“On Fridays” UiTM Google Meet That I Almost Missed!

May of last year, I was up at 5:15 a.m. toget my son off to school.  Not feelingwell (lack of sleep, perhaps), I went back to bed.  A phone notice woke me up, informing me thatmy story “On Fridays” from Lovers and Strangers Revisited, which I recently rewrote and blogged about, was being discussed in a Collaborative Teaching at UniversitiTeknologi MARA or UiTM—Penang (Bertam campus), led by Associate Professor Dr. MohamadRashidi Pakri of USM (discussing the literary aspect of the story) and NazimaVersay Kudus of UiTM. 

Previously, during Covid lockdown, I hadbeen invited by Nazima to join Google Meet to answer questions about my shortstory "Neighbours" also from Lovers and Strangers Revisited for her Faculty of Health Science students. This time around, since it involved aboutsixty students from several classes from Health Science, who are learning aboutnarrative writing, it was more practical to record and share the session amongthe students than to get them all together at one time, even online.

Surprisingly, I had not been forewarned, or was I a last-minute inclusion—hey, let’s wake up Robert to see if he’s available!  Either way, I was too late for the discussion,but I did manage to join the Q & A session.

 

“On Fridays,” the first story from Loversand Strangers Revisited has been published over a dozen times in seven countries.  In 2003, it appeared in The LiteraryReview (USA) and Frank (France) in a joint publication.  I had sent the story to the editor of Frank,unaware that he had been asked to be the guest editor of The Literary Review,so he chose “On Fridays” for their joint issue on Expat Writing.  The story, about an expat living in Penang,Malaysia who sits beside a crying woman in a taxi, later appeared as a reprintfor Cha: An Asian Literary Journal in 2010.  Since then, the story had been revised severaltimes in my effort to finally get it right… 

I would like to have listened in thesession, to hear what the students thought of the story since they would be freerto discuss it without the presence of the author—for fear of embarrassingthemselves or offending him—so why did we have to read that stupid story in thefirst place?  It nearly put me to sleep!  Hopefully, no one said that or felt that way!

 

           

By the time I came on board, or online, (freshlyshowered and wide awake) some students may have already left (is he coming ornot?)  The questions they did ask me werestraight forward.  Why did he, the unnamedfirst-person character, feel com­pelled to hold her hand instead of justspeaking, “Hi, how are you?”  Was it im­portantthat she wore traditional clothes?  Didthe story really take place?  Was it atrue story?  More than once, in the past,I had been asked, “Have you found her?”  “Areyou still looking for her?” Many of these ques­tions I had discussed in theStory Behind the Story (which I wrote for all seventeen storiesfor the MPH publication), about how the story came to be written, how the storyevolved after its initial publication, what significant changes I made to thestory (and why) that led to subsequent publications overseas… 

Having wrote the story in 1988 (first publishedin the March ’89 issue of Female in Singapore), I feel honored that thestory “On Fridays” is still being taught in 2023, 35 years later, and it stillresonates with university students who can identify with the characters, even alonely expat inside a share taxi on a rainy day sitting beside a crying Malay womanreading a letter on blue paper…

      —Borneo Expat Writer

 My interviews with other Malaysian writers:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize. Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban JourneyPreeta Samarasan, author of Evening is the Whole Day, finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize 2009. 
Chuah Guat Eng, author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change.
Malachi Edwin Vethamani, author of Complicated Lives and Life Happens.