Archive for the 'Malaysia' Category

I’ve been re-working the draft of my third novel Tianming Traviata recently.

The novel is an off-beat family drama with a cast of quirky, colourful characters. The main character is a 70-year old cabaret singer, Evie, who is still going strong in her sequinned gowns and feather headdresses. She owns the only nightclub in a small town in Malaysia and sings old show tunes, with the “grand dame” air of days gone by. Her neice Kit-Mei works as software programmer in Kuala Lumpur, a blogging, city-slicking modern young woman who is very much part of 21st century Malaysia. The family are thrown into crisis when Evie’s daughter disappears and the clash between the old and the new generations are brought to a head.

I had been writing it in Standard English using a third person narrative structure. It was zipping along nicely - but it just lacked “oomph” and I was finding that I was getting bored. The dialogue bits were fine when Evie was in the thick of the action. But the narrative was just lacklustre. Now, if the author is bored by the novel, there’s no hope that the narrative will be able to grip others!

So I put it away for several months. Then a few weeks ago, Evie’s voice kept coming back to me. In the dialogue bits, she is in full flow, loud and raucous and full of energy - speaking in Malaysian English. In contrast, the third person narrative was in measured, proper, sensible full sentences with proper syntax, grammar and punctuation.

And I thought, why not try writing the narrative bits in Malaysian English? Yah, why not-lah? So stupid I was before. This one is Evie’s story-lah so, of course, got to tell it with her voice, isn’t it?

Since then, I’ve had such fun getting the narrative down in the voice of a 70 year old cabaret singer who will not let her arthritic hip stop her doing high-kicks and whose language is full of verve and peppered with “-lah”s.

When I’ve got a bit further along with the text, I will upload a podcast reading of the first chapter so you can see what you think. In particulary, I would be interested to see the response of Malaysians to the use of our form of the English language in fiction.

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To hear what Malaysian English sounds like in contrast to Standard UK English, listen to my podcast “Two Voices” about my “schizophrenic” relationship with language.

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I will write more next week about “-lah” and its use in Malaysian English.

I was interviewed by Elizabeth Tai of The Star newspaper, Malaysia on Friday for an article on writing and blogging. She asked for an update on what I’d been doing since my two novels were published (answer: taking a break from serious writing, changing jobs and moving house) and also if I was working on a third novel (answer: yes, very slowly. It’s called “Tianming Traviata” and is an off-beat family drama told in the first person by a feisty, old lady - and is mostly written in Malaysian English). I also talked about Fusion View and the joy of blogging (creating an online community of international writers and artists, including Malaysian writers Lydia Teh and John Ling, to name a few well-known names). She asked what advice I had for Malaysian writers (answer: read widely, keep writing and keep learning. Also, I referred them to my Getting Published series on this blog, which I started when a Malaysian writer asked me how to get published in the UK - although it gives advice to anyone wanting to be published in the UK, I try to focus on issues that would be of particular interest to Malaysian writers).

Elizabeth asked me for my reaction to the statistic that apparently, Malaysians only read two books a year. Well, as a writer, it makes me depressed. But after I came off the phone, I wondered: can that really be true? There are lots of bookshops - and they are big, too - in all the shopping malls in Malaysia. Can they really be doing hardly any business?

I estmate that I read more than 20 books a year, both fiction and non-fiction - although this year, non-fiction seems to have dominated. How many books do you read a year? Let me know, especially if you are based in Malaysia. Can we prove this statistic wrong?

Even if you’re not Malaysian, please try out the poll below (it’s anonymous) and add your comment as well, if you’d like to share more details about what you are reading or if you have views about reading. I am really curious now to get a sense of how much people are reading - all the more interesting in today’s world of video games and home entertainment centres. Are Fusion View visitors more likely to read books or less so?

I’ll review the results in a couple of weeks and report back.

PS. Elizabeth couldn’t confirm when the article on Fusion View would appear in The Star - if you are based in Malaysia, can you keep an eye out for it and let me know when it comes out? I’m curious, naturally, to know what the article says.

My father continues his memories of life under the Japanese during World War Two, when he was a young boy of about six.

He writes:

Lessons consisted exclusively of learning the language and the script - not the one that uses the Chinese characters. There was no Japanese literature or war propaganda in the lessons. Soon there was not much to teach us and a lot of the periods were spent in singing some popular Japanese songs.

After the British surrendered my Father had to get rid of his tin hat and gas mask with which he was issued when he was drafted or joined the medical service of the British Army. As a doctor the Japanese issued him some petrol and so he was able to use his car which had a red cross pasted in the front wind-screen and the back. This would ease him in passing through the check points that were erected on most cross-roads.

One matter caused me a great deal of anxiety and that was the radio. The Japanese had made it known that if anyone was found with a radio he was liable to have his head chopped off. So for a few mornings I would wake up with cold sweat worrying that Mother had not got rid of our radio. Eventually she did by dumping it into a deep mining pool. She could not have done it herself and must have needed someone to help her and it is a wonder that whoever he was he did not squeal to the Japanese about it.

The only time I came across some Japanese soldiers was when a few of them came round to the vicinity of our house. They were intent on catching some chickens and they asked me to help them to round-up the chickens; we didn’t catch any. I wondered if that amounted to collaborating with them! By the third year of school I was quite fluent in writing and speaking Japanese but I soon forgot all of it after the return of the British. Being young I did not know what happened to the production of rubber and tin and how trade was conducted. What we know was the scarcity of food. We had also dug vegetable plots at the back of the house and planted the easily grown vegetables but it was not enough to be self-sufficient.

As the Allies fought back and in the last months of the Occupation we could see the B-29’s dropping bombs over the airfield, the Central Railway Workshop and unexpectedly the National Museum. The places bombed were quite far from where we lived so we did not suffer any collateral damage as it would be called now. Some people watched and cheered but a lot were still apprehensive because the Japanese had not surrendered yet.

Finally the Japanese surrendered and the occupation was over. I did not witness the ceremony of the signing of the surrender which was conducted in the school hall of the Victoria Institutions, the school I attended in later years.

Written by Guest Blogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

Photo: thanks to indianaradios.com

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Following on from my father’s post last Friday about his boyhood experiences of the Japanese occupation of Malaya during the Second World War, the story continues with an account of life at Japanese school.

The family hid deep in a rubber estate when the Japanese troops swept through the country. Now, a few years on, life has settled into a new routine under the occupation.

My father writes:

In our family there was my Mother, my maternal Grandmother, the four of us and a servant who has since become very close to the family. Father was away with his first family which will be explained later. The servant’s name was Ah Hoe but we children called her Ah Hoe Cheh (AHC) - the “Cheh” means sister a term the children of the house used for these young girls who came from China to work in the various households in Malaya. She came to work for us soon after her arrival from China until she retired. She had shared the privations and happy times of the family, and never grumbled about her work and was and is an excellent cook. As I write this she is 82 years old and she now lives in Hong Kong with her niece in well deserved retirement. Very unusually she was literate in Chinese and as children we listened to the Chinese folk tales and ghost stories that she would tell us and stories from some of the Chinese classics which every Chinese knows. She even recited from a book the prayers for Kuan Yin (the Goddess of Mercy) before the latter’s image in the household altar and lighted joss sticks twice a day before the household Gods. (Mother was busy helping my Father in the clinic and we children would not know how to attend to these devotions.) As Mother was thus away she looked after us, fed and clothed us and did the household chores as well.

Almost all of these girls who had come over had sworn that they would not marry and very few broke this oath. A dozen or so of them would group together to rent a floor on top of a shophouse in town where they would go for a rest on the occasions they could get away from their work. There were no fixed off days. Most of them would use letter writers who wrote in Chinese to send letters back to their homes. They would send money and it was done this way: they would give some person who has a trusted reputation the money meant for the family and the agent of this trusted person in China would give the equivalent to the family. I have never heard any of them being cheated.

For food the adults’ staple was boiled sweet potatoes, boiled tapioca or tapioca flour made into pancakes and occasionally rice porridge boiled with sweet potatoes. For us children we had rice porridge boiled with sweet potatoes. We became quite experts on the quality of sweet potatoes; they came in various colours: orange, yellow and purple. The purple ones were rare but they were usually the sweetest. In the early days of the Occupation we would slaughter the chicken and ducks because soon there would not be enough food to feed them. So for a short while we had good food.

I cannot remember the exact age but it must have been about 6 that I was enrolled in a Japanese school. It was a Japanese school in that it taught us the Japanese language, arithmetic and drawing. There were about 40 Chinese boys in a class and the form master was also a Chinese. There were other teachers who were Indians, a Sikh (the locals) and a Japanese woman. I later found out that the locals had been teachers in English schools before the coming of the Japanese. They must have taken a crash course in Japanese to teach Japanese. Later on after the Occupation they went back to teach in English schools. The Japanese lady was in her early thirties and she wore skirts and blouses and taught us singing. She was a quiet and dignified person and quite pretty and there was no trace of any arrogance.

The whole school would assemble every morning in the school field in orderly lines and the Japanese flag was raised. The whole school sang the Japanese national anthem and a teacher more fit then the others climbed on to a table tennis table and led the whole school in free hand exercise for about 15 minutes after which the boys marched back to their classes and the day’s lessons began. In a visit to Tokyo a few years ago I could see some Japanese doing the same exercise as we did, standing in front of their shophouses.

There was a gardening period twice a week. During this period the boys were expected to and did plant sweet potatoes, tapioca and vegetables. The plants did not bear much fruit. (But strangely when the British came back we also had gardening periods in the English schools.) The teachers’ salary was supplemented by sweet potatoes, yams and noodles given periodically. AHC would send me to school on her bicycle with me seated on the back seat. When two more of my brothers went to school she would take all three of us with one sitting on the cross bar in front and two of us on the seat at the back.

Written by Guest Blogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

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*This photo and others illustrating my father’s posts are taken from the internet and not from our family albums.

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I was telling Angie the other evening about a call and answer game I learnt at primary school in Malaysia. It was an English school (as opposed to a national Malaysian school) where there were many ex-pat kids from the UK, Continental Europe and the US. We would sit in a circle and each have a number. We would clap and click our fingers in rhythm, calling and answering:

~ Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

~ No. 4 stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

~ Who me?

~ Yes, you.

~ Couldn’t be.

~ Then who?

~ No. 1 stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

Angie cried that they played a similar game in South Africa. But the back story had a different, much more saucy twist:

~ Who stole the kisses from the girl next door?

Isn’t it weird how the exact same game can be reinvented on different continents? I want to know who made this chant up - and who changed it for the different countries. It’s the same curiosity that makes me want to know who makes up playground rhymes and games - and how they get made up - and also why some catch on and last for generations and some don’t get picked up at all.

Is the version I learnt the version without physical intimacy specially tailored for Asia? (In Malaysia, you can get arrested for public demonstrations of affection). Or is the version in South Africa liberalised for that particular society? Are there other versions? What do they say? I would love for someone to share their views.

My father seems to be on an inspired roll. Ever since his first contribution to Fusion View, about his first experience of coming to England as a young man, he has been writing down his memories for our family. Here, he writes about his experience of the Japanese occupation of Malaya as a very young boy - stories that I never knew about at all before the email he sent earlier this week.

For people of my father’s generation, their childhood / young adulthood were indelibly marked by the Japanese occupation of Malaya during the Second World War. However, I think it’s important to make the point that these days the relationship between Japan and its Asian neighbours is peaceful and there are many Japanese families living in modern Malaysia, thriving and co-operating together with Malaysians.

My father writes:

When the Japanese in their conquest of South East Asia reached Malaya in 1941 I was 4 years old. Certainly not old enough to read about or understand the politics that gave rise to the war with Japan or the European war. This account is merely that of a family of the professional class in a British Colonial possession in the Far East which underwent about 3 years of the Japanese occupation and survived without any death in the family through torture or other atrocities.

I had 3 other younger brothers each younger by 1 year than the next. My Father was a medical practitioner who graduated in the 1920s from the King Edward VII College of Medicine in Singapore. It was one of the two finest medical colleges in the British Empire, the other one being in Hong Kong University. It produced solidly competent doctors. My Father’s elder brother and their brother-in-law also graduated from the same college. My Father-in-law was also a graduate of the same college at a slightly later date. My Father’s Father (i.e. my paternal grandfather) taught Latin in the secondary school.

The earliest memory of the state of the war was our fleeing to Singapore by train when the reputation of Singapore as an impregnable fortress was still intact. We went to our maternal grand aunt’s house in Bukit Timah where she and her family of her grown-up children lived in a large rambling wooden house in the midst of a pineapple plantation with fruit trees of rambutans and also chickens. A new experience for us was to live in such a large open space with so much greenery and fresh air without electric lights and having to draw water from a well for our baths. Soon the myth of the impregnable fortress was eroding and we fled back to Kuala Lumpur by train and the journey took hours, stopping every time there were hostile planes overhead. My parents must have heard of the rapes and atrocities committed by the Japanese in Shanghai and other parts of China and we then moved deep into a rubber estate with the whole family and livestock (mainly chickens and ducks.)

Here life was quite idyllic. We lived together with other families in rooms one next to the other. There was no electric light again and had only kerosene lamps so we went to sleep very early. The rubber trees kept the temperature cool and there was a stream with clear and clean water in which we could bathe. We were disturbed by the Japanese only once when they came in trucks. We heard the rumbling of their trucks when they went over a bridge which they had to cross to reach the rubber estate. All of us then ran deeper into the jungle which surrounded the rubber estate. All the younger women would put on ugly torn and patched peasant clothes and make themselves as uninviting as possible by rubbing ash or mud on their face or arms and were the first to run away for everyone had heard of their rapes. In this instance none was raped. They were after men who were alleged to have been conducting anti-Japanese activities.

Each one of us had a few clothes and some homemade biscuits tied up in a pillow case standing in the bedroom to be picked up when we had to flee from the house. The peasant clothes were also always ready to be put on.

Other than this disturbance, life was without any untoward event although at all times there was at the back of our minds the worry as to what would the next day bring. The adults must have had a great deal of anxiety especially people like my Mother who had four very young children to feed and bring up.

Next Friday: Japanese school

Written by Guest Blogger Ooi Boon-Leong

memmlya

A while back, I wrote about the First Ancestor, the story that my family tells of where we came from. I found a tape recording of an interview that I did with my grandfather on my mother’s side 30 years ago, asking him to tell us the story of our family. I was thirteen at the time - and I guess in a way I was doing a podcast even before podcasts were invented!

The family gathered round one evening just before Christmas 1976 and I taped the story that my grandfather told. This is the last and only recording we have of his voice as he died a year later so it is a recording that is treasured in our family.

I have transferred it to digital format without any expert or fancy technology so the sound quality is not perfect. However, I hope that you can still enjoy the story he tells…

Listen Now:

 A Voice from the Past (Family Story): Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (1186)

My father has recently been inspired into a spate of creative activity. He submitted a Fusion Story a little while back, about his first experience of coming to study in England. He is of that generation of men - particularly in the Chinese tradition - who were never encouraged to share personal moments publicly. And he has never been known to write much creatively. So I am really touched that recently, he has been sharing his personal reminiscences with us in writing - and really proud of him.

This piece about his grandmother also gives us a flavour of a Malaya of a different time - before the freeways and high rise buildings and Starbucks.

He writes:

My earliest memory of Grandmother was when I was four or five when we moved to Cheras. I had gone with her to clean the house before the family moved in. Some day she would buy durians from the Malay vendors who came with a huge basket of the fruits stacked on the back of his bicycle. We would eat them squatting at the front door. She was very fond of durians.

In the little garden in the front of the Cheras house there was a pomegranate tree to which she seemed very attached. She would water it with water which had been used to clean fish and would hang empty crab-shells on the branches because they would help the tree. It seldom bore fruit and when it did she was very pleased with it.

She doted on his grandsons and I think particularly me. She would make sure to buy Nyonya kuih from the Indian vendor who would come around with his 2 huge baskets on a pole across his shoulder hawking his wares. And very often he had a pot containing assam curry with a charcoal stove underneath it - for making assam laksa. A word about this Indian gentleman. He was already quite old then, I would say at a guess about 50 years. He would carry these two baskets and the pot and walked many miles a day to sell his food. It must really be a very hard life. I still remember his gaunt but cheerful face wearing a brown felt hat like an inverted flower pot. He would disappear every now and then for 3 months or so and then he would appear again saying that he had gone back to India.

There are two things which Grandmother wanted me to do which caused me some pain - as little boys would have when they are asked to do things which caused them to stand out amongst their peers. The first was to part my hair on the right side because she said that if I used the left side all the time, the hair along the line would drop out. The second was to wear braces to hold up my shorts. It was, of course, a sensible thing to do but little boys did not do sensible things when the others do not do it. I can’t remember how I got her to allow me to revert back to normal. May be I complained to Mother who must have stepped in.

She would tell very earthy stories to AHC and I heard some of them which I can still remember but it is not suitable for re-telling as my secretary types all my letters.

When Mother went out with Father she would bring back Hokkien mee about 11.00 at night and Grandmother would eat the mee with me in the bedroom. As far as I can remember my brother BT never joined in the eating. Was it because of my known greedy nature that I was that she woke me up. Grandmother was full of common sense and it was she who told us that Queen Victoria had lots of children whom she married off to all the royal houses in Europe and thus she was related to them making the likelihood of disputes or war less likely. (Although it did not prevent the First World War.)

I had always thought she had a noble face with good cheekbones and bone structure. She did not chew betel nut but she smoked self-rolled cigarettes but did not have the dirty habits of the smoker. I remember using up my savings of Japanese paper money to buy her, just before the Japanese surrender, tobacco in packets and the cigarette paper.

Later on when we were in secondary school she lived in the Imbi Road temple and we would see her when we visited the temple on the first and fifteenth day of the Chinese month and other feast days of the Gods. Still later on when she lived on top of the dispensary we would see her on Friday evenings after going to the Rex and Madras cinemas.

She was so effacing that she would not stay with anyone of us for fear of disturbing our lives. I remember saying to myself on her death which occurred on a Saturday that she is so understanding that she would not want to inconvenience anyone and have them to take leave to come to her funeral.

Written by Guestblogger: Ooi Boon-Leong

The Cornish Pasty is the iconic food of Cornwall. Everywhere we went during our holiday there a few weeks back, the delicious smell of pasties wafted out at us from bakeries and whole shops devoted to the speciality. They are savoury portable meat pies in a distinctive half moon shape. To my Eastern eye, they look like giant curry puffs.

The outer case of the pasty is made of golden brown pastry that crackles and flakes as you bite into it. Its shape comes from folding a large circle of pastry over the filling and braiding the resulting curved edge. The traditional filling is steak and potatoes but these days, there’s lamb and mint and steak & stilton and a whole range more. They have a satisfying, heavy feel in your hand, about the size and weighty book.

Curry puffs are much smaller. They can be the same handbag shape as a pasty or sometimes can look like a fatter and shorter sausage roll. Inside, the filling is made of minced pork, chicken or beef, onions, vegetables and potatoes fried in dry spicy curry. You can get fried puffs with crispy oily pastry or baked ones with flaky puff pastry. Even describing it now makes me drool…. Bizarrely, the best curry puff I’ve had was at the canteen in Singapore General Hospital some years back.

Pasties are really yum on a blustery Cornish day. We shared one in Falmouth as Hurricane Gordon blew itself in across the Atlantic, the sky glowering darkly and the sea sharp and choppy in the bay. The light drizzle was like a sheet of pins thrown at us by the wind. A hot pasty in our hands, steaming in the cold, was just what we needed.

But there is always a slight disappointment in the back of my mind. Tasty as pasties are, they strongly retain their ancient British identity as solid, rather bland but nourishing food. They aren’t - and never will be nor should be - spicy, meaty curry puffs wafting of garlic and coriander and burning your mouth with the more pugnacious taste of the East. Sigh. I do miss a good curry puff eaten in the sweltering heat of a street market…

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Can you tell which is the pic of Cornish Pasties and which of Curry Puffs?

Picture A

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Picture B

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Answer: A = Curry Puffs; B = Cornish Pasties

The New Straits Times, a Malaysian Newspaper, has reported that there is 471 million Malaysian ringgit (£117 million sterling) sitting in the official trustee’s bank account which is waiting to be distributed from the estates of deceased Malaysians. The fund has accumulated from people who died before they were able to make their wills and there are cases where their heirs then also died without making wills.

The paper reports “Dusuki Ahmad, chairman of Amanah Raya Bhd, as saying the majority of cases were unresolved because families squabbled over assets in the absence of a will, or because the original beneficiaries could not be bothered to distribute the rest of the estate — sometimes for two or three generations.”

This makes me think of Charles Dickens’s novel “Bleak House” which opens in a shroud of London fog. For generations, the Jarndyce family has been fighting over a will in the case Jarndyce v. Jarndyce and it has become so complex with so many litigants and so many lawyers that no-one knows where it started and where it will end. The phrase Jarndyce v Jarndyce has passed into common parlance to describe court cases that spiral out of control with no end in sight.

Who will be the Malaysian Dickens and write a story of feuding families and generations torn apart by dispute?

I can see the opening chapter now:

“Kuala Lumpur. Haze {substitute “haze” everytime “fog” appears} everywhere. Haze up the river, where it flows among green lalang and padangs; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Haze on the Selangor marshes, Haze on the highways. Haze creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; Haze lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Haze in the eyes and throats of ancient Cheras pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; Haze in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; Haze cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his sweating little ‘prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of Haze, with Haze all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.”

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A copy of Bleak House and other books discussed on Fusion View can be found at the Fusion View Store