Cross-cultural writer, Yang-May Ooi, faced family illness and bereavement and the breakup of her civil partnership after the success of her theatre and book memoir project Bound Feet Blues. And the world went into lockdown due to the global pandemic. She writes here about how these painful and difficult years gave her the inspiration for her new family memoir Land of Hope and Curry – An Idea of England.
How A Disrupted World Inspired Yang-May Ooi’s new family memoir, Land of Hope and Curry – An Idea of England
Lockdown created a world where the default is often to meet via Zoom and to sign documents digitally. So it was a novelty and very satisfying to meet in person with Lucy Melville, Managing Director of my new publisher River Light Press to sign my book contract the old-fashioned way with pen and paper. It was my first new book contract since my family memoir Bound Feet Blues some years ago and a long time in the making so the personal meeting gave this moment a sense of occasion.
A Disrupted World
After the successful run of my solo theatre performance Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes about my great-grandmother who had bound feet – and the publication of the family memoir of the same name (Urbane Publications), I had a lot of family material and personal stories left on the cutting room floor. The challenge was to bring these together in a coherent way somehow to continue my explorations of family, legacy and the big themes in all our lives of identity, belonging, love and more.
I was tired after the two years of bringing the theatre piece to the stage and the writing of the book version. Life took unexpected turns with family illnesses and the breakdown of my civil partnership. The divorce meant my reluctant selling of my house in London and a fresh start in Oxford. But in the midst of this, I was blessed in meeting a new person … and then just as we were starting a new life together when Covid happened to the whole world.
I turned to podcasting as a way to keep my creativity sparky and expansive. In the last few years, I produced and hosted The Anxiety Advantage, a podcast about living in this age of anxiety and taking my personal fears and doubts as the starting point to explore this very human condition. This was followed by MetroWild, a celebration of city life and wild nature against the backdrop of the climate emergency. I also kept my core podcast Creative Conversations ticking along, talking to a range of creatives about what can emerge when creative ideas and action flow together.
Emerging from Lockdown
As we emerged from lockdown, life seemed to bloom anew everywhere. I was establishing my new home and community in Oxford. My creative energy was flourishing again.
It was time to re-connect with the stories I wanted to tell in book form.
I dug out my metaphoric box of ideas. They were scattered and disconnected. Fragments of stories, a jigsaw of memories and images. Covid meant that the world had been locked down and I had not visited my parents in Malaysia, the country of my birth for a few years. My father had passed away peacefully from old age during the lockdown years. We had not been able to go to my mother nor attend his funeral.
Three Generations of Migration
I thought about my life here in the UK, my mother alone in Malaysia, my grandparents who had built their lives there, and my great-grandparents who had migrated from China to British Malaya. Themes emerged.
Separation, migration, making a home in a new land. A pandemic of global proportions affecting the lives of individuals, the policy decisions of nations changing the course of families, not just ours but across world history.
The fragments of stories from my family’s history began to fall into place within the context of world events that shaped the 20th century. Famine, floods, social unrest, the expansion of empires, war.
And how was it that I decided to make my life here in England? This choice that had meant my separation from my mum and dad for most of my adult life.
It had been a dream that drove me for as long as I can remember: to live in England. Even as I played in the hot tropical sunshine of Malaysia, the bright colours of the jacaranda tree and flame tree in my parents’ garden mingling with the fronds of the coconut trees, I imagined roaming the Sussex downs and pulling a jacket closer round me as snow begins to fall.
An Idea of England had lured me here.
But where had that Idea come from? How did it come to be such a driving force in my life?
Land of Hope and Curry and River Light Press
So it was that my new book emerged. To explore the origins of the Idea of England and how it influenced my family – and my own life choices.
One of those choices led me to make a new home in Oxford and the timing of this book led my path to cross with that of Lucy Melville, MD of River Light Press, another Oxford resident.
So join Lucy and me as we meet together in person to sign the publishing contract for my new book. In the video below of the contract signing, I also talk a bit about my book, Land of Hope and Curry – An Idea of England and Lucy tells us about River Light Press.
