creativity

Follow Bound Feet Blues updates at Yang-May Ooi’s new blog at TigerSpirit.co.uk

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Bound Feet Blues author and performer, Yang-May Ooi, has launched a new website and blog at TigerSpirit.co.uk. The new site brings together all her creative interests and projects into one space.

 

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Yang-May writes:

I will continue to blog about my memoir Bound Feet Blues, just over at TigerSpirit News – so if you’d like to follow my updates about this book, please do check out Tiger Spirit and click through to News

What else will you find on the Tiger Spirit blog?

Well, having spent many decades as a creator of work – ie as a novelist, business book author, memoirist, storyteller and stage performer – I want to offer support to others who are, or want to, follow a creative path. So in addition to blogging about Bound Feet Blues and my other books and creative projects, I will also be publishing multi-media content offering tips, inspirations and stories that can fire up others who want to be more creative, productive and authentic in life and at work.

Yang-May Ooi

Tiger Spirit is a resource hub exploring how we can dream wild, work smart and live true. It shares my own journey – which is still ongoing! – as a way to talk about universal issues that are relevant for many others. I will also be interviewing others who work or live in a creative way so we can all benefit from their diverse experiences.

I hope you will join me over at Tiger Spirit and become part of what I hope will be a lively online hub.

 

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About Yang-May Ooi, @TigerSpirit

Yang-May Ooi is a writer, speaker and actionista. She has successfully combined her creative career with her professional career  for over 20 years – as a bestselling author, award-winning TEDx speaker and acclaimed stage performer as well as a respected lawyer and asset manager in the City of London. Tiger Spirit is her resource hub exploring how we can dream wild, work smart and live true in life, art and business. Go to News for more articles and multi-media content.

Facebook/ Instagram/ Youtube: @TigerSpirit

LinkedIn: yangmayooi

28 Days in the Writing, A Lifetime in the Making – Bound Feet Blues, the BOOK [video]

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Author Yang-May Ooi talks about how she was able to write the book, Bound Feet Blues – all 420 pages of it! – in 28 days.

This groundbreaking family and personal memoir was a lifetime in the making. The stories span several generations, going back to the young boy who was kidnapped by bandits and the young woman with bound feet who ran away from an unhappy marriage. Yang-May interweaves these ancestral tales with her own personal story as she learns what it takes to become her own woman.

In this video, she gives us a flavour of the book and shares her creative process in bringing these stories to life.

TO BUY THE BOOK, click on the links below:

AMAZON.CO.UK

AMAZON.COM

URBANE PUBLICATIONS – special 25% discount code: shoes

How hard hearted can I be in Editing Bound Feet Blues?

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I Finished the script of Bound Feet Blued a couple of weeks ago. Now be hard task of editing it begins.
 
 
 
I laid out all 25 pages of the script on the dining table so that I could see the flow of the story in one glance. Also, having it spread out in front of me means that I could see how each section relates to other sections.
 
 
 
Assuming three minutes per page, the script was running to about 75 minutes – which is the outside running time. My aim is to try and
Continue reading →

It’s the small things that make up some of the best stories [Bound Feet Blues]

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We often think that stories need to be grand and on an epic scale to be compelling. We think that great stories involve heroic, larger than life characters. And so, we come to believe that our own stories mean very little because they happen on such a small scale compared to people who have been through war, disaster, terrible illnesses and events that seem “Worthy” of recognitiion.

I am of course not disrespecting the trauma and suffering of people who have been through those harsh and terrible experiences. Those stories are meaningful and need to be told.

Storytelling round a campfire

Storytelling round a campfire

But other stories have their place too. Stories on a smaller, less epic Continue reading →

How do you write about your life without upsetting the people you love? [Bound Feet Blues]

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As an author of memoir or true stories that is the big dilemma: how do you tell stories about your life without upsetting the people you love who may be an integral part of those stories –  especially because they are an integral part of your life?

I’ve mulled over this long and hard as I’ve been working on Bound Feet Blues, which tells stories from my life – and which inevitabley involve those people who are an important part of my life.

My blog post on my main blog StoryGuru explores this dilemma in more depth: see  True Stories Told Live: Innocent Bystanders May Be Written Into This Story [Bound Feet Blues]

“One of the challenges about true stories told live – ie telling stories from your own life – is that they involve other people. And while these people may have signed up to your life as a friend or enemy or lover or relative or colleague, they may not have signed up to be in your story, whether that story is a written memoir or an oral story told live to others. So, how do you tell stories or write books about your life without upsetting those who appear in them because they happen to be around during the incident you are talking about?…

[READ MORE]

 

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Photo: thanks to flattop341 on flickr.com (CCL)

Solo Performance: Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes (work in progress)

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In Chinese tradition, women with tiny bound feet were desirable as wives and lovers, their delicate feet seen as objects of both status and sexual fetish. In her first full length storytelling piece Bound Feet Blues – A Life Told in Shoes, Chinese-Malaysian story performer Yang-May Ooi explores themes of female desirability, identity and empowerment in this personal story told through the shoes in her life.

The image of Chinese women with bound feet has haunted me since I was a child. I think of these women who have been crippled for life ever since they were 4 years old, unable to walk, with broken stumps for feet beneath the delicately embroidered silk shoes. Just so they can appear to have little, dainty feet and seem to be elegant and graceful – and therefore desirable and marriageable.

Small Feet

I’ve always had small, delicate feet. My shoe size is 3.5 and it’s a real problem trying to Continue reading →

Follow my Mood Board for Bound Feet Blues on Pinterest

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Images can help the creative process. Artists, writers and other creatives use Mood Boards to help them in their work.  Discover how Author and Story Performer Yang-May Ooi has been using Pinterest to collect pictures in a Mood Board for her current project, Bound Feet Blues.

For Bound Feet Blues, I’ve found it helpful to collect images of bound feet and the Chinese cheong sahm (long dress) as well as other images – no matter how tangently – that relate to the various themes I’m exploring:

# Chinese Continue reading →