This post is by Norma Wong. Born in Hong Kong, Norma has lived in various countries in Europe and Asia. For the last ten years she been resident in Norway.
Read more about Norma on our Friends of Pens page here.
A murmuration
“The birds are going home!” In my defence it was a picture-perfect, cosy sight on a winter evening with deep snow, high cotton candy clouds, and a murmuration of starlings sweeping across the pink sky before dusk. Like a weightless silken veil blown by the wind, they swirled from one end of the horizon to the other, then disappeared behind the hills. My passing comment, however, has become a running joke with my boyfriend, for my overly romanticised view of nature. Of course, most birds do not have homes except when nesting. They sleep wherever they landed for the night.
Perhaps then it is just us humans who are obsessed with the concept of home. Even though the people who moved around, across plains, borders, oceans, and continents, are as important to human history as those who settled. People move, but we love to ask others, “where’s home?” How often do we get a straightforward answer?
When I started writing short stories, I quickly realised that I wanted to write about people like me: people to whom too many things have happened since they left home; people who have accumulated so many life experiences that they can no longer translate them back fully into their native tongues. At the same time, they are not quite at home in the place they choose to live, or where they find themselves living.
Perpetual outsiders
The main characters in my stories are perpetual outsiders. These stories are my way to explore life at the margins; how individuals live with a tentative sense of home.
Annie, for example, did her best to fit in. In order to adapt, she let go of a large part of who she had been before. It was easier to rebuild herself, to let go of what did not fit the new life. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, she became a completely different being, or so she would like to believe.
Mahmood had just reached his new home after fleeing a war. Having struggled through a depression, he wanted to get back on his feet and to start again with what he knew best. However, he then had to confront the new challenges of settling into a completely foreign world that made him question his identity and values.
Marina never felt much emotional connection with the place she was born or the places where she found herself living. Dubai or Oslo were more or less the same to her, as long as her job was secure and her accommodation paid for. There was no space to think about anything else in between airports, work, gym, grocery shopping, ordering food, cafes and restaurants, vacations, dates. There were also the occasional planting and resurrection of houseplants, and the contemplation of the meaning of roots.
Sam, in contrast, found a deep connection with the nature surrounding where she lived. She was comfortable being the odd one out. She chose to live a secluded life and expected no one to even know the name of the country she came from. She kept her memories in a wooden box high on a shelf in the middle of her cottage, deep inside the pine forest.
Starling
What I enjoy writing the most through these characters, are their interactions with others, as well as the lands they find themselves in. How do they manage being in between? What do they do with a past that people around them do not share? With whom do they connect, from whom do they distance themselves? Like the murmuration of starlings, these relationships make endless combinations that give me inspiration to keep writing.
Last weekend, on a walk along the barley field that had just turned gold, I spotted a lone starling on a tree, its body dark as the night sky in deep winter and dotted with the silver stars that gave it its name. “What are you doing here?” I asked, surprised. It tilted its head, then flew away, leaving me with the question. I will keep searching for the answer in my stories.
Beautiful writing, Norma. I think most of us can feel a connection to your ‘outsiders’. My most financially successful single story was about a girl who ran away from an abusive home as a child, ‘Lost’. My first story as an adult, a novel still needing further editing before I send it to a publisher, is about a girl in the Neolithic, who has spent her childhood and youth as an outsider. I’d just not connected that link before, but perhaps we all feel ‘outside’ in some ways. Perhaps it is what makes us write.
Thank you, Gill! Glad that the theme resonates with you. Yes, I agree, we probably all have some experience of being an outsider whether we have travelled or not. We are vulnerable when singled out, but writing turns the unpleasant feeling into something to relate to others 🙂 I think we also seek out characters who are at odd with their surroundings for the same reason! Best of luck with the novel on the Neolithic girl! It sounds epic!
Thank you, Norma. I’m in the middle of a huge music-writing project at present, and lost all my copies of the novel just before, during and after our move from Wales to Orkney, so I’ll have to return to the single paper copy I have to begin edits and rewrites, so I’ve been procrastinating for rather too many years, but I’d like to get back to it.
Best of luck with all your writing. What would you suggest as the first of your books to read?
What an evocative post! Thanks for writing this, Norma.
Thank you, Gail! Glad you enjoyed it!
By definition, we, members of Pens Around the World, are all outsiders who have chosen to live somewhere far from “home”. Even those who return to their starting points find it hard to reconnect. I could never return to my country of origin. Especially NOW!
Thank you, Norma, for your thoughtful post.