May 2014 Archives

Faces from Kampung Hakka Mantin

A few weeks ago I visited Kg Hakka Mantin, a century-old village on the way between Seremban and Kajang.

It was a picnic by the river, organized by the villagers and Rakan Mantin. Since last year, they’ve been holding events like this that allow people to experience the culture and history of Kg Hakka up close.

The future of the village is precarious. Villagers are up against Mega 9 Sdn Bhd, a private developer claiming to have bought the land from the Negeri Sembilan state government. Like Kg Berembang and Kg Buah Pala before it, Kg Hakka is the latest in the recurring tale of forced displacement happening across Malaysia. This one is still on-going; there may yet be a chance to determine how it ends, or rather, how it continues.

The day unfolded in bright sunshine. We moved from house to house, making our way down to the river and the shrine where we had lunch. Throughout, villagers told stories about their lives and the land they’ve lived on for generations.

I didn’t catch the name of this auntie, but I know she’s 74 and doesn’t look it. We were gathered at the Kg Hakka Interpretive Centre – about 20 of us, an equal number of villagers and visitors.

She spoke first, in Hakka and Mandarin, which was translated into English by the few who could understand all three. She remembered growing up alongside the nearby tin mine, and being absolutely forbidden to go there.

The Interpretive Centre is well named. Oral history isn’t neat and linear, the way it’s laid out in textbooks. The gaps get filled by others and by the imagination. It’s history as a collaborative and continuous process.

In my utopia, all Information Centers are replaced with Interpretive ones.

This is Jun Kit’s grandmother – Madam Yap, 85 years old. Her house is actually in the Cantonese village adjacent to Kg Hakka. The two communities have always been close.

Once upon a time, she transported coal on bicycle, tapped rubber, raised pigs, brewed soy sauce, and had 6 children. Eventually, she moved with them to the city.

After the picnic, Jun Kit and I accompanied her as she went around calling on old friends – a merry and moving experience. The ties of friendship and community forged in this place have lasted longer than I’ve been alive.

Chong Tze Yaw, Kg Hakka residents committee chairman. The Interpretive Center is set up in a house belonging to the Chong family, which has been in Kg Hakka for 6 generations.

‘It’s not about money or compensation, but tradition and history. We’ve got hundred year-old temples and houses, a 90 year-old school. There’s so much here, we don’t want to let it go. Thank you for coming today to support us’.

Grandpa Chong. He was in Standard 2 when the Japanese invaded Malaya. As a young man, he began work laying pipes at the dredge mine. He got into an accident 2 weeks into the job and never went there again.

The route on the way to the river was strewn with trash. Old furniture, mattresses, broken glass, an altar – all manner of flotsam and debris lay there rotting in the undergrowth.

Whatever the differences between urban and rural life, rubbish is one thing we have in common.

Sungai Setul. 100 million years ago, it and other rivers brought tin rich alluvial soil down from the surrounding Galla and Setul hills into the Mantin valley. These hills lie at the foot of the Titiwangsa mountains on the southernmost west side.

The history of Kg Hakka is also the history of tin mining, itself foundational to the history of Malaya. It dates back to the 1800s, when Chinese immigrants came to mine the highly priced tin ore that flooded the western foothills of the peninsula. Tussles between Chinese towkays and Malay sultans for this treasure gave the British an excuse to intervene and secure their colonial foothold.

Years ago, I memorized a mass of disparate geographic, historical and economic facts to pass school exams. I felt them finally start to arrange themselves into a coherent picture in my mind…

Lunch was at a shrine next to the river. Samy is the caretaker. He sleeps there, and wakes up at 4am everyday to clean the place. People come from all over Mantin to pray, give offerings, and ask for lottery numbers.

Many villagers contributed something for lunch – yam cake, steamed chickpeas, fresh nangka. This Auntie cooked meehoon and chicken curry. It was so good. She was wearing bright pink shirt with flowers all over it.

This auntie was so full of character I had to draw her. She declared that she was going to cook two of her own chickens for the next event!

I brought jelly dyed with bluepea flowers for the picnic. The aunties were curious about the deep blue colour, and we chatted about natural food dye as far as my broken Mandarin would allow.

When I arrived at Kg Hakka, I passed someone lying on the floor, pressed up against the front of an empty house. At first I thought it was a dead body, but then saw it heave gently, breathing. I walked on.

I passed him again on my way back. Now he was standing up, his left hand grabbing his crotch as he stared ahead with empty eyes. Around him was a strange display – rows of used plastic lighters arranged on piles of gathered dirt. The image haunts my mind. I wish would have have stopped and said hello, but I was chicken shit.

What’s a Chinese village without dogs? They’re suspicious of strangers, but confidence is the key. By the end of the day, I’d learned to stride pass them like I belonged there.

The best thing you can do for Kg Hakka Mantin is to take part in their activities, and yay for this, because they are fun and will make you happy.

Join the Rakan Mantin FB group for updates.

The next event will be ‘Grandpa’s Era’ Bicycle Carnival on Sunday, 8 June 2014, 10am – 2pm.

A Portrait of Vivian Lee

In July last year, I drew a portrait of Alvivi.

Alvivi are Vivian Lee and Alvin Tan. I follow them online. It’s like following a meteor as it trolls brightly through the Internet, trailing controversy and naked pictures in its wake.

This time though, the stakes were different. It was Ramadan, the holy month. Alvivi uploaded a photo of themselves eating pork soup, wishing Muslims ‘happy breaking fast’, and included a HALAL logo in the corner.

The public outcry was intense. They were arrested, denied bail, sent to prison for 8 nights and charged with the Film Censorship Act, the Sedition Act and Section 298A of the Penal Code.

As is usual with controversies, especially ones online, and especially in Malaysia, you’re either for or against. I drew Alvivi’s portrait as an escape route, an attempt to look at them (and our reactions to them), differently. I wasn’t very successful. There is a limit to the insight you can gain when you only know your subjects through the Internet.

People interacting with “Vivian Lee, Social Portrait” at the exhibition opening.

That portrait eventually led to me meeting Vivian in person. She saw it and friended me on Facebook. Months later, I sent her a message asking: ‘Can we hang out? I want to make art about you.’

I’m not sure if she found it flattering, or creepy. Possibly both. Anyway, she said yes.

Meeting Vivian for the first time was surreal. My brain kept recalibrating the online image I had in my head with the reality of the human being, both simpler and more complex, in front of me. I’ll be honest – I was inclined to be sympathetic from the outset, and had trouble keeping my projections in check.

My affinity for Vivian comes not just from being a woman, but one whose life, work and self-image are closely tied to the Internet. I met my first boyfriend in an IRC chatroom (back in the earlier days of the Internet) when I was 16. Almost 2 decades later, the Internet is allowing me to build an independent art career by connecting me directly to my audience. At the same time, my Facebook feed shows me ads for weight loss and vaginal tightening creams because its algorithms predict that’s what I’m mostly likely to buy.

Vivian is 10 years younger than I am. She was about 11 or 12 when she first encountered the Internet. She started chatting over MSN Messenger, and moved on to the proto social network site Friendster. When she joined Facebook, she was extremely self-conscious and cautious about posting there because her family and friends shared the same network. Her mother, a conservative single parent, would nag her based on her status updates.

Photo by Nadia J Mahfix

Tumblr was different. The blogging and social media platform has relatively low usage amongst Malaysians. It was there that she and Alvin started their (now defunct) sex blog Sumptuous Erotica in 2012, which was followed by international fans and a handful of close friends. She spoke with sadness about no longer having the blog. She had lost a place on the Internet where she felt free to be, as she put it, ‘my true self’.

Vivian maintains she never wanted controversy or fame. She regrets that Alvin shared the link to their sex blog on forums like hardwarezone.sg, which led to it being picked up by Singaporean media. Whether he did so to connect with more like-minded people, or to boost the Alvivi signal online, is open to question. This sheds light on Alvin and Vivian’s relationship and the Alvivi ‘brand’ – while they may have differing approaches to fame and the Internet, they bear the outcomes of each other’s actions together.

Many accuse Alvivi of being low-rent attention seekers. But who’s really mining and exploiting our human attention spans? In today’s economy, ‘eyeball hours’ are the new raw minerals. Stock prices depend on views, likes and shares, while Youtube sensations leverage their millions of subscribers for lucrative partnerships with big brands. An indication of what Vivian does for web traffic: a photo posted to my Facebook page usually gets 200 – 600 views. A photo tagged with Vivian got 2,000. When The Star broke the story of Alvivi in Malaysia, it garnered record page views, and continued to feature them in print and online every day, for a week.

Photo by Masjaliza Hamzah

In the press and their social media channels, Alvin’s voice dominates. Negative comments on their Youtube videos reveal a marked difference in the way people perceive him compared to Vivian. He’s ‘wasting his future’, while she’s ‘stupid for being used by an asshole’. She said that most of the ‘shameful’ and ‘slut’ comments were directed at her. Even though Alvin was derided for embarrassing his family, she was seen as ‘incurring the most loss’ because no one would want her as a wife. It seems that women can’t even be harlots on their own terms; they’re bad not because they’re bad, but because they’re unmarriageable.

When I asked Vivian what she had learned about race and religion in Malaysia since the Ramadan pork soup controversy, she could not answer. I’m not sure if it was because she didn’t understand my question, or because there was nothing she had learnt. I rephrased: ‘what do you think about race and religion in general?’ She expressed frankly that she likes the fact that she’s Chinese, and that there must be reasons why people don’t like different races, for example: because Chinese are greedy, Malays are lazy and Indians are violent.

She felt that people should be less sensitive about race and religion, and wondered ‘why make such a big deal out of it?’ On the one hand, she seemed to buy into racial stereotypes. On the other, she felt that race and religion were forms of social control, and saw no difference between being offended by racial or religious self-expression and being offended by sexual self-expression.

Hello can you hear me? Photo by Maryann Tan

This is where my values differ from Vivian’s. Freedom of expression is a poor defense for holding and expressing racist views. Maintaining the right to individual self-expression, while expressing a group racial identity (e.g. Chinese eating pork soup) to address another group racial identity (e.g. Muslims fasting during the holy month), is hypocritical.

Vivian said if she had known that the consequences of posting the Ramadan picture were jail and criminal charges, she would not have done it. Not because it was hurtful or offensive, but because it was ‘not practical’. This is important. It tells us that criminalizing offense does nothing to impart understanding. It only enforces obedience based on fear. As long as we turn to repressive laws to manage our cultural differences, we will continue to live in fear.

Vivian’s racism does not diminish my affinity for her in other respects. Looking at her honestly enough to make a portrait that has a kernel of truth and meaning trains me to look at Malaysia the same way. The picture that emerges is complex: brave, ugly and challenging all at once. She is neither good nor bad, she is simply herself. Looking deeply into the individual, we may find a way to understand the whole.

We are all Vivian. Photo by Maryann Tan

Many thanks to Zedeck Siew, Danny Lim, Maryann Tan and Sunitha Janamohanan for editorial help on this essay.

The Good Malaysian Woman: Ethnicity. Religion. Politics is showing at Black Box, MAP Publika, from 18 – 25 May 2014.

Portrait of En. Raman

Mr. Raman is our gardener.

He comes round every month, sometimes more often, sometimes less. He cuts the grass, sweeps the leaves and clears the drains.

He’s built like a tree, solid and barrel chested. Our garden is a two-day job for him. He’s getting older now. He’s had several eye operations and wears big sunglasses when he works.

Once he tried to introduce me to another lady in the neighborhood who also employs him to keep her garden tidy. I think he thought I was lonely, since he only ever sees me sitting at my table hunched up over a drawing or my computer. Finally, I ran out of excuses and went to visit her. We had tea. She was very nice to me, but I got the strong impression we were both there to oblige our gardener.

The portrait shows him cutting down a bougainvillea tree that used to choke our front fence. It was a massive tangle of thorny branches that grew so high, it blocked out the street light. I remember him standing in the shadow of the bougainvillea, hacking away at its trunk with a small hand axe: Thwuck! Thwck! Twhuck! For some reason, that image is like chewing gum on the bottom shoe of my mind.

He invited us to his 68th birthday party yesterday! I rushed like crazy to finish the portrait in time. I gave him the drawing, but I’m not sure if his eyes can see it clearly. We met his family. Most of his children are in Port Dickson now, so he’s got company. He’s been a widower for many years.

I ate too many poppadoms at the party, which I am wont to do. And I tried not to be envious of his super cute garden, full of pretty plants. I want green thumbs, I get green eyes. WHY.

Happy birthday, Mr. Raman!