The Sounding Board Of The Universe

I sometimes wonder if they come with instructions.

Having a big-assed camera is starting to make me lazy. It's so much easier, for instance, to shoot a picture and let the image do the talking for you, particularly if said camera allows you to do fancy shwag like bokehs or zomg-freeze-in-the-air action shots.

But that's digressing. 

I've been thinking, lately, about teenagers. About how we deal with our problems. Not too long ago, just a few days after the STPM, I was sitting at McD with a friend I hadn't seen for awhile. I ordered a fish burger and we sat down and he immediately burst forth into a tirade of his college course, his problems, his idiot group members, his crazy lecturers, his even crazier year-end project, his friend who has brain-cancer-and-is-depressed-and-dresses-like-a-goth and other topics to that effect. Some things were about pretty decent stuff, but my friend had that unnatural and highly peculiar knack of making everything sound like the end of the world.^[1]

I was torn in two. Part of me wanted to empathize with him, wanted to be a good listener and to uh and ah at all the right moments, to ask questions about several semi-interesting details, to allow this friend of mine to vent through me. But the other part of me wanted to yell at him: "you're talking to somebody who's just finished the bloody STPM, one of the friggin hardest pre-U examinations in the country, who the friggin shit are you trying to kid?" It wasn't that I had no excuse not to - as far as I could remember, this particular friend had nothing but horrible things to say about most of the stuff that had happened to him. I was fed up and raw after my exams, and it really wasn't the best time for me to do listening. So I shut up and proceeded to ignore him, and I turned to the other end of the table where a whole bunch of people were making fun of McD's twister fries.

Did I do the right thing? I'm not sure. Since about age 15 there has always been a tendency for people to open up and talk to me about their problems and their feelings and whatever cool/shitty stuff they'd seen/felt/heard that week. I'm not telling you this with pride, nor am I telling you this so you can go out there and start bombarding me with trivia: it's just the truth. And I'm not the only one who's experienced this - two of my friends: Wen Qi, Paul, both tell me that they sometimes feel the same way I do: as collective sounding boards for the universe. And I'm pretty sure that there are hundreds more who feel and act the same way - who attract their problem-ridden friends like some perverse fire hydrant put down by God for people to pee on.

I have a theory for this phenomenon, and it goes something like this: the people whom act as sounding boards are most often the ones we see as secure and mature and who aren't (relatively) as self-absorbed as their peers. It's a subconscious evaluation that takes place, very subtly, in our respective social circles, and very often not even the sounding boards themselves are aware of it. And I do suppose that in some sense it's a fair deal, because these sounding boards are granted immense influence: Paul, for instance, has perfected a fine art of modifying your perspective on things without actually revealing anything about his own - something that's infinitely useful when you're dealing with difficult, treacherous people. 

But that really isn't my problem with the whole sounding board affair. My problem is that these sounding boards occasionally need sounding boards of their own. There is no such thing as a completely secure, self-possesed man, much as I'd actually like to be one. So when we stumble or fall and feel downright horrible, we often find it very hard to vent. The problem is two-fold: firstly, almost all our friends turn on rant mode the instant they sit down with us, and it's very hard for us to change what is an established, patient habit. But the second problem is that we've forgotten how to open ourselves up, how to completely trust in some other secure, mature, non-self-absorbed individual. And that is probably the most dangerous illusion a sounding board can conjure: that he or she is everyone's confidante, and he/she is above all of them. It's a hole, for sure, that I'm trying to get out of.

My friend from McD isn't really related to the sounding board problem - his is another teenaged disease, one that I suppose is unescapable for all of us. Everyone has a tendency to blow our own problems into overwhelming, mind-boggling proportions, in the hopes for attracting sympathy, or perhaps attention. But there is a paradoxical truth about popularity and attention: self-absorbed people are often the most boring people to be around with. Some can get around this by being rich or good looking, but as we grow older, and our social circles begin to settle into contented shapes, these personality attributes become obstacles rather than enablers to love and attention.^[2]

I still have to wonder, you know, if I should've faced off with my friend and told him exactly what I thought of all that complaining. But that wouldn't be empathetic, would it? And there'd also be the tricky prospect of judgement in such action - judgement being something that I'm adverse to for reasons far too academic and theological to be listed here. And if I don't empathize and I judge from an imagined high ground, would this mean that I'm a bad friend, that I suck because I'm not there for them everytime they need me? Or is there some little switch at the back of my head that's supposed to prevent me from listening whenever I'm feeling particularly vulnerable myself, and to shut myself off from being a sounding board too often to be good?

I think I should stop here, though - the bottom line is far away, and in the end we're all just kids in various stages of growth, and the fine divisions between all these evaluative thought-traps are too tricky for me to finish exploring in one piece of writing. So I'll close here, and ... (I can't help this, really) gimme a hydrant, mate, I need to pee.


^1.I recently wrote a piece, entitled Hindsight, that is guilty of the exact same whiny, complaining tone. No wonder I wasn't happy with it. ↩
^2.This might also explain why teenage suicide is so common. Though, if you really think about it, suicide is nothing more than the most selfish form of complaining ever invented by the juvenile mind. ↩

Let's Wash Our Hands

I'm new to photography, and I'm not sure why I shot this in black and white. But it felt right to me. Christmas is a time for family, for God, and for food. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Ida

This is her tag. The rules:

• Take a recent picture of yourself or take a picture of yourself right now
  
• Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair ... just take a picture
  
• Post that picture with NO editing
  
• Post these instructions with your picture
  
• Tag 5 people to do this

The rules were simple enough, though Ida, being Ida, challenged me to do ahlien. 

Which I did.

I tag: Tracy, because all girls have a camwhore gene somewhere in them, though I have NEVER seen her camwhore; Daniel, because I know his gayness is crying out for it; Wen Qi, because then I won't have to look at all the fantastic food photos whenever I visit her blog; Tze Lun, because he never updates his; and ... Alex. Because it's Christmas.

Hindsight

I finished watching Quantum of Solace a couple of nights back. And it was when James Bond finally caught the villain and said goodbye to the girl and the credits rolled up the screen that I realized that I could no longer avoid writing about the STPM. Things started two years ago had now come full circle with the movie. I couldn’t ignore those things, and I was by then sick of waking up from repeated nightmares of the STPM Math T paper. So here I sit: pen in mouth, screen on word processor, trying my best to relive - in paragraphs - a very personal hell that ended two or so weeks ago.

The story of a Malaysian public exam begins not with the first day you enter the exam hall, IC and exam slip and pencil-case clutched to your pounding chest; but in the moment you decide to sit for it. I can tell you that there are a hundred alternatives to taking one: some of my privileged friends jump ship (quite literally) onto the sandy beaches of Australia or New Zealand. Others run away to Singapore, that eternally kiasu land of the underperforming birth register. For the Form 6 student the decision to sit for the STPM is often a bitter one by the end of the year: all of us had had the opportunity to go somewhere – anywhere – and to carry on with our lives without ever sitting for another bloody Malaysian paper. But we made our choice and we picked that path. Or perhaps someone picked it for us.

A person wiser than I am pointed out to me a long time ago that certain individuals lived their entire lives in the shelter of one institution or another. These were the people who would grow up under the shelter of school and would later skitter, when it was time, under the open sky the same way a rabbit might cross a meadow: fearful of the hawk and the eagle; fearful of death from above. The shelters that would invariably follow would be predictable and safe: the University, the Company, eventually the Retirement Plan, sometimes the Hospice. Form 6 was a way to stretch the first shelter, and stretch it I did.




The STPM is tough. Some say that it is the third hardest pre-U examination on the planet, though I cannot find any evidence that actually proves this. (Most of it is I think nothing more than hearsay, passed on in kopitiams and Internet forums. There's a thread on a student forum somewhere that eventually spirals into a heated rhetorical discussion on why the education system sucks and why our keris-weilding education minister should be fired. Very Malaysian. Yes). But the STPM is hard, I'll grant it that. But it's also public, and it is free, and you cannot really argue with free.

There is something inexorably sad about a Malaysian public exam. Thousands of our students go through them every year, but very few talk about it in gatherings beyond the uncomfortable shrug and a singular wave of hand. Our newspapers are comfortable with writing about the success stories, the girls and the boys who achieve ever-escalating numbers of A1s and A+s. We are happy to indulge ourselves in newspaper ads advertising 'the secrets to success' for students, filled with glowing pictures of parent and child and some equally glowing statement (eg: Student Success Program has enabled my darling Tiffany to score straight As for her UPSR/PMR/SPM! Thank you so much Student Success Program!). We also have television ads selling us 'exam grade' stationary, acted out by bookish smart-looking students who jump in the air with pencils and erasers clutched in their hands, or who look up from an exam paper and flash us a megawatt smile and a thumbs-up. Which is really, totally, surreal.

But our society is a strange one, and we are used to keeping mum about the most obvious of things. Nobody - and this is also strange - has actually written about the experience of sitting for a major public exam. We regard our exams as a necessary rite of passage in our society - we treat it like puberty and sex: human experiences that everybody would go through sooner or later. So I suppose what happens after is perfectly natural: we get everything over and done with, and then we fast forward the next few months in the hopes of erasing all memory of what went on during the bloody thing.




A Malaysian public exam begins in the choice to sit for it, and in my case I chose Form 6. As a whole those two years taught me - more than anything - how to be lonely. My schedule for a good part of 2008 went something along the lines of Monday: Judo; Tuesday: Judo; Wednesday: Tuition; Thursday: Judo; Friday: Tuition; Saturday: Gym; Sunday: Judo/Stamina Training. I now have no idea how I survived all that, but three months ago my father attended an Old Thomian dinner and sat next to my Math teacher, who was a school mate from his era. They talked, and eventually he turned to my father and demanded to know why I was sleeping so much in class.

Other things changed. My friends eventually stopped asking me out for movies and drinks; I found that I could no longer identify with many them. Most were more interested for me to hear about their lives, rather than to listen to me talking about mine. I was also lonely because I was the only Form 6 student on the state team, and nobody else could identify with the academic and physical workload I was carrying for half the year. The pressure was intense. I looked for empathy, but it was very hard to find: very few people around me could understand the fatigue of what I was going through. I remember thinking once that I could share my problems with the Thomians on the state bowling team, but then I realized that most of them were staring whenever us Judo guys came to the gym. We screamed with our squats; they did dumbbell rolls.

Sitting here, writing this, I guess that maybe I tapped into mental reserves I never knew I had; but I believe I also got through because I learned to draw upon the strength of a few of my friends. Most didn't listen to me, or didn't want to - I often directed our conversations to their lives, their problems. And, yes, while it wasn't perfect it was very soothing: talking to them about inconsequential things reminded me that there was a world out there, and it wasn't all Judo and exams. The talking about myself I left to God - He was probably the only empathetic person who knew what I was going through, and I worked out most of my frustrations through Him. Form 6 was a year where I became Christian again, in an inward way, a quiet way.




There is a very specific kind of panic associated only with exams. It is a kind of guilty, flighty weight that drops onto your lap when you're not busy studying for one subject or other. Before a public exam any time not spent in front of a book is time wasted, and every Malaysian student knows this instinctively. But your panic only gets worse when when you cannot for the life of you bring yourself to start. Once you do start, however, a different kind of torture emerges.

I never did liked studying. When I was 9 or 10 I came up with the ingenious solution of putting a novel in the centre of an open Chinese textbook, and I lifted the book to my face so that anybody looking from afar would assume I was studying Chinese. I completed quite a few novels this way, including perhaps a quarter of the Hardy Boys series. I had a fantastic time, until my parents caught me.

Serious studying for a public examination differs from person to person. Some of my friends study best when in a group, and they stay back in the libraries of their respective schools, poring over books and memorizing equations into the wee hours of the night. I learned very quickly that two things were problems for me: 1) I was easily distracted, and 2) I wasn't a reader.

The first I solved by downloading albums and listening to them on my iPod, playing them on constant loop until they blotted out the sentient sounds of any study area. There are now several albums I will never touch again, chief amongst them TV On The Radio's seminal Dear Science. The second problem I solved by doing exercises on sheaves of paper, crumpling them en masse at the end of the week and tossing them into my bedroom's wastepaper basket. My bedroom itself became a place I could barely recognize: I rarely did any studying there, chiefly because it was filled to the brim with distractions any geek would immediately love - novels and magazines and my writing notebooks, plus little puzzles and Pokemon figures that you couldn't help but mess with.

No, I did my studying at the dining table, under a freezing air conditioner. And later on, when my youngest sister finished with her PMR and began watching TV and generally started to have a good time I began to study at my aunt's place, at an uncomfortable dining table where I would occasionally set my head down against my textbooks, earbuds playing Radiohead, and sleep.

My study patterns changed because of one other thing. Some idiot at the top of St Thomas's administrative piramid thought it was a good idea to keep all the students in to the very last day of school. It was a logical failure on many fronts: most of the teachers had no idea what to do with us, and very few of the exercises they gave (save perhaps Chemistry) we finished. But the bigger problem with such policy was that each of us had different problems at that stage - some of us were weaker in Math, and some of us were weaker in Physics, and the only people who really did know and could affect change were ourselves. What we needed was the freedom to divide our time amongst the subjects according to our strengths and weaknesses, but what the school forced us to do was to sit and follow all the subjects, according to a rigid school timetable. I was beyond tired of arguing with the administrative office by then, so I changed my study patterns to suit my school days. Every night at about 11 I drank coffee, and turned in only around 2 or 3. I would then stumble through school and collapse at home in the afternoon, before beginning to study all over again at 7. It was a horrible study schedule, but it had to be done.




There is a very surreal quality to the opening minutes of your very first paper. It's a little like an out-of-body-experience: you open the question booklet and some part of you knows that these are the very questions coming generations will study and will attempt to trump. That same part of you can't believe you're actually sitting there, writing answers to questions that collectively, when finally marked, will determine you your future. But of course such thinking is counter-productive, and all of us learn to shut out that little voice very quickly in the opening minutes. The invigilators tell you the same things before each and every session: that cheating is not allowed, that you are only allowed to leave for toilets after the first 30 minutes and before the last 30. They don't talk about exits and life-jackets, but it's a close thing. Sometime during the Physics paper 2 I forget the toilet injunction, and I finish my last essay with my legs crossed so hard I had to take a couple of minutes to uncross them in a toilet cubicle later.

The STPM has papers divided over the space of three weeks, with two papers per week. I suppose this was to make sure you would go crazy long before the exams were over, and it was very effective in that regard. The second day was Math T, paper 1. I couldn't do half the questions, and I came home to a week of no-exams, half of which I spent staring at the ceiling, or the wall. I was depressed. I called my friends. Nick told me that it still wasn't over, that I shouldn't give myself room for regret. Horng Eng told me stories about her STPM, stories that both scared and provoked me. Paul told me to stop acting like an idiot.

My last paper was Physics paper 1. It was an objective paper, and it was a subject I sucked at. My friends were going to Richmond's Place later in the evening, they invited me but I could see they weren't convinced I would go. I didn't. I stood under the school hall, the sunlight gold and the shadows long, and I stared out at the empty carpark for a long time.




I enjoyed Quantum of Solace. Bond was still recovering from Vesper Lynd's death, and he had already turned into a man scarred by duty, one who never wanted to fall in love again. And at the end of the movie the beautiful Camille leans over to Bond and says to him: "I wish I could free you from your prison. But your prison is in there." And then she kisses him. I don't know what this says about me or pop culture, but I found myself identifying with it.

Two years ago when the SPM ended I shouted for joy. Garrick and Paul and I walked down McDougall road and made the crossing to the cinema. We were going to watch Casino Royale and we would be introduced to the world of Vesper Lynd and James Bond and the Aston Martin DBS for the very first time. The sunlight was gold and the shadows were long, and we were laughing and walking and talking and we had not a care in the world. It was a happy time, and why shouldn't it be? Our future was bright before us, like the evening sun that illuminated our faces; the same sun that lighted mine after the STPM, the sun that was the ending of a Malaysian public exam.

Writer's Note: This piece took an unbelievably long time to write, involving one draft and 5 unfinished ones, plus a semi-serious edit and polish. And I don't think it's very good. It seems that after every public exam I suffer a short period of writing depression, where I just can't seem to produce good stuff. Blasted exams. That being said, I hope to never revisit the months I spent doing the things I talked about above, so I beg your forgiveness if I leave this piece as it is. 

Photolog: Sematan

I've spent the past two days in Sematan, with only a handphone and a camera on me. This is a photolog of that trip.

I was shooting my sisters and cousin doing jumps when I decided to try this. This is ukemi, one of the basic falling techniques in Judo, and flying through the air made me realize just how much I miss the sport.

This photo was taken in Lundu. I was trying to be unobtrusive, but the kid with the liondance helmet was impossible to resist. I think their parents own the shops in this lot - one of the aunties in the kopitiam nearby was looking up from her cooking every few seconds to make sure all the kids were still there.

I was standing downstream when I took this. These women are shell collectors. Several minutes later the one with the white tudung came back to warn us against bathing near the river mouth, because undercurrents had claimed an old man the week before. I remembered thinking about this woman later in the day. What is her life like? What would she use those shells for? I didn't dare to ask.

On the way back from Sematan my cousin (who is in centre of this picture) turned to me in the car. "I can be happy everywhere," he told me. "All you have to do is not complain. And love." I wish I had his confidence.

Upstream, behind my camera, is a swamp. I followed my grandfather as he investigated, and we came upon loose bits of wood, plastic, and this thrown-away tire. I wonder if the kids over there even know what they're playing in.

This was ironic, because all the getting back to nature rubbish was ruined by a beep from my sister's handphone. And then ten minutes after I took this we came upon a blue pipe running parallel to the trail. Techonology seeps into everything.

This is a hermit crab. My grandfather found it and plopped it onto the table where we were eating breakfast. My grandmother was the first to notice that the shell he had brought back was actually making its way across our breakfast, right at noodles. Whatever you might say about hermit crabs, I'll admit: they make good morning entertainment.

This is my dog. She was very happy when we finally came back.

I Woke Up Today

I took this photo on the very last day of the STPM, an hour or so before the Physics paper started. It was probably the last time I'd be in school uniform, and I wanted to remember it. I know that I've a lot to write about, and a lot of people to thank, but I just spent a good part of today in virgin jungle, hunting for a rare medicinal tree. I'm tired. Grateful, sad, relieved, but also tired.

Thank you folks for waiting. I'll be back soon. Promise.

After Math

Goodbye

I know I said that I wouldn't be blogging till after the STPM, but I'm taking exception to this one post. Tomorrow is the last day of school. I've been sleeping at 3 everyday for the past 2-3 weeks, trying to work around the school hours, and I'll be glad to study full days now. STPM starts on the 18th.

I'll keep this post short. I entered St Thom six years ago, the result of a quick, thoughtless decision. My father asked me if I wanted "St Thomas's or St Joseph's?", and I said: "The first one lah. St Thom."

So here I am.

Goodbye folks. I'll miss you.

Lousy

Dear HFM,

You really have good timing, don't you? I mean, you could've picked any number of days in the year to attack me. Like Hari Raya, for instance, where I was busy getting fat. Or Chinese New Year. Or the two mock exams. All of these wonderful, valid times to prevent me from stuffing my face/stressing myself out.

And there's also the sticky issue of my age. What are you - blind, or something? Last I checked, I'd lost ALL of my milk teeth! And gained four headache-causing wisdom ones. I'd write a letter to them, too, only they aren't viruses. George Chan (yes, he of the frog face) says adults are immune to the virus. HAH! Go visit him sometime, won't you? Cocky little idiot probably thinks he's immune to everything, seeing as he survived the last butt-kicking elections.

Okay, okay I get the idea. I suppose I should be grateful: I'm feeling relatively okay, apart from the mouth-ulcers and the hand and foot sores. And the horrible bone-ache I woke up today with. But there's no danger of me kicking the bucket. Or pulling the plug. Or whatever you call it when you win and I lose and you laugh all the way to the grave. (Dr Chan might call it losing an election. Hyuk hyuk.) I am very grateful for that. No kid.

I think I'll choose to look at the bright side of things. Like being able to study at home. Or the way my sisters are treating me like the plague (because, like, you know, I am the plague). Or the sight of mum pouring hot water over my plates and spoons and forks, or dad going: "Why you touch the wall? Now you infect the wall. Don't touch the wall. And don't touch the rice. And why you sit in that chair?"

Okay that's not really funny.

They say when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. Now I wonder what you'll taste like.

Bleeurgh.

PS: This is, until further notice, my last post before STPM. Unless something big happens that grants me Internet access, that is. Like a 5km asteroid smashing into earth. Or the abolishment of the Malaysian Examinations Council. Or Anwar getting sodomized. Again. You get the idea.
PPS: I'm wondering if my dog contracts HFM from me, what would it be called? Paw, paw and mouth disease? That would be ... cute.

{Essay} We Catch Stars Before Dawn

We are often asked, when we are young, what we want to be when we grow up. A child's answer to this question is often a confident one: Astronaut! Scientist! Teacher! Mummy say doctor is good! And we repeat it - don't we? - whenever we are asked, all the way into primary school, because the very idea of being an astronautscientistteacherdoctor is exciting to our young minds. It's the same way a young professional may feel when he walks into a Saville Row store, credit card strapped tight in a back pocket, the idea of a credit rating alien in the afterglow of a first paycheck. He doesn't yet comprehend the work needed to compensate for his new suit, the same way we couldn't yet comprehend the cost/payout ratios of our childhood ambitions. This changes soon enough.

Ask a teenager now, anywhere on a street, what he wants to be when he grows up, and you'll more often than not get a blank stare in return. Something has changed in the years between the confident 'Astronaut!' and the evasive 'I don't know.' - and I can assure you that it isn't just the cost/payout ratio. A teenager is frightened by many things, some of them universal (the ridicule of peers, for instance) and some of them senseless. This fear of ambition is both universal and senseless, but it carries on in many of us, way into adulthood, because it is rarely (if ever) an outright threat. Most of us, in fact, learn to work around it; some of these may lead well-to-do, often happy lives. Others lead unexamined ones, and therefore do not care at all.

This essay is a thesis on growing up. It is written for the person I see whenever I look into the mirror, because that person is often terribly confused. The context is this: I am going to have to choose what I want to be when I grow up very, very soon. And I'm not very confident about it, because all around me are signs that this is one drawing that I'll have to do in a no-eraser zone. If you're in the same boat as I am, with sharpened pencils and blank canvasses, and the great fear of putting one to the other, then you're welcomed to join me. I promise not to waste your time.




Let us consider the life of a child. This child is born into a world where the major variables have already been decided for him: family, nationality, intelligence, socio-economic status. His parents decide which kindergarten he goes to, which schools he attends, and later on the subtle variables like which exams to take and which streams to go into. His parents are the Gods of his world, and he grows up in a life determined by them. He lives for them.

The child then enters a brief sanctuary, after high school, perhaps, or the period between starting college and entering a first job. These are the years where he can choose - he decides what to do with his life, who to allow in, where he is going to live. How he is going to live it. Then the rest of everything comes around knocking, and he has to think of other things. A wife. Children. A mortgage; car payments. He is working his butt off for these entities now - his children are the Gods of his life (how is he going to get them through college?) and he wakes up one day, middle-aged, kids gone off to school, and wonders: What have I done with myself? What happened to all the astronautscientistteacherdoctor? My dreams? Plans? Where did these all go to?

And the painful one: What could I do differently, if I were to live my life again?

This is a question worth asking now, all the teenagers stuck thinking about careers. If you lived your life for your parents, and then your college loan, and then your mortgage, and then your kids ... when are you going to live your life for yourself? If you're going to choose something to live for, what would it be?




The title of this essay is taken from a poem. It's called Song, written by John Donne, and the first stanza goes like this:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil's foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

The lyrical structure of the rhyme probably means very little, but note well that stars do not appear in the day. It is for this reason that we can only catch stars before dawn, the same way we can only chase dreams in the chaotic period between childhood and adulthood. The years between leaving school and starting a first job is when we are singularly responsible for our futures. The years before belong to our parents, and the years after are increasingly difficult for us to change all that we've build up, regardless of whether it's any worth to us at all. There are, of course, cases of people defying conventions and doing what they want, right smack in middle age, but these people are the rare ones, with the courage of their convictions and the ability to scale the brick walls around them. The rest accept the compromises of middle life and downgrade their ambitions: some live vicariously through their children; others take pride in things they did not set out to be proud in - their orchids, for instance, or their local bookclub. Little joys, tiny beauties to get by with.

The sheer possibility in these few, pivotal years is one of the causes of the blank 'I don't know!'s you get the world over. Teenagers know, on some primal, subconscious level, that this is one of the few instances where a whole life hinges on a single decision. We understand that not making a choice is not an option at all - sometime sooner or later we'll have to choose, and it had better be a good one. Till then, however, we clam up, trapped in some kind of circuit overload, hoping to delay the time when we face the inevitable. We say - to ourselves, to everyone else - 'I don't know.'

There's also the tricky question of responsibility. Teenagers have never ever in their short lives had such power to choose what to do with it. It's like taking a monkey out of a zoo and supplanting it right smack in the tropical rainforest. The monkey has no clue to its newfound freedom, so it awaits dinner at the foot of a tree, and ends up being the meal of a Bengal tiger. These twin obstacles of possibility and sudden responsibility render most of us helpless, scared to our very core, despite being a fear that - when you really look at it (perhaps with the benefit of distance and hindsight) is senseless. But then again it is universal.

Or is it?

We often forget that the fear of ambitions is limited to a select, fortunate few. There are those, stuck in poverty, war or natural disaster, who do not have the liberty to ponder upon what they want to do with their lives. Everyday is a fight for survival: against disease, rape, fireball. And tragedy doesn't just strike the bowel nations of the earth: it can happen to you and me, any moment of any day. If we allow ourselves to be morbid, for an instance, imagine: what happens to your plans if a family member - a breadwinner - dies? Or if you have to enter the working world supporting a terminally ill relative? The sheer randomness of life - the cruelty of it, in fact - turns even the best laid plans into cosmic jokes.

Regardless, there are those who know exactly what they want to be when they grow up. From 6 to 60 their ambitions stays the same - and while the path changes their goal remains ever fixed in their heads. I envy these people. Their certainty comes from some God-hand, and we must seem like mindless plebeians running around in circles to them. I've a friend who has wanted to be a doctor since - well, since time immemorial, I suppose - and her choices in academia are simple and clear-cut. She has no idea how beautiful her gift is - the confidence to believe that it would somehow all come together in the end, sometime in the future; the certainty of it. What a wonderful thing to have.




College is a strange thing. Verily it is the gateway into the working world; the golden ticket to the chocolate factory of adulthood, but this wasn't always so. In the medieval ages teenagers were recruited into guilds and schooled in the secrets of their chosen trade, then sent off as apprentices to master their craft. Later on they become guildsmen; further down the road they become masters. The differences here being that their working educations started very young, and the opportunities available were limited by blood, influence, or luck. Career counseling was out of the question.

But the colleges of today fare no better in helping the average teenager manage the leap from student to working tradesman, in an age of unlimited opportunity. I can safely say, for instance, that the middle class can be whatever they want to be here and now in the modern world. But how many squander this opportunity? How many surrender the responsibility of choosing to their parents, school counselors, college entrance salesmen? How many believe in the lie of a career they do not love, when they see their fellow coursemates working their asses off to get a degree? These people, who do not bother to examine their lives, wake up one day in the light to find their sky void of the stars they had when they were younger. And they become bitter; or they learn to never, ever examine their lives when they have the time.

The other question about colleges is this: is it really necessary? The list of people making it big without ever finishing a college education is long and growing: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Madonna (this one is interesting: Madonna was a straight-A student who left University despite being on a dance scholarship); Richard Branson, Coco Chanel, Simon Cowell, Michael Dell. All their stories involve great personal courage and sacrifice, and they all involve people finding and doing what they love. In contrast, the list of people who graduate and go on to the glory of warming an office seat is long and endless; the people who graduate and never find what they love because of their degree ever-growing. Their reasoning is such: I've spent so much time and money to get a degree, to buy security, that I can't not do something connected to it.

This reasoning is fine and dandy, really, if that degree is an gateway to a career the person loves. But if it isn't - and here is the risk, for how do you know what you like when you're 19 and picking a course? - then the degree is not security, nor is it an enabler: it is a piece of paper costly of purchase and insignificant of build - nothing more than an extra brick wall in a life rapidly filling with them; walls that reach higher each year, every year, after dawn.




All essays must end with answers. Good ones, if the essay is worthy of a second read. I promised not to waste your time at the beginning of this essay, but now I must be frank: these are my answers. My dogma. Don't believe in them anymore than you should believe your parents, your career counselors, or those annoying salespeople you meet in booths at career fests. Your life is yours to examine, and the choices yours to make. Make them well.

That being said, let's examine the lives of all those who have succeeded in living their lives the way they wanted despite never graduating. What made them succeed? It surely wasn't college - they never completed it, did they? Nor was it money - these people came from different socio-economic backgrounds: Bill Gates was born rich, but Coco Chanel (she of Chanel No.5) started out as a seamstress. And these people are of every race and philosophy you can possibly imagine.

The best answers - or some of them - I have found are hinted at in a 2005 commencement speech by Steve Jobs.

... you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

All these people (and if you really think about it, even those who did complete college) had the courage to just go out and do things. They didn't fret, they didn't dally. Madonna quit University while on dance scholarship, Dell quit college to work on a small PC company, Branson dropped out at 16 to start a student newsletter. There was no way any of them could have known if this was the big thing, the job they'd be doing for the rest of their lives. They didn't play inside the box - they did crazy, they followed their hearts, and they had the courage to believe everything would all work out in the end. This is idealistic, this is, but it is also one of the strongest arguments for religion I can think of - who else can you expect would have the ability to connect everything so beautifully for you, at the end of the road? Science, while wonderful, isn't quite there yet.

The second thing Steve talks about is love. In his words (and probably because he is of greater wisdom than a teenager, ergo, me):

... that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

The difference here is not the college, the degree, or the socio-economic status. These people found what they loved, never settled, and always believed that God/karma/spongebob would somehow connect the dots for them in the end. And then, once they found what they were looking for, they worked hard. Very hard. It didn't matter if they started out poor, and it didn't matter if they had to overcome some significant challenges along the way. Oprah, for instance, got raped, but that didn't stop her now, did it?

The upshot of all this is that star-catching can happen no matter where you are. No matter what family you were born into. And it can happen at any time of day, provided you have the heart to do it. And for people like me - the star-catchers before dawn? We live in the sweet-spot, the perfect place to be if we just realize this truth and act on it.

I wish you all the best in catching that falling star.

STPM

If there is only one good thing to have come out of 8 hour study sessions, then it is this:

My library is increasing at a rate of about 5 albums per week, and that's only because I'm running through most of them at about that pace. It's the only thing that's keeping me sane. My aunt, to me, this afternoon: "Are you dreaming or are you thinking?" she asks, and I pretend not to hear her. The windows are thrown open in front of me and it's a beautiful day out, but I'm shut behind a table, chin on hand, staring at the sky.

And if my parents are crying /then I'll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours

And escape.

Dreams

I am having my mock exams. The teacher passes down the Chemistry Paper 2 question papers and I ready my pencil. My watch is in front of me, my calculator is on the ready (that little underline thing blinking on off on off), my mind is set on Go.

"You may begin," she says, and I open the booklet.

The first question is about the periodic table - I see the familiar four-group diagram, and I am about to write when I realize that the question is in Chinese. I blink; and then I turn the pages, hurriedly now - and I discover that ALL THE QUESTIONS ARE IN CHINESE.

I am horrified. I turn to the front page, where all the instructions are, and I realize that it says there, right in the first line: 'This paper is bilingual. Students are expected to answer in their mother tongue.' I look around at my classmates and I find that they are all scribbling away at their answer scripts: Teck Chaw is biting his pencil as he thinks, Tay is making clucking noises at the first question, and I realize that I am alone in this -

I wake up in cold sweat.

A few days later I receive my Macbook in the mail. I open it, remove the instruction manual, the Apple stickers, the adapters, and then I tear open the bubble wrapping of my new Mac. I am happy as it chimes on, I type my name into the necessary fields, and I marvel at the beauty of OSX.

Then I go downstairs.

I cannot stop myself. There is this magnetic compulsion to leave my mark on my new laptop - as strong as whatever drives dogs to pee around their property, so I go downstairs and enter the kitchen and take a knife. And then I return to my Mac and I take out the knife ... and I carve my name onto the soft white plastic, under the lacquer Apple logo. As the cover peels under my fingers I am silently screaming in my head, unable to stop myself, but the knife keeps going on and on at the C of my name, deeper into the laptop -

I wake up in cold sweat.

We are in school now! St Thomas's is under monster attack! A dragon-creature lands right smack outside our classroom, sends a couple of cars flying, and starts to blast fire at the nicest vehicles in the immediate vicinity. My classmates go crazy and begin running about, screaming, and quickly I am enveloped in a throng of scared, brainless plebeians who want to get as far away as possible from the monster. I stare at it, and as I am wondering how best to bring it down and kill it my friends start to point at something running helter-smelter right at the monster.

It is my Physics teacher Pn Loh. I am about to shout a warning at her when she stops and rummages in her handbag. The monster turns its fearsome head to look at her; I see its red pupils contract into angry maroon pinpricks. Then - and this is the most improbable thing ever but I swear to you I saw this happen - Pn Loh takes out a plastic star and puts it on her forehead.

And she turns into Ultraman.

I wake up in cold sweat. Exams are not a good time for me to dream in.

Bookeeping

Now I don't really like tags, but this one's from le Edrei, so I can't just ignore him and hide under a bomb shelter. And he's right - memes are a 'lost art people don't really know how to do anymore' - but I think that's mostly because Malaysians grew up in a blogging environment that threw about the Stupidest. Memes. Ever. I mean, random songs as answers to questions? Like that's interesting to read. And then there's this one going around ...

Okay maybe that was a bad example.

On with the tag:

Do you remember how you developed a love for reading?
Oh yes. I was a very lonely kid in primary school - my classmates mostly spoke Chinese, my best friend transferred out in Primary 3, and I was stuck in this alien world where running fast meant the difference between being bullied and being - (wait, what's the word for 'not-bullied'?) - happy. Reading - and later on writing - was a very good way of escaping my problems.

There was this one time in Primary 4 when I had two essay corrections to hand up right after recess, but I hadn't done both and there was no way to complete them in time. I was in the 'new' block in Chung Hwa No. 1, and in front of it there is this slice of beautiful slope, covered by trees and always overflowing with kids. I took a book, sat under the roots of one of those trees, and read the recess away.

The caning seemed more bearable after that.

What are some books you read as a child?
I finished a good portion of both the Hardy Boys and the Nancy Drew series, and I think I ploughed through at least half (if not all) of the Famous Five, Secret Seven and Adventure books by Enid Blyton. I really enjoyed The Secret Garden in Primary 3, and I started reading Harry Potter when I was in Primary 5.

Thinking back on it now I realize that the books I loved were usually the ones with a lonely, misunderstood character in the centre of it all, who finds a reprieve from his/her problems in some way. The secret garden and Hogwarts became wonderful places to run away and hide in, back then, and now sometimes - just for kicks - I take those books out again and vanish into their pages.

What is your favourite genre?
I don't have one. Or rather, I'm not sure I do. I enjoyed a lot of fantasy when I was younger, but after SPM I forced myself to start reading real literature, for what it was worth. And I found that I enjoyed both - and thrillers, and mystery novels, and chic-lit. There are too many good books in too many different genres with too many winning qualities out there to be picky.

Do you have a favourite novel?
Oh that's easy. Lord Of The Flies. Golding's masterpiece is a wonderful exploration of sin, civilization and man, even if using boys on an island to play it out is a slightly perverse premise. But what the hell. Great pacing, jaw-dropping writing and an explosive ending - crazy stuff.

Where do you usually read?
In bed, in the family room, or on the road. I've developed reading while walking to a fine art - you know how those action sequences always never seem to end ...

When do you usually read?
Anytime. And I'm not kidding. Sam lent me Life Of Pi once, and I spent hours on a lifeboat along with Pi Patel, way into the wee hours of the morning. I finished Breaking Dawn at 4 a.m. A whole day on Daniel's Dune. A week in Lord Of The Rings. Ahh. Good times.

Do you usually have more than one book you are reading at a time?
Yeap. I've put War and Peace on hold for a very long time, and I recently paused Moby Dick to read some online work. I usually get back to them once the shorter, easier books are done and there's nothing else in the house.

Do you read non-fiction in a different way or place than you read fiction?
Yes. I read non-fiction less voraciously, I often reread non-fiction, and I take my time between chapters to think about what I've just read. No choice. Some of the concepts in the non-fiction books I read are way over my head, even if they are easy to understand. And here's a head's up: really good non-fiction books tend to make you rethink everything else you thought you knew about the subject matter (Theology of Economics, I'm looking your way).

Do you buy most of the books you read, or borrow them, or check them out of the library?
Let me paraphrase Edrei on this one:

Being poor, I don't usually have the option of buying the books that I want. So I usually borrow them from someone else or check them out from the library. These days though, thanks to the genius that is the internet, I find myself reading more and more books in electronic format instead. I may love the smell of musty pages on a cold day, but that's nowhere near my thirst for reading and finding out new things I never knew.

Being poor, I don't usually have the option of buying all the books that I want. So I usually borrow them from someone else, or check them out from the Sarawak Club library. But I'm reading more and more fiction online, blooks, torrents, the like. It helps that the publishing industry is starting to experiment with using the Internet as an alternative distribution channel, even if similar attempts have failed in the past.

Do you keep most of the books you buy? If not, what do you do with them?
No. I feed them to my dog.

If you have children, what are some of the favorite books you have shared with them? Were they some of the same ones you read as a child?
I don't have kids at the moment, but if I do ... well. I'll definitely want them to read Harry Potter, and probably Famous Five, Secret Seven and the like, but for their sake I hope they don't identify with the lonely, misunderstood children in those books.

But then again I'll be happy as long as they're reading.

What are you reading now?
My Chemistry and Physics textbooks. Sigh. But I'm also rereading Oren Harari's Break From The Pack, and Stephen King's On Writing.

Do you keep a "To Be Read" list?
I did. But I lost it, so all I've got is a buy all Steinbeck novels you find item flashing in my head.

What’s next to be read?
I'll see if I can get a PDF version of The Wealth Of Networks printed, and then I'll probably consume that.

What books would you like to reread?
It's funny you know, how this question plays out. Some books I've found to be better and better with every reread - the Lord of The Rings, for instance, was horrible the first time I finished it at 14, but then it became better and better everytime I revisited Middle Earth. I'm not really sure why.

I reread Harry Potter too, when I'm bored, and sometimes I open up random books I have in my room to find a particularly memorable passage, or perhaps a particularly touching scene. There is one in The Age Of Innocence where Archer bends down on one knee and kisses Countess Olenska's shoe, because he is forbidden to love her and that is all he dares to do. I friggin loved that. Completely fell in love with that. Yowza.

Who are your favourite authors?
There are many. Steinbeck, for one. Jeffrey Archer. Diana Wynn Jones. Johnathan Stroud. But this really shouldn't matter, no? It's the books we fall in love with, not the authors, and these names aren't as important as the feelings you get when you're curled up, mug in hand, buried in a good book.

I tag:
Tracy
Wen Qi
Ember

Consummatum

Dear Sensei.

You're leaving now. After so long with us. I don't know why the state government refused to let you continue teaching us, to let you finish what you started. But it doesn't matter anymore. You're going. To where not even you know. Maybe you'll be done with Malaysia and go to that German Olympic Training Centre you were offered several years back. Not likely, I know, because you promised your sensei to improve the standard of Judo in Malaysia. And you're tied to that promise. Binding words, those are - and we know you're a man of your word.

But anyway, thank you. Thank you for being there for us. Thank you for teaching me my Osotogari. Thank you for clapping your hand on the small of my back before my first match at the Nationals, against that national player. Thank you for yelling at me whenever I lost a match.

Thank you for teaching us about spirit. About never giving up, no matter who the opponent. Thank you for telling us stories (the one about Kankenai, for instance, changed the way Tang and I thought about life, forever). Thank you for tending to our injuries, no matter how trivial, or how bad. You were there at the hospital when Vincent broke his collarbone, you were constantly on the phone with the doctors when Shahirah compressed a disc in Johor; you taught us conditioning to prevent most major injuries from happening. Remember when I passed out from a choke last year? You stopped the match when I turned blue, treated my neck muscles after the competition and joked about it in training afterwards. Stupid of me to have fallen forward.

Thank you for yelling at us when we were running. That the only reason we were to stop was if we passed out of exhaustion. Thank you for telling us about Steffi. Being compared to a girl was precisely what we needed, nevermind that she was one of the toughest judoka you ever taught. You told us she got up faster than all of us during Randori - and we didn't like that. So we got up. Again and again. Every time you slammed us to the ground.

Thank you for lying to us in the gym. I've lost count of the number of times you've said "One last time!" on the bench press, only to have it repeated again and again as we strained against the weights. You taught us style and you taught us technique, and you were never satisfied with our performances. Our Judo was shaped by your hands.

Most of all, Sensei, thank you for teaching us about life. Like politics, for instance. In Penang, you sat us down and talked to us till late in the night about our country. About how being sent for competitions on state money was no small thing - it wasn't the government's money, it was ours. About how our government heads were our servants, not our leaders - leaders only if they gained our respect and if they were willing to lay down their lives for us. Through Judo you taught us about obstacles, and how to deal with them; you taught us respect - for officials, opponents; you taught us attitude. To know what you want in life and to work hard towards it. No nasi lemak culture. No shortcuts.

We made an agreement with you very early on in 2008 to give up our social lives for Judo. And for academics. You gave us our priorities: exams first, Judo second, everything else after that. Those were the conditions of being in the state team, and you sat us down one Sunday to explain it to us. We agreed. We never complained afterwards, because it was clear what you expected of us. And everytime I came close to falling from exhaustion I reminded myself that it was this deal I made with you, that we made with you, and it was my choice. And somehow I always managed to carry on. Thank you for pushing me to my limits, and for making me find out that my limits aren't so clear cut after all.

And do you know that Horng Eng's leadership style, Tang's management can-do, my teaching technique for debate, these were all from you? We learned more about leadership from your Judo than we did from anywhere else (the *ahem* prefectorial board, for instance - but that's just ironic considering Horng Eng and Steffi were both head girls). You were a great leader. And yes, we know you're not without your faults - but you taught us that being human was no excuse for stagnating. Come to think of it, you didn't like excuses. Period.

My last lesson with you was on Saturday. I didn't know what to say, when I shook your hand: "Goodbye Sensei. Thank you for -" and my brain froze up. Circuit overload. I struggled for the right word, and settled for: "- everything."

You smiled. "You're welcomed," you said to me. "I hope you learned something."

"I did! Spirit ... Not giving up, Judo." Clipped. Staccato. A rush of images behind each word.

"Good, good." I stepped back to collect my shoes, my gi, to leave my last lesson under you. "Oh and - ?" you cut in. I turned.

"Remember to pay your fees."

Damn.

Goodbye Sensei. Wherever you'll be, whatever you do. We'll miss you. I'll miss you.

Take care.

Heavy

I found out I was 64kg today.

That made me feel very bad. I went downstairs and opened the fridge and took out a bar of Elvan chocolate and finished that, and then I opened the larder and took out a bag of sugared cookies and finished that, and then I went to the dining room and opened a packet of Mentos and sucked on that.

Then I was better so I watched the Olympics until I felt thinner, and then I went back upstairs to stare at my Physics textbooks for the next four hours.

Which is all a lie.

But here's the sad fact: my lie isn't too far from the truth. Over the past 2 months I had been doing all of the above, only over the space of weeks, not hours. I hadn't been to the gym, played Judo or ran in those 60 days, and I had a bad shock when I stepped on the scales in the afternoon.

Let me clarify. Weighing yourself isn't as easy as jumping on a scale and screaming your head off. I stripped down to my underwear and distributed my weight evenly on the metal surface, and then I stared as the meter swiveled up, up past the 60 kg mark and onwards to the half-point. I was in my parents' bathroom - a completely weird thing to do and probably even weirder had they barged in. Imagine finding your teenage son near naked and staring at an analog meter.

Totally freaky.

(Oh and by the way, if you ever get the opportunity to play at a national level Judo tournament be sure to bring nice underwear. The weighing-in ceremony takes place in a roomful of opponents, random coaches and fierce-looking officials - in your underwear - so it makes sense to leave your pink playboys at home. I find it really distracting to fight against a guy in a thong - don't you?)

So anyway I found out I was 64 kg. Which meant that I was 4 kg overweight. I figured that at least 2 kg of that was water (I sweated out as much the last major tournament), and since I had not being gaining muscle in the past 2 months .... the other 2 kg was fat.

Damn.

I started running. I knew what I was getting myself into, but I strapped on my shoes and plugged in my iPod and got my dog all excited at the prospect of a walk. She rushed out wag wag wag. Poor girl.

And everything came back to me quickly. The slap of rubber on cement, the steady thump of beats from my earbuds, the smell of sweat as it trickled down my chin. And the pain! Oh how welcomed the pain was! A burning sensation reached out from inside my chest and spread its fingers down, past my solar plexus, stabbing right into the stomach muscles. It hurt so badly! Breathe. Stabofpain. Breathe. Wobbly legs. I thought back to the afternoons being yelled at by Sensei and kept at it.

The idea behind running is to maintain a rapid pulse, and to keep at it for a good period of time. 1 kg, for instance, takes approximately half an hour of aerobic running to burn. And my metabolic rate had skyrocketed after training this year - while my training intensity had gone down my hunger hadn't. I can now eat two packets of rice and still forage for cookies. D'oh.

I came back and stripped down and weighed myself again. The analog meter swung right up, up, past the 60 kg mark, and it settled at ... 64.

Dammit I'm fat.

Studystack

Been studying 4-5 hours a day, which is torture if it wasn't for a steady stream of good music. The following are a few albums I've been listening to on near constant loop for the past few days. Click on any one of them to listen to download one song from that album ... not the best, but the most listener-friendly.

Note: I'm an alt junkie, so all of the above music are from the alternative genre. Metro Station is the only band you'll hear on Malaysian radio - they're new, relatively unknown, and the lead singer is Miley Cyrus's older brother Trace. Paradoxically, he actually makes decent music.

Commonwealth

Title: One And The Same
Topic Number: Class A: 3, Is The World Becoming Tribal Or Global?

Mr Brigham is slightly excited when the plane touches down. He has been promising himself a holiday for five years now, and this year he finally puts his foot down and shuts his wife up and packs his bags. By George he is going to have a holiday, he tells himself, he deserves it. And nevermind the mortgage for three days. Nevermind the travelling expenses. He needs a reprieve from the humdrum of daily life, so the month before he goes off to the travel agency and picks the most exotic location he has never heard of.

The brochure reads ‘Malaysia’. It has a picture of an Orangutan in the front, some leaves at the border, and a very fierce looking warrior-type man with a wooden shield. Mr Brigham likes it immediately. He signs up to stay with a local family, because he is a Smart Man. Smart Men do not fall for tribal wish-wash on travel brochures: they want the Real Thing, and living with a Malaysian family for three days is as close to the Real Thing as Mr Brigham can possibly get.

So here he sits, a cup of peanuts in hand and awaiting his first gasp of Malaysian air. The airport is all sleek steel and shiny metal, but Mr Brigham ignores this and looks beyond. He sees a highway full of rushing cars: Mitsubishis and BMWs and local Protons. Mr Brigham ignores this and looks beyond still: ah! Dense tropical foliage! They did not have this in Britain!

Mr Brigham snaps a picture through his airplane window and chuckles to himself. It was quite a pity Mrs Brigham hated travelling, or she, too, would be enjoying this beautiful first glimpse of Alien Country.

Mr Brigham gets out of the plane at last and takes a deep breath. He wants to savour local oxygen, but what he gets instead is a solid blast of cold, dry air conditioner. It is much like the sharp sting after a spell of English rain.

Mr Brigham doesn't mind: he is sure the air outside the airport is warm and humid and nothing like London's. So off he goes to collect his bags at the carousel, out the whoosh of the sliding glass doors, and he finds himself in the midst of a bustling multi-racial world.

Mr Brigham is suddenly very happy to see so many different faces. There are sharp-featured Indians, slant-eyed Chinese and a brown-skinned people he supposes are Malay. He feels like he is in Canada again, where he cannot tell who is what. He taps a porter curiously and asks: "Excuse me sir, are you Malay?"

The porter smiles back and says: "Hello sir I am Chinese!"

"Oh!" Mr Brigham exclaims. He looks around the arrivals lounge and recovers quickly: "And that fellow there - he is Chinese, I suppose?"

"Tunku," the porter's mouth twitches, "is a Malay."

"But you look so alike!"

The porter frowns for a moment. He does not look pleased. "All of us sir - including you - are quite alike."

But Mr Brigham sees his family now, waving his name, and he excuses himself. He is bouncing with his bags by the time he reaches them.

Hello! Hello! Hello! they say, and he loads his bags into Mr Goh’s car. As they drive down the highway Mr Brigham acquaints himself with the family: Mr Goh is an insurance salesman, Mrs Goh is a housewife, and Michael is a teenager, a whole career in itself. Mr Brigham is pleased with his family; he does not notice the huge roadside billboards advertising everything from plasma televisions to perfume.

When they arrive in Kuala Lumpur Mr Brigham wants to eat. He sees all these interesting little coffee shops, tucked away in corners and populated by the uncles and aunties of the country. He supposes this is where the beating heart of Malaysia lies: over kaya toast and teh tarik; however, he cannot be sure. The Gohs take a turn and the old shophouses disappear behind a curtain of flyovers, skyscrapers and monorail lines.

They take him to eat in a food court in Midvalley Megamall. The mall is obvious; the valley is not. As Mr Brigham eats his five ringgit nasi lemak he sees a funny looking stall. To his consternation it reads ‘authentic Scottish Western traditional fish’. He tells the Gohs no such thing exists. Michael tells him the food there is very nice.

The Gohs bring him back to their home, and Mr Brigham finds his room very tolerable. He is tired after a long flight, so after watching 30 minutes of a Lost rerun with the family he goes to bed. The Ikea comforters the Gohs use are so comfortable they’re almost like the ones back home. Mr Brigham sleeps well.

The next day the Gohs take him out to the National Zoo, where the orangutans and the elephants and the monkeys look exactly the same as the orangutans and the elephants and the monkeys back in Twycross. Nothing escapes import, Mr Brigham says, and he feigns interest in a sleeping Bengal tiger.

After the zoo they eat at this trendy haute cuisine place, only trendy is subjective to preference. The Gohs dig into their food with gusto, but Mr Brigham’s moustache droops at the thought of how unoriginal his foie gras is. He makes a note to remind the Gohs to bring him to a traditional Malaysian coffee shop (‘mamak’, the glossy in-flight magazine calls it) for a taste of true local fare. Then he eats his foie gras and finds the dish to be international standard. He can close his eyes and imagine for a moment – almost – that he is in New York.

When they reach home the Gohs spring a surpirse on him: the Durian. With the smell of hell and the taste of high heaven the Durian is the King of Malaysian fruits. The Gohs tell him there is no middle ground with this one: he will either love it or hate it. Mr Brigham takes one, finds it remarkably better than the sample his Indonesian clients once opened in his office, and then finishes six pieces. He keeps up the act of a naïve foreigner throughout (oh my God it stinks!) and the Gohs smile and laugh with him. “Nothing escapes import,” repeats Mr Brigham, just before he goes to sleep – some part of his brain tells him he has tried nothing very different in this country, but he is too tired and collapses snoring onto his Swedish covers.

Mr Brigham has always been good with young people, so he goes out the next day with Michael and his friends. They strike up a lively conversation about football on the LRT to the shopping centre. Mr Brigham supports Liverpool; but Michael and Eric argue vehemently for Manchester United, and Navi is a Chelsea supporter.

“I once read somewhere that soccer is responsible for something akin to culture genocide.” Navi says.

“Oh really? Why so?”

“It’s like a virus: it spreads all over the world and wipes out the traditional games it comes into contact with. You never wondered? Malaysia, for instance – football is pretty much a part of our everyday life.”

“Oh you play it?”

“Sometimes.” Eric answers. “We watch it more.”

Mr Brigham keeps quiet for awhile. “And Malaysian football?” he asks, “Do you watch that?”

All three boys burst into laughter. “No! Absolutely not!” Michael says, and Eric cuts in: “English football is the best.”

They head for Berjaya Times Square, and Mr Brigham wants to know what music they listen to. He is – by now – completely unsurprised when they squeal ‘My Chemical Romance!’ – his nephew back in London has the exact same taste. He enquires about local bands, and they take him to Borders and pop headphones on him and play OAG. Mr Brigham yelps and tears it off: his ears are attuned to The Beatles, so this music is horrible in comparison. On top of that they sound exactly like MCR.

They go off for lunch. Mr Brigham asks them to take him to a local mamak, but they laugh him off and bring him excitedly to a McDonalds. “Even if you have eaten in one before,” Navi says, “You’ll love the Ayam Goreng McD – they won’t have that in England now, would they?”

Mr Brigham goes home that day staring at every coffee shop passing him by. The Malaysian night air is warm and unhealthy – the city is big enough and modern enough to have its own air pollution index – but he takes a deep breath at every station, when the doors electronically open and a crush of new passengers enter. Mr Brigham is reminded of his hitchhiking days, when smells announced new places: sea-smell for Cornwall, bread-smell for Paris, the sharp bite of coffee-smell for Rome. Here the air is marked by heat and rain, and the barest hints of spicy cooking, but it is also interwoven with the smells of Big City. Smoke and dust and sweat are whisked in with the people, and Mr Brigham coughs.

He reaches home to (finally!) some authentic Malaysian cooking – Mrs Goh sets the table as Michael and him relate their day, and Mr Goh folds his newspaper and laughs at all the right places. Dinner is a few stir-fried vegetable dishes and chicken, which Mrs Goh has cooked with rice wine. Mr Brigham enjoys this meal tremendously. After dinner he discusses global affairs with Mr Goh: Iraq, Iran, the US presidential elections, before retiring to bed. He chuckles to himself while brushing his teeth: “Mr Obama is spiffy, don’t you think?” Mr Goh had said, “Far more exciting lah than any Malaysian politician you’ll ever see.”

The next day is Mr Brigham’s last, and they are off for a traditional dance and orchestral ensemble at Istana Budaya. Mr Brigham looks forward to this: he can barely sit still as the lights dim and the clash of gongs announce the dancers.

As Mr Brigham gets his taste of Malaysian culture we should consider, for a moment, what the show represents. Dance was once the communal draw in the fishing villages of the country, and people grew up breathing in its beat … forgetting the fish, the weather and the sea in the trance of the Gamelan or the Joget. Now it is a preserved commodity, its collection of liquid moves and music on a lifeline of audiences like Mr Brigham, trapped on stages playing to expensive seats, nothing more than a left-behind, a relic made obsolete by modern entertainment. Soccer wiped out stick games and Two-Old-Cat; videogames and television swallowed dance. The lucky become global and the tribal die, or it changes – until what you get is a heady mix of both; a hybrid in-between.

This diatribe plays somewhere at the back of Mr Brigham’s head, but the dance is short and sweet – a spike of instant gratification. Two hour shadow puppet epics must wait for another day; the Gohs now rush him back to pack up and strap on his travelling implements.

Mr Brigham presents the Gohs with a bottle of red wine. He tells them he has enjoyed his stay, and he can’t wait to come back for another round. The Gohs twitter in approval, they load his bags into their car and send him to the airport.

It is only in the plane that Mr Brigham reviews his holiday. Mrs Brigham will surely demand a comprehensive report upon his return, of which he would lie and assure her it was very enjoyable, thank you very much, he did many New Things. But the truth is less cheerful: Mr Brigham finds Malaysia too much like the world, he is sick of fast food and zoos and copy-culture. He leans back in his seat and closes his eyes for the whole of ten seconds. Then his hand reaches up into his breast pocket, and he retrieves what he has picked up on his way to the departure terminal.

It is a purple brochure. It has a picture of a temple in the front, some leaves at the border, and an Indian dancer with ruby marriage spot and golden trinkets. Mr Brigham likes it immediately. He loves the photos inside even more: there is no sign of a shopping mall anywhere and the people walking within are clad in sandals.

It might be three years or so before Mr Brigham can get away with another holiday. But he is a Smart Man, and Smart Men know what they want. This time he wants a tribal vacation, and – well now – India sounds like a good bet, doesn’t it? Mr Brigham closes his eyes once more. The plane shudders, it lifts him up into the air and past wispy clouds, back into the sky, where he really belongs.

*

When I was in Form Four I remember going through a strict submission process for the Commonwealth Essay competition in my school. The teacher in charge was a supposedly brilliant one, famous in 'the whole of Kuching' for teaching English and Literature. I did not like her. The first draft I submitted was entitiled 'The Experiment', and it involved God pressing the reset button on planet Earth.

The essay came back to me with a terse: "Typical cloak and dagger story with the Almighty at the end. Not original." Okay, I thought. I sat down and redid my essay, this time on another topic: "Tell us something you're good at, and what it means to you." I wrote about writing, because I loved it, was good at it, and had being doing it since I was seven. I got called to the staffroom.

The teacher sat me down at her table, took out my draft and looked me in the eye. "The judges," she said, "Are looking for something good. Something honest, maybe original. You should write about something you're really good at; something you can write honestly about. This topic you've chosen, about writing ... you're not very good at it."

Oh, I loved that. I remember thinking to myself: who are you to talk about writing? I left the staffroom, promptly quit the competition, and I didn't submit anything for the rest of my St Thom school life. St Thomas's won nothing that year, and had a draught for five.

Until now.

To that teacher, wherever you are (and God have mercy on your students): this essay is for you. People like you exist to make sure that not everyone becomes good in their respective fields: you are the shit filter and you ensure the weak never actualize their potential. You provide a necessary function in our society, much like the bottom feeder and the short trader, or perhaps the guy who boos at all the wrong moments in a football match.

God bless you.

Why Student Opinion Matters

Anybody submitting a class profile to the Thomian magazine today would find that there are no more class mottoes allowed in the respective class pages. The story behind their exclusion is an illustrative one, and it speaks volumes about what is happening in our schools today. It goes something like this:

Not too long ago, in a Thomian magazine, one student wrote ‘Go to school to get attendance’ as her motto. Perhaps she thought it was witty, perhaps she was being sarcastic, or perhaps it was a stab in the eye of the status quo – we may never be sure. But three things happened.

The first thing was that our Principal noticed. I can only guess at what he was doing when he went over the mottoes in the yearbook ... but there you go. He saw it. The next thing that happened was that he didn’t like what he saw. So he got rid of the mottoes altogether.

What is wrong with this story? I can point out a few things: firstly the banishment of the mottos in the school yearbook based on the actions of one student (no, make that one sentence) is unjustifiable. The girl had a right to her opinion, a right to personal expression within reasonable means – one that the school squashed under the heel of censure. And so what, if her motto swam against the current of conformity? Did the administration honestly think that the motto would single-handedly change the mindsets of the rest of its student population? Did it believe that class mottoes in a yearbook would damage the school’s reputation? And – more importantly – did the principal actually believe this to be reason enough to ban one of the remaining forms of personal expression – however pathetic it may be – in the school yearbook?

The truth is that: yes, it did; yes it thought class mottoes would be damaging; yes, the principal actually thought it reason enough. But don’t get me wrong: I have no problems with a ban on class mottoes in my school’s yearbook. Not by itself. Not with the right reasons. What I do have a problem with, however, is bigger than that: it is the simple fact that not even mottos – the smallest form of personal expression – is allowed in the Thomian. This is sad indeed: if the Thomian school magazine is not for the Thomians, then who is it for? The public? The advertisers? The school’s image?

Let's hold off that question for a little bit. I point now to The Square, which is the school's newsletter for students. It recently put out it’s 160th anniversary edition, a collection of articles then and now, charting the history of a hundred or so years of education. And while compiling features for that issue I ploughed through a stack of Old Thomians to see what things were like a few decades back.

And I couldn't stop reading.

The old Thomian magazines had soul. In the 1960s the students were allowed to write editorials on relevant, modern day issues – there was one about patriotism in the time of the Emergency and it was stark, honest, and wonderfully written. There were House reports too - the captains each had to submit one, and they took the space and the time as to wonder why their Houses did so badly (or so well) on Sports Day that particular year. I remember one Noel captain writing in his report how a lack of spirit after top athletes had left in his House had contributed to their defeat. If that had been written now, in today's St Thomas's, the principal would probably ban the whole section on the grounds of 'school image'.

During his last term as editor of The Square Ravindran had to handle a controversial pullback of every edition of the newsletter. The administration of St Thomas's had struck again: censoring this time an offending article in the center-spread about the state of the Science and Arts streams in the Malaysian education system. The strange thing was that there was nothing wrong with the article. It spoke truth, truth that anybody studying in a Malaysian school could testify to, and the administration pulled it back and removed it on the grounds of 'school image'. Here was the offending paragraph:

Generally, when one leaves secondary three, one is permitted to choose whether to continue their studies in either the science's stream of the art's stream. Unfortunately, the Form 4 arts students in SMK St Thomas do not have a choice. After going through their secondary 3 examination, they are forced to enter the arts stream as if it had been predestined for them. This is because they had failed to excel in their studies, and moreover, to be in the science stream, one has to achieve good grades in English, Mathematics and Science. Apparently, they just do not have the least laudable credentials. Furthermore, most of them belong to the categories that are uninterested in studies.

But here was the context:

On the other hand, lower and upper 6 arts students are a tale of a different story. They enter arts stream through their own choices. They know what they want and exactly how to achieve their targeted goal. One thing is for sure, being in arts stream does not mean they are stupid and being in science stream does not guarantee one's success in life. I truly think that students should not be judged by their intelligence and therefore separated by boundaries created through the particular judgment. Students, in fact, should be looked upon as a whole which are then differentiated by their personal character so that the urge to be arrogant and discriminating against the poor would not be triggered.

The article had struck a chord. It was true that there is a stigma between Arts and Science in Malaysia, one that, if had been recognized, could have been corrected. Singapore was fortunate because it had a visionary Education Minister who recognized the need for an Arts scene, but in Malaysia this perception did not yet exist. The writer, a Form 5 student, could have been encouraged to think critically about matters related to nation and state. But what was the lesson here? What did he learn from this fiasco? What did the administration teach him with censorship?

The lesson was this: the boy learnt that it did not pay to talk, think and speak the truth. It did not pay to voice his opinion, no matter how correct it was. And that it is better in the Malaysian context to sweep current issues under the carpet, to keep silent in fear of 'spoiling the image of the school'.

And I say to this: bollocks. If it seems that St Thomas's is a socialist regime with a censorship board of its own then that is because that it is. In many ways it reflects the current state of Malaysia: we present a idealistic, beautiful face to the world, while the paradoxes of our society stress and strain beneath the surface. The simple truth here is that we cannot hope do become a great nation with the suppression of critical thought and opinion. By extension, we cannot hope to create a dynamic, intelligent youth through the suppression of personal expression. We cannot grow if we cannot speak, and it would do well for our educators to sit up and take notice.

As the editor responsible for the redesign and revamp of The Square I have faced and dealt with many such instances over the last year. Sometimes I relent, because I understand the moral aspect of editorial power. Other times I am stamped out by the censorship board of the school because I stray too near to the truth. The administration complained after the late 2007 revamp that there were not enough reports and too many articles. But the results were telling: before leaving the school last year many Form 5s came up to me and commended our efforts on The Square. To them, it was a far better representation of Thomian life, thought and spirit then the Thomian magazine ever was. The irony wasn't lost on me, nor was it lost on the team - the truth that a small newsletter had beaten the school magazine (which bore the Thomian name) was funny in a very sad way.

You must realize that I do not speak of St Thomas's alone. The suppression of critical opinion is a national problem, created by a Government not fond of press freedom and implemented by Education officers like my principal. When submitting an essay on the effect of inflation my sister had her Kuching High teacher censor all parts mentioning the failure of the 1st Malayan Plan. My sister had merely seeked to prove the effect global prices had on national economic policy; her teacher saw this as 'sensitive' and red inked the whole paragraph. I am sure many such examples exist in our national school system, and it saddens me that my friends and siblings cannot learn to think for themselves.

At the end of the day my class would probably submit a profile without mottoes. It is merely one more sacrifice on the altar of school image and we're used to it. I won't fight for something as small as the inclusion of mottoes, but I will be watching closely the following issues of The Square, as well as further censorship moves the school might or will take.

If it improves, then bravo. But if it doesn't, if the school continues to step in and censor perfectly reasonable opinion, then be certain that you'll hear from me.

Till then.

Note: I edited this article and removed all hints of personal attack after long consideration. I want this to be interpreted as an objective piece, not as a rant, and I believe it is better for it.

Photolog:St Thomas's Pesta Ria

Most of you know by now that when I say photolog on this blog I mean a visual essay. This one is no different: I spent much of Saturday walking around with Stefan's DSLR, shooting left right and centre.

Stefan is one hell of a photographer. The dude got a Nikon D40x right after his SPM and started hanging out with a bunch of camera nuts (read: old men), and they go out for shooting trips every once in awhile. His photos are brilliant. His teaching skills are even better - within a few seconds he covered the basics of aperture, shutter speed and then sent me off to shoot whatever I wanted.

I mean, how cool is that?

An overhead shot of the Pesta Ria from the school hall. Notice the huge space in the middle - runners gathered there earlier for the annual joggerthon.
The clown was a big hit. Pn Eng tells us he's a student in Lower 6 who part-times as a clown. Gotta admire his guts
.
My generation of Thomians.

Fiona and guava. Go figure.

Aidan back from France. He looked at the D40x in my hands and said: "I'm picking up my D60 tonight." Damn.
U6S4's stall.

Some big assed Datuk came, along with a whole host of policemen.

Joanne and hat. David found her cute.

Ball magic.

Ball fiasco.

Ho John giving free rides. He likes attention.