Richard Oh: A passion for books

--------------------- David Eyerly The Jakarta Post Jakarta -----------------------

Author and bookseller Richard Oh is first and foremost a lover of books. He loves the way they look and how they feel in the hand, but what he really loves are the stories, the tales and the information inside the books.

Maybe that is what has made him so successful as the owner of QB World Books, which recently opened its third branch in Pondok Indah. It could be that the key to making it as a bookseller is not to love the selling part, but to love the book part.

For Richard, who was born in Medan on Oct. 30, 1959, his passion for books goes all the way back to his childhood. Richard was something of a roughneck growing up who, by his own admission, got into fights and was not very academic. He was sent to stay with an uncle in Jakarta and found himself spending much of his time alone in the house.

It was during this period that his love for books began.

"I started reading. At first I read abridged stories by Longmann's and from there I started reading to read Joseph Conrad in the unabridged version. And I started to find English as a language I could master. And for me that was an achievement, a way to gain some self-respect. And from there I started to write. It starts from there, reading, then writing. And I think now it is more or less an obsession."

An obsession that has taken him to the United States, where he graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in English literature and creative writing. An obsession that has driven him to become the author of two novels, both written in English: The Pathfinders of Love and Heart of the Night. And an obsession that has made him the owner of the highly successful QB, which are, by most accounts, the bookstores in Jakarta with the widest and best selection of books.

Though he now enjoys great success and rubs elbows with Indonesia's literati, when Richard Oh looks back at the period following his graduation from the University of Wisconsin, he has a very harsh, and unliterary, assessment of himself: "Chickenshit."

"After I graduated, I had to come back. I was already married and my wife got a job in Jakarta. So, I came back. And it was thought that if you got a degree from America you would make it, big. So it was thought, 'OK, my son is back. He's going to make it. Everybody was watching me. And meanwhile, all I had was this little dream of just leave me alone and I'll spend time in the room and try to type."

He found everybody was waiting to see what he was going to be and he could not take the pressure. He found himself looking for a job.

"I had an option to be just absolutely an artist, which I knew would be tough going because I knew everybody in the family would be against it. So I said fine, I'm going to make money now. I'm going to make lots of money and then later on I'll do what I always wanted to do."

So that's what he did. Within five days he was hired as a copywriter at a multinational advertising agency, and he was quite successful. And somehow within the next few years, Richard found himself with his own advertising agency. In 1997, his firm was in the top 20 agencies in Indonesia, with a clientele that included some of the biggest conglomerates to multinational companies in Indonesia.

"It was a hectic 10 years, but all that time, there's something inherent in me I think, there was always this obsession with books."

And it was this obsession that took him from the advertising world back to the world of books, as a bookstore owner and an author.

"It was not a business decision. It started, I think, right after the riots in 1998. For the past close to 10 years I'd been running an advertising agency, and up until then it was like, life is going to be like that. But that period of time, chaotic and rather turbulent period of time, somehow gave me time to pause and think in retrospect what I had done and what I wanted to do. It was sort of a time for reflection."

The result of his reflection was that he decided to open a bookstore, which became the QB branch in Plaza Senayan, and he began work on his novel The Pathfinders of Love.

While the success of his bookstores must be satisfying, not only financially but also from the point of someone who loves books making them available to a wider group of readers, one gets the feeling it is writing that gives him the most satisfaction. He is always willing to discuss writing, and his personal style.

"There was a period of time when I went through my Raymond Carver period. I tried to make the prose neat, cut and dry, a lot of showing not much telling. Then I then developed more gradually into a style that I thought was more suitable to Indonesia or to my own personality. I've been reading a lot of books by V.S. Naipul and also Paul Theroux, and I find their language very languid and easy, and Graham Greened, I've read a lot of Graham Greene. I find on the surface that the prose is deceptively plain, and yet it has all these undercurrents. I think those are the types of writers I like to model my writing on."

His first novel, The Pathfinders of Love, came out in 1999. Though it received a mixed reception from critics, with the sometimes poor language a particular target, it was an unforgettable moment for Richard.

"It was an unbelievable feeling of seeing yourself in print. But the other, more exciting, thing is that after it was published, having people walk up to me and tell me how much they loved the book because of what I had written and how they felt; some of the truths in it .... For me that is the thrill."

Richard has much to be thrilled about. His is something of a storybook life, realizing his passion and making his dreams come true. How the next chapters of his life unfold remains to be seen, but there is little reason to doubt that Richard will author a happy ending.