What is the date you began writing this memoir and the date when you completed the memoir? This is a difficult question. I don’t remember when I started writing it, it could be a few years after I left medical academia at the end of 2006. I am guessing 2008 but I did not write continuously. I completed it in 2012. I found an agent who found a publisher, however, I decided against signing with the publisher.
My memoir was put on the backburner while I worked on other projects which became my first and second published books; Lest We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak (2018) and Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir (2020).
Click on the below link to purchase “We Forget: A Doctor’s Experience with Life and Death During the Ebola Outbreak” from Amazon
Click on the below link to purchase “Into Africa, Out of Academia: A Doctor’s Memoir” from Amazon
My memoir underwent many revisions before I sent it to Vine Leaves Press in 2020 and it was accepted in 2021 for publication in 2022.
Click on the link below to purchase “The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly” from Vine Leaves Press.
https://www.vineleavespress.com/the-girl-who-taught-herself-to-fly-by-kwan-kew-lai.html
Where did you do most of your writing for this memoir? And please describe in detail. From 2007 on, I volunteered all over the world volunteering my medical services mainly in Africa. In my spare time I wrote bits and pieces of my memoir. When I returned home, I went back to work as a doctor. I continued writing at home in between my work, mainly in my kitchen, sometimes in my back porch when the weather was nice.
What were your writing habits while writing this memoir- did you drink something as you wrote, listen to music, write in pen and paper, directly on laptop; specific time of day? I wrote directly on my laptop, occasionally listening to classical music, sometimes listening to NPR.
Out of all the specific memories you write about in this memoir, which ONE MEMORY was the most emotional for you to write about? And can you share that specific excerpt with us here. The excerpt can be as short or as long as you prefer, and please provide page numbers or Chapter number as references.
The one memory in my memoir was Chapter 15 page 178 This chapter described how my father gave Wan, his fifth and the youngest baby at the time, to his brother and his wife without telling my mother.
Excerpt:
The day arrived for my uncle, aunt, and Ah Paw to leave for Kuala Lumpur. That morning, my father had Ah Yee dress baby Wan in her best. We stood under the spreading arms of a rambutan tree by the flower garden to say goodbye. Ah Yee held the baby, picking up her arm to wave at them. At last, my father said to her, “Hoe yi kiá la.” Give her the baby. Confused, Ah Yee squeezed Wan. My aunt reached over for the baby but Wan twisted her body and clung to Ah Yee’s neck. Ah Yee suddenly understood what my father was up to: he was giving the baby away to his brother. Wan started to scream when my father wrenched her away from Ah Yee’s grip. Relieved of her baby, she stood under the rambutan tree and began to cry. My aunt held the crying baby, who was still craning for Ah Yee. With her free hand, my aunt handed Ah Yee a pair of golden earrings. Ah Yee did not take them, sat down, and let her tears flow down her cheeks.
My father took the earrings and said, “Hoe sim.” Have a heart. He told her to have pity on a woman who could not have children of her own; Ah Yee had so many she should be able to part with one. His brother was doing the family a favor by helping to raise Wan. There would be one less mouth to feed. To him, she was just another baby girl who could never carry on the family name, not a great loss, but to Ah Yee, she was her flesh and blood, and she was still breastfeeding her. The sudden separation was too much for her.
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Can you describe the emotional process of writing about this ONE MEMORY? I have very fond memory of my baby sister, Wan, and when she was wrenched away from my mother and from us forever, I tried to imagine the pain and sorrow my mother went through as she was still breastfeeding the baby. For days afterward, she suffered from the pain of breast engorgement and had to manually express milk from them. I countered the loss of my sister with a paragraph about her looking like a princess when she was being washed in a fabulous floral bath to lower her fever and to sooth her skin rash.
Were there any deletions from this excerpt that you can share with us? My aunt handed my mother a pair of gold earrings when Wan was taken from my mother’s arms. My mother did not take them but my father did. I did not know what my aunt’s thinking was when she did that. I grappled with the idea of the pair of gold earrings in exchange for Wan as a transaction. In the end, I rewrote the last two paragraphs attempting to soften the blow of losing Wan and to try to explain why my aunt gave my mother the pair of gold earrings.
Excerpt:
Looking back, I believe my aunt handed the pair of golden earrings as her way of expressing her gratitude to my mother for giving up her baby to a complete stranger to raise. I do not think she meant the earrings were compensation enough in exchange for a baby girl. It would have been more humane if my mother had been forewarned. My father did not feel the need to let her know, and during that post-war period, men made the decisions, and their women were to comply no matter how heart-wrenching it was going to be.
Because of Wan’s adoption, I always had the lingering fear that the youngest baby girl might be the next target of my father’s scheme. After all, he had to spend his hard- earned cash feeding her see png, dead rice, gaining nothing in return.
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