ONE AFTERNOON just before Christmas, every head in the crowded Page One bookstore cafe at Festival Walk turned to stare at a woman drinking tea and chatting away in Cantonese on her mobile phone. They stared initially because she was speaking with such gusto. Their attention was held upon discovering the owner of the voice was not a local, but a tall, blonde American.
Daisann McLane, New Yorker, travel writer, author and committed Chinese-language student, was oblivious to their reaction. She was too busy arranging to meet a friend at the cinema to see a new Andy Lau Tak-wah flick to notice. The friend, who is president of Lau's fan club, is Japanese and speaks no English, so she and McLane communicate only in Cantonese.
Cheap Hotels is an extension of McLane's New York Times column, 'Frugal Traveller', for which she has combed the world for the past four years.
Since late 2001, she has also contributed one essay a month to National Geographic Traveler magazine. Prior to becoming a travel writer, McLane worked in the music industry, then wrote on culture, food and world music for publications including the Village Voice, Vogue, and Rolling Stone. She was a history major at Princeton University, speaks fluent Spanish, once worked as a calypso singer in Trinidad, and wrote an unauthorised biography of pop star Terence Trent D'Arby for British publisher Bloomsbury in the late 1980s.
