More History Here

This was a favour for two friends, but it took me more than three months before I finally penned it and sent it off. Last month, I was told that the author will be relocating to China. But for some reason or another the review didn't come out until today; I suppose the order of publishing was already determined some weeks back.

At least I kept my promise.

But it's strange that the word "history" has lots to do with some of the reviews I've written lately. I wouldn't call it coincidence.

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Is this our history?

first published in The Star, 12 July 2009


Nostalgia. Every time life deals us a blow, we reach for it like child with a scraped knee running to his parents. Is that why we're seeing so many biographies on the shelves nowadays?

There's a different kind of nostalgia hovering over our heads right now, brought on by depressing news headlines greeting our mornings in the past several years – commentaries over our once shared past, now frayed for what seems to be political pantomimes for specific audiences.

Muhibbah, according to at least one old-timer, could be summed up by one name: P Ramlee. Who remembers the blindfolded Chinese tailor who was led by Ali Baba's faithful maid via a song-and-hop routine to perform the gruesome deed at her master's house? I'm not sure if anybody would be able to film that again in this day and age without some sort of outcry.

When did we stop being confident and comfortable with ourselves to the point where we cannot laugh along when others laugh at us?

Some people are trying to find the answers; others are content with revisiting those simple serene days, so far away now that it sounds like another place. The anthology Postcards From a Foreign Country is of the latter persuasion. The author, who goes by the single moniker "Yin", wrote these stories as a hobby, it seems, and was persuaded by a friend to publish them.

The book comprises 10 stories blurbed as sepia vignettes of a less complicated time and set in the 1950s and 1960s, although no dates are mentioned.

From the first few chapters it would seem that the past – or more precisely our past – should be seen as a country with closely-guarded borders. "The Langchia Man", one of Postcards' better stories is also the grittiest one, with the harsh and sometimes seedy lives of the rickshaw men of old laid bare for all to see.

In Postcards, the characters' mannerisms and prejudices appear to have been deliberately magnified, making them quite stereotypical, and I found myself thinking, "Wow, is this how things used to be?" Not to say that the author is being pedantic about the signs of our times but, looking closer, I found no heroes or villains.

Just people, sometimes at their best, but often at their worst. Sensitive minds should probably take comfort in the fact that this is fiction.

However, some parts in Postcards did take me aback – in a good way: Ho lan sui! Or "Holland water", that antique Cantonese term for soft drinks when one brand known as Fraser & Neave often came in re-used, not-so-new glass bottles. And how amusing it was to read about another kind of muhibbah – a bunch of punters, representing our major ethnic groups, divining for winning lottery numbers at a cemetery. I bet there are some of us who want to forget a time when we believed in ghosts and black magic.

The progression of stories in the beginning was okay but quickened towards the end, at the point where the last two stories began.

Still, the last piece is poignant in its brief hurried way, a subtle rebuke to those who try to sanitise history and erase the role of "outsiders" in the nation's history, even if their goals and means may have been less than ideal.

Often wistful, at times tongue-in-cheek, and sometimes discomforting, Postcards is like the grimy, scuffed F&N bottle of my childhood. But no amount of "Holland water" will bring back those good old days.

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Postcards from a Foreign Country

Yin
Published by East West Publishing Pty Ltd
235 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-9751646-5-5

Farewell, David Eddings

David Eddings, author of the Belgariad, Malloreon, Elenium and Tamuli fantasy novel series left us forever.

I can't remember when I started reading his books, but I do know a copy belonged to my sister. It was a book from the Elenium trilogy, featuring the Pandion knight Sparhawk. I've since grown tired of the humour and other gimmicks that were his stock-in-trade for who knows how long. But when I first read it, I was hooked. I remember reading a brick-thick book from the Tamuli trilogy cover to cover in less than two hours. At work.

Sparhawk the knight may be the Queen's Champion, but we can, in some way, identify with him. He hates (some of) his bosses. His servant gives him lip. He has money issues. He's got wife issues, too. All in language we can understand.

Looking back now, I wonder if my new-found interest in books began with Eddings. I seem to be more into the shelves now, and not just plain browsing. And not just because of the new job.

Buried In Time

My unedited review of Anchee Min's The Last Empress that got swallowed up by the labyrinthine editing process at The Star. I felt the book, the sequel to Empress Orchid, spoke for itself. It also marked the start of a brief spell where the books I chose were part of a series.

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History has never been kind to women with power (not when men write the books, anyway): Boudicca, Nefertiti, Cleopatra, Catherine the Great, Empress Wu Zetian and even Queen Elizabeth I.

Apart from Wu Zetian, the only other empress this side of the world who’s been given a bad rep is Ci Xi. Tales of her excesses roared across every corridor and back-alley during her days. Under the Communists, her reputation fared no better. Modern-day scriptwriters did her no favours, either. Thus, the image of the female tyrant who reigned in her son’s name lives on to the present.

Then I came across Anchee Min’s The Last Empress. I was expecting the usual, so I thumbed a few pages - and was proven wrong.

The Dowager Empress Ci Xi began life as Orchid, the daughter of an official whose death left the family in dire straits. Once she entered the imperial court, she schemed and bribed her way into the emperor’s bedchamber and eventually sired an heir, no doubt stepping on some toes and ruffling a few feathers on the way. Ci Xi’s rise to power is chronicled in Empress Orchid, also by the same author. The story continues in this kind-of autobiographical account of the Dowager Empress’ days until the end.

I knew how the story ended, but I was unprepared for how it was told here. Min depicts the Dowager Empress as a smart, strong-willed and all-too human woman trying to shine in her role: disciplining the unruly, forging alliances, outmanoeuvring scoundrels and keeping her enemies at bay, struggling against the tide of public opinion, political chicanery and the onset of globalisation.

The author gives readers front-row seats to the drama that is twilight of the Qing Dynasty and remains faithful to the historical timeline. In this version, Her Majesty was in fact aware of the plots swirling around her, but every attempt to remedy the situation was sabotaged by traitors, schemers and the ineptitude of others, including her son. Other times, she was simply outmanoeuvred. Blame is also laid on the foreign media of the time, with accusations of sensationalism and propaganda. Once can’t help but draw parallels with Iraq and its “heroic exiles” like Ahmed Chalabi.

While there are glimpses into Ci Xi’s official role, more emphasis is given to her personal side. Your heart is wrenched by the Empress’ losses and how she reacts to them. As the country collapses around her, sabotaged by enemies from within and beyond, friends and loved ones are taken away one by one: her biological son, her eunuch attendant, trusted advisors and the other man in her life, whom she could not openly acknowledge. Her slow, painful decline is finally marked by one last departure - her own.

The prose is powerful and evocative of that bygone era. The Wade-Giles method of spelling Chinese names (as opposed to today's hanyu pinyin method) gives the pages the feel of an old history book. The flapping sounds of pigeon’s wings, the scent of flowers in the garden, meandering streams and the smell of musty old corridors and dark corners of the Forbidden City, are all brought vividly to life - minute interludes before each chapter unfolds.

In The Last Empress, Min abandons the notoriously popular Ci Xi of the silver screen and (sometimes biased) history books and gives us Ci Xi the mother, aunt, sister, lover and human being - a convincing portrayal that will have you wishing that the author’s interpretation of the Dowager Empress is actually closer to the truth. One can’t discount the possibility; written history has been proven to be as fallible as human memory, and subject to interpretation - or subversion.

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The Last Empress

Anchee Min
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
308 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-7475-7850-5

Blookish And British

For this one, they actually rang me up and sent me a copy of the text to check. Not much to do, really. This time they did a better job.

Sadly, another review of mine for Anchee Min's The Last Empress will never make it to print; they apparently published an overseas review of this book instead, not knowing they had mine on file. So it goes...

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Slight ride

first published in The Star, 17 May 2009


Unless hosted on a subscription-based system, password-protected, or set to private, blogs are generally open to the public. So why compile the posts of a public blog into a paperback volume for sale?

Well, for one thing, charity. Which is nice of the authors. But I think some readers would have a hard time fathoming the need for this "blook".

A blook is a book derived from a blog. In 2002, Tony Pierce collected posts from his blog on Hollywood and published them in a printed book called Blook (the winning entry from a contest Pierce held to name his book, sent in by American professor, blogger and media guru Jeff Jarvis). Which is what two women who travelled 12,500 miles (about 20,000km) on three wheels for charity did with their blog posts.

British belles Antonia "Ants" Bolingbroke-Kent and Jo Huxster, both in their late 20s, have been best friends since secondary school. Bitten by the travel bug early in life, they'd planned to go on a jaunt upon graduation from uni. But their plans were derailed when Huxster succumbed to depression for several years. Bolingbroke-Kent also became more aware of mental health issues when she lost another friend to suicide.

Then, when a recovered Huxster was on vacation in Bangkok in 2002, she encountered the cute tuk-tuk. The diminutive, garishly decorated three-wheelers that throng Bangkok's roads rekindled the girls' enthusiasm for travel – but on a much larger scale than before.

Their trip, they decided, would start in Bangkok and end in Brighton, England – a journey of those aforementioned 12,500 miles. It would aim to raise £50,000 (RM270,000) for a cause close to both girls' hearts: Mind (www.mind.org.uk), a mental health charity for England and Wales. And ... they'd be travelling in a custom hot-pink tuk-tuk that they euphoniously christened Ting Tong.

"Ting tong" actually means "crazy" in Thai. It's like the gods wanted them to go on this trip, which eventually began in May 2006 and ended triumphantly in Brighton 14 weeks later in September that same year.

No crazy 20,000km trip would be complete without mechanical tantrums from their best supporting character, of course, despite Ting Tong having been souped up to withstand the long miles. But the emergencies always got a helping hand from the tuk-tuk manufacturer in Bangkok, and even from some locals in different countries.

Hard-core romantics will be disappointed to know that, being a sponsored charity tour, it wasn't all roadside camps and grubbing for roots for dinner.

Nor were there any run-ins with smugglers and paramilitary types, thank goodness – although Ants scrapped one route over the possibility of US missiles over Iran.

The trip and its purpose were heavily covered by the press in most countries they visited, but to keep their audience more up-to-date, the girls blogged. And I read the dead-trees version of their crazy adventure; a cut from the proceeds of the blook's sales will go to Mind.

According to the girls' website, tuktotheroad.co.uk, the trip raised £24,000 (RM129,600); donations to the cause still being hosted at justgiving.com/tuktotheroad has since raised the figure – as of Friday – to slightly more than £45,000 (RM243,000).

The book gives quite a bit of backstory about the girls' lives, from how they first met to Huxster's struggle with depression, and the events leading to the birth of their tuk-athon.

In the tradition of a typical travel book, there's a travel resource section at the end, and a frequently-asked questions list for aspiring cross-country tuk-tuk daredevils. Suffice to say that this is not something anybody does on a whim!

Tuk Tuk to the Road is an enjoyable ride, but isn't anyone involved in producing this book worried about the story going stale after the second re-reading? I know I'd be. The only reason I'd ever pick it up again is if I need a distraction from other more important things. You know, like, reviewing other books....

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Tuk Tuk to The Road

Two Girls, Three Wheels, 12,500 Miles

Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent and Jo Huxster
Friday Books
262 pages
Non-Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-905548-65-1

The Ailing Mousedeer

I don't know why I'm furious over this (hat tip to the Bangsar Boy). But I am. And not just because of the guy in the picture.

There's a few things I've heard about Malaccan Chief Minister Ali Rustam - namely his political ambitions - but none I can substantiate. And that's not the issue here. But that article just ticked me off.

Because I feel there's so much that's wrong about it.

First, why would a mere facsimile of an Arab neighbourhood be of any micron of satisfaction to anyone willing to put in the money and effort for the real thing? They have a tourism industry over there, don't they? Isn't it a self-defeating move to bring the Middle East over here, when they can spruce up what they already got at home, brush up the security and roll out the welcome mat for tourists - for less? As for the high exchange rate and costs of living, well, not much can be done about that. Where travel is concerned, we pay to play.

Another thing is, I'd think that any Arab who wants a slice of home - hookah and all - while he's travelling abroad is just plain rude, especially when he's in another Muslim country. How hard is it to walk the straight and narrow in Malaysia? I think back to the OIC delegate who reportedly had reservations coming here because there's no camel milk - what I wouldn't give to hurl a store-full of shoes at that person now!

At the same time, it is equally rude for Malaysians to expect Penang char koay teow - halal or otherwise - in Riyadh, or kuih talam in Fez. Isn't the whole point of travel to get away from the familiar, and experience the new?

(Even at home the kuih talam of my youth is elusive. Our heritage is under siege.)

If the Arabs who are coming here are from Dubai, let me just say that I'm not enthusiastic about their "culture". Especially the glitzy, towering, superlatively opulent monuments to excess that is now coming up in Dubai. The Burj al-Arab, the Palm, World Islands and the Dubai Festival City... that's not culture. They're abominations - big, grotesque and soulless. We can do that already. As investments they're flawed, as demonstrated by the recent financial crisis. If things don't get better soon... I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Not many have heard about the island nation of Nauru, but it has much in common with the Middle East. Years ago, Nauru was rich. After being shat on by birds for aeons, the island is literally covered in phosphate, a key ingredient in fertiliser. But the islanders weren't smart with their money. Corruption, profligate spending and unwise investments (such as the Nauru House in Melbourne), combined with the near-exhaustion of its phosphate resources eventually took their toll. The island now lies scarred by years of rampant mining, and is virtually broke. I see the Middle East going the same way if they don't get smart.

But you say, hey, it's a billion ringgit. And sure, I wouldn't mind having an Arab enclave around if I get curious about their cuisine (I've yet to experience the Arab Walk at Bukit Bintang). And - well, cultural transplants are an ongoing process, you'd say. If not, you and your bak kut teh, char koay teow and tau hu hua wouldn't even be here!

But Malacca is not the place for them, not in the historic heart of the state. And certainly not in the hands of those who have devastated the historic heart of the state.

After many years I returned to Malacca, only to have my heart broken by what I've seen. Canto- and Mando-pop in Jonker Street, which looks more like Petaling Street South. Christ Church and Stadhuys infested by kitsch-peddlers and rickshaws with garish, eye-gouging decorations even more tasteless than what's in any Burj al-Arab suite; at night, they're traffic hazards with their blinking lights and all. A cannon next to the clock tower had garbage inside; has anything been done about that since I left? Parts of the surrounding area reminds me of my hometown Penang, and not in a good way.

Free from the confines of a tour bus, I walked the Jonker Street neighbourhood. It's grubby and worn down in places, no air-conditioning and whatnot. But it was beautiful. I felt like a kid again, even though as a kid I never traipsed the old Penang neighbourhoods on foot. I used to see more sky whenever I cycle from home to the city; now I can't. I actually wept.

Can the current administrators of Malacca be trusted not to screw up with these new projects the way they screwed up with the historic heart of the state?

This year I was driven around Penang island by an aunt; what I saw made me mad. Most of the beaches are now covered with rocks, concrete or mud. Underutilised and abandoned hotels. I remember walking on sand and picking seashells on what is now the rock and mud hellhole that's Gurney Drive today. The aunt thinks that development (by E&O, I think) made the waters there stagnant and kept the tide away.

And some lecturer said the ecosystem there is clean because of the presence of thousands of freaking mudskippers! Go there and take a breath, for goodness’ sake. It’s freaking Funky Drive now! Who cares if they’re mudflats and they’re clean? We had a beach, which we did not respect even back then! And it’s gone!

Mr Amir Muhammad, please, please, please put the joker’s quote in Volume 3 for posterity. We owe her at least that much.

By some fluke of fate, my work put me on the path of two codgers whose work included documenting some of Malacca's history from an architectural perspective, with graphics. The sketched structures were clean, neat. Almost surreal. And although free from garbage, kitsch and tasteless works of art, are still beautiful. That's the Malacca I want to see, and preserve.

Look up the Malacca Sketchbook at your nearest bookstore, by the late Chen Voon Fee and Chin Kon Yit, because soon it will probably the only existing record of what Malacca used to be like.

Booked

From what this guy says, we're a nation of readers starved of good and affordable books. He's also telling us that we're probably importing too many foreign books, and the brain-drain phenomenon is an illusion, with our 350,000 teachers and more than forty thousand lecturers or professors who can crank out heaps of good local books. It seems we need to publish 27,000 local book titles for general reading a year to catch up with developed countries, more than the current rate of a measly ten thousand.

My beef, not to mention my mutton, venison and poultry with this, is the archetypical Malaysian approach in solving problems.


Do we read - like, really read?
For one, I don't feel we're a nation of serious readers. We seem to approach books as consumers. Not knowing better, we depend mostly on reviews, or recommendations from the more informed. Otherwise, it's all down to eye-grabbing titles that incorporate keywords such as "sex", "love" (in all recognisable languages), not to mention phrases such as "be rich", "earn money", "earn millions" or "be an eBay maven"; or if there's a hot woman on the cover.


No bookworms here
My last visit to a "book fair" is a fair indication that there's a class hierarchy of sorts in when it comes to reading preferences. The more "intelligent" books: dictionaries, encyclopaedias, heavy fiction - mostly in English - were displayed one floor above the textbooks and revision materials, cookie-cutter "romance novels" and religious stuff.

I don't think there is a significant percentage of those reportedly 400,000-odd brainiacs that could write a damn for the general Joe. The teachers we have don't seem like the type to hit the keys after a long day of marking papers, drawing up timetables and reading prepared notes to bored students who chat, text, or sleep during classes.

Right now, I'm not betting on finding a lot of good authors in our institutions of higher learning - considering what has been said about them. I think academia in general desperately needs to learn to write in a newer, livelier way.


Book Of Records mentality
Third, as I said, is the volume thing. We're an industrialised nation 'cos we build lots of cheap cars (Proton!). We're a wired nation 'cos we have free wi-fi. So a smarter nation publishes more books? Crank up production and it'll fly off the shelves? That approach might work better with McDonald's meal vouchers.

Flooding shelves with locally-published books won't necessarily cultivate good readership or reading habits, because it'll mostly be written by people with the similar mentality (lagi-lagi cinta, beb). Even if mass production does lowers prices, there's no guarantee of record sales; nor does it say that all those bought books will be read. What's going to happen to all the unsold copies, left to gather dust or mould in the storerooms?

Then there was the mention of an allocation RM300 million. Has the mass media become a platform for soliciting funds, which may not accomplish what they are meant for? And do they really need that much money?

We have enough books. We just don't have the brains, the drive, the whole reading mindset, which drives all the developments necessary to create a nation of intelligent, mature, responsible and active readers. Not yet.


What to do?
Most of us should cultivate a reading habit because we can't improve what is not there. This is something I owe my folks big time for. It started out with encyclopaedias and those "amazing facts" books and copies of Reader's Digest. Start them out young and they'll take to it like trout to water as they grow. Just look at me!

How to cut down on unnecessary imports or publications? More good libraries. Some people don't want a lot of books in the house. Problem is, the library culture here generally sucks. And I'd rather have big, well-staffed and well-stocked libraries rather than those monuments to excess called shopping malls. Leave the cafés alone and replace the racks in Mid Valley's Prada or DKNY with bookshelves and I'll be happy. It'll also help with shopaholicism, a really inconvenient affliction in these troubled times.

E-books are also a logical step forward for a society that's - supposedly - as wired as ours. Libraries can even offer e-books online for a fee, and link up with other libraries in other states and abroad for more reading material. Wouldn't that be cool?

Most importantly, government shouldn’t treat its citizens like children. We don’t stay kids forever. Censorship, for one, does not necessarily safeguard morals, reduce crime or build better thinkers. All it has done is breed a bunch of people hungry for escapism (cari cinta, misalnya).

Golden Age, Subdued Glitter

After weeks of waiting, another review. They made this sound more like an advert rather than a ...review.

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Thoughtful read

first published in The Star, 05 April 2009


In December, a coalition led by Sheikh Hasina Wazed's Awami League scored a landslide victory in Bangladesh's elections.

The win was, if one reads the country's history, highly symbolic. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was the first president of an independent Bangladesh, in 1971. After years of conflict and political instability, Bangladeshis are hoping his daughter's victory will bring an end to the troubles.

The days before Bangladesh's birth in 1971, when what was then East Pakistan seceded from West Pakistan (what is now Pakistan), are told in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age.

Rehana Haque is a single mother of two from East Pakistan, one of the two wings of a nation formed after the 1947 split with India. Her husband suddenly drops dead one day on the way home and her children are taken away by their uncle to Lahore in West Pakistan.

So Rehana sells some possessions and builds a rooming house with the money, a place she names "Shona", or gold in Bengali. With this source of income and a court order, she brings her children back, and every year, she celebrates this triumphant return with her tenants and neighbours.

Meanwhile, there are war-like sounds being made: To quell what it saw as East Pakistan's moves towards independence, West Pakistan launches a military crackdown in March 1971. East Pakistan's new cabinet is established in exile near the Indian border while its leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, is thrown in jail.

But it isn't political strains that occupy Rehana's mind; rather, it is the strains within her own family that weigh on her: Her son Sohail, a student activist and supporter of Sheikh Mujibur, is heartbroken by the approaching marriage between sister Silvi and army officer Sabeer, who is very much an establishment man; her other daughter, Maya, has communist leanings and is rebelling.

Sohail and Maya soon join East Pakistan's freedom fighters. The son goes one step further and brings home his buddies and commanding officer, a man Rehana calls the Major, and turns Shona into a base of operations.

Spicing things up is the budding romance between Rehana and her unwanted tenant. With the memories of her late husband still strong in her mind, she grapples with her growing feelings for the mysterious Major.

The only major complaint I have about this novel is the way Rehana (mostly) tolerates her kids' flights of fancy. And how it makes me hungry: There's food in every other chapter or so, all described deliciously, biryani, jhaal moori, chapatis, laddoo. One British reviewer hungered for Indian cuisine after finishing the book. Luckily for me, my trusty neighbourhood Indian restaurant is within walking distance of my home....

But Rehana's not just a war-time supermum. She's also cultured and educated, as demonstrated by her love of Urdu poetry and fondness for Western films. Although a Muslim, she doesn't mind a sip of Mrs Chowdury's whisky-laced tea, or a few rounds of gin rummy. The world today needs more women like Mrs Rehana – or have they all been driven into hiding by loud, angry ideologues?

What Anam is trying to say is that war does horrible things to friends and families, especially a civil war that strikes so close to home. The part where the Major moves into Shona is reportedly based on true stories told to Anam by her parents about the same war, when freedom fighters stayed in their home and buried weapons in the front yard.

This is a story about the culture shared between a country now split in two, the conflict that led to that cleavage, and the sorrow and hope that came from it. A Golden Age is a beautiful story, and as soon as I closed the book I found myself pondering the worth of all the fighting that's going on right now, beamed live from the world's hottest flash points into living rooms worldwide.

A Golden Age, through Rehana's words on and feelings about Bangladesh's birth, encourages thought long after the book has been put down.

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A Golden Age

Tahmima Anam
John Murray
276 pages
Fiction
ISBN: 978-0-7195-6010-1