An old friend came to see me a while ago.  I’d given her precise directions on when she should get off the train.  However, to my surprise, she phoned me from a completely different train station.

“I’m sorry, I missed the stop,” she said.

“Oh, that can happen,” I said.  “It’s easy to- -”

“I was paying attention.”  She paused and I could hear the phone line crackle.  “I didn’t get off the train because I just really didn’t think that you could possibly live there.  I mean, I looked out the window and there were a couple of cows.  And some grass.”

Although I don’t live quite as far in the country as this might sound, I’m certainly not in New York anymore.  Or Hong Kong.  There are, in fact, cows and sheep grazing freely in a pasture just a few blocks from my house.

My twenty-two-year-old nephew, born and bred in New York, came recently to visit me and almost ran for cover when he saw them.    “Are those wild cows?” he asked.

But I actually live in a lovely town, with smart sophisticated people and a great school.  And on a snowy day, this is what I see from my window:

This swan couple always swims in the canal outside our house.  And inside, I have this:

That’s Anibaba, the little cat we found on the beach on Bali.  She’s really happy she doesn’t need to go outside today, especially since she doesn’t have any under-fur.

Do I miss New York sometimes?  Yes.  Absolutely.  But when I have views like this from my window, I can deal with any wild cows.

If my hair isn’t cut perfectly, I get firmly rebuked (and rightly so) by photographers, makeup artists, and other people who need to make me appear presentable. I’ve learned that since my hair is all one length, every minuscule fault in the hair shows up on the photo or video.

I had to search through all of Holland for the right hairdresser and finally found her in the form of the lovely Elena at Toni & Guy in the Hague.  A few snips of her magical scissors and my hair is just right.

However, we always have this conversation at the beginning of our haircuts:

Elena inspects my hair before I get whisked away to be washed and conditioned.  As she looks more closely, she raises one perfect eyebrow.  Her British accent makes her sound even more incredulous.  “Have you been cutting off bits of your hair again?”

This is the part where I look down and begin to stammer.

Because Elena is as kind as she is beautiful, she smiles and says, “No, it’s all right.  You can cut your own hair if you want.”

But then she stops smiling and starts enunciating very clearly, to make sure I understand.  “But please try not to do anything that…  Would.  Be.  Impossible.  To.  Fix.  All right?”

As I nod earnestly, I hear her say under her breath, “Close shave this time.”

Sometimes I wake up in the morning when I haven’t been to Elena in a while, and my hair is so long that I can’t see, and then before I’m fully awake, I’ve taken a pair of scissors and hacked off a few chunks.  So this was one of my New Year’s resolutions, to not upset Elena anymore.

But guess what happened this morning?  Yep.

I just got great news this morning from Tracy Fisher, director of international rights at William Morris Endeavor:  foreign rights to Girl in Translation have been sold to Sweden, Norway, Finland and Denmark!  Very exciting!

My fantastic web designer, Ilsa Brink, has already started building the Dutch version of my website, which will be at www.jeankwok.nl

This means that I need to get her the Dutch translation as soon as possible.  Sigh.  I worked as a Dutch-English translator for a long time but I always go from Dutch to English.  From English to Dutch is a whole other kettle of fish.  I’m calling on the help of native speakers but it’s going to take some time and a lot of head-scratching.  And Ilsa is so unbelievably fast, I call her Octopus Ilsa because she must be doing eight things at once.

And I’ve just been told that I should really submit all my receipts and bookkeeping from last year to the person who does my taxes (my long-suffering father-in-law) by this weekend!  So that means I have to sort through the bag of wrinkled, tea-stained receipts and try to make some sense of it all.  Hmmm, where did all those bank statements go?

So now I’m back home in Holland again and incredibly jetlagged.  Although my last stop was in Ohio, I spent almost a week on the west coast so I’m actually dealing with a nine-hour time difference.  Of course, my two little boys woke me up at 6AM as usual today.

Speaking of Ohio, I am so glad I dragged my down coat and boots through half of America because I needed them there!  I’d gotten up at 3:30AM in Los Angeles so I could catch a flight to Ohio that would get me there in time for an event that evening.  Couldn’t really sleep on the plane.  I was feeling pretty tired by the time I got to my hotel and I needed to prepare for a telephone interview with Publishers Weekly in a few hours.  Then I saw the shower.  It was HUGE, with two rain heads, two shower heads and two rain bars.  I got in.  It was basically like a wild rapids water ride and by the time I managed to find the exit (did I mention it was huge?), I was wide awake.

Good thing too, because Laura Castellano, who did the PW interview, was really well-prepared and insightful.  And then another meeting that evening with some people who were warm enough to compensate for the freezing weather outside.

Finally, the long plane ride back to Holland.  It’s great to be back but it was also some trip.  I had so much fun and can’t wait until May 4, when the national book tour begins.  The novel will actually go into the world then and real people who aren’t professional book people will be able to read it.  How about that!

It’s been so great meeting booksellers and other book people at dinners across the country.  The best part of becoming a published writer for me is getting to meet so many people who genuinely love books, whether they’re readers or work as writers, booksellers, journalists, in book sales or publicity or marketing or whatever.

This morning, however, I did something a bit different and went to visit Starr King Elementary School in San Francisco, where my old friend Chris Rosenberg is the principal.  I visited several different classes and talked to the kids about writing, choices, and who we were in terms of race, gender or cultural identity.  They were so smart and thoughtful, and so far ahead of what I knew at their age.  The school has a very diverse population and has implemented a Mandarin Immersion Program.  Believe me, it is impressive to see those little kids chatting away in Chinese.  And the ones who weren’t in that program were equally wonderful, talking about use of detail, conflict, and the five senses in their writing.

My only problem was that I kept forgetting to call Chris “Principal Rosenberg.”  Sorry, Chris.  I mean, Principal Rosenberg.

When I was first told that NY journalists would be invited to a media lunch at the restaurant in the Museum of Modern Art to meet an author and that that author would be me, I was just a little nervous.  Actually, I was terrified.  However, something happened recently which changed everything: my brother Kwan died.  The heroine of my novel, Kimberly Chang, is also partly based upon him and his life, and his death helped put everything into perspective.  I was still nervous but I was also glad to be able to talk about my book, why I wrote it, and how Kwan was a part of it.

Everyone was extremely kind and I actually enjoyed myself.  I was pretty thrilled to meet the people who write for publications I admire, like USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Time, Reuters, Salon.com, Bloomberg News, and Good Housekeeping.   For example, I got to sit next to Sara Nelson (O, The Oprah Magazine), whose work I’ve read religiously for years.

Afterward, I went back to Riverhead/Penguin headquarters to meet with people from the academic publishing department and the Penguin Speakers Bureau, and then to shoot a video.  The two very nice and very skinny guys doing the filming swore they’d make me look good, somehow, because I was pretty convinced I looked just like a rabbit.  Then another meeting with publicity to go over my schedule because I start flying out tomorrow, and finally, I got back into the car to be driven back home.

Mo, my driver who happens to be built like a tank, told me 1) I didn’t look like a rabbit; and 2) a mad cow joke.  Here’s the joke:

So one cow says to another, “Hey, I’m pretty worried about that mad cow disease that’s going around.”

The second cow says, “I’m not worried.”

“Why not?  I heard my neighbor just got it.”

“Naw, it doesn’t affect me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I just know, that’s all.”

“How come?  It can happen to any of us cows.”

“Because I’m not a cow, I’m a rabbit.”

I think this is really funny.  Maybe Mo tells it better.

It’s been so great to be in NYC again!  There’s so much art and music here.  I love the street musicians in the subway.

My incredible publicity team sent me a huge basket from Zabar’s — not only chocolate and salmon but real bagels!  I’d just missed lunch that day because I was holed up preparing for everything that’s coming up this week, so it was wonderful to open the door and find a messenger with that basket filled with goodies.

When you’re 5’0″ and live in Holland, home to the tallest people in the world, you can’t do a lot of shopping there.  Before I arrived in the US, I’d ordered some clothing on the Internet to be sent to my mother’s house in NY.  I needed something more formal for the media lunch that would be given for me at the Museum of Modern Art.   After I got here, I tried them on:  nothing worked!  So I ran to the department stores.

Nothing fit that I liked.  However, I’d just found this fantastic tailor in the Lower East Side, Mustafa of the shop Laura & Melinda.  And I was desperate.  So I grabbed two outfits that were much too large (they don’t make them any smaller) and brought them to him with my fingers crossed.

I put the first one on and it basically looked like I was wearing a bag.  When I stepped out of the dressing room, the other people who were waiting had to giggle.  Mustafa started to yank his hair.

“They are SO BIG,” he said.  “Everything has to be completely remade. There are six separate pieces.   And there is embroidery.  And zippers.  And lining.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said, genuinely contrite.  I tugged at the skirt, which hung down almost to my ankles.  “How long will it take?”

“I require at least 14 days.”

I winced.  “I only have 4 days…  really really sorry.”

Somehow, he did it for me.  He phoned me at 11pm the evening before I needed them and I raced downtown in a taxi.  It was incredible.  Everything fit like a glove.  Except for one piece, which he couldn’t cut because the entire hem was embroidered.  I tried it on again and again while he made adjustments.  When he finally solved the problem, it was after midnight.  But both outfits looked like they’d been made for me, which they actually had been.

That’s my story of The Amazing Mustafa.

Getting ready to fly to the US today for the pre-publicity tour for my novel, Girl in Translation, which comes out in May.  Very excited but nervous too.  I’m still wondering if I should bring the big down coat and snow boots or if I should simply be cold….

Got good news today from my editor, Sarah McGrath:  the book’s just been chosen as a Blue Ribbon feature selection in all of the following clubs: Book of the Month, Doubleday, Literary Guild, Large Print, the Lifestyle Clubs, Rhapsody and Book of the Month Club 2!  It’ll be in their April catalogs.

Need to leave and am just going to bring all of the warm stuff.  The last stop of the tour is in Cincinnati, OH, which is at this moment 9 degrees F.