Before the gate has been closed,
before the last question is posed,
before I am transposed.
Before the weeds fill the gardens,
before there are no pardons,
before the concrete hardens.
Before all the flute-holes are covered,
before things are locked in the cupboard,
before the rules are discovered.
Before the conclusion is planned,
before God closes his hand,
before we have nowhere to stand.
By Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Before
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Notes From Home
Sakura plant in bad condition. Dad seems to have lost interest in maintaining it since the kingfisher ate all the guppies from the pot.
***
Family dinner last night. Gulf with same-age cousin Ching gets wider each time. We sat at the table after dinner. I was thinking of the requirements of my Milton essay. From the corner of my eye I could see her shift.
- The old days, huh, Alissa, those were the great times lah. The old stories are the best.
I smile, but I don't offer to play remember with her. It's a family habit to regale each other with stories forgotten or familiar at the end of the meal. She starts it off instead, pulling a random memory from one of our annual family holidays. We're clannish that way. Can't go off on a holiday without extending an invitation to uncles, aunts and grandparents.
- Remember anot, that time in Pangkor? We took torchlight to look for crabs?
- Which time? You have to specify. We went so many times I don't remember.
- That time..I'm not sure you were there or not.
I cannot bring myself to answer in our lingo. Maybe I'm feeling contrary. Maybe I don't dare to because I know I've lost the sense of rhythm. Afraid I might sound false. So I answer curtly, knowing she could hardly follow me.
- But which one? Was it the last trip? You need to specify, otherwise how can I tell? I think that must have been three years ago.
Bro steps in to say that I had been in England at that time. Yes, I had chosen to visit the houses of dead white writers over returning for the largest family holiday in years. Even the family in Australia flew over to join them. Ching continues, undeterred. She straightens in her seat, drawn up by happy memories unmarred by the demands of morose telebanking customers. A familiar mischievous glint in her eyes. Without even saying so, she skips to one of our earliest mutual memories--another crab hunt of antiquity. I cannot fail to identify it.
- Aiyoh that time Andrew and Chester take the torchlight to look for crabs, there, at night in Port Dickson one. Then they chase the big one and Andrew whacked it. Then Nigel you said, "die already, why you whack," then Andrew keep whacking and whacking and say "I don't care!"
She imitated Andrew's manic voice and his frantic arm movements. He had always been the initiator of all our adventures, whether it was venturing out on mud flats only to sink knee deep into mud and almost get sucked under, or throwing firecrackers at the lion's feet at a lion dance. It's been years since he left to the US. Nobody remembers his wife's name. But we prayed for them when we said grace over dinner. Someone remembered that it was their birthday (they share the same birthday). Now it is Maxi, his son, who is the evening's entertainment in his place, sole KL representative of the fourth generation. A displaced US citizen, the family's first ABC, and not a little confused with his Malaysian relations. He seems to call my cousin William his papa, who is actually his uncle. He must learn to live the life of one who belongs to the clan, loved and claimed by all--until his parents take him back again.
- Yarlah, I don't know why he kept whacking, says Nigel.
- And Liam so cruel uh he, he pull the hermit crab out of its shell. Eiyer, Ching intones, and winces in disgust.
Nigel turns to explain to Mei Qi our Australian cousin's cruel talent for deshelling hermit crabs. Their inside bodies were a wormy purple tendril--just seeing their delicacy gave you the shivers. If the crab submitted to being pulled, it survived; but if it clung too tightly to its calcite home, it ended up torn in half, and Liam would proceed to the next one in our bucket of live catch. We also raced our chosen hermit crabs on a table at the holiday bungalow. I could not have been more than eight years old.
As for Mei Qi. I only found out yesterday that Mei Qi had officially become part of the family. Dad had said in the car when he picked me up from the bus station,
- William and Mei Qi signed the registry on Valentine's Day. Probably they'll get married in November.
Later I asked bro,
- Why so secretive?
- No, no, not secretive. William went to Ah Ma first and told her.
My grandmother is the grand matriarch. No holiday plans, no Chinese New Year celebration, is planned without her consent. Everyone else hears through the grapevine.
Sometimes my family forgets to tell me someone has been hospitalized, or they choose to save bad news for when they see me face to face. Somedays I worry that I'll return to find that somebody has died without me knowing it. All this travelling back and forth, this switching of worlds...I've learnt to build a shell around myself, a compound of the best things and the best people in both places to protect me. Hermit wanderers carry their homes on their backs. It is our burden, our protection and--if we cannot live without it--possibly also our destruction.
***
Bro wakes me up early for church. We walk out to the bus stop in the dawn light. The street lights are not working again.
- Is it wet? The lady at the seat asks aloud, in order to warn me politely that the tiled concrete bench might hide a puddle in the darkness.
- No, I don't think so.
I feel the bench and sit down. Two ladies on their morning walk pass by. I recognise the voice of my childhood best friend's mother.
- Hello aunty.
- Hello.
She pauses.
-Eh, Alissa. Sorry ah, didn't recognise you. You...grow big already.
That's what she always says. In her eyes I'm always the scrawny bespectacled piece of awkwardness who appeared at the gate to invite her equally awkward, bespectacled daughter to the playground after homework had been completed.
-Do you have two ringgit? Bro asks for the third time.
- Yes, I say without checking.
Four elderly men pass by on their morning walk. Two cuckoos call to each other across the playground in a series of piercing whistles. I look to the right, down the road to catch a glimpse of the bus as it rounds the corner. No bus in sight. Squares of light in the far distance, like jewels strewn across the narrow band of blue velvet horizon, crowned the trees. Not stars, but hovering lights from distant high-rise apartments, whose blue silhouettes had receded and merged into the shadowy sky. I had not known. Even the city could be beautiful.
- Do you have two ringgit? asks my brother.
***
Family dinner last night. Gulf with same-age cousin Ching gets wider each time. We sat at the table after dinner. I was thinking of the requirements of my Milton essay. From the corner of my eye I could see her shift.
- The old days, huh, Alissa, those were the great times lah. The old stories are the best.
I smile, but I don't offer to play remember with her. It's a family habit to regale each other with stories forgotten or familiar at the end of the meal. She starts it off instead, pulling a random memory from one of our annual family holidays. We're clannish that way. Can't go off on a holiday without extending an invitation to uncles, aunts and grandparents.
- Remember anot, that time in Pangkor? We took torchlight to look for crabs?
- Which time? You have to specify. We went so many times I don't remember.
- That time..I'm not sure you were there or not.
I cannot bring myself to answer in our lingo. Maybe I'm feeling contrary. Maybe I don't dare to because I know I've lost the sense of rhythm. Afraid I might sound false. So I answer curtly, knowing she could hardly follow me.
- But which one? Was it the last trip? You need to specify, otherwise how can I tell? I think that must have been three years ago.
Bro steps in to say that I had been in England at that time. Yes, I had chosen to visit the houses of dead white writers over returning for the largest family holiday in years. Even the family in Australia flew over to join them. Ching continues, undeterred. She straightens in her seat, drawn up by happy memories unmarred by the demands of morose telebanking customers. A familiar mischievous glint in her eyes. Without even saying so, she skips to one of our earliest mutual memories--another crab hunt of antiquity. I cannot fail to identify it.
- Aiyoh that time Andrew and Chester take the torchlight to look for crabs, there, at night in Port Dickson one. Then they chase the big one and Andrew whacked it. Then Nigel you said, "die already, why you whack," then Andrew keep whacking and whacking and say "I don't care!"
She imitated Andrew's manic voice and his frantic arm movements. He had always been the initiator of all our adventures, whether it was venturing out on mud flats only to sink knee deep into mud and almost get sucked under, or throwing firecrackers at the lion's feet at a lion dance. It's been years since he left to the US. Nobody remembers his wife's name. But we prayed for them when we said grace over dinner. Someone remembered that it was their birthday (they share the same birthday). Now it is Maxi, his son, who is the evening's entertainment in his place, sole KL representative of the fourth generation. A displaced US citizen, the family's first ABC, and not a little confused with his Malaysian relations. He seems to call my cousin William his papa, who is actually his uncle. He must learn to live the life of one who belongs to the clan, loved and claimed by all--until his parents take him back again.
- Yarlah, I don't know why he kept whacking, says Nigel.
- And Liam so cruel uh he, he pull the hermit crab out of its shell. Eiyer, Ching intones, and winces in disgust.
Nigel turns to explain to Mei Qi our Australian cousin's cruel talent for deshelling hermit crabs. Their inside bodies were a wormy purple tendril--just seeing their delicacy gave you the shivers. If the crab submitted to being pulled, it survived; but if it clung too tightly to its calcite home, it ended up torn in half, and Liam would proceed to the next one in our bucket of live catch. We also raced our chosen hermit crabs on a table at the holiday bungalow. I could not have been more than eight years old.
As for Mei Qi. I only found out yesterday that Mei Qi had officially become part of the family. Dad had said in the car when he picked me up from the bus station,
- William and Mei Qi signed the registry on Valentine's Day. Probably they'll get married in November.
Later I asked bro,
- Why so secretive?
- No, no, not secretive. William went to Ah Ma first and told her.
My grandmother is the grand matriarch. No holiday plans, no Chinese New Year celebration, is planned without her consent. Everyone else hears through the grapevine.
Sometimes my family forgets to tell me someone has been hospitalized, or they choose to save bad news for when they see me face to face. Somedays I worry that I'll return to find that somebody has died without me knowing it. All this travelling back and forth, this switching of worlds...I've learnt to build a shell around myself, a compound of the best things and the best people in both places to protect me. Hermit wanderers carry their homes on their backs. It is our burden, our protection and--if we cannot live without it--possibly also our destruction.
***
Bro wakes me up early for church. We walk out to the bus stop in the dawn light. The street lights are not working again.
- Is it wet? The lady at the seat asks aloud, in order to warn me politely that the tiled concrete bench might hide a puddle in the darkness.
- No, I don't think so.
I feel the bench and sit down. Two ladies on their morning walk pass by. I recognise the voice of my childhood best friend's mother.
- Hello aunty.
- Hello.
She pauses.
-Eh, Alissa. Sorry ah, didn't recognise you. You...grow big already.
That's what she always says. In her eyes I'm always the scrawny bespectacled piece of awkwardness who appeared at the gate to invite her equally awkward, bespectacled daughter to the playground after homework had been completed.
-Do you have two ringgit? Bro asks for the third time.
- Yes, I say without checking.
Four elderly men pass by on their morning walk. Two cuckoos call to each other across the playground in a series of piercing whistles. I look to the right, down the road to catch a glimpse of the bus as it rounds the corner. No bus in sight. Squares of light in the far distance, like jewels strewn across the narrow band of blue velvet horizon, crowned the trees. Not stars, but hovering lights from distant high-rise apartments, whose blue silhouettes had receded and merged into the shadowy sky. I had not known. Even the city could be beautiful.
- Do you have two ringgit? asks my brother.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
Diary of a Bad Year by J.M Coetzee
When you read a Coetzee, you have to ask yourself, how far can you take the art of compression in a novel--if this book can be called a novel in the first place. First thing that struck me when I flipped it open: two horizontal bars invariably on each page, demarcating three journals of two different characters involved in the story. The three-in-one gets rather annoying, especially when the narrative breaks off mid-sentence and continues on the next page--you're not sure whether to flip over and continue or skip to the section below first, which continues the second character's story.
Not that there's much of a story. The plot is relatively simple, involving only three characters. An old, dying writer who is attracted to a young Filipina, Anya,his neighbour. He engages her as his typist for a series of opinion pieces; she has a boyfriend, Alan, who wants to cheat him of his money. The story is actually sidelined for the opinion pieces, which appear in the first bar, followed by the journals of the nameless writer and woman. I was not a Coetzee fan, after Waiting For The Barbarians and Disgrace but for Diary I respect the careful crafting that went into developing the characters' stories as an ironical counterpoint to the writer's opinions on authority, political responsibility and social conscience. While such grandiose themes were being proclaimed, the journals reveal a writer on shaky ground, unsure if he is able to finish his task before he can no longer write. The personal histories of the three ask questions of personal ethics and individual conscience, and the irritating yoking together of these seemingly disparate themes, without saying as much, forces the reader to consider the relationships between the individual and the history he is born into--whether we owe the world an apology, not for who we are but for where we come from and who we're with, just as Anya feels she owes JC (the only name appearing for the writer--probably Coetzee writing as himself) an apology for her boyfriend's desire to cheat him.
(Spoiler alert!) I accuse Coetzee of unabashed reader manipulation when several empty slots in the writer's journal towards the end caused me to think the persona had died or just given up writing--but fortunately he does reappear, only for Anya's journal to start revealing her fantasy on saying the best goodbye to him at his deathbed: "sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest," she would wish to say. By that time the writer, through the twenty-odd opinion pieces we have read, has come to embody the best aspirations of humanist modernism, the search for humanity's transcendence or rebirth, for a united push to seek a way of living approved by the conscience. But the book is written during the Iraq war, post September 11, and during the Guantanamo Bay exposure, and makes clear that there is no escaping a scarred conscience. It seems to simultaneously attempt to reclaim those visions as well as sound a death knell for modernism, while searching hesitantly for an ethic, a moral framework, for a very different world--the world of Alan, the rapacious and remorseless investor, and of Anya, his pleasure-seeking, materialistic girlfriend.
All in all, a book worth looking into.
Not that there's much of a story. The plot is relatively simple, involving only three characters. An old, dying writer who is attracted to a young Filipina, Anya,his neighbour. He engages her as his typist for a series of opinion pieces; she has a boyfriend, Alan, who wants to cheat him of his money. The story is actually sidelined for the opinion pieces, which appear in the first bar, followed by the journals of the nameless writer and woman. I was not a Coetzee fan, after Waiting For The Barbarians and Disgrace but for Diary I respect the careful crafting that went into developing the characters' stories as an ironical counterpoint to the writer's opinions on authority, political responsibility and social conscience. While such grandiose themes were being proclaimed, the journals reveal a writer on shaky ground, unsure if he is able to finish his task before he can no longer write. The personal histories of the three ask questions of personal ethics and individual conscience, and the irritating yoking together of these seemingly disparate themes, without saying as much, forces the reader to consider the relationships between the individual and the history he is born into--whether we owe the world an apology, not for who we are but for where we come from and who we're with, just as Anya feels she owes JC (the only name appearing for the writer--probably Coetzee writing as himself) an apology for her boyfriend's desire to cheat him.
(Spoiler alert!) I accuse Coetzee of unabashed reader manipulation when several empty slots in the writer's journal towards the end caused me to think the persona had died or just given up writing--but fortunately he does reappear, only for Anya's journal to start revealing her fantasy on saying the best goodbye to him at his deathbed: "sweet dreams, and flights of angels, and all the rest," she would wish to say. By that time the writer, through the twenty-odd opinion pieces we have read, has come to embody the best aspirations of humanist modernism, the search for humanity's transcendence or rebirth, for a united push to seek a way of living approved by the conscience. But the book is written during the Iraq war, post September 11, and during the Guantanamo Bay exposure, and makes clear that there is no escaping a scarred conscience. It seems to simultaneously attempt to reclaim those visions as well as sound a death knell for modernism, while searching hesitantly for an ethic, a moral framework, for a very different world--the world of Alan, the rapacious and remorseless investor, and of Anya, his pleasure-seeking, materialistic girlfriend.
All in all, a book worth looking into.
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