Richard Oh: A passion for books

Richard Oh: A passion for books

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David Eyerly
The Jakarta Post
Jakarta
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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.