Archive for June, 2007

I just came across the blog Global Culture which is a fascinating read and could keep me up for hours tonight if I don’t consciously pull myself away. It’s “a blog on migration, globalization and their impact on global culture”. It’s categories of posts include topics on Global Culture, Local Culture, Ethnosphere, Multiculturism, Folksonomy alongside Diversity, Migration and Diasporas. A must read for anyone who’s interested in cross-culture - as I am and I expect as most of you are!

The blog’s creator is someone called Juan who says of himself: “When I’m not blogging I create technologies that allow global citizens to tap the true power of the web to express their culture and in the process redefine the mechanisms by which travellers immerse themselves in local cultures, facilitating the spread of cosmopolitanism.” That’s a rather cool job, I have to say.

In the sidebar, Juan has posted this poll:

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Global Culture Poll

What is the most important tool of the Global Citizen?

* Money
* Dictionary
* Travel Guide
* Camera

I was going to vote but then I couldn’t make a choice out of those four items. I hesitated, I think, because the choice I wanted to vote for wasn’t in the list. It took me a few moments of pondering to reach towards the semi-formed thought in my mind. What was it that is - for me - the most important tool of the Global Citizen?

Curiosity.

Okay, technically, that’s not a tool. It’s a quality or a state of mind. But I suppose in my mind, nothing else matters if, as a Global Citizen, you don’t have that: curiosity.

You see how I could stay up all night exploring Global Culture? Just a fun little poll like that gets me thinking and mulling and questioning….

As I said, what a great site.

Photo: from Global Culture

DSC00063.JPG, originally uploaded by MacOoi.

We passed Haymarket this morning on our way to the Mac shop in Regent Street and I took this photo with my cameraphone. The ranks of cameras and journalists were clustered at the edge of the police cordon, shooting footage of Haymarket - which was cleared of traffic and strangely silent and still. There were lots of tourists milling around with the reporters shooting the empty street, too, with their digital cameras and handycams.

As you may know, Haymarket was the site where the unexploded car bomb was found early this morning and a potential bomb attack in Central London was foiled.

We were approached by a Canadian reporter, Trista Kelly, who writes for Bloomberg News (online) wanting our reaction to this event. My response was that this was bound to happen at some time - we are always being warned that London is a target for attack that sooner or later, it is not so surprising that something will happen. London has always been a target for attack for as long as I’ve been in the UK - since the 1970s. At that time, it was the IRA and now it’s Al-Qaeda.

Fortunately, this time, the attack was stopped in time and no one was hurt. In this light, the incident became another one of those inconveniences that Londoners always have to put up with - like tube strikes and road works. For me, it felt like something annoying that I had to work around in the busy day that I had planned.

It seemed that most Londoners had a similar approach, judging from the traffic chaos. Everyone was trying to get to work or wherever they had to get to. No-one was staying home because of fear or anxiety.

And as if to prove this, just round the corner - literally - in Trafalgar Square, the Canada Day celebrations were in full swing a bit later on today. There were maple leaf flags and balloons, Canadians playing hockey, marquees with stalls promoting all things Canadian. People were strolling along, laughing, taking photos. Wandering around, you would not know that just a few streets away there had been a car packed with explosives.

We were all getting on with our business. London always does.

PS. To all my Canadian readers: Happy Canada Day!

The following series of three posts is taken from an essay I wrote for a collection of essays by various Malaysian-connected writers coming out in Malaysia sometime soon to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Malaysian Independence from British rule.

Part 1 - The meal that made me cry

I stared down at my plate. There was one soggy piece of toast on it, drowned in a pool of orangey-brown baked beans. I looked around me at the crowded dining hall. The girls were all taller and bigger and heavier and stronger than me, all tucking in to their lunch of baked beans on toast, all laughing and chatting. There were a few black faces but otherwise, they were all Caucasian, pale skinned and robust. I was the only South East Asian, skinny and small and caramel-toned. It was my first day at boarding school in the UK. It was 1975 and I was twelve.

The morning had been a tumble of classes and new friends as I trailed behind my new classmates to change rooms for each new lesson. In Malaysia, we had the same teacher for most subjects and any specialist teacher who taught us came to our classroom while we stayed put. This new pattern of packing up my pencils and books after each class and fighting my way through the chaotic corridors to find the next lesson confused me. Several times, I got lost, like a new recruit left behind by her platoon, and stood bewildered as girls hurried past me.

By lunchtime, I was exhausted and disorientated. My legs felt cold in the navy school kilt and my arms felt tightly constrained in a long-sleeved sweater. My knee-high socks prickled my shins. Lunch would help me feel better, I thought. I always liked break-time at school in Kuala Lumpur. My friends and I bought curry laksa at the canteen, the spicy soup ladled out of huge steaming vats into a bowl of noodles, beansprouts, soya and chicken. Sometimes, I brought in fried rice and would eat it lukewarm from the tupperware. Friends would bring in soy sauce noodles and vegetables. But here in this rowdy English place, lunch had not turned out how I had expected. I stared down at the baked beans and toast on my plate.

I looked up at the clock on the wall. It was just after 1pm. I looked at the strange, noisy, pale girls around me. It struck me that I had five years here. Five long years of baked beans on toast. Five years without curry laksa. Or stir-fried vegetables. Or soy sauce chicken or grilled satay or beef rendang or nasi lemak. Or anything that I knew as food. Real food. I burst into tears. The girls sitting at my table fell silent, staring at me uncomfortably. A sixth-former said, “She’s just homesick. She’ll be all right.” And they left me alone to sob despairingly over my baked beans.

Later, when I was older, I realised that this was probably not an uncommon experience for Malaysians going to study abroad - especially back in the ’70s and ’80s. These days, in the 21st century, even the remotest part of the UK will probably have a Malaysian restaurant or at least an eatery that can do a decent curry. Back then, England was still emerging uncomfortably from its post-war troubles and coming to grips with the loss of its empire. It had been used to exporting its culture and habits and food across the world and it would be some decades yet before a new generation would return from the hippy trail with bottles of fish sauce and chilli belacan and recipes for Thai green curry and satay. Back then, curry was a strange concoction involving a plain curry sauce, pineapple and raisins. To my horror, they also mixed curry powder with sweet salad cream to make a weird cold dish called Coronation Chicken.

For five years, I learnt to eat potatoes with everything. Roast potatoes, boiled potatoes, buttered potatoes, jacket potatoes, sauteed potatoes, chips, mash, potato salad. The were lots of interesting things you could do with potatoes. But none of them turned the spud into rice. Every now and then, though, we would have rice. Aaah, rice. Those were my favourite meals. Except that the rice would come with that pineapply-raisiny curry and I’d have to spend ages picking out the bits of fruit. Or with chicken fricassee, a mix of shredded chicken in what tasted like Campbell’s cream of chicken condensed soup - which was marginally better than pineapply curry in that I could pretend it was chicken a la king.

When I went to university, it was like a liberation after prison….

To be continued next Friday (06 July 2007)…

Photo: thanks to Johnnie Shannon on flickr.com

lffd

After a successful print run in hardback, tradeback and paperback, my second novel Mindgame has now pretty much sold out. However, I have the last 100 copies of the paperback edition of Mindgame sitting in my hallway.

The blurb:

In MINDGAME, the career of ambitious young lawyer Fei-Li Qwong looks set to soar as she steers her major clients to the successful launch of their visionary sanitorium. Piers and Ginny Wyndham claim their Centre for Mental Health and Excellence will revolutionise Asia’s health care practices. Fei is proud to be part of the team.But Fei’s professional success masks a turbulent private life as she tries in vain to reconcile her Western education and outlook with the restrictions of life in Kuala Lumpur and the feminine qualities of charm, modesty and family-mindedness demanded of tranditional Asian womanhood.Her problems have only just begun. As she begins to uncover the dark reality behind the Wyndhams’ public front, Fei finds herself drawn deep into a pall of intrigue and murder to a secret experiment that could enslave Asia under a terrifying new tyranny.

If you’d like to buy a signed copy direct from me, here’s the deal:

RRP: £6.99

My price: £5
plus post and packaging: £2*

*This is for one book posted by the public postal system to an address in the UK. If you would like to order more than one book or to have it / them posted to an address outside the UK, email me the details and I’ll work out the cost and let you know.

What you need to do:

1. Contact me using via the Email Me link on the top of the far right sidebar with the following details:

• Your name and address

• No. of books

• Name and Address to post the book(s) to (if different from yours)

• Any short message you’d like me to include when I sign the book(s)**

2. I will email you back to confirm the cost and give you an address to send your cheque to. I can only accept UK cheques drawn from a UK clearing bank.

3. Once I receive the cheque for the cost I quoted to you, I will post the book(s) within 28 days and confirm this action to you by email. When sending your cheque, please include a print out of our email exchange. If the address to post the book to is not the same as your address, please also ensure that you include with it your name and address so I can contact you if necessary.

4. Please note the following:
4.1 I will post the book(s) by the public postal system. I am not liable for loss or damage caused by any acts or omissions of the postal services in the UK or any other country.
4.2 Where the address is not in the UK, I am not liable for any taxes, duties, or customs or excise or import requirements that may be applicable in the country of receipt nor for ensuring compliance with any other laws, including but not limited to laws relating to copyright, censorship or any other matters that may arise regarding or in connection with the book(s). These remain the liability of the recipient and it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure compliance with the laws of their country.
4.3 By sending the cheque for purchase of the book(s), you are confirming to me that you are over 18 or that you are over 13 and have the permission of your parent or guardian to purchase the book(s).
4.4 I reserve the right not to make any sale whatsoever and in such circumstances, I will inform you of this by email and return your cheque to you by post.

** Please be sensible - I won’t write any offensive, obscene or inappropriate message nor anything over lengthy.

Reuters reports that according to research done by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, most of the 1.3 billion people in China share only 1000 surnames. At least 100,000 people share the name “Wang Tao”, for example. The report states:

“Police in China, where most of the 1.3 billion people share just 100 surnames, are considering rules which would combine both parents’ family names to prevent so much duplication, state media said on Tuesday.

The report gave no details of the Public Security Ministry’s motives for seeking the change, but use of so few names by so many often sows confusion and must presumably hamper police work.”

My surname Ooi is very unusual and strange in the UK. There are probably only a handful of us in the phone books - and three of those would be me, my brother and sister. It’s difficult for Westerners to pronounce and they can never believe it when I spell it for them that it’s all vowels only. I’ve been variously called “Oi”/ “Oy”/ “Doi” and of course, double-oh-one.

But in Malaysia, it’s a fairly common name - and no doubt, it is pretty common in China, too. When my British friends have come to visit in Malaysia, they are always surprised to see Ooi all over the place.

The Chinese pictorial diagram for it is “yellow” so it’s the same surname as Wong or Wang or Whang and they are all pronounced differently because they are different dialects of Chinese.

So over in the West, I have the fantasy of thinking of myself as rather unique but I’m not really, of course!

One drizzly day in London, a colleague mentioned that his step-sister was just qualifying as an elephant doctor in Botswana. In our air-conditioned office with our identical desks and grey demountable partitions, looking out at the grey streaks over the grey city I was intrigued by the idea of a different kind of career path and a different kind of lifestyle. So I tracked down Elephant Kate and got her to tell me about what it takes to become an elephant doctor.

From Botswana, Kate sent me her responses to my email interview:

YM: First off, give me a quick thumbnail of who you are.

Kate: I am a research associate at the University of Bristol. Curiosity always got the better of me and my childhood was spent peering under rocks for what might be living underneath. However, whilst living in Asia, it was elephants that really caught my imagination. A promise to an elephant, on a visit to an elephant orphanage sealed my future and made me pursue my dreams to be an elephant researcher. Since 2002, I have been living her dream, studying elephants in the Okavango Delta Botswana.

What inspired to become an elephant doctor?

It was on a visit to an elephant Orphanage in Sri Lanka at the age of seven that shaped the rest of my life. I made a promise to an elephant that I would help in their conservation. As, we all know an elephant never forgets and so from that day I had one dream and one ambition, to be an elephant researcher.

Can you describe where you are now based?

My camp is based in the western Okavango Delta. I live in a tent so feel very much in touch with the environment in which I life. The view from my tent is typical Delta, a horizon that goes on forever interrupted by islands covered in palm trees with water or flood plain in between (depending on the season). It is pure wilderness, the home of the animals and I am just a visitor. Yet I feel far safer here then I do in a city, where the sharp lines of modern architecture are sore to my eyes, the noise of cars and people living sore to my ears. Contrary to public believe the bush or countryside is never quiet, there is always something going on – at night I am often awoken by the roar of lions, the trumpeting of elephants, the call of the bell frog, or the spotted genet (like a small cat) running around the roof of my tent. When I come back to the UK, I cannot sleep because it is too quiet.

What is your typical day like?

On a normal day, I awake just before dawn when the birds start to sing. My favourite dawn chorus is when the woodland kingfishers are in camp. Slowly the horizon turns pink as the sun starts to rise. As the day breaks more birds and animals join in. I listen for the tell tell signs of predators before I walk up to the kitchen to make a cup of tea before heading out to find the elephants. If I have heard elephants during the night I will head in that direction, particularly if I have not seen any for a few days. If not then I go out tracking the elephants that have collars in the area, at the moment the only ones that have collars are the released elephants. Since 2002, we have released five elephants from a herd used in the safari industry at Elephant Back Safaris. It is always wonderful to see them and she who they are hanging out with and how they are interacting and slowly becoming integrated into the wild social system. When I first started the research project there would be days when I did not see another person. Listening to the radio chat from the nearby safari camp was all the contact I had with humans. I did not mind it during the day when I was out with the elephants, but at the end of the day I felt lonely when there was no one to share my amazing day with. Now I am slowly building up a team and its great to be able to talk elephants with people. I am also more a part of the fabric and have friends at the nearby safari camp, and indeed camp where the research is based has now opened as a commercial camp open to tourist so I get to meet some very interesting people from all over the world. I do sometimes miss the tranquillity of the camp when it was just me.

Can you tell us something about the elephant culture?

Up until recently very little was know about male elephants, as research has concentrated on the more social females and their herds. I study the males and trying to add to the knowledge we have of them. I feel privileged to spend time with the males and I feel I am amongst friends when I am with them. What intrigues me the most is the social relationship of males. It is not random associations, males are choosing who to hang out with – it is these relationships I would like to understand – are they mates from long ago, new friends, relatives? What we do know is that old males are important to the development of young males and integral to the fabric of male elephant society. It is this relationship I see paralleling in our human society. As the social units break down and young males are left without mentors, males to look up to, to learn from and to be disciplined by we see an increase in delinquency and unsocial behaviour and this is evident in both our societies and those of elephants. Perhaps it is time we should learn from the animals.

Can you tell the differences between individual elephants?

When I first started my research I knew I wanted to get to know the population and the individuals within it. As I drove around all the elephants looked the same; big and grey. How would I ever get to know the individuals? Slowly, over the years the big grey gentle giants have become individuals, ‘William Wallace, Shaka Zulu, Dingaan, Nelson Mandela, Ganesh, and Oliver Cromwell – when I say their names I can see their faces in my mind and how I differentiate between them is primarily through their ears. Elephant have big ears, we all now that – the infamous Dumbo had the largest of all. The ears are often torn or have holes in and so by taking photos of these and making sketches of them as well as other characteristics such as the size and shape of their ears, or bodily scars help me tell whose who. So far I have identified over 500 males and 100 females, and so whilst there are a few that visit often and who I can tell at first glance, there are others that take a while to ID and others that are new to me.

Do you have a favourite elephant?

People often ask me who my favourite elephant is, and I have many. But if pushed I always say Mafunyane. He is a very special elephant and one I have spent most time with. He signifies the beginning of the project and my living my dream. He was the reason it all began, as he was the first elephant to be released on the 1st February 2002. He first came up to Botswana in the 80’s as he was originally from the Kruger National Park in South African and when his herd was culled as part of the management program there, he and other young claves were brought by the owner of EBS, Randall Moore, to expand his safari herd. It was always Randall’s vision to release the young males when they hit adolescence and it was their natural instinct to leave their herd and become independent. And so when Mafunyane began to show behaviour that it was time for him to leave, we put a satellite collar around his neck and bid him luck in his life outside of the herd. And so for the past five years I have followed him and seen him become slowly integrated into the wild bull society, growing ever more confident to leave the area he knows and explore more of the delta.

What are the challenges facing elephants in the region?

Botswana has a healthy population, the largest population of elephant left in the world at approximately 120,000. But elephants all over the world are losing habitat and struggling for survival. Slowly as time ticks by they are slowly loosing the battle as the areas they are allowed to inhabit and utilise become smaller and smaller. Most populations are small fragmented populations and we have to manage them more and more, moving individuals around to ensure genetic diversity and sustainability. Ivory is still very much in demand and the price per pound is on the rise, carved into beautiful objects the tusks are a poor reminder of the beautiful beast it once belonged to. With the rise in the price of ivory there is the evitable rise in poaching in certain areas. We have to decide if we can give them the space they and other species need and the protection they deserve.
For me a world without elephants would be a very poor world indeed and one I am not sure I would be able to live in.

What are some of the things you miss about the UK?

  Family
  Friends
  Pubs
  Long English summers
  English villages
  The Welsh Coast
  The theatre
  The sea
  Mountains

Anything else you’d like to share?

I feel very privileged to be living in the magic of the delta, living my dream and have a chance to pay something back to Botswana . This would not have been possible without the help and support of Randall Moore of Elephant Back Safaris. He and I are joining forces once more to enable us to give something back to the country and animals we love so much. We are setting up the Elephants for Africa Trust to be able to continue with the research but a large aspect of this trust will be to provide funds for a Motswana Scholarship Fund to enable local students to carry out their postgraduate degrees. Our first student is about to embark on his Masters degree and I look forward to supervising him and working with him.

To find out more:

Go to Elephant Research at http://www.elephantresearch.co.uk

There are some great profiles of the different elephants, with each of their individual stories in the Elephant Profiles section.

You can also help by adopting an elephant in the Adopt an Elephant section. Or you can support the cause by buying cards, notelets etc or giving a donation via the relevant links on the site.

If you do contact Elephant Research, do mention that you came to them via Fusion View!

Continuing my series of Extreme Activities here on Film Mondays, here is a witty film on the latest hot sport: Finger Skating!

The screen is black for the first few seconds - if you have sound enabled you will hear someone’s footsteps coming up the stairs. It’s well worth the short wait.

I had no idea that Finger Skating is a huge craze - just check out the numerous Finger Skating videos at YouTube. This video is one the best ones for its high production values, having a narrative (of sorts) and using the objects found in the environment.

For other videos in the Extreme Activities series, take a look at:

Extreme Unicycling

Extreme Dancing

Extreme Kuala Lumpur

Extreme Ostrich

Fusion View is being featured on the BBC Radio 5 programme Pods & Blogs on Monday 25 June night (actually 02am on Tuesday 26 June) when it will go out over the airwaves to around half a million AM listeners and half a million FM listeners. The programme will also be available online for ONE WEEK on their website but unfortunately not as a podcast so if you’d like to catch it, you need to go to the site and listen during this coming week. (The Fusion View piece is at around 30 mins into the show, after the news and sport.)

I met Chris Vallance, the presenter, for lunch a few weeks ago at Hayes Galleria by London Bridge and we had a wide-ranging discussion about blogs, podcasts, the Chinese in the UK, cross-cultural issues, globalisation, Malaysian bloggers and much more. It was great to get his perspective as a blogs and pods watcher as well as sharing mine with him as a blogger and podcaster.

He only pulled out his recording equipment after lunch and we wandered around trying to find a quiet corner for him to record the interview. We ended up standing in an alleyway, not far from a white van where a couple of builders were having their sarnies and thermos of tea. Having had a good old chat over lunch, the moment Chris thrust his fancy microphone towards me, I went completely blank and started stammering and dithering - we had to start again several times before I hit my stride and could even say anything sensible about who I was and what Fusion View is all about! I’ve interviewed a number of people on my podcasts and I have to say, it’s utterly different being on the other end of the mike - I have even greater respect now for my Fusion View interviewees in that they never had to do any re-takes and just started chatting with confidence and panache.

The interview was only 10 minutes and we ended up focusing on my novels rather more than on Fusion View. After we finished, I realised I hadn’t had a chance to talk about the various themes of my blog such as:

# Fusion Stories - personal stories of people who live cross-cultural lives eg a Welsh-Iranian student, a South African living in Germany, a Caucasian-American who writes fiction in Mandarin.
# How switching between my “two voices“, speaking “proper” English and heavily accented Malaysian-English, affects my personality and identity
# Podcast interviews with Lucy Luck, a literary agent and Terry Bailey, a lecturer in screenwriting
# Curious Legacies - Recipes and other legacies from people who have influenced my life eg my first boyfriend’s recipe for Hairdryer Duck and my grandmother’s recipe for Soy Sauce Chicken.
# Legacy Blogging: stories from my family eg a recording from 1976 of my late grandfather telling the story of the “first ancestor” from China and my father’s Memories of Malaya during the Japanese occupation.

Chris also wanted me to explain to the world the equipment I use to do my podcasts. I had described it to him over lunch and he thought it was worthwhile for other potential podcasters to know that the equipment didn’t have to be too fancy or expensive - although I have to say, I was rather impressed by his equipment: the professional big flash drive; the robust noise-cancelling microphone and all those buttons. In the end, they didn’t use that bit of the interview in the piece they broadcast but anyway, here’s a picture of my home-made podcasting gear.

That’s a wooden kitchen roll holder and slotted into it is an old leather mobile phone case. The digital recorder sits snugly in the leather case. Ideally, I sit at a table with my interviewee with the equipment sort of in the middle on the table between us. I point the recorder at them when they speak. When it’s my turn to speak, I swivel it towards me by turning the base gently, ask my question and then swivel it back to them. The advantage is that my arm doesn’t get tired holding the recorder up and it also sits a sufficient distance away from our mouths to avoid explosive “PPPs” and “TTTs”. I’m tickled that Chris, the professional BBC journalist, has given it his seal of approval!

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The variety and fun of this blog would not have been possible without all the people who contributed to it through writing guest pieces, agreeing to be interviewed, adding comments or emailing me in response to posts - and also all those offline who sparked ideas for posts through our conversations over coffee and dinner. So thanks to everyone who has been part of the Fusion View community is some way or other!

Think about this the next time you walk into a bookshop to have a browse.

Do you stay near the front of the shop and look through the latest books or latest offers on those big tables piled high with books? Are you taken by the books eye-catchingly displayed just within easy reach and in a prominent position in the bookshop?

You imagine as you browse that the bookshop staff might have lovingly displayed these books here because these are the best books or the books that they have enjoyed. Or that these books have some sort of special aura of greatness or popularity which is why they are here for you to pick up. Or even that these are the only books in the store - period.

The truth known by authors and publishing insiders alike for ages is that those books are there because of the money. The money that the bookshops demand from the publishers for prime retail space on that first table write by the door. But it’s never been made public - till now.

The Times reports about the hidden cost of a bestseller on a leaked document from Waterstones, the UK bookshop chain:

The most expensive [display] package, available for only six books and designed to “maximise the potential of the biggest titles for Christmas”, costs £45,000 per title. The next category down offers prominent display spots at the front of each branch to about 45 new books for £25,000. Inclusion on the Paperbacks of the Year list costs up to £7,000 for each book, while an entry in Waterstone’s Gift Guide, with a book review, is a relative snip at £500.

I can understand why this has become so. Think of the cost of retail space in the UK - and in London in particular. Think of the finite amount of space a bookshop has compared to the infinite number of books out there. How do you get a shop front in along the prime shopping streets of London eg Oxford Street or Regent Street - ahead of your competitors who also want a slice of the lucrative action? You pay the huge rents for it. How do you get a presence in the prime spots in a bookshop - ahead of all the other publishers who want to put their infinite number of books there? You pay for it.

So those books have to blockbusters to make a return for the publisher.

And for the authors who write good, even great, books that may not have the crowd-pleasing quality to sell a million, their books are stuck somewhere in the back shelves. It’s even worse for the self-publishing author who doesn’t have any financial clout or proven track record - you can walk the streets for days with your suitcase full of books, trying to get a bookshop to take a few copies but this kind of mega-muscle is what you are up against. Because for every book on their shelves that doesn’t sell - or doesn’t sell well, that shop is losing money.

If you are a book-lover and want less well-known literary gems to continue to be a part of our culture, move away from the front tables, go to the back shelves, look at the books with their spines turned to you. Or even better, buy your books off Amazon where they have an infinite amount of space to store an infinite number of books. Surf, browse, take a risk in your reading. Try something obscure that your friends may not be reading. Be the first to tell them about it, be a trendsetter not a follower.

Keep those poor non-blockbusting authors alive, support the self-published writer.

On a more light-hearted note, I wonder if property investors/ speculators could get a piece of the retail book space action by leasing the front tables of bookshops and subletting to publishers? You know, like that investment deal where you can buy a hotel room and share part of the income from it with the hotel owner. I’m off to talk to my bank now about getting a buy-to-read mortgage…

Photo: thanks to amalthya from flickr.com

I have been posting occasional posts by my father about his Memories of Malaya. He celebrated his 70th birthday earlier this year and recently found time to write another piece for the family about our family traditions in the time of British rule over Malaya. He writes his memories as an email to our family, who are spread out all over the world, and I edit and share the ones which have a wider general interest here on Fusion View.

While my mother’s side of the family are staunch Methodist Christians, my father’s side of the family comes from a Buddhist tradition. I grew up going to Sunday School and reading Bible stories so it’s really interesting for me to learn more about the traditions from the other side of the family.

He writes:

British rule

I grew up in Malaysia and until I was in my late teens in 1957 the country was one of the many British colonial possessions. There were roughly two kinds of colonial possessions, one, a colony and the other a British protected possession. The first is ruled directly from Whitehall and the other is one where the local chieftain or sultan had entered into a treaty with the British Government where the former had asked for British protection usually against other local chieftains, sultans or neighbouring states. The British Government then sent a British Adviser to help in the administration of the local chieftain or sultan. He would also set up the administrative institutions and infrastructure not unlike those of a colony and for practical purpose the country was administered like that of a colony. Examples of a colony were Singapore, Penang, Malacca, Hong Kong etc. Malaya is an example of the second type. The empire had not only a vast mix of racial types who spoke their own languages practised their own customs and worshipped their own gods. In all these respects British colonial policy was benign. There was no compulsions of any kind: the natives and immigrants need not go to English language schools, worship the Christian god in the manner of the Anglicans nor eat with knife and forks nor dress in suites. They did interfere to do away with inhuman customs or practices like widow burning or slavery. The policy of generally not interfering with local family laws, customs and cultural practices prevailed. The British must have adopted these policies from the examples of the Romans in their dealings with their empire. There was therefore little serious social or political tension in the possessions they ruled.

Taoists

In our households like most Chinese household who were not Christians, we were actually Taoists although without very clear thinking we regarded and called ourselves Buddhists. We worshipped various gods and goddesses with an altar and little statuettes of each of them. I do not think we were even pure Taoist although to this day I do not know what Taoism is. A Buddhist generally means a person who follows Buddha’s teachings and there is no image or statuettes and no worship other then paying respect to a statuette or painting of Buddha in the usual eastern way of paying respect, by kneeling and the bowing to them. I will continue to refer to ourselves as Buddhists although by this it is really the kind of Taoism I have described above.

Daily rituals

There were certain daily rituals to be performed. In the morning after my Mother or the servant, Ah Hoe Chey (AHC) had done their morning toilet, they would place one joss stick for one deity into a bowl filled with a kind of grey powder which held the joss stick in upright position and would kneel with hands clasped bowed to each deity in turn.

The gods and goddesses were placed in a row on a long altar table and going from left to right they were the following:

1. the “Heavenly Emperor”: there is no image of Him. I think he rules the heaven;
2. the Warrior God (Kuan Kong): He was not a god to help people to fight wars like the Roman god, Mars. In his life on earth he was a warrior in the classical period of Chinese history; after his death, a cult arose in paying respect to him and sometimes people who did so also asked for favours and they were granted and he became deified like some Roman emperors although there is no record of a dead emperor granting any favours. There was a painting of him in his warrior robes famously with tucked up eye brows with a red face with two lieutenants standing beside him.
3. the Goddess of Mercy (Koong Yum): She was a human at one time who did a lot of good deeds and was known for her filial piety. Her life was portrayed in a film version with a famous Chinese star playing her part and there was a scene where she was shown to pluck out her own eyes to use them to cure her mother. Again she was deified after her death because she still performed good deeds in her answers to prayers. There was a small statuette of her made of white porcelain looking serene and benign, like a caring and loving mother.
4. next to her there was the Monkey God. There was a little statuette of him dressed in a yellow robe in the style of the classical Chinese time but with the face of a monkey. I do not know what his position is in the pantheon. I think it arose as follows: there is a Chinese legend that a Chinese monk traveled to India to receive the Buddhist scriptures and his traveling companions included two persons one with feature of a pig and the other a monkey and the legend is full of stories of their adventures in their journey to India. He must be the one with the features of a monkey. Because of this god in our house we would not use the ordinary word of monkey “ma lau” but a more polite word.

There was a small altar at the foot of the altar table. I do not know what god is represented there. There is the god of the kitchen who had a small altar over the kitchen stoves. He reports to the Heavenly Emperor at the end of each Chinese calendar year on the deeds of the household. On most mornings either Mother or AHC would chant prayers from a prayer book and this lasted about fifteen minutes.

First and fifteenth

On the first and fifteenth day of each Chinese calendar month the worship of these deities were a little more elaborate in that the appropriate temples must be visited and worship conducted there. The more religious minded, like Mother and AHC, would not eat meat for the two days. The temples would provide free vegetarian food for these two days for anyone who attended them whether they worshipped or not. In addition to joss sticks, joss papers were burnt.

Feast days

In addition to the daily prayers most Chinese also celebrate other feast days many of which were not religious but involved the cycles of the earth around the sun. The first major festival in the calendar is the Spring Festival or more usually known as Chinese New Year. Like all humanity it is a celebration of the beginning of new life - wearing of new clothes, cleaning house so that it looks new, wishing good fortune for the New Year. In our household we children wanted presents left near where we slept like on Christmas Eve. So we had Mother to give us presents in this manner. In one year Mother gave us a small magnifying glass to complement our stamp collection and packets of stamps and fountain pens. Father did not have relationship with his relatives except his elder brother. Mother was the only child. So we had no relatives to have to visit except Father’s elder brother and two ladies whom, like all Chinese, we call aunts although we were not related but were only Mother’s friends. We therefore received very few red packets and were impressed when some of school friends who related the amount they received. For the first day of the Chinese New Year even we children ate vegetarian and AHC made some delicious vegetarian food. When we grew up in secondary school Father would allow us to see any number of film shows for the two days of holidays. Normally we were allowed to see one film a week. So we packed as many as 3 shows into a day.

There was the mid-summer celebration which occurs on the fifteenth day of the eighth month in the Chinese calendar. This is a harvest festival and the moon is supposed to be at its biggest and brightest. Children would stroll around the garden of their houses holding lighted lanterns.

There is the day the winter solstice is celebrated when everyone eats little dough balls cooked in sugared water with ginger. I personally did not like them but Mother did very much.

There is All Souls Day where families go to the graves of parents or grandparents to pay their respects and render filial piety by cutting grass and sweeping away rubbish around the graves. About 14 days are given for this duty. I feel very touched when I see photographs of cemeteries filled with the Chinese doing this. I know of several persons who have travelled from as far as Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to perform this duty and I have just heard a few days ago that a friend traveled from Hong Kong where he worked to do this duty.

Cowherd and the weaver girl

There is one particularly romantic festival and it occurs on the seventh day of the seven month in the Chinese calendar. It is the festival of the “Cowherd and the weaver girl.” A long time ago there was a cowherd who tended the cows and a girl who weaved cloth. They were so enamoured and spent time mooning over each other that they neglected their chores. The gods became angry at this and separated them and permitted them only to meet for that one day in a year on the rainbow bridge and it is this that the earthlings now celebrate. I think this would make a splendid opera. Imagine the last scene where the young couple meets on a rainbow bridge singing duets of love and longing and below on earth the people dance and sing in celebration of the meeting. Opera composers have always included one scene where there is a lot of spirited music and vigorous dancing and this can be it and be a very fine one too.

There are other festivals but regrettably I cannot remember them.

Deity of little children

When we children celebrated our birthdays we had to worship a very old lady deity whose altar was at the end of our bed. She looks after little children. When I use the word “worship,” I mean that one would kneel put our palms together and bow three times to the altar and if Mother or Grandmother is standing beside us she will prompt us to say “make me a good and filial boy and help me to be successful in the examinations.” To celebrate I had a bowl of rice and as a treat I was given the thigh of a roasted duck all of it for myself. I remember eating it by myself holding it by the bone and it was a treat not to have to eat together as usual with the family. Even then the birthday was not celebrated every year - only when Mother, Grandmother or AHC remembered it.

Photo: thanks to limeydog on flickr.com

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