Q & A: Rena Pederson / The Burma Spring

The Burma Spring, by award-winning journalist and former US State Department speechwriter Rena Pederson, is a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi.  It offers a portrait of the woman herself, and also portraits of Burma, and of the Burmese people. (Burma was renamed Myanmar by the military government, but since this was not democratically elected, Western policy has often been to refer to the country as Burma. Rena adopts this policy too.)

Q & A with Cheryl Robson

Amongst many other achievements, writer, editor, arts entrepreneur, and charity activist Cheryl Robson founded Aurora Metro Books, which has offices in London, Sydney, and Singapore, where she is now based. Aurora Metro is strong in non-fiction titles relating to the arts, in biography, and in fiction for young adults.  It also has an exciting adult fiction list, including debut novels from many new voices; it is particularly keen to champion previously unpublished women writers. The company is committed to bringing non-English-language writers to an English readership in good, accessible translations. Authors from over 20 countries are represented in its lists, and many of its translated titles are available in English for the first time.

I asked Cheryl about her life and about Aurora Metro, and its big ambitions.

Lion City Lit: Q & A with R Ramachandran

Following on from the success of Singapore Writers Festival, we realised here at Asian Books Blog that we ought to give greater coverage to what's going on in our own backyard. The result is Lion City Lit, our new Singapore slot.  Here, Rosie Milne talks to R Ramachandran, executive director, National Book Development Council of Singapore.

Singapore aims to position itself as a centre for publishing of Asian content - it wants any writer with content relating to Asia to think of it as the place to publish. It helps that the country has four official languages: English; Chinese; Malay; Tamil. The vibrant local publishing scene is unusual in that it has houses specialising in each language. As part of its strategy to win pre-eminence in the region, the National Book Development Council makes a number of awards through the Singapore Literature Prize, which has categories in each language sector.  The 2014 awards were announced last week. I asked  Mr. Ramachandran about the tiny City-State’s big ambitions.

How does the Singapore Literature Prize contribute to raising Singapore's profile as a centre of publishing? 

Books can be eligible even if they are not published in Singapore, and the award system is geared to grow both to include books published throughout Asia, and also to include a larger number of categories and languages than at present.

Other than administering the Singapore Literature Prize, what else is the National Book Development Council doing to promote publishing in Singapore?

In order to serve as an effective centre of Asian content, we need to develop our translation resources so that Asian content in other languages can be translated into English and published in Singapore. Such translated works could be more easily marketed in the region and beyond than could books in Asian languages.  We are planning to set up a translation centre to facilitate translation of literary works into different languages.  We have also upgraded our established training body, the Academy of Literary Arts and Publishing, to develop the skills of those in the local publishing industry. 

Doesn’t the City-State’s small size and small books market limit its ambitions?

No. We publish for the world. For instance, each year we organise the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. This brings together content creators and producers, publishers, teachers, librarians and anyone interested in quality Asian content for children. The Festival carries the slogan: Asian Content for the World’s Children.  But it’s not just children’s publishing, we want all our local publishers to publish beyond the region to the world market, as do publishing houses in the US and the UK.

Have you learned from other small countries, which have had a big literary impact?  I'm thinking of Ireland.

We have not only studied Ireland, but also Israel and New Zealand, countries whose writers and creative people have made an impact on the rest of the world. The great advantage these countries have over us is a longer tradition of literature and a culture of publishing. Singapore is a migrant state, and a relatively new one, and even though our fathers and forefathers came from nations with rich cultural traditions – China, India, the Malay world - they migrated for materially better lives. Singapore’s early years were essentially spent on day-to-day matters and economic concerns were predominant. Since independence, after 50 years of post-colonial development, cultural interests have come to the fore. The growth of libraries, museums, art galleries, performing art centres, and a host of other services have emphasised the importance of the arts.

Okay, but are Singapore’s publishing ambitions driven by commerce, or culture?

Singapore has always been a commercial city and it will continue to be. But great commercial cities also emerge as centres of culture. Take London and New York in the present day, and Alexandria and Venice in earlier times. All are great examples of cities that are or were centres of the arts made possible by their commercial wealth. While commerce and banking are the foundations of wealth in Singapore, it has also realised the important part culture plays in people’s lives and is committed to nurture Singapore as a global city of the arts. The government has spent billions developing arts infrastructure, for example setting up the National Arts Council, the Media Development Authority, the School of the Arts, LaSalle College of the Arts, and the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, to train, nurture and support creative talent.

An international publishing industry needs an international rights marketplace. Are there any plans for Singapore to develop a books fair and rights market?  

Yes, the Singapore Book Publishers Association is planning to set up such a fair. The Book Council hopes to be involved in this effort. Meanwhile, the Book Council has developed a marketplace for children’s contents called Media Mart as part of the Asian Festival of Children’s Content. We want Media Mart to become known as the foremost regional rights fair for children’s content.

Q & A: Susan Barker / The Incarnations

Susan Barker’s newly-published novel The Incarnations is the book club pick for July – see the previous post for a plot summary.  Susan was born in the UK, to a Chinese-Malaysian mother and an English father.  As an adult, she moved to Beijing, where she spent several years researching ancient and modern China, before returning to the UK. She then moved back to China, to Shenzhen, and she currently lives in Beijing. Her earlier novels are Sayonara Bar, about a graduate student from England who takes a job at a hostess lounge in Osaka, and The Orientalist and the Ghost, which explores Malaysia’s 1950s Communist insurrection, and its continuing impact down to the 1990s.  All Susan’s novels are published by Doubleday. The Incarnations is available in hardback, priced in local currencies.

Here Susan answers some questions I put to her by e-mail.

What drove your return to China, after you moved back to the UK?  Why are you currently based in Beijing?

I moved to Shenzhen in June 2012, to stay with my boyfriend who was working for the Chinese tech company Huawei. We lived in the industrial suburbs in the north, where Foxconn and Huawei are. I lived in Shenzhen for about 20 months. My boyfriend quit Huawei this past March, and we moved to Beijing. Shenzhen was really interesting. It is a city of migrants, everyone comes from another province, so I met people from all over China.   

While you were working on The Incarnations did you ever feel that writing in English distanced you from your characters and subject matter?  If so, how and why?

I’ve been studying Mandarin since mid-2007 when I first moved to Beijing, but am far from fluent. I don’t feel writing the novel in English distanced me from my characters or subject matter though. Language is a medium of expression, and that which is expressed, i.e. the characters’ thoughts, emotions and behaviour, does not vary much with the language that is used. There are surface cultural and sociological differences between China and the UK that I took into account when writing my characters, but I don’t see these differences as being predicated upon language. Linguistically, my characterisation and dialogue is not very different from many Chinese novels that have been translated into English. Of course, I avoided using overly Western slang and colloquialisms.

Is a Chinese translation likely? If so, would you want any input into the translation? 

I would love for The Incarnations to be translated into Chinese. In the past when my novels have been translated into another language I had minimal or no involvement. I think it is best to let the translator have free reign.  

What drew you to write about reincarnation?

When I started researching and writing The Incarnations in 2007, I knew I wanted to write a novel set in contemporary Beijing, as I was interested in urban China and the speed of development and social change. I was also fascinated by Chinese history, which is rich with narratives of revolution and war and the rise and fall of emperors, and I knew I wanted to write stories from different historical eras and weave them into the modern-day narrative.

At the risk of demystifying the novel and writing process, the idea of reincarnation in the novel was initially a narrative device; a way of structuring the novel and bringing together all of my separate research interests in China past and present. But over the years, as I wrote draft after draft of the novel, the reincarnation aspect gained substance and became the essence of the book.

The idea of reincarnation and recurring souls also links to one of the major themes of the novel, which is the cyclical nature of history. The taxi driver Wang Jun keeps repeating the same destructive mistakes in each of his past lives, due to innate flaws in his nature (wrath, self-interest, possessiveness, jealousy) that recur life after life. History is repetitious too, with the same large-scale destructive power struggles playing out generation after generation, arising from the same innate human flaws.  

Do you believe in reincarnation? Do you believe you have had earlier incarnations?  If so would you be willing to give details? … Or do you think asking you about your own beliefs about reincarnation is like asking a crime novelist if they’d ever commit murder?

I am not sure whether or not I believe in reincarnation. Perhaps I do in my more irrational moments, but it’s a vast leap of faith to believe you’ve had past lives. My sister once met a medium when we were teenagers, who said that she (my sister) and I have been linked together for several past lives, but obviously I am sceptical.  

Was it daunting writing about 1000 years of Chinese history? Did you ever feel overwhelmed by history?

The Incarnations has five historical stories (ostensibly the five past incarnations of the main character, the taxi driver Wang Jun). The first story is set during the Tang Dynasty, the second story is set during the invasion of Genghis Khan, the third is about imperial concubines during the Ming dynasty, the fourth is set during the Opium War, and the last story is about Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.

When I started writing the novel in 2007, I knew I wanted to include historical stories, but I wasn’t sure which eras I would write about. So I read books that gave a broad overview of Chinese history from the Qin dynasty to Chairman Mao, and when I came across a historical period or figure who was especially interesting to me, I would deepen my research in that area (i.e., find every book I could on the subject). As I read and made notes, ideas for plot and characters would surface from my research, and I would proceed from there.

I was slightly daunted by the amount of research I had to do for each historical story, but at the same time, I like being challenged and immersed in a long project. I had no idea that The Incarnations would take six years to write though – I thought it would be three years at the most. I definitely would’ve been overwhelmed if had I known back in 2007 how long it would take to write this book.  

Were you worried about the historical accuracy of your novel, or not?

As well as Chinese history the stories are influenced by Chinese folklore and superstitions, and as a result are quite surreal and fantastical in places. As a fiction writer I don’t feel constrained by historical fact in the same way a historian would be. I was able to take inspiration from historical incidents like the Mongol invasions or the Opium War and build on them creatively. The stories do deviate from historical fact, but this did not concern me.

Why should readers read The Incarnations?

I hope that the sections in contemporary Beijing offer a snapshot of urban China, and that the historical sections offer a glimpse of each era (though, as stated above, The Incarnations is nothing like a history book). I really believe that the reader should be entertained, and wrote the plot(s) with that in mind, and was inventive with my use of language. Characterisation is really important to me too, and I worked hard to make sure my characters are multi-faceted, and psychologically and morally complex.

More Information

www.susanbarker.co.uk

@SusanKBarker

Q & A: Wendy Wong on eBooks In Asia

Tusitala's logo is a kitsune, a fox with 9 tails,
which features in Japanese, Korean and
Chinese folklore

Wendy Wong is Studio Manager / Creative Director of Tusitala.  The name is Samoan for storyteller, or a teller of tales – fitting, since Tusitala is a digital publisher of indie authors. The company is based in Singapore, and is a huge fan of Asian content and Asian writers.  

I spoke to Wendy about eBooks in Asia generally.

Are eBooks as popular in Asia as in the west?

Not yet, since there are issues around availability and accessibility.

Can you expand on that?

One of the biggest barriers to eReading in Singapore and in Asia generally is that the larger providers of eBooks – Amazon and Apple iBooks – don’t allow for potential readers in Asia to buy eBooks directly. To make an eBook purchase on your Kindle, for example, you’d need an American address and credit card. If you’re especially dedicated, you’d find a backdoor entry, and the locally available service Kindle Concierge can purchase eBooks on your behalf, so you can bypass all the off-putting red tape, but most local eBook enthusiasts end up with libraries of pirated eBooks.

Google Play Books has recently entered Asia, and at Tusitala we hope that Amazon and Apple will follow Google’s example by expanding into the largely untapped Asian market, thus making eReading more commonplace.

Aren’t there any local eBook retailers?

In Singapore, local eBook stores come and go. Amongst those that survived are Booktique and M1 Learning Center, yet little is done to publicize their services to the general public. (Note, in Hong Kong, eBooks are readily available through Paddyfield.)

Given the problems of availability, how aware of eBooks are readers in Asia?

I think readers may be aware of eBooks, but local authors are often unaware of how easy it is to publish digitally and to access worldwide markets. At Tusitala, as digital publishers, we do our part to celebrate Asian content and to get Asian authors to try ePublishing. It isn’t always easy, but we believe that it is a necessary process that will end with a more vibrant and locally relevant eBooks scene, certainly in Singapore, and then more generally in the rest of Asia.

Do you think libraries have a role in helping raise awareness of eBooks?

Yes. In Singapore, National Arts Council data shows that eRetrievals at libraries across the island have recently seen a spike; in response the National Library has expanded and diversified its collection of eBooks to include more languages and titles. The National Library Board has also been quite vocal lately about their eBook borrowing campaign, and we hope that this encourages people to consider eReading as the convenient and hassle-free experience that it is.

What about the language issue?  Are eBooks available in languages other than in English?

Sure. In Singapore, local content in Chinese, Malay and Tamil is abundant. But while there is no dearth of quality Asian-language content, people here primarily read in English. I expect this aspect of eBook publishing in Asia varies market by market.

I see the main advantage of eBooks as giving me access to content that wouldn’t otherwise be available to me in Asia.  What do you see as the advantages?

Reading habits have adapted to the fast-paced lifestyles of developed Asia – increasingly, people consume news or articles on their phones. By comparison, reading books seems to be a choice that needs to be made (do I lug a novel through my commute?), not an option that is readily available on readers’ gadgets (let me scroll to my e-reader app), and eBooks can help level the field between surfing for information, and reading for pleasure. 

I sometimes find eBooks frustrating, for example, in non-fiction titles, flipping to illustrations, or trying to follow footnotes.  Do you think the format has any disadvantages?

This is not a disadvantage of eBooks per se, but in Asia I think the ecology of reading is such that academic reading is encouraged in young people, rendering reading a habit that doesn’t generally integrate with everyday life - there is a tendency to associate reading with passing exams, rather than reading for pleasure. 

What are your thoughts on the future of eBooks in Asia?

The eBook scene has potential for huge growth, and eBooks are surely set to become more popular, but, as I mentioned already, it’s a matter of availability.  At Tusitala we hope Google Play Books’ entry into Asia marks the beginning of burgeoning accessibility to eBooks in the region. We hope this encourages local writers in Asia to start telling their stories to an ever-expanding audience.

All in all, we are optimistic about the future of eBooks in Asia. When accessibility and awareness align, we hope that eBooks can change the perceptions towards reading for pleasure, and thus foster a more inclusive and pervasive reading culture that everyone can be a part of.

Do you have a message for potential authors?

If you are an author of a book with Asian content and you are looking for a digital publisher to get your existing printed edition made available as an eBook, or to publish a new title, we would be very glad to connect with you!