Findings, vol. 6
Postcards from a waterfall + letters new and old + readings and screenings + joy, wherever it's found.
Since I last wrote: a day out at a waterfall in Pahang, Malaysia, for a friend’s birthday. Off the main road, past a couple of construction sites and retreat stays, a clearing where you pay the landlord a fee to park your car. Then a short hike through the jungle and a climb down a slope with thick tree roots for rungs to get to a pool of ice-cold water fed by a lusty gush down a rocky slope. It looks placid, this not-untouched wilderness, but on quick googling pre-trip I read that people have died here: from unexpectedly strong undercurrents, fallen trees.
As you can see from these idyllic photos, our time passed without incident. We swam, sunbathed, lunched, took too many pictures (I haven’t used a camera that isn’t my phone in a while). Our group had the whole place to ourselves until a couple arrived, any planned romantic plans they had scuttled. Our canine companion for the day added a comedic touch when she relieved herself right next to where they were reclining together on a picnic blanket.
New letter
As the world continues too heat up, I’ve been trying to find personal ways into understanding the climate crisis—to better appreciate that it’s not something that is just happening to the world at large, but something that is happening all around us, to us, and how every aspect of our human lives contributes to it. This has meant, for me, finding out more about how our natural and built environments work and how we interact with them; and what I’ve found particularly interesting is how pathogens (and zoonotic pathogens in particular) spread. I plug my newsletter as one that seeks out stories to make sense of our place in the world; I’ve realised, too, that this encompasses making sense of, and reimagining, our place in nature.
I’ve been meaning to write a letter riffing off this story I wrote for South China Morning Post’s print magazine last year—about the increased risk of emerging zoonoses, through the historical lens of the deadly Nipah virus that broke out in a pig-farming village in Malaysia in the 1990s, owing to our intensification of animal agriculture. I found out so many things I didn’t know in the writing of the story, which has helped me better appreciate how human, animal, and planetary health are intimately intertwined—and the multitude of connections I keep discovering has recalibrated the lens through which I see a lot of things. With new developments on the H5N1 virus, I finally got down to finishing this letter, which has been languishing half-done in drafts for a long time. Apparently, timeliness does give me the push I need 😅
From the archive
Last year, I wrote an essay for The Mekong Review about rivers, connecting the dots between the bodies of water I’ve come to throughout my life.
An excerpt:
When I was a child, the river was a place of mystery and wonder—I saw my first fireflies there—and sometimes, of adventure laced with danger. I spent much of my childhood in Kota Tinggi, a town in the southern Malaysian state of Johor, where my maternal grandparents lived. A river traverses through it, and floods are not an uncommon occurrence despite its name, which literally translates to ‘high town’. One year, amid a deluge, my grandmother was marooned on the third floor of the building where she lived and had to wait for the fire department to rescue her. I know this from the newspaper cutting she kept, which featured a photograph of her perched on the shoulders of her bandana-wearing saviour.
More recently, when it flooded again, the state’s wildlife department warned residents to be on guard for crocodiles. They might have strayed out of the rivers—perhaps to seek out the carcasses of drowned animals—and into monsoon drains, which, even in the absence of floods, could turn into little rivers of their own in stormy weather. I remember once, when I was a child—still small enough to clamber down into these drains to catch tadpoles with my bare hands—and it was pouring, my mother asked me to wait by a corner shop while she went to get the car. When she came back, she couldn’t find me and panicked, imagining that I had fallen into the drain and been carried away by the gushing water. Later, she found me at the other end of the shoplot, clasping the hand of an elderly uncle who had taken it upon himself to watch over me until she returned.
Readings, screenings, etc.
1/ I am trying to make rituals of things, such as reading out on the porch in the mornings with coffee—or chilled coconut water as the days have grown warmer!—while spending time with the dogs. Here’s Ducky, waiting for ruffles and pats as I finish Rachel Heng’s second novel, The Great Reclamation, which I went through very quickly. I had read her debut novel, Suicide Club, but this one resonated much more with me. It’s a really well-crafted portrait of a fishing village changed forever by the determined march of development—land reclamation and the construction of HDB flats—in a newly independent nation just coming into its own, with a lot to prove. (It’s an ongoing struggle in other places: fishermen in Penang, Malaysia, still protesting the building of new artificial islands, for one.) The novel is charted along a historical timeline I’m familiar with, having researched the history of Malaya for a series of TV documentaries some years ago. Heng skillfully weaves in the history of Lee Kuan Yew’s bid for power and for Singapore’s self-determination from the British, which, in a post-WWII world dogged by international pressure to decolonise and tensions of the Cold War, led him, critics say, to crack down ruthlessly on his political rivals—painted as “communists”—to clear the way for his ascent. The book comprehensively presents multiple perspectives in granular detail about Singapore’s trajectory towards modernisation and westernisation through its characters, though it felt at times like their motivations perhaps tracked too neatly. Actually, the book feels like a grand fable to me: the somewhat ominous opening sets up how it’ll end so there is a sense of the inevitable about the tale’s trajectory.
2/ I’ve been interested in how the ideas behind veganism and animal farming are engaged with in literary works—distinct from nonfiction primarily trying to impart information or persuade—and recently picked up J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (1999) and Elizabeth Costello (2003). The first takes its title from two fictional lectures Coetzee, who is most celebrated for his writing on the sins of apartheid South Africa, delivered at Princeton in 1997—in third person: the character Elizabeth Costello, who is also a successful writer. The lectures are published in full here and form the crux of this book, followed by reflections from four scholars (including animal rights activist Peter Singer) of various disciplines—responses which they also offered Coetzee at Princeton. The second, Elizabeth Costello, is a portrait of the writer’s life, told in a series of lectures about storytelling and human-animal relationships—including two of the same lectures Coetzee gave at Princeton published in The Lives of Animals. Coetzee is vegetarian and Elizabeth Costello has been said to be his fictional stand-in. Some might say it’s an evasive way of expounding one’s ideas without taking responsibility for it; I think it could be a vehicle to explore one’s ideas more deeply from different points of view. It’s true that when he has written about human exploitation of animals in his fiction or literary essays, he often comes across as more ambivalent; and apparently, when he took questions from the audience at Princeton, he would answer by prefacing, “I think what Elizabeth Costello would say is that…” On the contrary, he has been more straightforward in op-eds.
3/ I just finished How to Hunger, a short story collection by Singaporean writer Grace Chia. It explores themes of longing and belonging through the many permutations that cross-cultural friendships, relationships, dalliances, and rivalries—cousins, one who stayed and one who left, competing to prove who is more Singaporean, for one 😆—can take, in cosmopolitan Singapore and abroad. I like that it refutes our often too facile ideas of what belonging means, as if it’s just about what you eat or how impervious your stomach is. It reminds us that there are multiple variations of belonging to a place, depending on one’s class, race, religion, etc. I found her through Junot Diaz’s newsletter; he also blurbed her book—and I can see why he likes it? There’s a similar energetic quality to her writing, a similar spiky, camouflaged vulnerability to her voice/her characters’ voices. They feel alive, shot through with vigour, though I feel some of them edge a little close to cultural caricature. But I appreciated that they were never without agency—including the women with husbands and boyfriends too myopic to appreciate them—and that their feelings and actions don’t always cohere.
4/ Feeling listless one day, I started watching the TV adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials—and I’ve been through all three seasons of it, though I would be lying if I said I didn’t skip parts that felt drawn out. Perhaps, in trying to get into a more “fiction” mode of mind for a short story I’m working on, I was looking for inspiration in more obviously imagined stories. I haven’t read the source material, so I don’t know if the shortcomings I felt of the adaptation are its own, but still, I liked the feeling of the worlds it created—the dark academia of Oxford, the fairytale Arctic—and wanted to immerse myself in it beyond the end of the series. I found it particularly compelling that, despite the story being written for children, good and evil are not binary forces but often co-exist in the same person: specifically, both of Lyra’s parents. I also was very much drawn to the idea of a person’s soul being manifest as a separate being, an animal—so that if you learn that you need to suppress your heart to live in the world, it shows in the animal, in how you treat it. I didn’t go on to read the trilogy of books the series is based on, the TV series still too fresh in my mind. But I did pick up the second book in the follow-up Dust trilogy, The Secret Commonwealth, which begins roughly ten years after the conclusion of the original trilogy. I would put on the audiobook at night before bed and be immediately transported.
5/ When I saw the trailer for One Day, the new TV series, I wondered what the point of it was: a remake so soon (well, thirteen years ago), simply replacing the white protagonist with a brown girl? Why not just make more new films by brown people telling their own brown people stories? But a friend said she liked it, so I watched it. And actually, I think I prefer Emma and Dex in this adaptation over the Anne Hathaway one—though I like Edinburgh’s wet moody ambience on the night they met in the film adaptation more. I don’t remember now if Emma Morley in David Nicholls’ novel is as prickly, defensive, and sardonic as Ambika Mod plays her on TV, but I definitely found Mod’s Emma to be more convincing as a British uni student and wannabe writer still tripping over her growing pains, hiding her vulnerability under a veneer of superiority. I don’t have any real empirical comparisons for this, only that I went to university in England in the noughties and Mod’s Emma just feels right to me. Also: Snakebite, anyone? 😆
Joy is not a crumb
Goodnight hugs with Little Miss Marple. I love it when she stays still enough to let me hold her 🩵
E.