Guest Post: Hal Levey’s Path to Publication

Guest Post: Hal Levey’s Path to Publication

Every self-publisher can recall how his/her first book was born. This is my story. “Under the Pong Pong Tree” is a historical novel dealing with the Japanese atrocities committed against the Chinese residents of Singapore during World War II. The book was incubated several years ago during a year spent as China Medical Board Visiting Professor on the medical faculty of the National University of Singapore. My journal of that year became a valuable background resource. I also met friends and colleagues who suffered under Japanese occupation. Nevertheless, the year in Southeast Asia was an exhilarating experience. I did a certain amount of recreational jungle-bashing upcountry in Malaysia, and befriended the RAF contingent at the Seletar Air Base in Singapore. I became close friends with Squadron Leader Darrol Stinton, MBE, and joined him and the RAF Seletar Sub-Aqua Club on an expedition to Pulau Perhentian (Perhentian Island) in the South China Sea. The purpose was to develop sea rescue capabilities for airmen lost at sea. The job previously was done by the Royal Navy, but, for some reason, they terminated such operations and the RAF was obliged to create their own system.

The airmen made me Honorary Member No. 1 of the Club, but harbored the faint suspicion that I was a CIA plant. Darrol died in 2012 from a hospital-borne infection at a military hospital in London. He was there for surgical replacement of titanium rods that supported his spine, stress-fractured from his years as a test pilot for the RAF. I brought him back to life in my book as Squadron Leader Darrol Stanton. I also borrowed Chinese and Malay names of individuals I had met as characters in my book. I did this to avoid inventing ethnic names that might inadvertently have had a lewd context.

The novel started to come to life when I spent a summer month in the Caribbean, lecturing to pre-med students at St. Georges University on the island of Grenada. This was a pleasant diversion, and St. Georges relied on visiting faculty, mainly from Australia, India, and the USA. Part of my stipend was a room at a first-class hotel perched on a glittering white sandy beach. I delivered lectures in the morning, and spent the afternoons sipping rum punch at a tiki bar next to the hotel. Sitting on a bar stool with time on my hands, I started to scribble an outline in pencil on a yellow legal pad. After much putting down and picking up of the manuscript over several years, it ultimately emerged as “Under the Pong Pong Tree.” The first draft ran to about 185,000 words, but I chopped it down to 78,000 words in the published version.

It is a gripping narrative, that also bears elements of a cautionary tale. In the book, the Japanese are portrayed as brutal and pitiless in their treatment of the Chinese residents of Singapore. They executed thousands and practiced decapitation almost as an art form. Times have changed. Today we view the Japanese as a tidy little people, hard-working, and steeped in their quaint cultural traditions. The other naughty nation, Germany, has emerged from the horrors of Naziism to become an economic powerhouse. One might wonder what the future holds for brutal regimes of the present day.

This is my first novel, and I am unaware of literary influences that have helped me along the way – although there must have been some. I find that I write from the omniscient viewpoint, with little inclination to emulate the machine-gun conversational style of the contemporary best-seller. Nor do I have an affinity for the current obsession with zombies or mutated mosquitoes the size of Greyhound buses. I lost interest in fairy tales when I was about eight years old. Although now that I think about it, I have toyed with the idea of writing a story about a hemophobic vampire. If I have a favorite author, it might be Archy, the poet reincarnated as a large cockroach, who chatted frequently with Mehitabel, a morally ambiguous cat who claimed to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra. Archy typed messages to his boss, Don Marquis, by diving headfirst onto the keys. The messages understandably all were in lower case and lacked apostrophes. That did not disturb the editors of the New York Sun, who were happy to publish Archy’s messages in the daily edition. Nevertheless, Archy complained to his boss about the shallowness of the reading public, who missed the fine points of his philosophy of life, but chose to focus on the paradox of Archy’s inability to manipulate the space bar.

I am making feeble attempts at marketing the book. I won’t bore you with details, but, if you write a book, you want it read. Of course, I also might call your attention to Boswell’s quote from Samuel Johnson: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” It adds up. A penny here, a penny there, and soon you have two cents.

 

Title: Under the Pong Pong Tree

Author: Hal Levey

Blurb: Nothing can prepare the Chinese residents of Singapore for the tyranny that is ahead when the Japanese invade Singapore during World War II.

They get a sense of their new reality when Col. Kosaka stands in the shade of a Pong Pong tree—a tree that bears poisonous fruit—and orders the beheading of Mr. Tan, owner of a rubber plantation.

Li Lian Goh, a beautiful, sixteen-year-old girl, survives the carnage that follows, but her family is torn apart—like so many others that come under the iron fist of the Japanese.

She’s consigned to a military brothel where she is impregnated by a cruel Japanese officer. Desperate to survive and protect her unborn daughter, she manages to escape and gives birth in a Malay village to a baby girl she names Maimunah.

Capt. Mike Cagle, an American fighter pilot in Vietnam, meets Maimunah in her home village many years later, and he’s dazzled by her beauty. But their blossoming romance seems doomed when a missile locks onto Cagle’s F-4.

Love and the brutality of war are woven together in a beautiful, heart-wrenching tapestry in Under the Pong Pong Tree.

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