The Only American

Having spent two days at the International Humanities Conference at the Park

Royal Hotel in Penang, I am reeling over my role as spokeswoman for America! I am one of the few non-Muslim presenters at the conference, and I definitely am the only woman wearing a short skirt! My presentation was the first day, so I got to swim through the next day and watch my friends squirm through their pre-presentation angst. When I first arrived, I noticed a woman who had no jacket on and realized she, like me, would be freezing cold in the overly air conditioned auditorium for the welcoming ceremonies. We began to chat, and I learned that she taught Bengali in Calcutta - lucky for me as I could pick her brain about Bengali writers.

After an enormous buffet lunch and more presentations in the afternoon, we dispersed at 5:30 to reconvene at 8:30 for a dinner at which "traditional dress" was encouraged; I borrowed Pearl's cheongsam that I'd posed in several years ago, and off I went on the bus, following Pearl's warning that I must not hold up my long dress as I walked because the slit would reveal my underpants. Oh, horrors! I tried to behave, but when I saw the culinary spread before us, I wallowed in the desserts especially: sago pudding with browned cane sugar and coconut cream was to DIE for! Pearly and Chandra rolled me home, tossed me in bed, and I was up at the crack of dawn to get to Bengali friend, Afroja's, paper at 8:30.

She didn't walk into the room until 8:45, oblivious that the presenters had already begun without her. After the first talk she quietly reminded the facilitator that she had arrived. Her paper and powerpoint were excellent, ordered, sophisticated and thoroughly substantiated - her 6 Bengali authors writing about Muslim women's rebellion. Talag, a term I was not familiar with, was in the titles of two of the stories; it means divorce, and Afroja and I talked about the different laws governing talag in Bangladesh (state law) and India (family law).

The two Iranian women at the right teach English Literature and their subjects are Emerson and O'Neill. I kept asking them what they thought about Persepolis but neither seemed to know of it. I told them that another Iranian had presented on the novel's use of images of the veil, but they missed it. Finally, by the end of the second day I got them together with the fellow who had written about it, and it turned out that they had been at school with his professor; this called for another photo, which seems to be all we do at this conference - the flash bulbs popping at every turn!

I had a long conversation with Malaysian novelist Chuah Guat Eng, who writes in English and has gotten flak from the Malaysian academic community for not writing in Bahasa Malay. One of her novels is a detective tale, and I'm going to track both of them down when I'm in KL this weekend. She asked about my writing, and I had to confess that I'd not finished anything of substance; she admitted that all writers feel that way, which, of course, makes me feel like a coward. Sigh.

I took the bus back to Pearly and Chandra's house in the gloomy afternoon drizzle after standing at the bus stop for what seemed like an age, but I watched as maybe 10 monkeys frolicked in the trees across the street, flying from branch to branch, leaping across to other trees, skittering up and down the branches, goading each other to do it again. Just as I took this picture of the view from the bus, we stopped at a large crowd of people blocked the road; a car had gone over the edge and smashed down on the rocks and sand.