West of Eden: a tale of Bhutan

On the eve of the publication of my new novel "The Heart of the Buddha", set in Bhutan, due for release on October 1, 2009, I am posting my short story of Bhutan, to herald the novel. "West of Eden: a tale of Bhutan" was first published in "Imprint, 2009", a magazine of Women in Publishing Society, Hong Kong. This story bears no relation to the plot of "The Heart of the Buddha", except for the setting.

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HAPPINESS IN BHUTAN

My romance with Bhutan began in February 2000 when I flew for the first time from Bangkok to Paro, the only airport town in Bhutan. The airport had no radar detection device. Planes could only land and take off in broad daylight, in good visibility. At the time, “planes” meant the two aircraft owned by Bhutan’s national airline, Druk Air. As we neared Bhutan, the arid landscape gradually gave way to layers of mountains looming grey and purple in the distance, becoming luxuriant with vibrant shades of green as the plane glided over them. Mountains and valleys interlocked with one another like fingers of hands clasped in prayer. I had the inkling I was about to experience something quite different from what the biggest cities and fanciest resorts of the first world could offer.

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Nong Tang: A Walk Back In Time

At the historic Peace Hotel in Shanghai’s busy commercial district, a doorman hails a taxi for us. Michael is on a consulting mission to Shanghai. After fifty-seven years, he has come home to the city of his birth. “Where to, sir?” the taxi driver asks. Michael takes out a small piece of paper from his breast pocket and pronounces in Mandarin, “I Yee Jin Lu.” The driver seems puzzled, looks at the street name, and checks his directory. “No such street. Where did you get this name?” “I lived near that street, in one of the nong tang, more than fifty-seven years ago.” Nong tang, each a labyrinth of small lanes lined with low brick houses joined end to end, built in the early twentieth century, some earlier, a relic of a time bygone.

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Travels with Michael

In the last ten plus years, I have had the good fortune to travel to countries some of which are not on many tourists' beaten tracks, and spend a considerable amount of time in certain ones, long enough to get a feel for the place. Above all, I have met many interesting people in different countries, some of whom have come to be good friends. While much of my traveling had been in connection with Michael's international consulting/teaching work, we had managed to do traveling of our own between his work trips. Some of the most interesting and fulfilling experiences had been in Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Bosnia, Bulgaria, China (including a good number of provinces, districts, cities and towns), Croatia, Egypt, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Sarawak (Malaysia), South Africa, Tanzania, Uzbekistan.  I will share some photos (in the Travel Section), and stories based on my travels in my Blog with my readers, over time.  My travels have all enriched my life experience immeasurably.   

  

My road to self-publishing

Updated on Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 04:41PM by Elsie

I started writing my first novel Hui Gui eleven years ago, 1998, when I was a librarian with Scarborough Public Library in Toronto. Hui Gui, which literally means returning home in Chinese, is a novel about events in Chinese and Hong Kong history in the 60 some years leading to the return of Hong Kong to China by the British in 1997, as told through the lives of one Chinese landlord's family. I took the workshop at Humber School for Writers that summer of '98, and decided to continue with the correspondence program in the following winter. I was very fortunate to have Isabel Huggan as my mentor. That was the beginning of the writing of the formal manuscript of Hui Gui.

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