Writer's Blog

ROMANCE, ADVENTURE, DRAMA, HISTORY MELD IN SWEEPING ASIAN SAGA NANYANG, AN EPIC TALE SPANNING 200 YEARS

In the mid seventeenth century Dutch soldiers and officials sent by ship from Batavia to acquire laborers for the Java settlement seize a young woman, Mei Ling, from a village in Fujian, China, along with scores of men. Seventeen-year-old Mei Ling is kidnapped  at the behest of a lecherous Dutch official, who organizes a mutiny when the ship’s captain places her under his protection.  Nanyang follows the adventures of Mei Ling and her brother, who sets out to rescue her, and their descendants amid land and sea battles of warring nations, natural disasters and rampant disease. They are caught up in historical events (in Europe as well as South-East Asia), in which notable English, Dutch and Javanese figures play their real-life roles. The story begins in China and ends soon after the founding of Singapore by Sir Stamford Raffles, who features in the book along with other personalities of the period, including Horatio Nelson.

 

"A pleasure to read." The detail of the history is “engrossing” - Amazon 4 star review.

“The author gives life to history through his characters, both real and imagined.” - Amazon 4 star review.

 

[SEE BELOW FOR LINKS TO NANYANG AND OTHER WORKS BY IAN STEWART NOW PUBLISHED AS E-BOOKS]

NANYANG

 

I first published Nanyang, my new historical novel, as an Amazon eBook.

[See: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006PHIPU4].

I then went on to produce a print edition - a more challenging task. The 700-page paperback is now available at: http://www.amazon.com/Nanyang-Mr-Ian-Gordon-Stewart/dp/1468153013

The culmination of ten years of planning, research and creation, Nanyang reflects my longstanding interest in the history of East Asia, where I worked as a foreign correspondent for 30 years, including the emigration of Chinese to the Southern Ocean lands, among whom were ancestors of my wife, Truus. (Nee The Tiang Nio). The story reaches back to the fifteenth century and the voyages of Admiral Zheng He with his fleet of the world's largest sailing ships, during which he visited foreign shores from Java to the African continent. But the main period it covers is from the middle of the seventeenth century to the founding and early years of Singapore in the first half of the nineteenth century.
As mentioned above, protagonists are involved in events not only in China and South-East Asia but also in Europe and North America, where the politics and conflicts of European governments had a significant influence on developments in Nanyang. The main characters include Chinese, Dutch and English men and women and indigenous people of the region.

The story recounts the painful disruption in the quiet lives of two young people - brother and sister - suddenly separated from each other and their father by the Dutch raid and traces subsequent events over two centuries in South-East Asia in which they and their descendants are involved.

 

THE UNINTENTIONAL JIHADI

* * * * *

[See: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0087EHI7O]

Charlie Finch is a divorced, Singapore-based stringer for a British newspaper, who is struggling to make enough money to meet his alimony payments and provide the financial incentive required to persuade a Chinese bar girl to live with him. In order to sell a story to his newspaper about the arrest of terrorists by the Singapore authorities, he embroiders it with fabricated details. They point to the possibility of a strike against world leaders at a forthcoming APEC conference in Kuala Lumpur by the terrorist group Jemaah Islamiah, an affiliate of al-Qaeda,.
To Charlie’s delight, his newspaper accepts the article for publication, splashing it on the front page as a major news item. However, forsaking his journalistic principles for monetary gain has fraught consequences.
At first his false story produces a bonus when British and American intelligence agents separately ask him to secure further details from his fictitious Malaysian informant in exchange for substantial cash payments. But he is kidnapped and taken on a wild ride through Malaysia by two ruthless henchmen and a burqa-clad woman to meet the emir, or leader, of Jemaah Islamiah. The emir thinks someone has disclosed to Charlie his plans for an attack on the APEC conference and wants to know who it is.
Charlie soon finds himself ensnared in the terrifying world of Jemaah Islamiah – hunted by police, marked for death by a crazed terrorist and seemingly helpless to save the lives of world leaders on the emir’s hit list.

"The Unintentional Jihadi is a damn good yarn. Fast paced and exciting." - Amazon 5 star review

 

THE PEKING PAYOFF

* * * *

 

See: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009HPE0T6

In the 1970s, a Hong Kong taipan, Donald MacGribben, sets out to obtain a secure future for the British Crown Colony amid uncertainty created by a power struggle in Maoist China. He arranges a meeting at the Canton (Kwangtung) Trade Fair with the Chinese Premier to seek a public assurance, in return for a substantial annual payment, that China has no immediate plans to seize HK. However, the Premier’s enemies are scheming to have him killed in a manner that will incriminate MacGribben, whose heroin-addicted wife has been blackmailed into carrying the murder weapon from Hong Kong into China.

Getting wind that MacGribben’s scheme is under threat, Hal Jernberg, his friend and partner, races to unravel the complex conspiracy of the Chinese leader’s opponents but becomes himself a target. Suspense builds up in this action drama as the time for the meeting of the Premier and MacGribben draws near.

The Peking Payoff takes the reader back to a China where rival factions are positioning themselves for the succession battle after the aging Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) dies and to a Hong Kong still controlled from London through the Governor. The transfer of sovereignty over the territory from Britain to China is still more than two decades away.

Nine years after The Peking Payoff was published (in 1975),  Teng Hsiao-ping (Deng Xiaoping)  outlined his "one country, two systems" policy in relation to Hong Kong at a meeting with a delegation from the British Crown Colony. He declared that Hong Kong would “remain the same for a long time to come”. It was just what MacGribben sought to achieve.

[I have retained the old system of romanizing Chinese script in this e-book edition of The Peking Payoff, which was standard at the time I wrote the book. Subsequently, of course, Peking became Beijing.]

 

"The story has action, believable characters for the reader to either sympathise with or hate, crafty `baddies' and an exotic location." - Amazon four star review

 

THE SEIZING OF SINGAPORE

* * * * *

 

 

See: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00ALQL39K

 

The seriously obese Morgan Khoo believes he has come up with a brilliant idea to recoup financial losses threatening to sink the family empire he has inherited from his father and, most importantly, allow him to continue a lavish lifestyle centered on his passion for copious quantities of ice-cream and a steady supply of young women.

It might cost a few lives but Morgan has long been guided by the family maxim: “The table manners of the Szechuan tiger are execrable, but he seldom goes hungry”.

His plan centres on the control of government by making the Prime Minister a prisoner in his own office, which the tycoon achieves with the help of local accomplices and ruthless imported mercenaries.

It also involves holding hostage delegates to an international meeting, including the US Secretary of State.

Newspaper editor Jeremy Lord is close to uncovering the plot when he falls into the hands of the mercenaries and is thrown, shackled and semiconscious, into the turbid Singapore river.

A complication arises for Morgan’s mercenaries with the coincidental launching of a strike against the Prime Minister and the international visitors by a communist terrorist cell.

In the ensuing mayhem, the hostages appear doomed to die at the hands of mercenaries or communists. Their lives are dependent on one man’s suicidal-seeming attempt to rescue them.

 

 

REUNION

* * * * *

 

See: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008YVLPNI

With Australia and Indonesia on the brink of war over Jakarta’s designs on Papua New Guinea, Gordon McGregor is faced with revealing a secret he has held for 35 years, which will expose a painful episode in his life but is his only hope to stop the Indonesian Defence Minister from carrying out an air strike against Darwin. It concerns what he was told by an Indonesian army officer in East Timor after McGregor saw him shoot dead four Australian journalists. He and the Indonesian were close friends as young men in Jakarta but the relationship soured over McGregor’s brief affair with the woman who later became the Indonesian’s wife. McGregor’s personal moment of truth comes in his appearance on a television current affairs program with the Indonesian Defence Minister, who is beamed in by satellite link from Jakarta. In the studio watching are members of his family gathered for a reunion to mark his eightieth birthday.

Reunion draws heavily upon my experience as a foreign correspondent in Indonesia, where I met my wife, Truus, (as well as my visit to East Timor just before its seizure by Indonesian troops in October 1975 and the execution of five Australian journalists they captured).

 

“This book is full of adventures, both rewarding and heartbreaking. A very good read with characters you care about.” -- Amazon five star review

 

MY WORK

I am the author of seven published works of fiction and one non-fiction book. My first novel, The Peking Payoff, was published some 30 years ago in hard cover by Macmillan Inc in the United States and in paperback by Hamlyn. Hamlyn also published my next three fiction books - The Seizing Of Singapore, Deadline In Jakarta and An H-Bomb For Alice.

I self-published a fifth novel, Reunion, in 1988.

In December, 2011, I published a historical novel, Nanyang, as an Amazon e-Book and in March it became also an Amazon paperback. (See above.)

In June, 2012, I published a novella, The Unintentional Jihadi, as an Amazon e-Book. (See above.)

In 2003, Allen & Unwin published The Mahathir Legacy, my book on the former Prime Minister of Malaysia. It was also published in Asia, North America and the United Kingdom.

The Mahathir Legacy is available through Amazon as an eBook.

Since The Mahathir Legacy is as much about Anwar Ibrahim as Mahathir it is especially relevant today in the context of the former deputy premier’s new political prominence following his return to parliament.

I have now published three of my older works as eBooks. They are The Peking Payoff, The Seizing Of Singapore and Reunion. (See above.)

During my career as a journalist I wrote many articles for leading magazines in Australia and abroad. I was a foreign correspondent in Asia for The New York Times for 15 years, after first working for Reuters. I subsequently moved back to Australia, working in publishing and public relations, but returned to Asia in 1991 as a freelance writer, following the death of my wife. I based myself first in Singapore and then in Kuala Lumpur, returning to Sydney in August, 2001. (For biog details click on About in column on left.)

I have uploaded onto my blog Letters To My Late Wife, which I started to write while I was in Malaysia and finished when I returned to Australia. It is the story of the emotionally-painful journeys of an estranged father and son, which become more fraught when the son is arrested in Singapore on a criminal charge and his sister presses their father to help him.

(See Letters Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.)

China Watching [And Memories of Korea and Jakarta]

Captain Louis Renault’s line in Casablanca, “Everybody comes to Rick's”, could well be applied to The Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong from its founding in the fifties after the Chinese communists seized power until the 1980s when the colony’s China watching cachet began to fade. The FCC’s most glamorous period was when it was located in a magnificent Midlevels mansion with a large lawn overlooking the harbour. This allowed for outdoor functions – including dancing on a wooden floor laid over the lawn. Lunching on the balcony in 1954, with a view of the harbour unobscured by high-rise apartments or office towers, on the same day I took the photographs of the island and harbour shown here, I decided Hong Kong was my preferred place of residence in Asia.

Hong Kong harbour photographed from Midlevels in 1954.

Hong Kong Island photographed from Star Ferry in 1954

Unfortunately, the mansion was only leased and the owners decided to sell it and build an apartment block. The FCC had three more homes during the years I was based in the Crown Colony and served two terms as club president. But it remained a magnet for visitors and sitting in the bar or restaurant, you could often see familiar faces of foreign political leaders, movie actors, senior military officers, editors, authors and entertainers, who had stopped off in Hong Kong on their way to other Asian cities.

The Vietnam War and the tumult in China made Hong Kong an important regional centre for the media. Many correspondents covering the war made Hong Kong their base. At the same time, China watching from Hong Kong was a major industry. The colony was a key outpost for monitoring events in China from the fifties through to the eighties, a decade in which foreign journalists began to find it a little less difficult to visit the Middle Kingdom. (The 1970s, after US President Richard Nixon’s visit, saw an easing of restrictions on journalists but it was still not easy to obtain a visa.)

Folk Night At FCC.

“We’re the China Watchers of Hong Kong

We’re never, never, never, never wrong.

We may sometimes not be right

But it’s just an oversight

And we’ll certainly correct it ere too long.”

This is the chorus of a song I wrote during the Cultural Revolution, poking fun at myself and my colleagues, as a little light relief from the hours spent pouring over the content of provincial radio stations, central government pronouncements and interviews with people who could cross the border barred to us. I sang it with a folk group set up with other instrument-playing journalists and a guitar-virtuoso diplomat, who were fans of Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary and Woody Guthrie, to entertain members of The Foreign Correspondents Club of Hong Kong. (The three lads above are Len Port, Ian Stewart and Alan Thomas.)

I wrote my first articles about China from Hong Kong in 1954, when, as a young Reuter correspondent, I flew to the British Crown Colony from Japan to stand in for the resident correspondent, Graham Jenkins, when he took a couple of months sick leave. On the day of my arrival in Hong Kong,  I snapped the harbour photo above on the Star Ferry with my new Canon camera and the Midlevels shot from the FCC.

One of my earliest stories was a report on the British Labour Party delegation which visited China that year and departed via the British Crown Colony. I met them at the border and talked to members on the train to Hong Kong. In those days visitors departing from China travelled on a Chinese train from Canton (now Guangzhou) to the border, where they walked across  a bridge and boarded a British train at the Lowu station. Members of the delegation were naively enthusiastic about Mao’s China but provided little real information. They seemed to think their most significant finding was that there were “no flies in China”.

I was posted to Indonesia in 1955 and returned to Hong Kong in November, 1957, with the aim of writing a book and surviving by freelancing (having quit Reuters).  I married Truus The Tiang Nio, whom I had met in Indonesia, that same month. I wrote China stories for a year for various outlets before heading off to Indonesia for another spell in Jakarta. In late 1959 I went back to Hong Kong, where I was hired by The New York Times. For the next 14 years I reported on Mao Tse-tung’s China, with all its amazing developments, including The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution. (I had a break from Chinese politics for two to three months each year when I travelled to every East Asian country from Japan to Burma to gather material for articles for The New York Times’ year-end Asian economic survey.)

I repeatedly applied for visas to enter China but to no avail. I had a New Zealand passport but as a correspondent for The New York Times was treated like an American. I finally crossed the border in 1972 in the wake of Nixon’s entry - 18 years after my first visit to the border to meet the Labour Party delegation.

The opening to China engineered by Nixon and Kissinger was warmly welcomed by me and other China watchers. But I was surprised by his bold move. On the two occasions, I had met him before he became President he had not struck me as showing little leadership potential. But my view of him was not as jaundiced as American colleagues.

A short time after his ignominious departure from the White House, an American colleague whom I had not seen for some years came up to me in the bar of the FCC and said: “If it hadn’t been for you, you bastard, we wouldn’t have had to suffer that miserable skunk Nixon defiling the office of President of the United States.”

He was only half joking.

It turned out he was referring to an incident when Nixon went to South Korea in 1953 as Vice President and visited several US military units by helicopter, with a press entourage of which I was a member as the Reuter representative. Japan and Korea were my first overseas postings as a foreign correspondent.

Panmunjom, Korea, 1953 - UN Correspondents with Indian soldiers. Back row: Jack Sampson, Ed Hymoff, INS, Ian Stewart, Reuters; Front row: Frank Jordan, UPI (later NBC), Forrest "Woody"  Edwards, AP.

At the last the stop, where there was a phone link to Japan, I insisted on calling the Reuter office in Tokyo. The line was - as always - atrocious and it took some time for me to dictate my story, much to the agitation of the US Army press liaison officer.

He decided to send the rest of the media pack back to Seoul according to his schedule and keep one helicopter waiting for me. However, I was still talking to Tokyo when Nixon was ready to return to the South Korean capital and the helicopter assigned to me was blocking the path of the one on which he had been travelling.

So he was escorted to the first chopper in line and I, when I finally emerged, was given the vice-presidential machine.

On the way to Seoul, flying over mined paddy fields, the engine ceased functioning, and we plunged downwards. The engine gave a cough that kept the rotors spinning sufficiently to prevent a major crash but we landed heavily enough to destroy the undercarriage. Fortunately we did not land on a mine. We were picked up by a rescue helicopter and returned to Seoul.

My colleague reckoned that if Nixon had flown to Seoul in the defective chopper, together with his minders, it might have veered slightly and hit a mine or struck the ground hard enough to write off the future President of the United States.

After witnessing Nixon’s less-than-inspiring discourse with the troops in Korea and coming away unimpressed from a one-on-one interview with him in Hong Kong during a global tour he made in the mid-1960s before his successful bid for the White House, I always wondered how on earth Americans came to make him their President.

Nixon apart, my initiation as a foreign correspondent in Japan and Korea in 1953 and 1954 was an experience that confirmed for me that I had made the correct career choice when I accepted an offer to join Reuters. And lunching at the FCC in Hong Kong demonstrated that not all a correspondents’ bases need to be hardship posts. I had begun a great adventure that would take me subsequently to every country in East Asia, including Indonesia, the home of my future wife.

Being greeted by President Sukarno, whom I met more informally and talked to on many occasions, at a palace function, in 1956 or 1957.

 A grand gaggle of prominent foreign correspondents meet President Sukarno in his palace in Jakarta in 1955. Those whose names I remember are: Back row, first from left, Hans Martinot, a Dutch correspondent renowned for his coverage of the Indonesians' struggle for independence and at that time editor of the Aneta press agency;  second, Ian Stewart, Reuters; fourth, Bernard Kalb, The New York Times; sixth, Anthony Lawrence, BBC. The woman in the front row is Dorothy Russell, standing in for her husband, UPI correspondent Jack, who was ill, while the correspondent to her left, between two Indonesian officials, is John Ridley, from London's Daily Telegraph. Any jogs to my memory concerning the names of the others would be welcome.(I just discovered, after posting this pic that Jack Russell died in Japan in 2007. Hans Martinot and John Ridley are also among old friends now deceased. Anthony Lawrence celebrated his 100th birthday in Hong Kong in August, 2012!)

 

Bullie to blog to eBook - a technological transition

My first work of fiction - a short story - was published in The Bulletin in 1953. Sadly, The Bulletin's life ended recently. The final edition was published to mark Australia Day, January 26 - an ironic death date for a weekly that had been an Australian icon for 128 years. However, it was the name rather than the contemporary publication that was mourned by older journalists and writers, for The Bulletin had lost its literary cachet in recent decades. It became a news magazine, linking up with Newsweek, with a similar format. The old Bulletin - or Bullie, as it was widely called - was the size of a folded broadsheet - like the television guides and special supplements inserted in newspapers today - with newsprint pages and a red cover. It had a topical selection of articles and political commentary and published some of the best poetry and short stories being written by Australians (and New Zealanders) at the time. It was the ambition of most serious writers and poets to see their work in The Bulletin.

Two short stories that I submitted to The Bulletin in 1953 were both published. The thrill of seeing them in print was surpassed only by my delight in finding in my letter-box some two decades later a package from Macmillan Inc in New York containing a copy of my newly-published book, The Peking Payoff.

During the intervening years I concentrated on writing the copy - newspaper stories and magazine features - that kept me in employment as a foreign correspondent. I did take time to write a non-fiction book on Indonesia and tried my hand at a couple of novels (which weren’t very good) but none of these works were accepted for publication.

However, when I focused on writing fiction in the 1970s and 1980s I was successful with my first serious attempt, The Peking Payoff, and subsequent novels of the same genre, all of which were published internationally.

Since publishers make no commitment to keep a book in print, it can disappear from stores and libraries while people are still interested in reading it.

My answer to this was to publish my old, out-of-print works on a blog, following the procedures provided by TypePad. So came to pass Writer's Blog. That's a pun if you did not grasp it at first sight.:-(

First, I had to scan the pages of my old books and convert the images to editable text. After some initial frustration I finally discovered how to operate the scanner in conjunction with the software package that came with it. Another rewarding eureka moment.

There has been an even greater technological leap forward for the writer with the development of the eBook. And would-be authors can now bypass the tedious and depressing process of trying to interest agents and publishers in their books by self-publishing.

I have now published my historical novel Nanyang as an Amazon eBook. It was a new learning experience, an interesting exercise, and a technological challenge. But Amazon supplies the tools and lays out the steps precisely. We’ve come a long way since Johann Gutenberg!

Building an eBook is the latest in a series of technological advances that I have had to master over a long lifetime of writing newspaper articles, magazine features, short stories and books. Adjusting to change has not always been easy but there has been one constant: qwerty. It has given me some sense of continuity through my transition from the old standard typewriters in the reporters’ room of The New Zealand Herald, to the Royal portable (in a hard case) which I carried around Asia, followed by an electric typewriter, early computers with their requisite, large floppies, more sophisticated desktops and, finally, laptops and notebooks.

It took me a little time to adapt to some electronic developments. The emergence of the mouse delighted people whose typing skills had never progressed beyond hunt-and-peck. I didn’t warm to it at first but learned to appreciate its functionality. Still, I much prefer tapping away at the keys.

I learned touch typing in my teens, coached by my commercially-trained sister on an ancient typewriter which my father kept at home for his occasional use, and my fingers were soon gliding effortlessly over the qwerty key arrangement and transferring my thoughts seamlessly to a sheet of paper - and later to a computer screen.

At the same time as I was keeping pace with the technological progress in copy production methods, I also had to stay abreast of changes in how the written words were sent to a newspaper from a foreign outpost. During my Reuters years in Jakarta I carried typewritten pages from my office to the post office where the words were painstakingly counted for later billing before they were passed through a slot to a Cable & Wireless operator. He then transmitted my report by Morse key to Singapore. From there they were relayed to London by Teletype.

Some three and a half decades later, when I was working in Singapore, I transmitted stories to The Daily Telegraph in London direct from my laptop computer via a modem and telephone plug. Now, with satellite links, foreign correspondents can file from anywhere.

But the quantum jump for me has been publishing an eBook. It is not a go-it-alone option for a novice, who should seek editorial advice, but for an experienced writer it offers a unique, painless way to get his or her book out into the market place.

The Beginning

We were anonymous. I never had a byline in my early years in journalism. No one did. The most you could hope for was to have something like, "By a special correspondent" at the top of your story. That meant you had joined the top rank of reporters. Some famous correspondents became known for their work during the Second World War or for their coverage of major international events but you usually had to know who was covering what to be able to identify a "special correspondent".

This didn’t worry us when we were young cadets. We were simply thrilled to be employed by a newspaper. We hung on the words of senior reporters who had stories to tell about murders or earthquakes or some foreign country they had visited.

The normal shift for reporters on The New Zealand Herald was 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. but most of us wandered into the reporters’ room around noon or earlier, partly in the hope there would be a breaking news story to which we would be assigned and partly because we just loved the atmosphere.

Often Jack Baragwanath, a large, ebullient, red-faced extrovert, who drove a spiffy, open-top sports car and was the first person I ever saw smoking with a cigaret holder, would be perched on the edge of the desk of the Chief of Staff, Noel Chappell, as the latter was making last minute additions to the assignment book. Noel was tall and thin, with sunken cheeks and the general appearance of a man who was suffering from some terrible debilitating disease, although he was perfectly healthy. He would give a resigned half-smile as we gathered around to listen to Bags, who was Deputy Chief Of Staff and the most senior reporter, holding forth on all manner of topics with the assured air of someone whose written words in the newspaper were treated as gospel.

We loved them both.

I don’t know exactly when I first decided I wanted to be a writer. It was sometime in my teens as I was reading my way through Ernest Hemingway’s books. In my second-to-last year at Auckland Grammar I knew I wanted to be a foreign correspondent and a writer of books.