Talking About Cultural Stereotypes On National TV & Radio

On Turkey's national TV and radio channel TRT2 News with Isil Okan talking about how cultural stereotypes are a two-way street.

Going On Record As A Travel Writer With Rolf Potts' Interview Series

Excerpt from a travel writers interview by Rolf Potts at his Vagabonding site, 2006. View the full interview here. How did you get started traveling?

My fascination with a wider world cropped up early.

As a toddler in countercultural Berkeley, CA my favorite pastime was "French Lady", a tea party with Continental accents.

I began traveling even further when I learned to read -- comic books.

Instead of poring over Archie & Veronica, perky storylines that revolved around characters who never graduated from high school nor breached the border of their staid hometown, I was entranced by the global expanse of history and people and culture revealed in the Belgian-made graphic adventures of Tintin.

Tracking a drug-smuggling ring in Egypt, discovering a meteorite with a Polar research vessel, surviving a plane wreck on an Indonesian island -- this was life!

Tintin's travel tales, and many others after them, remain reference points. Last fall at a museum in Nazca, Peru one long-haired, head-banded Incan mummy stirred a pleasant flashback to "The Seven Crystal Balls", as well as the awe of my twelve-year old self. It's no wonder I pursued a degree in archaeology.

How did you get started writing? AA: In the early  '70s I kept a journal on childhood road trips where I recorded preferences for the wildness of Baja's bumpy sand roads and discovering the mother-lode of sand-dollar graveyards in San Felipe to a sedate spin around British Columbia's Lake Victoria and a fur-seal keychain from the gift shop.

Later I was a correspondent, trying to explain my own culture to teen pen pals in Wales, Northern Ireland, and Malaysia, while I searched for clues about theirs hidden in precise penmanship, tarty vocabulary, and postage stamps with monarchs -- some butterflies, some queens.

During a slew of 20-something media and entertainment jobs I wrote and edited for years, whenever the opportunity presented itself, for a book packager and literary agency in New York, and for television, theatre and film producers in Los Angeles.

What do you consider your first "break" as a writer?

AA: Reviewing Pico Iyer's essay collection Tropical Classical: Essays from Several Directions for the Far Eastern Economic Review in 1997. The newsweekly magazine based in Hong Kong was equivalent to TIME in Asia. I was living in Malaysia and devoting more attention to my writing career, so it was a breakthrough to write for a major publication and huge audience about subjects which mesmerized me.

What is your biggest challenge in the research and writing process?

AA: Calling up facts. Seeing the larger story. Sitting down and doing the writing!

What is your biggest challenge from a business standpoint? Editors? Finances? Promotion?

AA: Publishers and acquisition editors and publicists seem to have narrow expectations for travel literature so for my next book I plan to devote a lot of energy to a detailed marketing plan which will accompany the manuscript in its rounds to publishers. Jennifer and I learned quite a bit about marketing to publishers with Tales from the Expat Harem, which was initially turned down by 10 New York houses who liked it but couldn't fathom its market (Turkey's too limited a subject, they said).

We've since determined that it addresses a multitude of distinct groups beyond the basic cells of travelers, expatriates, women writers and travel writers. In fact, we found enough specific target markets we were able to fill a hundred pages of our marketing plan with actual contacts of potentially interested people and organizations, like Turkish American associations, 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.

And the beauty of a marketing plan which breaks down readerships is that a writer (or if you're lucky, a publisher) can contact all of these people.

Jennifer and I also compiled more practical subsidiary audiences for the anthology, like multinational corporations with operations in Turkey, and embassies and tourism organizations which might use the book as a cross-cultural training tool or a promotional vehicle. We were successful enough in our initial efforts in academic marketing that the book is currently used in at least three university courses and is stocked by more than 100 academic and public libraries worldwide.

Have you ever done other work to make ends meet?

AA: Always. Often my most satisfying work has been poorly compensated. I do believe that will change, eventually! Until then I continue to be a proponent of pursuing the work you love rather than the work which pays best.

An essay about a transformational subway ride which I wrote for an obscure website in 2002 not only led me to be quoted in the New York Times and brought me my literary agent, but it also now appears in The Subway Chronicles book published by the site's creator, alongside venerated New York writers like Calvin Trillin, Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Lethem.

What travel authors or books might you recommend and/or have influenced you?

AA: Recently I enjoyed Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before by Tony Horwitz for its mix of historical research, personal experience, and contemporary journalism.

Historical travel writing also connects me to the lands I find myself in, and points to the parallels which still exist.

My steamy days in Kuala Lumpur were enriched by reading Somerset Maugham, whose Malayan fiction was entirely believable. A series of historical Asian travelogues and contemporary scholarship released by Oxford-in-Asia jogged my imagination and similarly, now that I am based in Turkey, I'll be turning to the Cultures in Dialogue series at Gorgias Press, which resurrects antique writings about Turkish life by British and American women travelers and refreshes them with contemporary academic analysis.

What advice and/or warnings would you give to someone who is considering going into travel writing?

AA: Advice: Read the bulletin boards at Travelwriters.com. A lot of very fundamental wisdom there about the life and business of travel writing. Warning: Don't post a word at Travelwriters until you've read the boards for a week or two and have a good understanding of what topics have already been covered, and how best to introduce yours.

What is the biggest reward of life as a travel writer?

AA: Sharing my view of the world with others. Adding to the conversation. Having every excuse to adventure.

Heartbroken (or Hot-and-Bothered) Globetrotters

My review of Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men by Jeannette Belliveau Jeannette Belliveau was a "sex pilgrim" for 12 years and now the 51 year old former erotic adventuress reveals all in this dense volume of travel sex history and how-to cum memoir.

The author got her groove back after a divorce by sleeping with men in Greece, the Virgin Islands, the Bahamas and Brazil. Of French Canadian descent, she is currently married to a younger man of color she fantasizes looks like a 'pharaoh'. In ROMANCE ON THE ROAD she attempts to place her actions into wider context. As an American expatriate living in Turkey, this reviewer senses a motive of authorial self-preservation: to normalize controversial sexual behavior which not only falls outside the bounds of her own culture but severely strains mores at international destinations.

Creating what she calls a geography of sex and love, the newspaperwoman from blue-collar Maryland examines a social phenomenon that may have involved more than 600,000 Western women in the past 25 years: travelers who engage in flings or long term affairs with foreign men, vaulting over cultural boundaries. While intercultural love and marriages are a subtheme, the book's focus is hedonistic sex with virile strangers.

"Travel sex by women is revolutionary," Belliveau declares, a rebellion barred from polite conversation and insufficiently chronicled by social scientists even if its roots are deep in Victorian travel. The Western world might not deem it noteworthy but the buzz is growing in remote Central American fishing villages, sandy strips of West Africa, and the tiniest towns in the Himalayas. The author suggests that today's feminine voyagers are "stumbling into a major life experience without a map."

Does Romance on the Road provide a compass for the heartbroken (or hot-and-bothered) globetrotter looking for a distant cure? It can get a gal started. Prurient interest will be dampened however by the charts, graphs, survey results, and Modern Language Association-style citations of more than 800 bibliographic sources from Henry James' Daisy Miller to a British newspaper feature entitled "My Toyboy Tours". There's a global chronology of the trend, a summary of related books and movies, and basic ethics and etiquette ("remember the man is real, not an actor in your fantasy"; and "do not use him as a sperm donor").

She has done an admirable job of combining veteran intelligence on each locality with a profile of an adventurous Western woman and a timeline of foreign female exploits in the region. Much like the book itself, these geographic chapters are not all fun and games. In Latin America, "sex is a parallel universe of magic" yet gigolos may sport "a breezy attitude toward the truth". A sex pilgrim profiled has a bleak history, found murdered on the side of a Mexican road, "presumably left by a cruel pickup". Clearly an optimist, Belliveau argues that despite obvious risks the lustful practice can be psychologically healing, fulfill a woman's urge for sexual connoisseurship, or address situations like involuntary celibacy.

It can also be a road to discovery. Erotic adventure may not be on the agenda but can be inspired by the act of travel itself. Wandering women have the opportunity to "reclaim pagan freedoms lost since the advent of civilization" Belliveau waxes, since they exist in a liminal zone, a reality unconnected to their usual existence. A traveler may view the people around her as social equals, think of herself as anonymous, feel unburdened by expectations of social propriety, be more playful and suggestive. Novelist Rebecca Brown is quoted discovering her sexuality on a trip abroad: "Like Stein, Toklas, and other women who have traveled away from home, it took leaving my native land to realize I was a lesbian."

Even so, it is difficult to approach Romance on the Road, or know who would, besides social scientists who might wallow in its surfeit of statistics or old hands who will identify with the insider dope, and buoyant we-can-all-get-it-on (and perhaps heal the world by having international children) conclusions. It's hardly pleasure reading nor something to openly peruse on a crowded subway. Some may not want to get caught reading it at all. This reviewer's Turkish husband handed it over saying "You got a trashy book in the mail."

It's unfortunate that Belliveau's concentration on ecstasy abroad overwhelms her scholarship on ethical and economic questions as well as cultural and social ramifications in sex-host cultures. The few harmful consequences she includes are female tourists being perceived as "man-stealers" by native women in the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and Africa; the new role of hustler that thousands of foreign men have adopted; and a rise in STDs and incidents of harassment and assault. Soon enough she is making the case for positives like liberated Scandinavian women spurring sexual revolutions for their sisters in Spain, Greece and Mexico.

Belliveau doesn't seem concerned with the cultural factor freespirited sensualists export. Writing from the sex-toured Near East, this reviewer suggests the damaging potential of each disposable liaison is empirical evidence that Western culture is morally corrupt. One forgettable fling has the power to affect systems far larger than the person, family, village or region which witnessed and absorbed the behavior.

The environment of sexual predation many Western women face overseas is also bound to be heightened by the wanton and culturally inappropriate choices of sex pilgrims. Travelers and expatriates striving to modulate their behavior to find social acceptance with native friends, families and colleagues must struggle to differentiate themselves from sexual opportunists who don't have to lie in the messy bed they've made.

Without apology Belliveau admits this detrimental byproduct of her Shirley Valentine amusement (or was it healing?): "At first I was appalled at the smothering level of harassment I encountered in Athens. Then I succumbed to these temptations, with the likelihood that my sex partners became further convinced about the ease of seducing any lone Western female tourists to later cross their paths."

On behalf of thousands of traveling women hoping to explore the world unmolested -- thanks for nothing.

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This appeared in Perceptive Travel, July/August 2006

Expat Harem Event At Turkish House, Dupont Circle, Washington D.C.

Özge Ovun and Yalcin Sert from Voice of America News filmed the event to air on Turkey’s national TGRT TV and Erju Ackman and his partner Goksin Carey filmed a segment to air on Virginia’s Channel 10 (WSLS NBC). Organized by the ever-supportive Didem Muslu of the American-Turkish Association of DC, the event was held at the homebase of the Assembly of Turkish American Associations — the Türkevi (Turkish House), and was attended by ATA-DC president, Pelin Aylangan (who is currently penning a Turkish culinary history and memoir) and secretary, Patsy Jones (whose Fenerbahçe-loving Turkish inlaws are scandalized by her love of the rival football team Beşiktaş!).

Audience members included: Yalçın Sert, director of student portals at the University of Maryland and owner of various forums and web portals; Ralph and Linda, who are currently enrolled in US State Department Turkish language courses for Ralph’s impending posting to the US Embassy in Ankara as an FDA specialist (both Ralph and Linda told us they wished their entire Turkish class would have attended our event); Turks like Ayşe, a Crimean Turk, and Özge’s parents visiting from İzmit; and other daring American gelins, like Jetta Karabulut who has road trip adventures of her own to tell, like a trip from Istanbul to Mersin in 1968 with her two year old in tow!

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.  

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.

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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?

Radical About Face: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the General

I want to see a general in the White House. For a woman born and bred in Berkeley, a leading community in any anti-war movement, this urge should generate an identity crisis. But it doesn’t. That disorientation has already occurred. In seeking the presidency, former Supreme Allied Commander Wesley K. Clark fused my conflicted self and brought me back to Democratic ground.

The general and I have a lot in common. Now living in Istanbul, the Turkish site of four recent terrorist bombings, and a former ground zero resident with a view of New York’s smoking pile, my world is a war zone. Instead of activist or escapist pursuits, I choose geopolitical chess.

After September 11 I worried I was turning into a Republican, practically an out-of-body experience. Longtime leftist friends marched in the streets while I was glued to the couch, waiting for the latest Osama tape on Fox.

I was already apolitical, having come unmoored from the leftwing in my twenties, when superficies concerned me most. Ineffectual packaging and delivery of a message, a typical province of radicals, seemed the ultimate self-indulgence and more about making statements than differences.

But then I saw myself acting like someone else. I was displaying the flag in my New York apartment window, on my lapel, and in the car, without a hint of irony and much emotion. Brandishing the flag was a homecoming after a lifetime of being an outsider. There was a time when I felt I couldn’t even buy one.

At a 1975 church rummage sale, my sister and I coveted a star-spangled banner as a bedspread, but the elderly seller chastised our disrespect. I was better educated about icons of Communist China than emblems of the nation, my progressive school abandoning the pledge of allegiance that year for an alternative morning ritual: calisthenics to a scratchy Chairman Mao record.

Most people can’t go home again, but I can’t even visit. My bohemian parents no longer recognize my political identity as an offshoot of their own. One Berkeley notion I’ve sloughed, illustrated by NATO generals at my wedding (groom’s side) is that the military is solely negative.

My Northern Californian childhood was steeped in a fundamental enmity for the armed forces, sinister wing of an objectionable government. Instead of tying yellow ribbons around gnarled oaks, neighbors papered telephone poles to get the U.S. out of Latin America. When my rebellious younger sister requested an Air Force brochure, the corruptive material was confiscated directly from the postman.

However alien in our mailbox and out on the scruffy streets, the service was familiar to me. Counter to Berkeley counterculture, and owing to my father’s drafted acquaintance with Army discipline, I was raised in a spit and shine household. Excellence was the only option, elbow grease the lone method, hierarchy unimpeachable, and punishment swift. Ever grunts, my sisters and I scrubbed bathroom grout with toothbrushes and grew steely with push-ups when afoul of regulations, while good report cards and judo promotions netted weekend passes for R’n’R sleepovers at friends’ houses. I trained seventeen years in boot camp, I discovered in college.  A first year West Point cadet described the climate he was expected to endure at the elite academy. “They take away basic rights and give them back as privileges,” he whined, trying to impress me.

That particular West Pointer failed to stir me, but crisp four star General Clark has. On television after 9/11, Clark anchored my attention with his magnetic and commanding presence, and drew me to his reasoned and reasonable commentary about Iraq, the war on terror, and the importance of the U.N. and NATO.  Later, the grassroots draft of the worldly and diplomatic warrior stoked hopes for a better world.  Eighty year old Midwestern veterans called the general back to duty, West Coast thirtysomethings pledged unemployment checks, and Europeans ineligible to vote declared “the world needs you”.  In announcing his Democratic candidacy, the brilliant strategist and Rhodes Scholar restored my place in that party. I recognize my complicated self in the Democrat he defines, a patriot forged from diverse life experiences and high-stakes demands of our time. Clark’s erudite defense of our Constitution reverberates in my idealistic Berkeley heart.

With the general in the White House, America is my home.

In a brainy, principled, comprehensive Clark world I’m not a traitor because I performed calisthenics to Chairman Mao, and intense athletic and academic achievements made me the stalwart character I am today. Clark’s well-delivered presentation of important issues is standard.

A liberal in conservative uniform, a peace-lover who knows how and when to prosecute a successful war, a thinking man of action whose own self-respect is a pleasure to esteem, Clark is where I’ve been headed my whole life.

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.

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.

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.