New Village

theparisreview: From Robert Dawson and Josh Wallaert’s Public...

tshiunghan — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:39:53 +0800

From Robert Dawson and Josh Wallaert’s Public Library: An American Commons.

theparisreview: This landscape with its somber skiesMust have...

tshiunghan — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 16:38:27 +0800

This landscape with its somber skies
Must have fallen in love
With a story by Edgar Allan Poe.
One of its birch trees could be his Eleonora,
And the other, further on, Ligeia.

Life is a dream within a dream,
Whisper the fallen leaves under our feet.
The old house, softly lit from within
By its copper pots and mirrors,
Seems even more abandoned this evening.

What if I were to knock on its door?
Keeping in mind, as I push it open
And enter cautiously, that for Poe
Beauty could be the cause of sudden death.

—Charles Simic, “Dead Season”
Art Credit Jungjin Lee

Introducing New Village 3

tshiunghan — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 13:58:00 +0800

Introducing New Village 3, featuring a front cover by Andrew T. Crum and a special back cover by Wo Swee Teck.

Also:

A short story by Tan Ray Tat.
Essays by Alex Lee and Goh Lee Kwang.
Poetry by Catalina Rembuyan and Kuning Pening.
A comic by Jin Hien Lau.

And a photo essay by Wilfred Weegee.

Buy a hard copy for RM10 at Silverfish Books or read it online below.

New Village 03

Tioman (part 5)

tshiunghan — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 17:23:00 +0800

This is part 5 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here.

One person I met had an interesting story about her own experience of running away from home. She had gone to London, where she had found work as a hairstylist, illegally, and hid away in an attic with her lesbian lover, who owned the salon. She did what she had to survive, she said, and once you get to a place big enough, it’s easy to disappear. She only came back for her son, whom she had left with her parents, a burden she cannot carry with her. In the end it was the irrepressible desire to see him again that made her come back, and somehow that thought comforted me. As they say, water cannot be cleaved. One day, perhaps kakak will come back, or if I go far enough, she will be the one to see me first.

So all the memories I could carry of my sister, which would tell me who she is, whenever, wherever I would find myself finally face to face with her, are some faint glimmers I could remember of our childhood together and ones which are of every woman but not of her. The only images I have of kakak now, are of her when she had just turned fifteen. In the picture I carry with me in case I had to show anyone, she is a school athlete, trim and slim, with long, dark hair, woven in voluminous pleats that reach her torso. It made her appear thinner than she really was. She was just starting to round out around her hips, and she had her arms crossed awkwardly over her budding breasts, but her face had by that time completely morphed into the face I knew she would carry all her life, already so pronounced and definite, a face that was several years older than the rest of her body. It is this picture that I am holding now, next to the image on my computer screen. It is the spitting image of her, and I am certain that it is her.

Sofi calls me a few days later. Her excitement crackles over the phone. “Sir Dip, bless him, came through for us. Guess where the postcard came from?—it’s here, Malaysia!” So she did have a cable to the Post Secret guy after all. Normally Post Secret would be very tight-lipped over such queries, as their existence depends on guaranteeing the anonymity of their users, many who send in their most private thoughts in the mail, so that they could be exhibited flagrantly to the world. They would say that there is no return address, and there was no signature, and that was normal and to be expected. It was sent from Mersing, in August 2005. Three months ago.

So the picture was recent, and the trail is alive. The beach, must be somewhere around Mersing, or the islands thereabouts. I take out the well-thumbed atlas that my sister and I had once pored over together. A neon sticker glares over Tioman island. “What do you think about joining me for a trip to Tioman?” I ask Sofi. She says yes. Of course.

End of chapter 1. Chapter 2 coming soon. What did you think of the story? Let us know in the comments.

Tioman (part 4)

tshiunghan — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 21:11:00 +0800

This is part 4 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here.

So after Sofi confessed that—in different words—she had no desire for me, I secretly started to haunt drinking holes around town, bouncing from bar to bar after school, and returning home by midnight. My parents thought I had been spending time with Sofi as usual. They had long decided that my friendship with Sofi was healthy, and I showed no signs of breaking out the way my sister had, so they never questioned where I went. Outside, nobody suspected I was a minor. By all appearances I blended in easily with the yuppies I befriended, and having read precociously I could engage anyone in any topic of conversation. This was how I bartered for drinks with my yuppie friends, as I was the ideal and able wingman to play the dandy and always ready to strike up conversations with the women and bring them to the team. Years of being close yet distant to Sofi had taught me the art of conversation, peppered with double entrendres yet framed with sexless, unthreatening body language; and ironically I began meeting women who found that attractive and frequently offered to send me home; albeit after brief stopovers at their bachelorette flat or some deserted office parking lot. If Sofi suspected of my activities she never said anything, only huffing with displeasure every now and then when I rebuffed her late-night telephone calls, too inebriated with either alcohol or post-coital stupor to make the effort to listen to her chatter.

I didn’t desire these other women, not the way I desired Sofi. Although I found pleasure in seducing them, it was their desire for me that I craved, and I let them consume me. Always at the back of my mind was my lost sister, and the reason I told myself why I must remain distant with the women was because I was looking for kakak. I started constructing imaginary lives for kakak around the worlds of these women that pass through these cycles of instant and fleeting courtship. Is she now using a different name? Has she dyed her hair red and is it blowing free in the wind like wild fire? Or is she behind a hijab, having found a kind of freedom that anonymity can provide? I never spoke to them about kakak, remembering how it affected my relationship with Sofi.

That kind of talk I inflicted on the ‘working ladies.’ The ‘professionals.’ I never frequented brothels, although I wondered if I might find kakak inside, for lack of money and the heady cocktail of curiosity and repulsion at entering such places often stopped me just outside of their signages. The pros I met were women who roamed the same kind of places I went to, and I started to recognise and rub shoulders with them. At first they never talked to me. I swear they can spot a dead stick a mile off, a flat wallet from the way you walk. But then as I perfected my modus operandi of the dandy bar-rat, and as the yuppies become as extravagant as their pay scales, hence drunker and looser with their appetites, the pros and I started orbiting the same people, and I became part of their network, the party maker. It was just good business to know each other, and before long I was firmly in their circles. On quiet nights, we would trade war stories. How we were all whores, even I, the man-whore in denial. What was I doing there anyway? Sometimes the subject falls on my sister, what she did and what she would be doing at that moment. “Look at me, I also went off to live my own life, and I’m okay.” Sometimes they would give me a free pass, as if to show that what they do is by choice, by their own right, and would take me into their homes and bed. You would not believe the luxuries they have, in their private worlds. Some of the lucky ones anyway. The unlucky ones could not have been so freely hobnobbing with customers out in the open; they would be the ones shadowed by the triads, cloistered behind the walls of a brothel or held captive in some cubicle in an apartment with many others, to be shuttled around in sedans with dark-tinted windows for customers. That could be the worst thing that could happen to kakak, but they said it would not have happened to her. She would have been too educated to be trapped like that, and if it even came to it, a ‘talent’ like hers would have been privately bought for obscene sums of money, and treated preciously as soon as she hit the market. Was she sending any money back, they ask? When I said no, they just shrug and look away. By the time I turned twenty-one, I had gone to bed with over four-hundred women and all these things I could never tell Sofi, things my ‘sister’ should never know about.

Click here for part 5.

Tioman (part 3)

tshiunghan — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 23:22:00 +0800

This is part 3 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Kakak was my best friend. When she didn’t come home, Mama would not tell me where she had gone. My parents constantly argued about what to do, about why she’s gone. That they knew the reason was undisputed. Kakak had left a note. She had made up her mind, and she’s not coming back. We knew it was not a kidnapping. Kakak always had an independent spirit, and sometimes she would tell me of her desires to travel to distant lands. She showed me all the places she’d go to, marked in the family atlas with little neon stickers. I always said I liked it better at home, why should she want to leave, but she just laughed. “You should get out of your books,” she said, “I’m going to be living in Talinn, and you can come visit.” Then she would fetch the atlas from the sitting room and make me figure out the route to Estonia. So when she finally left I wasn’t surprised. I was happy for her. Why my parents behaved the way they did was what I could not understand.

Not that such serenity came easily. I admired kakak’s courage. Her apparent freedom was alluring… whereas I, already predisposed to be content with the comforts of a sedentary existence, became even more restricted by my parents to stay at home, eventually passing the SPM at the same school I attended since seven years old. That was where Sofi and I met each other. We were in different classes (she was a year ahead) and we would never have spoken to each other had I not—acting out, angsty from the aftermath of my sister’s disappearance—started playing truant to grape with some of the older kids from school, loitering at video game arcades in Sungai Wang Plaza. Sofi was there sometimes—”whenever the cramps hit me, I just can’t deal with classes,” she said, to excuse her truancy. One day, while sneaking smokes in the deserted corridors of the top floor of the mall, I told her of the story of my sister who had run away from home. She hugged me and, much to my dismay (as I was hoping to score sympathy points and get hookie with the cute and sassy senior), declared that she would be my sister instead.

So that was how we became close and frustratingly chaste friends. Sofi took her role as a surrogate sister seriously. She introduced me to all her friends as her little brother, and I was frequently invited to play games at her house and escort her to parties hosted by her friends, only to help fend off other boys eagerly suiting her. She wanted nothing to do with those boys, and I was exempted from the rule, being her “lil bro.” At first I had surreptitious hopes that I could somehow salvage a romance out of our relationship, reasoning that we made a perfect couple, as a couple of years had passed and we had both spent almost all the time we had after school and on holidays with each other. Sofi decisively quashed these hopes, when at one of these parties, I, heady with the thrill of a crime I had perpetrated (buying my first ever two cans of Tiger at a 7-11 (how my hands shook as I walked to the counter; being a lanky sixteen-year old, sporting a goatee, I was sure I passed for eighteen), and having downed them both) and fuelled by the alcohol-induced courage, suddenly pulled her aside and kissed her full on the lips. She went rigid with shock and the outrage that flashed across her face was as good as a slap to me. She stormed away and I was left to stand awkwardly in the stares of the others who had witnessed my indiscretion. On the way home she told me that being her brother was a privilege no other boy will have, and I must never treat her in such a way again, for she’s just not ‘that’ type of girl. She made me promise not to desire her if I respected her. It was a few months later, the night when we first installed the Post Secret watcher, and I was invited to sleep over and, having dragged a mattress in front of the computer to watch the exquisite-corpse-ish stream of confessions onscreen together, she touched me under the blankets and, holding my hands tightly, whispered to me that she was a lesbian. This was one of the few certainties she held in her life. I was special, a little brother she never had, and I must never tell anyone she had told me this. Then she gently stroked me all over my body until I climaxed, to seal the deal.

Since then I started keeping secrets from Sofi. At first, when kakak disappeared, we had lodged a police report, but as months went by and after many (increasingly heated) visits and calls to the constable assigned to the case, my father (who rarely raised his voice) bellowed into the phone to demand explanations for the police’s inaction. One day an inspector visited our house and addressed us over coffee. We were told that each week hundreds of teenagers go missing all over the country. Most eventually come back, unable to convert their new-found freedom to sustainable living. He played out for us the possible scenarios, and spat statistics of the likelihoods of her return in the event of each scenario. They made us realise that we for the most part have sheltered lives, that there is much darkness in the world that we had only considered peripherally if at all, or had dismissed what we read in the news as something that could never happen to us. Since then I read the newspapers in a different way. Every story I read could be kakak’s story, her reality, so I understand why Mama stopped reading the news. But unlike Mama, I became more intrigued by the shadowy parts of the world that I was made suddenly aware of.

Click here for part 4.

Tioman (part 2)

tshiunghan — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 15:42:00 +0800

This is part 2 of Reza Rosli’s short story. Read part 1 here.

Today my sister’s photo showed up and Sofi emailed it to me, which I am looking at now.

“It is her isn’t it?” the IM from Sofi says.

I say I’m not sure, weary of the years we had argued over what appears on these images, whether they mean anything or not. At one point, it was like when everything that appears means something in some way, and we looked to it for answers. We grew out of that, after learning of the nature of randomness and our own propensity to apply meaning to things when none exists; but Sofi remains convinced that God tells us things in many ways.

“If it’s her… do you think you can find her? Hang on lil bro! I’ll ask Sir Dip if he can get me a return address.”

“Sir Dip,” is a cheeky contraction of Serendip, her nickname for the guy who runs Post Secret. Whoever he is. She writes to him sometimes to share her philosophical musings on the images she sees on Post Secret. It’s sweet of her to offer to do it, but I can’t help rolling my eyes. Does the guy even write back to her? Still, if there could be a clue as to where my sister is now, it doesn’t hurt to ask.

It was fifteen years ago that my sister ran away from home. I was twelve, and my sister was fifteen at the time she vanished. Mama used to sing every morning. She sang to us when we were babies, songs that she learned from others, which eventually became hers, and songs she made up on her own, in meaningless, wordless sounds, but she only cared about their tune. She cried for a very long time when my sister left us, and then she went silent for a while, but then she started singing again. She sang slowly, tumultuously, in long, drawn-out tunes, heavy with ineffable grief, pining for my sister. For hours on end she sang in this way until she had not the strength to sing anymore, and only her laboured breathing can be heard, and yet it was as if the world shook with her every exhalation. Then one day she stopped singing. Even on the sunniest days, when her spirit had a certain lightness it seemed the walls glowed with warmth, she would start humming a tune that would after a while peter out into staccato bursts of cries. People say that mothers would never so easily give up a child, and certainly not my Mama, but I could tell when she stopped singing that she had started to grieve for my sister. Yet, she keeps on looking over the tree tops and, from the rhythm of her breathing, I know she still sings for God.

My father, he is as taciturn as always. I have never seen him cry, but he holds on to my sister’s photographs. He’s taken all her pictures and put them in an album that he keeps behind his desk. He flips through it sometimes. I’ve seen him do it, when I come home in the dead of the night and walk past the study. He would quickly close the album and put it aside, clearing his throat and suddenly appearing interested in something outside the window. In public, or even with me, he never talks of her. But I guess he does so with Mama.

My other two siblings, they are too young to remember their older sister. They are as resilient as children always are. Sometimes they ask when kakak will come home. At first, we said that she’s away, travelling somewhere, and she’ll be back soon. Birthdays are the worst times, for they wait by the telephone for the call that will never come. As they grew older they started to grok what had happened and we gave up lying to them. They show no signs of forgetting her and tell us stories of the bloggers they read about in distant lands. Those dazzling personalities like Belle de Jour, or the English teacher who suffers a bad breakup and travels the world and settles down in a village in Peru, occassionally blogging on sporadic trips to the nearby town, where there is a cyber café. They imagine kakak is also somewhere out there, living a life none of us can imagine.

Click here for part 3.

Tioman (part 1)

tshiunghan — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 09:00:00 +0800

Reza Rosli

My sister’s eyes, staring dolefully from the image on my computer screen, struck me dumb. Submissions made to the Post Secret site are known to be anonymous, so I knew any effort to find the one who had sent in the postcard would be futile.

Here is a portrait of her smiling widely on a sunlit beach, nondescript, except for a long, jutting rock formation looming in the background. These words, made of letters cut out of a magazine, or a newspaper, are pasted over it, “I’m sorry.” The postcard is undated.

Hope flares in my heart. She is alive. After all these years.

My laptop whoops. Sofi had sent me a message on Instant Messenger.

Sofi has a Pentium in a corner of her room that serves only one purpose: display Post Secret. This it does on a bygone-era cathode-ray-tube monitor, displaying Internet Explorer 6 running a frameset and a javascript loop that refreshes the Post Secret home page once a minute and another script which copies the image that appears and saves it on the local hard drive. We had written the software together, one school holiday, based on tutorials from a Javascript for Beginners book, which now props the monitor up, like a pedestal to a monument. She’s had it on for five years now, and the “revelations,” as she calls the burgeoning archive of Post Secret images (as opposed to “confessions”), sprawl in a collection of blinking, whirring hard disks that were a JBOD experiment that had improbably survived years past its useful lifetime; the result of another productive holiday. “Built like the Mars Rovers,” goes our braggadocio. Sometimes we joke about building a data warehouse to keep everyone’s secrets for Judgement Day, but as the space in the disks filled up, she learned some batch programming and then wrote a script to randomly delete old pictures every now and then, and we left it there. Like a sculpture, the jumble of machines just whirs on in the corner, a reminder of a time when everything we touched was a plaything.

The whine of the monitor; the constant stream of images; the soft ticks of the browser’s sound effect as it reloads the page—they comfort her, she says. She could not sleep otherwise. And when she complains of hearing sounds in the closet, now she knows it is just the constant activity of hard disks. (She hasn’t heard of solid-state drives yet, silent as ghosts, and I am getting her one for Christmas.) She would stay up for long hours in the night, watching the computer screen, as thousands of confessions, most private thoughts and images of strangers from all over the world, stream past. She calls me sometimes, telling mind-spinning stories that she has threaded from the images she sees. The “revelations” she receives.

Click here for part 2.

millionsmillions: In honor of National Poetry Month, the Poetry...

tshiunghan — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 16:58:42 +0800

millionsmillions:

In honor of National Poetry Month, the Poetry Foundation will offer free copies of the April 2013 issue of Poetry. Sign up by March 24th!

[Image via Mediabistro.]

“Rising above the barriers,” a book review by Adibah...

tshiunghan — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 00:55:27 +0800

“Rising above the barriers,” a book review by Adibah Amin of Salleh Ben Joned’s Sajak-Sajak Saleh.

From New Straits Times, August 14, 1987.

“Out of the Stony Rubbish,” part 1 of 3, an essay by...

tshiunghan — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:53:00 +0800

“Out of the Stony Rubbish,” part 1 of 3, an essay by Wong Phui Nam.

From New Straits Times, May 5, 1993.

Notes on culture

ade-le — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 00:35:00 +0800

In addition to fiction and poetry, New Village is dedicated to encouraging the development of cultural criticism in the Malaysian context.

While there are countless articles on the political and economic stakes of the nation (a glance at Malaysiakini and Malaysian Insider suffices to confirm this), what is missing in most such analyses is an awareness of how these stakes are connected with the question of culture.[1]

What is culture? It is a tricky concept, but we can think of it as what binds the collective and individual in the Malaysian context. This derives from the notion of Geist (or Spirit) in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and posits that one can make a link between something called ‘society’ – its norms, fantasies, and so on – and the individual subject’s understanding of its place in this. In thinking about the political and economic dimensions of Malaysian life, one must not isolate them as “policy questions”, and neglect their link with a larger discourse on the Malaysian collectivity, with historical and narratorial significance.

To refuse this arbitrary division of culture from its material bases (and vice versa) is to affirm the existence of cultural politics, and to suggest that politics always manifests a cultural component. Culture, rather than existing simply in a void, reflects the current anxieties and neuroses of society, and is always shot through with shards of the collective question.

As an example, the significance of Mahathir’s reign – let us call it Mahathirism – has not been fully elucidated until we account for the way it has shaped Malaysian existence (or Malaysian ‘being’), through its emphasis on professionalization, privatization, and so on. To examine Mahathirism is to examine further the phenomenon of neoliberal technocracy in the Malaysian context, and to situate it in the discourse of modernity/modernization, with its accompanying problematic (see for instance Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment). The question of Mahathir’s politics needs to be re-visioned in its cultural context, and described in terms of what they imply about the historical development of the Malaysian subject. Mahathirism cannot be simply thought of as a set of policies that has no significance outside of the political and economic realm; rather, it has very real effects on the structure of the Malaysian self, and its fundamental being. It is an existential, as well as political and economic phenomenon.

Cultural criticism thus serves to diagnose the state of culture of this collectivity, and intervenes by showing its hidden understanding of the world. It attempts to read culture in politics, and read politics in culture. It unearths the existential core of what is articulated in representations and depictions of Malaysian life, and connects them to the historical circumstances that have created them. Criticism emphasizes the historical and material development of culture, and attempts to describe what has made us into what we are today.

[1] Recent articles that are exceptions to this include Alicia Izharuddin’s take on Islam in Malaysia, and Alwyn Lau’s piece on Malaysian politics:

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/malaysias-commodified-islam-alicia-izharuddin

http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/sideviews/article/revolutionising-malaysias-vending-machine-politics-alwyn-lau

“Haunting the Tiger,” a short story by K. S....

tshiunghan — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 18:42:00 +0800

“Haunting the Tiger,” a short story by K. S. Maniam.

With biographical note and judges’ commentary (the story won first prize for the NST-Shell Short Story Competition).

From New Straits Times, June 9, 1990.

“Self-conscious Vietnamese in America” Book review,...

tshiunghan — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:59:00 +0800

“Self-conscious Vietnamese in America”

Book review, by K. L. Bird, of Robert Olen Butler’s A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain.

From New Straits Times, Dec 29, 1993.

“A not so singular collection” Book review, by Wong...

tshiunghan — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:44:00 +0800

“A not so singular collection”

Book review, by Wong Phui Nam, of Singular Stories, edited by Robert Yeo.

From New Straits Times, Dec 29, 1993.

“Much ado about drama” Salleh Ben Joned’s...

tshiunghan — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:37:00 +0800

“Much ado about drama”

Salleh Ben Joned’s column about novelist Shahnon Ahmad’s attitude towards drama.

From New Straits Times, Dec 19, 1993.

“Sacrilege in the name of freedom” The article in...

tshiunghan — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:25:00 +0800

“Sacrilege in the name of freedom”

The article in mention, “Speaking up for a writer’s right,” is collected in his selected writings.

From New Straits Times, Dec 29, 1993.

“Self, Society and the Malaysian writer using...

tshiunghan — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 01:14:00 +0800

“Self, Society and the Malaysian writer using English” by K. S. Maniam

From New Straits Times, January 12, 1986.

Abridged notes on K. S. Maniam's "The New Diaspora"

tshiunghan — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:45:00 +0800

This post is a distillation of a previous post about the same topic.

Who is K. S. Maniam? K. S. Maniam (short for Subramaniam Krishnan) is a novelist and playwright. His novel, The Return, has been a school text since the late 1990s. His play, The Sandpit: Womensis, was staged in Penang last May.

What is the publishing history of the essay? ”The New Diaspora” was prepared as a keynote address for a conference in 1996, called the Internationalising Communities Conference, hosted by the University of Southern Queensland. It was published in the book, Globalisation and Regional Communities: Geoeconomic, Sociocultural and Security Implications for Australia, the following year.

The essay is available online on the University of Calgary website, where he was a guest lecturer in the international literature course during the 1998 Spring semester. To my knowledge, it has never been published in Malaysia.

An unpublished preamble to the essay, In Search of a Centre, has been made available on the University of Calgary website.

Why should I read this essay? K. S. Maniam’s use of English was widely discussed in Malaysian academic circles in the 1990s and early 2000s. If we are interested in the construction of Malaysian identity, we must take him seriously.

What is the “new diaspora”? The new diaspora is a minority that identifies with each other based on ideas, rather than ethnicity. What sets them apart from members of the same ethnicity, Maniam explains in a 2012 interview, is a Western education.

In the interview, Maniam says that he was specifically referring to Malaysian Indians,

Who can appreciate both Indian and Western sense of values, but whose imaginative, intellectual and emotional space is reduced because a dominant culture wants to become more than dominant,

and respond to this reduction of space by becoming

a kind of international community who shares common tastes and emotions. You are not Chinese or Indian or Malaysian – you are just this diasporic person. You share a common humanity because you are not allowed to be yourself in your own country.

What is the essay about? In the essay, he says the essay is about “exploring the problems of internationalising community literatures, using the multicultural situation in Malaysia as a sort of model.”

What are community literatures? I take him to mean ethnic literature: Malay literature, Chinese literature, Indian literature. But his discussion includes “a work originally written in English by a Malaysian,” which does not fall comfortably into these categories.

Why does he use the term community literatures? Perhaps it has something to do with the name of the conference where this piece was delivered, the Internationalising Communities Conference. Although he was talking about Malaysian Indians, maybe he had to internationalise the paper to make it topical.

What does he mean by “the problems of internationalising community literatures”? He’s talking about bringing community literatures to an international audience, which inevitably means translating the work into English. The problems lie in the cultural values transmitted by these literatures: what kind of message are we sending? His examination of these problems takes the following shape.

The Role of Histories
The Contextualising Philosophy
The Foundations of a New Diaspora

In “The Role of Histories,” he argues that ethnic communities do not share some parts of their history and understanding these histories allows us to be more sensitive to them.

In “Contextualising Philosophy,” he outlines two approaches to cultural integration. The way of the tiger is full and total assimilation of minority communities by the majority. The way of the chameleon is a blending in of the minority communities with the social, political and cultural landscapes of the country.

In “The Foundations of a New Diaspora,” he talks about the emerging minority that can address the problem of internationalizing community literatures. Maniam says, “The writing intended to reveal the true nature of any society must… come from this diaspora.”

The New Year’s End

tshiunghan — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 16:50:00 +0800

by Catalina Rembuyan

On Saturday morning, when Minerva had been planning to wake at eight but woke at nine instead, she turned to her alarm clock and realized that it had stopped around midnight. She got up, washed her face and brushed her teeth, prepared breakfast and threw her laundry into the washing machine. After that she checked the time by switching on her computer. It was ten. If she hurried she would be able to get to the mall before the cars rushed in and the parking lot became full. She decided to take her time. She read a few chapters from a book. She browsed Youtube and Facebook. After this she checked the time again, and this time it was noon. It was too late for her to go the shopping mall. There would be too many people, too many vehicles, all of them jostling for the sparse number of vacant parking lots. She waited until it was evening before she decided to go shopping for a new alarm clock.

On the way to the shopping mall Minerva began to think about the books that she had been reading. She had read several acts of Death of a Salesman and several more of The Crucible. Reading Arthur Miller was an activity that emerged as a consequence of her recent interest in Marilyn Monroe. How stunning Marilyn Monroe always looked like in those old movies: her eyes were full of spark and life. It was so strange and so sad that someone so beautiful could suddenly die. Arthur Miller was all about people dying. Just like in Death of a Salesman, with that guy—the father, what’s his name—Willy, Billy. It was very unfortunate and so pointless, what he had done in the end. But she understood. She preferred Death of a Salesman over The Crucible. Not many will ever find the world stacked against them in symbolic forms of oppressive American government policies, set to trial by judges working within a theocratic state who accused them of witchcraft, but most have to or will end up spending their whole lives paying for houses.

Yesterday night, her friends celebrated the end of the year by answering a questionnaire that had been going around as a meme. What were the questions again—what did you do last year? What did you wish you had done? What did you wish you had done different? What have you never done before? What would you do again? Some had visited another country, someone had experienced giving birth to a child, someone else had got a new job. Someone had children, some others knew someone who died, another person had paid off his credit cards, and two others made clearing them off a resolution for the following year. Inspired, Minerva had sat down and started to write her own overview and realized that she could sum up her life lived in the past year in a single sentence: there was not a day when she went to work without a sense of dread.

Why? Why the dread? She had been, as a child, intelligent. She had presided over clubs, chaired organizations, and won competitions. Her academic folder was rich with certificates: for championships, for public exams done well, for impressive violin performances. This present state that she was living in was an unprecedented future for the person that she was then. She was made for great things. She recollected the pride and the certainty she had when she left college: the photos taken with her college mates showed young women with big smiles and faces full of joy, each of them happy that they were going to be humans that mattered, stepping forth. Then she remembered Mr. Goh’s face, how his sneering eyes would peer through his dark-rimmed glasses as they glazed over her work while she sat hunched before him, as she tried to hide herself behind the computer monitor.

Mr. Goh, Noreen, and Kamal—these were the names to the faces who judged her, occasionally acknowledged her, but largely looked upon her as a utility. She felt like a plastic spoon: made of material that would outlast generations and shaped into an object designed to be disposable. Mr. Goh with his crater-covered moon-face, dark rimmed glasses, Noreen with blue blazer slung over her kebaya and her red tudung (or was it yellow? blue? green? brownish perhaps?) and Kamal, who seemed to come to work wearing the same shirt every day, who was rather short or perhaps rather tall (Minerva could not quite remember) and who spoke with an annoying, yes-yes-I-understand tone that was supposed to be gentle but only sounded grating. All of them saw her as a number and a tool and not a human being. But she could not leave her work because she needed the money. She had a student loan to pay and the many hours that she spent in her office among people she disliked was simply a way of earning the loan’s erasure. She was choked with dread, desperation, and debt and she could admit none of this. None of this was permissible in adults. It was permissible for adolescents to whine about the aimlessness of life; as an adult she must get up and get along. She was effective and efficient. She was getting everything done.

Where were the alarm clocks? (She had parked her car. She had acquired a ticket. She had checked her vehicle to make sure that she had no belongings in it, and then locked it. She was getting things done.) The shopping malls were full of people. It was the end of the year, the next day was the New Year and the mall was full of people and many of them were clumped into families. Old and young, men and women, girl and boy, dark-skinned and fair-skinned, tall and short. Groups of four or five or three milled and mulled about. So many people! But she just wanted an alarm clock. It was the end of the year, and because New Year’s Day fell on a Sunday she would have Monday off. So of course the shopping malls would be full of people, of all different skin types and colours and heights and weights, their voices uttering many languages all disappearing into a kind of incoherent and steady hum. But on Tuesday she would have to return to work again and she did not want to be late. There were many people who brought their children along and there were so many children walking around her that she had to watch her feet. She had decided to go shopping in the evening thinking that there would be fewer people around, but now the mall was going to close and no one seemed to be leaving. A long row of people were still lining up at the cashiers and beyond them she could see a slightly longer row of people lining up to purchase three-layered coffee with gelatinous bubbles (it was the latest trend, the newest sweet addiction). She still could not find her clock.

Still, the lights were very bright, and she liked this; she felt that if she could stop time she would pick this moment, and she would be forever shopping here, with all these people. Such merriment, so pleasant to imagine that life could always be this way: a few things desired and a few things to tempt you, and all of them always within reach. And plenty of money to get a few things one wanted. It was a moment as beautiful as a photograph for a fashion advertisement in a magazine.

She remembered Mr. Goh’s face: big and moon-faced, lips pursed in judgment. She remembered Noreen’s cackles, each of them like arrows that were thrown at her from directions as random as her unfunny jokes. And Kamal, kind Kamal, who listened to people and smiled and understood nothing.

In her youth she was not frightened of these things. Minerva would jump on a train with a one-way ticket and hop from one track to another, ride on buses that went anywhere, and walk to places she had never been to. The city, with all its dangerous corners and alleys full of unspeakable things, was a temple of sensations, a sanctuary of stimulation and delight. In daylight, when dust and smog covered the city, Minerva would join the throng of people pouring into its heart in the trains and the roads that functioned like vessels, like rivers; at night the roads were full of light, lit bright by headlights, as if they were currents slowly bearing lights down a stream. In the daylight and on the trains and buses there would be the crushing crowd from the mornings and evenings, full of people dressed in dress suits and staring into space. There were those in t-shirts, in jeans, in sandals and with backpacks slung across their shoulders. Buses boasted distractions in the form of flat-screen television that looped the same advertisements over and over. There was so much smog. There was so much colour. Signboards and advertisements in yellow, green, purple blared for attention. Minerva had darted in and out of the city in taxis and buses and trains, breathing, taking in every possible sensation. The city was a page of a love letter unfolding, full of surprise and endearments; the city was a feisty lover, seemingly unlikeable and harsh yet always the source of wonder and desire. It could also be a dangerous place. It was a city of old buildings and young rebels, of thieves and scoundrels, of the wealthy and the poor, and this whole city was surrounded by a donut of suburban neighbourhoods, sedate and dull.

Back then Minerva had been brave. She had thought that the worst possible thing to happen was death. What was death if not the ceasing of thought and sensation? The muscles stopped, the eyes darken from failing to register sunlight, sounds cease, and darkness falls. Nerve, brain, heart and body terminate operations. She learned later that life did not let one go after one’s passing. It clung on, sticking to the person in the form of numbers and countable things. It cost this much for a birth, with options for varying methods of delivery; that much for an education, a life; this much for the saving of your life from illness; that much for a wedding, and this much for death. Oh, but who would pay for the last? Not her, because she would not be around, but it would be done still, and all done in her name. So, thought Minerva, even after you have gone the numbers cling and become the cause of mouths to curse you.

The alarm clock that Minerva settled for was a small, red square object that gave a shrill beep. As the shutters of the shopping outlet were drawn and a voice instructing customers to make their last purchase played on the PA system, Minerva made her payment and left. Then she went to the parking lot. There she noticed that another line had developed: cars were now lining up to get out of the building, slowly making their way out of the only exit from the floor.

She could back her car up, get out of her lot, and join the jam as each car inched its way past the ticket reading machine. She could wait. She decided to wait. She switched on the radio and stared into space. Across her was an office block, all its windows were dark except for a few floors. These were kept bright.

Minerva sat in her car and watched the fluorescent lights in the office block across from the shopping complex parking lot. Across her and in the office block, straight within her line of view, was an entire floor lit up by fluorescent lights, with no one on it except for a solitary office cleaner who walked up and down the cubicle aisles. During the day, under the bright sunlight, this was a place where men and women went to war by sitting in their chairs and staring at computer screens. Hearts would pump as fingers typed and numbers rose and fell. People became fat in their seats. But at night the empty office floor, lit up with all its lights, was as silent as an artifact. Like a scene from after the apocalypse or a Hollywood movie, this place where people poured the time of their lives into—typing, cursing, having office lunches and throwing wads of paper into wastepaper baskets—looked serene and beautiful.

She leaned back in her seat and looked at the traffic jam behind her in her rear-view mirror while popular music played on the radio. It is ignorance to claim that popular music of the day is naive, apathetic, hedonistic, and empty. She knew this; in the many hours she had spent commuting she had become an unwitting and captive student of popular culture and her car was her classroom. The sense of fatalism in popular music was thick. It coated songs the way rot coated the paintings of overripe fruit in old paintings with hidden skulls.

Behind her were rows and rows of cars, all of them trying to get out of the parking lot at the same time, all of them inching and pushing their way towards the exit where the automatic gate slowly let the cars out from the building, one by one by one. In her car, listening to songs about partying until the end of the world, Minerva waited for the time to pass.

This short story first appeared in New Village 1