It started with a newspaper article, that impersonal medium seeming personally addressed to me – two American women living in Istanbul were looking for submissions for an anthology. I read twice to make sure I understood the Turkish completely.

I was living in Çanakkale, home to Troy, the birthplace of literature and Gallipolli, the end of the Ottoman empire. Both have a constant stream of visitors, but few stay for more than a day or two, blown on by the incessant wind. Though there are a few expats, there is no expat community and I was lonely.

After two years in Turkey I was not put off by the title “Tales from the Expat Harem.” I knew it was more than the seedy stereotype known outside of Turkey. The harem was the centre of the Sultan’s household, the domestic powerbase that supported him. Girls were brought to the harem from throughout the Sultan’s realm, many from outside the borders of modern Turkey.

Thrown into a new culture and new language, I shared some of their bewilderment and loneliness. Though the harem bore little relation to my life in Turkey, the desire to link to a community of women in a similar position was overpowering. Letting my 9-month-old oversleep, I wrote a raw piece about my first arrival to Turkey and hit send.

It was rejected.

The editors, Anastasia Ashman and Jennifer Eaton Gökmen, asked if I could write another piece, more relevant to life within Turkey. ‘The Food Factory’ was about my acceptance of my place as gelin, bride, within a typical Turkish family. Through months of back and forth editing my imagination was alive with thoughts of the book’s launch. I would travel to Istanbul, meet these unknown friends, live my 15 minutes.

It didn’t happen.

By the time of the book’s Turkish release in late 2005 I was over eight months pregnant, and the six-hour commute with a toddler was too much. The official launch was a week after my son’s birth; 15 minutes of sleep was the limit of my ambition. Needless to say I missed the American launch the following spring.

Lines of communication sprang up with other contributors. E-mail exchanges of writing, Facebook friendships and Twitter conversations expanded my circle.

Three years later Anastasia announced her ambition to refashion the website as a global niche, a hub around which expats, travellers, the culturally aware could interact. Launched in October 2009 the expat+HAREM has sparked conversations on topics as varied as motherhood, language, archaeology and the dangers of smiling. Contributors, both male and female, are geographically spread from Taiwan to Turkey, New York to Moscow and represent half a dozen nationalities. Rose Deniz, spurred on by Tara Lutman Ağacayak, developed Dialogue2010, a place to talk about art, culture and the hybrid life of the expat.

In the last eight months I finally made it to Istanbul and met Anastasia. I participated in a global phone conversation with nine other expats. I’ve set up my own business. I’ve expanded my blog.

Being surrounded by a dynamic group has ignited my drive. Friendships made with inspiring, creative women, linking up through social media, interacting in a real sense, having real conversations.

I’ve found my community without stirring from my desk chair.

2007 photograph of the Harem at Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, © Catherine Yiğit.

Catherine Yiğit runs a language-editing business Skaian Gates English, blogs at the Skaian Gates and tweets with an ever-expanding circle of expats, writers and the culturally aware from her home in northwest Turkey. She holds a degree in geology from Trinity College in Dublin.

Like many travelers who have spent time in Beijing recently, I read Andrew Jacobs’ piece in The New York Times on the demolition of Gulou, an ancient neighborhood near the Drum and Bell Towers. Photojournalist Matthew Niederhauser writes about the logistics of the video story behind the story on DSLR Newsshooter, the website of Guardian photojournalist Dan Chung.

Amazingly, this was Niederhauser’s first video project for the Times.

Photo of Matthew Niederhauser from DSLR Newsshooter.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language by Robert McCrum, 2010, Viking Press, London.

For better or worse, English is the pre-eminent language of global capitalism, of the Internet, of popular culture and international relations. One of the principal reasons for Ireland’s popularity as a destination for migrant workers and students is the possibility of living among native English speakers who have the reputation for facility with the language. I myself taught a course on Anglo-Irish literature to foreign students for several years. Poles, Chinese, Nigerians, Pakistanis — everyone, it seemed, wanted to learn English.

In his book, Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, Robert McCrum examines the medium of ‘Globish,’ as identified by a former IBM executive, Jean-Paul Nerriere. He coined the term based on his observations of Asian workers who were able to successfully communicate with one another as non-native English speakers in a truncated form of English.

Globish consists of a vocabulary of about 1,500 words, eliminates idiom and vernacular, and provides a simple syntax that minimises the number of clauses in a sentence.

Teaching a course on Irish literature gave me a chance to engage with young men and women from all over the world. The students I taught, in a classroom of the Museum Building at Trinity College in Dublin, were a hodge podge of different backgrounds and nationalities. They ranged from the son of a teacher in Gdansk to the daughter of a fireman in Boston, from the son of an army officer in Nairobi to the daughters of a pediatrician in Kuala Lumpur. They had two things in common, an interest in language and a love of books, two sentiments I reciprocated heartily.

Although the standard of spoken and written English among the students was variable, all had a modicum of English, certainly enough to get by, a Globish standard if you will. So when I knew that some of the non-native English speakers were having difficulty what I did, subconsciously, was to prepare ‘Globish’ lectures in which concepts were explained using relatively simple terminology. Local vernacular, which I used to give students a flavour of Irish writing, was either eliminated or dealt with cautiously. One of the major issues, however, was the translation of Irish idioms or slang terms, particularly in the novels of James Joyce and Flann O’Brien.

Sometimes, however, the students picked up their own local vernacular from the streets of Dublin. I remember on one occasion trying to explain one of Joyce’s particularly difficult passages in Ulysses. After a solid 20 minutes of me speaking, when I became very conscious of the entire class, even the native English speakers, getting increasingly lost in translation, I finally finished my explanation and asked what they all thought. The classroom was silent until a teenager from Krakow named Piotr —  whose English was very limited indeed — looked up and said “ah Jaysus” in a perfect imitation of a working-class Dublin accent. The class descended into an uproar of laughter.

Robert McCrum’s book looks at that very generation of literature students who increasingly use English as a means of expression. McCrum examines how English spread throughout the globe in tandem with the spread of the British Empire and how, in fact, English was one of the principal weapons in the cultural arsenal of colonialism.  Despite this, he argues that rather than being a tool of oppression this new form of English, Globish, is a potentially liberating phenomenon. He suggests that it allows cross-border communication using modern technologies enabling cultural and intellectual exchanges to take place between people who would otherwise never have the chance to interact or exchange ideas. “Language becomes more than just an essential means of communication; it embodies a contemporary aspiration, expressing a willingness to innovate with new ideas, to adapt old uses and to enfranchise new people,” he writes.

However, this highlights a central problem with McCrum’s argument, namely that Globish is a relatively limited and limiting mode of expression. It is tied quite explicitly to the economic arena of trade, finance and global capitalism. As useful on a pedestrian, everyday level as it is, Globish lacks the vocabulary of political or cultural modes of expression. Nerriere argues that Globish will retard the spread of English and will ultimately render it useless as a global language.

History is full of pidgin languages that emerged as a stop-gap for people from disparate groups to communicate. These pidgins are usually linked to specific purposes, such as trade.  Ireland’s colonial past and its problematic relationship with its geographical neighbour Britain in general, and the English in particular, left many legacies. Probably the most lasting legacy is the English language, which my visiting students were so intrigued by. Posing and answering questions about Joyce and Flann O’Brien, Beckett and Elizabeth Bowen, I was reminded that visitors wanted a far deeper engagement with Ireland and Irish culture than a phrasebook could possibly provide.

Perhaps they only wanted to get on in life, perhaps they saw learning English as a path to career advancement. A Chinese colleague once told a friend of mine that she viewed English as a tool to make money. But all of these students of English wanted to learn and to know, and not simply to get by. As a simplified and utilitarian variant of English, Globish is unlikely to have the lasting impact of its parent language or to give its users what they want in the long term out of any language.

A writer and teacher in Dublin, Garry Prendiville founded SpeakWrite Media and is the editor of The Moth and the Candle.

Above, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s ‘Sphere within a Sphere’ at the Museum Building, Trinity College, Dublin. 2010 photograph by Javi Masa of Sevilla, Spain.

“It’s quite obvious. You’re seeing a knuckle-ball effect.”

– Rabi Mehta, an aerospace engineer at NASA, on the official ball of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa.

FIFA announced the official ball of the 2010 World Cup — the Adidas Jabulani — in December 2009. Adidas called it the roundest and most accurate ball ever made, citing wind tunnel testing at Loughborough University in England and its own laboratory in Germany.

In June, NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, California, released analysis indicating the ball wobbles at speeds of 45-50 miles per hour. It doesn’t look like the Loughborough people were talking to the NASA people.

Two observations:

1. NASA’s timing and use of sports to teach concepts of physics is brilliant.

2. Experts in computational fluid dynamics, such as physicists at NASA and designers at Formula 1 racing teams, have an opportunity to collaborate on equipment for future sports events. The potential for co-branding, education, and credibility is substantial.

]]> http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/07/nasa-on-the-world-cup-ball/feed/ 0 http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/06/entrepreneurs-in-singapore/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=entrepreneurs-in-singapore http://www.mercurybrief.com/2010/06/entrepreneurs-in-singapore/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 04:05:36 +0000 Geraldine Kan http://www.mercurybrief.com/?p=3477

Funny how things in work and personal life converge — maybe because one is feeding off the other. I’m building a communications consulting and training business in Singapore, LINEA, and meeting some really cool, independent businesspeople as a result. I’m also working with volunteers to beef up the learning program for children at the Whampoa Family Service Centre.

Through these seemingly unrelated events, people and places, I’m learning that diversity and differing points of views are crucial in strengthening the collaborative process. Yes, it takes longer to get to a conclusion and if not managed well, becomes a spaghetti-like mess of meetings and endless talk. But without it, originality, creativity and ah-hah moments would be few. And how would we develop if we don’t take in new ways of looking at things?

Take something as simple as goals, for instance. The small-and-medium (SMB) businesspeople I’ve met have an independent streak tied very tightly with pragmatism and a link to their business goals. Paradoxically, their goals aren’t measured purely by numbers but whether they’re doing something tied with their beliefs and ideals and ultimately makes them happy. In my mind, business success had always been tied firmly to the bottom line.

After starting LINEA with a focus on public relations for small businesses, I also quickly realised that small businesses don’t care about putting marketing disciplines in silos — they don’t have the time or resources, and they want everything linked together. So I’m working with other independent partners to meet SMB needs so they don’t need to go hunting around. Larger companies call this Integrated Marketing and sometimes view it as, uh, a Utopian state. Happily, I’m meeting other independent consultants like myself — and am looking forward to meeting more potential partners and learning from them.

Through a photography class, I’m also meeting independent shopkeepers who are totally going against the grain. Each photography student is shooting a single travel-related theme. I’m shooting “Singapore Retail: Beyond Orchard Road,” to extend the boundaries of the usual Singapore shopping experience.

I’ve discovered that stores in the area of Ann Siang Hill, Club Street and Haji Lane (away from the usual tourist belt called Orchard Road) have strong, distinctive personalities and are run by young people with guts and strong vision. Their view is that the books, clothes, accessories, homeware and other products that make them happy will also make their potential customers happy to hang out there — and buy stuff.

Tying this back to the volunteer work I’m doing, I’d like to take some of the older, 11- and 12-year-old Whampoa kids to visit the area and meet these store owners and hang out in bookstores. There’s a really cool kids’ bookstore called Woods in the Books on Club Street. I’d like the kids to be able to chat with entrepreneurial young people who aren’t confined to the mainstream, so that the kids realise they’re not on some unchangeable hamster wheel that defines conventional success.

And at Whampoa, new volunteers have come up with some really cool, specific suggestions to improve the program. One volunteer suggested we weave in some mathematics rather than focus on English all the time. So we’re experimenting with a “manufacturing and commerce” game. We placed the kids in teams and gave them Monopoly money that they “earned” by answering mathematics questions. With this money, they bought raw materials to make simple stuff — like bookmarks and decorate clothes pegs. Next week they’re going to make goods, price them and “sell” them back to the volunteers.

Quite honestly, our strategy was good but execution less than perfect. We’d forgotten the power of little boys’ cliques and weren’t prepared. Pandemonium broke out when the boys didn’t want to be in the same team as the kids from a different neighborhood. (Sound like the real world much?) But – we’re learning.

While work, retail, and voluntarism seem like diverse worlds without natural links, I’m discovering an independent streak does exist in a country many have called, rightly or wrongly, a Nanny State. I’m hoping this streak develops quickly into strong brushstrokes that bring colour, originality and innovation to our canvas.

Top, a staff member at “Books Actually” on Club Street in Singapore. 2010 photograph by Geraldine Kan.

Geraldine Kan recently founded LINEA in Singapore.

A systematic approach to watching football in South Africa boils down to airplanes, buses, hydration and comfortable walking shoes. Alastair Cameron, an operations expert in global sporting events, provides an update from the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

Alastair operates Global Nomad, a sports marketing consultancy, and has supported four editions of the Olympic Games: Sydney, Athens, Beijing and Vancouver. An Australian, Alastair’s portfolio also includes the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay, two Commonwealth Games (Manchester and Melbourne), the Sydney Paralympic Games and the Doha 2006 Asian Games. He last reported for The Mercury Brief from Vancouver.

Q1. What is your role in South Africa?

My role is Match Day Experience Manager, working with a USA-based agency handling arrangements for various sponsors. I am here for six weeks. Based in Cape Town, we fly to matches all over South Africa. The agency primarily supports the Olympic Games, but supports other global events as well.

Our day typically begins around 5 a.m. when we meet at the hotel, gather our guests and head to the Cape Town airport. There we board our flight, often to Johannesburg some two hours away. There we are met by our ground transport supplier and transported to the pre-match hospitality venue where the guests can relax for an hour or two and have lunch and refreshments. However, sometimes the drive between the destination airport and the stadium can be up to four hours. Then we head to the stadium. We attend the match and then reverse the process, skipping the hospitality portion. We often return to Cape Town in the wee hours of the morning, sometimes 22 hours after we first started.

My role is to manage all aspects of the day, working with the suppliers, coordinating with our locally based venue staff in each city, any airport teams we have in place, the airlines we fly with, and the hospitality providers. My number one objective is making sure the guests have an enjoyable and safe day, returning back to Cape Town with me.

Q2. World Cup football is being played in 10 stadiums in South Africa. As people around the world watch these matches, what should they know about the unique logistics of the tournament?

Several sponsors have opted for a Base Camp model to manage their operations because it is not practical to have hotels and teams in 10 cities. So the distances we cover in a day are challenging. At least five of the stadiums require us to fly into Johannesburg and then bus to them. Four others we fly directly into. And we can actually walk to the stadium in Cape Town. One of our key concerns is always guest safety, so this is a great way, and a great city, for us to operate in. We know where all our people are all the time.

Q3. From your position on the ground, how does the FIFA World Cup feel different as an event than, for example, an edition of the Olympic Games?

The vibe here is fabulous. Like an Olympic Games, people are from all over. The South Africans are very warm and welcoming. The noise from the vuvuzelas, the loud South African horns you hear in the background as a constant drone, has even grown on me. The big difference is that this is a single sport event, so if you are not a huge football fan, you may be out of luck. Whilst I have never been an avid football fan, I have always watched World Cup matches over the years. There are more similarities than differences.

Q4. What events so far have stood out for you in this World Cup experience, and what are you looking forward to?

I was at the Opening Ceremony and Match 1, South Africa vs. Mexico. The local fans were very much in evidence, but so were many Mexican fans. I am also looking forward to Match 64, the final, when we will be back in Jo’burg. Attending one of Australia’s matches, the draw between us and Ghana, was also exciting. It was terrific to be amongst so many of my countrymen in a distant land supporting our team, although, sadly, they did not make the second round.

Q5. What Cape Town bar has been taken over by insiders managing the operations of the World Cup?

I have not had a lot of chance to hit many bars. But here in Cape Town we are based in the Waterfront area, where Ferryman’s is popular, as is Quay Four. There have been a number of temporary structures built in this area as well. Also, in Cape Town you have Long Street in the center of town, where there are some great bars in big, old colonial buildings with great verandahs looking over the street below. A few miles away is Camp’s Bay out along the coast where there are some good bars too.

Above, Alastair on one of many bus trips to a World Cup football match in South Africa.

Seven hundred people in North Carolina are basing a new business model on the idea of me and my family changing our behavior when we go to the beach this summer. They are re-inventing the T-shirt, and they are some of the most optimistic people you will ever meet.

Going to the beach is a series of rituals. We overload the car. We drive six hours from Chapel Hill to Hilton Head Island although other beaches are only three hours away, because that’s the place our family adopted. We pack cold drinks in coolers and sit in the sand under umbrellas and build castles with moats and turrets. We ride bicycles along paths shaded by palmetto trees to the plantation ruins of William E. Baynard, who grew cotton before the Civil War. We pay $18 for T-shirts that say “Salty Dog Cafe.” Sea Island cotton hasn’t been grown on Hilton Head since 1920, but when we return home, these T-shirts from Honduras and Peru remind us of happy days.

We buy T-shirts because of the messages printed on them, but we spend very little time thinking about where they come from, what they’re made of, or who makes them. This is what Eric Henry and Tom Sineath want to change.

They run TS Designs, a small apparel company in Burlington, North Carolina, and they ask a simple question. Would my family make different decisions if we knew who made the T-shirt? What if we could point to the Stanly County farm of Ronnie Burleson, who grows cotton for TS Designs, on our drive to the beach? Or to Wes Morgan’s cotton gin in New London, where the cotton is cleaned? Or Mark Leonard’s yarn spinning plant in Thomasville or Brian Morrell’s knitting plant in Wendell? It’s a 750-mile path for their shirt, about the same as our trip to the beach and back. But it’s much shorter than the 17,000-mile global supply chain for most T-shirts.

What if knowing all this would cost us $21 rather than $18? Henry and Sineath (pronounced SIGH-neath) believe we’ll spring for the extra $3, because we all want to help our neighbors and we all want to reduce consumption of petroleum. So they and about 700 other people in the textile business created a brand, “Cotton of the Carolinas,” that connects you with the people behind your shirt at the same time you’re showing personal connections to beaches, universities and football teams.

There are other reasons to buy their shirts, or, more accurately, to suggest that beach shops, schools, companies, brewpubs and athletic teams source them from TS Designs. Their smallest quantity is 200 shirts — where the price is about $10 each — but starting this summer they’re offering one-off designs on their website for $26. They use ring-spun yarn, which is more expensive than open-ended yarn, but stronger and softer. They patented a printing process that embeds the design into the fibers of a garment-dyed shirt, in a high-tech version of batik. They print with water-based inks rather than non-breathable plastic inks containing polyvinyl chloride or phtalates, which have questionable effects on people and the environment. They maintain a company garden so their 25 employees can afford to eat local organic produce. They sew on a thoughtful tag showing where and when the cotton was harvested.

Almost 40 years ago, based on her experiences in southern France, Alice Waters launched a local food movement in Berkeley, California. Henry and Sineath believe the same kind of movement can happen with cotton. Like William E. Baynard and cotton from the Sea Islands, they believe we’ll pay a little bit more to know where and who it came from.

Above, a ‘Dirt to Shirt in 750 Miles’ T-shirt from TS Designs. Below, the state flag of South Carolina celebrates the role of palmetto trees in the Revolutionary War battle of Sullivan’s Island on 28 June 1776.

“It’s simple. In the same way that anyone learning German becomes a Nazi, or anyone learning French becomes an ass___, learning Chinese has only one outcome — Communism.”

• From Aasif Mandvi’s hilarious bit on teaching Mandarin Chinese in Hacienda Heights, a town in Los Angeles County, Calif. For The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, produced by Oren Brimer and edited by Daric Schlesslman. Worth watching for Mandvi’s conversation with five smart middle-schoolers at the end of the segment.

The Los Angeles Times provides more details of the Hacienda Heights curriculum issue. More information about the Chinese government’s Chinese Language Council International, also known as Hanban, is available at the Hanban website.

Above, Aasif Mandvi points to a flash card example of Chinese language ‘propaganda’ pervading public schools in Hacienda Heights. From The Daily Show, 7 June 2010.

Thanks to Richard Burger and The Peking Duck.

Beijing writer and translator Brendan O’Kane’s reaction to Buzzfeed’s “16 Items They Only Sell at Chinese Wal-Marts.” Above, Item No. 1, crocodiles.

“When I first moved to China in 2002, I got to Harbin — the city in the Northeast where I first lived — about two weeks after the first Wal-Mart opened there. I avoided it for months out of some pretense that I was having a ‘genuine China experience,’ but after a while I succumbed to the desire for breakfast cereal and cheese, and shamefacedly made my way to the Harbin Wal-Mart only to find that it was exactly the same as a regular Chinese supermarket. The only difference was that all of the employees wore nametags with their English names. I spotted a couple of ‘Happy’s’ and a couple of ‘Apple’s’ and other standard Chinese English names, and after scouring the entire supermarket for something, ANYTHING, that I might want, I got my groceries (eggs, bacon, a couple of rolls and a thing of socks) rung up by a checkout girl whose English nametag said ‘Lonely.’

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt so bad before or since.”

– Brendan O’Kane