From The Outside

Managed to get going on Yeng Pway Ngon's Art Studio after a shaky start and found myself happily swept along by its various intertwining narratives. My initial problems related to the novelist's rapid cross-cutting between what seemed a bewildering array of characters in the opening pages, compounded by my struggles in remembering and differentiating between the Chinese names involved. Yes, that sounds pathetic, and it's meant to, reflecting as it does my ignorance of a crucially important aspect of the culture of these parts. In truth, all I needed was to keep going to realise that what appeared a bewildering array was actually a small, loosely connected group and each story was quite clear enough in its way, with two proving unusually gripping - these being the most melancholy of a generally downbeat volume: the tale of the Teacher Yan Pei, in some ways the archetype of the suffering artist; and the account of the almost surreal flight of Jian Xiong into a kind of jungle exile to escape detention over his political associations. This second narrative involved two quite extraordinary sequences involving the experience of dying, both unexpected and quite beautifully achieved.

The most powerful segments of the novel for this reader involved the writer's steely-eyed focus on matters of physical decay and decrepitude, best realised in the evocation of Yan Pei's illness which dominated the central portions of the text. The grim, dreary details of his prostate cancer gripped me in a positively unnerving fashion, enough to make me uneasily aware I need to go for a health screening myself, and, let's face it, it doesn't get more real than that. Yeng is also very good at dealing with loneliness and isolation; his characters are never that far from losing their place in the world even when they seem to be prospering.

The rather melodramatic aspects of the novel struck me as somewhat curious - at least two coincidental encounters seeming positively Dickensian in their fortuitousness. I wasn't sure to what degree the sense of the heavy hand of fate intervening in the characters' lives was meant to be seen as saying something serious about the nature of reality or was operating as simply a kind of self-conscious literary trope. I suppose this was one of the reasons I never felt quite at home in this world despite recognising a number of its features.

In line with this response, I also found myself strongly aware of the very Singaporean features of the English translation, though these seemed appropriate given the background of the novelist. The colloquial flow was appealing, though I found myself wondering whether this was a reflection of the tone of Yeng's original. That's part of the fascination of being such an outsider, the sense of never being quite sure you've really got the point even when you've managed to gain some degree of entry into another world.

Some Relief

Was surprised and pleased in equal measures to find myself talking on the phone to brother-in-law John yesterday. I'd assumed he was going to be in hospital for quite some time and phoned Maureen to see if we could get a direct number to speak to him, having realised earlier in the week that we didn't have any hand phone number for him. In fact he was the one who answered the phone having just discharged himself, if my understanding is correct, basically because he was fed up with life in the ward he been placed in.

He sounded weak, hardly surprisingly, and made it very clear he'd had a miserable time all round. But he was obviously chuffed to still have his foot and didn't sound overly upset at the thought of probably losing some toes. It seems the doctors will make some assessment of the damage caused to his extremity as a result of his recent problems in the next four weeks or so. From what I could gather he's had a pretty major operation to restore the blood circulation to the limb and that's been successful - he didn't know whether he'd wake up with the foot still there, it seems, and his gratitude at keeping it has instilled a distinctly positive outlook. Tired as he sounded, there were several indications of the feisty old John about him, and that was good to hear.

It looks like this story might be heading in the right direction.

Indebted

We watched a grim little programme last night about a young mother of three who got herself and her husband into debt after they moved into a flat of their own. Like most couples in their situation they'd spent some money to have the place renovated, and decided they needed a nice television set and computer and stuff on top of what it already cost them. Also they employed a maid. None of this cost a fortune: you couldn't have accused them of spending wildly. But they'd gone beyond their means, despite both of them having a job. Obviously they were not earning all that much.

The young lady involved had turned to money-lenders to tide the family over. The amounts involved were not all that great, but when you're struggling a few hundred dollars starts to look like a lot of money and the debts, partly due to the excessive rates of interest involved, eventually ran into thousands. The stress got too much for her and she became suicidal.

Fortunately some kind of resolution had been worked out, due to the intervention of the girl's family, and the debts had been settled. It took a lot of courage for her to go public on her troubles, we both felt, especially in the context of the relatively small Malay community here - the programme being broadcast on the Malay language Suria channel. We guessed she'd been encouraged to speak out about her situation to help others by airing the issue.

A further reasonable guess to make is that there are an awful lot more like her, struggling, often in silence, with debts significant enough to make their lives thoroughly miserable, yet by no means having been outrageously extravagant. They just want what everybody else seems to have got before they can really afford it, in a world that tells them these are things that everyone should have.

I was brought up with an absolute horror of debt, I suppose because in the days of my childhood our family was never that far away from the possibility of slipping into it. It was taken for granted that going without was the way the world was ordered. That way of thinking seems to have been left behind in our brave new world of consumer credit, more's the pity, leaving many quiet victims, I suspect, to pity.

Under The Weather

It's been a funny old week. I came back from Malaysia on Sunday with a mild ache around the left side of my back and an aching left shoulder, confidently expecting to feel completely recovered and ready for action by Wednesday at the latest, only to find the achiness getting steadily worse as the week wore on (with wore being the operative word for me.) Fortunately it was a relatively easy few days work-wise, but I somehow managed to make hard labour of every day. I felt like I was about to become spectacularly ill without ever really getting there which was simultaneously a relief and a disappointment. Above all I felt sleepy almost all the time, despite having slept almost too well last weekend.

The pattern has continued today. I've fallen asleep at least four times in the course of the day without particularly intending to. We went shopping in the late afternoon - which felt like a welcome break from dozing off yet again - and just walking around the supermarket felt vaguely heroic, silly as that may sound.

I've been trying to snap out of this, and to that end have been making progress in my latest novel-for-reading, Art Studio by Yeng Pway Ngon, to make myself feel that I'm actually getting something done. I deliberately selected this as a novel that would lead me into unfamiliar territory, and make me do some work as a reader. It seems the writer is a big cheese in literature in the Chinese language on these shores and I'm struggling to figure out why - not that I'm implying any deficiency in the writing in that regard. The heavy weather I'm experiencing in that regard is more than likely to be purely internal to a very dull reader.

Time Out

I spent a fair proportion of my morning being told to talk with colleagues about stuff I wasn't that keen to talk about but dutifully doing so, and then being interrupted after two minutes or thereabouts, just as the conversation was getting mildly interesting. This is called training, I'm told.

I remain baffled as to why not being given time to think and reasonably develop ideas is seen as educational.

Beating The Retreat

Just back from another work-related dinner. As a youngster I relished any opportunity to adventure beyond the house. Now I just think of getting home.

The mighty Richard Thompson captures the mood in one of his finest, most sombre songs, defining the need to Beat The Retreat.

Dining Out

It's that time of year for me when I'm expected to attend a variety of lunches and dinners related to work one way or another. This is linked to the notion of staff welfare, which is odd when you bear in mind that over-indulgence in terms of the eatables doesn't do anyone much good at all. I manfully restricted myself to the braised tofu and mushroom dish today, but even that felt a bit much.

Thank goodness I didn't follow one of those trades that involve business lunches and the like. I don't think I would have been able to cope.

Reconfiguration

Finished Steven Pinker's eminently readable The Better Angels of Our Nature today. Much food for thought in its sweeping pages. Plenty to argue with and to nod in recognition of.

One idea that comes late in the book managed to startle me in its simplicity and obviousness, leaving me to wonder why it's never factored into my thinking - indeed, never been actually thinkable for me. This derives from the prof's explanation of the Flynn effect, i.e., the remarkable fact that IQ tests have to be regularly 'renormed', making it harder to score well in order to balance the higher scores achieved by successive cohorts. I first came across this oddity in Ian Deary's excellent Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction in which Deary quite understandably attempts no definitive explanation of the phenomenon. Pinker's explanation, in contrast, is short and sort of sweet: we are getting smarter as a specie with each succeeding generation.

That just can't be true, part of me said, reading Pinker's thesis. It's entirely counter-intuitive, as any teacher is likely to tell you. But The Better Angels puts up a very good case for the notion, strong enough for me to wonder if I've seriously been misreading the signs over a life-time. The jury's still out on this one for me, but just getting said jury to excitedly confer on the matter is no small feat.

Less Than Optimal

Phoned Maureen & John earlier in the evening hoping for, if not good news, at least no deterioration in their circumstances, things not having gone too well for them of late. Unfortunately the latest news is not good at all. John is in hospital, having found himself completely unable to walk a week ago. It seems the current problem relates to the less than adequate circulation of his blood and there's a real possibility of him losing one of his feet. Add to this the fact that Maureen is unable to get herself to the hospital to visit and it all adds up to a thoroughly grim situation.

Part of me wishes I was there to do something, and another part knows there's probably precious little that I can do to really help. Hope the various medical staff involved can look at the two of them with more optimism than that.

A Bit Too Much

Though not exactly a noble truth of my existence, the fact that I always get a lot of sleep whenever we come to Melaka certainly qualifies as a surpassingly jolly fact of life. This weekend has not disappointed. Although we arrived quite late on Friday evening and for some reason I slept somewhat fitfully that night, highly enjoyable naps on the bus yesterday, at the wedding itself and at the little resort we all retired to in the late afternoon more than made up for our travails on the road. And last night's visit to dreamland was of major proportions.

As a great believer in the notion that sleeping well is a sign of the good life I'd say that life here is all good, despite the mild headache that comes with over-indulgence in the zzzzzzzs.