New Giveaway, Old Book

To revive interest in The Battle of Chibi, the first book I published, I decided to do another giveaway through Goodreads. I don't remember having done so for this particular title but thought I should do it (perhaps again) now. Anyone interested should click on the following "widget" from Goodreads. The Giveaway begins in a few days on February 15.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

The Battle of Chibi

by Hock G. Tjoa

Giveaway ends February 25, 2016.

See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三國演義) is one of the four great Chinese novels. The other three are The Water Margin (shui hu zhuan/水滸傳 ), sometimes translated as All Men Are Brothers or Outlaws of the Marsh, Journey to the West (xi you ji/西遊記 ), and Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅)  often translated as The Plum in the Golden Vase. This last title is a translation of the given names of the three main female characters in it but in any case, this novel is often deemed too pornographic and hence substituted for by The Dream of the Red Chamber (紅樓夢). The most recent translation into English uses the title The Story of the Stone as the "frame story" to this classic is that of a sentient stone left over when the heavens and the earth were renovated.

My book, The Battle of Chibi, consists of twenty three chapters or portions of chapters (out of 120 chapters in the Romance) that I translated from the Mandarin in the long fit of boredom that afflicted me when I retired. Unwittingly, I thus embarked on the third act of my working life. The choice was not difficult to make. Although Pearl Buck thought much of The Water Margin and her translation of that work (as All Men are Brothers) is highly regarded, it is to me a tedious tale of banditry. There were 108 of those brothers or outlaws and not much that distinguished one tale from another of a good man driven into such a life by political or personal circumstances. 

Nor was I attracted to the story of the Monkey King and the rivalry between Daoism and Buddhism that makes up the fantasy world of The Journey to the West. An occasional encounter with the paranormal would enliven my reading, and I enjoyed the shenanigans of the Monkey King as much as the readers of the Journey did though I much preferred the very short version published by Arthur Waley as Monkey. My preference is to take paranormal shenanigans in small doses.

The Dream of the Red Chamber mentioned above is another thing, telling of the fall of a family from high society and of young love among many sisters, cousins and aunts. It is also an academic specialization of its own. Scholars spend almost their entire careers in the study of its linguistic or literary nuances, as some might choose to study Shakespeare or Sophocles. It might be worth the trouble extricating the story from such a tangled fate, probably not as a selection and translation so as to avoid the parsing of phrases but as a selective retelling of the story. 

Ah, another project.

Born Standing Up

Dying is easy, said a famous actor. Comedy is hard. 

Actors and writers know all too well the truth of these lines. This is therefore a tribute to Steve Martin who wrote Born Standing Up, about a person he used to be.

"At age eighteen, I had no gifts," he disclosed in this engaging book. "Thankfully, perseverance is a great substitute for talent." 

His high school jobs at Knott's Berry Farm and Disneyland had introduced him to the world of magic and comedy. Under the influence of a girl friend he gravitated towards studying - taking courses in - philosophy which gave him material for his early comedy routines. He is also a member of mensa but so far does not appear to have worked that into any comic work that I am aware of.


"I've decided my act is going ... avant-garde," he announced early in his career and elaborates in the book, "I am not sure what I meant, but I wanted to use the lingo, and it was seductive to make these pronouncements. Through the years, I have learned there is no harm charging oneself up with delusions between moments of valid inspiration."

He found in San Francisco "the cultural melange and the growing culture of drugs," that made the crowded streets of North Beach "simmer with toxic vitality." His years as stand-up comic made him aware of the loneliness of that calling. Unlike the teams that worked on shows like the Smothers Brothers, for which SM wrote until the show was cancelled due to political pressure, there was no team or band that congregated around a funny man. No "others" with whom to commiserate on a disastrous outing or to review a problematic performance or to plan a road trip.

SM likened the first time he did the Tonight Show to an "alien abduction: I remember very little of it, though I am convinced it occurred." 

As this and all the above shows, the man is witty. But even he does not succeed in writing any scene of gut-heaving hilarity. Two scenes of what happened at the end of his stand-up routines when his audience declined to leave despite his best efforts and when he left by "swimming" over their heads, passed from out-stretched arms to others, come close in concept. I have to confess that visualizing them did not stimulate more than a chuckle, no more than the one-liners that fill this book.

He explored the psychology of comedy early on and concluded that the build-up of tension by a comic was often followed by an "artificial" release (punch-line). What, he wondered, if there is not any release /punchline? "What if I headed for a climax but all I delivered was anti-climax?" In many ways that was the essence of the SM brand. But it is not any easier to visualize or (I imagine) to perform. Certainly, to describe it would invite disaster.

His choice of the many comedians to which to pay tribute is interesting: Laurel and Hardy, the Smothers Brothers, the cast of Laugh-In, the team at Saturday Night Live, Don Rickles, etc. One wonders about the absence of Bob Hope, perhaps less so at the non-mention of Jerry Lewis. Pride of place was given to Johnny Carson who "enjoyed the delights of split-second timing, of watching a comedian squirm and rescue himself... He knew the difference between the pompous ass and the nervous actress and who should receive appropriate consideration... he served his audience with his curiosity and tolerance. He gave his guest--like the ideal America would--the benefit of the doubt: you're nuts, but you are welcome here." 

Voice and Point of View

The concepts of voice and point of view in writing challenges me continually. The first person narrative and the third person omniscient should be clear. But there were passages in Mo Yan's Red Sorghum that impressed me greatly because he wrote as if slipping in and out of the point of view of a pack of feral dogs. Further, an Indie writer, Lee Fullbright, wrote The Angry

Woman Suite, adopting the perspective of three characters in turn--Elysse, the step-daughter; Francis, the step-father, and Aidan, Francis' school teacher and mentor who is friend to both--but the novel impressed me with a single overwhelming, angry voice. 

I understand that the third person omniscient is a dangerously alluring voice or POV for an author and one best left to the masters, but one of my favorite authors frequently employs--I am flabbergasted just to think about it--the FIRST person omniscient. How else would you account for a statement such as "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world. I told you that"? (Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children). I actually think that Shame was a greater work (though slighter in physical volume), but that too uses the same technique.


Christa Wolf's Medea consisted of eleven monologues, ranging from taut, focused lamentation to unbounded rage all part of a "riff" on the ancient Greek legend of Medea. I do believe that we are better off with that book than without, as far as understanding the Medea legend goes. If that has become a

category in psychotherapy, I am happy to say I am not aware of any such thing. Muriel Barberry's Elegance of the Hedgehog (some love this work, others don't) alternates between the first person voice of a concierge-savant and that of a child-savant. I suspect that the "savant thing" puts many readers off. Humility is not a common virtue among writers and it is probably more valued as a result. 

Writers are cautioned about the use of the first person; it is by far the most intimate voice, but can you, the author, handle it? And can you handle it in a manner that connects with your readers? After one writes something like "Call me Ishmael," how does one sustain the story, the narrative? Notice that there are more first person narratives that are not in the voice of a Captain Ahab or a Sherlock Holmes. Somehow, one suspects that a reader is more likely not to feel connected to a monomaniacal whaler or a highly functioning sociopath of a detective, hence the function of the faithful "side-kick." Speaking of which, the TV series that cast an Asian woman as Doctor Watson has managed to inject a brilliant case of cognitive dissonance--what remains is to see how well the script-writing sustains this.

For a writer, especially one relatively new to the craft, the safest voice and point of view is that of the third person objective. One does not try to get into any of one's characters' heads. One observes and practices the craft of describing/showing as opposed to narrating/ telling. Just the facts ma'am. But. 

Fiction should engage the reader just a little (or a lot) more. Hence, the POV often employed is the third person limited, which means the reader is allowed into the head of one character, usually the main character or the side-kick. That person is allowed to conduct "internal dialogue." Some style sheets have evolved to codify this by requiring italics without quotation marks. This gets us into some advanced areas that I would just as soon avoid for now. One can only read so many "how to" books on the art of writing.

Further, what happens when there are many characters and one does not wish to have the main character in every scene. Is the third person limited supple enough to to slip into the mind of the main character for the scene in one chapter and into that of another character in a different chapter? This is where writing dissolves into empiricism--what works? A writer should listen to reviewers. They are not all right nor always right; but they provide feedback to a writer as echo location functions for a bat. 

The Diplomat

What follows is an extract from The Ninja and the Diplomat, volume 2 in The Chinese Spymaster series. Some time ago, I published an extract that presented some inner monologue for the Ninja. This extract features the Diplomat; inner monologue is represented by passages in italics. But these are not the thoughts of the Diplomat. Instead, I have tried to present the thoughts of his students. How does one know what a group of people are thinking? Well, one hopes for some artistic license.

Former Minister Yu began the class. It was a course studying theories of the ideal state or society. This in itself made the students uncomfortable. No one wished to say that whatever state China was currently in was not ideal as any such discussion implied.

Yet Yu blithely continued to describe the syllabus that in the forthcoming weeks would take them through discussion of theorists like Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, before turning to Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong. He had chosen, however, to begin with Confucianism, a departure from orthodoxy that would have had the Red Guards screaming obscenities in a different era; it still seemed so old-fashioned. Worse, the assignment for the day had been the Dao De Jing, surely a book of riddles.

If the students at the “other school,” the China Executive Leadership Academy of Pudong in Shanghai, found out, they would surely laugh. Actually, there were five schools in all dedicated to the further training of middle and high ranking officials, but as commonly happens, rivalry was strongest between number one and number two.

“Who will begin our discussion? Does anyone have a comment on the reading assigned for today?” asked Yu.

This was another disconcerting aspect of the course, the professor always asks for opinions and comments. Doesn’t he know we are Chinese? Who among us makes comments?

Nonetheless, a brave soul ventured,

“I have heard that this classic proposes a way of life and thought that is obsolete. They say no person or state could live in such isolation as is recommended.”

“Very good. I myself thought that. Does everyone agree?”

The students murmured restively, realizing that the professor had set a trap for them. They could not agree because he would then criticize them for not thinking for themselves. But what should they say if they disagreed? This man is devious, everyone in the class agreed. Some rumors said that he was a princeling and had been a rising star in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If so, what was he doing here? Could it be possible that this school meant something in their party career.

“Weren’t the followers of the Dao often hermits who retired from towns and cities to work on wonder-making powers, including the drug to give man immortality?” persisted the lone voice.

Everyone else was sure he was a marked man, his name remembered. But what if he should be earmarked for special promotion?

Another voice was raised. “I have been told that the Monkey King was such a Daoist, perhaps even an Immortal himself.”

The students laughed with relief, as many of them had heard similar stories from doddering old men and women, their grandparents or family friends of that generation. Some of the stories, it had to be admitted, had reappeared in many computer games.

Yu remarked seriously, as if scolding the students for levity, “The Monkey King is a character from old literature. He did not seek a better state or society. He sought to gain more powers himself, and in the end, it was proved to him and his readers, that the Buddha’s power was stronger than any he exhibited. But I want to draw your attention to a passage that you might remember reading in preparation for today:

Though the next state can be seen

And its barking and cock crows heard,

The people of one state will age and die

Without having to deal with the other.

“In what way, if any, can this be interpreted as a statement about a social or political ideal?” asked Yu.

“I don’t have an answer but a question,” remarked a third student. “I don’t understand the verses just before these that you quoted. They suggest this society or state abstains from goods or weapons that it actually has. Is that because these material things were unnecessary or because they were not good enough?”

“Indeed, a thoughtful observation,” replied Yu. “Perhaps those verses about not using weapons, chariots or ships that they have are not unrelated to the notion of the ideal society or state.”

No, we will not say anything. The professor has the answer in his mind already. If we say anything, it might be right but most likely would be wrong. It is best to say nothing and do what we do best: We look inscrutable.

“Well, let me suggest a possibility to you. You tell me if you agree or not, and try to base your arguments on the text we have read,” Yu announced. “Let us say, the ideal state or society is one in which the inhabitants are not concerned with wealth or power. They remain poor or appear so to the states around them so no one from these other states wishes to conquer or even visit them.

“On the other hand, they are so well-governed, a fact that is not visible from outside the state, no one inside the state or society wishes to leave. Is that an ideal state?”

“Who would want to live in a poor state?”

“Who could govern the state so well that no one would want to leave?”

“You need power to govern well, and if you have power, why wouldn’t you use it to enrich yourself?”

Yu interjected an occasional question or remark that served only to keep the discussion rolling along. He grinned and waved at his visitors who prepared to leave.

Radiance, a review

Because Louis B. Jones is soon to be the key-note speaker at the first ever Sierra Writers Conference, to be jointly sponsored by Sierra College and Sierra Writers on January 3, 2016, I have discovered what pleasure can come from "slow reads." (Perhaps some day I shall blog on the value of writing that is deemed "fast-paced.")

Radiance (published in 2011) begins disarmingly with a familiar scene. A San Francisco parent (Mark) accompanies a teenager to an (expensive) Fantasy Celebrity Vacation in Los Angeles, enabled by a recent inheritance and prompted by the discovery that his daughter (Lotta) had started shopping among senior high schools in Connecticut. She plots to leave us. But barely has the "Fasten Your Seat-belts" sign been turned off than we find ourselves in deep, heavy territory. 

Mortality, late-term abortion, and the quality of life are the weighty considerations homing in like predator drones at the reader almost from the beginning of Radiance. "Death abides always there in constant contact ... in the Periodic Tables of Elements' basic, cool powders and metals and crystals and colorless odors, while the sensation of 'life' is merely the rarest, briefest tingle through all the galaxies' endless tonnage."

The turmoil faced by the parents who eventually decided on the late term abortion is hinted at by the abandonment of her vocation as a corporate lawyer by the perfect wife who then dons the hair-shirt of a middle-aged mom apprenticed as a carpenter, driving herself into exhaustion working with Habitat for Humanity. Atonement by heavy labor without lunch breaks. The sonograms had revealed a "hydro-cephalic condition," the fetus appeared "cretinous-looking." Teenage daughter, whose "ethical equipment was somewhat simplistic," initially declared for termination, asserting a woman's right to choose and the prospect of a short and unhappy life for what would become her brother. Within a month she had changed her mind. 

Then she met Brodie. 

He was a senior, a "paraplegic boy drummer" at the Fantasy weekend who had learned "to extract his rewards from the world by asserting intellectual dominance." His own condition was a "defect from birth" and "now he's got the grateful-to-be-alive gospel." Teenage daughter reports that hedeclares the lost life would have been "the same as ours in terms of absolute value." Father dreads the inevitable conversation, the impending battle "with those innocent certainties."

Somewhere between the Hollywood sign (Los Angeles continued to look, to this northern Californian, "like local news crime scene footage") and the Santa Monica Police Precinct (it has wheel-chair access), and while enduring in the holding cell "the 120-volt clang of its inner electromagnets" and the old metal bars "painted the old Wrigley's Doublemint green," Mark concludes, "the truth is, a physicist and a lawyer are worth more than a paralyzed, retarded, blind baby. [Otherwise] the evening sound of dishes is as great as the Milky Way or the sensation of cotton fabric is as profound as the Seven Wonders of the World." 

Brodie persists in asking "What is everything made of these days, ... below atoms and quarks and super strings?" Mark wonders whether "it would be odd if inquiring into his ideas as a physicist should seem more insolent than kissing his daughter." But he affirms that "two plus two would eternally equal four ... even in the emptiness before the beginning of time.... The principle alone furnished the radiance to have made matter originally bead up out of nothing."  

Awesome Indies Approved

The email said: 

You may now tell your readers that your book is ‘Awesome Indies Approved’ or ‘has been awarded a place on the Awesome Indies list of quality independent fiction.’

Not only that, it came with a badge of some sort, several in fact. A couple I could put on the cover of my book (The Chinese Spymaster) and one I could use on this blog/website. I have not figured out how one adds to one's cover and in any case am loath to tamper with the pixels; whatever they are, the word evokes pixies and I don't feel inclined to mess with them.

Asking around about all this, I was pulled up short by the challenge - "have you noticed any increase in your sales?" That I suppose is the point of the exercise, at least to this one of my fellow authors. But I rather like the idea that at this stage of my life, in its Third Act, I might actually get something like a gold star. That now seems so long ago and far away.

So here it is. From Awesome Indies.

Awesome Indies Review

I am delighted this week to share a paragraph from a review of The Chinese Spymaster (published in 2013) in AWESOME INDIES.

***
Told primarily from Wang’s point of view, with occasional diversions to other characters who are central to the overall plot, and written in English, but in Chinese style language, it will be difficult at first for the average English language reader (American or UK), but patience is its own reward. The story unfolds much like a traditional Chinese story would unfold, and in the end the reader will be rewarded with a fuller understanding of the murky world of intelligence and foreign relations, as seen through non-Western eyes. That alone would make it a worthwhile read, but the fact that it’s a well-constructed story with tons of suspense and the occasional plot twist, merely adds frosting to a tasty reading treat. 
***
For the full review, follow this link.

Awesome Indies itself is 
... an indie book accreditation service that approves independently published works of fiction that meet the same standards as books published by mainstream publishers – as evaluated by publishing industry professionals. We aim to showcase books that meet a specific set of standards for fiction writing so readers can browse for indie books knowing they will be buying well-crafted works.

It's stated mission is

• Identify and honor independently published books that meet, or improve on, the standard of books published by major mainstream publishers and their imprints.
• Promote and support Awesome Indies Approved (AIA) authors and their books,
• Raise the standard of independent publishing,
• Assist authors to achieve quality, 
• Raise the image of independent publishing among readers.
• Operate ethically in all aspects of our endeavors.

As an "Indie Writer," all I can say is - more power to them! Visit and explore the website (link).