The world in Norwich

Nine years ago — with Beng and then later our daughter Demi in tow—I took up residence at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, on a fellowship to begin what would become the novel Soledad’s Sister. We got there thanks to the visionary generosity of David T. K. Wong, a retired Hong Kong civil servant who moved to England after the handover, did well, and endowed UEA with an annual fellowship in his name, for the production of new fiction about Asia. I was the second such Wong fellow.

Last week, thanks again to Mr. Wong, a gathering of Wong fellows took place in Norwich, in celebration of the fellowship’s 10th year and in conjunction with a larger conference devoted to the literary nexus between people and nature (formally, the conference was titled “New Writing Worlds 2008—Human : Nature”). I’ll try to report at greater length about the conference and its proceedings another time; suffice it to say for now that perhaps only English academia can discuss beech trees, rooks, and trout fishing in the same breath as “theology” and “moral paranoia.” Not only the English were represented at the conference, which sought to look beyond the surface assumptions and platitudes of environmentalism and climate change; the Nobel and Booker prizewinning South African novelist J. M. Coetzee and the American Pulitzer prizewinning poet C. K. Williams were among the conference attendees.

Our sub-group of Wong fellows represented a broad range of writing origins and sensibilities. The very first fellow, Po Wah Lam from Hong Kong and the UK, was unable to attend, as was the 2004 fellow, Rattawut Lapcharoensap, from Thailand and the US—but as their binational addresses show, many writers these days are culturally and personally situated in more than one place.

The fellow who followed me, Simone Lazaroo (2000), lives and teaches in Australia but also has roots in Singapore. After graduating from Curtin University in 1983, she took a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Western Australia, and teaches Creative Writing at Murdoch University.

Liisa Laing (2001) is a Canadian with an Estonian mother and has lived for many years now in Thailand, where she works as a freelance writer and editor as well as her Wong project, a novel on the Thai sex industry. Liisa studied in Manila for two years in the 1970s when her father, a journalist, worked for DepthNews and the Press Foundation of Asia.

Wendy Law Yone (2002) was born and raised in Rangoon; her father—an editor and publisher of a liberal English-language daily—won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1959 for his work. Wendy studied German and modern languages in Rangoon and the US, and now lives in the UK, where she is working on her third novel. She was once married to the author Sterling Seagrave, who wrote a book on Ferdinand Marcos.

Lakambini “Bing” Sitoy (2003) is the other Filipino to have received the Wong fellowship. One of our finest fictionists and the author of two collections of short stories, Bing spent a year at Roskilde University in Copenhagen after her Wong fellowship, and maintains strong personal and professional connections with Europe—still a new frontier for Filipino fiction, despite the great numbers of Filipinos now inhabiting that vast and varied continent.

Linh Dinh (2005) left Vietnam for the US as a refugee at age 11. He studied painting in Philadelphia, then published several collections of his fiction and poetry, both in English and Vietnamese. He returned to Saigon in 1999 but eventually re-embarked for the US after, he says, one too many encounters with the Vietnamese police, thanks to his translation of dissident Vietnamese poets.

Mulaika Hijjas (2006), of Malaysian and Australian parentage, studied literature at Harvard and Radcliffe, then took up Classical and Medieval Islamic History at Oxford, followed by a PhD in traditional Malay literature at the University of London. She is working on a novel set in contemporary Jakarta.

Balli Jaswal (2007), the newest and youngest Wong fellow, was born in Singapore and grew up in Japan, Russia, and the Philippines (where, like Liisa, she went to the International School).  After college in the US, she taught in Singapore, the setting of the novel she is completing.

The world, indeed, came to Norwich last week, and I was glad to be there, lending—with Bing—a Filipino voice to dialogues about writing that were even more interesting off the conference floor.

For more information about the David T. K. Wong fellowship, check out http://www1.uea.ac.uk/cm/home/schools/hum/lit/awards/wong.

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I was in Norwich when I received an e-mail sharing the happy news that two lifelong friends—stalwarts both of the Saturday Group of Artists—are putting up a two-woman show of their newest paintings, aptly titled “Duetto,” opening this Friday and on view till July 19 at Galerie Stephanie on E. Rodriguez in Libis, Quezon City. Migs Villanueva and Anna de Leon Marcelo were classmates since grade school, and being creatively inclined, both gravitated to painting, although from different backgrounds—Anna is a sought-after interior designer, Migs is a prizewinning fictionist. “Duetto” is their first show together, and it displays their convergences and divergences as artists.

As the Saturday Group anniversary book puts it, “Migs believes—and trusts—that art is a projection of the self. Therefore in painting as in writing, Migs gives way to unplanned impulses where thoughts and feelings she might not even be aware of have a way of becoming form. She aims not so much for beauty or polish in her art as for a rugged, expressive mess of a sort—like her characters are in her stories. While she goes for a very illustrative effect when writing stories, in her visual art, she takes on a reductive sensibility that reduces all illustration into distilled essence.”

On the other hand, Anna—the SAG’s new president—is fascinated by “Fusing odd but familiar pieces together... Rendering it in drab colors but giving it touches of bright hues over it gives it its twist.” She formally launched her painting career with a one-woman show called “Fragments” at the Crucible Gallery in 2006. “Fragments” was a collection of nude paintings patched with strips of veneer. The adding-on of raw wood is a major element in de Leon’s art, perhaps a take-off from her many years in design. 

It’ll be interesting to see how two different sensibilities and talents come across on canvas—one of them is exuberantly gregarious, the other pensively reserved, but you’ll have to check out “Duetto” to find out who.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.