Winning the Wong

It’s been almost 10 years since I got an e-mail message that would change my writing life. I remember surfing away on my desktop Mac late at night in our apartment on Masikap Street when I noticed a message in my inbox from a vaguely familiar name — Val Striker, a lady in England whom I’d mailed off a packet to many months earlier and had practically forgotten about. Val worked for the University of East Anglia, and that packet was my application to the David T. K. Wong Fellowship, then a newly established prize of sorts that allowed a writer to spend nine months in the UK at the UEA campus in Norwich to write, or begin writing, a novel about Asia. The message was simple: I had won the fellowship, and would I please confirm my willingness to come over to the UK a few months hence.

I was, as the British would say, utterly gobsmacked. I’d won many prizes before, but this was something different, not just for the amount involved but also the fact that it was an international and a solitary distinction. I woke Beng up to share with her the good news. “We’re going to England,” I told Beng, who was too groggy to comprehend the gravity of what I’d said. I was, I think now, also too dizzy with delight to understand exactly what I’d taken on — a commitment to deliver on an idea for a novel that I’d scratched out over two pages and a 2,500-word excerpt.

As it happened, it took many more years for that novel to be finished and to see the light of publication, and those of you who’ve followed the story of Soledad’s Sister know that it remains, in a sense, a novel in progress, ever mutable in the new edition and translation that it’s going through.

But that year in Norwich proved a valuable time for rest and reflection — I’d published about eight books in as many years before coming over — and being in Norwich allowed us to go off on weekend sorties to London and across the Channel (which answers the question of where the money went, aside from rescuing and restoring my beloved Beetle back home from decrepitude into a car show-winning polish). That was, after all, the idea of the Wong Fellowship — to give harried writers a break, some time to rest and some time to write — before they returned to infernal reality.

Astonishingly (or perhaps not), four years later, another Filipino writer won the Wong fellowship. That was Lakambini “Bing” Sitoy, as fine a fictionist as they come. Bing went on to write a novel that was longlisted for this year’s Man Asian Literary Prize (whose results come out this Thursday in Hong Kong, with Pinoys Alfred Yuson and Miguel Syjuco still in the running).

Earlier this year, yet another Filipino writer made the Wong shortlist; this time I was on the final selection panel but I can’t divulge the name, as that shortlist isn’t officially released, but I can say that it was a young, Manila-based woman whose name I hadn’t come across before — someone thankfully from outside the usual circuit — whose prose was impeccable and sharp. Unfortunately, her entry came up against some very strong competition. The eventual winner, Vietnamese writer Nam Le, proposed a novel on the boat people — “History writ large,” I noted, “but with some very fine if gruesome strokes. The author clearly knows his subject, and his gifted prose is up to his ambition. We step into a very dark hold seething with unimaginable cruelty.”

I’m playing up the David T. K. Wong Fellowship because the deadline for the 2010 fellowship is coming up soon, on Jan. 31, 2009. In a 10th-anniversary reunion of former fellows in Norwich last June, I was reminded by the organizers that, strangely enough, the competition for what happens to be one of the world’s largest literary grants hasn’t attracted the droves of applications you’d expect it to get.

So we were asked to drum up some publicity and enthusiasm wherever we came from — and here I am telling you (you, the Filipino writer with that brilliant novel in mind — and, hopefully, the language to match) that with two Filipinos having gone ahead of you, the gates are wide open to a year in Norwich, in an apartment overlooking a “broad” or a small lake speckled with swans. (I have since observed that sylvan surroundings do not necessarily lead to easier novels; the beauty can overwhelm and lull you to a dream-filled sleep, and then you wake up to another dream.)

Let me quote from the fellowship flyer: “The David T. K. Wong Fellowship is a unique and generous annual award of £26,000 to enable a fiction writer who wants to write in English about the Far East to spend a year in the UK, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. The Fellowship is named for its sponsor Mr. David Wong, a retired Hong Kong businessman, who has also been a teacher, journalist and senior civil servant, and is a writer of short stories himself.”

The UEA, incidentally, is regarded as one of the UK’s most vibrant centers of creative writing, with such writers as Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury having served on its teaching staff, and producing such graduates as Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan. Former Wong fellows have also come from Hong Kong, Australia, Thailand, Singapore, Vietnam, and Malaysia. They don’t have to be Asian themselves, nor do they need to be published writers or academics. Everything comes down to the writing sample and to the proposed novel (they’ve since begun to accept proposals for story collections). Applications need to be snail-mailed, and there’s a form to complete and a fee of 10 pounds to be paid, so keep that in mind.

Please don’t write me to look over your proposals or for tips on how to succeed. The first and last tip I’ll give you is “Be resourceful.” For more information, write to davidtkwongfellowship@uea.ac.uk or look up http://www1.uea.ac.uk/cm/home/schools/hum/lit/awards/wong.

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This coming Saturday, on the 15th, I’ll be joining a group of people who share a professional and personal interest in American affairs to talk about all manner of things “Kano” — politics, culture, and business. That group is the American Studies Association of the Philippines, which is holding its annual conference and general assembly at the Philippine Social Science Center on Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City on the theme of “Converges and Diversities: Dimensions of American Studies.” Like all good conference themes, that means anything and everything, but I’m told that on the menu are discussions covering the US elections, call centers, the recruitment of nurses, and, of course, American culture.

Lined up for the morning session are Dr. Dean Kotlowsky on the US elections, Dr. Jaime Galvez Tan on the recruitment of Filipino nurses to the States, Mr. Rod Spires on American corporations in Asia, and Mr. Danilo Sebastian L. Reyes on the American business process outsourcing in the Philippines.

 The afternoon speakers include Dr. Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr. (who he?) on teaching American literature, Dr. Ma. Socorro Q. Perez on the association of Ilokano writers in Hawaii, and Dr. Ma. Rhodora G. Ancheta on American stand-up comedy.

For more information, contact Dough Ancheta at 0924-6104310 or Linda Bascara at 0915-9766707.

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