Global Fiction by Ann Gaylia O’Barr
Searching for Answers With a Story
I wrote Singing in Babylon after I returned to life in the United States from my State Department jobs overseas. Like most of my writing, it was an entertaining way for me to explore questions.
How adjust to the world I had grown up in, yet now saw with new eyes? How mesh that world with what I experienced half a world away?
So I wrote a story about Kate McCormack.
How does the rest of the world look to most Americans who, like Kate at the beginning of the story, have scant knowledge of other countries? She ventures out of the U.S. for the first time in her life. She’s overwhelmed with the demands of a new culture.
She and the man she meets, American journalist Philip Tangvald, work out personal problems even as she knows she will never see the world the same way again.
It was, I suppose, a way to introduce that world to my friends and others curious to explore neighborhoods outside their own.
