual bookstores, the Kindle edition here, for Sony eReader, and as an Apple iBook. For the visually impaired we have a large print version here. It's also stocked in 186 libraries in 7 countries around the world.

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MEDIA COVERAGE  Since 2005 Anastasia Ashman, her coeditor Jennifer Eaton Gokmen and the Expat Harem anthology and contributors have been featured by more than 200 mainstream and independent media sources across the globe in news, travel, literature and culture. Includes New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, International Herald Tribune, NBC TV Today Show, Globe & Mail, Daily Telegraph, National Geographic Traveler, Lonely Planet, Frommer's, Rick Steves' Istanbul, Cosmopolitan (TR), Travel + Leisure (TR), Time Out Istanbul, Mediabistro, Expat Focus, Guardian Abroad and Voice of America Radio. See a list and links here.

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[18 months, 2 expat writers, one feminist travel anthology with three editions. Our first book! A bestseller. How'd we do it? Read the story of making Tales from the Expat Harem]

+"An excellent holiday read." – Lonely Planet Turkey (10th Edition)

+"Beautifully written, thought-provoking and inspiring. Be ready to book a flight to Istanbul afterwards." – Daily Telegraph (UK)

+"Insights from women who learn to read the cultural fine print... Valuable today as an antidote to bigotry, it will serve as an even more valuable corrective to the blinkered historians of tomorrow." – Cornucopia

+“Comic, romantic, and thought-provoking.” – Cosmopolitan (Turkey)

+“Not only aesthetically pleasing but instructive. A great read! Don’t miss it.” – Journal of Middle East Women's Studies

+“Rip-roarer of a guide to understanding Eastern and Western social values.” – The Gulf Today (United Arab Emirates)

+“Charming, warm-hearted and vivid…a definite must-read for everyone pondering the question of what it is we call 'home'.” – NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands)

Tales from the Expat Harem (Seal Press, 2006)

This anthology  "successfully transcends the cultural stereotypes so deeply-embedded in perceptions of the Eastern harem.” -- from the foreword by Elif Shafak (Turkish editions only) November 2010: Turkey’s most-read author Elif Shafak picks Expat Harem as one of her best five books on Turkey

+Edited by Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gökmen

As the Western world struggles to comprehend the paradoxes of modern Turkey, a country both European and Asian, forward-looking yet rooted in ancient empire, this critically-acclaimed collection invites you into the Turkey that thirty-two women from seven nations know.

ASSIMILATION STRUGGLES

Australian and Central American, North American and British, Dutch and Pakistani, our narrators demonstrate the evolutions Turkish culture has shepherded in their lives and the issues raised by assimilation into friendship, neighborhood, wifehood, motherhood.

[Hospitality] Delirious with influenza, a friendless Australian realizes the value of misafir perverlik, traditional Turkish hospitality, when she’s rescued from her freezing rental by unknown Anatolian neighbors bearing food and medicinal tea

[Family] A pregnant and introverted Irishwoman faces the challenge of finding her place in a large Black Sea clan

[Cultural Taboo] A Peace Corps volunteer in remote Eastern Turkey realizes how the taboos of her own culture color her perceptions about modesty and motherhood

[Femininity] A liberated New York single questions the gallant rules of engagement on the Istanbul dating scene, wondering whether being treated like a lady makes her less a feminist

AMBITIOUS STORYTELLERS

...from a Bryn Mawr archaeologist at Troy to the Christian missionary in Istanbul, clothing designers and scholars along the Aegean and the Mediterranean coastlines, a journalist at the Iraqi border, Expat Harem's writers revisit their professional assumptions.

SPANS COUNTRY + 40 YEARS

Humorous and poignant travelogue takes you to weddings and workplaces, down cobbled Byzantine streets, into boisterous bazaars along the Silk Road and deep into the feminine powerbases of steamy Ottoman hamam bathhouses. Subtext illuminates journeys of the soul.

ANACHRONISTIC TITLE = WESTERN STEREOTYPE + KINSHIP

Expat Harem notes the erroneous -- yet prevalent -- Western stereotypes about Asia Minor and the entire Muslim world, while declaring the writers are akin to foreign brides of the Seraglio, the 15th century seat of the Ottoman sultanate:

Expat Harem writers are wedded to the culture of the land, embedded in it, yet alien.

Dogan Kitap 4th edition, with foreword by Elif Shafak

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From the introduction:

Threshold to worlds both East and West, Turkey is itself a unique metaphor for transition. Forming a geographic bridge between the continents of Europe and Asia and a philosophical link between the spheres of Occident and Orient, Turkey is neither one of the places it connects.

EXPAT HAREM WOMEN RECLASSIFY THEMSELVES

Foreign women on Turkish soil are neither what nor who they used to be, yet not fully transformed by their brush with Turkey. Aligned in their ever-shifting contexts, both Turkey and the expatriate share a bond of constant metamorphosis.

Expat Harem women are challenged to redefine their lives, definitions of spirituality, femininity, sensuality and self.

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One editor's story behind the book: THE ACCIDENTAL ANTHOLOGIST by Anastasia Ashman

+++++ HAREM GIRLS: THE MAKING OF EXPAT HAREM By ANASTASIA ASHMAN and JENNIFER EATON GÖKMEN

Eighteen months.Two expatriate American writers in Istanbul.We created a feminist travel anthology, landed a North American book deal and dual language editions from Turkey’s strongest publisher, while winning representation at one of New York’s oldest literary agencies.

How did we do it?

THE SHORT ANSWER:

• We recognized our project’s potential.
• We created a compelling brand.
• We requested counsel, material, and support from family, friends, business acquaintances and complete strangers.
• We refused to let doubts impede our trajectory, infecting naysayers with our enthusiasm.
• We shared every success with a growing contact list, sustaining a positive buzz.
• And we hunted unique marketing and publicity opportunities.

This is the story of Tales From The Expat Harem: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey.

RECOGNIZING OUR POTENTIAL

editors speaking at Assembly of Turkish American Associations, Washington D.C.

Writing full-time since 2001, California-born Anastasia’s arts, culture and travel writing appeared in publications worldwide, from the Asian Wall Street Journal to the Village Voice. Soon after she moved from New York to Istanbul in 2003, she met Jennifer, a ten-year expat with a degree in literature and creative writing whose writing career had been on a slow burn since her move to Turkey. The Michigan native had been a staff writer for a popular expatriate humor magazine and contributed to other local magazines. To advance our professional aims we established a writing workshop in Fall 2003 with a handful of other American women writers.

Interaction during bi-weekly workshops revealed our compatibility and vision: within two months it was obvious that the writing group could spawn our first book-length project. Most pieces critiqued revolved around each woman’s Turkish experience and what it revealed about her personally.

By the 2004 Spring thaw we elicited the curiosity of a new Turkish/American publishing house in Istanbul. That was the trigger that launched us into high gear. Translating the small publisher’s casual interest into a writing exercise, we charged the group to fashion a book proposal, but our enthusiasm for the potential project quickly outstripped our group colleagues’ as we targeted what we knew could be a hit.

We had to act fast. World attention was increasingly focused on this much-maligned Muslim country as its new conservative religious party government enacted sweeping reforms to speed the country towards European Union membership. This was heat we could harness for our book.

Although Anastasia had worked in a New York literary agency and was somewhat familiar with the elements of a book proposal, we sought further guidance from published friends and writers’ online resources. Consumed with pushing the project forward, we covered ground swiftly, passing the ball when ideas slowed, inspired by each others’ fresh input.

BRANDING

Expat Harem envisioned by expat designer Leslie Dann...the book has had at least 5 covers!

Since we didn’t have established literary reputations to lend recognizable names, the title of the anthology needed immediate appeal, palpable impact. Something born of the literary circumstance we would collect: atmospheric travelogue; tales of cultural contrast and discovery in the streets, at weddings and workplaces, hamams and bazaars; and journeys of assimilation into friendship, neighborhood, wifehood, motherhood, citizenship, business and property ownership.

To decide concept and brand, we spun favorite motifs of female culture in Turkey, snagging on the quaint rural tradition of marking one’s visit by weaving distinctly colored thread into a friend’s carpet. But the earnest New Thread on the Loom: Outsiders in Turkish Culture sounded too woolly, academic, unmarketable.

Not a title we ourselves would snatch off a shelf or cuddle up with in bed.

Instead, the theme had to elicit strong response with a tempting metaphor that could withstand scrutiny. We hit on a conspicuous and controversial tradition of the region, provocative enough to intrigue or enflame book buyers worldwide. We created the Expat Harem.

We were banking on the title ruffling feathers. Anachronistic. Titillating. Bound to provoke reaction. We decided to co-opt the word harem, with all its erroneous Western stereotypes about Asia Minor and the entire Muslim world.

Infusing ‘harem’ with new meaning, we declared our foreign-born contributors were modern reflections of the foreign brides of the Ottoman sultans: wedded to the culture of the land, embedded in it even, but forever alien. Adding to the title’s seduction, we mocked up a book cover with an iconic Orientalist painting by Ingres, a reclining nude looking over her shoulder.

THE FIRST SALE

within 3 months, Expat Harem went to #1 at national bookseller Remzi

“We’d love to do this book!” said the owner of a new, young local publishing house, herself an American expat.

She bought the slim proposal composed in six weeks: a brief introduction to the Expat Harem concept, a list of chapters and proposed contents, editor bios, and an essay by Anastasia about a meet-the-parents trip to Istanbul which gave alarming Turkish connotation to her Russian name and urge to belly dance.

Despite the publisher’s limited resources and fledgling distribution network in Turkey and America, that overcast day in April 2004 we were thrilled to have our first book deal.

Undeterred that we bore the onus to propel the project to our envisioned heights, our adrenaline would compensate for all.

DOGGED PURSUIT

Between Anastasia's industry experience, drive, and efficiency and Jennifer's marketing background, local connections and knowledge of the Turkish language and culture, we complemented each other seamlessly.

Having a hands-off publisher was a blessing: it forced us to learn the ropes of book-making.

We called for submissions and publicized the project, set up a barebones website, posted flyers around Istanbul, and announced the book on bulletin boards and online communities of expatriates, writers, women writers, travelers, Turkey enthusiasts. We wrangled free listings in local city guidebooks. By July 2004 we convinced one of the top Turkish newspapers that the project was newsworthy and received a full page in the weekend lifestyle section, the first in a long line of local and international media coverage.

Responses began streaming in from the worldwide diaspora of eligible contributors. From West Africa to Southeast Asia to America’s Pacific Northwest, more than a hundred women sought to recount their sagas. We were overwhelmed with positive reactions to the project, and braced ourselves for darker interpretations. A few people chastised the title as unthinkably Orientalist while others were baited by our sexy cover.

“Wow, I wish I were an expat!” declared an airport security screener in New York.

ASKING FOR HELP

Joe McCanta, creator of the Expat Harem martini 2007

We brainstormed all of our personal and professional contacts—people who might assist us. We approached friends who had published books for their advice on the agenting process and targeting publishers. We sought mentoring from corporate friends on image and branding, marketing strategies, potential blurbists, and press contacts. We requested aid from family members with expertise in promotions and press relations.

With a few ready essays we began sending requests for blurbs to prominent people who had a strong connection to Turkey, like the author of the international bestseller Harem: The World Behind the Veil, and a prominent news correspondent for Le Monde and The Wall Street Journal. Positive quotes spurred reviews from increasingly higher profile experts. In September 2004 an international design team began to construct a cover for the book as a personal favor, including the raves that were rolling in from experts in expatriatism, women’s studies, the Ottoman harem, and Turkish society.

By the Frankfurt International Book Fair in October 2004, it was obvious to more people than just us that Tales from the Expat Harem was a hot property. Our proposal had expanded to 28 pages with seven essays, including tales from an archaeologist at Troy, a Christian missionary in Istanbul, a pregnant artist in the capital of Ankara, and a penniless Australian stricken with influenza in the moonscape of a wintry Cappadocia.

Unfortunately the Istanbul publisher’s catalog for the German fair revealed that our hot property was not being handled the way we thought it deserved. Calling a meeting with the Istanbul publisher, our priorities and expectations didn’t jibe with theirs. Amicably, we decided to cancel our contract.

Meanwhile, we reached out to a literary agent who had been following Anastasia’s writing career, since it was clear the book could benefit from professional representation. Within a month, his top New York literary agency agreed to represent us.

speaking at Population Action International, an NGO in D.C.

Suddenly several Turkish publishing houses approached us after reading about Expat Harem in the local media and we explored their interest even though we had already set our sights elsewhere. Freed from the limited resources of our first publisher, we aimed for the best Turkey had to offer: Dogan Kitap. The strongest publisher in the country, Dogan Kitap is part of the largest Turkish media conglomerate of television and radio stations, newspapers and magazine holdings and a nationwide chain of bookstores. But we didn’t approach the publisher first…

Instead, we contacted the owner of one of Dogan’s television stations who is known for her active involvement in promoting the image of women in Turkey, which dovetailed nicely with the theme of our project. Through professional connections we also requested aid from the head of Dogan’s magazine holdings. By the time Dogan’s book publishing branch received our request for an appointment, they had already heard about us through those two executives and had seen coverage of the book via three of their news outlets and at least two of their competitors. Our follow up call secured us a meeting with the publisher’s general manager in December 2004.

“You’ve come to the right address,” he declared. Then we didn’t hear from Dogan again.

THE SUBMISSION PROCESS

Expat Harem signing for a Munich-based expat group 2007

The vast potential of the project began to dawn as our agent compared it to accessible personal stories of life in the Middle East, bestselling titles like Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Bookseller of Kabul. He began submitting the growing ms to U.S. publishers.

“What could be more timely than an insider’s view of women’s lives in the Middle East—as told by resident Westerners?”

We asked this in our November press release, generated in four languages and sent to foreign press correspondents in Istanbul, followed up with phone calls. Agence France Presse, one of the world’s largest news agencies, interviewed us before an important European Union vote on Turkey, while in February 2005 Newsweek International published our letter to the editor, exposing the upcoming anthology to more than a million readers across Europe.

Meanwhile, in New York, an editor at a publishing house known for its anthologies effusively praised the manuscript but her editorial board demurred.

Turkey was too small a subject they felt, suggesting we expand the book to other Muslim nations like Sudan, Kosovo, and Iran. We countered with a franchise series of Expat Harem books. Too large a project, they said. Editors at ten other New York houses also were split in their reactions, recognizing the appeal of the Muslim setting and the foreign female focus, yet unconvinced that a collection by unknown writers would draw major audiences. By February 2005 all the top New York houses had passed so we targeted more independent houses, university presses and those which had published our blurbists.

STAYING POSITIVE During the excruciating winter months of ms submissions, sustaining enthusiasm wasn’t easy. Doubts began to multiply. We hadn’t heard back from Dogan Kitap, they weren’t answering our emails, and U.S. publishers weren’t biting. Taking inspiration from a chapter in our own book, one devoted to Turkey’s shamanistic roots and methods of banishing the envious evil eye, we created a ritual to cast off negative energy.

We wrote down fears we had discussed as well as those we would not openly admit to having: ‘We will not find a publisher. We will not finish the book. No one will read it. It will be embarrassing to promote…’

Then we burned the list – and not just anywhere. Since the Expat Harem co-opted the image of the Ottoman harem, we headed to the Topkapi Palace, visited the chambers of our namesakes, and asked their blessings. In an outside courtyard, we literally reduced our fears to ashes.

We also considered the mindset of our agent. It can’t be easy to break bad news to clients so we never expected our agent to be our cheerleader. We responded to his rejection emails with the successes we were achieving on our front.

We invested no energy in the negativity of others. Without rebutting critics, we would smile and say, ‘we’ll see’ as if we knew something they didn’t.

Naysayers couldn’t argue our continued success when they-- along with all our contacts-- received bubbly email announcements every time we appeared in the media, received a new blurb, or made another advance.

MARKETING

the two Turkish editions discussed on a national literature TV program

We both have professional experience and a personal predilection for marketing and turned our attention to finding every opportunity to get the word out. Before we had one page of the manuscript, we had already perused John Kremer’s 1001 Ways To Market Your Books, were tracking academic conferences in which we might participate, researching comparable books, and compiling lists of audiences and organizations that might like to host us as speakers.

Even so, the book was rejected by fifteen publishers before we tackled the daunting official marketing plan. Most editors commented that they liked the idea but didn’t see the market. Was Turkey truly too far from the U.S.A. to matter to American audiences?

We needed to make our case and identify potential markets American publishers might not traditionally consider.

In January 2005 we defined our main audiences as having something in common with the contributors:

• travelers
• expatriates
• women writers
• travel writers
• those interested in women’s and Middle Eastern studies
• people whose lives were linked with Turkey

We noted the 1.2 million Americans who’ve traveled to Turkey in the past five years, the 87 Turkish American associations serving more than 88,000 Turkish nationals in America plus tens of thousands of Americans with Turkish heritages, women’s and Middle Eastern studies programs at hundreds of North American universities, and specific Turkophile populations like the alumni of the Peace Corps who served in Turkey. We also compiled more practical subsidiary audiences. Multinational corporations with operations in Turkey, embassies and tourism organizations might use the book as a cross-cultural training tool or a promotional vehicle.

We imagined the book developing a positive image of Turkey abroad, addressing the unvoiced but deep concern of many businesspeople, travelers and diplomats: will our women be safe?

SECOND AND THIRD SALES

meeting of potential Expat Harem contributors 2004

Unsure how to interpret Dogan Kitap’s silence, we wondered if they had been serious about our book. After our visit in December, why didn’t they call? Why didn’t they answer our emails or those from our agent? Staying positive, we phoned until we secured follow-up appointments by the end of January, and at that meeting they acted as if the project were already theirs. Contrary to our gloomy speculation, their behemoth operation had slowed their response. Reluctant to misstep, they seemed hesitant to start negotiations until our agent sent them a draft contract in English. Though Dogan originally planned to publish only in Turkish, on the strength of our marketing plan we convinced them that the local English language market was large enough to warrant two editions. In February 2005, Dogan bought the Turkish world rights and the English rights for Turkey.

Success snowballed. On Valentine’s Day, the feminist imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Seal Press, offered us a publishing contract for the North American rights! When Seal’s marketing department presented the book at a June 2005 presales conference to book distributors from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others, everyone was ‘flushed with amazement’ at our detailed marketing plan.

SPAWNING CONTINUED MARKETING OPPORTUNITIES

Expat Harem panel, Istanbul Book Fair 2005

The marketing never ends! In April 2005 we produced at our own expense 5,000 promotional postcards with our book cover, photos, website address and reviews from scholars, journalists and diplomats, distributing them via our worldwide contributors. When the postcard found its way into the hands of the producer of Publishing Trends, an American book industry intelligence newsletter, Tales from the Expat Harem garnered nearly a page of coverage in the June 2005 issue, winning us the attention of a highly influential international publishing audience.

Our website consistently delivers a stream of queries from people identifying themselves as future book buyers while our web-tracking reveals the growing global audience we’ve created in the past year. Thirty-five hundred visitors from 90 countries have dropped by since we began tracking site activity. To tap into this ready-made market, our publishers set up pre-sales via internet bookstores, while our local speaking engagements have generated offers for additional receptions and book signings. We kept the pressure on once the book was released in Turkey, using the printed books to seek new media coverage and fresh blurbs in September 2005. Stephen Kinzer, the former New York Times Istanbul bureau chief, offered us a quote for the cover of our Seal Press edition. We also turned our attention to the official launch party scheduled for November.

Since our publisher’s launch party budget didn’t cover our starry-eyed fantasy of an event at the Topkapı Palace harem, we looked for a sponsor.

Though we didn’t exactly end up with our fantasy, through fearless soliciting we did land a prominent hostess for our 200 person cocktail at a 5-star hotel—the owner of a Dogan television station who initially paved the way for our book deal. A woman concerned with Turkey’s image abroad, and in particular with the perception of women’s lives in Turkey, she invited her own A-list guests as well as our growing list of international press correspondents, blurbists, supporters, and many of the influential people we hope to cultivate.

The event was broadcast on television news for several days, and featured in newspapers, their glossy weekend supplements, and magazines.

HARD WORK PAYS OFF

At the Istanbul International Book Fair in October 2005, where we headed a panel discussion and had a book signing, our Turkish publisher promoted Türkçe Sevmek, the translation of Tales from the Expat Harem, on a 15 foot illuminated display alongside its translations of Umberto Eco and Julia Navarro.

After hitting the Turkish bookshelves, both Dogan editions sold out within six weeks, with the English edition debuting on the bestseller lists at several national bookstore chains and making its way to the number two spot – beating out two J.K. Rowlings, a Michael Connelly and three Dan Browns.

We have appeared on a handful of national television stations, including three different CNN-TURK shows which were simultaneously broadcast on CNN-TURK radio, and have been invited to appear on several other stations; we were featured in all the top national Turkish and English newspapers, with one providing three consecutive days of extensive coverage during one of the country’s highest circulation weeks; we are sitting for interviews with specialized media; we’re fielding requests for review copies from international culture journals; and, quite edifyingly, we are meeting readers as well as our expat peers in cities throughout Turkey on weekend book tours.

[This article first appeared in a slightly different form in ABSOLUTE WRITE, 2006]

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Hover over the images to see the caption. Click on an image to enlarge.

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Culture, Writing, Expatriatism Interview With The Bosphorus Art Project

Excerpts from a joint interview with Zeynep Kilic of the Bosphorus Art Project Quarterly and my Expat Harem coeditor Jennifer Gokmen. See full interview here. Q: What inspired you to start this project? What is your vision?

AA: Jennifer and I created a writing workshop with a few other American women in Istanbul and soon realized we were all writing about our lives in Turkey. We thought if we collected the stories we might begin to piece together the puzzle that is Turkey. It was a ripe idea and the floodgates opened. We heard from more than 100 women from 14 nations whose lives have been touched by Turkey in the past 50 years – and we’re meeting more women of the Expat Harem every day!

Q: In every country in the world the equality of women and men is skewed in at least one or more of these categories: economical, social, reproductive and human rights. What did you find were the greatest challenges for women native to Turkey? The women expatriates? The greatest triumphs?

AA: What’s interesting is to me are personal perceptions about equality. Turkish women have taught us and many of the expatriates in Expat Harem what strength there is in being a woman. Western culture seems to have stripped the power from femininity; it has confused us into thinking that to be taken seriously, we must dress and act like men. The ancient wisdom of Anatolia’s goddess culture is alive and well in Turkey, and in Turkey’s women.

A challenge for Turkish women seems to be attaining the independence many expatriates enjoy. Turkish society is so inter-dependent there are few acceptable lifestyle options for the loner, even in the most modern families.

Q: Your book has become a bestseller in Turkey, was this something that you expected or did it come as a surprise?

AA: The book’s strong performance probably has less to do with our gender than the fact that it taps into an interest great numbers of people have…Turks want to know what foreigners are thinking of them, while expatriates want to see if their fellow foreign nationals have had similar experiences. And people who have left the country (including Peace Corps volunteers who were here 40 years ago) are eager to relive their Turkish memories!

Q: Is there an underlying theme other than expatriation that links all of these stories? What do you hope the reader takes away from this reading experience?

AA: Besides exploring the land and culture, these women are exploring themselves. They’re on journeys of self realization. Turkey happens to be the backdrop. Their tales show how Turkish culture has affected their lives as they navigate their way into friendship, neighborhood, wifehood, and motherhood in Turkey.

AA: Perhaps readers will understand how much another culture can show you who you are, and how you can change, if you want to.

Q: What do you think about how Turkey is represented in today’s world? What do you think can be done to extend the reach of Turkish arts and culture across the world?

AA: Turkey has a dark and contentious reputation, with conflicts like historical ethnic and geographic rivalries dominating news coming out the country. Although it has a rich creative heritage, that’s not the first thing people think of. A fictionalized Oliver Stone movie from the 1970s comes to mind, or a sad report they heard on NPR. Many of the writers in our anthology have had to defend their choice to live in Turkey since friends and relatives back home were worried for their safety – and their sanity!

AA: In this same way, extending the reach of Turkey’s art and culture is a matter of enticement. Enticing people to learn more, and making the introduction as accessible as possible. In Tales from the Expat Harem each writer acts as a guide into her world, and the Turkey that she knows. Readers will go along with her to meet an art gallery owner in Ankara whose ancestors were fortunetellers of the sultan; they’ll whirl through the streets with Gypsy dancers; they’ll be invited into the ritual bath of an Anatolian bride.

Q: What is your favorite thing about living in Turkey and the least favorite?

AA: For me it’s the same thing: the close observation of my life by family and neighbors. For an independent Western woman it can be disconcerting to feel every move is watched – and reported! What time I went to sleep, who came over to the house, things like that. But on the flip side, this very scrutiny is what makes me feel safe and cared for, especially since the motivations for this are not malicious, or even necessarily having to do anything with me. People-watching seems to be a national pastime. If I need help from my family or neighbors I know I can count on them, and perhaps they would even know I needed help before I told them myself. One tale in our book is about that very phenomenon: an ill Australian is rescued by her neighbors who notice she hasn’t left the house in days.

Q: Do you have any recommendations or advice for people planning a move to Turkey or another country?

AA: Take extra care to supply yourself with what you need to be happy, wherever you are. Feeling light-hearted and productive is important when you suddenly are surrounded by so many new situations. You’ll need that inner strength in order to remain flexible about things you can’t control or don’t understand. Try to get up to speed on what life might be like in Turkey. When we were brainstorming the anthology’s concept we imagined it could be a cultural primer for newcomers to the country. It will be wonderful if people actually use it that way. Women about to wed Turks have said the book made clear which aspects of their relationship have to do with the culture and which are individual to the couple.

Q: Do you have any projects planned for the future?

AA: We’ve been asked by our Turkish publisher to consider doing a male version of the anthology. That would elicit a very different set of views on the country… Currently I’m at work on a collection of my own cultural essays Berkeley to Byzantium: The Reorientation of a West Coast Adventuress, a travel memoir charting the peaks and valleys of my life, from mean elevators and subways of Manhattan to the gilded palaces of Asia Minor -- and Southeast Asia, where I lived for five years.

My Expat Philosophy: Why Two Life-Abroad Experiences Are Night & Day

Thoughts I shared in an expatriate group: About a decade ago I lived in South East Asia 
for five years. I know some of you are longtime, veteran expats and
 hope you'll indulge me when I share my developing philosophy
 about being an expatriate.

My two life-abroad experiences have been like night and day, and I'd
 like to think the main reason is that in Malaysia I identified my 
boundaries after the fact (by having them badly over-run by
 circumstance and culture, among other things) and that in Turkey, I 
have protected them much more from the outset....my sense of self
 being my most valuable expatriate possession.

I have found the more that I honor what is meaningful to me, the 
more my expatriate life takes care of itself.

For instance, when I
 moved to Istanbul from New York City, I was committed to writing a
 memoir. Soon it was supplanted by another literary project which 
helped me not only create a solid foundation for my life here, but 
incidentally, for the travel memoir I have now returned to.

Along
 with a fellow American expat, I edited a collection of true tales of 
cultural conflict and discovery written by foreign women from seven 
nations about their lives in modern Turkey.

Compiling the anthology has helped me as an expatriate in many ways.

It's put my Turkish experience into perspective, brought me
 quickly up to speed on the region's culture, connected me with my 
foreign and local peers and other personal and professional
 communities of interest, and has fueled my writing career.

This is a 
result miles away from the disenfranchisement I felt in Malaysia,
 languishing in the jungle, attending social events with people
 marginally related to me and my interests, never quite being myself,
 never sure how I was going to fit in or if I even wanted to.

I am grateful for the hard lessons I learned in the tropics, they 
have proven that devoting oneself to being personally fulfilled –
rather than aiming to somehow contort to fit in-- in foreign 
surroundings can lead to feeling comfortable where we are and being
accepted by those around us.

Speaking At The Istanbul Book Fair

We conducted an Expat Harem panel at the 24th Istanbul Book  Fair with editors and writers including Kathy Hamilton, Katie Belliel and Valerie Tasiran. The anthology was also launched there, featured at the Dogan Kitapcilik stand.  

Consulted On Web Content For Well-Aging Spa

Consulted on web content for this well-aging spa and detox center on Turkey's Aegean coast, 2005 (took the photos here too)

• yoga class,
• Goltürkbükü bay,
• entry to the wet spa,
• LifeCo grounds,
• raw food salad,
• stair to meditation/meeting/colema rooms,
• the hamam,
• a flotation tank,
• Thai massage,
• ingredients for a liver flush

Call For Submissions For The Expat Harem Collection

Calling all women writers who have lived, worked, studied or traveled in Turkey for at least a year: Contribute your voice to a new anthology of foreign women’s reflections on modern Turkey. Deadline: August 1, 2004 TALES FROM THE EXPAT HAREM: Foreign Women in Modern Turkey, edited by Anastasia M. Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gokmen

The book aims to be a personal, entertaining read for both students and scholars of Turkey as well as armchair cultural travelers, fans of women’s literature, and expatriates of all stripes.

During Ottoman rule, the word 'harem' (from the word ‘haram’, meaning sacred and forbidden) referred to both the population as well as the living quarters of the foreign-born brides and servants of the Turkish sultan. An intimate and confined community of women, it was a place for sharing womanly wisdom and cultivating cultural tradition.

In this non-fiction anthology we invoke a modern day Turkish harem with its chorus of voices and shared female experience -- in the sense that the expatriate population is naturally cohesive and isolated due to the process of assimilation. Newcomers learning to maneuver within a new set of variables and cultural boundaries necessarily experience a limitation of freedom: language barriers act as an obstacle to travel and independence, cultural naivete hinders social interaction, and ethnocentric rigidity impedes dynamic experience.

Taking the reader on humorous and poignant journeys of cultural contrast and discovery, our contributors break free of the confines of the harem, breaching the confined world of the unassimilated to touch the true heart of Turkey. Whether newly arrived or well-established expatriates, or Turks repatriating to their homeland after a long absence, all our contributors are foreign brides of modern Turkey: wedded to its culture, embedded in it even, and yet forever outsiders.

We are looking for high-quality personal essays, insightful flash non-fiction and colorful travelogue--in English, 2,500 words or less.  Unpublished work is preferred, although well-crafted previously published work will be considered.

Further information and to submit work please visit the rudimentary site: www.expatharem.com

Inquiries info@expatharem.com

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CHAPTERS:

• LAST STOP ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS: The last city in Europe and the first city in Asia, arriving in continent-straddling Istanbul, Turkey naturally commits a person to a state of permanent limbo, an ever-shifting flux between West and East. An expatriate can tie herself into existential knots while transitioning into a culture that is itself a metaphor for transition.
• PEDDLER IN THE BAZAAR: From the routine of the weekly open-air vegetable market to the entrancing delights of the Grand Bazaar, Turkey’s brisk street life includes haggling with street peddlers and shop keepers, narrow escapes from aggressive vendors, and sometimes deep friendships established over cups of tea. What makes the difference in still being quoted ‘tourist prices’ or becoming a vendor’s prized foreign customer? Other shopping issues.
• DIVANS, HOOKAHS & COFFEE HOUSES:  Turks are a communal people, opting for interaction and conversation whenever possible, each demographic migrating towards their particular haunts: young people play backgammon in cafes, puffing on fruit-flavored tobacco from huge hookahs, while older men gather on street corners, under shady trees, or in smoky kahvehaneler to play cards and sip from tulip glasses.  In the Ottoman court the divan was the public audience room, traditionally a gathering place of men, but here refers to the social pursuits and behaviors of Turkish men – from football fanaticism and drinking with the lads to their particular blend of machismo tempered by acute sentimentality. How do Turks accommodate social expectations of foreign women, and how do expats adjust to the sometimes exhausting, invasive communal spirit?
• KETTLES & CAULDRONS: Culinary effort equals family devotion and a freshly made dessert signals hospitality for the constant flow of “unexpected” guests. Any self-respecting cook lovingly creates time-consuming meals from scratch, efforts balanced by the lingering pleasure of dinners that last half the night.  Adventures in the kitchen, memorable meals, being a force-fed guest.
• SALVES & SOOTHSAYERS: Since the early days of the Selcuk settlers, Turks have clung to their shamanistic roots, while the folk art of natural healing has been passed down through the generations. Clove for a toothache, licorice root for bronchial complaints, fennel tea as an herbal birth control method. Doorways hung with blue glass talismans for protection, fortunes divined from coffee grounds, supplications made to Telli Baba. Do old wives’ tales—like infertility from walking barefoot on a cold marble floor or jaundice caused by failure to urinate immediately after a scare—apply only to those born into the Turkish culture, or should everyone on Turkish soil heed their witchy wisdom?
• SHIMMY AT THE DRUMBEAT: When a dish hits a restaurant floor, Turkish women will take it as an opening drum beat and get up and dance, so the joke goes. Traditional folkloric music and dance is in the blood, widely learned and performed by young and old, male and female, in formal costumed performances or just around the living room. An innate part of the Turkish psyche, song and dance can erupt at any moment and overwhelm even the most intrepid expatriate
• HENNA'D HANDS:  Courting rituals both customary and modified to accommodate foreign brides and clashing cultures. From traditional village weddings to big city civil services to high society receptions covered by voracious paparazzi, weddings are colorful events in Turkey.  The traditions both high and low, ancient and modern, whether simply witnessed, or lived.
• HAMAM:  The valide sultana, the ruler’s mother, once inspected prospective brides for her noble son in the hamam, the display venue for female comeliness.  It was also a place where women whiled away the hours in each others’ company. The traditional Turkish sauna and scrub remains a complex tradition of beauty practice, female retreat and even matriarchal power base, but our hamam doubles as a metaphor for acceptance into the Turkish female culture, and the value of female friendship.
• PRECIOUS DARLINGS: Worth their weight in gold, children are revered in Turkish society. All segments of the population expect a young couple to procreate and then join together in raising the children, often redefining boundaries for expat women.  Elaborate circumcision customs.  Typical overindulgence of offspring balanced by honoring the homemaker and priority placed on family.
• KEREVANSERAY: Traveling across the country, one witnesses places that still echo a way of life centuries old. Hospitality on the homesteads, natural wonders, historical ruins. Expat adventures across the expanse of the Turkish coasts and heartland.

++++++++++++++++

TIPS FOR WRITERS

We prefer personal essays with evocative language and dialogue, detailed description that sets the scene and sketches the people. You may have heard this type of writing referred to as creative or literary nonfiction – facts conveyed with the devices of a novelist.

TELL US A TALE, A MOMENT WHEN YOUR SENSE OF SELF WAS CHALLENGED, WHEN YOU LEARNED A TRUTH ABOUT TURKISH CULTURE.

SET THE STAGE – TELL US WHO YOU ARE, WHERE YOU ARE,  HOW YOU CAME TO BE THERE AND THEN TELL US WHAT HAPPENED.

BE SPECIFIC. FOCUS ON YOUR THEME WITH EVERY PARAGRAPH MOVING FORWARD TO YOUR DESTINATION, YOUR POINT. DESCRIBE DETAILS THAT YOU WANT US TO EXPERIENCE.   GIVE US A SENSE OF PLACE,  A SKETCH OF A PERSON. SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SMELLS.

BE LIKEABLE. REGARDLESS OF TOPIC, WIN US OVER WITH YOUR HUMANITY, YOUR HUMOR, YOUR GOOD INTENTIONS. REVEAL YOUR MOTIVATIONS, AND BE POSITIVE.

BE RELEVANT.  HOW DOES YOUR STORY FIT INTO THE BOOK? WHICH ASPECT OF TURKISH CULTURE, OR BEING A FOREIGN WOMAN IN TURKEY, DOES IT ILLUMINATE?

POSSIBLE BREAKING POINTS/BOUNDARIES/AREAS OF ILLUMINATION

•  Code of Ethics
• Morals
• Independence
• Common sense/folk wisdom
• Expectations
• Culture/Social conditioning
• Fashion/trend-setting
• Privacy
• Modesty
• Language skills
• Femininity
• Wifely duties/skills
• Motherly duties/skills
• Domestic skills (cooking, cleaning, shopping)
• Mother-in-law

TIPS FOR NONWRITERS

TELL US A TALE, A MOMENT WHEN YOUR SENSE OF SELF WAS CHALLENGED, WHEN YOU LEARNED A TRUTH ABOUT TURKISH CULTURE.

SET THE STAGE – TELL US WHO YOU ARE, WHERE YOU ARE, HOW YOU CAME TO BE THERE AND THEN TELL US WHAT HAPPENED.

BE SPECIFIC. FOCUS ON YOUR THEME WITH EVERY PARAGRAPH MOVING FORWARD TO YOUR DESTINATION, YOUR POINT. DESCRIBE DETAILS THAT YOU WANT US TO EXPERIENCE. GIVE US A SENSE OF PLACE, A SKETCH OF A PERSON. SIGHTS, SOUNDS, SMELLS.

BE LIKEABLE. REGARDLESS OF TOPIC, WIN US OVER WITH YOUR HUMANITY, YOUR HUMOR, YOUR GOOD INTENTIONS. REVEAL YOUR MOTIVATIONS, AND BE POSITIVE.

BE RELEVANT. HOW DOES YOUR STORY FIT INTO THE BOOK? WHICH ASPECT OF TURKISH CULTURE, OR BEING A FOREIGN WOMAN IN TURKEY, DOES IT ILLUMINATE?

Launching Writer's Desk: A Web Tool To Organize The Writing Life

My software developer husband and I designed and built a new web-based writing tool. It was inspired by my experience as a freelance nonfiction writer. This online service provides a basic foundation for writers to get organized by recording revisions, tracking submissions, compiling market information and registering rights and income. For the past six months my husband and I have been designing and building a new web-based writer's tool. In this season of resolutions, we're happy to announce the launch of Writer's Desk, an online workspace to improve the way writers spend their time. We'd be honored if you pass the opportunity to colleagues and friends -- writers of all kinds -- who may have resolved to get organized this year.

SITUATION

Being a writer often sneaks up on a person.  Not many train for the vocation nor start with all the equipment, contacts, long view.  It's no wonder that eventually the snowball of success or dogged enthusiasm becomes an avalanche of produce - or expectation. Then buried writers inch along using outdated, poorly conceived systems to track work; repeatedly resolve to better keep writing in circulation; dream of one day expanding to new markets. SOLUTION

My computer scientist husband watched me -- a New York-based freelance writer -- function in this typical writerly way.  But unlike sympathetic others in the writing trade, he found observing me in action unbearable. So we pooled my professional nightmare with his software developing expertise to construct a website that has revolutionized the way I work and is too useful not to share with the wider writing community.

If you can operate a web browser anywhere in the world you can use this online service to simplify the logistics of being an active writer. Subscription is less than USD20 per year and while the site is optimized for the U.S. market, feedback from international users will help make it a global service.

FREE SUBSCRIPTION

Register for a thirty day free trial at www.writers-desk.com to judge if Writer's Desk improves your current method to:

• Track writing objectives and submissions
• Compile editorial guidelines and publishing contacts
• Register rights granted, income earned
• Trace the development and history of work - and more!

+++

We just opened it to the public as a subscription service.  You can find the creative and business workspace at  www.writers-desk.com

Writers use tools to *write* and tools to *sell the work*.  Writer's Desk is a bit of a cross between the two since it helps a writer envision her portfolio, both published and unpublished; encourages hierarchical thinking about projects and other writing ideas in order to more deeply develop material; offers a place to consolidate market contact information and notes; and helps track submissions, rights and income.

I can upload documents to the web service for retrieval on the fly -- and open and update my account from any computer with Internet access. So for me, logging on to Writer's Desk every day affords a quick overview of what I've done, what I must do today, what I plan to do and what I hope to do.

+++

A superb and versatile tool to manage song submissions and grant applications.

-- songwriter, Seattle, WA

Smart use of web technology. Finally I'm not tethered to my laptop.

-- journalist, New York, NY

Perfect for disorganized writers. Especially helps follow up with editors and agents!

-- novelist, Lawrence, KS

Portfolio overview is priceless. Great to develop new ideas, exploit material.

-- essayist, Des Moines, IA

Suits my purposes: developing scripts, tracking festival submissions.

-- screenwriter and director, San Francisco, CA

Word Play: Avant-Garde Poet Brion Gysin Resurrected

"I talk a new language. You will understand," Brion Gysin said in a 1960 poem, originally spoken into a tape recorder and then replayed for a London audience at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. Meanwhile onstage, the Canadian multimedia poet silently plied a large canvas with paint. "I will make a bow to the picture between your ears," he continued in the poem, composed from a collage of texts. Credited with pioneering the "cut-up" technique, Gysin proposed to liberate words. Among those who accepted his challenge: William S. Burroughs and Laurie Anderson.

Yet after existing on the bleeding edge of innovation for 50 years—prodigiously producing visual, written, and spoken poetry alongside the best in the surrealist, bohemian, and Beat movements—Gysin's written lingo faced extinction. Now, 15 years after his death, the publication of an unprecedented anthology, Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader (Wesleyan University Press, $24.95, paper), revives his known body of literary work and showcases rare finds, like 1972's unproduced screenplay of Naked Lunch.

Arranged chronologically and annotated with a light scholarly touch by Brooklyn-based editorJason Weiss, the anthology amasses obscure pieces, historical scholarship, memoirs, songs set to music, and permutation poems, the widespread spoken recordings of which afforded Gysin a founder's rep in sound poetry. Precise mathematical rearrangement of text rather than haphazard collage, permutation poems were patterns of words liberated from their meaning, creating new meanings. Musical and relentless, the poems' influence can be heard in the repetitive compositions of Philip Glass.

To get Gysin's newly collected writing off the page and back into ebullient performance, the Poetry Project will present a late-night reading curated by 31-year-old multimedia poet Christopher Stackhouse. Artists lined up to spout Gysin's psychic adventures and aesthetic provocations include video maker Marshall Reese, printmaker Terry Winters, and poet Pierre Joris. Stackhouse's own foundation in spoken-word poetry has spurred visual work paralleling Gysin's later forays into "Calligraffiti" (language transformed into pure image, brush strokes approximating Arabic and Japanese calligraphy). If the mere look of Stackhouse's poetry introduces a new vocabulary, Gysin, wherever he is, surely would savor his sound.

++++

This appeared in The Village Voice, December 4, 2001

Digging Up Conflict: Archaeologist & Murder In The Holy Land

My review of SACRED GEOGRAPHY: A Tale of Murder and Archeology in the Holy Land by Edward Fox  In a land as old as murder itself, American archaeologist Dr. Albert Glock lay assassinated on the West Bank doorstep of his favorite Palestinian assistant.  Israeli authorities stationed nearby inexplicably took three hours to arrive at the scene, and now ten years later, have yet to solve the real-life crime.

Reopening the 1992 investigation, London-based journalist Edward Fox pries into a neglected but central theme in the Near East: the role of archaeology in the political, cultural and religious hotbed that is Palestine.  A kaleidoscope of bias awaits and offers us a stark looking-glass, the sum of its shattered parts.  The very phenomenon dogging the archaeology of Palestine and that set Dr. Glock in the crosshairs of an unknown assailant, Fox alleges in SACRED GEOGRAPHY: A Tale of Murder and Archeology in the Holy Land, is what catalyzes and paralyzes the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In this smart and gripping thriller, the author does an admirable job of digging up both the psycho-political terrain, as well as the dirt on the professor from the West Bank’s P.L.O.-funded Birzeit University.

Admittedly not a specialist in politics or archaeology but armed with a graduate degree in Arab language and culture and more than ten years’ interest in Palestine, Fox pored over Dr. Glock’s papers, interviewed his associates, and enrolled at the university where the slain man directed the Palestinian Institute of Archaeology.

In a tale that crisscrosses itself in time, the journalist literally becomes an archaeologist sifting through the artifacts of the case, and putting them into context. Arrogant and undiplomatic 67-year old Glock, an ordained Lutheran minister on the payroll of a missionary group, had cultivated many enemies in his two decades in Palestine, where espoused a controversial form of archaeology emphasizing the tenacity of Arab villagers. Suspects start to pile up faster than Fox can catalog them, from rival archaeologists, Jewish settlers and Israeli hit squads, to neighborhood intifada vigilantes and the military arm of Hamas.

To build context for the case, Fox delves into the history of biblical archaeology, an opportunistic sub discipline founded on the idea that the Bible is a true chronicle of history, its finds shrouded in religious mysticism and light on science. A field replete with religious charlatans and swashbuckling adventurers, its power has been recognized and exploited by generals and statesmen who mined Palestine for biblical wonders to advance their own causes.

It started in 325 A.D. when the first Christian Roman emperor Constantine institutionalized the faith by creating a tradition of relics and pilgrimage to the Holy Land.  The resulting tourism industry in Palestine may now be one of the oldest in the world, but its sacred geography consists of layer upon layer of myth, tradition and pious fantasy, reports Fox. The facts have been obscured by centuries of rewriting history for the benefit of whomever was at the top of its heap.  A particularly dense chapter illustrates the dizzying spiral of zealotry affecting Jerusalem, where holy spots were enshrined, demolished, replaced, wrested from rulers with differing beliefs, and given new histories and new futures.

By the end of the 19^th century, most of the world’s powers were drawn to establish national archaeological societies to explore the Holy Land despite the fact that Palestine’s archaeological remains were among the most meager in the Near East.

“This was negative cosmopolitanism in action,” declares Fox, a phrase he coined to mean the identification of many people with one place.  Palestine was left edgy and exhausted by the cultural, theological and political plundering of Americans, French, British, Russians, Armenians, Ethiopians, Germans, Christians, Jews, and Muslims.  The modern state of Israel has been well-served by biblical archaeology’s predilection for making the landscape fit the map, Fox goes on, with archaeological finds legitimizing its right to the land, while the Islamic stake in the Holy Land “has been taken up and developed in recent years by the Palestinian Islamist movement.”

Yet it was Glock's keen interest in history and geography that led him to see that the land did not fit the map. His evolving skepticism in the Bible as history took him from biblical scholar to biblical archaeologist, to an archaeology of Palestine “of interest not to biblical scholars in the United States but to the Palestinian people themselves,” records Fox.  In particular, he was attracted to the long and hidden history of the Ottoman period, a relative golden age for the common man in terms of peace, prosperity and political autonomy.

Knowledge of such a past might invigorate the surly and downtrodden population, Glock mused. He had witnessed their disenfranchisement by the practice of Israel- and Bible-biased archaeology and the way it overlooked Arab and Islamic contributions to history and culture, and in some cases bulldozed it into oblivion.

But restoring a connection to the land would not be easy in an environment where archaeology and the military were inextricably entwined, and where pro-Palestinian archaeology had been literally outlawed.  Since the 1967 Israeli occupation, Fox relates,  Israeli censors stamped out anything that “contained a Palestinian version of the history of the country, and [ruled] that recording the Palestinian past was considered an act of sedition.”  Furthermore, Glock’s determination to dig was met with resistance and hostility from suspicious villagers, and his own students who wanted to provide a more glorious myth of Palestinian statehood.

In this cobwebby tale of bias, the journalist fails to escape its tacky tendency to skew results.  Fox’s prejudices, underscored by a middle-of-the-book admission that  “Like Albert Glock, I took to rooting for the Palestinian underdog,” sometimes make him blind to irony. Regarding the 1954 Hague Convention’s prohibition of excavation in occupied territories, the author gleefully reports the professor’s wily machinations to circumvent the agreement, yet reminds us “all respectable archaeologists” refrained from excavating in deference to the Convention,  “(except the Israelis).”

Even so, Fox the investigator is balanced enough to leave the case unsolved.

As in archaeology, the final answer is delayed by the prospect of a new find changing everything.

Emerging Artist Curates His Influences

"I just discovered this cat a month ago," admits Poetry Project curator Christopher Stackhouse. He's referring to Brion Gysin, the avant-garde artist whose newly anthologized 50-year career he will highlight December 7th.

The rangy, 31-year old African-American artist, polite in a blue oxford shirt and subversive in open-toed sandals this cold October day, shifts on his girlfriend's futon couch, enthusiasm undampened by the admission. A broad-headed white dog at his feet keeps sleeping.

A privately-taught multimedia poet from Grand Rapids, Michigan, Stackhouse is a quick study and has no doubt that a gem has dropped into his event-coordinating lap. As presenter of the Friday Night Series of the Poetry Project's 35th season in St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery, he's charged with bringing established, multidisciplinary poetic talent to the public from October 2001 to May 2002.

His particular mission --closely instructive to his own passion as an emerging figure on the New York underground arts scene -- is to illuminate and explore the shared poetics of filmmaking, music, visual arts, and the written word.

So the discovery of Gysin is topical kismet for Stackhouse, since the cat at hand is not only the subject of a December publication ( Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader, Wesleyan University Press), but was categorically made for an East Village reading. The Canadian poet-performer-painter's impeccable bleeding edge credentials include being a Beat collaborator of William S. Burroughs in Tangier, and the Bohemian associate of Picasso, Dali, Man Ray and Gertrude Stein in Paris. Deemed an innovator of sound poetry, Gysin was especially interested in getting it off the page and back into ebullient performance.

With talent bookings by anthology editor Jason Weiss, newly-in-the-know Stackhouse will host a late night reading by multimedia performers of all stripes. Videomaker Marshall Reese, printmaker Terry Winters and poet Pierre Joris will join others spouting an unprecedented collection of Gysin's psychic adventures and aesthetic provocations in a cozy ("we've only got 75 chairs") lecture hall annex of the landmark chapel.

While Stackhouse moderates the show and manages the physical operations, supported by three interns and a sound engineer, he'll most likely absorb, absorb, absorb. The Gysin event promises to be a valuable experience for the young poet, who candidly describes himself as "living by his wits," diverted by day with a succession of jobs like editor, film grunt, file clerk, web content producer and art handler in museums.

Even so, spoken word poetry has formed the foundation of his artistic career. Over the past five years, Stackhouse recorded several poetry collections set to syncopated music and sparse, harmonic, computer-generated voicings over polyrhythms, like the Black Market Records/MCA International release The Beauty Of Celeste. Stackhouse frames the recordings as "the aesthetic antithesis of late twentieth century rap, or hip-hop," however much rap provided the inspiration.

Those recordings are in large part what led him to be tapped as a symposiast in the Poetry Project's 1998 "Blues, Hip-Hop, and Identity" and the "Spoken Word, Poetry, Electronic Music" symposium at the Tribes Gallery in 1999. In addition, Ed Friedman, the artistic director the Poetry Project, claims the multimedia poet's conviction that "artmaking should be a multi-genre, multicultural, political, philosophical and historical undertaking," made him a natural choice to curate the late night series.

Despite his oral strengths, the multifaceted Stackhouse submits a good case for putting poetry back on the page, especially when he breaks out the pigments and brushes. Recent works have focused on transforming language into pure image, much the way Gysin did, when he produced paintings suspended between word and image, brush strokes approximating Arabic and Chinese calligraphy. Allowing the mere look of language to dictate its meaning, Stackhouse muses that his own work is "art as notion, as opposed to actual materials. Art for the mind."

His brushy text-based ink-on-papers shown by Gale-Martin Fine Art earlier this year led NY Arts Magazine reviewer Susan Kart to think of "the wall markings made on caves by early humans," while Kevin Platt, director of the gallery and Stackhouse's dealer of two years, cites a parallel to the output of Belgian-French artist and writer Henri Michaux, another influential figure Stackhouse recently recognized. Having sold 25 of Stackhouse's works Platt describes a fascination with the elements of calligraphy created by someone proficient in both written and visual media. "It's as if Christopher's introducing a new vocabulary," the South Chelsea dealer says.

In a sky lit Sixth Avenue living room, a matted and framed set of four pen and ink portraits hang over the Stackhouse girlfriend's futon couch.

The artist waits for an interpretive reaction.

The linear male heads drawn on a ringed pad of paper, top edge ripped, seem like coffeehouse sketches. Staring, cobwebbed eyes have a circular mole placed between them, just like the one Stackhouse has in real life. (A third eye, or just a mole? Stackhouse laughs, "Yes, a third eye.") Vertical lines intersect the serious faces, drawing down from the eye like a monocle chain.

"Tension," prompts the artist, the tension between opposites. Opposite views, opposing urges, perhaps? Two of the heads sport an X on their foreheads: representing the mark of man, explains Stackhouse, the mark of pre- or illiterate man.

"Like the signature of a slave," he adds. Or perhaps that's the former signature of a former slave?

Stackhouse seems distinctly inclined to explore the de-evolution of expression. As a literate artist, he often spurns his ability to write by making marks on paper that look like writing, but somehow aren't, and then he would mean something by them. Gysin would be proud, and given the social context, so too might James Baldwin. Baldwin is one cat Stackhouse has already discovered, at the age of nine when the family relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Stackhouse's Virginian father "traveled with Jimmie's entourage as secretary and friend from 1979 to 1983," and Baldwin's political and social theories pervaded the household. For three years Stackhouse has honed his own expressions of being Black in America as a Fellow of Cave Canem, a 35-year old organization providing retreats and workshops for African-American poets.

A knock at the apartment door reveals a workman in an indeterminate uniform, inquiring about the origin of a water leak discovered downstairs.

"There's no sign of it up here," assures Stackhouse. Yet the soft-spoken poet knows full well that discovery is part and parcel of creation, and it's just a matter of time before the source of a well-spring is identified.

+++

A version of this profile appeared in The Village Voice, December 2001.

A Colonial Tale Of Vengeance & Deceit

(This appeared in the Asian Wall Street Journal, January 2000) Review of MURDER ON THE VERANDAH: Love and Betrayal in British Malaya by Eric Lawlor, 260pp, published in 1999 by Harper Collins Publishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Road, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB.  L17.99

In Kuala Lumpur in 1911, an adulterous British woman shot and killed her cheating lover, scandalizing the town and sending reverberations throughout the Empire.

Now her shocking behavior -- famously fictionalized by W. Somerset Maugham in his 1926 short story "The Letter" and portrayed by Bette Davis in the 1940 Hollywood film -- is examined in an entirely new and perceptive light, at once sympathetic to the Eurasian murderess and damning to the rigid Eastern protectorate in which she found herself captive.

Although Eric Lawlor's Murder on the Verandah is ostensibly the true story behind the notorious Ethel Proudlock case, within a few chapters his account morphs into a withering social history of British Malaya. For prurient interest, especially to residents of modern Malaysia, it doesn't disappoint.

However, Proudlock herself remains a cipher in spite of Mr. Lawlor’s admirable (albeit hypothetical) efforts to flesh her out. Unable to procure even one likeness of the woman, the author instead is pressed to supply photos of clubs, activities and locations which have only peripheral bearing on her story.

It is understandable that Ethel Proudlock was actively erased from the lives and memories of those who knew of her.

In race- and class-conscious British Malaya at the turn of the twentieth century, Proudlock appears doomed from the beginning.  Mr. Lawlor surmises she was born illegitimately to a low-ranking Briton and a native woman, then treated coolly by her father's European family, and hastily married in 1907 to the undistinguished and naive young teacher, William Proudlock.  Ethel was most likely pregnant with her only child at the time, born on the honeymoon trip to England.   "So much in her life reeked of deceit," notes Mr. Lawlor.

Even though she was a minor figure about town and dogged by ill-health, Proudlock apparently dreamed of being noticed: she was both a clotheshorse and an aspiring actress.

These qualities cannot have been rewarded in a society which had recently traded in its freewheeling pioneer atmosphere for a distinctly suburban, timid conformity.

"Malaya no longer felt like Malaya," was the nostalgic lament.  "It had been domesticated, and where once tigers had roamed, now there were tennis courts and cricket creases."

Racial purity was also being increasingly emphasized, with nascent movements to exclude Asians from the civil service and to segregate train cars.

In this climate, Proudlock’s mixed bloodline would have resulted in further ostracization.

When Proudlock's audacious actions finally captured the ultimate limelight in her murder trial, "people who saw her on the witness stand remarked on how self-possessed she looked."

She enjoyed playing an upright woman who had killed defending her honor, as she claimed William Steward attempted to rape her.  Only when sentenced to hang for the murder of the tin mine manager did she lose her composure.

A debate raged in both England and Malaya over the virtues of the case and her supporters looked for a way to reverse the decision.  It was mostly a matter of appearance, however, as the British liked to believe they cut exemplary figures in Malaya.

Eventually she was pardoned by the Sultan of Selangor and exiled to England. If the shame weren't enough, her husband's public denunciations of the trial proceedings effectively ruined him too.  He was forced to resign as headmaster at the Victoria Institution and his inquiries were rebuffed ever after by the Colonial Office in London.

Murder on the Verandah succeeds as a masterful negative-space account of the woman and her vengeful crime, supplying us with context,  the pressures and the expectations under which Proudlock and her husband must have labored.

It also paints the portraits of a large cast of characters who lend their thoughts and life experiences to Mr. Lawlor's points: among them newspaper editors, estate managers, civil servants and their wives.

Mr. Lawlor's dark perspective specifically vindicates Maugham's acerbic view of Malayan planters and district officers, even though Maugham’s unwitting subjects uniformly insisted that they had been defamed.

The revealing retrospective continues through a host of ills suffered by the British in Malaya, as well as the hardships of Asians at the hands of their insensitive British masters.  Exploring the cruel indentured servitude of Tamils on rubber plantations and the perception of Chinese rickshaw pullers in town, Mr. Lawlor exposes just how alienated the British managed to make themselves.

So unnerved at surrendering control even for a short ride across town, they believed a rickshaw puller "used the opportunity not just to avenge every wrong he had suffered at their hands, but to avenge as well every wrong done to every member of his race."

Paranoia, perhaps.

Yet, as Ethel Proudlock knew to her core, revenge is the province of the dispossessed.

Career Girl At Age 8

At the age of 8, my three favorite activities were:

1. driving my car (which was actually a bookcase with a cardboard steering wheel taped to it)
2. to a "French Lady" tea party with my sister (where all conversation was spoken with some kind of fru-fru accent)
3. and then back in the car to my office where I shuffled papers, filled in some outdated, discarded forms we salvaged from a Dumpster somewhere, and sent and received mail with my sisters who were in their offices, for hours on end.

Playing with dolls was not a major occupation. I was a career girl!

That year for my birthday, I got a baby doll (the kind with the big bald plastic head) from my aunt back east who didn't know me at all.

Eerily foreign, I didn't know what to do with it.

Should I take it in the car to my tea party and to the office?

A baby had no place in my life.

Developing Cool Arts South Sea Cultural & ECommerce Portal, 1998

In development, to be located at www.flamingeast.com  

Presenting a feverish vista onto Southeast Asia, from the Age of Discovery through the Golden Age of Travel….spiked with the delirium only a good bout of malaria can provide!  A site of resource and entertainment for Western nostalgia-seeking Baby Boomer travellers to their Generation X backpacking cultural tourism children.  A window into this part of the world both past and present, through the atmospheric and romantic filter of history, art and literature (COOL ARTS): summoning up awesome adventure, the pursuit of commerce and spirit of exploration that once characterized the Western world's relationship with these Crossroads of the East.

Our upscale, well-educated English-speaking target clientele are historically- and aesthetically- saavy people as well as others enchanted by our handsome, substantial, well-read and humorous rendering of the region.  They include both people who voyage in the flesh and those who visit this part of the world virtually.  We'll provide the attractive, entertaining context for their explorations, as well as provide access to select products, suppliers, resources, establishments and destinations which currently celebrate South East Asia's colorful legacies and legends.    Cool Arts South Sea will offer a comprehensive and contemporary look at an old place, all the while having a little fun with the history, art and literature generated both in the West about this place, and here in Asia.

For instance, the first edition of the site might feature in its TERRA INCOGNITA Tales section a piece about the tea trade and how pidgin english originated from the Europeans' need to communicate with the Chinese in some language they could both understand; and in the Hot Spot section, a spotlight on a Bangkok-based publisher of quirky travelogue reprints from the 19^th century and reprints of antique books about Asian elephants. This publisher currently sells online and we would want to get involved with that, perhaps offering his wares in our ARCHIPELAGO TRADING section, or operating as a portal to his site.  In further additions we would add archives, a searchable timeline, more products and vendors, information about resources and destinations featured in TERRA INCOGNITA and ARCHIPELAGO TRADING.

Also for instance in the first edition, the more rollickingly interpretative COOL ARTS section:  in the Literature section EX LIBRIS we might feature excerpts of turn of the century British Malaya newspaper items along with jocular contemporary criticism and images in GALLERY section to illustrate the points.  These artistic, computer-assisted images (and sometimes the images of the literature itself) and their wacky explanatory captions could be sent to one's friends via our POSTAL CARDS section.  In PANDEMONIUM we may start compilation of a series of famous people who've had malaria, and the outcomes of some of their bouts, such as the esteemed naturalist Alfred Wallace, who originated the theory of Natural Selection while in a malarial fever in this part of the world.  The fact that Darwin is better known for his Origin of Species may be directly related to that debilitating but illuminating fever.  We might explore this in more detail in our NATURALIST'S CORNER which will highlight the natural world and the people who came here to study it, a subsection most likely of TERRA INCOGNITA.  We might also ask our audience to nominate other worthy parties for inclusion in the MALARIA HALL OF FAME which may be set up in Pandemonium.

In any case, we want input from our visitors, we want to know what they know, what they love, what they want to know more about and we'll give them every opportunity to tell us, as well as offer them a GLOSSARY to explain the terms and phrases we use, some of which are not used very often any more.  We want to bring them back in all their mystique and style.  We'll also ask our visitors to sign our GUESTBOOK to build our database, vote on the first items to be offered in ARCHIPELAGO TRADING (some of which we may produce ourselves in our COOL ARTS product line) and tell us what they want defined in GLOSSARY, as well as suggest venues or tales they'd like to see featured in TERRA INCOGNITA.  Very interactive.

By the third incarnation of the site we hope to have a virtual community beginning, as well as some ecommerce structure in place, and a more fully-fleshed portal-like directory growing.

What follows here:

1) The company philosophy as it was written for the ABOUT US section, an introduction for our visitors

2) The site map

3) A description of the design theme for the site and logo

4) Directions for home page and directory page with design and mouseover information

5) Extended definitions of bracketing periods to be placed in site's glossary

6) Materials and Labor: breakdown of what we have, what we don't

COMPANY PHILOSOPHY

AN ILLUSTRIOUS MYSTIQUE

"The part of the world that lies around the South China Sea", as one European narrator so circuitously  referred to it, was once immersed in an illustrious mystique.  Pirates and monsoons held sway on the seas while headhunters and mosquitos did their part in the interior.  Yet over several centuries an international set of adventurers, traders, colonizing industrialists and pleasure travellers risked these and a slew of other tropical hazards.  Along with Asiatic goods and unimaginable riches, fanciful tales filtered home: of ancient races, shining temples and blue, impenetrable jungle.  Even the air was different here, as the east wind apparently came laden with the aroma of silks, sandalwood, spices and camphor.  Well, no longer.

LOSS OF NAIVETE

Oh, Southeast Asia (and the scattered bits all around and around...)continues its enveloping assault on the senses; its roots are as deep as ever; and its jungles, untouched by the Ice Age (although mauled by Cro-Magnon's less-hirsute relatives), still encompass a greater diversity of species than any other place on earth. But in today's shrinking world we have lost a most colorful naivete, the uncensored awe and attendant romantic notions that once swirled like a thick fog around exotic new lands.

A NEW LOOK AT AN OLD PLACE

COOL ARTS SOUTH SEA seeks to renew the wonder that existed in these watery crossroads of the East from the Renaissance's Age of Discovery with its ambitious empire-building and search for profitable trade-routes, through the impossibly sophisticated steamer trunks-and-servants Golden Age of Travel, and beyond. By conjuring the senses and sentiments of those vaporous days, as well as helping you access suppliers, establishments and destinations which celebrate those colorful legacies and legends, we propose to take a new look at an old place.

RESOURCES FOR THE HISTORICALLY-SAAVY TRAVELLER

Cool Arts South Sea intends to amass both modern and ancient resources, for today's more historically-saavy traveller, whether you voyage by virtual-armchair, in the flesh, or both. A wide array of avenues will aid in enriching your trip, and assure the mementos you bring home to loved ones reflect your most adventurous notions of the place. From firsthand accounts of Asiatic travels, to the hippest opportunities for capturing a vanishing slice of South China Sea life, Cool Arts South Sea marks the spot.

FOR RELUCTANT ADVENTURERS

Fear not.  Cool Arts South Sea is the perfect place to begin exploring uncharted territories, an introduction to the mysterious world that lies at the intersection of the East and the West, the past and the present.  We aim to provide general explanations and further references for all newcomers whose interest is aroused. (with GLOSSARY and mouseover texts)  If you don't see an explanation already on the site, refuse to be daunted in the face of the unknown (like all good explorers) and ask us for one -- we will do our best to supply it.

MAIN STREET MEETS SULTAN STREET

We are the intersection of old and new; east and west; straight-ahead historical fact and irreverent revisionist fantasy; gravity and levity. So in addition to straight-ahead historical representations, you will also see hybrid ventures and fusion perceptions, those with meaningful East-West elements and contemporary slants on ancient motifs.

TWEAKING THE FOLLIES OF THE DAY

Our particular interest lies in the rediscovered and reinvented treasures of the region -- and our modern, tongue-in-cheek spin on the region's events and customs (of natives and foreigners alike) not only memorializes the lives and livelihoods past, but also wickedly tweaks the follies of the day.   Our romantic fog banks burn off when the sun gets hot enough!

SHARE THE WEALTH

We invite all you world-class explorers and armchair historians, landlubbers and seapuppies to be active participants in our search for meaningful destinations and quality purveyors of flaming east mystique -- by nominating for our ever-growing roster the unique gems you have mined in your own South China Sea escapades.

OUR FLAMING FUTURE

…includes a full-fledged virtual community and ebusiness. Meet others with similar interests -- and debate esoterics or tropical topicals-- as well as access an unusual collection of products, services and other instruments tailored for the historically and artistically astute Cool Arts South Sea crowd.  See our PRODUCTS page for more information and to vote on the products, services and other instruments you want to see first. If you would like to be kept abreast of this site's advances check that box in the guestbook.

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SITE MAP

HOME PAGE

|

DIRECTORY

__________________________________ _______________|_________________________________________________________

|                             |                                       |     |                                         |       |

ABOUT US/SITE         TERRA INCOGNITA                COOLARTS       POSTAL CARDS        ARCHIPELAGO TRADING  |

|     _____|______                         |                                                                       |

CONTACT US             |                  |                   ____ __|_______                                                             GUESTBOOK

Hot Spots            Tales             |          |          |

|          |          |

(Fine Arts  Philosophy  Literature)

GALLERY  PANDEMONIUM  EXLIBRIS

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MAIN THEME:  Artistic, aesthetic, historically-based but funky and contemporary

COLOR/MOOD

Burnished, old-timey feel - no bright, clear jewel tones, no mcdonald's yellow or corporate blue

Mysterious and spicy colors, muted or "dusty-looking" (like burnt orange, maroon, teal and seafoam green, cream, white, black, dusty rose, dusty purple)

DESIGN ELEMENTS:

Two Typefaces for Headings and subheadings:

1) EASTERN/ASIAN (like current Rickshaw)

2) WESTERN/EUROPEAN COLONIAL (like current Caslon Antique)

MUST CONTAIN AT LEAST ONE OF EACH, IF NOT MORE:

1. SOMETHING GEOGRAPHICAL (whether explorers, traders or luxury travellers)

Old maps, cartography symbols like galleons and compasses, nautical symbols, yellowing parchment paper, clipper ship, fancy cruise luggage labels from grand old hotels

1. SOMETHING ARTISTIC (local art forms)

Architectural details (like shophouses, temples, atap villages); Sculptural details (like Angkor Wat figures): Textile patterns, fancy borders, wood carvings

1. SOMETHING JUNGLY (plant or animal or both)

Bamboo, Palms, beaches, Padi fields, jungle, tropical fruits, spices, orchids; Elephants, tigers, cobras, monkeys, butterflies

And if can find a place:

1. SOMETHING FROM COMMERCIAL/POPULAR ART

Trademarks from defunct businesses, matchbook covers, old photos, stamps, money, advertisements, signboards with different languages, old newspaper and book excerpts

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HOME PAGE - Centered Logo on Map background, with  copyright and viewing info.  All fits on one screen

Above logo, medium font Caslon Antique intro:

"Ahoy there!  You've run aground in the Flaming East…

prime territory for world-class explorers, swashbuckling privateers and [sniff!] the most discriminating of gentility's travellers."

Below logo, also medium font:

"Presenting our feverish vista onto the fringes of the South China Sea

-- or "INDIAE ORIENTALIS ET INSULARUM ADIACENTIUM," as those Latin-happy cartographers would have it -- from THE AGE OF DISCOVERY through THE GOLDEN AGE OF TRAVEL…

spiked with the delirium only a solid bout of malaria can provide!"

(* mouseover definition: "the East Indies and adjacent islands")

(*mouseover definition:  (1450-1650) an explosive sea-faring period of world exploration and East-West trade routes)

(*mouseover definition:  (1880-1939) from the Victorian era of the swift steamship to the advent of the modern jet age, when the allure of exotic ports of call dovetailed with technological advances…..and the entire planet became a playground for the rich and famous)

Mouseover box on Logo: "Whether you come via luxurious ocean voyage or that damn bumpy road to Mandalay, by trusty mail steamer from darkest Borneo or the night train to Singapore…all routes lead to the world of COOL ARTS SOUTH SEA. Click to enter."

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DIRECTORY PAGE plus LOGO

ICONS OVER ELECTRIC BAMBOO THICKET:

Each icon has a boldfaced title underneath and beside the icon, a description.  Plus a mouseover-box invitation.

Title: ABOUT US (Lady's head with superimposed compass)

Mouseover: Get oriented!

Description: The swiftest means to orient yourself in this mysterious domain.  Recommended for all maiden voyages.

Title: TERRA INCOGNITA (Steamer ship)

Mouseover:  Explore "unknown territories"!

Description: Investigate select venues and vendors, destinations and diversions, travels and tales.

Title: COOL ARTS (Mosquito)

Mouseover: Succumb to a tropical fever!

Description: Run amok with our biting look at art, literature and philosophy.

Title: ARCHIPELAGO TRADING CO. (Chest of drawers)

Mouseover: Dive into our treasure trove!

Description: Hunt through unearthed treasures and prospect in our jungle motherlode.

Title: GUEST BOOK (Elephant with chops)

Mouseover: Stoke the flames with your opinions!

Description: As a memento of your peregrinations with us, kindly leave your mark.

Title: POSTAL CARDS (Missent Postcard)

Mouseover: 'Wish you were here!

Description: Let your correspondents know how you're managing in the tropics.

Extended definitions of periods (to be placed in glossary)

THE AGE OF DISCOVERY (1450-1650)  Concurrent with the European Renaissance. With access to new sea-faring trade routes pioneered by world-class explorers like the Portuguese Vasco de Gama and Spanish Ferdinand Magellan, Europe enjoyed a massive expansion of trade with the Far East.  Eastern riches flowed into Europe: tea, sugar, cocoa, spices, gems, drugs, silks, embroideries and fine fabrics.

GOLDEN AGE OF TRAVEL (1880-1939)  The Orient's exotic ports of call became pleasurably accessible when two things happened almost concurrently:  the invention of the steam-powered ship (replacing the 19^th century's far-ranging but slower sailing ships, the clippers) and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.  Not long after, a stylish Victorian Age phenomenon began to take shape: Extremely civilized round-the-world cruises complete with servants and steamer trunks became known as "Making the Grand Tour".  New status symbols cropped up: A suitcase full of fancy luggage labels marked the well-heeled and well-traveled person.  Luxury liners circumnavigated the world, disgorging their celebrity and high society passengers into fabled playgrounds, like Asia's grand hotels: Singapore's Raffles, Penang's Eastern and Oriental, Rangoon's Strand and Saigon's Continental Palace.

MATERIALS AND LABOR WE HAVE:

a great deal of historical and artistic images we can play with

a library of historical travelogues, and books on many far-ranging and pertinent topics

supply of researched materials, topics, phrases, the platforms for expansion into features, etc

our own images ready to go

rudimentary list of companies/ventures to approach for inclusion in the site, both online and off

registered domain names

registered Malaysian company

draft of proposal letter to featured companies to enlist their cooperation/collaboration in portal/ebiz

Site Development schedule in three phases

metatext and comprehensive list of keywords for search engines

writing and design talent/capability

scanner, color printer, photoshop, corel draw, dreamweaver, hotdog web editors

MATERIALS AND LABOR, etc WE DON'T HAVE:

Technical resources and state of the industry experience

Coding:  html, java, cgi and others for all pages including mockup of site theme

Programming for Postal Cards (to send or bring recipients to site to pick up)

Programming and database institution for Guestbook

Server (requirements, location, etc)

Ebiz solutions and related support and guidance, including advertising and promotion

Cool Arts South Sea Products

Product copy from a web venture in development, 1998 Description of Product Line:

We intend to offer a spectrum of products from the affordable and funky, like T-shirts and stationery items to pricier items like clothing, jewelry and home furnishings based on more regal traditions and of finer quality materials, including original art. All will sport cool, informative labeling which places them in the proper Cool Arts historical context, making them perfect for gift giving. No explanations needed!

We envision Cool Arts South Sea products as intelligent and hip travel mementoes, ideal for all visitors to this region, whether real or of the armchair variety! Our products will not be typical tourist items, the things that are easy to find in this part of the world but dreadful to own and use, like those crudely decorated sarongs tied in inverted nooses around the necks of hotel lobby mannequins; like plastic keychains with scorpions imbedded in them; like woven and varnished tea trays. This kind of merchandise is already available, as are more traditional handicrafts made in villages all over Southeast Asia. We mean to provide an alternative to both these souvenir and gift options: by designing our own products; by sourcing appropriately themed products from other companies; and for gathering and putting our value-added spin on any pre-existing items which happen to catch our fancy. Whatever we chose to offer, from the authentic to the fabricated, be assured Cool Arts South Sea products will be accessible and fun while giving you the distinct impression you're somewhere exotic, in the middle of it all. For instance, our clothes will be geared to individuals interested in traditional outfits, the kind you might see the locals wearing in Vietnam, Burma and Malaysia but not know where to find, or modified pan-Asian outfits which can make the transition into your life without excessive drama -- at least emotionally. That is, you'll be dramatic but you won't feel strange.

FABULOUS SILKS Just an example of the local treasures awaiting your hot little hands: these elegant and wildly-designed, one-of-a-kind, batiked brocaded silks lend themselves not only to the traditional and hybrid Malay women's jacket-and-sarong sets known as the kebaya, but also translate auspiciously into luscious western outfits. Although such silks are often glimpsed worn casually, they remain unfailingly formal -- the dress shirts for men constitute a high-style variation on the national dress.

Mimicking The Fireflies: Kuala Lumpur By Night

In most parts of the globe the setting sun signals a natural winding down of the day's activity in preparation for rest and renewal.  As the sky darkens and shadows grow, tucked-in babes embark on dream-filled journeys.  Although no early-riser, often I am not far behind.  Yet in sultry, equatorial Kuala Lumpur, or KL, I find it just the opposite. At twilight both I and the city seem to awaken from our heat-of-the-day slumber, refreshed and full of plans. And my fellow bedtime buddies, young boisterous children, are seen and heard at KL's nighttime establishments, accompanying their families as they all partake of the temperate breezes.

Many others seem enlivened as nightfall offers its welcome change to the heavy tropical air.  The sound of electric generators and motorbikes add their man-made whine to dusk's cacophony of enduring inhabitants: the cicadas, bats and bullfrogs.  Just as the forest has its set of nocturnal creatures, so too does KL's city-within-a-jungle.

While city-slicking, storm drain-dwelling bullfrogs make their amorous presence known at twilight, energized Malaysians begin their zip around town. Checking the air for signs of a cool current, pedestrians emerge from the steelwork of office buildings and exhibit a new briskness of step on the illumined streets.

Meanwhile, veteran teksi drivers and suburban commuters alike leave a swift streak of red tail-lights in their wake, inspired less by the dropping temperature than evening's empty stretches of road, a rarity during sluggish, traffic-logged daylight.

KL's night shift shows its face: packing the sidewalk restaurants and coffee shops, and thronging popular pasar malam night markets.   In narrow alleys, deserted parking lots and commandeered thoroughfares like Chinatown's Petaling Street and Bukit Ceylon's Jalan Alor traders begin a ritual.  Vans and lorries are unloaded, makeshift tables and generator-powered lights assembled, wares laid out to best advantage. As fire is lit under a hawker's huge wok, stirred chili padi peppers release their arresting oils, contributing an acrid accent to the city's medley of night scents.

Is that a whiff of durian I smell, the swamp gas King of Fruits?

Elsewhere in the low-rise shadows, delicate night-blooming jasmine wafts on the breeze, a chance treat from tended but unseen garden pots cluttering tiny urban balconies.

When I ramble through the dusky streets, taking in the sights and smells -- and an unexpected bowl of Hokkien prawn noodles, for no Malaysian excursion is complete without an unscheduled food stop -- I often become engrossed in a miniature nighttime ballet. Close to the dazzling night lights, there gather flurries of flying insects, reeling from the amperage of KL's street lamps shining brighter than the jungle moon ever has.

Omnipresent and waiting nearby are their foes, the predatory and gravity-defying cicak lizards. A small taupe one advances with measured steps, sometimes to battle for territory with its fellows, other times to corner a fluttering, light-stunned prey.  Then sated and heading home over a backlit acrylic shop house signboard, the lizard's transparent skin reveals its inner-workings.

Yet KL's real nighttime spectacle takes place on a grander scale, one best viewed from a passing car, or a skyscraping lookout. A perfect vantage point graces Bukit Nanas Forest Reserve in the heart of the city's Golden Triangle district, the Telekom Tower.  This third-tallest radio spire in the world offers a sparkling panoramic view of the Klang Valley, complimentary with a tasty dinner.  The reverse prospect isn't bad either with the pale mauve edifice a visual triumph in its own right, observation decks glistening like gems in a jeweler's setting.  At its darkened base, high-rent monkeys doze in their precious parcel of virgin forest.

Nearby, the fashionable pylons and sky bridge of the world's tallest structure, the Petronas Twin Towers, blaze as they pierce the clear night sky.  The KL City Centre monument is awesome at any distance, yet its height is most unfathomable when one looks up from the sprawling park at its foundation.

But look up I must, until a crick in the neck and the park's ground-level features seduce me away.

A favorite gathering place in the evenings, the clean wide esplanade offers the perfect runway for a popular tropical evening institution: after dinner strolling cum people-watching.  The humanity spectrum is broad here, with business people from the surrounding corporate neighborhood still crisp from their office work; perfumed shoppers laden with packages spilling out of the glittery Suria KLCC mall; and sightseers from nearby kampung villages and far off countries, drawn by the world famous landmark, like moths to a flame.

Meanwhile, the jogging pathways meandering through a grove of replanted ancient trees attract courting couples who cease their sweet nothings to admire the ever-morphing fountain sprays and attendant laser show.

Across town at the convergence of the Klang and the Gombak rivers, what is the birthplace of Kuala Lumpur, stands a glorious nighttime exhibition of more human proportions.  Bounded by a procession of colonial buildings full of both history and life, Dataran Merdeka, or Independence Square, has long been a beloved circuit to saunter of an evening, as well as a chosen site for national gatherings.

Taking a turn around the padang field, I soak up the historic mock-Tudor Royal Selangor Club with its raucous, patron-brimming Long Bar.  The Club's wide verandah looks out onto its famous cricket field and beyond that, to the fanciful domes, arches and spiral staircases of the Sultan Abdul Samad courthouse.  Stunning during the day, at night the eclectic Indo-Arab details of this 1894 justice building are transformed into a three-dimensional wonder of light.

The Moorish architectural influence continues downriver, where the fantastic and light-hearted 1911 Railway Station is a feast for the eyes.  Cupolas, turrets and keyhole arches are so reminiscent of a childhood carnival ride I half expect a little train to rocket through the arches, filled with squealing people.

Nearby the appealing lattice work high-rise Kompleks Dayabumi provides a twentieth century translation of Islamic design while the nation's site of worship, Masjid Negara, sports chic international style architecture.  And overlooking everything from the Lake Gardens hill above, the National Planetarium echoes the mosque's color scheme, its blue dome and white observation tower peeking over the tree-tops.

Yet further downstream on the outer edge of the city there awaits a most meaningful nighttime phenomenon.

Fronting the King's Istana, the official seat of Malaysia's royal ruler, techno-festive strings of lights dangle like ethereal tendrils from the broad branches of tall and seasoned trees.  In a moving and masterful embellishment, the city fathers here seem to mimic the cascading roots of nature's mighty banyan -- and the incredible, magical blazing created when forest fireflies gather by river's edge. The tribute is palpable. Behind its gilded portal, the golden palace gleams in silent, awestruck reflection of a brilliant equatorial moon.

This rejuvenating starlit experience will redeem me tomorrow when I oversleep the chilled and dewy dawn.

+++

This appeared in Malaysia Airlines' inflight magazine GOING PLACES.

Nyonya Cuisine For Far Eastern Economic Review

This appeared in the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine May 21, 1998 Fabulous Fusion

Jonkers Melaka (17 Jalan Hang Jebat, Melaka, 06-283-5578) Bon Ton (7 Jalan Kia Peng, Kuala Lumpur, 03-241-3614 or 241-3611) Bon Ton At The Beach (Pantai Cenang, Langkawi, 04-955-3643 or 955-6787)

T he multiculturalism of Malaysia can be downright delicious, if you know what to look for. After sampling the country's superb Chinese, Malay and Indian fares, turn your attentions to Nyonya, a definitively indigenous cuisine, which, like all good secrets, delivers a rich reward.

A scarce but savoury vestige of an illustrious Malayan sub-culture, the Nyonya culinary tradition rates among the country's most creative. Complex, labour-intensive Nyonya dishes spring from the Peranakan, born in 15th-century Malacca when Chinese traders married local Malay women (Nyonya). Although their offspring identified themselves with the Chinese, many of their customs mixed the best of both traditions. Chief among these was their food, which some describe as Chinese in spirit and Malay in form, with ingredients dictated by Chinese tastes (and religions), while the spices and preparations are traditionally Malay.

This cultural fusion explains why chillies, cinnamon, pungent roots and grasses, tamarind and coconut milk have found their way into dishes with such stolid Chinese staples as pork, mushrooms, soy sauce and bean curd.

Towards the end of the 19th century, the Peranakan culture reached its pinnacle both in Malacca and in the other British Straits Settlements of Singapore and Penang. Genteel communities of Straits Chinese flourished in ornate terrace houses, their marble-topped tables laden with unique concoctions prepared by the Nyonya and her legion of servants.

Revelling in high-calibre culinary artistry, Nyonyas refused to cook simple Chinese dishes like fried rice, proclaiming it too easy. This feisty and hybrid tradition is highlighted at a trio of stylish eating establishments in Malaysia which specialize in the blending of cuisines.

With three exceptional locations and one highly inventive owner, the decade-old Bon Ton restaurants have inspired gourmet pilgrimages among their clientele. For, while the venues share many aesthetic characteristics, along with gift shops and links to the local arts community, they stand alone in their singular settings and menus. All excel with innovative East-West fusions, including astonishing desserts--and have played an important role in rescuing from obscurity old-style Nyonya dishes. The uncommon recipes were provided by the copious culinary memory banks of two Malaccan Nyonyas, one a descendant of the Jonkers household.

Jonkers Melaka, located in an exquisite 90-year-old Nyonya house in the heart of historical Malacca, is an ideal spot for refreshment during a day spent pounding the pavement in search of antiques, the oldest Chinese temple in Malaysia or the replica of a Portuguese man-of-war docked nearby.

Initially you'll be stunned by the naturally cooling features of Peranakan architecture until you dig into the current week's medley of Nyonya favourites. Dry curry-beef rendang provides a sweet counterpoint to fern tips or hollow-stemmed morning glory stir-fried in ubiquitous prawn paste sambal belachan (which raises a heavenly stink while cooking, eventually settling down to an inimitable fiery fishiness). The lemongrass chicken is wrapped in the extensively used pandan, or screwpine leaf. Acar, a zesty chutney of crisp cucumber, onion and pineapple, edges a mound of delicately flavoured coconut rice nasi lemak.

Bon Ton in Kuala Lumpur is a society favourite. Housed in a latter-day colonial bungalow in the heart of the city's Golden Triangle district, the restaurant boasts a comprehensive wine list in addition to theatrical, teak-furnished dining rooms.

A good bet is the broad-spectrum Nyonya Special, which includes charming Top Hats (deep fried pastry baskets filled with shredded yam bean, carrot and prawn with a hot and clear dipping sauce); prawn and mango curry; mutton with potatoes; and a piquant braised eggplant alongside nasi kemuli (cinnamon-tinged Nyonya wedding rice). Finish with the oddly comforting and old-fashioned bubur cha cha (cubed yam and sweet potato, white beans and bananas in a warm gravy of coconut milk).

Bon Ton At The Beach, a romantic open-air restaurant, is the hottest dining destination on the legend-rich resort island of Langkawi. A field of windswept coconut palms and beach chalets of century-old Malay timber houses surround the restaurant; hurricane lamps illuminate it as ocean breezes grow brisk after sunset.

The exuberant laksa lemak (yellow noodles in a spicy coconut soup, topped with chicken, prawns, ginger buds, cucumber, omelette and red chilli) should leave you just enough room for dessert. Your choice ranges from the classic cendol (a mountain of ice and coconut milk burying kidney beans, palm sugar and the neon green pandan noodles) to decidedly avant-garde East-West confections like the coconut cream caramel adorned with mango and ginger glass biscuits.

Law Of The Jungle: Milquetoast In The Malaysian Suburbs

I may live in a plush suburb of Kuala Lumpur, but being a First World transplant in a newly industrialized country, I spend most days simply surviving.

Semi-polished Malaysia is a confusing and paradoxical place, rife with hardscrabble hazards. As an American -- spoiled by a high standard of both development and social contract, balanced by the threat of world-class legal recourse -- I am unprepared.

Every step presents an adventure as civilization unevenly veneers wilderness, the ground itself quicksand.

Consider head to toe casualties of an innocuous invitation to lunch, for example, from ego to footgear.

In a booming land often untroubled by zoning regulations, meeting friends at a prominent equatorial hotel may unexpectedly require a swampy trudge through the mosquito-infested construction site separating the elegant establishment from the main road, strappy suede sandals intended for marble floors providing meager protection.

But perhaps even more startling than the region’s frequent ambushes on both my natural instincts and established convictions is the chronic role I play in this survival game:

I am perpetual prey.

When planning a whimsical, open-ended trip to Southeast Asia from the dream-factory comfort of my home in Los Angeles, I projected with my sterling education and big city experience I would cut through local rustic life like a machete-wielding explorer clearing a path through ancient undergrowth.

There would be culture shock, surely, but nothing perilous.

How could an entire rainforest of a country, sixty-percent untouched wilds and the rest sparsely populated by 20 million people, compare to the gritty intensity of life in that untamed concrete jungle of New York City, a hotspot I’d already survived, if not conquered?

I not only miscalculated the proportion of predators per square kilometer in this mountainous green peninsula, I misjudged my strengths. Instead of useful skills and equipment, the professional and personal properties I brought with me hindered my progress and exposed me to the bitterest situations.

I couldn’t hack through any obstructing foliage with the Bryn Mawr Honor Code.

Once the high-minded “no lying, no cheating, no stealing” system afforded me the freedom to leave my backpack without incident anywhere on the suburban Philadelphia college campus and to complete my exams unsupervised, but it was hardly a weapon – or a shield. Stretches in New York and Los Angeles may have awakened my general security habits, atrophied from collegiate ethics, but I can’t say I’m prepared to face unbridled depredation in the real world.

My classical archaeology degree was no tool of success in a developing nation where the past is swiftly being razed and architectural conservationists fighting for World Heritage status are pests for authorities and property owners aching to level historic and crumbling settlements for profit.

My muscular command of the English language, a skill which had clinched opportunities and pulled me out of tight spots before, won me no particular allies in the Asian tropics nor was it a translation aid in communicating with the natives.

Previous prolonged exposure to professional entertainment media, producing and administrating studio motion pictures, Broadway and television shows didn’t inoculate me against the rabid tradition of amateur hour, otherwise known as karaoke, nor the backward entertainment industry’s endemic third-rate productions and pirated material. Instead, my allergic reaction – symptomized by general irritability and catatonia, lack of enthusiasm while warbling La Bamba into a microphone or pawing through DVDs of the latest Hollywood releases at the pasar malam night markets -- was heightened.

Other personal provisions were stripped from me by force, or discarded as useless.

A Northern California background, values marked by non-conformism and far-left political correctness, was no compass for a conservative landscape where children are segregated and schooled by race and religion, and classified ads for jobs, housing and advanced education baldly specify the race, sex, age and religion of those who can expect to receive preferential treatment.

Here Malays call themselves Bumiputera, or princes of the earth, and Chinese people refer to themselves as ‘Chinamen’. That's a term I would have been disciplined for using as a child and when I type it today, my Pacific Northwest spellchecking program reminds me I am way, way out of line, suggesting I substitute ‘cinnamon.’

Here  I am automatically designated "white", upsetting a lifelong resistance to America’s own crude race option of ‘Caucasian’. There is no use for my more nuanced self view of being ‘Indo-European’. Besides, what difference could it make to people who presume I’m exactly the same as every other light-complected person who ever set foot in these latitudes, and more recently, whoever crossed their path.

So along with a new cultural classification, I now hold a fresh history. I wear the mantle of red-haired people, Dutch and British and French colonials, stinking privateers and planters, pompous district officers and butterfly-chasing naturalists, decadent drug-addled Orientalist writers, American expats flush with corporate money, and beer-drinking young backpackers who take their tops off after a few.

And my aesthetic treasure map – arty West Coast upbringing’s penchant for clean Japanese design, natural fibers, sensual incandescent lighting -- did not match the landscape in modern Southeast Asia.

Here ascetic living is rarely a style choice, plastic is the craze, and harsh green fluorescent lighting is preferred over illumination that might generate more heat.

So, weighed down with impractical baggage and unschooled in the wily ways of the jungle, from the moment of my arrival I have been fresh meat for stealthy indigenous hunters, a wrong-thinking creature captured unaware and defenseless in alien territory. I even set traps for myself, behavior a terrible tangle: Nerves snap when the situation calls for pliancy, I telegraph approachability when being inscrutable and remote would achieve a better result.

If I had disembarked as an insulated expatriate under the aegis of a multinational company, doubtless palms would have been crossed in advance, maps drawn, guides and porters waiting – and, ensconced in a world geared to my needs, none of this would matter.

Instead, I was a corporate nonentity on a tiny budget, accompanying an ethnic Chinese but Malaysian-born companion who had grown unaccustomed to the country after decades abroad. Along with his mother-tongue, he had forgotten many other crucial details, including that the Chinese are second class citizens in Malay-controlled Malaysia.

My life was to be couched in the local ways without benefit of street savvy. I was about to be eaten alive.

First, enroute from Tokyo, the national airline misplaced my brand new Ping Zing golf clubs and Plop putter, still pristine in their factory boxes. I promptly filed a claim at the Penang airport and trusted the airline bureaucracy to locate the missing equipment.

Instead, the huge corporation slumbered for weeks, deflecting my earnest attempts to follow up at one branch office after another like an elephant brushes off a tenacious fly. Finally, the mailman brought a form letter telling me what I already knew: the clubs were gone. The sensation of blasé victimization mushroomed when I read the airline’s offer of compensation for my loss: Ringgit Malaysia 48 (less than $20USD) per kilo, reducing the worth of my state-of-the-art clubs to their weight in ultra-light graphite composite.

Then my ship came in.

The vessel that carried all my worldly goods over the Pacific Ocean anchored in the Port of Penang, an island state off the northwest coast. In meetings the weeks before, my boastful local freight forwarder, a chain-smoking Chinese character named K.K., clad in Camel cigarette brand khaki safari suits, dismissed my worried-white-woman questions about port procedure and protocol, saying, “Leave it to me, it’s always the same.”

So I don’t begin to know the details but when he failed to show up at the Penang container yard to represent me and my interests, the unattended household container was ransacked by customs officers with the abandon of rampaging chimpanzees, to judge from the scene when I arrived.

After rending boxes from end to end and strewing delicate computer peripherals and precious belongings across the hot tarmac, like mischievous primates they pilfered lightweight shiny trinkets, Ray-Ban sunglasses and Harley Davidson keychains. Later, when my jumbled container was opened in front of my suburban Kuala Lumpur home, family heirlooms skittered into the sludge-filled storm drain.

The silent Tamil moving crew, neon yellow uniforms florid against their dark skin and bloodshot eyes, pretended not to notice. The only woman on the scene, the only foreigner, the only hysterical person, I climbed down to retrieve my things from the muck, not knowing what dank-living creatures I might meet, nor what distress signals I was emitting to the entire zipcode’s blood-thirsty leeches.

Within a few weeks my new pedigreed puppy, romping in the sunshine of my ‘padlocked residential compound’ known in the United States as a gated front yard, was whisked away in the jaws of another predator. A snapping, snarling Rottweiler of eight weeks, the ink on her pedigree papers not yet dry, the Little Brontosaurus Kid’s fearsome promise attracted the marauder she wasn’t mature enough to dissuade.

My Malaysian friends sighed and said it was to be expected, the dog was 'too nice'.Too nice for a trusting milquetoast like me to hang onto.

Later I discovered they were right, it was to be expected. An article in The Malay Mail, a tabloid newspaper specializing in grievances of the common man, reported that a dog theft ring had been operating out of my suburban, not-particularly-criminal neighborhood, stalking RM30,000 worth of well-bred canines in the time I lived there.

Cut-throat dupings and uncivilized endangerments permanently enflamed my pampered sensibilities.

Soon it didn’t matter whether the offense was personal or to my environment, or to society as a whole. The government, the press, the business community! The health care system, the food service industry, the tourism trade! The injustice, the danger, the rudeness!

I squawked and squealed to everyone who would listen and many who wouldn’t. Some local counterparts who had experienced mountains of loss and hazard sympathized, but no one recognized or mirrored my particularly American need for restitution, for justice.

“It happens,” my boisterous neighbor Tuan Tin would sagely explain, nodding and absorbing my bad news. “You can’t do anything,” she’d finally blurt if we talked long enough, quickly daubing her tears as if her tattooed eyeliner would smear.

But Tuan Tin the Buddhist did think a person could do something. She changed her faith to raise a young son stricken with leukemia, embracing Christianity that offered him a rose-colored future in heaven with the son of God – rather than Buddhism’s projection that if he lost his struggle with this life he might be reincarnated as an ant.

No jungle mother wishes her son to become a lowly ant. And so it is in sink-or-swim Malaysia: certain beliefs offer rosier futures than others.

I had wondered how Malaysians maintained their refreshing naïvete in the face of spirit-crushing jeopardy and now I knew. Benign acceptance of life's treachery is an integral aspect of the sunny Southeast Asian disposition.

My neighbors and friends and strangers I read about in the newspapers seemed to possess a mastery of personal tragedy and disappointment in their fellow man, fortitude in situations of over-exposure and lurking menace.

Over the years, I must have heard it all.

• In the southern state of Johore, just across the causeway from civilized Singapore, massive python nests discovered near residential complexes where children daily played in the tall grasses;
• tiger maulings in remote village kampungs on the Thai border;
• regular outbreaks of water-contaminated typhoid and mosquito-borne dengue fever;
• children in the East Malaysian state of Sarawak perishing in an epidemic of a particularly lethal strain of the Coxsackie virus; expensive apartment towers unsoundly built on spindly legs over a riverbed in Kuala Lumpur collapsing, crooked contractors on the lam;
• suburban elevators that suddenly plummeted, taking high-rise dwellers to their parking-garage demise;
• the densely populated Klang Valley subsisting without running water for weeks during a dry-season drought, while Olympic-size swimming pools were kept filled for the hosting of the splashy Commonwealth Games;
• rare wild cats struck by cars on country roads, hauled off by an unfindable Chinese person before the wildlife officials arrive to take custody, the endangered animals’ organs possessing aphrodisiac qualities;
• monsoon storms uncovering barrels of toxic waste dumped illegally at the expensive island beach resort of Pulau Pangkor, yards from where uninformed foreign vacationers lounged on the sand.

As much as these scandals were reported in the paper or whispered at kopi tiam neighborhood coffee shops, it seemed no one took further issue with the government or their employer, their landlord or their doctor, no one threatened to sue or strike, quit a rubber-tapping job or moved away from the palm oil plantation.

Apparently, being cheated by a merchant or eaten by a tiger or flattened by a speeding bus are legitimate events governed by the preeminent system in these parts, the law of the jungle: Eat or be eaten.

My resilient Chinese acquaintances, sure to point out that their immigrant brothers can be found thriving up the smallest river in the darkest corner of Borneo, have an expression for this zealous phenomenon. They call it kiasu, “afraid to lose” in the Hokkien dialect.

A survival attitude that can seem like a complete lack of generosity or respect for others, the syndrome is in full flower in Malaysia and perhaps most obvious on the roadways.

An attempt to merge into another lane will compel the car behind to speed up, horn blaring, in order to pass first, as if breathing your exhaust is the kiss of death.

Even down south in the land-poor island republic of Singapore where the culture is kindred but the jungle is less immediate a threat, paved over and fenced in, being kiasu is still part of life. It’s shrunk to a vestigial trait – and likenesses of Mr. Kiasu, a grasping self-centered Singaporean comic book character, grace the bumpers of luxury cars on the republic’s orderly one-way boulevards.

But in Malaysia’s rural areas and urban centers, equatorial wilderness is no faded notion, no gimmick for the national tourism board to exploit.

Here in the former Third World the jungle still rules and inhabitants face the endurance game with gusto. I must admire the Malaysian brand of fearlessness, although I cannot help but wonder whether I mean foolishness.

Throwing themselves headlong into traffic circles congested with over-laden, careening lorries and reckless motorcyclists, they navigate situations that give me a vehicular-induced migraine. Faster vehicles bump cyclists and pedestrians into squalid gutters while pedestrians scurry with packages and babies across dusty highways in the blistering heat.

In their neighborhoods they face a gauntlet of hazards while doing errands, going to work and school. In flimsy, open-toed sandals urban jungle-dwellers weave their way through tetanal conditions for which this sissy Westerner considers construction boots sine qua non -- sidewalks blooming with rusty metal stumps of defunct street signs.

But the most consuming phenomenon, at 4 degrees North of the Equator, is the invisible march of the tropics: life and death cycles of spores and microbes, accelerated by a steamy atmosphere.

If they sit in the closet for a week or two, green fungus grows on my leather shoes and ages my handbags, dulling their buckles and imbuing the smell of must.

Microscopic organisms stain the pages of my books with veiny brown splotches, and under the glass of framed artwork, blemish cream-colored matting.

My college diploma now appears to be an antique.

Wood furniture oozes crusty white sap, while piles of sawdust appear on the floor under chairs and couches, microscopic organisms eating everything in their path.

Thick moss grows overnight in the storm drain out front and mildew darkens the exterior of my house, buckling freshly-applied anti-fungal paint.

Whether indication something is dying or something is growing -- or both -- the tropical face rot is world class.

During muggy New York summers I used to suffer from a seasonal outbreak of acne that I theorized sprang from walking the city streets, sweating and accumulating layer after layer of powdery black carbon monoxide. To cheer myself up, I imagined the worst and called it tropical face rot.

But in the perpetual August of Kuala Lumpur, a trip to my local dermatologist for the same condition gets me no respect and no relief.

Statuesque Dr. Singh, a Sikh in pristine lavender turban and smooth olive skin, holds a magnifying glass to my epidermis and assures me I need no medical treatment. He sends me away with oil-dissolving cleanser.

Dr. Singh knows tropical face rot when he sees it, counting among his patients those in rural Kelantan, the northeastern-most state, victims of the flesh-destroying disease leprosy. Once leprosy patients were easier to find near Kuala Lumpur, leper colonies surrounding the city.

Now dwindling leper villages are taken over by a new growth business, plant nurseries for the nouveau riche.

After decades of beating back the jungle, in densely settled areas greening one’s property is a cutting edge practice. Tiling over their compounds for easy cleaning and felling trees since the shady, oxygen-producers attract loud dirty birds and the egg-eating snakes that follow them, suburbanites repopulate properties with greenhouse-grown varieties of docile plants. Favored is the papery-flowered Brazilian vine bougainvillea since it doesn’t attract birds or bees with a scent, drip nectar or soil the walkway with whatever sticky juice more succulent plants spit.

Envisioning myself the great white planter-cum-naturalist in the denuded suburbs, for my small patch of land I yearned to create a sanctuary of bird-friendly fruit trees and night-blooming jasmines, exotica impossible to grow in cooler, drier climates.

I’d be the genius who drew brightly-colored jungle birds and big-winged dragonflies back to the neighborhood.

Capriciously, I planted a mountain banana culled during a four-wheel drive weekend trip into the interior. No sooner was it in the ground than it started attracting trouble.

“Evil spirits live in mountain bananas,” my professional Malay neighbor Khatidja warned through our Cyclone fence. “Better to get rid of it, yah?”

But instead of heeding animist jungle wisdom I dismissed her alarm as lowland, big-city snobbery.

Besides, my Collins Field Guide to birds of Southeast Asia said Arachnothera flavigaster, or spectacled spider-hunters, built their nests on the underside of banana leaves at this elevation and I wanted to encourage that. The three foot stalk grew with ferocity, fruiting faster than I could distribute its petite orange bananas or make breads, cakes and frozen drinks. Sturdy shoots with elephantine fronds may look spectacular on a verdant hill-slope or rimming a muddy river but made my place the neighborhood eyesore, tropical equivalent of a wrecked car up on blocks. Within three months the wild baby banana towered nine feet, overtook the yard with new stalks, required constant pruning of dead leaves, cut the light coming into the house, and had to be uprooted by an itinerant handyman with a pickaxe.

But my quest for butterflies, birds and blooms wasn’t going to be diverted by a rogue mountain banana that may or may not have been haunted, so I consulted the experts. The Malaysian Nature Society’s bird watching group publishes a list of indigenous flowering plants and birds they attract. I settled on the sweet-smelling ylang ylang Cananga odorata but for an unexpressed reason nursery after nursery neglected to cultivate the tree. The five foot tall sapling I later planted was shamefully ripped from its natural place in the first growth rainforest by an enterprising garden supplier.

Armed with binoculars, I was now ready to catch sight of Nectarinia zeylonica, the purple-rumped sunbirds that would materialize just as the spindly white flower buds matured. But on the eve of each flower cluster’s opening, its branch was crudely hacked by an anonymous, superstitious neighbor. Perhaps it was that faceless individual across the street who rings an eerie bell five times a day, shadowy figure illuminated by a lone candle, or the middle-aged yuppie who practices his golf swing on his tiny patio every evening. Regardless, I consider myself a failed planter, and no naturalist in my own neighborhood.

I’m no environmentalist either. I have a limit when it comes to legions of bugs.

It’s clear that we are the intruders in insects’ lives and on insects’ turf, our mouths, eyes, noses just new realms to explore but instead of embracing the flying and crawling wildlife, I try to keep them out of my vicinity.

When I was a California girl I pored over green ways to clean, the awful details of toxic paint, EMFs and sick buildings, but now I contract an exterminator to spray a deadly malathion solution around my house and garden on a regular basis to combat ants and termites, aphids and cockroaches. The fact that the sprayer has three thumbs, a birth defect, serves as a monthly reminder to me of the world I am fostering.

Sometimes the peril for me lies not in being devoured but in finding my own daily sustenance.

Insects and microbes rule so jungle guts have grown as hardy as jungle soles.

No one sends back to the kitchen a bowl of soup with a fly in it.

Squeamishness could sound a person’s death knell, whether by over-excitement or starvation or both. Detection of the dreaded rat urine-borne Hantavirus at one of the capital’s major food courts did not affect its popularity nor require it to be closed for extermination and testing purposes. Intrepid jungle-dwellers scarf down dishes prepared by sidewalk hawkers who operate without the benefit of soap and running water, without refrigeration, without covering food from the elements – like the concrete dust drifting over from the construction site next door.

Sometimes I wonder if I am overreacting like a prissy Puritan when I cannot finish my meal after a trip to a particularly bad restaurant bathroom, a bare room with a concrete floor and a bucket of water which, when poured on the floor, snakes in an open drain past the cooking area. Or am I simply the insomniac product of alarmist U.S. media?

As an American I admit that I am burdened with an E. coli information overload, but I am not sure if all this science-based survival information shields me from danger any more than the ignorance of it protects the unconcerned people around me.

Despite outstanding questions, I have survived five long years as fresh meat for the elements, the mosquitoes and the microbes, my endurance fueled by the desire to overcome local life’s obstacles, and falling short of that, being mired in the fatalism of the forest.

Every day I undergo a battery of wilderness precautions, slathering on repellents and sun-blocks, strapping on serious head- and footgear. Making sure I'm carrying enough water, towels, extra supplies, I scurry along suburban walls like a rodent, avoiding the midday heat and blistering rays. On trips abroad I trawl through adventure stores for the latest in jungle trekking equipment, floatable sunhats and collapsible canteens.

In this oldest rainforest in the world, untouched by the Ice Age, specialized jungle gear is not for sale since the natives don’t need it. But fragile foreigners like me do, just to survive the suburbs.

And, like most of the world’s vulnerable creatures eventually do, I’ve developed a prickly exoskeleton to shield my soft innards. I’ve earned my special place in the ecosystem, striking hard and fast at the first sign of trouble from landlords and airlines and resort-operators. I put my counter-attack in writing and raise the alarm, sending a copy to the paper of public grievance, The Malay Mail. Casting a spotlight stuns the predator and slows the plundering, but I have not found a way to completely stop the human depredation, nor accept it.

So while nature’s laws have gained my full respect, man-made cataclysms still have not.

Walking around the shops one sun-drenched noon I slipped into a typically uncovered monsoon drain, substandard concrete returning to its slippery component of sand under foot. Just another victim of the country’s noxious civil engineering, there was nothing to be done and no one to call, except perhaps a friend to drive me to the nearest medical klinik.

“Everyone falls in, don’t you worry,” the Dr. Azreena assured me as she cleaned my exotic-looking but painfully pedestrian gash. She's probably right since ungrated three- to ten-foot deep drains surround residential and business blocks like steep-sided concrete moats, separating people from everything they need to do.

As I rub on vitamin A oil to speed healing of the five inch wide rectangular wound, I fantasize about a conquering tribe that will cut the swath through this jungle that I will never be able to.

A tribe that survives and grows strong on folly like uncovered drains and plummeting elevators, improper food handling and toxic dumping: lawyers. Not like the Malaysian breeds, bogged down in insipid real estate rental agreements or stalking around British courtrooms in powdered wigs and black batrobes, but the hungry, late-night television-advertising ambulance-chasing strain from the U.S. Malaysia is a paradise of prime litigation just waiting for a new rule of law.

In the meantime, when my friends in the States -- who picture me a wild adventuress in a pith helmet regardless of what information to the contrary I reveal about my life -- notice the huge indented mark on my leg, I have the option of glamorizing its far-flung cause: it does look a lot like a shark bite.

In fact, I'm lucky to be alive.

+++ Variations of this appeared in The Expat magazine in Singapore, Men's Review magazine, and Agora web portal for international living and studying.