From Escapism to Exploration I grew up in a small town in southern Malaysia. In the early days, the so-called town centre was a barely tarred street, flanked by about twenty wooden shop houses on either side. The Malays from nearby villages and the Indians from the rubber plantations came for rice and flour and sugar, and textiles for their sarong, sari and mundu. The shop owners were mostly first- or second-generation Chinese from southern China. They worked hard, and urged their children to work hard too, hoarding money, hoping to return home one day. My grandfather was one of them, though he did not own a shop; he had a butcher stall in front of our house in a side alley. When did he realise going home became an impossible dream? Was it when the number of mouths to be fed kept increasing? Or was it because there was never money left to hoard up, to bring home? The answer was never specified but self-explanatory nonetheless. The butcher stall that mainly sold wild boar meat never generated enough income to fill the stomachs of the family. As a child, when Grandpa could still manage the business single-handedly, Father went selling kuih (pastries and cakes) baked by Grandma door-to-door after school. During his fifth-year, Father began to walk the streets all day with his basket of kuih – he never went back to school. Like many children of my father’s time, when survival was the main concern, education was pushed into a corner. My mother sometimes spoke with a sour tone of how lucky Father was, that he had five years schooling while she only managed three. She would grumble about her brother for leaving her walking alone for five miles to school while he cycled past, mocking her. This did not deter her from attending class but the Japanese, who were famous for their cruelty against women, did. When Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers marched into the remote village where she lived with her family, Mother went into hiding in the plantations, and her school days ended. In those years, a shopkeeper’s children were expected to be shopkeepers, a rubber tapper’s rubber tappers; so too for the children of a butcher (Father later worked at the stall alongside Grandpa), a job, or maybe two – Mother took up tailoring work from a garment shop – were waiting. What could books do? The characters ‘√◊’ (rice), ‘√Ê’ (noodle), ‘»‚’ (meat) would not leap off the pages and transform themselves into their physical forms – so they thought. I didn’t. Perhaps it was the constant busyness at home, perhaps it was the endless shouting and cursing of the adults driven by their busyness, I began to find refuge in books. In the house of a playmate whose parents were both teachers, I was amazed by the rare collection of illustrated books: The Happy Prince, The Little Match Girl, Crime and Punishment, The Merchant From Venice, and many others. I wept when the little girl scratches the last of her matches, when the Happy Prince gives out the last of his jewellery. The sketches of the streets, the buildings, the artefacts, the costumes – strange yet pleasant to look at – aroused my imagination. I withdrew into the fantasy world whenever I was excused from helping Mother with sewing. People and their noises became more unbearable. There were thirteen of us sharing a life under the aluminium roof: six siblings – two brothers and four sisters, my parents and grandparents, an elderly couple who rented the front chamber of the five-room wooden house. In the small town in the old days, doors were always wide open and there were always streams of people who called by any time they wished, neighbours or relatives, known or unknown. Some would sit down for a cup of my mother’s favourite sweet coffee or Chinese tea, equally cold and weak, and chat for half a day; some simply entered the front door and walked straight past the long hallway, the many curtained rooms, and exited the back gate – their shortcut to their homes or the marketplace. Others came for Grandpa, who, besides the butcher business, was also a Taoist medium. The old man would gladly display a show of communicating with god or ghost, would make a cup of ‘burnt amulet’ drink, the perfect antidote for all sickness – so it was said. I hated it. I began to create my own stories. At night, when all activities ceased, silence wrapped over me like a soothing blanket, and I would invent the perfect world I longed to inhabit. Sometimes, though, I fictionalised the events I witnessed during the day: the young Indian man who collapsed from alcoholism: eyes bulging and bleary, stomach protruding on skeleton-body; the Thai woman who walked around half-naked, and ‘prostitute’, the new word I learned associated with her; the illegal gambling den behind my house: the cursing, the arguments among the gamblers, the fights. As though after writing them down, they would disappear: the noise, the pain, the hatred, the ugly side of human beings. Did they really disappear? Momentarily, perhaps. As a child, writing helped me to escape from the real world; ironically, as I grew up, the reality I witnessed and felt became submerged, and writing became my tool to explore and expose the many true faces of life, the human sufferings, social injustice, and the reasons behind all these. Why, for instance, did my great grandparents and their generation, and the many other colonised people around the world, leave their homeland for the so-called ‘better life’? Why are people fighting against each other, nation fighting against nation? What has made the world as it is? We need to be informed in order to understand and act accordingly, to feel for the victims and the voiceless, to promote humanity among mankind. That’s all I wish for through my writing.