Fernando Ting
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The award-winning author won a Finalist Medal in the recently concluded 2021 Next Generation Indie Book Awards. He was born in Manila, Philippines to a Chinese immigrant father and a Filipino mother. At the age of two, his family moved to the northern city of Baguio where he learned his second language of Ilocano. At the age of nine, his family moved to the town of Tarlac where he learned his third language of Pampango. Due to financial difficulties, he did not go to college after finishing High School. Instead, he opted to slog through casual jobs. Eventually, by God's will and sheer determination, he broke into overseas work when the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia opened up job opportunities to international workers. Thereat, he completed his learning and understanding of life through careful observation at the workplace and also picking up some Arabic words in the process. He found time to court and later marry his fiancee, Lucila Espinosa Muan. They were blessed with a daughter they named Hannah. The family immigrated to the United States in 1998 and settled in the beautiful city of Anchorage, Alaska. He found a job as a housekeeping supervisor in Barratt Inn and later as airport custodian at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport after joining the Local 71 Union.
After fifteen years, he retired in March 2013. He and his wife resettled back in the Philippines for six years before moving back to the States to be with their daughter and her family in Las Vegas, Nevada. |
The Kingdom I Came To Love
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Memoir
This book was written to share and preserve the memories of ecstasy and tragedy experienced by the author as an expatriate worker in Saudi Arabia. The reader will gain insight into the world of multinational brains and brawn who were drawn to the Middle East in search of work, adventure and the lure of petrodollars. Greatly sacrificing being away from home and loved ones for great lengths of time, each and everyone of these brave and hard workers has a story to tell, this book is one of them. Although not everyone will have the experience of working away from home let alone find a job in the Middle East particularly Saudi Arabia, a trip to the library will open doors to the whole, wide world. A voracious reader can experience in a matter of hours within the comfort of a safe and nice environment what this author took years to accumulate in the hot and dusty desert kingdom. Again, this book is just a microcosm of the so much bigger story of Saudi Arabia and its heroic workers. While not intended for children, young adults and grown ups will find this book worth reading for the actual, real life events described therein and will stir up further interest in related, broader subjects. Those in the construction and industrial maintenance industries may deduce some of the stories herein anecdotal and therefore amusing rather than technical in nature. Fernando G. Ting Author of the book 
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