Elsewhere in Asia

Hello Garunya.

Living down hill from a Chinese restaurant here in Maryland (USA) is as close as I have been to Asia in nearly twenty years. The last time I was in your part of the world was in Korea during my tour of duty with the US Army. Although I am older than most of the soldiers who served in Viet Nam, I was not in the army until mid-1973.

Rather, prior to my marriage in 1967, I served as a United States Peace Corps teacher at Holy Cross Mission in Bolahun, Liberia (West Africa). It was like the first time falling in love. I measure everything else in my life against that experience. I got myself out of Africa but did not get all of Africa out of myself.

I have always enjoyed associations with others living elsewhere. That's why I studied Esperanto and spoke it with others living in Asia and in Europe years ago. Among my books in Esperanto is one containing stories from Viet Nam.

Now I am half a world away, and after November will be checking around the world to see what other participants wrote about.

My tentative title for NaNoWriMo this year will be Where the Devil Celebrates Christmas. Its setting will be in the very village where I lived in Africa but will not merely be a rehash of my life there disguised as fiction.

If you ever decide to use your own country of Viet Nam as a setting, you may well find an audience here in the Western Hemisphere. Vivid visions of war's turmoil there forty years ago and its human carnage are held by less than half our population. It will have soon given way to an older notion of Asia that began during the Western Renaissance with Marco Polo.

That is the mystery associated with that part of Asia. For years writers enamored readers with exotic stories from the East. You are well positioned to capitalize on it again.

Nevertheless, enjoy your writing. Remember, even if you never see another NaNo participant, we're with you in spirit , even thousands of miles away.

With warm regards,

NaNoPerk

Hi. Another RPCV here. I lived in Central Asia for about eight years and it makes up a big part of my novel. Also in Eastern Europe- a lot of ex-U.S.S.R. countries as well as Afghanistan. Soooo... just wanted to drop in and show my face, even if I'm not in Asia now. I probably won't be there in November, though I may go back this year. Not Afghanistan. I mean Asia.

Just a word also with the other RPCV who dropped in here as I did.

Eight years in central Asia is enough to have given you fits when getting used to the states again.

Three girls gave me the brush off my first six weeks back. I tried to shake hands African style the first time back in the states. I carried an internal parasite for the next two years.

A lot of us RPCV's got drafted while others tried to stay overseas in some kind of service capacity. Some months after we were out of Viet Nam, I joined the army. Kids in Germany used to give soldiers the Peace sign. I suspect a lot of draftees from college, serving there in the army instead of burning their draft cards and fleeing to Canada, taught it to them.

If you are going back to Asia, you may very well be one of those expatriates who fall in love with the local scene. If not, I am sure you no longer look at things at home in quite the same way you did before overseas service.

I have traded emails with a man who was in Liberia several times since as far back as 1958 and went back in 2005 to help restore a hospital there. Talk about determination.

Good writing to you.

Actually, I think that in the 90s and naughties it's a lot easier to move locales. They have the Internet, they have hot-dog stands (halal, of course), and, well, although Afghanistan has slid down into the dark ages, we did get R&R in Dubai. Talk about surreal.

I do love Central Asia, and I married a man from there, but we're both here now. We need the money. This is pretty much what my novel is going to be about though so I better stop.

I still have my parasite! I have dormant giardia. Being pregnant or nursing for four years straight since returning from Asia means I've never had time to get it treated. Ooooops. I just have to stay healthy enough for it not to come up.

If I may, I'd like to drop by this site (If my senior citizen mind will allow me to remember) to check out your detailed plot synopsis after November.

One major way the similar paths in our lives is different. I didn't fall in love in Africa. My wife of forty-two years is the fourth girl I dated after returning from Africa.

The love story in my novel will not reflect my own experience. My buddy Mike, who flew into Bolahun's aristrip with me there, did meet a German missionary from the coast, and they tied the knot, later living in Bolahun. They had one child there and adopted an African boy, whose mother in a nearby villlage died in childbirth. By the time my family visited their Stuttgardt address ten years later, they were divorced. He's lived in Germany since 1969.

As I have reflected on my female characters, I find they are all strong willed. Peace Corps women facing the same day-to-day challenges as us guys contributed to this.

There is one thing I still got from Africa. Every chest xray shows an encrustation. I went TB positive between February and July of 1965.

As for raising children, I did everything a mother does but nurse them. That didn't work to my advantage. My wife dried up in six weeks and never heard them crying out of hunger at night. So I got to warm formula at 2 am.

I wish you the best. Marrying an American meant that your husband had to get used to some things.

Until after November if you'll be so good as to post your synopsis.

NaNoPerk

Hi everyone. I'm in Vietnam, or at least I will be for the bulk of November. Currently in the Philippines doing a little sightseeing and some diving. This is the first time I've done anything like this. I started my first novel at the beginning of this year then lost the lot when my laptop died on me. Unfortunately, the external hard-drive I backed everything up to was attached to the laptop at the time and was completely wiped too. Valuable lesson learned! Now I back up my back ups!

Anyway, after that I lost heart a bit, and focus too, so I signed up for NaNo to get back into it. So there you go, here's to a full on November!

Hi, Kitty,

I got kind of wordy in my posts on this site. You'll thank me for being laconic here.

You picked an exotic part of the world to work through a mid-life crisis. I'm into senior survival now.

I have one suggestion that can assure you that your work in November will survive everything short of a fire.

If you risk occasional power outages, use a manual typewriter. Keep a running total on each page. Paste a scrambled doument of the same length on your NaNo site for word credit.

The advantage off sets manual counting in that it discourages time wasted wandering into email, the net, and editing as you write. Let the words flow. You can do it.

This worked for me last year. Like me, you'll have a mix of brilliance and mush. Few of us are a Mozart with a typewriter. You have the following months to revise on a computer.

Enjoy your writing experience. I'd like to see your synopsis after November.

"As for raising children, I did everything a mother does but nurse them. That didn't work to my advantage. My wife dried up in six weeks and never heard them crying out of hunger at night."

Or so she would have you believe, right? If we had done formula you can bet my husband would be waking up to make it.

My baby is right at that wonderful baby age, all cuddly and round and hungry.

"I wish you the best. Marrying an American meant that your husband had to get used to some things."

LOL!

Along with your husband, enjoy being heroes at that time in your child's life when you can't do anything wrong. Our granddaughter Felicia is in high school, an age in which our daughter and her husband can't do anything right.

We've often pointed out that both parents are at home and take great interest in their children. Especially my son-in-law. Early on he, like a lot who know me only casually, was afraid of me. (I don't have to work at it. My daughter always laughed when friends at the army base in Germany asked if I was mean.)

Back to Felicia, I heard her going on about their parenting beliefs and methods. I asked her if she meant that somehow her parents were old fashioned.She said yes. I regret not being there to hear it. A little deja vu. There's the normal friction with her ten-year-old brother Peyton.

Concerning RPCV's, another Liberia volunteer from Lancaster, PA , went with me to Peace Corps' 25th anniversary in DC. We filled a circus tent and sat according to host countries. As I looked around that day, I knew that behind every name tag with host country on it was a story. There was not time to even begin to hear all the stories they could have told, but what stories they must have been.

Either of us should be able to talk years about our experiences. 50 K words should come easy.

Yeah, I have a lot to say, the question is, can I banish my inner editor and type while nursing a baby on a plane while my three-year-old sleeps?

Yes, it's past eleven here on the East Coast, and I have been reading about those rare romance novels written in the male point of view. Not one of my main female characters in my two unpublished novels deals with children. One thinks she is pregnant at some point in the story, and in the other story the heroine's former lover beat her so bad she couldn't have children. But in the final scene, she surprises her husband with good news that they can have children. (They both had been in cryonic suspension.)

It was far easier to offer Kitty advice on how to keep from losing her work. Not that you were asking. Managing things at 30,000 feet up would certainly require you to be inventive. With our daughter turning forty in two months, such problems have seemed remote for a generation.

What you said did remind me of something I saw at a local Cracker Barrel restaurant one day when I was with my wife, who was off during a school day. Probably a medical appointment.

An attractive, well-dressed young lady managed to cover herself discreetly, nurse, and eat simultaneously. It was almost poetic. With few patrons there, her subtility went almost un-noticed even by me. With ease she shifted her child from one side to the other, resumed feeding, and took an occasional bite. Without losing rhythm, she placed her young boy on her shoulder and gently patted his back. It was a moment of closeness for both, with the mother planting a gentle kiss now and then.

Feeding my kids with that formula (We switched to milk with both after a short time) I tried to achieve something like that by making sure an ear was next to my chest. They could hear my heartbeat.

I don't remember saying anything to my wife altough there was little chance of intruding on the young lady's delecate privacy. One could only appreciate such bonding in silence. It's a different kind of love between mother and child. That's what I said early on when my wife almost apologized for doing what was necessary for our son.

What could I do after perceiving such a beautiful experience between mother and son?

Keep my trap shut! That's what!

There's no way a guy can compliment a strange woman on such experience without being taken for a dirty old man.

I'm not sure how the young lady would have done all of those things and write a novel in Cracker Barrel at the same time.

Forgive my verbosity. It's a generational thing.

Awww. I'm always nursing my baby at random low-end delis and cafes while out and about and it's nice to know not everyone thinks I'm all primate in public. But yes, I would be totally creeped out if a guy commented on it out of nowhere.

Hi everyone,

NaNoPerk - my NaNo novel this year will indeed be based in Vietnam (specifically Saigon, in fact), but I'll be very much avoiding depictions of Saigon as an exotic location. I've lived here for two years now, and it's very much daily life here, nothing exotic at all. (and I've lived in Asia for over half my life, so it never really was something hugely exotic)

But more than that, I'm not interested in depicting any place as exotic... because then it's just a question of "exotic to who?".Nowhere is exotic to the people who've grown up there, and those are the people I primarily (though not always) write is about. If I do depict something as exotic, it tends to be more about the person than the place.

Kitty - Where in Vietnam are you going to be? Are you living here or will you just be passing through?

Chr

My wife was on Facebook this evening and just got off.

This is for MmeZeeZee. After this post I will be composing an email to your "MyNaNoWriMo" site where you have your Bio and your Novel Info.

Garunya, by exotic, I was referring to the way Europeans and Americans viewed the East in cinema and literature prior to the 1940's. Similar idealistic beauty of such places as Samoa was portrayed in Rogers and Hammerstein stage productions such as South Pacific.

I have seen Americans portray the United States as "boring" to people in Australia. However you wish to portray Saigon and/or Viet Nam, enjoy writing your story in November.

What is for me?

Hi everyone,

I'm Vietnamese and actually studying in Australia at the moment so my location is not quite Asia for November.

Growing up in Hanoi in the late 1990s and 2000s I'm not sure I can ever stick the word 'exotic' to Vietnam. Then again, that's probably to be expected considering I've spent most of my life (all 17 of my 21 years) in Vietnam. I am probably am the youngest of everyone in this thread (and feeling a tiny bit intimidated).

My novel for Nano 09 will be set in 1700s China, during the Qing dynasty, which had always been a point of interest for me.

Hey everyone! I'm another RPCV. I'm currently living in Ireland but I'm originally Bangladeshi and have spent the majority of my life (A whole 10 years out of my 15 years) living in either Bangladesh or Saudi Arabia. I won't be in Asia during November but I am going down there for December.

Just thought I'd drop in and say hello!

Hey,

I am here in Asia -Elsewhere as well. Currently residing in the middle east. This will also be my first NaNo.

Is there anyone esle who is in United Arab Emirates?

I have to ask... you are 15 and have already returned from Peace Corps? When did you finish university? Or is that a typo???

hmmm.....elsewhere in Asia is also Saudi Arabia :P

good luck everybody!

Nobody is perfect. I am nobody. Therefore, I am perfect!

im 18, if that helps :P

Nobody is perfect. I am nobody. Therefore, I am perfect!

I'm here
I dont know how far I will get but i aim to give it a try

Posting from Kathmandu, Nepal. This is my first year participating in NaNoWriMo, though I have been writing for some time.
Though I am not a Nepali, I have lived here for over thirteen years now. And I love it. As you would imagine, my book is set here; though others, still unfinished, are set in other times and places.
Good luck to us all!

I'm sharing the NaNo insanity all the way from Amman, Jordan.

I'm sixteen, and this is my second year.

:)

I am in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, this is my second year and my novel will surprisingly be set in Cambodia based on the Dragon Boats races held during the Water festival which is happening right now.

Michelle S. Murray

Hey, I'm here in the land of sand and fun. What's up?

JS

Mongolia Represent!!! I too am RPCV though I've yet too return, still in Mongolia, though I now live in an apartment, with running water, power, and internet. Somehow I think this task of writing a novel in a month will be a lot harder than surviving the frigid winters here. Би чадна!

I am presently living and writing in Astana, Kazakhstan. Vala

VAla, we also have a russkoyazychnoy thread in Russia, if you want to join there, too. Same goes for any other homo sovieticus, or russkoyazychniye lyudi here. Welcome.

Hi, there noorelven.
I am from the UAE as well and this is my second year doing nano.