Surprising transmissions — etc.
The digest: including postcards from a waterfall + an essay about river journeys + readings + joy, wherever it is found.
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
Since I last wrote: a day out at a waterfall in Pahang, Malaysia, for a friend’s birthday. Off a trunk road, past a couple of construction sites and eco-retreats, 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 ice-cold pool fed by a small but lusty waterfall. It looks placid, this not-untouched wilderness, but on googling pre-trip I read that people have died here: from unexpectedly strong undercurrents, fallen trees.
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). We had the whole place to ourselves until a couple arrived, any planned romantic plans they had scuttled for we were much greater in number. Our gentle canine companion added a touch of comedy: she stopped mere steps from where they were reclining together, relieved herself.
New letter:
Surprising transmissions
It’s about the unexpected ways in which pathogens have spread, directly or indirectly, to humans: for example, some transmission pathways were unlocked by timely social and political factors you may not have thought would play a role.
I had 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 a historical lens: 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 (it has spread for the first time from mammals—dairy cows—to humans), 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:
Peering around riverbends
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, etc.
1./ I am trying to make rituals of things, such as reading outside in the shade somewhere, sipping coffee—or chilled coconut water as the days grew warmer in March/April!—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 these parts: fishermen in Penang, Malaysia, are 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 years ago, and I think Heng has put in just enough here as scaffolding, without overwhelming. She 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 as well as Cold War tensions, 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 (though not predictable) in its narrative arc.
2./ I’ve been interested in how the ideas behind veganism and animal farming are engaged with in literary works—in the sense that they are distinct from nonfiction primarily intended to impart information or persuade—and recently picked up J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals and Elizabeth Costello. The first book takes its title from two lectures in fictional form Coetzee (most celebrated for his writing on the sins of apartheid South Africa) gave at Princeton in 1997, delivered by a character he made up, Elizabeth Costello—also, like Coetzee, an esteemed writer. The lectures are published in full and form the crux of this book, followed by reflections from four scholars of various disciplines, including the animal rights activist Peter Singer. The second book, Elizabeth Costello, is a portrait of the character’s life, told in a series of lectures about storytelling and human-animal relationships, which includes the two lectures Coetzee gave at Princeton. Coetzee is vegetarian and Elizabeth Costello has been said to be his fictional stand-in, but it’s not that simple. 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. When Coetzee has written about our exploitation of animals in his fiction or literary essays, he often comes across as more ambivalent. Apparently, when he took questions from the audience at Princeton, he answered by prefacing, “I think what Elizabeth Costello would say is that…”
In The Lives of Animals, the 1997–98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, John Coetzee displays the kind of seriousness that can unite aesthetics and ethics. Like the typical Tanner Lectures, Coetzee’s lectures focus on an important ethical issue—the way human beings treat animals—but the form of Coetzee’s lectures is far from the typical Tanner Lectures, which are generally philosophical essays. Coetzee’s lectures are fictional in form: two lectures within two lectures, which contain a critique of a more typical philosophical approach to the topic of animal rights. Coetzee prompts us to imagine an academic occasion (disconcertingly like the Tanner Lectures) in which the character Elizabeth Costello, also a novelist, is invited by her hosts at Appleton College to deliver two honorific lectures on a topic of her choice. Costello surprises her hosts by not delivering lectures on literature or literary criticism, her most apparent areas of academic expertise. Rather she takes the opportunity to discuss in detail what she views as a “crime of stupefying proportions” that her academic colleagues and fellow human beings routinely and complacently commit: the abuse of animals.
—an excerpt from the introduction to The Lives of Animals, by Amy Gutmann
3./ I’ve 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 emotional/sexual, and rivalries—in one story: cousins, one who stayed and one who left, competing to prove who is more Singaporean 😅—can take, in cosmopolitan Singapore and abroad. I like that it refutes our often too facile ideas of what belonging to a place means, as if it were just about what you eat or how impervious your stomach is. It reminds us that there are multiple variations of belonging, depending on one’s class, race, religion, etc. I found her through Junot Diaz’s newsletter, and, without being presumptuous, I think I can see why he likes the book? There’s a similar energy to her writing, a similar spiky vulnerability to her characters. They feel alive, shot through with vigour, though perhaps some of them edge a little toward caricature—or is it that some of them have too-similar sounding voices on the page? I’m not sure. But I like how they never see themselves as without agency, including the women with men too myopic to appreciate them, and how their feelings and actions, like our own, don’t always cohere.
4./ On the same theme, I picked up Living Things by Munir Hachemi. In this slim volume, a group of friends travel from Madrid to France to work the grape harvest, more for ‘life experience’ than for money, but ended up working at an industrial chicken farm—culminating in a road novel that comments on the excesses of capitalism, mass production, and modern slavery. It could be thought of as ‘autofiction’ (like Kate Zambreno’s Drifts, in the form of a diary), since Munir really did work on an industrial chicken farm with his friends. But in this interview, he said that what happened on the farm was in fact far worse in reality than he described in the book; he held back because he did not want this book to be didactic, the point was not to tell people to stop eating meat (he’s either vegetarian or vegan himself). Isn’t that always the dilemma of the literary writer? You don’t not want to be seen as a ‘mere’ activist, a documentarian; there is a sense that you cannot, should not, write fiction to change the world? Yes, novels have changed the world, but one can’t start out wanting to do so because that would make a bad novel—because then message would trump narrative? At the same time, I find it a little disingenuous when novelists say they don’t hope to change people’s minds with what they write.
5./ Feeling listless one day, I started watching the TV adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy (Northern Lights, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), and I’ve now flitted through all three seasons of it. I think, 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 (the motivations of the characters and the conflicts between them didn’t always feel convincingly built) are its own, but still, I liked the atmosphere of the worlds it created—the dark academia of Oxford, the mythical 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 co-exist in the same person: specifically, both of Lyra’s parents, and their expedient-over-good treatment of her and other children. I was also drawn to the idea of a person’s soul being manifest as a separate being, an animal, so that if you’ve learnt 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 put on the audiobook (read by Michael Sheen) some nights before bed and was transported.
5./ When I saw the trailer for One Day, the recent Netflix TV series, I wondered what the point of it was: a remake so soon (well, thirteen years after), replacing the white protagonist with a brown protagonist? Why not just make more new films by brown people telling their own brown people stories, or original stories by whomever already featuring diverse characters? But a friend said she liked it, so I gave it a shot. And actually, I think I prefer Em and Dex in this adaptation over the Anne Hathaway one (though I found Edinburgh’s wet moody ambience on the night they met in the film adaptation more memorable). 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 solid empirical comparisons for this, only that I attended university in England at a time before social media’s chokehold on our daily lives 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 long enough to let me hug her 🩵
From KL,
E.
Emily- Thanks for sharing this. I love this one. Please send my hugs to Little Miss Marple. :) -Thalia