Gone to look for my body #2 – In sickness and in health

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My knee in March 2016

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11 Oct 2017: I spent last week sick and denying it. When the fever started on Monday, I thought I would be back in training by Wednesday, and when it was accompanied by a dry hacking cough that kept me up for the next five nights, I was still stubborn enough to book class on Saturday, which, of course, I had to cancel.

My mind went strange places, including convincing myself that wellness was a matter of will. A real fighter wouldn’t let a cold stop their training, in fact, a real fighter wouldn’t have gotten sick at all.

In short, while my body was fighting a virus, I was fighting my body. The fever came and went. I was like an abusive lover, tenderly feeding my body vitamins one moment, berating it for not responding by instantly getting well the next.

It was the same when I injured my knee last year. The same mental tape. When? When will you be back to the way you were? And why? Why are you not healing the way I want you to, in the time that I need you to? Rehab exercises, turmeric, physio sessions, kinetic tape – what else do you want from me?

Hyper-vigilant and agonized, I counted the days of missed training, which turned into weeks, then months.

Today, it’s as if I never tore my meniscus, and besides a lingering cough, the recent cold is all but forgotten. My body has healed, in its own time, in its own way.

I will tell you a story about the mystery that exists between mind and body. Up to March this year – a full 12 months since the tear – I was still taping my right knee before class. My left kick had never been pretty, but it was worse now, because it’s not the kicking leg that matters, but the standing leg, the one that pivots. Tall Coach watches my left kicks on the bag, and how I frown and wince with each one. He asks if my knee hurts. I’ve been asked this before, by other trainers, and always answered no, because I don’t want to seem weak, or like I’m making excuses. This time, I stop and think about it. ‘No,’ I say, ‘There’s no pain, but it feels, I mean I feel… afraid.’ I’m laughing, sheepish. Tall Coach nods, silent for awhile, then tells me: ‘Your knee remembers the trauma.’ On hearing those words, a gap that had existed in me for a year closed, as surely as a key fitting into its lock. I felt the click, not in my knee, but my whole body. I turned back to the bag and executed a series of almost perfect left kicks, more beautifully than I’d been able to do before I got hurt.

It would seem that my knee had mended long ago, but there is so much more to healing than the knitting of flesh and bone.

I’m learning – and it’s hard for me, very hard – that to be sick or injured, isn’t some kind of moral failing. It doesn’t say anything about commitment or ability. It’s simply a thing that happens to bodies: to have a body, is to be ill or incapacitated sometimes. To not be optimal.

Even in the sick time, the body is speaking. The body doesn’t just exist during training, or for training, or for any of the thousand productive things I need it to do. The body’s suffering does not pit it against me. It IS me, in sickness and in health.

There’s a phrase in the Tao Te Ching that I often puzzle over. My understanding of it goes in and out of focus.

I suffer because I’m a body;
if I weren’t a body,
how could I suffer?

In the hardest moments of training, it’s my mind that searches for escape. Anything to occupy it away from the sharp difficulty of the present, be it halfway through a 5km run under the blazing sun, or the last twenty of 200 sit-ups. Usually a song will loop in my head (the chorus to Solange’s Losing You), or a phrase (You must free your ambitious mind, and learn the art of dying. – Bruce Lee). If my mind is elsewhere, maybe this body that’s suffering is not me.

Recently, I’ve been telling my mind not to leave my body to endure the training on its own, to stay with it. What happens in those moments I haven’t found the words to tell. Not well, anyway. It’s a little like opening up more… bandwidth. A rush of information? Of sensation? I am a nut cradled in its shell, existing in inner darkness and in outer light, enduring, being one. I can’t do this for more than a couple of minutes.

If I weren’t a body, how could I suffer?

To train muay thai is to trace new routes, to know what it’s like when my shin hits my partner’s in a drill, or when Young Coach’s foot connects with the side of my head in sparring. It’s also to go over old routes, tracing the deep grooves of where the mind goes in sickness or suffering, as if seeing and knowing them for the first time.

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Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching, An English version by Ursula K. Le Guin, Chapter 13

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Gone to look for my body’ is a line from a song called ‘Weary’ by Solange, on her 2016 masterpiece album A Seat At the Table.

I’ve been wanting to write about training muay thai since last year, but my mind has always come first, and this was something I wanted to just let my body do. Then I realized I was stockpiling notes, feeling the wave of words come, and letting them break into foam, lost. I’ve been gone, standing on the shore, listening to the roar. Now I have its rhythm, and write my way to the return.

Part 1

Am I Chinese? – Notes on Chong Kim Chiew’s Isolation House (2005 – 2017) at A+ Works of Art

Disclosure: the proprietors of A+ Works of Art have previously purchased my work

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Chong Kim Chiew, Isolation House (2005) at Rumah Air Panas

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I’m late. Sentul, like Cheras or Kepong or Shah Alam, makes me anxious – a result of mere unfamiliarity, which I suppose you could say defines the Malaysian condition. Waze sends me to Bangsar on the NPE and onto Sentul Link. I see familiar buildings, but the elevated highway messes with my sense of direction, already useless in the best of times, and renders everything distant.

It’s tempting to fall into the lull of this speed, the lack of friction. From my home to the destination, via algorithmic app, in an Uber or a Grab, personal playlist streaming on Spotify. I float in my car, the road clean and smooth. It’s a soporific effect. I struggle against a sense of inevitability.

I experienced Kim Chiew’s installation as it was originally conceived, twelve years ago, at the artist-run space Rumah Air Panas, which was on a road called Lorong Air Leleh, surrounded by roads with names like Jalan Air Madu, Jalan Air Bersih, Jalan Air Dalam, and Jalan Air Pusing, in place called Air Panas, in Setapak. Today, a highway runs through where Rumah Air Panas used to be.

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I remember the earth under my feet, and the hole it’d been dug out from. The hole, outside the house, was wide and deep enough to bury a human body, and filled with light brown rain water. We entered the locked house by a door near the roof, down a shaky staircase. Inside, down low, the spread earth pressed against the white walls of the house in a dark ring. Here and there were cages, objects inside: a wooden crutch, a flute, a gourd. Eight enclosures and eight tools to stand for the Eight Immortals who crossed the sea in story.

In this new version, in a newly opened gallery housed in a commercial complex built by YTL as part of their multi-billion ringgit Sentul Raya redevelopment plan, there is no soil. The floor is concrete. The cages  – just two of them – are empty.

Many years ago, I lived in a rented house. We had a god that we’d brought with us from my childhood home, on the ground, in a red hut. But we didn’t take care of him – it’d been a hard year. I could barely take care of myself, and two dogs. We didn’t light his oil lamp, forgot to lay out his cheroot and curry and soft pink cakes, and the rain rotted his red wooden plaque inscribed with glittering gold Chinese words I couldn’t read. When it came time to move again, a man well-versed in these matters came, looked at the hut, and told us: there was no more god, he had left.

I thought about this as I looked at the empty cages.

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Chong Kim Chiew, Isolation House (2005 – 2017) at A+ Works of Art, d6 Trade Center, Sentul East

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Another thought rippled up, unbidden – am I Chinese?

The rusty metal plates bearing the names of roughly 40 new villages remain in the new Isolation House. Slowly they oxidize, breathing oxygen, alive: Semenyih, Rasa, Batang Berjuntai, Jinjang, Salak Selatan.

During the Emergency period (1948 – 1960), in an effort to halt the spread of communism amongst the rural population, the British colonial administration resettled 530,000 ‘squatters’ and workers into more than 400 new villages across Malaya. These ‘new villages’ were guarded camps, with strict curfews enforced by police. The large majority (but not all!) were ethnic Chinese.

This history of the new villages – is it mine?

I remember, as a teenager, quite literally, growing up in shopping malls: specifically, 1 Utama, Bangsar Shopping Center, Jaya Shopping Center, Subang Parade, Sunway Pyramid and Midvalley Megamall, where my parents had opened a chain of deli-style restaurants.

But I go further back, to childhood. An old lady, Ah Chun Yi, took care of me, while both parents worked. In the day, after school, I went to her wooden house. Was it in a village? I can’t… remember. I dig for it, but I hit concrete. Her long hair, her soft voice. Her polyester floral shirts. Naps in the hot afternoon, the standing fan and fluttering of green lace curtains. No, that was in my grandmother’s house, where the god came from, the one who left.

Who else besides me remembers the feel of soil on the parquet floor of Rumah Air Panas? The pixelated video documentation of the original Isolation House tells us almost nothing except that this work existed in another form in another time. It’s my memory that gives the new Isolation House its full meaning – without it, the defining feature of this work, which is loss, is lost. Or say rather: locked. Hard to reach, and thus, hard to read. Harder now than it was 12 years ago. And soon it will be harder still.

In his refusal to stage a straight reproduction of an acclaimed past work, his commitment to the reality of this new site, and his fidelity to the truth of where we have come in the last decade, Kim Chiew teaches us that we must – we can – learn to read and face our history even in the smooth, clean and silent concrete.

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This installation is part of the exhibition Kadang Kadang Dekat Dekat Akan Datang: Chong Kim Chiew & FX Harsono, 15 Sept – 7 Oct 2017 at A+ Works of Art

‘Playing with History’ by Beverly Yong, a joint review of Chong Kim Chiew’s Isolation House and my first solo exhibition Boats and Bridges, first published in 2005 on kakiseni.com (now defunct).

Gone to look for my body #1 – Beginnings

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I went to a new gym today. When asked, I say I’ve been ‘doing’ (taking classes in) muay thai since December 2015, and ‘training’ (classes 3 – 5 times a week) since this year. In fact, I picked up kickboxing over ten years ago, when I came back from studying overseas, and again when I was 30, just before moving from the city to Port Dickson. I never took it seriously, but no one else took me seriously either. The closest someone got was a trainer who told me, offhandedly, ‘you could probably get pretty good at this’. He also, possibly in reaction to my stony suffering face during our 7am sessions, regularly asked if I was depressed.

Until recently, I’ve had trainers hit on me in every gym I have ever been in. This is not to say that I’m somehow extraordinary, rather that I suspect this is the overwhelmingly ordinary experience of women in gyms, martial arts ones or otherwise.

Now, at 36, no one hits on me. Or perhaps it’s because I’ve learned to take myself seriously. I’ve had to ask for everything I wanted in muay thai – better trainers, more sparring, the opportunity to fight, or simply to be left alone. Not long ago, someone (it could only have been a man) asked if English was my second language, because ‘you seem… kind of reserved’. No, I replied, my English is perfect, it’s that I want to practice punching this bag instead of talking to you.

Sometimes, especially when my body registers the very real difference in endurance between now and when I was 30, I wish I’d learned to speak my desire – to ask – earlier. But I don’t really regret. Part of aging is knowing certain kinds of learning only come with time, like wingseeds borne spinning down by gravity.

Still, I think a lot about how I look in the gym. Pink and green is a favorite color combination. Today, between the tight camouflage singlet and the loose camouflage t-shirt that I like to wear with my pink satin shorts, I chose the t-shirt.

A new gym means getting to know a new coach, his rhythm, his persona – who, really, he is. Martial art is full expression of the self with nowhere to hide, for both teacher and student. The first word ajarn J. said to me, as I took off my shoes at the door of his gym, was ‘welcome’.

I haven’t studied enough muay thai to be able to discern good teaching. I’m at the unicellular sponge phase, absorbing everything in the ever deepening water. But I know how I feel. Padwork with ajarn J. was like dancing with a great partner. I felt the joy bouncing off me, coming out in explosive little laughs, even as I gasped for breath. In three 3 minute rounds I learned an astonishing amount, which I will note here, in an effort to retain as much as I can in the sieve of my body and brain:

No skipping in the left kick, or left knee. An easy, sure step with the right leg is all it takes. Note the difference in balance and power.

My knees could be angled more, and higher. And then turned into a block, where I press my shin against my opponent’s upper thighs, while grabbing their neck with my opposing arm.

Also, 3 different counters for the jab or punch – a teep to the lower lead leg for the jab, right teep for the punch. Sweep the jab with the right hand while sweeping the lead leg with your lead leg to throw the opponent forward. Sweep inside the punch and hook the back leg with the lead leg…? Damn, I can’t remember the sweeps.

I’ve never been able to do spinning back elbows with any kind of conviction. I mean, I know the move, but today I learned this: to apply the technique… you have to keep your eyes open. I was closing them at the moment of impact. This is what progress, and a good teacher, means in muay thai – realizing the split second of what the body is doing.

He kept distracting me, little flicks of his hand, pointing to the door, to the ceiling. I fell for it every single time. After the experience of keeping my eyes open during the spinning back elbows, something snapped into focus. I locked onto ajarn J.’s eyes, and entered a pocket of calm­ for maybe 20 seconds. In that pocket, no fear, no real effort or striving for the right technique. Just a pure focus in the moment and the other person facing me. It was… something I have been trying to achieve. I knew it intellectually – I experience flow regularly in art making – but my body had not known it in muay thai until then. The body does not go into the pocket because the mind wills it. No, that’s the difficulty – it’s a letting go, not a striving.

How do I extend these 20 seconds? This is the meaning of practice. Months, perhaps a year, for 20 seconds. Meanwhile: failure, defeat… and joy.

~

‘Gone to look for my body’ is a line from a song called ‘Weary’ by Solange, on her 2016 masterpiece album A Seat At the Table.

I’ve been wanting to write about training muay thai since last year, but my mind has always come first, and this was something I wanted to just let my body do. Then I realized I was stockpiling notes, feeling the wave of words come, and letting them break into foam, lost. I’ve been gone, standing on the shore, listening to the roar. Now I have its rhythm, and write my way to the return.