Asia Literary Review No. 17, Autumn 2010 by Asia Literary Review

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ASIA LITERARY REVIEW No. 17, AUTUMN 2010

Publisher Editor-in-Chief Deputy Editor Managing Editor Poetry Editor Consulting Editors Contributing Editor Production Designer Sales, Circulation & Marketing Director Cover Images Back Cover Image

Ilyas Khan Stephen McCarty Charmaine Chan Duncan Jepson Martin Alexander Ian Jack, Peter Koenig John Batten (art) Sandra Kong, Alan Sargent George Pang Anil Kumar Courtesy of Phung Sunthary; Sovan Philong Phung Ton’s inmate photograph, taken on entry into S-21; other Khmer Rouge S-21 prisoners Xavier Comas

Asia Literary Review is published by Print Work Limited 2401, Winsome House, 73 Wyndham Street, Central, Hong Kong www.asialiteraryreview.com To subscribe email subs@asialiteraryreview.com Editorial: 852.2167.8947 Email: stephen.mccarty@asialiteraryreview.com Advertising: 852.2167.8910 / 8980 Email: anil.kumar@asialiteraryreview.com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Printed in China by Shenzhen Jin Haoyi Color Printing Co., Ltd ISBN: 978-988-18747-4-0 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual stories © 2010 the authors This compilation © 2010 Print Work Limited

Contents

Stephen McCarty

From the Editor

Robbie Corey-Boulet

Reportage The Teacher and the Torturer

Louis de BerniĂ¨res John Batten

Poetry The Man Who Travelled the World Put Out the Light

37 38

Essay Artists Unbound

Liam Fitzpatrick

Poetry On Gascoigne Road

Fiction Youth-in-Asia

James Kidd

Interview Jonathan Watts

G.B. Prabhat

Fiction The Silencer

Peauladd Huy

Poetry Before the Bones The Mango Tree

Ron Schafrick

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Xavier Comas

Photographic Essay Haunted by History

102

Zeffry Alkatiri

Poetry At the Same Time (Semanggi Tragedy 1 and 2)

127

Priya Basil

Memoir Losing their Religion

131

Viki Holmes

Poetry Aubade

143

Charmaine Chan

Travel Spirits in the Material World

145

Goenawan Mohamad

Poetry About That Man Killed Sometime Around Election Day Pastoral A Prayer for Refuge (in a Romanian Church) The 12th Commandment

158 159

Anna Saa-Feliciano John Javellana

Fiction Aqua Mors

161

News Archive Dateline: Manila

175

Frank Dikötter

Non-fiction Excerpt: Mao’s Great Famine

183

153 154

Contents

Laksmi Pamuntjak

Poetry Ellipsis Krishna to Arjuna: On Bhisma’s Final Day The Break-up A Traveller’s Tale

Stephen McCarty

Endpiece My Kind of Town ... Apologies to Woody Allen (The first in an occasional series)

Contributors

199 200 200 201

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From the Editor

From the Editor “… And in the master’s chambers they gathered for the feast they stab it with their steely knives but they just can’t kill the beast …”

here are more obvious places than the lyrics of The Eagles’ 70s rock hymn ‘Hotel California’ to begin any discussion of literature and its import.* Nevertheless, the quoted shank, with its artless tense change, of that popculture cash cow recently elected itself the intractable theme tune, in at least one head, to a lusty literary punch-up. Culture critic (and novelist) Lee Siegel recently opined in The New York Observer that the American novel was dead. If his purpose was to cast bait in a slow summer news week his article turned out to be a whopper of a maggot, polarising writers, readers, critics, bloggers and Tweeting (I prefer “twittering”) rent-a-mobs around the entire circumference of the “blogosphere”. Taking his lead from The New Yorker’s latest directory of the future great and the good, its selection of 20 Under 40 writers to watch, Siegel had a bit of fun by wailing (while winking to the wings) that woe was him because fiction (“fiction” and “novel” swapped places randomly in the article) had suddenly become “culturally irrelevant”. “… with the exception of a few ambitious – and obsessively competitive – fiction writers and their agents and editors, no one goes to a current novel or story for the ineffable private and public clarity fiction once provided”, he said. “… fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers”, he said. “Now everything literary is also furtively commercial, but nothing is popular, except for the explicitly commercial fiction that the literary crowd refuses (or is unable) to write,” he said. * Improbably, in an exchange with critic John Soeder in March last year, The Eagles’ Don Henley referred to metaphor, sociopolitical statements and “using literary devices in songwriting”. See www.cleveland.com/popmusic 7

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Non-fiction was the way to go, he said. Oh, the righteous indignation! Up in the blogosphere, outraged defenders of the literary faith immediately had Siegel by the throat, bulldozing his argument, ridiculing his reasoning or circumventing all articulateness and just insulting him. Serious commentators from The Observer to the Los Angeles Times put themselves at the head of the rabble and took their turns at the pulpit. All of which did the job Siegel and his employers had been hoping for in the first place: generating publicity for their newspaper. And all this is a non-story. Fiction is dead! Again. And again. The notion appears in print or online with something like the regularity of the World Cup; it heaves itself into view from behind the sun every few years, flaring into our orbit like a familiar comet before trailing off into the darkness. And there it stays until another slow news week beckons. For those of us standing around the ring, however, the vicarious thrills afforded by the fisticuffs were considerable. It was amusing to be almost part of it, in a sort of I’ll-hold-your-coat way of fighting. But our side of the planet is a foreign country; we do things differently here. Admittedly, Siegel was writing for an American audience – and in so doing was taking aim at a single tree while failing to spot an entire forest. Why did he adopt such a narrow focus? Because nothing of any significance can possibly be happening unless it’s happening in the United States? As a hobby horse of various cultural commentators in the western press, the fiction-is-dead proposition will run and run. Were it to be floated to the right of the eastern hemisphere it would be seen to have the legs of a rocking horse. Across Asia, despite some territorial exceptions in the appreciation, as we shall see, long fiction seems to be in robust health. So too is short fiction, a condition report borne out by a peek at the Asia Literary Review submissions basket, which occupies its own expanding universe. And Asian writers, from Manchester to Melbourne, flourish (not being, unlike many American authors, it seems, constrained by their national geography). And that’s just writers writing in English. How many more might there be, writing in their own languages or dialects, who have no need of any US-centric teeth gnashing concerning cultural deficiency? How many, such as Man Asian Literary Prize winners Su Tong and Jiang Rong, 8

From the Editor

whose work, thanks to the burgeoning business of translation, might reach English-speaking audiences? Perhaps Asian writers simply haven’t had time to become jaded. Perhaps Rana Dasgupta (winner, Commonwealth Writers’ Prize), Kiran Desai (winner, Man Booker Prize), Aravind Adiga (winner, Man Booker Prize), Miguel Syjuco (winner, Man Asian Literary Prize) and Tim Winton (winner, too many prizes to list) have indeed killed the American novel, or at least rendered it “culturally irrelevant”. These authors, among many others, are exactly the people we now go to for “private and public clarity”. Recent expansion of their operations by publishers Macmillan and Penguin in India and China respectively seems to augment the notion that artistically, as well as economically, the 21st will be the Asian century. If we are seeing the beginnings of a marginalisation of the United States, heavierhitting critics than Lee Siegel will have greater problems to exercise them than the expiry of fiction. For now, Asian fiction looks like a runaway beast it will take far more than steely knives to bring down. * * *

n Hong Kong, every shiny new I.T. toy is embraced with the enthusiasm of Robinson Crusoe finding a crate of beer washed up below his palm tree. Usually. But one sullen pair of electronic devices are wearing the embittered frowns of outcasts left in the shop window. The eReader and the iPad have been available in Hong Kong for some time, at first at a premium from under the counters of the more disreputable electronics shops, then, demand safely created – or so the manufacturers thought – legitimately. Shockingly, my continuing survey of reading habits on Hong Kong public transport has to date realised one sighting of an eReader and one of an iPad. Against that background, according to The Independent sales of digital books rose by 8.5 per cent in the United States in the first five months of this year – a figure not even accounting for the appearance of the iPad. (I wonder how many readers were buying fiction.) Does this mean Hong Kong has fallen out of love with the gadget? No: countless commuters can be seen playing video games on hand-held devices or scrolling through interminable BlackBerry or iPhone messages. Does 9

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this mean commuters are still reading “real” books? In the case of a solitary traveller, yes. Perhaps it’s just that all those weary workers prefer to dedicate themselves to reading in the cosiness of their homes. Yes, that must be it. PS: playing with a gleaming electronic bauble may release lots of happy endorphins. But consider the visceral effect books can have, as described on separate occasions by Aravind Adiga in The White Tiger : “Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.” “Standing around books, even books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up towards you … It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans. “Except here what happens is that your brain starts to hum.”

* * *

ollowing an extensive refit, the good ship Asia Literary Review set sail in its present configuration early in 2008. Helping to send her gracefully down the slipway was Consulting Editor Ian Jack. Ian, having begun his journalism career in his native Scotland, is perhaps best known for his weekly column in The Guardian. But other stops in his award-strewn vocation have included South Asia, his patch as a foreign correspondent, and the editor’s chair at The Independent on Sunday, which he co-founded. He served too as the editor of literary magazine Granta from 1995 to 2007. This incarnation of the Asia Literary Review has benefited immensely from Ian’s insight, guidance and inspiration. With a second anthology of his reporting and essays due next year, Ian will now concentrate on meeting the demands of his publisher and his voracious reading public. In the meantime, the publisher and staff of the Asia Literary Review would like to place on record their grateful thanks to Ian for his peerless contribution and to wish him great good fortune in all future pursuits.

Stephen McCarty 10

The 2nd Annual Fiction Edition Including the Griffith REVIEW Emerging Writers’ Prize This highly-anticipated collection of sparkling new fiction will focus on the Pacific region: from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific islands, New Zealand and Australia. What binds us? What pulls us apart? Subscribe online at www.griffithreview.com with the promo code ALR2010 to ensure you receive this edition in early November.

‘An absorbing read for the hot months.’ – Australian Book Review

The Teacher and the Torturer Robbie Corey-Boulet

Among the victims of Cambodia’s depraved Khmer Rouge regime were countless intellectuals considered enemies of its agrarian revolution. In the decades since the mid-1970s disappearance of professor Phung Ton, his wife and daughter have sought answers to agonising questions concerning his probable torture and murder. The recent trial of Pol Pot’s chief executioner, at which a notorious interrogator was called to testify, gave them hope of release from their torment. Would they, in the end, be free?

im Huy was 17 when Khmer Rouge soldiers went to his village in Kandal, southern Cambodia, to draft able-bodied young men into their insurgency. The year was 1972 and the ultra-communist movement, with its call for empowerment of the peasant masses, was rapidly gaining strength. Although his family viewed with contempt the US-backed government of Lon Nol – along with the elite in the capital, Phnom Penh, it seemed exclusively to serve – Him Huy had little interest in revolution. He had stopped attending school two years before, and hoped only to continue planting and harvesting corn in his family’s fields. Conscription, however, was compulsory, and the Khmer Rouge cared little about the fitness of their troops. When Him Huy told his commander he feared battle, he was not dismissed but rather offered a post in the navy, away from most of the fighting. He chose to stay with the ground forces, 13

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knowing he would be hopeless on the water. “I was afraid of the crocodiles,” he said in a recent interview. “And I didn’t know how to swim.” In the next two years he deserted his unit and ran back to his family twice. He stayed for one night the first time and five the second, returning only because he suspected he would be killed if he didn’t. Frustrated, his commander transferred him in 1974. The following April his new unit assisted in the swift assault on Phnom Penh that clinched the Khmer Rouge victory, approaching from the south and helping to secure enemy railway tracks in the capital’s outskirts. By the time he reached the city proper, thousands of people were reacting to Lon Nol’s surrender with enthusiasm, even some of the defeated soldiers. After five years of civil war, those who gathered on roadsides to cheer the Khmer Rouge tanks and trucks hoped their new leaders would bring about an era of peace and recovery. As it happened, the fall of Phnom Penh marked the beginning of one of the most destructive regimes ever to come to power: from April 1975 to January 1979, an estimated 1.7 million Cambodians – nearly a quarter of the population – died of overwork, malnutrition, disease or execution.

Khmer Rouge soldiers pictured at the Independence Monument after the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975. The monument was built in 1958 to mark Cambodia’s independence from France five years earlier. 14

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At the helm was Saloth Sar, alias Pol Pot. The son of a wealthy landholder, Pol Pot first learned about Marxism-Leninism while studying in France in the early 1950s. On returning to Cambodia he worked as a teacher in Phnom Penh before a crackdown on progressives prompted him to flee to the jungles of the northeast, where he began winning over recruits with talk of a more egalitarian society sustained by large-scale irrigation projects. These, he said, would make the country entirely self-sufficient, and thus removed from the foreign influences he viewed as threats to the ethnic Khmer majority. Those with tertiary education or ties to the old government had no place in Pol Pot’s vision of agrarian utopia; many were executed in the early days of his rule. All Cambodia’s cities, from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap to Battambang, were soon evacuated, with the regime sending their residents to rural communities headed by peasants.

Khmer Rouge cadres receive instruction during a political study session.

Before long, more ominous signs began to emerge. Post-conflict, crop production fell; division leaders were eager to please the Standing Committee and sent as much food as possible to Phnom Penh. The workers – deprived of food and, in the case of the resettled urbanites, training for their new agricultural tasks – therefore fell far short of the regime’s lofty initial production quotas. But instead of discerning the flaws in his plan, Pol Pot viewed the poor start as evidence of an internal plot to thwart him and charged his security division with rooting it out. 15

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It was in this division that Him Huy spent the whole of the regime’s rule. His transfer in 1974 had placed him under Comrade Hor, a much-feared soldier in his mid-twenties who became deputy chairman of Tuol Sleng (or S-21, the designation referring in part to the Khmer Rouge security police), a secondary school turned prison that served as the hub of Pol Pot’s execution campaign. Hor installed Him Huy as a guard at the facility and in doing so made him witness to the interrogation, torture and execution of up to 16,000 men, women and children. Vann Nath, one of the few Tuol Sleng survivors, has described Him Huy as a “very cruel” member of the team that transported prisoners to the “killing fields” after their interrogations were complete. Him Huy, who views himself as more victim than perpetrator, claims to have had little involvement in the killings and to have treated prisoners with sympathy. Nevertheless, he has repeatedly expressed remorse for his role in one of the 20th century’s most efficient extermination machines. To the historian David Chandler he once remarked, “I don’t feel that [working at Tuol Sleng] is what my parents intended me to do.” When I met him in July at his home south of Phnom Penh, he said: “I don’t know why I helped the revolution. The revolution did not help us.” * * * Thirty-one years after the Khmer Rouge were run out of Phnom Penh by Vietnamese-backed forces, their rise and dominion remain largely unexplained. This is at least partly because, until last year, no Khmer Rouge leader had ever been made to stand trial. After nine years of negotiations, the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen joined forces with the United Nations in 2006 to establish formally the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, a hybrid tribunal charged with trying senior leaders and “those most responsible” for Khmer Rouge crimes. In February 2009 the tribunal began its first case, that of Tuol Sleng commandant Kaing Guek Eav, alias Duch. Unlike the four other suspects being held by the court – Khmer Rouge Brother Number Two Nuon Chea, Foreign Minister Ieng Sary, President Khieu Samphan and Social Action Minister Ieng Thirith – Duch (pronounced “Doik”), who converted to Christianity shortly after severing 16

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ties with remaining cadres in the mid-1990s, had voiced contrition for the killings and had vowed to describe the regime years candidly for judges. At the beginning of his trial Duch issued a statement that read in part: “I would like to apologise to all surviving victims and their families who were mercilessly killed at S-21. I say that I am sorry now, and I beg all of you to consider this wish: I wish that you would forgive me for the taking of lives, especially women and children, which I know is too serious to be excused. It is my hope, however, that you would at least leave the door open for forgiveness.” Hopes were high, then, that the value of Duch’s case would extend beyond the symbolic. In particular, observers were looking to see whether he would answer fundamental outstanding questions about the regime – what its ultimate aim was, for instance, and how it managed to transform farmers with no political leanings, Him Huy included, into ardent communists willing to kill. As the defence team began presenting its case, however, the likelihood of a forthright explanation seemed to recede. Even as he accepted “moral responsibility” for the execution of more than 12,000 prisoners, Duch denied any first-hand knowledge of the abuses that befell them. He told the court he spent very little time at Tuol Sleng, saying he was almost always in a nearby office reviewing confessions furnished by his interrogators. He also said all decisions on arrests and killings were made by the party’s Standing Committee, of which he was not a member. He carried out these decisions, he said, with an eye towards ensuring his own survival. Like Him Huy, who is not in danger of being charged because of his low status within the regime, Duch repeatedly stressed that his role in specific crimes had been minor. Asked by judges if he taught his staff how to torture and kill, he responded: “Let me just say I – in the Khmer saying – I do not need to teach crocodiles how to swim. The crocodiles already know how to swim.” Asked about the defence strategy in the run-up to closing statements last November, Rutgers University’s Alex Hinton, anthropologist and author of Why Did They Kill?: Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide, said: “The defence has set Duch up as an almost tragic hero, who, blinded by hubris and a lack of foresight, found himself swept up in great tragedy. He joined the revolution to help liberate the country, only to find himself unwillingly 17

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caught in a machine of death that he could not stop. Like a tragic hero, he comes to understand what has happened too late and tries to repent in the end.” Doubts have been cast on the sincerity of Duch’s apologies, which some suspected were merely part of a bid for a mitigated sentence. During his closing statement, Kong Pisey, a lawyer for civil parties to the case, went so far as to accuse Duch of shedding “crocodile tears”. Such suspicions were only strengthened when, on the final day of closing statements, the man who had earlier told judges he would be willing to subject himself to a public stoning informed them that, all acceptance of “moral responsibility” aside, he wished to be acquitted and released. Nic Dunlop, the photojournalist who in 1999 found Duch living under an assumed name in western Cambodia, suggested in an interview late last year that the case would probably be remembered as a disappointment even if Duch turned out to be genuinely repentant. Because Duch has insisted on playing down his role in the security system, little new information has been revealed, meaning the regime remains as confounding as ever. “From the people I’ve talked to, what they’ve been looking for is an accounting. They want something approaching the truth for what occurred,” Dunlop said. “I don’t think any measure of contrition from Duch is enough.” * * * Perhaps no one watching Duch’s trial was more disappointed than Phung Sunthary, the 54-year-old daughter of a Cambodian academic sent to Tuol Sleng in late 1976. Her father, an esteemed law professor named Phung Ton, was the only member of her immediate family who did not survive the regime, and to this day the circumstances surrounding his death remain inscrutable. The Lon Nol government sent Phung Ton, 54, to Geneva in March 1975 to represent Cambodia at an international conference on maritime law. On April 17, the day Phnom Penh fell, he was sent from Geneva to Paris, where he rented a studio apartment in the 13th arrondissement. Writing to a friend that year, he described the mood among the many Cambodians marooned abroad, a group that included civil servants, students and diplomats. “I have met many Cambodians who are in the same situation 18

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as mine and are awaiting the earliest possible opportunity to return home,” Phung Ton wrote. “All of these people are anxiously waiting for news from Cambodia. All they and I want is to return home immediately.” The letter alludes to his belief that the country was in turmoil, and that he would be met with hardship if he were to go back. “You reassured me about the rumours concerning the forced evacuation of Phnom Penh. Once again, thank you for that,” he wrote. “But I am still concerned by the news I hear on the radio, television, in the newspapers and in some magazines.” Despite his reservations, Phung Ton, missing his wife Im Sunthy and the rest of his family, returned home in December 1975, arriving in Phnom Penh via Beijing on December 25. His Khmer Rouge prisoner biography – biographies accompanied confessions – states that he was immediately placed

Phung Ton and Im Sunthy, who married in 1955. © Pictures courtesy of Phung Sunthary

Phung Ton and Im Sunthy on the River Seine in Paris, sometime after they were married.

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in K-5 and later K-6, both camps in Phnom Penh that housed intellectuals returning from abroad. The biography notes that he “had conflicts with others and the Central Committee”. No details are provided. He entered Tuol Sleng in December 1976. None of the documents later recovered from the prison reveals who decided to transfer him there. The last document that mentions him, dated June 6, 1977, refers to his various illnesses, including heart and respiratory problems, but says nothing about interrogation sessions or whether he was marked for execution. Since returning from peripatetic labour in the provinces to Phnom Penh after the Khmer Rouge were ousted in 1979, Phung Sunthary has struggled to piece together an account of her father’s last days from scattered documents, photographs and personal recollections. These efforts have yielded little, making the tribunal one of the last possible sources of information she needs to make the chronicle complete.

Phung Ton (left) with friends in France a few months before he returned to Cambodia. The man on the right would also be sent to Tuol Sleng; the other remained in France.

The Duch case was particularly promising. Because of Phung Ton’s fame, Tuol Sleng staff would probably have monitored him closely from the moment he entered the prison. Additionally, Duch had a personal connection to Phung Ton, having obtained a degree from the Pedagogy Institute of Phnom Penh when the professor was serving as its director. Phung Sunthary and her mother, Im Sunthy, were accepted as civil parties to the Duch case, and were granted legal representation and the right to testify. They have fulfilled the role with dedication, regularly attending six months of evidentiary hearings and taking meticulous notes. 20

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They were present when Him Huy told the tribunal how Cambodians who had returned from abroad, Phung Ton probably among them, were processed. His unit was responsible for receiving them at a house not far from Tuol Sleng. The prisoners at first had little reason to believe they had erred, and they are likely to have thought they were merely being transferred to a worksite, Him Huy said. “When they were sent to my location,” he told judges, “they were not yet arrested. They would like to go to another work location, so they came along. Because we had already made the arrangements, they were asked to enter the room, to sit at a table. And then we would make the arrest.” The prisoners were then led, sometimes in groups totalling 50 or 60, into the Tuol Sleng compound. “A rope would be used to hook through their arms, and they would be walked into the prison,” Him Huy said. “And actually they were blindfolded, so they could not see anything.” New arrivals were registered in a central administration building, where their basic information was recorded. They were ordered to sit down on a wooden chair so they could be photographed. A metal arm extended from the wall to hold their heads in place to prevent their avoiding the camera. With these steps completed, the prisoners were sorted into two main groups. Less important prisoners were shackled to long metal bars and forced to lie side by side all day save for a brief period each morning, when staff ordered them to “exercise”. As Vann Nath has recalled, the “exercises” consisted mainly of jumping up and down while holding defecation buckets, even as they remained shackled. “The noise of the shackles and buckets clanged throughout the room,” Vann Nath told one interviewer. “I tried to jump a few times with the others. How could we do that, with one ankle fastened to the shackles and the other foot jumping?” The prisoners were given spoonfuls of gruel twice a day; many suffered from diarrhoea. Skin infections spread quickly as detainees’ immune systems weakened. Describing how prisoners were cleaned, Him Huy told judges: “Normally they could have been washed by a spray of water from a hose … they would not be released to have a wash because the guards would be afraid that they would abscond.” More important prisoners were kept in tiny individual brick cells. Up to three times a day they would be blindfolded and escorted across the complex 21

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to interrogation sessions, where prison staff would question, intimidate and abuse them for five-hour stretches. The interrogators employed an array of means – suffocation, simulated drowning, electric shocks to the genitals – in coercing the prisoners to admit to traitorous links. Cambodians who in some cases had never left their villages were made to describe in detail affiliations with the CIA, the KGB and the Vietnamese, and to produce evidence implicating their colleagues, neighbours, friends and family. Chum Mey, a mechanic who had his fingers broken and his toenails ripped off with pliers during 12 days of interrogation, told the tribunal how he had confessed to being in both the CIA and the KGB in a bid to make the torture stop. “Even until now I am still longing for the reason why I was accused of being CIA and KGB, because I have never known anything about them,” he said. Duch himself admitted to knowing at the time that these confessions were largely incredible. “Only 40 per cent were true and only 20 per cent of persons accused were the right suspects,” he told the court. But the commandant, described by those who knew him as forever intent on pleasing his superiors – he chose the alias Duch because it was the name of a well-behaved student in a book he read when he was young – said he was determined to identify more enemies for Pol Pot and thus prove his commitment to the revolution. Him Huy has maintained that he did not know how interrogations unfolded. He recalled noticing, though, that some prisoners who were questioned returned with welts on their backs caused by lashes, and that “some died of wounds in the prison cells”. Those who did not succumb to their injuries, he said, had only to bide their time until they were killed. Of the 16,000 prisoners sent to Tuol Sleng, only an estimated 10 made it out alive. “I never saw anyone arrested and sent to S-21 be released,” Him Huy said, “because everyone who was arrested and sent there would end up being dead.” Mass executions were carried out once every two weeks or so; those whose interrogations were complete were killed as soon as possible. The staff walked around at dusk with a list of prisoners, removed the condemned from their cells or former classrooms and walked them to a truck parked near the entrance, telling them only that they were going to “a new home”. Typically, a few dozen were targeted in each round, though the total for one day in May 1978 reached more than 300. 22

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The prisoners were again blindfolded. Those who could not walk, because of malnutrition or the injuries they had suffered, were carried across the grounds to the gate. The truck took them to the Chhoeung Ek killing fields, roughly 15 kilometres away. On arrival prisoners were corralled into a hut on the site, where guards turned on a generator to muffle the wails from those outside who were moments from death. Often, a mass grave had already been dug and prisoners were told by guards to kneel down in a row at its rim. “Then they would use an oxcart axle to strike the back of the necks, and later on they would use a knife to slash the throat,” Him Huy told the tribunal, adding that rounds of executions could take hours to complete. Chea Leang, the Cambodian co-prosecutor in the Duch case, reviewed each step of this process to great effect in her closing statement last November. “At what point,” she asked, “did the victims know they were about to be executed? Was it when they were sitting on the truck en route to the killing fields? Was it as they were taken down from the vehicle and let out into the darkness, or when they were kept waiting in the small hut, the noise of the generator attempting to drown out the screams of those ahead of them? Surely, they must have known as they were led out one by one and forced to kneel beside the execution pits that their lives were at an end.” * * * Duch’s direct and indirect victims sometimes talk of how the horror of such accounts, even when rendered in lurid detail, has been dulled by repetition. They don’t need a tribunal to tell them how the killings were carried out, either because they witnessed them or because the accounts have become part of family lore. Not surprisingly, the killings also figure prominently in the broader national psyche. The current Hun Sen regime, infamous for corruption and its frequent attacks on democratic institutions, nevertheless has an unbreakable hold on power in part because of the role it played in overthrowing the Khmer Rouge. Every May 20, officials organise a national Day of Anger at Chhoeung Ek, during which participants dramatise the bludgeoning and stabbing of victims. 23

As Duch’s trial wore on, and a dozen or so S-21 prisoners and staff appeared before the judges’ panel, the testimonies proved far less upsetting to Im Sunthy and Phung Sunthary than the fact that they had no idea if what was being described was what happened to Phung Ton. “Even if his skeleton remains, I do not know where it is or how he died,” Phung Sunthary said. “How am I supposed to accept that, as a daughter?” On the day they were scheduled to appear before the Trial Chamber the women divided the two tasks before them: to honour the memory of the man they lost to Tuol Sleng, and to press for details concerning how that loss transpired. Im Sunthy spoke first, telling the court of the 20 years she spent as Phung Ton’s wife. “My husband’s hobby was reading books and researching documents,” she said. “He did not ever waste any time. His time and scheduling of the day was always strict and precise.” Their bond, as she described it, was in some ways like that between a student and teacher, though he also doted on her, she said. “He educated me very well to understand the right from the wrong and to make myself progress. During the time that I was with him, I also felt the warmth that I received from him, and I knew that I was one of the lucky women who had a very kind and understanding husband.” She told the court how she and her daughter learned of Phung Ton’s death in late 1979. While walking home one evening from their jobs at the Phnom Penh port, they stopped to buy some palm sugar. The vendor wrapped the sugar in a sheet of paper that caught their attention because it The seven children of Phung Ton and Im displayed print, the first they had Sunthy. Phung Sunthary, the eldest, is in seen since before the rule of the the centre. 24

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The Teacher and the Torturer

Khmer Rouge, who had banned independent publishing. They eventually discerned that the sheet included names and photographs of people who had died at Tuol Sleng, which they didn’t know existed. Phung Sunthary was the first to spot Phung Ton. The news of her husband’s death, Im Sunthy told the tribunal, had prompted “a kind of tremendous grief” that has not dissipated in three decades. She added, though, that she obtained some comfort from his obvious influence on their seven children. “Now, I can see that my children are brave, and every day they are outspoken people because they were trained well by their father. Although many believe that they seem to be aggressive by behaving like that, I know my husband would have liked them to be brave and aggressive.” Phung Sunthary spoke next. She wasted little time in telling the court she had three questions to put to Duch, and said that his professions of remorse would be for naught if he failed to answer them in full. First question: “Who made the decision to kill my father on the 6th of July, 1977, or a little bit after that?” The judges, as they did throughout the trial when victims addressed the accused, permitted Duch to respond directly. He stood up to do so. “Although I have the deepest respect for my former professor,” he said, “I do not have any answer to that at this time, and that is the truth.” “What types of torture were inflicted upon my father?” Duch said he had no reason to believe the professor had been tortured, but added that he had no way of knowing for sure. “Who made the decision to transfer my father to S-21?” “I did not have the knowledge of that,” Duch said before observing: “Maybe Mam Nai is the only person who can actually shed light on the exact details of his fate, if he is willing to do so.” Duch was referring to his former chief interrogator, who was called to testify in July 2009. The differences between witness and accused that day were stark in nearly every respect. Duch, about five feet four inches tall, sat behind his team of lawyers in a white shirt tucked into pressed black slacks. Mam Nai, who at more than six feet is something of a Cambodian giant, wore a dark green coat, blue fingerless gloves and a red and blue krama, a chequered farmers’ scarf that was a staple of the Khmer Rouge uniform. In those outfits one could read the extent to which their ties to the 25

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Mam Nai (back left) and Duch (back, third left) at Tuol Sleng with staff and unidentified women and children; 1976.

revolution – the main organising principle of their lives and the fortunes of their country – had long since diverged. Whereas Duch defected voluntarily years before many regime leaders, Mam Nai lives in an area of western Cambodia that remained a Khmer Rouge stronghold until 1998, and his neighbours and relatives still call him by his wartime alias, Comrade Chan. Little is known about his early life. Born in southeast Cambodia, he met Duch while studying for his bachelor’s degree in Khmer literature in Phnom Penh. Their bond was cemented in the late 1960s, when they were held in the same prison for a short period by the Norodom Sihanouk regime on suspicion of being communist sympathisers. The pair later worked at a secondary school in Kampong Thom, where Duch taught mathematics and Mam Nai biology. They had much in common even before signing up with Pol Pot. Chandler has written that both “emerge from the record as strict, fastidious, totally dedicated teachers – characteristics that they carried with them, to altered purposes, when they worked together at [S-21]”. In the early 1970s, fleeing a clampdown on progressives, they went into the jungle to join the Communist Party of Kampuchea – Duch in 1970 and Mam Nai in 1973. With Duch as his “introducer” Mam Nai became a member in June 1974. Those who later worked alongside Mam Nai at Tuol Sleng uniformly

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describe him as a fiercely dedicated revolutionary. Nhem En, who took photographs of prisoners entering the facility, discovered this when he was given the task of developing negatives from a trip Pol Pot made to China in October 1977. (China was one of the few countries with which Pol Pot maintained diplomatic ties; it proved a reliable source of political inspiration and economic assistance.) When Mam Nai noticed that a photograph had a blotch above one of Pol Pot’s eyes, he accused Nhem En of intentionally doctoring them as an insult to Brother Number One and had him sent to Prey Sar agricultural prison, a nearby “re-education” camp. Nhem En was not released until Mam Nai discovered, several months later, that the blotch had originated on the negative. Him Huy remembers Mam Nai’s distinct appearance: the strikingly light complexion, the large ears and the wide mouth that terrified staff and prisoners alike. He said the guards trod lightly when Duch and Mam Nai were around, careful not to make any mistakes that might hint at counterrevolutionary tendencies. “They both remembered everything that they saw,” Him Huy said. Though Mam Nai concedes that he was not, by birth, one of the peasants in whose name the Khmer Rouge revolution was waged, he told the tribunal he was able to transform his class identity after studying the history of communism in the Soviet Union and China. “I was a former professor,” he said. “I was in the bourgeoisie class, and then I rebuilt myself to adapt myself into the proletarian class, into the workers’ class. I achieved that. And that is the reason why the revolution allowed me to become a member.” It was this prior link to the bourgeoisie that made him of particular interest to Im Sunthy and Phung Sunthary. Even before Duch’s remark, they were familiar with the interrogator’s background and thought he might know the answers to their questions. Mam Nai is believed to have crossed paths several times with Phung Ton in the years leading to the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge, when they were both ensconced among the country’s intellectual elite. Like Duch, Mam Nai studied at the Pedagogy Institute – where he graduated at the top of his class of 200 – during Phung Ton’s tenure as director. The professor’s signature is on his diploma. Even more promising was another link between the two men presented as evidence in the Duch case: Mam Nai’s signature is on the professor’s 27

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biography and confession, documents that in many cases were produced only after multiple rounds of interrogation. From the moment he began testifying Mam Nai proved a troublesome witness. He refused to answer several questions owing to self-incrimination concerns, even though prosecutors have made clear they do not view him as a senior leader and have no plans to pursue a case against him. He also took pains to stress all the work he did for Duch that did not involve processing prisoners – cultivating rice fields, planting potatoes and transporting cattle, among other things. “And later on,” he allowed, “I was assigned to interrogate unimportant prisoners.” Asked to elaborate on the interrogation process, he alluded to the control he sought to exert over those made to answer his questions. “When a prisoner was taken to me, after the prisoner was shackled … I started to interrogate the person,” he said. “But first I had to play politics with them – to speak, to tell them, to make them understand – so that they would agree to make confessions. And then I started to ask about the biography, and I would ask them to talk about their personal histories and activities.” But he rejected suggestions that he and his fellow interrogators resorted to physical violence. When prisoners did not confess their involvement with the CIA, the KGB or the Vietnamese, he said, there were only two options: to “explain to them further”, or to send them back to their cells so they could “reflect on their negative and positive activities”. In reality, the process of obtaining a confession was far more abusive, a point driven home by Mam Nai’s own interrogation notebooks, which were recovered after the Vietnamese stormed Phnom Penh in January 1979. In them, he lays out the appropriate ways in which to inflict psychological and physical assaults on his subjects. Some prisoners were forced, for example, to salute images of two dogs, one of which represented “Vietnamese consumers of our territory” and the other “American imperialism”. “We have them pay homage so as to hold them firmly, because when they are arrested, 90 per cent of them still consider themselves revolutionaries,” reads one passage of the notebooks. “After they have paid homage to the dogs, they will realise that they are traitors.” Another passage not only acknowledges torture, but justifies its use. “Take their reports, observe their expressions. Apply political pressure 28

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and then beat them until [the truth] emerges,” Mam Nai wrote. “Thinking only of torture is like walking on one leg – there must be political pressure [so that we can] walk on two legs.” The judges were familiar with the notebooks and were not swayed when Mam Nai claimed to be telling them everything he knew. At one point during his testimony a judge asked Mam Nai whether he had “any problems” with his memory. Mam Nai said he had recently had a bad fall that left him unconscious “for about an hour”. “After the recovery, I seem to forget a lot,” he said. He had not, however, forgotten the arguments used to justify the regime’s treatment of prisoners. At M-13, a prison in Kampong Speu province where he and Duch worked before transferring to Tuol Sleng, detainees were

Photographs of victims on display at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, located in the former Tuol Sleng prison, Phnom Penh.

shackled and made to stand in pits, their heads poking just above ground. Survivors and staff have said it was not uncommon for prisoners to drown when it rained. Asked about the practice, Mam Nai told judges: “The country was bombarded, so villages would be bombarded by bombs by the Americans. So in order not to put these detainees in danger, we had to put them in the pits.” He went on to say that he believed most prisoners at M-13 and Tuol Sleng were “bad people” deserving of execution. “Through my observations, there were less good people than the bad people,” he said. “I’m very regretful for those good people who died and those people who are less good and also died. But I’ve never been regretful for those bad people who died.” When she was given the floor, Silke Studzinsky, the German lawyer representing Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy, asked Mam Nai what he 29

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knew about Phung Ton’s death. Mam Nai said he knew nothing about the professor’s time in Tuol Sleng. Studzinsky then pointed out that Mam Nai had signed Phung Ton’s confession. This spurred Mam Nai to concede that he had in fact written it. “It is my handwriting,” he said. But he added that he could not remember whether he had actually conducted the interrogation. Studzinsky, one of many lawyers appearing before the tribunal, had only 15 minutes to question Mam Nai. She informed him that Phung Ton’s wife and daughter were present in the public gallery. By that point, the two women could be heard sobbing in their seats. “It would be really helpful if you would contribute to find the truth for the relatives of Mr Phung Ton, and if you could elaborate,” Studzinsky said. Mam Nai said he would like to provide information about any interrogation, but that he knew nothing. Then one of the judges stepped in, asking Mam Nai to explain why he would have written out and signed a confession stemming from an interrogation he had not conducted. In response, Mam Nai reversed his earlier statement – and appeared to come close to addressing the torture question. “Regarding the interrogation of Phung Ton, I did the interrogation,” he said. “There was no – he was not forced to confess.” That was the closest he came to giving any new information during the initial round of questioning. As with all witnesses, Duch was afforded a chance to comment on the testimony. Though these responses were generally respectful, he was more hostile with Mam Nai, accusing his former subordinate of withholding information out of fear. “Please, please don’t be afraid,” he told him. “Just tell the truth. You cannot really use a basket to cover the dead elephant, so don’t even attempt to do that. I said I am ready to accept or be accountable for all of the crimes that I have committed. And I would want you to do the same. “So when it comes to Professor Phung Ton,” Duch continued, “we both admit that he was our teacher. I don’t want to elaborate further on why I liked this professor, but I’m here to talk right before the civil parties, and the daughter of my teacher. Here we are now trying to tell the truth of what happened to him, the victim, because the world and the Cambodian people are looking forward to hearing the truth. I think it is the best opportunity for us to put together the piece of the puzzle of this matter. So please be 30

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reminded that civil parties are here with us and they want to know how our professor died, and they just want to know even where he died and where his ashes would have been buried. So I think it is good that we should help them to locate that place. I think communism should not be in our spirit or blocking our views to tell the truth.” When Duch finished, Studzinsky again asked Mam Nai whether he could share anything about the fate of Phung Ton. Mam Nai began to cry. “I would like to make the following comments,” he said. “I would like to express my regret to the family of Professor Phung Ton.” His court-provided lawyer then asked for a break so Mam Nai could compose himself. After a few minutes, he was able to continue. “I have been very remorseful,” he said. “I am very remorseful because even my brothers or relatives died. I think it was a chaotic situation, and we have nothing other than to be very regretful, and we cannot do anything else. Through this court, I think the family of Professor Phung Ton is informed of my impression.” * * * When I caught up with Phung Sunthary not long after closing statements ended, she acknowledged that the hearings had been draining, and lamented the fact that none of the regime figures – not Duch, not Him Huy and certainly not Mam Nai – had told her anything new. But she remained convinced that because Mam Nai was one of Phung Ton’s former students, he would have monitored how the professor was treated and how he died. She also said she had been moved by the interrogator’s tears, which she believed were genuine. “Duch’s tears, his crying, that’s a lie,” she said. “But Mam Nai’s are real tears.” I told her I had decided to attempt to interview Mam Nai away from the tribunal, and asked if she had anything she would like me to say to him. She said I should ask him the same three questions she had posed to Duch, then she handed me a book: I Believed in the Khmer Rouge, by Ong Thong Hoeung, a student in Paris who, like Phung Ton, returned in 1976 hoping to assist the revolution. Phung Sunthary had underlined a passage describing an encounter Ong Thong Hoeung had with Phung Ton at one of the camps for intellectuals. 31

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“We were living in poor conditions – no sanitation, not enough food, no suitable clothes – and this caused us to come down with all kinds of illnesses,” the passage reads. “We tried to tell each other not to eat the unsanitary food, but after a while we had to eat first and think about death later. One day I saw Phung Ton collecting a dirty banana leaf and eating it – he was not careful about the food anymore because he was so hungry.” This was one of the few snippets of information Phung Sunthary had unearthed about her father’s life following his return. If Mam Nai were to see it, she told me, perhaps he would be willing to describe his own encounters with the professor. Mam Nai’s village, Chamkar Lhong, less than a mile from the Thai border in western Cambodia, is four hours by car from Battambang, Cambodia’s second city. As I drove there with my translator last December, travelling on mud roads turned hard and dusty in the dry season, I thought about what Mam Nai stood to gain from his reticence. There was a chance, of course, that he simply did not have the answers to Phung Sunthary’s questions, although his contradictory statements in court suggested he knew more than he let on. Or perhaps he viewed the regime years as too traumatic to revisit. That would have explained his repeated refusal to sit for interviews, a stance setting him apart from many former cadres. But there was also the possibility that, 31 years after the Pol Pot regime was toppled and branded “genocidal”, he still had faith in the ideals that shaped it, and believed it ultimately did more good than harm. Mam Nai’s house stands at the end of the only road in Chamkar Lhong. When we arrived we saw his daughter-in-law, So Teavy, sitting outside. She greeted us warmly, and told us that Mam Nai was working on a farm 40 miles away. We said we would be willing to drive there, but she said no one in the village knew where it was, and that Mam Nai didn’t carry a telephone. We told her we had a gift for her father-in-law. She did not respond. Then an older woman, dressed in a blue shirt, light flannel jacket and bright green pants, walked over from a house down the street. It was Mam Nai’s second wife, Khun Lak. We explained the purpose of our visit and her smile turned into a sneer. “When I saw your car I thought you were my son,” she said. “If I had known you were not my son I would not have allowed you into this village. All 32

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the foreigners who come here just want to get more information from my husband. But he already spoke at the court for two days! He said enough. No more information. So don’t even try.” I knew Khun Lak had accompanied her husband when he testified in Phnom Penh, so I asked her about her impressions of the tribunal. Standing in the yard with her arms crossed, she said that she had none. When all other attempts at small talk failed I tried again for some time with her husband, who I suspected was somewhere on the property. I said there were questions we hoped to pose that had gone unanswered during his two days of testimony, specifically relating to Phung Ton. I said we had a gift from Phung Ton’s daughter, one that she hoped would jog Mam Nai’s memory and allow him to recall more details about the death of her father. But Khun Lak remained unmoved. “And I want to say the following to Phung Ton’s daughter,” she added as we retreated to the car. “Who do you think you are? Only the court has the right to ask him. If you ask him again and again about the Khmer Rouge he will just say the same thing. It’s okay if you come here to ask about his health or how he’s doing – he is fine. Sometimes he gets sick, but he’s okay. But about the Khmer Rouge? I want to say the following to Phung Ton’s daughter: you have no right to ask about that.” * * * On the morning of July 26, Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy joined their fellow civil parties, as well as scores of diplomats, journalists and direct and indirect victims, in the tribunal’s public gallery for the announcement of the verdict on Duch, 18 months after his trial began. The proceedings unfolded with little pageantry: as Trial Chamber President Nil Nonn read out a summary of the ruling, Duch sat in the dock with his arms folded on the table in front of him, staring straight ahead at the judges’ panel. A few days before, Him Huy told me he already considered the case a success, arguing that it had forced Cambodians to examine in depth a period many would just as soon skirt over. “When I clarified my case at the court, it seemed that the story I was telling had happened the night before,” he said. “I think the court is very good because it makes us remember, and helps us to find justice for the victims.” 33

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Before announcing the particular form justice would take in the Duch case, Nil Nonn read out the names of all accepted civil parties, thus making their roles official. “Bou Meng, as a survivor of S-21 and for the loss of his wife, Ma Yoeun, alias Thy,” he said. “Chhin Navy, for the loss of her husband, Tea Havtek.” After six names had been read, Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy received formal confirmation that Duch’s role in the death of Phung Ton had been registered as legal fact: “Phung Sunthary and Im Sunthy, for the loss of their father and husband, Phung Ton, respectively.” This would turn out to be the only tangible benefit either woman would garner from their participation.

Former Khmer Rouge soldier and guard Him Huy gives evidence at Duch’s trial (left). Duch awaits the tribunal’s verdict.

Last year, the civil parties requested by way of reparation everything from free medical care to the construction of memorials to the establishment of a national victims’ commemoration day. Having listed the accepted civil parties, Nil Nonn informed them that most of those requests had been rejected, either because they were deemed too vague or because they fell outside the jurisdiction of the tribunal. He noted, however, that their names would be included in the final judgment, and that all statements of apology made by Duch during the course of the trial would be compiled and distributed. 34

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Then came the verdict, with Nil Nonn announcing that Duch, 67, had been found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under Cambodian law, he faced a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, though the prosecution had requested that he be made to serve 40 years. The court sentenced him to 35, from which five were subtracted for the illegality of his detention by a military court from 1999 to 2007, five years longer than permitted. With credit for the 11 years he has already served taken into account, Duch faces a maximum of 19 more behind bars. Afterwards, many foreign observers who had flown in for the verdict credited the court with handing down a “fair” sentence that reflected a range of mitigating factors, among them Duch’s cooperation with the tribunal and his “potential for rehabilitation”. But the reaction among Cambodians was more critical. Predictably, Duch’s victims were among those who said he had been treated far too leniently. “Regardless of whether the world is happy, I am not happy,” said Chum Mey, the mechanic tortured at Tuol Sleng. “My tears will still fall – we have suffered once under the Khmer Rouge, and now we are suffering again, so I am not satisfied at all.” A few hours after the proceedings concluded, Phung Sunthary, who in the last year has emerged as one of the most vocal civil parties, had little to say about the sentence or the reparation ruling. “My family and I were very disappointed and shocked when the court announced this,” she said. “I am not happy, and it is not fair for the victims.”

A visitor inspects photographs of prisoners taken on entry into Tuol Sleng. Most, if not all, were bludgeoned to death in the killing fields. 35

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Asked about the possibility that Duch will leave prison alive, she allowed only that it “makes me sad”, and noted that 19 years amounted to a little more than half the time she and her mother had been living without Phung Ton. These were the sorts of criticisms beamed around the world in news reports about the verdict. They came from Cambodians with a direct connection to Tuol Sleng, as well as those who don’t but who know enough about the Khmer Rouge revolution to blame it for the many hardships that still buffet their country. It would have been naïve to expect widespread acclaim for any verdict in the Duch case, particularly when one considers that, for some victims, the only punishment befitting the commandant of Tuol Sleng is 16,000 death sentences. But it is difficult to take issue with the frustrations of a woman who, having followed the proceedings in the hope of obtaining answers to the most painful questions she has ever faced, received instead a judgment she viewed as hollow, and a promise that her name would be included in a legal document affirming what she already knew.

Poetry Louis de Bernières Two poems written after arriving in Hong Kong on the author’s first visit; March 2010

The Man Who Travelled the World He travelled the world, restless as rain. There was no continent unexplored, Scarcely a city unworthy of days, a night, a week. In all these places he searched for her face In the streets, in the parks, in the lanes, Always pausing to look, listening out For the voice he’d never heard yet, yet Always knew he would know. So many lovers, so many encounters, So many years, so many lands. Now he sits by the window, a cat in his lap, An ancient man far off from the place of his birth. And inside that loosening frame of bones Beats the same heart as the heart that Beat in the young boy who knew she was there, And set off to travel the world. 37

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He thinks of the children he never had, The ordinary things foregone, The perverseness of such an exhausting, Such an impossible search; A whole life squandered on dreams. It begins to rain; he puts on his glasses Looks through the window, watches the girls Step by, avoiding the puddles, protecting Their hair with their magazines. He fondles the ears of the cat, This ancient man far off from the place of his birth, Still looking, still in fief to the same unsatisfied heart As the heart that beat in the young boy Who knew she was there, and Set off to travel the world.

Put Out the Light Close the shutters, Put out the light, Place one candle on the shelf. See, we are young again; Our malformations, all lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Etchings in our flesh are gone, Are evened out, engoldened, Softened by shadow. Your hair smells sweet, your Head in the crook of my arm, your Hand on my chest. We will lie like this til the candle dies, And then, in the dark, lie face to face. Theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll glitter like moonlight on water, Our old, experienced eyes.

Artists Unbound John Batten

efore the 2008 financial meltdown tempered spending sprees on art, the Asian contemporary- and modern-art market witnessed record-breaking sums paid this century for mainland Chinese works, especially at the seasonal auctions held in Hong Kong. In tandem, public museums around the world exhibited contemporary Chinese art in shows specifically funded as extensions of countries’ trade and foreign policies – an overt use of “cultural diplomacy” owing to China’s status as an emerging economic power. Oft forgotten is that before the art world’s fixation with Chinese contemporary art, the Asian contemporary art market was long dominated by modernist “masters” from Indonesia and the Philippines: Affandi, Sudjojono and Hendra Gunawan, and Ferdinand Amorsolo, Juan Luna and Hernando Ocampo were artists who regularly fetched record prices in the days when there was no contemporary Chinese art scene. Wealthy Southeast Asian collectors flew to Hong Kong (and, while they operated, the Singapore auctions) to trade their art as commodities or status symbols, and, in some cases, to build art collections. Anyone looking at Hong Kong to try to discern what was happening in Asia would have thought that Asian contemporary art was overwhelmed, even marginalised, by the Chinese art juggernaut, but only if they were sitting unaware in, say, New York or Paris. The domestic art scenes of all 39

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Asian countries have been remarkably robust, supported by a rising middle class of art collectors and patrons. The Asia Literary Review introduces this issue of the magazine at the Ubud Writers’ and Readers’ Festival on the Indonesian island of Bali. In it we feature a selection of young Indonesian artists whose work highlights the wide range of art being produced in this culturally diverse archipelago, and the issues they are tackling. In the twilight years of Suharto’s New Order – a 32-year period of tight political and social control that ended in 1998 – Indonesian art evolved from the depiction of social, rural and Arcadian themes using modernist ideas to the explicit depiction of the realities of a discredited and authoritarian political system. The blight of the country’s sprawling urban areas, and its associated social and environmental problems, was depicted using graphic expressionism and realism with well-honed and technically excellent painting skills. Using a changing political and social commentary style, artists expressed their views during the 1990s through performances and satire. A group under the banner of Apotik Komik (Comics Pharmacy) distributed easily understood cartoons and displayed murals to convey the public’s outrage towards the political and military establishment. Much of the current strength of the Indonesian contemporary art scene emanates from this period, with the benefits of freedom of expression and a vigorous print media allowing a vibrant climate of debate. Affordable technology (including digital camcorders and cameras) and easy access to international art trends through blogs and social websites allow Indonesian artists to acquire skills in a range of other media, which they can then use to express their ideas – and not just in painting. For example, the widely exhibited artists Jompet and Heri Dono include large-scale installation, video, sound, mixed-media sculpture and projections in their exhibitions. The oddly surreal photographs of Agan Harahap and Wimo Ambala Bayang’s “vampire” boys featured in these pages indicate an openness of subject that reflects an Indonesia now more tolerant of secular and grotesque whimsy. Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu’s Bird Prayers series harks back to traditional rural and village life, but with irony: it is from these same villages that many contract workers employed as overseas domestic helpers or factory workers come – young people exposed to a decidedly non-rural world. 40

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Jakarta, despite being Indonesia’s biggest city and capital, plays an almost secondary role in Indonesia’s art scene. The nearby mountain city of Bandung, with its universities, and Central Java’s traditional cultural centre of Yogyakarta, both possess intellectual, nurturing and inspirational environments, which make them the favoured places of residence for many Indonesian artists. Yogyakarta’s Cemeti Art House, in particular, has been a supportive exhibition venue for innovative and conceptual art ideas since 1988 and, alongside such private initiatives as the Jakarta Art Awards, the Indonesian art scene offers degrees of artistic excellence a refreshing world away from the tight market focus of Hong Kong’s auction houses.

Sahid Jaya Hotel Room 212 (2009) by Agan Harahap. Digital image on Hahnamuehle paper, 100cm x 145cm. Courtesy of North Art Space, Jakarta, Indonesia.

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The Candy Persuasion (2008) by Sigit Tamtomo. Acrylic on canvas, 150cm x 200cm. Courtesy of Jakarta Art Awards, Indonesia.

Artists Unbound

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m a Hunter (2007) by Tisa Granicia. Slip-cast semi-porcelain glazed with decals, 50cm x 45cm x 30cm (each). Courtesy of the artist, Indonesia.

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Bird Prayers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Ubud Bali (2007) by Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu. Digital print on aluminium, 80cm x 60cm. Courtesy of Biasa Artspace, Bali, Indonesia.

Poetry Liam Fitzpatrick

On Gascoigne Road For Madeleine San Miguel grows warm in the cup, Koels glide above the pool. A red platoon quicksteps Behind the steel mesh and bamboo â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Remote from our tableau Of summer lawn and waterside, Of fading clubhouse, scruffy hedgerow, Domain of Coppertone and dragonfly. We lie outstretched, hold hands In August light, and drink The air so richly freighted With the yet-to-be, and think Of our babies babbling pidgin Beneath the crooked frangipani, Of our home amid monsoon, Coastal highway, China Sea.

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There, behind the Kowloon hills, A nation quickens, gears for power. The cartels swoop and wheel Outside this slender acre. Let them make their futures. Mine is held beneath your skin, Glistening now from raindrops That a sudden cloud brought in.

Youth-in-Asia Ron Schafrick

’m listening to Joon’s story but I can’t stop staring at him, at this change in his appearance: the dark circles under his eyes, the unkempt, unwashed hair, skin that’s red and blotchy. He looks older – years older – than I remember. The situation with his mother hasn’t changed, he says. Not since he came back to Korea a couple of days ago. And it’s not expected to either. Not for the better anyhow. He talks about the plastic collar that keeps her neck in place, the network of wires attached to her body, constantly monitoring and measuring; and of the multiple tubes and hoses, large and small, penetrating holes cut into the base of her neck and the veins of her arms. When he goes into the critical-care unit to see her, he says, hands need to be scrubbed and shoes removed. He has to wear a special gown, mask and slippers. “Do you know?” Joon says. “Do you know she stopped breathing for 20 minutes?” What happened was that his mother was at home alone and in the middle of lunch when she started choking. It was a neighbour, he says, the woman next door, who called 119 when she found her in the hallway, crumpled on the floor and making terrible wheezing-gasping sounds, her face slowly turning blue. “Goet-gae,” he says, making a circle with his fingers the size of a small stone. “That’s all it was. Just a small … how do you say?” 47

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We are in a hospital waiting room in Nowon-gu, in Seoul, sitting on a thick blue wall-to-wall mat because there isn’t any furniture in here. The room is crowded and the air feels close. I’m dying to get out, or at least open a window, but there isn’t one of those either. “Crab,” I tell him, but he frowns, doubtful that it’s the right word. And he’s probably right. There’s probably a more accurate, scientific word to describe the bite-sized miniature crustacean that can be eaten whole – shell, legs, pincers and all – but what it is I’m not sure. “All this because of small crab,” he says. Doctors and nurses dart in and out of the room, calling out names, ushering waiting loved ones down the corridor. I can’t make out what the voices on the PA are saying. With blankets and pillows and flasks of tea marking where people have staked claims, the room reminds me of an emergencyrelief shelter, the kind you see on the news after a natural disaster. Some people sleep; others sit cross-legged, openly staring at us, quietly whispering. “Nway-sah,” Joon murmurs, leaning in, unsure how this translates. “Do you know nway-sah?” It’s a new word for me and I do a mental run-through of vocabulary to try to break it down. Nway: the brain. Sah: the Chinese character for death. It’s how he describes his mother’s present state. “I brought you these,” I say, sliding towards him a plastic bag full of old socks and T-shirts, a ratty old sweatshirt: things I planned to throw out sooner or later. It’s what he asked for on the phone the day after he arrived. Any old clothes I could spare, he said. He hardly had time to pack; just took the first plane out of Vancouver the moment he heard the news. “You know you can stay with me,” I offer, but he waves away the idea. Too far, he tells me. His mother has a sister; he might stay with her, he says and honestly, I’m relieved. I mean, it not like I really know the guy. A pair of doors opposite the waiting room abruptly swing open and what appears to be three generations of a family slowly stream out, wailing and sobbing and holding each other up in a manner that comes as shocking. The waiting room falls dead silent and everyone turns to watch them shuffle down the corridor. “Hyung,” Joon says, an intimate term meaning elder brother. “Thank you for the clothes.” He clutches the bag in his lap like a child who’s just received some long-wished-for gift. “Thank you for coming, Hyung.” 48

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* * * “If-plus-past-plus-would-plus-verb,” is what I’m nattering on about. Like a children’s rhyme, like one of those songs I remember on TV between the cartoons. Conjunction junction, what’s your function? In this case, it’s the formula for the second conditional, the hypothetical situation. “If you had three wishes, what would they be?” That sort of thing. Grammar reduced to a mathematical equation. I like looking at grammar that way. There’s a right answer and a wrong answer. No grey areas. I draw brackets around If + Past, a second set of brackets around Would + Verb. You can switch the clauses around, I’m explaining, but you can’t change the pairings. The “be” verb, though, is different. Its conditional form is “were”, not “was”, even though many people say “was”. None of this is news to Mrs Choi, my private student. She probably learned all this in school decades ago. Still, I figure, it’s good to review, and to kill time. “Your friend okay?” she says, unexpectedly, as she gazes out of the window. We’re in a coffee shop called Aquareum, our usual meeting place. Inside the enormous tank that dominates the centre of the room, brilliantly coloured fish flit back and forth in sudden start-stop movements. I told Mrs Choi all about Joon and his brain-dead mother at our last lesson. What she doesn’t know is that Joon is someone I met online, then hooked up with last summer in Vancouver, on a weekend stopover on my way back to Seoul from a trip home. But that was ages ago, it seems, and it’s April now and I haven’t kept tabs on him since. “Do you know he sleeps at the hospital?” I say, accidentally clanking my pen down on the glass-topped coffee table. “He hasn’t even seen his father yet.” Mrs Choi is of an age at which women are called ajuma. Aunty is what it means, though no one’s aunt in particular. She’s married and has two children. She has shoulder-length black hair done in a wavy kind of perm. She was a stay-at-home mom for years before recently returning to work. Her husband, a salaryman, seems like a non-entity in her life and English, I’m guessing, is more of a hobby than something for which she has any practical need. “Don’t you think that’s strange?” 49

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“But they are divorced, yes?” She clasps a mug of coffee in her hands, absorbing its warmth as if it were a freshly filled urn. “Not strange,” she says, pronouncing it strangey. “In Korea, divorce woman is cut,” and she gives the air in front of her a quick chop. * * * During the next few days I pop by the hospital after work. I take Joon his laundered underwear and socks, rolls of tinfoil-wrapped kimbap from a woman who sells it on the steps of the subway. He tells me how his mother’s entire body is severely bloated (“like balloon”): the result of heart failure when she stopped breathing and the medication being pumped through her non-stop. He spends an hour with her twice a day, once in the morning, once in the late afternoon. He empties the bedpan, then washes her limp body. I don’t ask if these are things he’s expected to do or does voluntarily. “You want to see her?” he asks, as if she were some rare sea creature that has washed up on shore. I might be desperate to leave but I don’t want to do it by taking a gander at her. His mother, I’m sure, wouldn’t want it either. One rainy afternoon he introduces me to his aunt. She gives me a cursory nod then herds us out of that airless waiting room and into a restaurant in a building full of restaurants across the street. We settle on nakji jeongol, but Joon’s aunt wants to know if they have any live octopus. The waitress says that they do, that it can be brought to the table, to which his aunt replies she’d like that very much. When the waitress leaves she asks Joon how he knows me, and on the spot he hatches something about some English conversation club. She gives me the once-over, then moves on to other, more pressing matters: how he’s doing for money, if his father is giving him any, if he plans to continue paying rent in Canada, if he’s going to quit college – things I really shouldn’t be listening to – and so I busy myself by helping the waitress as she sets down side dishes and chopsticks and an enormous pan full of red broth and uncooked vegetables on the gas burner in the centre of the table. She reaches over and turns a knob on the burner, the igniter tick-tick-ticking until a blue flame whooshes to life under the pan. When the table is set I look out of the window and watch the cars slip past on the wet street below. I look at the 50

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canopy of cherry blossoms hanging over the sidewalk, the rain and the wind ushering the fall of the pinkish white petals to the ground, like snow. By the time the live octopus arrives it’s been decided that Joon will stay with his aunt until this whole thing is over – whenever that will be. She takes the pan with the octopus from the waitress’s hands and tells her that she can go now; she’ll do the rest herself, the octopus still twisting and coiling, threatening to slide out and onto the floor if she’s not careful. Its one visible and nearly human-sized eye wildly scans the room. She sets the pan down on the table and says how much she loves fresh octopus. With the cooking scissors she snips off a tentacle that continues to struggle and curl into itself as she tips her head back and sinks the wriggling, worm-like thing into her mouth, chewing it slowly and carefully lest it attach itself to something on the way down. She offers to cut me and Joon a limb, but when we both decline she slices off a few more for herself. She gently eases the rest of the shapeless, writhing mass into the boiling red broth where it slowly goes under, ceasing its struggle, and eventually stops moving. * * * What Would You Do? That’s the name of the free-talking exercise on the second conditional at the end of the chapter. We run through the questions. If an older person got on the bus, what would you do? She’d give up her seat, she says. If you came across a diary belonging to a friend, what would you do? She wouldn’t read it, she claims. If a beggar asked you for change, would you give him some? Yes, she would. If a shopkeeper gave you back too much change, would you keep it? No, she wouldn’t, she says. Her answers are all predictable and don’t in any way correspond to what I would do – nor do they lead to any further discussion. And I can’t help but wonder if she’s really this boring or if she’s lying to me, telling me what she thinks are the right answers, both grammatically and morally. “But you,” she says, eyeing me suspiciously. “I think you keep the change. I know you.” And she’s right. I admit it. It’s happened to me before and I’ve kept the change. So shoot me. A small windfall is how I look at it. The last question reads: Make up your own so I throw her the first thing that pops into my head: 51

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“If you were on life support, would you want someone to pull the plug?” “What means ‘pull the plug’?” I pretend-slice my neck. “Oh! Pull the plug!” She mulls it over for a second. “You know ahlaksah?” “Euthanasia.” She looks at me as if I misunderstood the question and starts fingerpoking her electronic dictionary. “How do you say?” She spins the gadget around for me to read. “Yoo...?” I repeat my answer, but the word is like a ball that I’ve thrown, one she can’t seem to catch. “Think of it this way,” I say, and I write Youth in Asia in her notebook, which is exactly what I used to think people were saying the first time I heard it. She practises it a few times, rolling the word on her tongue, satisfied to have learned something she might actually say. “How about you?” she says, which throws me off for a second. How bout chew? is the way she says it. “Do you want youth-in-Asia?” “Oh,” I say, and think about Joon and wonder what he’s doing right now, if at this moment he’s in green scrubs and mask, swabbing clean his mother’s body with a damp sponge, and a wave of guilt washes over me when I realise I can’t give him what he wants or needs. “I think you want youth-in-Asia,” she says, grinning deviously. “I know you.” And I think she would be right. * * * It’s late May – nearly a month since Joon arrived – and now that he’s staying at his aunt’s there is no reason for me to visit the hospital as often to keep him company or to take him his laundry. I don’t call him nearly as much as I think I should. But one Saturday morning my hand-phone sings a cheery tune and his name starts blinking on the display. He tells me he wants to go shopping for summer clothes and asks me to come along. When I meet him outside the subway station he looks much better since I saw him last: well rested, his hair newly cut and styled; dried and cracked skin-coloured cream dots his face. We go to Myeong-dong, where the weekend crowds make it difficult to move. The sun beats down on our heads, and we shuffle along as though 52

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being carried by a strong current with little control over our speed and direction. When I look at Joon walking ahead of me – one black head of hair in a crowd of black hair – it hits me how alone he is here, in the country that he left some years ago, the connections to the past growing thin and irrelevant. I discover I don’t like Joon’s taste in clothes. He prefers what I hear is called hip-hop style and I can see I’m now at an age where some clothes might be considered too young for me. Joon has put on an act today: that of someone trying too hard to forget something. He’s too jovial, too happy, annoyingly so. He spends money easily (whose money he’s blowing, I don’t know), snatching anything that grabs his attention: an ordinary truck driver’s cap that for some reason has become fashionable and expensive, a gaudy belt, enormously baggy jeans, and cargo pants weighed down with multiple pockets, drawstrings, zippers and snaps. He picks up shorts, sneakers. T-shirts pile up in my arms like dirty laundry. “Which one is better?” he asks, holding up two brightly coloured T-shirts splattered with Konglish: Kay Slay You Know The Funny-Style Shit Is Go, says one. Clryde West Coster ’49, says the other. “The white one or the blue one?” I shrug. He shrugs and chucks both into my arms. “Keeping busy,” he says at lunch when I ask him what he’s been up to lately. “Meeting friends.” Somehow I doubt it. His mood is different now. Like someone exhausted from putting on a long performance, the strain and anxiety have flowed back to him. I’m spooning back heaps of rice and chigae when he tells me how deeply worried he is. There’s the apartment he’s still renting in Vancouver, his studies left incomplete, his English that he feels is slipping, and then there are the mounting hospital bills. Ten grand U.S. a month, he says, to keep her on life support. I clunk the spoon back down in its bowl. “What if this goes on for years, Hyung?” he asks. What if he needs to remain in Korea permanently? The education that he’d hoped for, the future that he had planned, he says, would be gone. I don’t know what to say that doesn’t sound like a cliché. “It’ll be okay,” I want to say. “It’ll all work out.” But the words stick in my throat somehow, and I’m not sure I even believe them. 53

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That night, back at home, I pull out a photo album after dinner and thumb through snapshots of Vancouver’s English Bay (behind us a glowing sunset, rolling clouds, moored cargo vessels in silhouette), Granville Island (the two of us having dinner on an outdoor patio, wine glasses tipped together). There’s a picture of us in his apartment, our arms slung around each other, smiles beaming, and another of a rocky shore, waves smashing, our eyes squinting into the sun. He looks better here, I think, in these photos, not the train wreck he’s become, though he wasn’t exactly boyfriend material to begin with either. A carefree weekend was all it was meant to be. A story I could later tell, even embellish a little. No strings. I didn’t expect to see him again. “Ever feel homesick?” I remember asking on the drive back from the Sunshine Coast in the little import we rented. He was quiet, staring out of the passenger window at the rocky shore, coniferous trees blurring past. “Not really.” This was home to him now, he said, where he could be free of having to fabricate elaborate lies just to keep people from guessing and of pretending he was someone he was not. The connections he had to the past – friends from school, old acquaintances – he had allowed them to drift away. He said little else in the car, making it clear that something was on his mind, that the weekend meant a whole lot more to him than it did to me. I can look no further. I snap the album shut and shove it under the bed, out of sight. And out of nowhere, I suddenly find myself angry with a woman I’ve never even met. “Just hurry up and die, will you?” I say out loud. “Get it over with already.” * * * Mid-July: the rainy season. For weeks now it’s been pouring nearly every day. Hours of torrential downpours. Flooding has been reported in the countryside, and the Han River, now a murky brown, is overflowing. The lower level of the Panpo Bridge has been blocked off and there are even some subway stations on the Number Seven Line that have been closed because of flooding. On the news I watch water cascading down the steps of a station in a way that is both shocking and beautiful. 54

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The air conditioner that stands in the corner of our usual coffee shop is busted today and a fan is running instead, rotating its head from side to side, tsk-tsking how hot and humid it is. My iced coffee beads with sweat; ring-shaped puddles pool on the tabletop. This afternoon Mrs Choi and I are going over family vocab and the pages in our textbooks curl from the humidity. The words are reasonably simple and straightforward, not like in Korean, which is infinitely more complex and where everything depends on which side of the family you’re on and one’s age and gender relative to another. She needs to brush up on words like mother-in-law and sister-in-law, niece and nephew, stepmother and stepbrother. And a question pops up. It’s always the same one: why are the English words for grandmother and grandfather, aunt and uncle the same on both sides of the family? I’ve heard this question so often now that it bewilders me too. “I think in USA, family not important like in Korea,” Mrs Choi offers by way of explanation – USA being the catchphrase that encapsulates the entire West. And by this I know she’s talking about traditional Korean values: children who live at home until married, eldest sons who financially support their parents, women who live with their in-laws under one roof. Values and traditions that are also quickly becoming outdated. “I think it’s because we consider both sides of the family equally important,” I counter, but she doesn’t buy it. And I’m not sure if I buy it either. Even as I say it, I can feel the falseness of it in my voice. There must be another explanation, but what it is I’m not sure. “I think white countries’ people are little bit selfish,” she suggests, holding thumb and forefinger closely together. “Specially young people,” she adds, and by this I’m not sure if I’m included in that category. “But what about my friend?” I ask. “Where’s his family in all this?” “That’s divorce,” she says, turning back to her textbook to fill in the blanks of the model family tree with the appropriate terminology, the ink bleeding into the damp page. “That’s not same.” * * * We haven’t talked on the phone for weeks. But Joon’s story is still playing in the back of my mind, like a news story of some calamitous natural disaster 55

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that keeps being broadcast, even after I’ve made my donation to charity, done my good deed. Now I just wish the whole thing would go away. “Did I tell you about a friend of mine whose mother – ” “You told me twice already,” Lawrence, another teacher at school, says one day in the instructors’ room. And yet I don’t recall having brought it up before, and I also don’t know why I keep doing so, mentioning Joon whenever there’s a lull in conversation, when I suddenly remember him, like something that remains forever on a to-do list. But what exactly I’m supposed to do I’m not sure. “How well do you know this guy?” Lawrence asks. “Are you two tight?” His questions take me aback, and my answer comes out in a peep. “Not very.” Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about her, this woman who’s caused so much trouble. I see Joon sitting on the edge of her bed, wishing all of this were over, looking not at her but at the battery of machines that keeps her alive, contemplating how to shut it all down. I wonder if it really is as simple as “pulling the plug” or “flipping a switch”. Somehow I doubt it. I imagine locks on the outlets, buttons and dials behind break-proof glass, alarms and emergency back-up systems. I picture him looking for another method: wrapping a rubber strap around an arm, flicking the skin, looking for a vein, then taking a syringe filled with something lethal – pentobarbital or whatever it is they use on dogs and cats – jabbing it into the arm, then slowly pressing down on the plunger. If I could promise you no one would know, would you do it? If I could offer you this gift, would you accept it? But then again, maybe there’s an even simpler method, an alternative scenario: entering the room with unwashed hands, a slight fever, the cautionary tickle in the throat, and removing the sterilised gloves, mask and cap. I see him brushing away the hair from her forehead, kissing her there, and breathing into her ear, “I’m sorry.” My mind switches focus. I concentrate on one of the contraptions next to the bed, the electrocardiograph, its bouncing green ball of light jumping in step with her heart rate, leaving a shadow of green in its trail, the machine emitting a steady beep-beep-beep. I focus on the monitor, the rhythmic peaks and valleys of the green ball of light. I will this light to slow down, the signal to become erratic, the gaps irregular, eventually slowing down altogether 56

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until it finally becomes a solid unbroken green line, the sound from the machine a steady, uninterrupted dial tone. * * * When he does call and I see his name blinking on the phone, I feel as if something has reached up and wrapped its tentacle around me. The phone beeps and buzzes, but before he has a chance to hang up I decide to answer. He says he wants to get drunk tonight. I find this surprising because Joon doesn’t really drink, but two hours later we meet in Shinchon, in my neck of the woods. It’s a hot and sticky August night and we wander down crowded street after street jammed with bars, karaoke rooms and smoky pork barbecue restaurants: a nightly carnival of pumping music and blinking neon. A clutch of children with butterfly nets scoots past along the edges of the crowd; a boy with his hands loosely clasped tags behind. Inside the cage of his interlaced fingers is a giant cicada – maemi in Korean, named after its summer song:

maem maem maem maem maem maem meeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Five years of its life are spent in semi-hibernation burrowed underground, after which it scales a tree to spend seven days and nights under a leafy bough singing its one and only tune before it dies. I don’t know how the boy can hold that vile thing. He spots me looking at him and just to repulse the foreigner, briefly thrusts his clasped hands in my face then darts off again, disappearing behind the butterfly nets poking through the crowd. Joon and I settle on a dak-kalbi-jip, where we grab a table that’s an upturned oil drum with a hotplate in the middle, and order soju with our food. Moments later, large roughly hewn pieces of chicken and vegetables 57

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arrive on a platter. The young waiter slides the pile onto the burner, where the pink pieces of meat, skin and bone sizzle in the pan. We crack open the cold sweaty bottle of soju and clink glasses. The place is packed, and nearly everyone looks about 20 years old. I crane my neck and realise I’m probably the oldest person in the room. It’s loud and smoky and crowded here: a festive atmosphere that I like. I watch one of the waiters at the front doors, clapping his hands together and calling out to the crowd that passes by like a thick and slow-moving river: “Very cheap! Very delicious! You won’t regret it!” he promises, again and again. “Hurry up and come inside!” Joon talks about the change in his mother: the disappearing muscle tissue, skin now hanging limp off her arms; there’s her jowly neck, her sunken eyes, cheekbones that stick out prominently. He must be exhausted now, I think, and when I look at him, I can plainly see it there: the clothes may be new but his face looks weathered. “She has some kind of virus,” Joon shouts above the music. “They don’t know how she got it.” It’s hard for him to explain in English the storm that’s brewing inside her body, and both of us know that I wouldn’t understand it in Korean. “Her lungs are filling up,” he says. “She’s slowly drowning.” At last, I think. “But her body is struggling,” he shouts. “Her body’s trying hard to fight it.” I raise my glass to my lips and shoot back its clear liquid, feeling its icy poison burn as it slowly slides down my throat. “And the insurance company,” he adds, “doesn’t want to pay.” There are discrepancies in her medical records, items not covered in the policy, fine print unread. “Who’s going to pay for all of this?” he wants to know. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what comfort I can provide. I look around the restaurant and it amazes me how much talking and laughing is going on. What are all these people talking about? What on Earth can they possibly have to say? And I find myself envying them. If I could switch tables I would do so in an instant. If you were in this situation, I imagine asking Mrs Choi, would you switch tables? I’m guessing that doing so wouldn’t even be difficult or awkward: where are you from? America? Wah! You speak Korean so good. How long you in Korea? You like Korean song? Come with us to noraebang! Cheers! To long and happy life! When a waitress comes 58

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around to ask us if everything is all right with the food, it occurs to me that Joon and I look exactly like a couple who have just broken up. We finish our food and drinks, hail a cab and make a beeline for Itaewon, the part of town full of prostitutes, American servicemen, western English teachers, Nigerian and Nepalese migrant workers, love hotels, and clubs and bars, straight and gay. When we reach Homo Hill, he goes his own way. I know what he’s after, and that’s fine. It would spare me the introductions, the embarrassing explanations. That’s him? That’s the one? I can hear people saying. I thought you said he was good-looking. It’s nearly four when I stagger back down the hill with Lawrence, who has also managed not to pick anyone up tonight. We’re hankering for ohdaeng and a cup of steaming broth from a street vendor when he sees someone leaning against a storefront that’s been shuttered closed, vomiting onto the street. “Ba-bo,” Lawrence says, the Korean equivalent of loser or idiot. But when I see that it’s Joon, I tell Lawrence to wait. I dash across the street and start clapping Joon on the back. “Hyung,” he says, plunking himself down on the ground, next to the mess he’s made. He wipes his mouth on his sleeve. He looks awful. There’s a dark stain on his T-shirt, the cap he bought in Myeong-dong is gone, and his hair is matted down and in disarray. He looks like some pathetic drunk and it shames me to think that I ever spent an intimate moment with him. I feel something like anger welling inside me, but I’m not sure if this anger is directed at him or at me, and I almost start to cry. You stupid asshole, I think, and I want to kick him into standing. Instead, I shout, “Get up!” “Oneul oma mot bawsah,” he says. I didn’t see my mother today, is what it means, and he starts to bawl. I pick him up by the armpits and brush the dirt off him as if he were some clumsy child. I ask him if he wants to stay at my place tonight, but he refuses. He has to go home, back to his aunt’s and, truth be told, I’m glad. I don’t want to have to take care of him and wipe up the puke and tiptoe around the house all day while he sleeps off his hangover. There are things I want to do tomorrow and babysitting isn’t one of them. And for some reason I think of Mrs Choi. Would she think I’m being selfish? What would she do in this situation? “Careful! Careful!” I say when he pulls out a fistful of crumpled bills, assuring me he has enough money for a ride home. “You’re going to lose it all.” 59

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I flag down a cab and stuff him in it. Then he’s gone, disappearing into the slipstream of red and white lights hightailing by. “Friend?” Lawrence asks as we make our way back down the street. There’s a smirk on his face, a smugness in his voice that I don’t like. “Just someone I know.” * * * I’ve started a new habit: I don’t return his phone calls when I see that I’ve missed them. “Don’t you want to take that?” the young Korean guy says to me when my hand-phone starts trilling its melody one night. He’s someone else I met online, 22 years old, doing his military service. He’s come to Seoul for some R&R. We’re still on the couch, drinking beer when it begins to ring. I look at the phone sitting on the end table, buzzing and flashing like some insect that’s come to life, and see that it’s Joon. “No, it’s okay,” I say. “It’s no one important.” The next time it happens I’m on the subway. I put the phone back in my pocket and press down on it, trying to make it as quiet as possible, but the tinny ringtone goes on and on and passengers turn their heads, wondering whose phone it is and why no one is answering. This is stupid, I think. I can’t run away. I decide to call him back as soon as I’m home, as soon as I finish dinner, as soon as this television show is over, after this commercial. But then I decide just to wait. I resolve to answer it the next time he calls. “Your friend okay?” Mrs Choi asks one sunny afternoon late in October. “He’s good,” I say, a little too quickly, a little too cheerful, suddenly realising how long it’s been since we last talked, and that in fact I have no idea how he’s doing. That night I lie in bed picturing a solid green line. I listen to the steady beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Days later, a number I don’t recognise flashes across the screen of my buzzing phone. I know it’s him. He’s resorted to the old trick of using another number. I answer, knowing that doing so will also betray me. “Hyung,” he says. “Where have you been?” 60

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“I’m sorry, I – ” I try to string together some kind of excuse, but he interrupts. “Hyung – ” * * * The entire basement floor of the hospital has been designed with death in mind: hallway after hallway of large semi-private rooms, like oversized office cubicles for the families of the dead to mourn, each bearing a number. When I find the right cubicle I discover there is no casket. Only her portrait, set on something like an altar: what appears to be a poor reproduction of the photograph on her national ID card, photocopied and enlarged and set in a black frame with two black ribbons encircling the top corners. It’s the first time I’ve seen what his mother looked like. A middle-aged woman. Wavy black hair, shoulder-length. Nondescript. It means nothing to me. It could be a photograph of anyone, any ajuma, a woman who died twice, once of asphyxiation, a second time by drowning. Sticks of incense slowly burn next to the photo. There are oranges and apples stacked in pyramids; a few more, sliced in half, sit on plates. There’s a bowl of rice, chopsticks jabbed straight in, and another of soup: offerings to the hungry soul. I slip off my shoes, kneel and bend towards the portrait, my head and hands touching the floor. I know my thoughts should somehow go out to this woman, that at this moment I should make a silent prayer, but the only words that come to mind are these: At last! Joon looks exactly as he did the first day I met him in the hospital. His hair mussed, skin broken out, dark bags under his eyes. He’s wearing a black suit, but it’s deeply wrinkled and one side of his collar hangs awkwardly over the top of his jacket. I imagine he spent the night here in this room, lying beneath his mother’s portrait. He introduces me to an aunt and uncle who’ve driven in from Ansan, just south of the city. He uses the word e-mo in introducing her and that’s when I understand that she is his mother’s sister. When I bow to the other aunt, the one who took us out for octopus, I understand that she’s his gomo, his father’s sister, and for some reason it feels as though I’ve uncovered a family secret by learning of this unsevered tie to his father’s family. 61

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We sit on the floor opposite the shrine. In the corner of the room is a rice cooker and a gas burner on which a pot of yookgaejang is simmering. There’s an opened case of soju and several plastic containers of kimchi and other side dishes. A low wooden table is in the centre of the room, and chopsticks, spoons and soju glasses are laid out. The two aunts dish out bowls of rice and soup, serving me first, as if I were some important guest or the oldest member of this family. And I think: Is this it? Isn’t anyone else coming? Where’s the neighbour who called the ambulance? Where’s his father? His friends? There’s another funeral going on down the hall and the loud and dramatic wailing makes it difficult to eat. Our table falls awkwardly quiet. Seizing the opportunity to break the silence, the uncle splays three fingers and explains that in Korea there are three days of mourning before the funeral. But not in this case, he says. It’s been nearly a year of mourning; everyone has already said goodbye. She was a private woman, his wife adds. She had few friends, kept to herself. “E-hohn,” Joon’s gomo says, too loudly. Divorced. As if this single word were the real explanation for everything that’s gone wrong. All of this is said as much for my benefit as it is for theirs, as if Joon weren’t even here. He just isn’t saying anything. I listen to them talking, making sense of it all: “She did everything for Joon Yong.” “She lived for him.” “Sent him money when he was in Canada.” “He was her only friend, really.” “He was all she ever had.” * * * At the end of the meal the dishes are cleared, the portrait is taken down and the fruit is packed away. A gaunt old man dressed in an oversized security guard’s uniform leads us down the corridor to a large room, an entire wall of which is covered with small steel doors. Taking a key from a loop on his belt, the man unlocks one of the doors and slides out a casket, a plain wooden box. I’m shaking for some reason and picture myself accidentally dropping my end, the wood splintering open, and catching sight of a black curl of 62

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hair, a grey patch of skin. But the casket is lighter than I expect, and Joon, his uncle, the guard and I carry the box through another door and into an adjacent underground garage, easing it into the back of an ambulance that is waiting for us, its engine idling, its back doors wide open. I ride up front, alongside Joon and the driver, and an hour later we’re at the crematorium, an immense granite slab of a building in the middle of a sprawling cemetery. A waiting attendant outside the main doors helps us load the casket onto a skeletal steel contraption with wheels and carts her up a ramp, leading the way. Inside, the place is a cavernous hall, all marble and glass, and a lot like a big, bustling airport; it’s crowded and noisy, and we have to check in at the front desk, documents need to be handed over, monies paid. On the flat-screen monitors hanging everywhere is something like a departure schedule for the dead: a long column of names, the window from which the cremation can be viewed, and the time remaining until complete. When we’re told which wing to head to, we wheel the casket down to the far end of the hall, where we queue behind a long line of other families, other wooden boxes, like passengers all bound for the same destination, all carrying the same luggage. Most of the women here are decked out in white mourning gowns; the men in dark suits, black-and-white-striped armbands, and tall dun-coloured hats like chefs’ caps – nothing traditional like that for our party. The place is buzzing with the sound of people talking and laughing, wailing and sobbing. On the PA the same echoey announcement keeps ringing out, something about the parking garage. The five of us hardly speak, and the hours drift by before we reach the head of the queue and a pair of large steel doors in front of us swings open, hitting me with a smoky, gritty wave of heat and the oceanic roar of the ovens inside. Two men in blue coveralls and surgical masks step forward, one of whom silently wheels the casket away; the other holds up four gloved and soot-stained fingers, indicating which oven he’s taking her to, and shuts the heavy doors behind him. We hurry around the corner to the viewing gallery, to the fourth window, past other weeping families and tiny children running and playing between rows of plastic chairs and potted plants, and through the large plate-glass we watch the men steer the casket up to the oven. The steel doors are opened and the casket is slid in. It’s when the doors close shut that Joon crumples and slides down the wall and onto the floor. 63

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There are no prayers, no eulogy, no final blessing, nothing resembling ceremony or decorum. Everything just happens, one thing after the other. And I worry that I won’t be able to cry, that I may appear cold-hearted and unable to play the role that’s expected of me. On a monitor above the window the word Ready, lit in green, changes to Cremating, in red, and a timer slowly starts counting down two hours’ worth of seconds until the cremation is complete. At the top of the screen is the name of Joon’s mother, in red, the colour in which the names of the dead are written, and that’s when it hits me that until now I never even knew her name. I don’t want to say what it is. At a neighbouring window a family gathers. Two men in black suits and funereal hats hold up a woman overcome with grief as they watch a set of oven doors open and the men in the blue uniforms slide out a human-sized tray, on top of which lies a heap of grey ash and the still-intact femur and tibia. I put my hand to my mouth and watch one of the men tap the bones with a trowel, instantly turning them into ash. * * * For the next two hours we sit outside at a plastic patio table and wait for the body to finish burning. Just me and Joon, like two strangers who have somehow managed to cross paths. The others are in the restaurant, as if we’ve silently agreed to sit at adults’ and kids’ tables. The two of us don’t say much. We’re drinking soju, and Joon is holding his glass as if it were a face and stares into it. None of this, I imagine, would have happened if she’d chewed her food more carefully, if she’d eaten something else. If I’d never even met Joon. Yet I can’t imagine any of this not happening. All of this seems predetermined somehow, destined. The crisp November wind passes through my suit. I swig back the soju, feeling it warmly coursing inside me. Wisps of breath curl around my mouth, then vanish. I wallow in this feeling of numbness, the gentle comfort the liquor provides, like a sweet medicine or an intimate friend, and let it carry me, as though floating on a river. I look at the hills of the vast cemetery that encircles this place, at the hundreds, maybe thousands, of graves dug into the terraced slopes, each marked by a rise in the earth, as is the Korean way, and an elaborately carved gravestone, like a small oriental obelisk. 64

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“Do you know?” Joon says to me now, his English halting and confused. “I’m so very, very thank you to you, Hyung.” He takes my hand in both of his and squeezes it, smothers it. “Do you know, Hyung? Do you know how important you are to me?” He looks at me, but I look down, at the pebbles and flagstones at our feet, a solitary ant zigzagging in the direction of my shoe. “Thank you for all you done for me, Hyung,” he says. This is where the story should end, but it doesn’t. This is something I can no longer walk away from. His words are suffocating, like something tightening around my neck, slowly pulling me to the ocean floor, the water teeming with marine life, the shiny, ripply surface high above. This is a responsibility I’m now to carry, a burden I’m to bear. We are like family now – a marriage of sorts, tied together, bound. “Do you know how much you mean to me, Hyung?” he says. “It’s okay. Don’t cry.”

ASIA LITERARY REVIEW

HEAT Literary Journal. The Persistent Rabbit. Slovenian poet Tomaž Šalamun, Argentinian novelist César Aira, Barry Hill on Ezra Pound and the Orient, John Bryson in Panama, Priya Basil in Berlin. Two Mapuche poets from Chile. Brendan Ryan on the Ash Wednesday bushfires. Fiction by Mireille Juchau, Michelle Moo, Barbara Brooks. Poems by ~ I I.O., Middleton, Leach, White, Gibian, Licari. Guan Wei’s Longevity for Beginners.

HEAT is Australia’s only international literary journal, received enthusiastically by readers, and applauded in the press for the quality of its writing and its outstanding design. As both a magazine and a book, HEAT is designed to travel, across academic boundaries, across literary categories, across languages and cultures. It offers variety in a single volume, poetry and fiction, essays and reviews, art and photography. HEAT is published three times a year. Subscriptions and contributor information are available at www.giramondopublishing.com/heat

Giramondo Publishing www.giramondopublishing.com heat@giramondopublishing.com 66

Interview: Jonathan Watts

Interview: Jonathan Watts James Kidd

onathan Watts begins the afterword to his first book, When a Billion Chinese Jump, with an epigram: 1949: Only socialism could save China 1979: Only capitalism could save China 1989: Only China could save socialism 2009: Only China could save capitalism

This witticism, popular in Beijing after the financial crash of 2008, provides a rare moment of levity in Watts’ comprehensive, illuminating but sobering environmental portrait of China in the first years of the 21st century. Having travelled the length and breadth of the country and talked to scientists, environmental campaigners and Chinese workers in a variety of jobs, Watts paints a bleak picture of China’s future: one of exhausted 67

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resources, rampant consumption, rising consumerism and ever-intensifying industrialisation. Were Watts to update the quip, it might read: 2010: Only the environment can save China 2010: Only China can save the environment

But Watts is too rational and realistic to believe the fate of the planet rests with China alone. An award-winning journalist and Asian environmental correspondent for The Guardian, he knows the crisis is global and the cause is two centuries of industrialisation that began in his homeland, Britain. China is simply the tip of a rapidly melting iceberg. The problem is the magnitude of the tip: for example, whereas Britain has five urban centres of more than a million people, China now has 120. “Economic development has always been unsustainable,” Watts says. “China is really the culmination of 200 years of carbon-fuelled, capitaldriven economic development. When it was Britain two centuries ago it was one tiny, unsustainable country pillaging the resources of the world. As more countries join that unsustainable model, you approach a law of diminishing returns. When the country is the size of China, you really do reach a tipping point.” During two lengthy conversations from his home in Beijing, Watts expands on the crucial relationships between China and the environment and China and the West. Having spent almost 15 years living and reporting on the continent, he is aware that the range of environmental issues across all Asia is breathtaking, shaped by confluences of religion, culture, history and geography. And as Watts shows, attitudes can vary wildly within a nation and across borders. Compare the cases of North and South Korea. Watts argues that enforced deindustrialisation in the North has inevitably lessened carbon emissions. But a report by the UN and North Korea’s coordinating council for the environment predicts that the country’s use of coal will rise five-fold in the next decade. And, Watts says, “they have wrecked a lot of their ecology – especially their trees – because they have been so short of resources in their recent history”. South Korea, by contrast, is praised for trying to reinvent itself as a low-carbon economy: the Renewable Portfolio Standard bill set a target of 68

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10 per cent clean energy generation by 2022. At the same time, it remains dependent on oil imports and carbon. Watts also mentions President Lee Myung-bak’s plan, announced last November, to increase supplies of fresh water with what Watts describes as a river “restoration” scheme. The president argues the US$19.68 billion project will clean up the country’s four major rivers, improve the quality of the water and regenerate underdeveloped rural areas. Conservation groups have expressed grave concerns about the possible impact on local ecosystems: the scheme not only requires the building of 16 new dams, but concrete to be poured along riverbanks. Other critics fear the development of the riverbanks for “eco-homes” will require the removal of green belt outside Seoul. Japan’s green movement has been shaped by a cultural, social and economic desire to maximise resources. “The Japanese are very skilled at using small spaces and scant resources,” Watts says. While their energy efficiency and environmental awareness are generally impressive, there are absurd exceptions: Japan’s love affair with superfluous technology such as the mobile melon cooler, for instance, to keep your fruit cool on the journey home from the supermarket. Watts, born in 1967, grew up in London. His first encounter with China (and Asia) came as a boy. Watts was unable to grasp the scale of the country and the size of its population, so an adult offered the illustration that would give his book its title: “If everyone in China jumps at exactly the same time, it will shake the Earth off its axis and kill us all.” A terrified young Watts added the hope that China’s citizens would not leap simultaneously to his list of night-time prayers. “It was,” he remembers now, “the first time I can remember coming to grips with China – its size in relation to the rest of the world.” Educated at Manchester University (where he studied English Literature) and London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (Area Studies), Watts moved to Japan to teach English in 1990. After stints in Kobe and Osaka he returned to London three years later and trained as a journalist. In 1994 he began his career as an assistant to the London correspondent of the Hokkaido Shimbun. In 1996 he moved to Tokyo and worked as a freelance reporter for The Guardian, The Observer, the South China Morning Post, The Daily Yomiuri and The Asahi Shimbun. Watts, who speaks Japanese, primarily wrote stories about business, finance and culture: “Japan as the future through technology. 69

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Japan as the world’s second-biggest economic power. Japan’s lost decade and its moribund economy.” It was during that period that Watts became aware of China’s increasing economic and political influence. “Japan is obsessed with China – it’s next door, it’s frightening, but also very similar. There were far more stories about China in the Japanese media than in Britain.” Watts was convinced China was going to be the big story of the early 21st century. In 2003, Watts moved to Beijing as The Guardian’s East Asia correspondent. The headlines trumpeted China’s economic miracle, but Watts found himself increasingly absorbed by the impact that industrial development was having on the environment. He estimates that in Japan he wrote an environmental story once every two months; in China it was closer to once a week. “The environment was clearly a factor in so many other issues – water shortages, protests about chemical plants, smog above Beijing. You just couldn’t ignore it.” The signs of conspicuous pollution made an immediate impression: a keen runner, Watts found himself wheezing after a short jog; a father, he was alarmed when his two daughters were not allowed outside during breaks at their Beijing school. It was China that taught him to fear for the future of the planet. Watts had found a cause, but quickly learned that unearthing stories in China required different journalistic skills than in Japan. “I often make the comparison in terms of footwear,” he says. “A Japan story is a shiny-shoe story. You walk through the corridors of power to get your information. You can get good access at a fairly high level to officials and policy makers.” China, by contrast, needs “muddy boots”. “You often have to go out into unusual and undeveloped places and dig around a bit deeper,” says Watts, whose Putonghua skills he describes as “basic”. “I enjoy going to the grassroots, talking to farmers and coal miners.” The need for such research reflects China’s complex relationship with the truth. This is distorted by the size of the country, the gulf between central and local government, corruption and censorship. Local officials and entrepreneurs often see foreign correspondents as bad for business and troublesome politically. Watts needed all his journalistic wits when researching When a Billion Chinese Jump. At one point, he posed as a British dealer in 70

Interview: Jonathan Watts

plastic waste to prove that foreign rubbish was continuing to be dumped in Shijing village, Guangdong, despite a ban by the central government. “You have to use a degree of subterfuge,” Watts explains. “China is actually one of the safer countries for a foreign correspondent. There is an unusual number of obstacles in your way, but they are relatively minor in terms of danger.” He is aware, however, that his presence could jeopardise people he talks to. Watts mentions his reporting on the deaths of 166 miners in a gas explosion at the Chenjiashan mine in Miaowan, Shaanxi, in 2004. Rumours that he was talking to some of the bereaved families about alleged breaches in safety procedures alerted public security officers, who harassed miners’ relatives. “A foreign journalist has a ring of fire around him,” says Watts. “While it protects you, it can burn your sources.” When a Billion Chinese Jump takes the form of a journey, its description winding between first-person narration and broader environmental analysis. It begins in southwest China, in the quasi-mythical mountain idyll of ShangriLa and ends in territory with similarly mythical references: Xanadu in Inner Mongolia. In between, he says, “There are a lot of places you wouldn’t want to go.” Although the journey is entirely real, Watts invests it with allegorical significance. “I tried to follow the progress of where I think humanity has been going, starting with concepts of paradise, ancient nature-worshipping beliefs and political philosophies.” The example of the forests of Yunnan is used to portray the planet as it looked before the Industrial Revolution. “Yunnan is exceptional now, but once a lot of the world used to be like that.” Watts found that large areas of the province remain an ecologist’s dream: 87 per cent of all fungi found in China grows in Yunnan; it also contains 72 per cent of the country’s endangered species. Nevertheless, with development and tourism encouraging man to encroach farther onto previously unspoiled land, Yunnan’s forest cover has halved in 60 years, glaciers are melting and grasslands are being over-farmed for the lucrative mushroom trade. One chapter describes his own “wake-up call”: the futile search for the baiji, the endangered Yangtze dolphin once worshipped as a river goddess. There were an estimated 6,000 baiji in the Yangtze in the 1950s. By 1984, there were 400. Since then, Watts notes, their decline has followed an almost perfect inverse relationship to China’s economic rise. The baiji is now missing, 71

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presumed extinct, the last confirmed sighting having been in 2002. Watts argues that the baiji’s habitat was eroded by two broad trends: economic livelihoods taking precedence over ecology; and the gradual development of the Yangtze delta which eroded the dolphin’s environment. It’s all downhill from here, as Watts guides the reader on a gradual descent into hell. “There is globalisation in Guangdong, urbanisation in Shanghai, pollution in Jiangsu and Zhejiang and industrialisation in Chongqing,” he writes. “The northwest of China is probably suffering more than anywhere. Some people describe it as the Africa of China. It has always been dry, but the water shortages and the blasted earth are really felt.” For Watts, the exploitation of China’s landscape and resources can be traced to Mao Zedong’s war on nature, as he built dams, roads and railways through seemingly impossible terrain. “Mao’s view was shaped by a Marxist ideology that the world could be controlled through science and personal will; 1958 represents one of the worst assaults on nature in modern times. The repercussions for humans were appalling – terrible famines,” says Watts. This narrative of seemingly limitless environmental exploitation can be followed through Deng Xiaoping’s decree that China should become rich quickly all the way to its modern apotheosis under Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao. The irony of Wen’s being a geologist and Hu a hydro-engineer is not lost on Watts, who nicknames them Premier Earth and President Water respectively. This is not the only irony surrounding China’s economic growth. “I hope I also show the benefits humanity has had – for example, in fighting poverty,” he says. China’s world standing has also been transfigured. Watts sympathises with officials who become enraged when Western governments lecture China about its poor environmental record. Not only are developed Western countries among the worst abusers of natural resources, they also export much of their waste to Chinese plants, then boast of their impressive records in recycling luxury goods and fighting pollution. The book’s final section and afterword examine China’s attempts to redress the balance – through technology, culture and political will. Can Premier Earth and President Water save the planet? Watts argues that oneparty states have the potential to be effective green-party states. “China does have this history of mass mobilisation – of the people changing their 72

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views quickly and radically. One moment, there is communism and little red books. Twenty years later, everyone is trying to make money in the free market. If there could be a mass green mobilisation, if China could lead the world on the environment, that could be wonderful.” Watts approves of numerous ecological initiatives, some instigated at high levels: for example, Hu Jintao’s Scientific Outlook on Development, which attempts to balance continued economic growth with responsible attitudes towards the environment and social equity. Watts speaks with similar admiration of environmental campaigners. The most famous is Ma Jun, the journalist, author of China’s Water Crisis and director of Beijing’s Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. In 2006, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world for his work in publicising environmental problems. Dalian recently witnessed the worst oil slick in China’s history. Following a pipeline explosion at Dalian Xingang port on July 16, crude oil spread over 166 square miles, endangering marine life, birds and water quality. Such ecological catastrophes as those in Dalian and the Gulf of Mexico may have made Watts increasingly sceptical that science holds the long-terms solutions to our environmental problems. Nor do politicians seem ready to impose the requisite global regulations to limit pollution, carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. “The 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference showed that the world’s leaders are not ready to come to a big accommodation – to find a fair balance between what’s been done in the past and what can happen in the future,” says Watts. With recession biting into economies, he believes most governments are too interested in the green shoots of financial recovery to worry about actual green shoots. For most, the environment is a luxury they cannot afford – nowhere more so than in China. “No politician is going to say to his people, I promise you less tomorrow than you have today,” he says. “China is ramping up consumption. Considered from an economic point of view, that makes total sense. It’s what the Chinese government wants. It’s what every international corporation wants.” Writing When a Billion Chinese Jump made Watts reassess his answers to the question of how we deal with our ecological debt. When he began the book, he imagined the solutions (at least in China) had to address pollution, 73

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climate change and the Communist Party’s lack of transparency. Having examined China from a geographical and historical perspective, he is now convinced the problems are over-consumption and the loss of biodiversity. Given the necessary investment, Watts argues, you can clean the skies over Beijing; however, there is no way to bring back the Yangtze dolphin. No issue has shocked him more profoundly than that of soil erosion. “It sounds boring, but many farmers say the soil is deteriorating and being drained of carbon. More fertiliser is needed to grow crops. The rich, black loam in Heilongjiang is going really fast,” he says. In Gansu and Mongolia, desert areas have spread rapidly – after over-cultivation in the mountains destroyed the trees, and mines, factories and farms drained streams and rivers. Droughts, especially in northern China, are worsening. With everincreasing numbers of people to feed, such erosion of sustainable farm land is “very disturbing on a big scale”, not least because policy makers seem relatively uninterested in it. Fighting this ignorance is essential, Watts says. “There needs to be a reconnection between the economy and the environment. We need to re-value everything, to connect our spending to the finiteness of the world’s resources. The only way round that is to change the concept of more and less – to change values about cars, flying and consumption. That is very difficult.” If Watts sounds pessimistic, for the most part he is. He cites studies that estimate the population of the planet will peak at nine billion people. “We are not quite at seven billion and we are feeling the strain. The next two or three decades are going to be extremely tough. Maybe we will look back on the untrammelled economic growth of the last 30 years with the same sense of horror we have for the Cultural Revolution. How could factory owners have polluted so many rivers? How could Western companies have kept on investing when it was clear it was unsustainable?” Watts pauses. “How could we have been so irresponsible?”

The Silencer G.B. Prabhat

ot until he murdered for the third time did he earn the moniker The Silencer. Until then he thought of himself as merely Raghu. When the media gave him his new identity he was initially filled with contempt for the weak pun. Couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t they think of anything better? Agreed, his method of killing was unusual for Chennai: not many were murdered in public places with a silencer-fitted gun. Most other killings were the crude work of knives, machetes, axes. Then there were strangulations. Deaths in fist fights. The occasional use of the gun, perhaps, but invariably with its loud report. When he featured as The Silencer in every newspaper, when every television channel put out public alerts and ticker tapes started providing frequent but absurdly inaccurate updates on his crimes; when sections of the gossiping Tamil public of Chennai who knew not a word of English referred glibly to The Silencer he started identifying with his new name. Maybe it wasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t, after all, in such terribly cheap taste. Barely a week after the third killing, when the first suspicions arose that there could be a serial killer on the loose, he found himself planning his fourth murder with the same diligence with which he once planned his vocational duties. He searched his mind intensely for any shades of remorse. None. He checked his vengefulness. Unsatiated. The emptiness? Largely unfilled. 75

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On the Thursday following the fourth murder a rare soul had presented a retrospective in The Indian Express, arguing that Raghu’s life’s work should be better recognised: he was the saviour of Indian villages and deserved an honour he had been twice denied. The poor reporter: what would be his argument if he knew about my present occupation? The Silencer thought. The good deeds of his previous life had faded behind the obsessive misdeeds of the new. The Silencer blessed the writer but realised his day had passed. He was already a footnote in the history of goodness that would blur as time drew the page farther away from the eyes of the myopic public. The newspaper article had two photographs, one a file picture that showed him with black hair, clean-shaven chin, eager and shining eyes. The recent other featured greying hair, sunken cheeks, straggly beard and drooping eyelids. The perseverant reporter had tracked him down and arrived at his house with a staff photographer. When Raghu had protested against a photograph the admiring journalist would have none of it. “Sir, not one village. You rehabilitated 150 villages! More important, you established a model of development for sustainable living. Saved hundreds of villagers from dying in inter-clan battles! You have been dealt a bad hand. The situation has to be corrected.” Raghu had made a self-deprecating gesture. If one looked carefully at the eyes in the second photograph, he thought, there was a faint gleam of the animosity that was a dagger in his heart. The day’s notices of The Indian Express, suspended from plastic twine in dozens of neighbouring shops and bearing the headlines of the commendatory column and his recent photograph, fluttered lazily. The notices must have been gazed at a million times by the indigent, aspiring newspaper readers for whom browsing them provided a surrogate reading experience. Yet at his routine stops – the tea shop where he had his daily mid-morning oversweet shot, the dry-cleaner’s and the corner shop from which he bought his favourite yelakki banana – he received not a single stare of acknowledgement or a grin of familiarity from a stranger. There were no hushed exchanges or cessation of buzz on his being sighted. He was a spirit in their midst. All right, a couple of neighbours called out from 76

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within their homes and congratulated him. But they knew him and his work already. At the shop where he regularly bought his milk and bread he looked meaningfully at the billing clerk’s face. The Indian Express notices were on display right under the man’s nose. The clerk charged for the purchases, dutifully returned the change, flashed his customary smile and prepared to serve the next customer. “Looks like you are out of my usual bread,” Raghu ventured compulsively. The clerk looked surprised. “Sir, what is your usual?” The imbecile couldn’t recognise him after years as a neighbourhood customer. Why would he match the face on The Indian Express notice with that of the man standing in front of him? How different it would have been if a famous cricketer had walked in. The headlines extolling Raghu screamed, in giant letters, about his good work, work that redeemed the lives of countless thousands of underprivileged people. “Never mind,” Raghu said. “Sir, can you please tell me what it is, and I can stock it for you next time?” “I have been buying bread here every other day for the last five years and been seeing you too. You mean you don’t know my usual?” “Sorry, sir. Hundreds of customers. Sometimes it’s difficult to recognise everyone. Please tell me what your usual is. I’ll remember to stock it for you.” “It’s black rice,” Raghu replied. “Sir, it’s not a particular favourite. However, I’ll make sure we have one reserved for you. I can even have it sent to your house. My name is Ganesan. What is yours?” Raghu looked meaningfully at him, even suggestively inclining his face towards the newspaper posters. “Never mind,” he said and started walking. “Sir, I can send the bread home if you’d like.” “Never mind.” He walked out. The invincible power of his anonymity. As he passed the door he heard the clerk remark, “The Silencer’s got his fourth one.” “Scary. Who knows who could be next?” a customer responded. 77

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Fair question, admitted The Silencer. Not even the killer knew. His resolve to commit a fifth murder strengthened. * * * The seeds of his murderous instinct were sown in exceptionally good deeds in a remote village outside Coimbatore, beautifully named Kuyili. He first travelled to Coimbatore by the overnight train from Madras in summer 1962. He was a student of sociology and was on a class assignment. His professor had discussed various theories of how people presented themselves. “We are all actors,” he said. “We play different roles at different times and seek the approval of different audiences. So say Erving Goffman and other leading thinkers on the subject.” Students were to travel to various parts of Tamil Nadu, urban and rural, to live with people previously unknown to them and report on the roles they played in their everyday lives. Raghu had chosen a rural setting. A dusty bus took him from Coimbatore railway station to Kuyili, beyond Perur. He had never been to that part of the state. Close to Kuyili he could see rivulets playing hide and seek in the thick foliage on either side of the road. “What’s the water?” he asked the villager sitting next to him. “That’s the river, Noyyal. See the mountains beyond? The Western Ghats? The river flows from some mountain there.” The bus dropped him on the main road. Kuyili was cordoned by blue mountains but was a yellowish-brown patch at a distance, dotted by tiledroofed houses. The Kuyili village headman, an acquaintance of his professor, was expecting him. Raghu was to stay in the headman’s house for the duration of his study. The headman introduced him to his wife, a large woman with betel-stained teeth wearing her sari in the rustic style. She grunted an acknowledgement and tailed her husband. They walked past the central courtyard of the house to an area of haystacks and cows; a stench rose from the fresh cow-dung cakes that had been slapped on the wall. A few servants, busy with their chores, glanced at him curiously before returning to their work. A tiled room whose door opened with a creak stood apart. Holding the door, the headman spat a thin jet of red betel-leaf juice in a perfect parabola. 78

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Raghu watched with fascination and realised later that the headman did that every time he began to speak, which was not very often. “You can stay here,” the headman said, waving with a flourish at the barren room with its cement floor. “Ask if you need anything.” “Yes, ask if you need anything,” his wife said tersely and both were gone. Raghu’s first brush with the village’s water problem wasn’t long coming. He asked to have a bath and the headman’s wife told him to wait near the well. He cursed her for not understanding his euphemism and made his request explicit. “Oh, toilet?” she asked and walked him to another tiled room built at the boundary of the plot. “Here.” She walked away. The stink was overpowering as Raghu approached. He nearly fainted from the fumes when he closed the door. With a shudder down his spine he looked for a tap, a bucket. Nothing. He saw two pits but didn’t have the courage to look down them. “Finished?” the headman’s wife asked when he appeared at the kitchen door. “I don’t know how to use the toilet.” “Oh, I forgot. You come from the city. Wait a minute.” When she returned, a half-naked urchin in a perpetual giggling fit accompanied her. “He’ll take you to the school toilet. That’s the only one with running water.” That convenience was no different but for the small mercies of running water and a bucket. The headman’s wife was waiting for him near the well when he returned. She had good-naturedly organised a bucket of muddy water and half a cake of red Lifebuoy soap. “Here. I suppose you bathe daily. We do only now and then,” she simpered. “This is special for you. This well doesn’t give much. A bucket or two.” That night they gave him a bed sheet to spread on the floor and a coir pillow. There was a power cut and Raghu had to spread the sheet in the dim light of a lantern. He realised later that there was a power cut every other evening and that there were only a few electric bulbs in the village. The kerosene-filled lantern with the now-alive, now-dead flame was the mainstay. 79

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First the heat, radiating through the sheet, woke him frequently and made him check that there was nothing abnormal underneath it. Then the harsh texture of the cement floor tested his skin. He woke next morning to discover it had left a mosaic of craters and welts on the red canvas of his back. It took weeks of vigorous scrubbing after returning to Madras for his skin’s smoothness to return. He asked the headman and his friends, during their nightly gathering, about the River Noyyal he had seen from the bus a couple of days before. “Oh, yes,” one answered, “the rivulets. They run to the neighbouring village. Nallur. About two miles away. They don’t flow here. The elevation seems higher here. The Nallur villagers also don’t permit the water to come this far. We’ve had many quarrels. Now we’ve given up. Lucky fellows. They can still live by agriculture.” For decades Kuyili residents had made a living running bullock-cart services for transporting agricultural produce from neighbouring villages and bringing back supplies from Coimbatore town. An old man with a flowing beard and combed-back, thinning silvery tresses dozed, chin tucked in, in the midst of village debates. Raghu guessed he was about 90. He was known only as Perisu. The Elder. “I have seen water here,” he announced. “In our pond. As a boy. There was so much water in it we used to swim. Have our daily bath. Routinely wash our bottoms. All that is now gone,” he said. “There’s a pond here?” Raghu asked. “Can I see it?” “Not now. There’s no light. Tomorrow I’ll take you,” Perisu volunteered and resumed his pose, looking like a giant bird catching up on sleep. The pond was unkempt, thick parthenium weeds hiding it from view. Under Perisu’s direction the usual retinue of urchins, whistling and dancing, parted the weeds. The bottom of the pond was lined with foliage bearing bright flowers Raghu could not identify. Here and there were black patches of water on which floated polythene bags and scraps of packaging. There was the one well in the village, which had water 100 feet down. It was the only water available for the villagers’ daily needs. A rationing policy was in force, every household being entitled to two bucketfuls a day. Villagers, taking turns, stood guard during the night, although the fear of being lynched usually kept potential water thieves away. 80

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Yet occasionally someone tried. During Raghuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s stay a man was apprehended for trying to steal an extra bucket of water for washing dirty clothes his family had accumulated the previous month. The transgressor was interrogated the next day at the village panchayat, the headman being the sole arbiter. The failed thief was let off with a warning and it struck Raghu then that there appeared to be no police, the nearest, sleepy, station standing at least 25 miles away. Raghu spent part of his stay wondering about the water problem. Born and brought up in Kerala, in substantially aquatic territory, he regarded the dryness as a chronic malady the village had learned to accommodate. Another part was spent trying hard to divine different personae in the villager. At all times, the villagers seemed seized by an indefinable equanimity: no excessive rejoicing about life, no mourning its injustices. As he told them stories of Madras they became a little more inquisitive than usual. The sessions finished, they resumed chewing the neem twig that was their toothbrush. Wives were equally stern with husbands and others in the family, overseeing their eating and eating last. Frequently overcome by panic about his college assignment, Raghu studied them intently for multiple personalities â&#x20AC;&#x201C; and came a cropper. They seemed supremely unmindful of adjusting their personalities to their circumstances. Every morning Raghu had idlis and sambar for breakfast. He did not complain, because the monotony was compensated for by the exquisite quality. The headman celebrated his birthday a week before Raghu left Kuyili. Every household was fully represented. They lined the four sides of the courtyard with banana leaves and placed a vat of water in the centre for guests to wash their hands after a sumptuous, six-course lunch. A luxury, the vat had been sanctioned at a special meeting convened days before. When he sat down to lunch with the villagers, choosing a large banana leaf to counter his clumsiness in handling it as a plate, Raghu realised the magic an affectionate rural hand could impart to turn a meal into a sublime gustatory experience. * * * When it was Raghuâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s turn to present his assignment he surprised the class by going against the mandate. He argued that however hard he searched, 81

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he could find among the villagers no evidence of role playing or pleasing different audiences. The class listened to the heresy in silence, turning to check the professor’s face for signs of disapproval. For the most part it remained inscrutable. However, as Raghu neared the end of his discussion he noticed signs of doubt, even faint signs of approval. “But this goes against the teachings of this course … Goffman, the other thinkers,” the professor said. “I am aware of that, sir,” said Raghu. “I tried hard. The villagers, they are a beautiful people. With all due respect to the theorists and you, sir, such people have never been the subject of the thinkers’ research.” “You may have a point,” the professor conceded. “But for the limited purposes of this course we cannot challenge the established theory, the received wisdom. Though your research is excellent and your reporting serious, I may have to grant you only an average grade.” The teacher’s voice betrayed his dismay at having to treat his brightest student this way, at not having the authority to sanction a violation of the hallowed theories. “I accept that, sir,” said Raghu. “But they are a beautiful people.” He now knew his calling. * * * Having completed his undergraduate degree in sociology Raghu took a master’s in water management. He was the leading student in both subjects, a fact he registered lightly. His burning desire was to bring water to Kuyili, and if that worked to take it to a dozen other villages in the neighbourhood. It took him a surprisingly short time to raise the first 50,000 rupees. Two Madras business corporations, eager to make their name in social services, provided the money, with which he formed a non-governmental organisation to relieve scorched settlements. He named his NGO Eeram. Wetness, compassion. It was a particularly dry summer when he arrived in Kuyili. The village headman, who had been reassured many times by Raghu during his interim visits that he would return with money and expertise to bring them water, treated his appearance with disbelief. Venkat, Raghu’s water-management 82

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classmate, had joined Eeram as its second employee. He did not possess Raghu’s missionary zeal, but was better than Raghu at water-management techniques. The only workforce Eeram had consisted of a few sceptical Kuyili residents who agreed to contribute their labour, limited to weekends, for token wages. They couldn’t abandon their living running bullock carts for what was almost certainly a chimerical pursuit. Raghu and Venkat planned the work during weekdays and it was mostly carried out at weekends. They stayed in the village headman’s outhouse – whose harsh cement floor had turned harsher. Perisu, who was still alive and who still slept with his chin tucked in, accompanied them to the village pond every morning and sat at its edge. He came out of his slumber now and then to shake his head and chortle hoarsely: “Nothing’s going to come. Not water, not a fart.” When Venkat took his first look at the pond he nodded at the carpet-like vegetation, the bright flowers and the black patches. He turned to Raghu, sniffing. “You are right. Covered with water hyacinth. And the stink.” “And water hyacinth usually means sewage. Somehow, from somewhere.” Raghu could now recognise the plants he couldn’t during his first visit. Kuyili was not the culprit. It was Nallur, connected to a country conduit that found its way to the pond. The first task was to shield the pond from sewage. It took about eight weeks to dig 20 feet deep along the perimeter of the pond, locate the seeping point of the sewage and raise a semi-circular bund. In another three weeks the sewage was redirected to the eastern side of the village, where no agriculture would ever be possible because of the rocky terrain. The work meant excitement in Kuyili. Teenagers joined in and the pond was dredged sooner than expected. Then came the difficult part: negotiating with the villagers of Nallur to channel water from their pond, which was always nearly full because it stood in the path of the River Noyyal and gathered run-off from the rains. Water sharing makes every civilisation insecure; Nallur was no different. The rival villagers listened because Raghu was the only read man to stay in their neighbourhood in a long time. “Your water is not threatened,” he explained. “The water will run off to Kuyili’s pond only after your pond is filled.” Nallur relented after many marathon meetings and the first signs of water became evident even before the rains. And after the monsoon, when the full 83

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pond shimmered in the mid-afternoon sun, Perisu, in his usual squatting pose, was agape. “Well, Perisu, what say you now?” asked Raghu. “Luck. What else can one say?” the old man retorted. “Your moustache has greyed, not your impudence,” said Raghu. “Anyway, use the water carefully and don’t quarrel with Nallur.” Perisu nodded happily but his face fell at what Raghu said next. “I know what you are thinking. Never, ever do it. The pond water is not for washing bottoms.” * * * The moment he committed himself to his mission Raghu knew a regular family life would not be his. Every few days, on the pretext of going shopping, he went to the neighbourhood around Coimbatore town hall. The three or four dowdy hotels there had a reputation. He was careful to leave no traces. He circulated among pimps so they wouldn’t remember his face. He spoke little, so that no encounter registered. If word reached Kuyili or other villages his mission would be jeopardised. His work depended more on the esteem he commanded than on the indispensability of water. Pimps led him down dark corridors to fat women in their 40s. On wrought iron cots lay mattresses that spewed through their split seams entrails of thick wads of cotton; on them lay the women, grey-streaked hair of a piece with the mattresses, who expected only to hitch up their saris and dirt-laced petticoats, urge their clients to be done with it and be gone. Raghu paid to stay the night but always left within two hours because the women could take him no more. After a few episodes he admitted to himself that he had a fetish about seeing whores in a devastated state. He began the ritual of leaving money on the woman – now reduced to a whimpering, curled-up mass. A face with screwed-up eyes would ease its grimace briefly to flash gratitude before resuming its reflection of incredulity and pain. * * * Within a year of the triumph at Kuyili the neighbouring villages signed up with Eeram. Raghu and Venkat were intrigued to discover two more 84

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defunct ponds in the area. One day, when they were dredging the second, Venkat appeared, excitedly clutching a book from the public library in Coimbatore. “Look!” he cried. “These ponds, they were dug in the first or second century BC.” The book revealed that the ponds they were working on probably dated back to the Chera Kingdom. The kings, with great foresight, had dug 20 to 30 ponds to catch mountain run-off. The kingdom surrounding the ponds seemed to have flourished on agriculture. Now the topsoil was as hard as rock. Money started flowing in generously, not just from corporate bodies but from the government too. Within five years Eeram had 100 staff serving about 50 villages. Eeram marched on, embracing long-term development as well as restoring ponds and tanks. Raghu and his staff led the planting of thousands of trees: palm trees, jacaranda, teak. The coconut groves that grew seemed a fitting atonement for the thousands of trees that once abutted the ponds but died when they dried up. The press reports began as a trickle. Raghu was hailed as a rural reformer who understood that harmony and affluence in rural India were founded on the availability of water. One reporter tracked internecine feuds in Raghu’s villages and showed that they bore an inverse relationship to the development work. Villagers in Kuyili and the neighbourhood returned to agriculture as their sustainable profession. Farmers provided the fodder of smiling faces to hungry cameramen. The minister for rural development planted the 10,000th tree and a photograph of Raghu and the minister shaking hands over the sapling made the front page of The Hindu. Media reports invariably showed pictures of caked, thirsty land before Raghu’s intervention and of paddy fields or gushing water afterwards. Raghu travelled to Coimbatore, Madras and Delhi for engagements connected with rural development – and others that had not the remotest link to his work. A ladies’ club in Coimbatore asked him to inaugurate its cookery fair. He conferred degrees at the Madras University convocation, presented school prizes and delivered scores of speeches on how to use water intelligently. Almost every week he appeared in a newspaper or magazine, if not for his work in the villages then for what he said during public appearances. 85

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“There’s more water than all of us need, if only we learn how to use it cleverly,” he said when Eeram adopted its 150th village, 28 years after he set foot in Kuyili. The following summer, in 1991, he was invited to address the United Nations. * * * At 60 he retired from Eeram, conforming to the rules of the NGO, which was then in the hands of a professional management group. It was funded almost to the point of affluence and was the caretaker of nearly 200 villages, some in the neighbouring states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. NGOs in other states, emulating Eeram’s model, accounted for roughly 600 villages. Two years before his retirement, at the chief minister’s behest, the government of Tamil Nadu granted Raghu five grounds of land in the suburb of Neelankarai, in a Madras by then renamed Chennai. With his life savings he built a house with a generous backyard and a tall compound wall. It stood at the end of a cul-de-sac and was effectively isolated from the neighbouring houses. Beyond his house lay the crashing ocean. As an adviser to Eeram he visited the Coimbatore villages once a month or so, more to watch than to do. In Chennai a few neighbours smiled on seeing him in the street and stopped to exchange an occasional word. But he made no friends, made no effort to make friends. The exception was the Colonel, widowed and childless. He lived three doors away in a sprawling house with another huge backyard. Raghu empathised with him in his loneliness and they visited each other’s houses for a drink. The Colonel was an inveterate fan of James Bond and possessed a Walther PPK pistol, complete with its signature silencer. The gun gave him a big kick. He taught a reluctant Raghu target shooting in his backyard, the gun making a soft plop with every shot. The thrill of hitting the bull’s-eye on the paper target mounted on the flame of the forest tree made up for the dull pain the recoil caused him after the first few sessions. Days before he died of cancer the Colonel presented the Walther, spare magazines and the target to Raghu. “I want you to keep these,” he said with an impish smile. “The gun’s from World War Two, it can’t be traced. A European friend, knowing my craze for 86

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James Bond, smuggled it in for me. Of course, you can’t buy fresh bullets for it either.” Raghu was about to protest, to ask why he needed it, but changed his mind and took it as a gift from a dying friend. Besides, the gun was a magnificent work of art and a piece of history. The Colonel died; Raghu placed the gun in his leather suitcase, to be forgotten. * * * With great accomplishment came a great anonymity. Raghu’s fame did not mean he was recognised on the streets. It was a fame that had to be recreated on a stage every time the lights came on; it was extinguished when the lights faded after each valedictory address. The media still covered him and he attended official ceremonies in cities around the country at least half a dozen times a year. His allergy to the razor intensified with age. It was probably caused by his first attempts at shaving. Owing to his meagre means he had used coconut oil, Hamam soap, water, whatever he could lay his hands on to provide moisture. In the villages there was nothing resembling shaving cream. His damaged skin never recovered in later times of affordability. When he grew a beard to avoid shaving the roots of the hair itched intolerably. With a pair of scissors he crudely trimmed his beard every 10 days or so. He possessed the appearance of a perpetually unshaven man, not a man with a luxuriant growth. His indistinct facial features and dark complexion made him dissolve into the nondescript millions in markets and railway stations. He had to reintroduce himself to press photographers; it annoyed him that he remembered them, but not they him. They would say, deferentially: “Of course. How could we you forget you, sir?” The lying bastards. The media repeatedly positioned him as the saviour of village slums, the bringer of water. Yet, visiting a new settlement, he had to be introduced elaborately by the beneficiaries of a previous village, or the local headman, or an Eeram official. The men in the audience regarded him indifferently, scratching their stubble; the women fiddled with their saris. After so many posters, photographs in English and Tamil publications and village talk, he felt outraged that the public didn’t celebrate him. By the end of his career his vocation no longer fulfilled him. The subcutaneous yearning 87

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for celebrity became a demon. It had been a supervention that had stayed in the shadow of his public service, growing a little with every accomplishment. The only thing that mattered now was recognition of his role as a god, the water provider: the rescuer of villagers from their abject existence. He cursed his dichotomous existence: well known in media and hoitytoity circles, unrecognised in general life. These days the anonymity began at the close of each official ceremony, when he would be dumped. On most occasions he wasn’t walked to his car. Sometimes, there wasn’t even a car. He had to fend for himself. When he hailed an auto-rickshaw in a suit, a bouquet in hand, he felt entirely foolish. The next morning he would return to his daily battle with impertinent plumbers, carpenters, electricians. The government had abdicated its responsibility towards him after giving him his land. What he needed more than the five-ground plot was the quotidian assistance of plumbers, carpenters and electricians. They did not turn up on time; sometimes they didn’t turn up at all. They had no idea who he was; they showed no respect. All that the erring workmen offered their clients was a judge’s impartiality. The tantalising glory of public recognition touched him like the brush of a crow’s wing as it flew low. The dalliance with fame was fleeting; the abrupt banishment to namelessness was barbarously cruel. * * * Unexpectedly, 12 months after his retirement, the flame of fame burning low, The Week named him Person of the Year. His face was on the cover of the magazine. Eeram officials called; they had organised a celebration in Kuyili with at least 10 other villages joining in. The Coimbatore Collector would preside. Anyway, Raghu’s monthly visit as an adviser in retirement was due. He bought himself a ticket on the Nilagiri Express. Boarding the train with a copy of The Week tucked under his arm, he saw a commotion on the platform. As he stowed his suitcase under his seat the passenger opposite remarked to nobody in particular, “I believe Kamal Haasan is on the train. In the first AC coach.” A plump, hitherto serene 50-year-old woman who had been immersed in a Tamil periodical jolted upright. She asked in adolescent disbelief, “What? 88

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Really? He’s my favourite actor. Oh, is this true? Is this true? Do you know how far he is going?” “I am told he will get off at Coimbatore,” the passenger opposite said self-importantly. “By whom?” the woman demanded. “The ticket examiner.” “Oh, oh. All my life I have waited to see him!” the woman screeched. “So have we, madam, so have we,” another passenger volunteered. “I’ll get off quickly at Coimbatore Station,” the woman announced. “The first AC coach is only two coaches from here.” The passenger opposite scoffed. “Madam, that’s the plan of all the passengers on the train.” Raghu shifted restlessly on his bunk that night while his fellow passengers also hardly slept. They excitedly discussed Kamal Haasan, having barely paid attention to the man who had sat opposite and ostentatiously read The Week. When Raghu left the train the following morning he was jostled by the crowds. Many held sweat-stained copies of The Week. Some even looked him briefly in the eye, but nobody stopped. Disregarding the bitter cold, thousands of fervent Haasan fans one glimpse from salvation had gathered at the station. As Raghu descended the stairs, shoved by the mob, the crowd hoisted the actor above their heads. Roars of “Long live Kamal Haasan!” rent the air. Raghu emerged from the station and pleaded with the auto-rickshaw drivers to take him to Kuyili. Wait, they told him as they desperately rubbernecked. This was real fame: a mob crushing, hoisting, bruising, raucously cheering, never letting up. It didn’t arrive when the lights went up and didn’t die when they dimmed. * * * By the age of 62 Raghu knew the world had voted for his anonymity. So he decided to play to the strength that came with being faceless. His first victim was a dog, a refugee in his backyard. He had named it Solomon after his servile subordinate at Eeram, who was a suspected traitor. Raghu was convinced that Solomon, who grovelled in his presence, worked against him behind his back, downplaying his contributions in official representations about Eeram’s work. His seething rage grew with the years and there were 89

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days when he almost felt powder on his tongue as he ground his teeth thinking about Solomon. He built an ambivalent relationship with Solomon the mangy white mongrel. On days when he felt wronged, when the clouds gathered and the darkness silhouetted the two of them, he petted the dog, let it rest near him and fed it. On other days he taunted it by frequently opening the back door of his house before slamming it shut as the dog bounded towards it. Every time the dog expected food; disappointed, whining, it would slink back to its place under the tree on which Raghu had fixed the target. It was easier than he thought. His hand did not falter and the gunshot was barely audible. His aim true, he struck Solomon in the head. There wasn’t even a yelp. Cleaning the splattered blood and brains was a filthy job and Raghu was wheezing by the time he had buried the dog beneath the tree. Solomon, the traitor, was dead. For his other sport he always visited North Chennai lodges at least 15 miles from his home. As in Coimbatore he never contacted the same pimp twice in succession. He needn’t have worried. The stare of the Chennai pimp was at the money exchanged in dim light; faces didn’t register. Raghu’s invisibility in North Chennai made it a convenient hunting ground. In a department-store aisle marked Dairy and Cereals he shot his first human victim. It was about nine in the evening and there were three customers, two of whom were chatting with assistants. The billing clerk was checking accounts to close the day’s business and perfunctorily monitoring crates of goods being lowered from a truck. The third, male, customer examined expiry dates on cereal boxes down the otherwise empty aisle. Raghu glanced around and took aim from the end of the row. The shot and the crash of the falling body were lost in the grating of the crates. It was just as with Solomon: barely a gasp, then the miracle of a lifeless lump. As he left the store the clerk was arguing with the truck driver about the number of crates expected. A five-minute walk took Raghu to a pimp. Close to midnight, after he had transformed the latest whore into a mangled mess, he took an auto-rickshaw, asking the driver to drop him on the East Coast Road. It would take him about 10 minutes to walk home. At the corner of the cul-de-sac stood a blinking street light. The light had been malfunctioning since he moved in and any number of calls to the 90

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electricity board hadn’t helped. Under the light stood a garbage can. When he neared it, a dark form emerged from the shadows. It was a man, about 40, with dishevelled hair and a thick, unkempt beard. His features were obscured in the intermittent light, but it was clear that he had been licking discarded morsels from banana leaves thrown out after some local feast. The leaves he had worked on lay in a garland around his feet, their surfaces glimmering. He approached Raghu in a stagger. “Good evening,” he said. The greeting surprised the killer. “Yes?” he said and waited. He was assaulted by the whiff of putrefaction: decaying oranges and stale rasam rice. “Saar, would you have any change?” the man asked through his matted facial hair. “Who are you?” “My name is Sami,” he said. “Sami, what do you do?” “I drink,” Sami said. Raghu laughed. “Besides?” Sami hadn’t meant it as a joke. He searched the sky and said, “I drink. That’s it.” He staggered to one side, balanced himself and asked again. “Do you have any change?” Raghu fished in his pocket and brought out a few 100-rupee notes. The pimp had returned all his change in hundreds. “Here,” he dropped some in Sami’s palm. Even in his drunkenness, Sami did not mistake the denomination. “Thank you, saar.” “Bless you,” said Raghu and started walking towards his house. * * * Curiosity about the identity of his victims came to Raghu after the department-store killing. The following morning’s newspaper reports revealed that the dead man, Arogyam, had been a baker who ran his own business close to his home. The bakery was a favourite among locals, many of whom, interviewed after 91

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the murder, praised its speciality: butter biscuits. A neighbour remarked, “I can’t understand why anybody would do this. Arogyam had no enemies. All he did was make food for others and spend his Sundays at the church – and feed the poor with the leftovers from his bakery.” This was an unexpected pleasure for Raghu. He pored over the reports to discover everything he could about the dead man. He searched the internet and found a local newspaper article from years before that recommended the bakery for its delicious treats. A television channel showed Arogyam baking, flying a kite with his son, running with his dogs, feeding the poor in his bakery – and his teary-eyed family today. Raghu spent the following week finding out more about Arogyam. He avoided the neighbourhood and personal inquiries, restricting himself to the local media. He made a point of choosing victims about whom he couldn’t guess the first thing. There should be only one way to discover the information: from the next morning’s papers. If he thought a man was a government clerk, he spared him. A man in a doctor’s coat wasn’t a candidate. A youth overloaded with books and a backpack was a student. He chose his targets after a couple of minutes spent discreetly following and assessing them. Reflecting on his second murder, Raghu had to admit he was genuinely stumped by the identity of the man he had killed. On the night of that murder he lay staring at the creaking ceiling fan. Could he guess even one detail about the victim? Sleep overtook him at about three in the morning. The thud of the newspapers (he bought six) instantly woke him. He was rapturous when he discovered that he hadn’t made one correct guess. This defeat was his victory; as it overwhelmed him every other motive for killing became secondary. The third murder was in a supermarket. He was cautious, but missed a closed-circuit television camera in a dark corner. A journalist managed to extract a photograph from the police files and publish it in a newspaper. The Silencer appeared in a corner of the picture, shown leaving the premises. His facial features were startlingly clear to him, but maybe not to the uninformed viewer, who would have had to stare hard at the blur to match the face with Raghu’s. The Silencer spent a couple of sleepless nights haunted by his face in the photograph. The same week most newspapers carried his image after the 92

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Rotary Club bestowed on him the For the Sake of Honour Award. Would anybody notice? He recalled that he had been assailed by a wheezing fit in the aftermath of the shooting. It had slowed his escape. It tickled him that his third victim was a plumber. He wouldn’t remotely have guessed the dead man’s occupation although he had taken a good look before he shot him. One tribesman errs. The tribe pays: another tribesman dies. For his fourth and fifth murders The Silencer deviated sharply to Guduvancherry from North Chennai. For months following his first killing the personal details of his game kept him fascinated. He closed his eyes and, in an exercise of punishing mental concentration, reconstructed each murder. He could see the victims’ faces well, how they walked, their clothes. Their jobs, their families, their lives were riddles. A murder usually ceased to make headlines within a week or so. The Silencer’s killings were different. The media, having given him his new name, were baying for the blood of the police and the government while screaming public-safety advice. Plain-clothes policemen reportedly watched from vantage points. In the elaborate effort to construct a theory about the killer, details of the victims were forever being discussed in the faint hope that at least a tenuous connection could be detected. The Silencer luxuriated in this frenzied pool of speculation. The murders weren’t just for the moment: the deaths lived on. The killer discovered that the baker had borrowed a substantial sum of money at usurious interest rates. The plumber had worked part-time as a tree cutter. Each elaboration was a sensuous stroke. He hadn’t killed his victims. He had saved them from their cursed anonymity. How could the city have known their names, their lives? Who would have discussed their qualities and shortcomings on TV? Why would the minutiae of their existences have otherwise been recorded? True, he couldn’t give them everlasting fame, not timeless glory, but they at least had their Warholian 15 minutes. He checked Google furiously every night. “The Silencer Chennai”: 60,000 hits. The first 12 pages were mostly about his killings, not about silencers of any other kind. “Killings in Chennai”: another dozen pages discussing his crimes. He shifted to the blogs. Nearly 3,000 pieces and chats on the unsolved murders. Thousands of reader comments below even badly written pieces. When he went back to Google and keyed in “Ernakulam Raghu” it reported 503 hits. The number hadn’t 93

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grown appreciably for the last couple of years at least. Page after page showed statutory reports on the websites of various organisations, or archaic, limitedcirculation pieces on his work in the villages. After a murder, wherever it was, he went to North Chennai. He began to feel a passing twinge of conscience for the woman of the evening as he placed the customary five 100-rupee notes on the ravaged prostitute. Most nights, as he came back from a killing or late walk, he encountered Sami next to the garbage bin. The Silencer’s munificence was entirely a product of personal gratification and varied wildly. Some days Sami gaped with incomprehension at the hundreds of rupees dropped nonchalantly in his palm. On other days, when he hurriedly abandoned the banana leaf from the garbage can from which he was gobbling, he picked up dolefully a 10-rupee note cast his way. The Silencer noticed that regardless of what he dropped for the drunk to pick up, Sami would call out, “Good night,” slurring to varying degrees. That was the only service he could render in return for the charity. * * * The Silencer returned, exhausted. It was the first time he had set out to kill and failed. Twice he had taken aim. Both times people materialised near the potential target. The second time it was a uniformed police inspector who seemed to gaze at him for a few seconds before turning away. He decided to retreat, but the rush of preparation, which could be suppressed only by the consummation of the life-taking act, kept his body tremulous. Should he find a whore? He decided against it, knowing that what he would vent on her would not leave her alive. That was not how he wanted to kill. He was reminded of his sociology professor. He was right, after all. The Silencer wasn’t sure if the villagers played roles. But he did. Of the many roles I have played, who am I really? he asked himself. The question started nagging him. The benefactor of the parched poor who delighted in bringing water? The animal who brutalised prostitutes when all they were expecting was the usual custom? The wimp who yearned for fame, the last infirmity of the noble mind? The killer with a misplaced chivalry who never targeted women? He was three when he was taken to the temple to be initiated into the art of writing with the blessing of the omnipotent Guruvayoorappan. 94

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The presiding priest, taken aback by the impeccable alphabet the boy wrote in a bed of rice, predicted a man of letters. Was he a sociologist of academic distinction? It was bad enough that others didn’t know who he was, but didn’t he have a right to know? How could a man be anonymous to himself? He turned into the cul-de-sac. Under the streetlight he found Sami. The tramp sprang to his feet in an unusually sprightly manner. The Silencer dropped a 50-rupee note in his outstretched palm and continued walking. Sami held the note against the flickering light. He pocketed it, but did not wish The Silencer a good night. Instead he followed him and tapped him on the shoulder. “Yes?” The killer was startled. “Fifty won’t do. I haven’t had a drop today. And I got to eat …” “So that’s why you aren’t staggering.” The Silencer sized him up. Sami wasn’t staggering, but he was quivering. The two men stood in silence, regarding each other. “Fifty won’t do,” Sami repeated. “Well, you’ll have to manage with that.” The Silencer tried to mask the strain in his voice. “I don’t have any more money.” “I don’t believe you. Show me your pockets.” Sami held one spasmodic hand with the other. “Listen, you son of a dog. You are begging and I give you alms. Take that demand back or you get nothing from me from tomorrow,” snarled The Silencer. Sami’s eyes had started watering and his cheek twitching. His right hand went to his pocket. Even under the winking light the blade gleamed. Had Sami been his usual drunken self The Silencer would have kicked him in the shins and continued heading home. But Sami was sober and enraged. The Silencer hadn’t expected to use the Walther in such circumstances. He could see Sami’s shocked expression as he considered the gun. “Go away …” He waved with the barrel. He intended only to scare the tramp into giving ground. Shooting him would mean going against his own rules: he knew who he was and this was too close to his house. “Go away.” Sami lunged at The Silencer. The Walther and the knife fell clanking to the pavement. 95

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The men struggled, groaning, yelling. The Silencer’s limbs were hit by paralysing cramps: age had dulled his responses. Capitalising on the moment, Sami delivered a kick to The Silencer’s stomach. Winded, he slumped to the pavement. Attempting to stand he was overtaken by a wheezing fit. He grabbed Sami’s ankles but his grip was far weaker than he had imagined. Sami tripped and fell but broke free and crawled to the Walther. The Silencer could see the cold, blue-steel glint of the gun in Sami’s hand. Before he could act he felt the jab of the silencer under his ribs. The plop. A sharp pang of pain. As he fell he kicked Sami, who let go of the gun. It landed in the gutter. The Silencer watched the shape of a panicking Sami dissolve into the darkness down the road. * * * The day’s copy of The Hindu was spread out before the Police Commissioner. Tapping the floor with his shoe, he kept shifting his glance between the newspaper and the telephone. Nobel Contender Shot Dead – The Silencer Claims His Sixth Victim? Ernakulam Raghu, twice a purported contender for the Nobel Peace Prize, was shot dead last night near his house. Passers-by who chanced upon the injured Raghu took him to a nearby hospital, where he was declared dead on arrival. The key question on the public’s mind is: has The Silencer claimed his sixth victim? It may be remembered that Raghu started the drive to provide villages with water in the late 1960s …

The commissioner knew the phone would ring at any moment, yet when it did his nerves jangled. It was, as he expected, the chief minister. “This time The Silencer seems to have hit a high-profile fellow. I didn’t know a potential Nobel Prize winner was holed up in Chennai.” The minister’s voice was strained and edgy. “Neither did I, ayya,” said the commissioner. “I discovered it only during the inquiry. He wasn’t carrying any papers. When we saw his body at the hospital we thought he was another homeless man. It took us a day to establish his identity. But ayya, you gave him government land a few years ago.” 96

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“Yeah, yeah. I do thousands of things like that in a year. Who can remember everything?” “Ayya, this is the man who worked in Kuyili and other villages ...” “Yeah, yeah,” said the minister impatiently. “I vaguely remember now. Haven’t you seen how the press is ripping me apart? About The Silencer? About the law and order situation? Catching the last crackpot consumed half my life. Now a killer with a gun and a silencer. Get him soon.” The commissioner promised to redouble police efforts. “Why are you so sure it’s The Silencer this time?” asked the minister. “Ayya, the bullet types match. We have bullets from the same gun. And this time we have the gun.” “What else?” “The gun has fingerprints. And, ayya, the gun: it’s the type that James Bond uses.”

Three Moslem Boys (from Everybody is a Vampire series, 2004) by Wimo Ambala Bayang. Digital print, 10cm x 15cm. Courtesy of the artist and Mes 56, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Poetry Peauladd Huy

Before the Bones O you living, hear me out. Before the bones, the endless interrogations and the waterboarding, I was shackled up like a rabid dog. Barking on all fours on the tiled floor sodden with piss and shit with flesh rubbed raw by irons, with gangrene with broken lips and swollen-shut eyes begging for a quick death. Out the main gate, the lucky ones dragged iron feet like saw-teeth whining through a solid log. On the path, dirt clouds stirred up by chained feet dulled the stench of the shallow-buried. In the field ahead, fresh dirt mounds bubbled up like termite hills 99

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and full pits swarmed with hungry flies. In our pit, everyone was piled up, mangled and bludgeoned, ripened by heat and bleeding maggots, like lumps of garbage: the newer dead heaped on top, limbs dangling twisted in awful distortions not meant for humans, bound arms pulled out of sockets, eyes ripped open by immense pain remained bulging out; the bottom swollen smothered by the top and the top spoiled by sun and greedy flies.

The Mango Tree I know my time is near. Outside, the mango tree has been empty for quite some time now; newer leaves are now budding with clustered flowers. Not long now till the buds mature, weighing down the branches. Sometimes, the limb knows how fragile the mind can be: too much, and it stops redirecting â&#x20AC;&#x201C; starts to believe that harm comes from flaws in former lives. Unredeemed sins. This torture. The pain is sharper now, the world more blurred â&#x20AC;&#x201C; bars lining the window, a gentler smeary-grey. The shackles blend metal into flesh. How is it possible 100

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for other humans to devise these tortures, to have the courage to stomp upon already hollow bodies? O unspeakable human facility to harm one another. The mangoes ripen; the birds, the flies and squirrels will help themselves to the ones high up; and those that fall will be eaten by worms. I think that those same worms which have made me and my grave-mates into soil and bones will eat those sweet, fallen mangoes.

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Haunted by History Xavier Comas

t’s late in Narathiwat. The last call to prayer wafts through the town’s dark streets. Soon, other mosques join in the howling refrain that rouses me to action. I hurry back by bicycle to my home stay in Kampung Takok: “scaring village” in the vernacular Malay dialect of Thailand’s deep south. My Muslim host family will be away for a few days and have asked me to look after their home, an abandoned palace they moved into at the invitation of Daiyoha, the caretaker. He is the local imam’s helper but also a shaman and healer with the power, I am told, to invoke rain. He is the strangest man I have ever met. I ride down the road that runs parallel to Bang Nara River, which marks the border with Malaysia. After reaching the outskirts of the village I make a quick left turn next to a small mosque with shiny green domes; I enter a narrow dirt road swamped by the last rainfall. I hold my breath to staunch the nauseating odours coming from a rubber warehouse. The end of the trail opens suddenly to reveal, amid tall palm and jackfruit trees, my temporary home – a large, dilapidated wooden construction raised on timber stilts and a burned-brick base. The full moon casts a pale haze across roof gables topped by wooden finials and edged with carvings. The collapsed right wing of the building threatens the rest of the structure: the cancer of neglect. In the centre of the façade a steep, crippled staircase leads to a verandah before an arched entrance. 105

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Locals call this place Rumoh Rajo – the Raja’s House. Now a tattered remnant of a faded past, it was once the magnificent residence of Tengku Samsuddin, a descendant of the sultans of Patani Darussalem, one of the oldest kingdoms on the Malay Peninsula. Patani was not only a trading gateway to East Asia – the Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Chinese and Arabs frequented its ports – but also a regional centre of Islam. But the 16th-century sultanate would eventually fall into obscurity. After several failed attempts, Siam’s army, led by King Rama I’s son, crushed Patani in 1786, depriving the kingdom of its sovereignty forever. In 1909 the Malay states, by then carved up into seven provinces, were annexed under an Anglo-Siamese treaty and all local rulers, Samsuddin among them, were divested of their status. Today local rumours claim Samsuddin cursed his palace to protect it from outsiders after his death. Nevertheless, during the course of time, it would suffer the indignities of plunder. I carefully climb the staircase, which creaks under my weight. From the verandah I stare at a large Arabic character on the arched double-door entrance: the sacred word Allah written in white charcoal by Daiyoha. Sporting his trademark Muslim piyoh, or skullcap, he once told me about his powerful magic. “I can pour water in a cup and cast a spell,” he said. “If someone were to drink it his stomach would swell until his organs imploded, killing him. If you want to try I can just make you feel some pain, but blood will spill from your nose and anus. Would you like to …?” Unfortunately Daiyoha’s magic, like Samsuddin’s curse, has failed to protect the palace. A wooden frontispiece of Arabic calligraphy is missing from above the main door lintel, having been stolen along with other decorative artwork that once graced the façade. Alcoves on either side once held flaming torches that illuminated the doorway. The old door squeaks as I slowly open it and feeble moonlight pours into the darkness. From under the lintel I wait hesitantly for my pupils to dilate and I catch a glimpse of a second door at the end of the large hall. I could grope my way to the switch that turns on the lights, but I choose not to. I step into the gloom, treading slowly on the battered floor. I must be careful because the original hardwood flooring, beautifully crafted and assembled, has long been replaced by a clumsy array of brittle, overlapping planks. A few weeks ago the army stormed the palace, which they suspected was a hideout for insurgents, and one of those flimsy planks collapsed under the weight of a soldier. 106

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My shadow slides across the long foyer as I make my way inside, frightening some nocturnal inhabitants. Wings flap away faintly. A rat sneaks out. Then, a forbidding silence. Ancient episodes of bloodshed and obscure rituals invoke the ominous spirit master’s words: “If you really wish to see the ghosts that inhabit this place, you must sleep here.” Decades ago, from a pillar next to the doorway, dangled a huge, menacing wood carving of an eagle with outstretched wings. The raja’s power emanated from this powerful talisman, under whose shadow propitiatory Malay ceremonies and traditional trials were staged. A defendant would be instructed to extract an egg inserted in the eagle’s throat. If he was unable to remove it he would be declared guilty of his alleged crime and executed immediately, with the raja’s kris driven into his heart. The eagle was taken away more than half a century ago by a shaman summoned from Malaysia to strip the house of its supernatural powers and dispatch the spirits that guarded it. It is said the talisman now lies dormant in a museum in Kuala Lumpur. I leave the lingering shroud of death behind, dodge empty coffee cups abandoned on the floor, reach the end of the hall and open the second door, which leads to a wider, bare chamber with three more doors. A pale light flows through the windows, carving out the graceful shape of a huge, half-moon bamboo kite that hangs in a corner. Attached to its neck is a bow with a network of rattan strings that plays a soaring melody when the kite is flown. Confined in silence, the kite begs to sing with the wind again. In the opposite corner, partially draped with a batik sarong, lies a safe box consumed by rust. No one knows what used to be inside. The only object left by thieves is an empty metal cigarette box stamped with the faded word “Pirate”. I venture deeper, beyond a translucent yellow curtain that sways behind the central door. I have reached the last hall, flanked by more doors, one of them leading to my room, two others to timber staircases climbing to a large attic. Two exits lead down to a courtyard fringed by a mouldering brick wall pierced by two gates. Outside, where I imagine the raja bathing, shrubs entangle a serviceable well and two neglected stone pools. The palace had dozens of rooms and was accompanied by manor houses and servants’ quarters. Most of those structures disappeared about 70 years ago, when a 107

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large part of the land was sold by the rajaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heirs to a Chinese merchant, who built a warehouse on the river. I hesitate to turn on the light and feel compelled to continue wandering in twilight. I am heading for the second level when a rumble takes my breath away. A black cat has just jumped from the staircase to the floor, dashing through a hole. Daiyoha says it would be imprudent to disturb the spirits who dwell upstairs: two court concubines with long black hair who dress in red. Some insist they still dance in sorrow for the absent raja. Despite foreboding shadows I climb the stairs. I ascend at a nearly imperceptible pace, holding my breath and sliding my hand up the warm wooden bannister. I reach the vast, desolate attic, the decrepit flooring whitened by the continual fall of pulverised clay from the roof. Seeds released by silk cotton trees drift in on the night breeze and lie like scattered snow. Frail moonlight shimmers through myriad punctures in the roof, like stars in a second sky. I walk under gables constructed with thick teak joists. Square pillars help support what is still a formidable structure that has withstood centuries of adversity and witnessed innumerable stories in a lost past. My meander reaches its denouement in what was the rajaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chamber, where a perpetual shawl of silence falls deeply. Suspended particles of debris glitter beneath my steps; I sit beneath a dusty, ghostly veil staring into the shadows. This lonely wooden derelict, burdened by hundreds of years of conflict and intrigue, is supine, breathing the name of a forgotten kingdom with its last sighs.

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Poetry Zeffry Alkatiri Translated by Kadek Krishna Adidharma

At the Same Time (Semanggi Tragedy 1 and 2) 1 Crickets call and respond from pockets, bags and waists. Students, spies, reporters and the masses like brokers at a stock exchange party. A few white reporters and the CNN crew whisper and pray that their long wait shall not be in vain to record blood spilling on the streets for that Pulitzer Prize one day or at least a triple-fold raise from their brothers who made and sent the weapons held by our soldiers.

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2 Bodies slick with sweat behind jackets – green-brown uniforms have been sticky for a week. Students attempt to claw a hole beneath the army’s feet. The soldiers have vowed to swallow seven pledges whole never to be kicked out to stand guard so that not even an ant could escape between their feet. 3 Long have we trained with punching bags and shadows. It’s time for real punches now (an uneven fight begins to avenge high-school grudges). Here’s a punch for your loud mouths when we had to keep ours shut awaiting orders and taunts. Here’s a punch for your lazy bones, city-slicker, for all those times we were packed like sardines in dormitories. Here’s a punch for those cheered as heroes while we had to put up with jeers and here’s a punch on behalf of our commandants. 4 Sparks of gunfire and the reporter’s flash come together to shoot at the crowd. The clink of gunshots, along with shouts, jeers and moans rattle the glass of the Sudirman office buildings and are mirrored on the glass of home TVs.

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5 Outside the buildings, restless, wet, anxious, tired, angry, and bloody. Meanwhile, inside parliamentâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s chambers, the cleaning service guy finds cotton-bud ear-cleaners fashioned by university students littering the floor under the tables. 6 Leaving plastic bottles, sandals, shoes and bullet cartridges posters, flags, bamboo, banners and towels strewn like rocks across the performance arena. No need to go far into the annals of time to scrape the muck at Tanjung Priok, Aceh or at Santa Cruz. Here, in the city centre in the middle of our living rooms the Tysons rampage like wounded bulls. 7 Spiced eyes brimming with warm water blocked noses stinging skin scrawny sweaty bodies. In the emergency ward, anaesthetics smell like camphor. Carts are pushed back and forth like irons on a board bringing in bruised, limp bodies of the wounded. 129

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In the maternity ward the heaving sobs of a woman who cries, “You should have put off the shooting. Did you not feel my pain running out of breath waiting for your child’s water to break?”

8 In the editor’s office photographs and words are tossed about while the rest of Jakarta sleeps. In silence, writers bicker ravenously and feast upon their favorite menu: sorrow, pain, blood and defeat.

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Losing their Religion Priya Basil

f fortune really favours the brave, I figured aged 12, then I was never going to be one of her darlings. I was a cautious child, afraid to attempt handstands or cartwheels, fearful of rides at the funfair. When I rode my bicycle downhill I kept the brakes on. My first visit to India, all 36 hours of it, passed in a frenzy of trying not to see. In taxis, I put my head on my mother’s lap because I couldn’t cope with the traffic. The rest of the time, intimidated by the noise, bustle and smells, I observed Delhi through the slats of my fingers. During game drives while we were on safari in Kenya I would panic if we drove too close to a herd of animals. Our family history is dotted with eye-rolling stories of my crying and begging my father to back away from the elephants or rhinoceroses grazing a few yards away. What was I scared of? Pain – seeing or feeling it – and death. This physical prudence went hand in hand with an avid intellectual curiosity. When it came to finding out more, expressing opinions or arguing a point, especially among my peers, I was intrepid. The mental feistiness compensated somewhat for my being a wimp in so many other ways. At least it gave me confidence, perhaps even a feeling of superiority – until the day I became a Christian. The conversion lasted 11 and a half days. It was time enough for me to understand that there was yet another type of daring: if one’s thoughts are to have any value or power the intellect must be backed up by moral courage. It seemed I also fell short of this most precious kind 131

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of strength, which requires something similar to the boldness that drives reckless physical acts. That’s why making hard choices, having arguments, sets our hearts racing, sends adrenalin rushing through our veins, leaving us as breathless and exhilarated as if we’ve done a bungee jump. Religious conviction did not arrive in a blinding flash. Rather it crept up on me the way a benign habit, like slouching, might. Funnily enough, my sense of the Almighty, shaky since I was a child, remained uncertain even during the period when I was most persuaded by Christianity. I never quite bought into the notion of this all-seeing, all-knowing figure looking down on the world. But I went along with the idea because it was convenient, especially on nights when my parents were out late. It was oddly reassuring to beg God to ensure they came home safely. I don’t think I kept any of the promises I made to God in return. They were always vague sorts of vows anyway – to be good, to do anything He wanted. Because He usually obliged, and seemed to require no great concessions in return, I was content with the arrangement. So there wasn’t much in my background on which the ardent Christianity I was exposed to at school could build. My family is Sikh but my parents are not especially observant, though they claim to believe in God. My father does not wear a turban. My mother has cut her hair. They eat beef, they drink alcohol, they do not know the names of the 10 gurus. Only the gold kara on my father’s right wrist hints at his background. An observer of my parents’ lives would be hard pressed to identify anything religious. Once, my sister and I were dropped off for an afternoon of instruction on how to read Punjabi and recite a prayer from the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy book. Our complaints of boredom ensured we never returned for another lesson. My parents did not teach me anything about Sikhism. The only time I had a sense of my religious heritage was on occasional trips to the gurdwara for a wedding. It may seem like my upbringing was quite secular and liberal. I certainly had the impression that my parents were pretty easy-going – apart from the warnings that a Muslim boyfriend or husband would be unacceptable. If this did not shock me in my youth it was because the sentiment was so widespread as to seem normal. Some of my closest friends were Muslim and they also knew that romantic liaisons outside the faith were forbidden. I should have guessed that if my parents could make such a vehement theoretical distinction 132

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they were in no way as open-minded as they purported to be. Then again, they chose to educate their daughters at avowedly Christian institutions, so maybe they were tolerant – in the contradictory and prejudiced way that many of us are. After kindergarten I was sent first to a Catholic school, Loreto Convent Msongari, in Nairobi. Everything there was strictly regimented, right down to the type of underwear (navy blue) you had to wear with your uniform. Religion did not tempt me in that context. It was too much about what you couldn’t do. The only times I felt envious were during chapel, when girls who had been baptised lined up to receive the Eucharist. Then I longed to be one of the chosen, with the wine goblet pressed to my lips and the delicate wafer laid upon my tongue. Really, I just wanted to know how the wafer tasted. I managed it one day when a friend brought back and shared the white disc, which had been placed in her palm for a change. Its dry, crumbly tastelessness banished any residual fantasies about the body (and the blood) of Christ. When I moved to a new school religion came alive. Cavina’s stated aim was and remains, “to develop many qualities in the children who come through her gates – academic excellence, an inquiring mind, a sense of moral and social responsibility, and most of all a recognition of their relationship with their Creator who has revealed Himself through His son Jesus”. Suddenly, religion was not just experienced in obvious ways: the hymns sung and prayers recited each morning at assembly, the afternoon every week devoted to hymn practice, the bi-weekly scripture lessons, the carol concerts at Christmas. Faith was also evident in the tireless commitment of the teachers and in the kindness of the gardeners and caretakers. It was epitomised by the headmaster and his wife, who owned and ran the school. Mr and Mrs Massie were honourable, generous human beings and devout Christians. Their lives were dedicated to converting every child who passed through Cavina’s gates. During the course of six years, I fell, slowly and unconsciously, for the idea of their big family (of mostly Indian students) happy under the guidance of Jesus. The fragility of the whole concept became clear only when I told my parents I wanted to be a fully fledged member of Christ’s circle – and my conversion was forbidden. Looking back, I realise that Cavina’s hold on me weakened because some things grip us only as long as we conform to them entirely. Deviate even a little, step beyond the haloed perimeter, and the magic no longer works. 133

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Strongly held convictions have the power to seduce and repel. It all depends on how articulately they are expressed and how inflexibly they are defended. Not just in life, but in fiction, people who exude certainty can seem more interesting than others, more defined. By contrast, the softer stance of relativism appears wishy-washy, even bland. While writing my second novel, The Obscure Logic of the Heart, I was surprised to find that the staunchest characters – the pious Muslim father, the militantly atheist young man – turned out to be the most appealing and enduring figures. The other, more complex, characters seem to be weakened by their very strengths: the ability to compromise and the humanity to tolerate ways of being entirely other than their own. Mr Massie’s religiosity endowed him with a powerful definiteness, as if he’d been outlined precisely with a thick black pen. Tall, well built and with a mop of blond hair bordering a high forehead, he cut an impressive figure. Now I think of him as attractive, but my pre-adolescent self was struck by his authority only, the assurance exuded in his every gesture. He was a gifted speaker, his accent redolent of public school and tea at The Ritz. He had trained as an actor and been part of several productions in London’s West End. His voice could lend majesty to the conjugation of Latin verbs. Put to the scriptures, it made poetry of the psalms and thrilling legends of Old Testament stories. A sucker for things said well, I capitulated, perhaps inevitably, to his beliefs. It would never have occurred to me to doubt a word he uttered. Indeed, on the one occasion I did raise a question about what he was teaching us in scripture I was so thoroughly silenced I was put off making enquiries for a long time afterwards. “Mr Massie?” I anxiously raised a hand, keen to articulate the question I had tucked up inside. He looked at me, blue eyes alert under shaggy eyebrows. “If Adam and Eve were the first people created by God, when they had children where did the people that their kids married come from?” Blood surged to his face, scrambling across his skin like a fast-moving rash. “Someone has clearly put you up to this!” His palm slammed down on the table. He was right. My father had suggested I pose the question after I’d brought up the subject at home. Neither of my parents had been able to provide any explanation other than “it’s nonsense”. “It is not for us to question the mysteries of the Lord,” Mr Massie insisted. He said more, but I can’t remember any of it because I was too busy 134

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shrinking with shame, hating my father and thinking, thank goodness I’m already head girl because after this my chances of preferment would be less than nil. Shortly afterwards I started to attend Bible Study, the Friday lunchtime club run by Mr Massie. The decision was driven partly by a wish to ingratiate myself once more with the favourite teacher who’d experienced such obvious disgust at my impudence. The head boy, with whom I was in constant competition for attention, approval and good marks, was also a member of the club. I might as well confess that another big draw was the fact that the meetings were held in the den of the Massies’ house, which was situated in the school grounds. Perhaps my religious attachments have been short lived because they are driven by rather lowly motives. The sybarite in me is seduced by aesthetics, pomp and the promise of pleasure. Sikhism too won me over for brief, delicious moments. I looked forward to going to the gurdwara for a helping of prashad, the golden mound of sweet pudding given to all worshippers as a blessing. When I realised the same taste could be created at home by cooking semolina with a ton of butter and sugar the temple became redundant. The Massie residence had sacred status in my mind and those of many other students. Once in a while we’d have the honour of going there to watch a film about Tudor history, or an adaptation of a classic book. I would sidle through the rooms that led to the little den where the TV and video player were, taking in the dark wooden bookshelves, family photographs and silverware gleaming behind the glass of locked cabinets. The curiosity about people’s private lives that partly drives my writing today was already active. Even then I wanted to know what it was like to live differently, to be someone else. I couldn’t have articulated it, but there was this hankering for something that, if discovered, might transform my own world. Throughout my childhood I suffered from I-want-to-be-in-that-family syndrome. That family could have belonged to a friend, or it could have been a random, contented-looking group spotted at a restaurant. It’s not that I was especially dissatisfied with my parents and younger sister. Whenever I spent time away from them I missed them and looked forward to going back home. But children can sense the undercurrents of discontent in adults and my parents, for all their efforts at making ours a happy family, couldn’t fully 135

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disguise their disappointments with each other. The Massies, parents and three children, represented a sort of family ideal. It wasn’t enough just to be part of their extended Cavina School family, I wanted to be right at the core. Bible Study seemed like a good way to take a step closer. The sessions were intense and intimate. Half a dozen of us, including Mr Massie, sat in a circle. We read a passage from the Bible, discussed it and then prayed together. I had done each of these things before, at school and at home, but the experience had a different charge in the Massies’ den. I can honestly say that my delight did not come solely from the Nice biscuits we were given to dunk into the tea, which was served in lovely porcelain cups. It had more to do with the thrill of being talked to as an adult and feeling like part of a select group. So much of what I did, and loved, at school every day was steeped in faith; by the second Friday of Bible Study I’d decided that my willing and joyous participation must have meant that I too was a Christian. There was excitement in the recognition. I hugged it to myself all weekend. My prayers, normally infrequent and desperate little bursts of wishing, in the dark of bedtime, for something to happen or not happen, became self-conscious sweet little chats with Jesus. On a Sunday evening, unable to contain myself any longer, I told my mother I had decided to be a Christian. She was bending over the washbasin brushing her teeth as I made the announcement. She rinsed her mouth, straightened up and said, “There’s just one God, and it doesn’t matter how you choose to serve Him.” I’m not sure how seriously she took my admission, but I was content with her response. Still, something must have niggled in me because I said, “Okay, but please don’t tell Pa.” I went to bed happy and passed the next day at school fired up by a renewed sense of belonging and self-importance, unaware of what would await me on my return home – because Mum had decided to tell Pa. F. Scott Fitzgerald suggested, with more than a touch of irony, that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”. Could this explain the masses of moderates in the world who make a claim to faith while regularly breaking religious rules? We all have some sense of what it is to indulge in this sort of “doublethink”, as George Orwell called it. It is not so much a sign of any first-rate intelligence as of human fallibility. 136

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At its mildest, it is a form of hypocrisy – like being a committed recycler and owning a sports car. In its more serious forms this kind of thinking is sinister: we have affairs and tell ourselves nothing is more important than our family. We waste food, time and money, then dream of leaving plenty for future generations. If you’re my father, you can be the most secular of Sikhs and most protean of men, a master of reinvention in its most glorious and dubious senses – and still be outraged by your 12-year-old daughter’s swing towards Christianity. My father stood by the polished wooden counter of the bar built along one wall of our living room. Behind him, spirits, liqueurs and wines were lined up in neat rows, the bottles sparkling in the bright glare of the ceiling lights. I trembled on the other side of the bar while he shouted. “You were born Sikh and you will remain a Sikh! Do you hear me?” Pa poured himself a whisky. The ice cubes hissed and snapped as the amber alcohol spilled over them into a crystal glass. “We sent you to that school to get an education, not to lose your identity! Do you really believe all that Jesus crap? Walking on water and whatnot?” He kept picking up the glass and then setting it down again with a loud rap, too angry to pause long enough for a sip. “That Massie has brainwashed you! I won’t have it! If you want to stay under this roof you’ll forget this Christian rubbish. Is that clear?” He went on in the same vein for a bit longer, then informed me that I had 24 hours in which to make it clear to him that I was not a Christian, otherwise I would have to leave the house. “I don’t care where you end up if you insist on following such nonsense. Go ask that Massie to keep you. Let’s see if his godliness extends that far.” I didn’t doubt my father’s threat. Unquestioning acceptance of authority was still second nature to me then. It had been fostered first by my parents, then enforced at Cavina, which continues to maintain to this day that “character is strengthened through discipline, not reason”. The school is one of few to endorse corporal punishment, “because the Lord disciplines those He loves”. I was never subjected to “the whip”, as the riding cane used to smack girls was known (boys were given “the tackie”, an old sports shoe that delivered a wallop) because I strove too hard to follow the rules. But no doubt some subliminal fear of being hit also made me toe the line. My father’s ultimatum scared me, especially because my mother was unable to calm him down. That evening I wrote a letter to him saying I 137

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had reconsidered my decision to be a Christian. I told him it had been a stupid mistake, one that I would never make again. I had no idea then how prescient my words would be. I told myself that in my heart I would still be a Christian and my parents would not need to know, but the gulf between religion and me only widened ever after. The next morning I left my letter on the bar where the altercation with my father had taken place. That evening he told me he accepted my apology, but was disappointed that I had written instead of speaking to him directly. The shame I felt at his remark was nothing compared to what I would experience soon afterwards, when I was summoned unexpectedly to Mr Massie’s office one day at break time. The Massies had an uncanny way of finding out everything about their students. A year after I left the school a transgression of mine came to light (plagiarism, would you believe? I’d ripped off Thomas Mann for a story contributed to the school magazine. All I can say in my defence is that my aspirations were always high.) Mr Massie sent a letter to the school I was attending in Britain asking me to go to see him next time I was in Nairobi! I dutifully did and received a deserved earful. I wouldn’t be surprised if this article comes to his attention and one of his letters appears in my Berlin mailbox. At least if we spoke now we would do so on more equal terms and I would be more courageous than I was during that break time 20 years ago. As Michel de Montaigne said, “I [still] speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.” Somehow, news of the confrontation with my father had reached Mr Massie. For a long time I thought it was a deeply religious friend of my mother, to whom she had related the incident, who had told him. But recently I found out it was one of my school friends. Mr Massie was pacing the room when I stepped through the door of his office. The floorboards creaked under each step. His chin was dipped towards his chest, his brow creased with concern. “I’ve heard something very disturbing,” he started. He made me tell him what had happened and I obliged with a version in which I appeared marginally less cowardly than I’d acted. I think he was genuinely upset and may even have felt some sympathy for me. Nevertheless, his stance was clear: “A true soldier of Christ will never deny Him. Fortes Fortuna Juvat,” he reminded me of the school motto, Fortune Favours the Brave. It didn’t matter that Jesus was in my heart, I was clearly not a worthy 138

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member of His military academy. I was told there was no point in my continuing to go to Bible Study until I had the courage to stand up for my convictions. The conversation with Mr Massie left me more dejected than that with my father. It catalysed the moral struggle my father’s ultimatum perhaps ought to have done, but didn’t. I felt weak and cowardly – something the hymns we sang in school in the following weeks seemed to reinforce. Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war … I couldn’t help thinking Mr Massie had selected the songs especially to make a point to me. Of course, it was probably all in my head. That’s why what stood out to me were the calls to rise forth in the name of God. The lyrics about his mercy – Rock of ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in Thee – offered no solace. Then it began to occur to me that maybe I wasn’t able to assert my allegiance to Christ because I didn’t actually believe in Him. And that too was the reason I could find no comfort in words that promised His endless love. So came one of those tricky and uncomfortable realisations that mark the way to adulthood and beyond: just because you like being a part of something doesn’t mean you really belong to it. And then, another realisation that one butts up against throughout life: just because you like something doesn’t mean it’s right, or true, or good for you. Still, I wondered if not having faith was a failing in itself. Perhaps, as my headmaster had implied, I really wasn’t strong enough to assume the mantle of religious belief. It was a long time before I was able to see that whatever my shortcomings may have been there were more serious flaws in the school – as there are in any system that insists there is only one way of being and thinking. It now shocks me that my parents could send me to be educated in such a way. They, like many, were attracted by the school’s impressive academic record and wide range of extra-curricular activities. But I have come to feel that none of that is worth the straitjacketing of the mind that can be the result of an education cloaked in religiosity. Even though I have many fond memories of Cavina, and much of the way I am is a result of my experience at the school, I continue to struggle against the tendencies I adopted then: to believe those in authority and not to ask questions. Writing fiction has liberated me from this somewhat. Funnily enough, it is often the past that feeds one’s writing, and then writing frees one from that past. 139

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I have always wanted to know more than I’m told. Where more information could be gleaned from books I searched for it without hesitation. But usually, when clarification has required more than a gentle face-to-face encounter I have shied away from it. I think most of us are curious about what else lurks behind the things others choose to reveal, but few dare to query further to find out more. Often we refrain out of a protective instinct – for the other person or even for ourselves. But it is difficult to squeeze more from an individual than they are prepared to give. Even so, most of us would rather be cautious than venture onto territory that might cause embarrassment or pain. We turn to art partly because it gives us the chance to know more about that which we might not ordinarily confront. No art form manages this as powerfully as literature. When we read great fiction we are as close as we can be to knowing another individual from within. In books we can follow not only a character’s speech and actions, but also his thoughts, silences and torpor. All those “gaps”, to which we cannot, for whatever reason, gain access in real life, are plugged in fiction. Through reading we can feel what it means to be another person and, in the process, we may confront different aspects of ourselves. The possibility of asking questions endlessly is one of the most attractive things about writing fiction. I may be nosy in life but I am even more inquisitive when writing. All the things I might hesitate to enquire about in my daily reality I can freely follow up in fiction. That’s not to say that writing provides me with unlimited, unbridled glee at imagining the innermost workings of another. Delving deeper into anything always has consequences, and not necessarily pleasant ones. It is sometimes uncomfortable to put yourself in the mind and heart of someone completely “other”, someone you probably wouldn’t choose to spend time with in reality. Writers don’t create characters they only like and agree with. The greatest challenge of writing is to express, credibly and sympathetically, views, motives and feelings that one does not share. When the writer succeeds then the reader too is able to make the leap into understanding, and even feeling close to, a character that is completely other. I felt this most strongly while writing my second novel. The story is partly about the conflict experienced by two lovers who come from different religious backgrounds. As an atheist, and given my bittersweet early experiences with faith, I was anxious about how I might write about religion 140

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without mocking or demeaning the characters. Of course, sometimes there is absolutely a place for satire or condemnation, but this tone did not fit the thrust of my story. I wanted to explore two different types of religious belief: the kind that is steadfast and inflexible and the kind that is able to compromise and contradict itself. Lina Merali, one of the main characters, falls into the latter category. Despite being a committed Muslim she does not pray regularly or follow Islamic dietary restrictions. She also wants to marry an agnostic man who comes from a Sikh family. In her mind, all this is justified by one aphorism from the Koran: Allah will not call you to account for thoughtlessness in your oaths, but for the intention in your hearts. For Lina’s father, Shareef, a figure similar in some respects to Mr Massie, this conveniently flawed rationale does not work. A man of integrity and conviction, he lives by the rules and won’t budge for anyone, not even the daughter he loves most dearly. He is clear that “God has made laws for us to follow. You can’t say: ‘I believe but I’m not going to do this or that.’ God and the laws are one.” I started off feeling I could never accommodate this kind of thinking. It exasperated me. How does a person arrive at such a stark position? How do they stick by it even when doing so threatens to destroy the very things they hold most dear? What are the compensations of faith that make the hardest sacrifices worthwhile? It took a lot of thought, research and care to build Shareef ’s character and life up to a point where his choices and actions began to appear logical, necessary and, above all, moving to me. I managed it partly by listening to and reading the words of different religious leaders. There were a few, like philosophy professor Tariq Ramadan and Archbishop Rowan Williams, whose views were expressed with such gentleness and humility that they touched me, even though I disagreed with a lot of what they said. I used their tone and vocabulary as a starting point for the creation of Shareef. It was through finding the right language that I was able to appreciate Shareef ’s commitment to his faith, which is the commitment of a decent man to an ideal. When you read, you enter into a ready-made world, the words arranged to propel you directly into certain thoughts and feelings. To write, you have to search for the words that form a character and then weave the web of a story. And the words cannot be found unless you let down your guard, 141

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step beyond what you know and open your heart to the vast spectrum of emotions that makes us human. The task of the writer is to negotiate the unmapped territory between us and the other: to conquer, word by word, the distances that seem too vast, too daunting, too unknowable. The fact that they can sometimes achieve this doesn’t necessarily make writers better people, or indeed better than other people. As Proust says in his essay Against Sainte-Beuve, “a book is the product of a different self from the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices”. He is suggesting that the writing self is the superior self – because one has the possibility to question, re-think, revise and refine one’s thoughts before setting them into sentences – a privilege that the pace of reality denies people in everyday life. Despite the dedication to reflection implicit in the writing life, it is also the case that understanding rarely arrives for any writer in flashes. Mostly it accumulates in tiny increments, which occasionally gather enough weight to give one’s thoughts the substance of truth. The arduous nature of the work forces writers to confront continually their limitations and helplessness, their failings as human beings and artists. The glory of language and literature is that it enriches and uplifts us even as it exposes weakness – because exposure comes through asking hard questions. And as long as we keep asking questions we have the hope of arriving at answers.

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Poetry Viki Holmes

Aubade Permit me, then, to fill my mouth with you before you take your leave of me; before the MTR shifts off at dawn and your departure jolts our just-born knowledge through. Permit me, then, to fill my days with you: new territories charted as we ask more of these glistening hours than any sun or waking god could give. As hunters pursue a worthy prey, so we should chase our need to understand what all this wonder is, and what it signifies. So closely knit the air around us sings; dawnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s music leads us here and we map our exchange, thus: this matters; and it would hurt not to have it.

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I Ainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t Going Nowhere, Just Shoot Me! (2008) by Indieguerillas. Acrylic on canvas, 25cm x 150cm. Courtesy of Biasa Artspace, Bali, Indonesia.

Spirits in the Material World Charmaine Chan

t was a wedding that would be talked about for years. In Turgo village, on the southern inclines of Gunung Merapi, the volcano was boiling mad, spitting bile and spewing invective with every sulphurous belch. The air smelled of stagnant water, its poison inflaming throats, eyes, skin. Clouds like tightly coiled balls of wool rolled down the slopes. Dogs howled. But still the husband- and wife-to-be insisted on going ahead with their nuptials. On November 22, 1994, their wedding party made merry in the shadow of the Fire Mountain until, without warning, a thunderous blast deafened all present. Houses collapsed, trees burned and ears melted as Merapi blew its top, volleying lava and heat clouds from its crater. The couple and 14 of their guests in Central Java were among 60 people killed in the eruption. Many died trying to outrun the wedus gembel (“curly-haired sheep” clouds) giving chase down the mountain. One man, Maridjan, apparently predicted the disaster, foreseeing in a dream what seismographic equipment monitoring the volcano’s moods had failed to detect. But villagers’ belief in his powers – among them the ability to commune with spirits and, if need be, vanish like a genie and reappear elsewhere – earned him notoriety 12 years later, the last time Merapi roared from the belly, coughing up lava, ash and hot gases that earned her a red-level alert. In 2006, despite the threat posed to 33,000 people living in the “danger zone”, only one third heeded the authorities’ order to evacuate. While some 145

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stayed for fear of losing property and livestock, many reportedly defied the command because they preferred to believe in Maridjan, the oracle. Mount Merapi, 2,968 metres from base to irascible summit, has for centuries played a spiritual role in Central Java and inspired myths and rituals that make a mockery of modernity. Her unpredictability and track record bolster beliefs of, among other things, spirits inhabiting the volcano in a world that parallels our own. Coupled with the fact that geologists cannot yet tell with precision when a volcano will blow and how devastating the consequences will be, the tenacity with which people cling to seemingly irrational explanations for eruptions is perhaps unsurprising. One interpretation is that volcanoes exact vengeful justice on the world (and by extension wrongdoers), which may be why everyone from farmers to politicians to intellectuals regularly pays their respects to Maridjan, whose official job is undeniably odd: to perform rites designed to placate Merapi’s otherworldly inhabitants. Statistics help explain fears: no other country has as many active volcanoes as Indonesia, with more than 130, and Merapi is the most volatile in the land, small outbursts occurring every two or three years, devastating eruptions every decade or so. These larger blasts can produce pyroclastic flows reaching 300 kilometres an hour and temperatures that would melt lead. In 2006, Maridjan, who is about 80, addressed as Mbah (grandfather) and considered Merapi’s guardian, a position he inherited from his father, brushed away officials’ insistence that he abandon his home a few kilometres from the volcano’s peak. “There is no risk,” he told reporters and set an example by trying to appease the gods rather than flee their wrath. Much Sony, who has studied vulcanology and was a volunteer in the 2006 evacuation effort, which made temporary refugees of thousands of Merapi’s neighbours, remembers the old man joking and speaking freely to anybody who would listen about his role in life. Defying the present sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengku Buwono X, who is obliged to put him on his payroll, and saying he would abide by the command of no one but the monarch’s long-dead father, who appointed him, Maridjan obstinately stood his ground. Then, in the glare of cameras mobilised for the stand-off and with 100 or so people in tow, Merapi’s gatekeeper led a silent procession around his village to propitiate the gods. Though far from the sombre occasion it was supposed to be, the media event seemed to do the trick – but not for long. 147

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After the circus the volcano’s lava dome – a stone cork under which pressure from magma and gas builds until the next terrifying ejection – collapsed, propelling an avalanche of fiery rocks down Merapi’s western flank but missing Maridjan’s village. He was unharmed when the dome crumpled again several weeks later. In that outburst two volunteers were cooked alive in a concrete bunker where they had sought refuge. Rescuers found the shelter under two metres of ash that had reached 300 degrees Celsius. Reminders of Merapi’s rage hang from the walls of the Selo Pass Hotel in Selo, a cool, verdant settlement 1,500 metres above sea level on the northern slopes of Merapi. Night-time photographs show mighty rivers of red gushing down deep crevices. The pictures, though fading, brilliantly illustrate eruptions so unearthly it seems only natural they have inspired strange beliefs – and bolstered defiance. The Javanese are far from the only people who ignore science, logic and authority when it comes to volcanoes. Hawaiians traditionally saw eruptions in their part of the world as blood from the vagina of Pele, goddess of fire, lightning and volcanoes, which is why, according to John Dvorak, who studied eruptions for 16 years while working for the US Geological Survey in Hawaii, Indonesia and Italy, they oppose any attempt to control an eruption by diverting the flow of lava, as scientists have often urged. “To them,” he writes, “it would be as unnatural as somehow trying to force a woman to end her menstruation.” Sulphurous smells, legend has it, are a sign of Pele’s continued presence. * * * It is not Hawaii but hell that comes to mind at Merapi’s summit, where noisome vapours waft through the air. It’s been five hours since we left Selo and save for our torches, stars and the distant lights of Solo, Java’s ancient capital, the climb has taken place in darkness. When dawn starts transforming the sky into a dark rum-citrus cocktail, we forget about belligerent gods and simply drink in the beauty that is theirs to destroy. Three Frenchmen appear from nowhere and quickly find ledges from which to throw their arms open, messiah-like, to greet the day. Although steam pumping out of rocks defrosts hands and warms backsides during the chilly morning, the volcano’s venomous intent is clear: 148

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sulphurous ground deposits recalling the malevolent outbursts of Orang Alijeh are reminders not to fool around or outstay one’s welcome. The Javan god and mountain ghost, who also oversaw Krakatoa before she blew herself up in 1883, is said to hurl lava to retaliate against perceived human transgressions. We linger at the top for as long as the hot drinks last, then peel off to answer nature’s call. Even this has its dangers, although no one holds back because of the reputed belief that relieving yourself on the mountain is a spiritual slight. Two years ago, a western tourist disappeared after wandering off to do the same. Trying to make his way down alone after realising he had walked too far, he was lost for three days before he saw sunrays pointing a path through trees. His guide, perhaps terrified that a foreigner had gone missing on his watch, paid a bomoh (witch doctor) to pray for his return instead of raising the alarm and organising a search party. All of us accounted for, we are pushed to make tracks by hot gusts that feel like the unwelcome breath of an ogre. Toxic fumes catch in my throat and blinding light prompts me to shield my eyes, making it appear as though I am saluting Merapi’s new lava dome. British journalist Simon Winchester, author of Krakatoa, writes that her eruption in the Sunda Strait on August 27, 1883, “was the loudest sound ever made since mankind started noting such things … It was like people in London hearing, with perfect clarity, an explosion in Baltimore, or Khartoum. Then the island exploded with a cataclysmic eruption, hurling a tower of ash, cloud and fire nearly 48 kilometres high, and raining down enormous islands of pumice, which were later found floating, laden with skeletons, 6,500 kilometres away.” If the explosion on Krakatoa, west of Java (not east, as the 1969 movie of the same name would have theatre-goers believe), shook the Earth and killed 36,600 people, one can only imagine the terrors of Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, 68 years earlier. That eruption, which claimed 60,000 lives and is the deadliest recorded blast, saw the ejection of twice the volume of material into the atmosphere, extinguished an entire language and rendered the island uninhabitable for years, says Winchester. More significantly, it cooled the world by almost one degree Celsius. Gunung Merapi may lag in infamy but not if there is truth in the theory that it wiped out the Hindu-Buddhist Javanese Kingdom of Mataram in 149

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1006. That catastrophe blanketed Central Java in ash and buried Borobodur (above), a ninth-century engineering and architectural feat as significant as the Parthenon, according to historian Arnold Toynbee. The Buddhist stepped pyramid of volcanic stone lay forgotten like some fictional lost city until 1815, when Singapore’s founder, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, then the British lieutenant governor of Java, led efforts to restore it. Change, often for the good, is believed to accompany volcanic eruptions. Soil is enriched by the fall-out, which explains why farmers choose to live in the path of Merapi’s fury. The Javanese believe her exclamations signify imminent political upheaval (although cynics might say that any changing of the guard could be blamed on the volcano, given her frequent paroxysms). Examples often cited include the blast in 1965, the year before General Suharto wrested power from Sukarno eventually to claim the presidency; and volcanic disturbance preceding the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the outcome of which saw Suharto fall the following year. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose presidency has been natural-disasterprone, is only too aware of his countrymen’s predilection for cosmic messages. Two months after he took office, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed one in four people in the worst-affected parts of Aceh. Then came Merapi’s 150

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eruption in 2006, which was followed by an earthquake a month later that jolted already-frayed nerves in Yogyakarta. Other earthquakes, avian ‘flu outbreaks, landslides and floods prompted murmurs of divine retribution and a call for national introspection in the editorials of newspapers, including The Jakarta Post. Not surprisingly, SBY’s political opponents made the most of the calamities, claiming he had helped spark these warnings from nature. Extravagant spending was one criticism, another that he was born under a bad sign. The belief that disasters indicate it is pay-back time for human folly underscores the degree to which animistic mysticism retains a strong hold on Indonesians, who are predominantly Muslim. The influential Muhammadiyah organisation, however, has been trying to purify Islam of mystical beliefs, including the veneration of volcanoes. In Java, where more than 120 million people live in proximity to 30 volcanoes that have killed 140,000 people in the last 500 years, it is little wonder Maridjan carries so much weight in his role as Merapi’s spiritual guardian. The volcano itself is significantly sited, according to traditional Javanese cosmology, which places it on an imaginary axis that runs from the Indian Ocean to the kraton (the sultan’s palace in Yogyakarta) to Merapi, 27 kilometres away. “The union of the spirits of mountain and sea is thought to be integral to the spiritual power of the court,” writes Michael Dove, a professor in the department of anthropology at Yale University. Despite the present sultan’s unease with mysticism, his palace still makes regular offerings to the volcano. In 2006, however, Hamengku Buwono X did not take part in a ceremony to bless the food, flowers and strands of his hair presented to mollify Merapi’s spirits and Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, the Goddess of the South Seas, who, legend has it, was married to the founder of the Mataram kingdom. The ritual is supposed to protect the sultan’s people by keeping the volcano, his home and the Indian Ocean perfectly aligned. * * * Descending Merapi in a straight line is difficult so we cut across scree to find a route kinder to joggled knees and feet. I imagine violence on an unimaginable scale taking place underfoot as tectonic plates collide beneath the Earth and earn Indonesia her spot on the Ring of Fire. 151

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Villagers who have climbed the mountain to pick berries and herbs ruffle an otherwise still environment. On an opposite bank monkeys scamper out of the shadows, their playfulness assurance that it is a rest day for Merapi. Sixteen years ago the wedding party in Turgo probably had similar thoughts. But when the sky turned black and a thunderous bellow muffled all other sound, they would have understood that Merapi was behaving normally: she was unpredictable. Some have argued that festivities should not have taken place on a sacred day of the Javanese calendar. Others say the celebrators should have heeded the warnings of scientists. Then there are those who are resigned to the fact that Merapi is impulsive. Sony, the volunteer who helped in evacuation efforts in 2006 and now heads an association of 55 Merapi guides, professes to have no time for superstition, but observes tradition in the annual offering to Merapi on the first of Suro (the Javanese New Year). “We cut off a buffalo head and take it to the crater,” he says. “About 1,000 people go up the volcano every year to bury the head.” Omnivorously religious, Sony, who has been climbing Merapi for 27 years, speaks of the volcano like a husband would a fickle spouse he adores. Her capriciousness, it seems, is a trait that makes her special. “You can’t tell with Merapi,” he says proudly. “Maybe she will erupt next month, next year, tonight, like that.”

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Poetry Goenawan Mohamad Translated by Laksmi Pamuntjak

About That Man Killed Sometime Around Election Day “God, give me Your vote.” The silence was the silence that follows a dog’s howl when the night watchman stumbled into the corpse by the dyke. Face down, as if seeking the fragrance and warmth of paddy. But the fetid smell and the cold of the man’s cheeks were contorted by the moonlight. Then came the others – flashlights, torches and fireflies – but no one recognised him. He’s not one of us, the watchman said. “God, give me Your vote.” Beneath the kerosene lantern in the village chief’s office they found the gaping wounds. Bustling shadows; leftover whispers on the veranda. The man had no identity card. No name. No party affiliation. No emblem. He had no one to cry for him because we couldn’t. Whatever could his religion be? “Great Mapmaker, where is my homeland?”

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Two days later they read about it in the city paper, on the front page. Someone cried without knowing why. Someone did not cry and did not know why. A worn-out child fashioned a hat from the morning paper that was later blown away by the wind. Look up! To those kites in the air, in pairs, leaning on the breeze. Later the twilight birds perched on the wires as the cranes sailed towards day’s end, crossing the wasteland and those long streaks of colour, like fading smoke. “God, give me Your vote.”

Pastoral I 15 metres from the road to Batuan, there is a dyke on a river’s edge, and the din of someone driving away birds, someone wading down to the river, singing, someone tasting the stream, trailing the sound of cold’s smacking on the pores of the forest, currents that comb the boulders, boulders which, like the shoulders of an ox, hold you back.

At 7.15 the limpid river disrobes you

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II Sometimes I want us to vanish like a pair of lizards in wild grass like lustre –

III Perhaps the time has come for us to let words be bewitched by the spread of moss or by torrents and furrows that shrivel Perhaps the time has come for us to be bewitched

IV Meanwhile in the south hay has been stacked, and folk are busy driving away birds, “Hai! Hai! Hai!”

A row of storks punches its bulbous white on rice

V Tell me, why upon your perfect body, the river doesn’t seem to touch a thing?

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VI Perchance tied is lotus to water Perchance tied is water to green Perchance tied is eternity to leaf I still fear deathâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s acrid odour at nightfall

like sin

VII Seconds are thorns that spread into mid October And so the day itches, and death descends, upon the watch that weaves cotton into dew VIII When you touch the petals of putrimalu you see the stems of time

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IX The transient cannot hold on to stars lost in the Milky Way That which quivers will be erased Those who make love will cease to make love But I remember a poem that pleads: “Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.”

X The next day, someone sends a postcard to the hut: “I like Malacca. The walls of the Portuguese, the street in early morning’s rumble, old roof-tiles on a Chinese warehouse, the port’s curvature, the colour of ships, and food stalls.”

That someone does not give a name.

XI Maybe indeed there is a city, so far away. Or a bay so far away

Hmm… What is the meaning of an end?

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XII 15 meters from the road to Batuan, there is a dyke on a river’s edge. Sometimes I want us to fall, like butterflies falling from a branch Before the certainty of death.

A Prayer for Refuge (in a Romanian Church) Oh, my Lord who has vanished into wooden walls so dark, dark as tobacco, let me hide thy name, let me shelve my hunger, my fear, my sword. Do not let this be thy kingdom. Free me from these dark narrows so like a fearful heaven. Give me a spell, from a foreign chant, like the Hebrew word on the priest’s tongue. Give me the red of spilled wine before they come before they cross the farmers’ graveyard 158

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and seize you from the sleeping congregation of this Gethsemane. Oh, my Lord who has vanished into wooden walls so dark, dark as tobacco, let me hide thy name, let me shelve my hunger, my fear, my sword.

The 12th Commandment I do not know what is said in the 12th Commandment. “Maybe something about the wind and the estuary,” you say. I hear your voice. I imagine salt scraped off waves, and waves sundered on the shore. I imagine a barge seeking space. Getting, not getting. I do not know what is said in the 12th Commandment. “Maybe a terse tale about an eternal journey, somewhere far away, with a simple ending.” And someone will depart; though I know not for long. Perhaps stars are honed at first light. I imagine time carried away by the river.

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Pemanasan Global (Global Warming) (2008) by Teguh Wiyatno. Watercolour on paper, 75cm x 55cm. Courtesy of Jakarta Art Awards, Indonesia.

Aqua Mors Anna Saa-Feliciano

here was a time, when Lito was a child, that his mother danced for rain. Now, she trembles when the skies darken. Lito watches his mother’s lips move in silent prayer as she stares at the bare headstone. He squats to put flowers in an old mayonnaise jar half filled with water and notices from the corner of his eye others doing the same thing. He is not alone in his grief. Merly will always be his kapatid, which means more than just sibling – more like someone joined by the same umbilical cord. It is not an easy word to translate. His grandmother used to sit by the wooden steps and teach them things, like how the movements of pattong were a matter of improvisation, no two dances ever being the same. Her dark and wrinkled hands would flit about, like her stories, as she told of headhunting and rain-calling ceremonies during February, March and April. The dance by the descendants of the Cordilleras was performed by women, “like your mother”, she’d say to him, who would, in prayer, gyrate with the beat of the gangsa and implore the god Lumawig to send rain. In his grandmother’s stories, warriors would push against each other, harder and harder, culminating in a mêlée. His mother’s rain dances filled his youthful dreams; now Lito wonders whether she will ever dance again. * * * 161

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Newspapers report that relief efforts are in full swing. Congressmen are being urged to donate one million pesos each for the rehabilitation of Manila and 25 other towns devastated by Typhoon Ondoy, the worst storm in 40 years. According to the latest statistics, 370,000 people are homeless and the number of dead runs into the hundreds, with authorities warning that the death toll can only rise. Total damage is estimated at 4.6 billion pesos, about a hundred million dollars. Politicians and celebrities compete to be seen to be giving more and amounts are flashed across the bottom of television screens. The two rival national networks compete in hosting telecasts to attract pledges. Lito wonders where all the money is coming from, given how poor and indebted the country is supposed to be. He wonders too where all the money is going. No one he knows has any money and those still with jobs are finding it hard to cope with the sharp rise in food prices. The president, who was uncharacteristically silent for days after the floods, is now declaring that her government is responding quickly to the calamity and, glittering with trinkets, nasally and nonchalantly announces the creation of a commission to seek grant aid, not loans, to pay for the reconstruction of roads, bridges and expressways. Lito has heard, and has no problem believing, that the reason the government was so slow to respond is that the disaster fund has been spent on politicians’ travel expenses. * * * Shivering in a cold sweat, Lito felt the chill wind that rattled the thin slats covering the windows. It was still dark, but his plastic watch said it was seven o’clock. It was still raining – how many days now? He missed waking to the warm rays of sunlight. The darkness, the dampness, depressed him. Next door’s kitchen radio carried news of the tropical storm edging towards Northern Luzon, but the typhoon warning for Metro Manila was still at level one and Lito would not be spared school. He felt the clothes draped on the length of plastic twine sagging over his bed and took down the least damp shirt and a pair of jeans so battered and worn the Makati kids would have paid a week’s allowance for them in one of their boutiques. He had only two pairs of jeans and a few loose-fitting shirts, and the others 162

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in his class never tired of commenting on his wardrobe – “peasant chic” they called it, laughing – though they were scarcely better off than him. All the same he would flush with embarrassment, and he could feel the pockmarks on his face left behind by his recent bout of chicken pox darken from their scorn. He was 17, strong and lean from fetching and carrying gallons of water for his neighbours at five pesos a trip. He drew water for them from the standpipe two streets away, though he was fairly sure the standpipe tapped into someone else’s water supply. He also worked part-time as a “tarpaulin boy”, climbing the scaffolding of skyscraper construction sites to hang huge advertising banners and to take them down again when the lease expired or a storm threatened to tear them away. He had been aloft most of last evening and looked forward to the little bonus that would come after the storm warning passed. He kept some of the money for himself and gave most of it to his mother, who always said thank you and who always let out a deep sigh when she put the grimy banknotes in her tin under the sink. It hurt Lito that he could not do more for her; when there was no work he would receive a 1,000 pesos for 500 millilitres of blood, but that always left him tired and in trouble for falling asleep in class. It was almost eight when he left home. The dark clouds and their steady, heavy rain portended a day to be endured in the discomfort of damp denim and wet feet and the shivering chill of sitting in the classroom. He tried his best to concentrate in class as the howling wind outside hurled sheets of rain against the leaky windows. The weather had gone from bad to worse: why was there no talk of sending them home? He overheard the principal’s secretary and the administrative officer talking about how traffic was at a standstill across Metro Manila. Classes were plagued by power outages, lights cutting out and coming back on throughout the day. Lito heard there had been some flooding already, but no one could say which areas had been hit. At the gate, after their teacher finally announced school was being suspended for the day and they should all go straight home, he heard a lady ramble about impassable roads, swallowed up in an instant by the rising waters. Floods were common in the monsoon season. Some parts of the city just couldn’t cope with rain, their neglected drains collapsed or clogged with rubbish left uncollected for weeks. It only had to drizzle and Malabon and 163

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Navotas, down by the bay, would be under water. And when the moon was full, the tide came surging in. There was no escaping nature and residents learned to survive by keeping a sharp eye on the calendar and an even sharper eye on the sky. Lito jumped at a clap of thunder that sounded as if it came from directly overhead and it made him worry about his mother and sisters at home. He had sent a text message to his mother’s phone but had not received a reply, though that might have meant there were lots of other people sending similar messages of concern. He tried to remember if they had managed to stop all the leaks in the roof the last time it rained, when they used every bucket and basin and bowl. At the gate the lady guard, who liked Lito because he always smiled hello and waved goodbye each day no matter how distracted he might be, caught him by the shoulder and urged him to stay at the school where it was safe because traffic wasn’t moving, all the public transport had stopped and it would be a long walk home. Lito thanked her and said he needed to make sure his mother and sisters were okay. “Be careful,” she said. Lito began walking, with one eye on the road for any viable transport to hasten his journey. He saw a garbage truck and waved frantically at the middle-aged man behind the wheel. The driver had already squeezed four people into the cab but said there might be room in the open back. Lito found a space among other stranded pedestrians crouching among the rubbish; someone banged on the roof of the cab for the driver to proceed. There were young and old, women and men, all trying to return home to their families. They whispered among themselves, all breathing through their mouths because of the revolting stench of garbage and scraps of rotting food. Lito pinched his nose and shared a weak smile with the others. It was nothing a good bath wouldn’t fix, and at least they had a ride. As the highwheeled truck drove through water half a tyre deep, Lito and his companions grew silent. All too soon the driver stopped and climbed half out of the window and told them he had gone as far as he could. To a chorus of frantic and desperate pleas to continue, he said he risked losing the truck if he went any farther. The water was too deep. They all climbed hesitantly down into waist-deep water. In the distance, Lito saw people wading chest high, some already struggling to keep their 164

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heads above water. The clouds were black and angry and everywhere it was as dark as early evening, though it was only an hour past noon. * * * Lito calculated that they had been living along the Manggahan Floodway for nearly 10 years. He liked their house and the ingenuity that had gone into its construction and extension. The walls were made of wood that worked around the dyke’s concrete supports and were decorated with old calendars and, in his section of the large single room, advertising posters of models and actresses. They had free electricity – they paid a man who used to work for Meralco and knew how to tap into the nearby power pole. He had gone around the neighbourhood, charging 1,000 pesos for connection, and he never came back. There was no water supply, which was inconvenient for no one but Lito, who had to fetch water three times a week, but he didn’t mind too much. The radio called people like Lito’s family “informal settlers”, which he knew meant “illegal squatters”. But Lito didn’t think they were doing anything wrong. The place stank too much to be of use to anyone else. Pools of stagnant water were everywhere, filled with garbage and the waste of families too lazy to take their sewage elsewhere. Their little compound, surrounded now by a five-metre wall, had been his home and playground since his parents decided to try their luck in Manila – there was nothing for them in the Bontoc mountains of the Cordilleras except a life in the rice paddies as harsh as that of their parents. Lito recalled fishing along the floodway before they fenced it off, testing his balance by walking along the top of the narrow levee. They were among the first settlers in the area, when the water was clean and smelled of promise. * * * Lito considered the floodwaters as one would any obstacle, something to be overcome. A young woman walked beside him carrying a young child and he nodded to her, hoping to reassure her while silently he prayed that they would survive. It was impossible to tell what lay beneath the filthy water and he annoyed himself by remembering that the city’s manhole covers were regularly 165

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stolen and sold to junkyards. He had laughed when he heard about the “Great Drain Robbery”: how manhole covers stolen from Manila and London and Chicago were turning up on the streets of China’s booming cities. The surge from a passing truck hit them from the side and the woman almost lost her balance but managed to steady herself, shifting the weight of the boy in her arms. She wasn’t pretty, but she was clearly feminine despite her pageboy bob; her thin shirt and tight jeans clung to her body and Lito caught himself staring and quickly looked away. She said her name was Ellen and, with that introduction, grabbed tightly at his arm for support. They walked for more than two hours. Ellen looked tired, though they took turns carrying Carlos. The three-year-old was brave and did not once cry but clutched in his tiny fist a clump of Lito’s hair, as if to remind him not to let go. Lito used the other people wading around them to gauge the depth of the water and tried to find the best path to follow, but Ellen wasn’t tall and she was often in up to her neck. Carlos sat atop his shoulders and sometimes called out “Over there!” Lito kept one hand on Carlos and with the other pushed aside the larger objects that rode the current: chairs and tables, cupboards and beds, boxes and bicycles, and empty Red Horse beer crates washed out of a nearby warehouse. Lito’s shirt snagged on the metal cap of a stray in a crate; he held up a full bottle and smiled at Ellen. “I can still be lucky at a time like this!” he shouted to her. Lito noticed Ellen had stopped moving. Her lips were white, her eyes wide and frantic. Lito followed their line to what looked like a clump of hair that had come to rest against her shoulder. “Don’t look at it,” Lito said quietly. “Look at me and Carlos. Now come this way.” He had to pull on Ellen’s arm to move her and the black thicket of hair drifted away. “Carlos?” he shouted. “Which way do we go now?” The boy steered his head towards a line of people standing waist deep about 100 metres away. Ellen’s face lit up and one of the people waved. She was nearly home. “Thank you so much for your help,” she said. “I hope we see you again and take good care of yourself.” Lito made Carlos promise to look after his mother and they parted company. Though now alone, Lito felt relieved to be free of what he felt was his responsibility to see these strangers safe. He was now more worried for his mother and sisters. 166

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* * * The rain had stopped and through the breaking clouds the moon provided some light. Shoes, chairs, toys, canned goods, plastic bags, clothing, books, a dead dog, underwear, a green sofa floated around Lito as he waded along the streets. A group of men was wrestling with a squealing swine that had managed to stay afloat. Lito saw the glint of a knife as one of the men brought it down across the pig’s throat. As his brain registered the vivid red of the arcing blood, he thought that it was the first colour he had seen all day, like he had been in a black-and-white movie all this time. Lito was hungry. He realised the marketplace and the bigger grocery stores were not where they should have been. The water had left a muddy line high above the shuttered fronts of the taller and sturdier buildings around him. Was the power still on? He had heard several people had been electrocuted. The automatic teller machines he passed blinked under power from their back-up batteries. His mobile phone, after so many hours under water, was useless and he doubted anyway if he’d have been able to make a call on the overloaded network. It was dark and all he could hear was the sloshing of water and a horrible wailing. Was this what the end of the world looked like? * * * Close to midnight he had to stop to rest. He heard his empty stomach and his throat was painfully dry. There was a footbridge ahead and, though it was already crowded, the displaced made space for him so he could sit. He felt a nudge and someone offered him a half-full bottle of water. He took a grateful sip and offered it back, but was urged to finish it. “You must be very thirsty,” the woman said; she reminded him of his mother and he was afraid he would cry. The woman touched his shoulder and said, “It’s going to be all right. You’ll be home soon.” * * * By five in the morning the water was subsiding, revealing a muddy wasteland. Overturned cars, one atop the other like toppled dominoes, were covered with the same thick sludge that squelched underfoot on higher parts of the street. The people moved as if they were dazed, like zombies in an old movie, 167

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Lito thought. Houses he had known his whole life were gone; landmarks that had steered him through childhood had vanished. He was standing where he was certain their house had been, and there was nothing. He looked around, suppressing a sense of panic. Then he saw his mother, and his thoughts of loss evaporated. There she was, in soaked and filthy house clothes, sitting in the mud, absently wiping at a muddy picture frame with muddy hands. It was the picture of him and his sisters, Merly and Jocy, taken last Christmas. Lito looked about and saw Merly’s little yellow bench, one of its legs broken. His mother’s eyes were red with crying. He hugged her tight, and she him. “You are safe. You are safe.” “Where’s Jocy? Where’s Merly?” It took Lito a while to work out from his mother’s account what had happened during the night. The flood water was deep and Jocy was the first to climb to the safety of a neighbour’s rooftop. His mother passed Merly up to Jocy and began climbing herself. It was all panic and confusion on the roof: children crying, men shouting, women asking for help. It was only when everyone began to settle that they noticed Merly was missing. “We were stuck on the roof for more than six hours,” his mother said. “It was so dark we were scared to move … Someone found a basin and used it to collect rainwater to drink … Mang Berto went into shock because he didn’t have any insulin with him …” Her words came like snatches of a remembered nightmare. “Someone got through to the emergency line on their mobile phone and they said there was nothing they could do for us … Only 10 boats for the whole city … The water just kept rising … People floated past on piles of garbage … They screamed for help, but we were helpless too … They disappeared so quickly … The current was strong …” She stopped talking, overcome by another bout of sobbing. “Where’s Jocy?” Lito asked quietly. “Jocy went crazy when we lost Merly and went to find her. I was afraid I’d lose her too, but she’s always so stubborn and never listens.” Lito said he would find them and asked some neighbours to watch his mother for him. She was rambling about open manholes and electrocution. She’d heard someone had been decapitated by a sheet of corrugated iron. He decided on a sweeping search that followed the flow of water. His voice grew hoarse from shouting his sisters’ names. In the distance he saw 168

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a girl covered in mud, hair plastered about her face. She appeared confused and kept sweeping her arms through the water, shouting and shouting. Lito drew closer and heard: “Merly! Where are you, Merly?” Jocy was wet, shaking with fever, nearly delirious and inconsolable. * * * “Brother, Brother, I can write my name! Now I can write you a letter!” called Merly as she jumped up and down on the bank. “No need to write me a letter; we are always together,” said Lito. “Didn’t I tell you, you are smart? I knew it: eating bananas makes you intelligent. Now come here! You are so dirty. Let’s eat, I already bought noodles.” Merly was born when Lito was 10; he carried her around in a sling made from one of his father’s old shirts and that way he could play with his friends and she wouldn’t cry. Merly slept as he played marbles in the dirt. There were times when they couldn’t afford milk for Merly and he could fill her bottle with water only, but she wouldn’t sleep, not matter how softly Lito sang to her, how gently he rocked her in his arms. When cooking rice their mother spooned out thick rice water from the boiling pot and put that in Merly’s bottle. There were happy times when Merly had powdered milk and she would sleep contentedly. And there were horrible nights when Merly could be ruthless, Lito trying to shush her cries, afraid the neighbours would hurl insults and worse for ruining their sleep. Lito had to take care of Merly, their mother said, because Jocy had school and she needed her strength to launder clothes so they could eat. Lito remembered when his mother took him to the big houses where she worked. He liked how they weren’t patched all over, stood straight instead of leaning and were always dry. Sometimes his mother would just collect the clothes and bring them home to wash near the broken standpipe; other times she did the washing at the houses where she worked. His mother always worked. Lito remembered little of their father except an overpowering smell of liquor, the shuffle of feet, the sound of pots and pans clattering off the walls, and shouting. And the bruises; they all had bruises, especially their mother, and sometimes she had blood on her face. Lito remembered not being afraid much after his father left. 169

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* * * Jocy was the last one carrying Merly, the one who passed her to a stranger. She was wracked by guilt, but allowed herself to be led away. All she could do was cry. Three days passed and Merly was still missing. Lito, his mother and Jocy were all exhausted and, to cover more ground, decided to split up and search separately, sleep wherever they could and seek food from whoever would share. A neighbour, worried about their sleeping rough, offered them a place on her roof. The house was ankle deep in mud, red and thick and foul smelling. Instead of resting, Lito used a broken plastic plate to help push the mud from the house until someone handed him a shovel. He noticed that each shovelful wriggled with worms. The neighbourhood women used a nearby water pump to rinse mud from plates and cups and cutlery recovered from the ruins around them, to share “mystery meals” made from the contents of unlabelled cans. Lito was asleep in a nightmare world when he was roused by an urgent male voice calling his mother’s name: “Aling Martha! Aling Martha! Are you there? Aling Martha!” He pulled on a damp shirt and hurried down to let the stranger into the house and stop his shouting before he woke everyone on the roof. When he opened the door he saw a man in a white shirt and denims. His face was familiar. It was Mang Isko. He said he needed to see Aling Martha but she was already coming up behind Lito. “Aling Martha. Forgive me for calling so late, but we have found Merly.” Mang Isko called to his companions and Lito saw a tired man carrying Merly’s limp form. He panicked for a moment until he saw the rise and fall of her little chest and realised she was asleep. His mother cried out and rushed forward to gather Merly in her arms, which woke the child. Merly began to cry until she saw her mother’s face and was quiet again. Mang Isko said they had been separated from the others and he was holding Merly when a rubber dinghy came by and they were rescued. Aling Martha hugged him in appreciation, grateful for the tears of joy after so much sorrow. Mang Isko said he needed to keep moving – he was taking his family to Cavite, where he had some relatives, and would start again there. He emptied his 170

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pockets of a few crumpled pesos, a packet of cigarettes and a plastic lighter, and handed over some bottles of water. “I must be going now,” he said. “I am so happy Merly is safe.” Mang Isko and his companions disappeared into the night. Lito picked up the cigarettes, offered them around the others and took one himself. His uncle used to send him to the sari-sari store to buy cigarettes and Lito had acquired the habit at a young age. A cigarette helps one to forget hunger. He watched the glowing tips around him in the dark and thought that no one would forget September 26, when a month of rain fell on Manila in eight hours. * * * Merly was unwell; she looked sad and was distant and Lito was afraid the separation during the flood had left her traumatised. He was glad she was alive. He had seen bodies being dragged from the mud; a corpse brought down from a tree. “She says her stomach hurts,” he reported to his mother. “She also has a fever, maybe from something in the water.” “Don’t worry,” Aling Matha reassured him. “You know how Merly is: she’s had a runny nose since the day she was born.” Ten days after the floods it was decided they should all move to the stadium, which had been turned into a relief camp, its concrete floor a patchwork of cardboard where the refugees marked out tiny spaces and consumed water rations and hot meals of rice porridge. Lito wasn’t sure if it might have been better to stay where they were, considering the stench of so many unwashed bodies still covered in mud mingled with that of clogged and overflowing toilets. Then there was the mounting garbage from donated food and disposable spoons, forks and plates, and innumerable empty plastic water bottles. The air was stuffy and people slept side by side. Jocy, Lito and Aling Martha took turns keeping guard because theft had been rampant; water, packets of noodles and clean clothing were now currency. Aling Martha pinned inside her bra a small black pouch, into which went her rosary, a few banknotes, her wedding ring and a pair of cheap earrings given to her by her grandmother. 171

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Everywhere there were children with runny noses and hacking coughs. Many adults also complained of stomach aches. There was a dangerous scramble after a megaphone announcement that a fire engine was outside for everyone to hose off the muck that reeked of fish, urine and sweat. A woman in a muddy housecoat came up to Lito and looked him squarely in the face. “Could you refrain from being noisy at night? The children can’t sleep.” “Pardon us,” he said. “My sister cannot help her coughing. She is also burning with fever.” “You should get her to a doctor,” the woman said. “Do you know where I can find one?” Merly slept most of the time and her fever showed no signs of breaking. They tried to keep her cool with cloths dampened with tepid bottled water. Lito was worried too about the stomach pains. He suggested taking her to the public hospital, but others had told him they were already overwhelmed. But they had to try and, borrowing 300 pesos from a friend, they asked someone to drive them to the emergency room. Lito noticed that the whites of Merly’s eyes were yellow and her breathing laboured. As she lay limp in his arms, Lito remembered seeing a dying kitten abandoned at a garbage dump and being slapped across the face by his father when he cried. It was a long wait before Merly was looked at; the diagnosis was leptospirosis. “We’re understaffed and there’s not much we can do,” the young intern explained. “We can give her a shot of antibiotics and prescribe a course of treatment, but there are so many people sick from the flood … she can’t stay here.” Lito felt a flush of anger at the intern’s indifference to his sister’s fate, before realising it wasn’t indifference but exhaustion that had drained the medic of emotion. Aling Martha stood in silence beside Lito, seemingly deaf to the exchange. Lito was handed a list of what he would need and directed to the hospital pharmacy. He looked at the paper and saw in the scribble only the need for money if Merly was to be made well again. * * * 172

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On the overpass with his mother, as they walked slowly home from the cemetery, Lito saw the tabloid headlines at a news-stand. The leader of the nation had just spent US$20,000 on dinner at Le Cirque restaurant in New York. Lito was aghast and dug in his pocket for some coins. Newspapers were a luxury and mostly full of lies, but he was angry; this one he wanted to read. “The president must get paid a lot if she can spend almost a million pesos on one meal,” Aling Martha said after Lito read the story to her. “Camote tops and fish sauce is enough for us,” Lito assured his mother. “How much do you spend on a meal for our family?” “Thirty pesos,” she said. Lito was upset, not surprised, by what he read. But he also felt a crushing sense of powerlessness, just as he had felt the humiliation and indignity of having to beg for help so they could give Merly a decent burial. So much corruption, so much scandal, so much stupidity, so much greed – worse is that everyone knows, thought Lito, and no one does anything about it. Lito’s brain felt like jelly. He had more important things to worry about, like how he was going to pass his exams without his class notes. Lately, he had also felt ashamed of the second-hand clothes he wore, generous though the school librarian had been in giving them to him. His mother reminded him there was no shame in being poor. His teachers had organised a collection of canned food and clothing for students who, like Lito, had been victims of the floods, and he was grateful for that because his family had absolutely nothing. He now understood the families who survived by working Smokey Mountain – one person’s trash was another person’s treasure. Lito was angry and confused but could find no outlet for his anger, or solution to his confusion. Though he tried not to, he cried a lot now. He cried when he remembered the certificate he received when he won first place in a poetry recitation contest. It was the only contest he had ever won. His mother told him to put mementoes of past achievements out of his mind, to forget them. “Crying doesn’t bring anything back,” she said. * * * 173

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Lito felt so tired. He had managed to sell more blood that morning â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a paltry 500 pesos a litre, even though the required month had not passed. He put his head down on the desk. He thought he might sleep a little in a quiet corner of the school library. They wanted him up the scaffolding that evening.

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San Pedro Laguna, south of Manila, September 27, 2009. A man pushes his fishing boat, used to transport residents for a minimal fee, through floodwaters brought on by Typhoon Ondoy. 175

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Centre: Bagong Silangan, Quezon City, Metro Manila, September 27, 2009. A resident carries possessions recovered after his home was badly damaged by Typhoon Ondoy. 176

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Nothing interrupts lunch in San Pedro Laguna, south of Manila, October 1, 2009. The typhoon, which left homes half submerged, sliced through Southeast Asia, killing 400 people. 178

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Workers salvage property from a building sinking into flood waters. Tanay Rizal, east of Manila, September 28, 2009.

Residents try to repair their storm-ravaged home. Bagong Silangan, Quezon City, Metro Manila, September 30, 2009. 179

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Left: the displaced wait for emergency aid on a basketball court used as a shelter on one side and for keeping a vigil for the dead on the other. Bagong Silangan, Quezon City, Metro Manila, September 30, 2009.

Postscript: scavenging for usable materials among garbage dumped on a busy street during a post-Ondoy clean-up. Pasig, Metro Manila, October 8, 2009. A week after Typhoon Ondoy subsided, unofficial figures appearing on charity websites reported that, including those killed, 1.8 million people had been affected, their homes and other property lost, their crops destroyed. The Philippinesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Secretary of National Defence declared a State of National Calamity.

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Jamrud Raya No. 28 (2009) by Agan Harahap. Digital image on Endura paper, 69cm x 100cm. Courtesy of North Art Space, Jakarta, Indonesia.

Excerpt: Mao’s Great Famine, by Frank Dikötter FROM 1958 to 1962 China was pitched into a hell of inconceivable proportions. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to overtake Britain, then still seen as an industrial superpower, in less than 15 years. By unleashing China’s greatest asset, a labour force counted in the hundreds of millions of people, Mao thought he could catapult his country past its competitors. In pursuit of a utopian paradise everything was collectivised, villagers being herded together in giant communes that heralded the leap from socialism into communism. In the countryside, people had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the party’s every dictate. Irrigation campaigns compelled up to half of the villagers all over the country to work for weeks on end on giant water-conservancy projects, often far from home, without adequate food or rest. Those left to cultivate the land were ordered to participate in controversial agricultural innovations such as deep ploughing and close cropping. Combined with the elimination of private property and the profit motive, these experiments resulted in a steep decline in grain output. But instead of sounding the alarm, local cadres were pressured by their superiors to report falsely ever greater yields. To protect their jobs they handed over a correspondingly bigger share of the crop to the state, putting villagers on a starvation diet. The experiment ended in one of the greatest mass killings in human history, with at least 45 million people worked, starved or beaten to death. Gradually I came to realise how bad Mao’s holocaust was as I spent three years sifting thousands of archives all over China. I was able to consult these primary sources because a little-noticed law has disclosed state documents 183

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more than 30 years old. And I discovered that even if the most sensitive information remains locked away inside party vaults, the available documents go far beyond the most pessimistic estimates of previous studies of the famine. A conclusion emerging from the detailed dossier that lies behind Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe is that coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundations of the Great Leap Forward. Millions of people were starved selectively because they were relatively rich; dragged their feet; spoke out; or simply were not liked, for whatever reason, by whoever wielded the canteen ladle. Even more vanished because they were too old, weak or sick to work and unable to earn their keep. Countless numbers were killed indirectly through neglect because cadres were compelled to focus on figures rather than people, ensuring they fulfilled leading planners’ targets. As the following extract from my book reveals, occasionally in graphic detail some readers may find disturbing, the meticulous reports compiled by the party show that from 1958 to 1962, by a rough approximation, six to eight per cent of those who died prematurely were not starved but tortured to death, buried alive or summarily executed. The percentage amounts to at least 2.5 million victims. Much of the horror of Mao’s Great Famine has been obfuscated by the voluminous literature on the Cultural Revolution. Yet, as the evidence illustrates, the pivotal event in the history of the People’s Republic of China was the Great Leap Forward. Less clear is how we are to grasp the enormity of the crimes committed during that period. The imagination stumbles when confronted with a total figure of 45 million premature deaths, all the more since so much of the killing was for nothing, the whole utopian experiment being utterly futile. The complete economic uselessness of all the suffering inflicted on so many millions of ordinary people – most remembered by none but a few surviving relatives – is unmanageable for the mind. The inability to comprehend the horror, however, does not mean that we should not try to confront it. Frank Dikötter, Hong Kong, August 2010

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error and violence were the foundations of the regime. Terror, to be effective, had to be arbitrary and ruthless. It had to be widespread enough to reach everyone but did not have to claim many lives. This principle was well understood. “Kill a chicken to scare the monkey” was a traditional saying. Cadres who forced villagers in Tongzhou – just outside the capital – to kneel before beating them called it “punish one to deter a hundred”. However, during the Great Leap Forward something of an altogether different nature happened in the countryside. Violence became a routine tool of control. It was not used occasionally on a few to instil fear in the many, rather it was directed systematically and habitually against anybody seen to dawdle, obstruct or protest, let alone pilfer or steal – a majority of villagers. Every meaningful incentive to work was destroyed for the cultivator – the land belonged to the state, the grain he produced was procured at a price that was often below the cost of production, his livestock, tools and utensils were no longer his, often even his home was confiscated. The local cadre, on the other hand, faced ever-greater pressure to fulfil and overfulfil the plan, having to whip up the workforce in one relentless drive after another. The constant hammering of propaganda may have helped in the early days of the Great Leap Forward, but the daily meetings villagers were required to attend contributed to widespread sleep deprivation. “Meetings every day, loudspeakers everywhere,” remembered Li Popo when interviewed about 185

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the famine in Sichuan. Meetings, some of them lasting several days, were indeed at the heart of collectivisation, but they were not so much a forum of socialist democracy, where the peasant masses openly voiced their views, as a site of intimidation where cadres could lecture, bully, threaten and shout themselves hoarse for hours on end. All too often farmers were woken in the middle of the night to work in the fields after an evening at a village meeting, so that they slept for less than three or four hours a day in the ploughing season. In any event, as the promise of utopia was followed by yet another spell of back-breaking labour, the willingness to trade hard work for empty promises gradually eroded. Soon, the only way to extract compliance from an exhausted workforce was the threat of violence. Nothing short of fear of hunger, pain or death seemed to be able to galvanise them. In some places both villagers and cadres became so brutalised that the scope and degree of coercion had to be constantly expanded, creating a mounting spiral of violence. With far fewer carrots to offer, the party relied more heavily on the stick. The stick was the weapon of choice in the countryside. It was cheap and versatile. A swing of the baton would punish a straggler, while a series of blows could lacerate the back of more stubborn elements. In serious cases victims could be strung up and beaten black and blue. People were forced to kneel on broken shells and beaten. This happened, for instance, to Chen Wuxiong, who refused to work on an irrigation project far away from home. He was forced to kneel and hold a heavy log above his head, all the while being beaten with a stick by local cadre Chen Longxiang. As famished villagers often suffered from oedema, liquid seeped through their pores with every stroke of the stick. It was a common expression that someone â&#x20AC;&#x153;was beaten until all the water came outâ&#x20AC;?, for instance in the case of Lu Jingfu, a farmer chased by a team of thugs. So enraged was their leader Ren Zhongguang, first party secretary of Napeng commune, Qin county, that he beat the man for 20 minutes. Party officials often took a lead. The report compiled by the local party committee that investigated abuses in a commune in Qingyuan explained that the first party secretary Deng Zhongxing personally beat more than 200 farmers, killing 14 in an attempt to fulfil the quotas. The brains of Liu Shengmao, too sick to work at the reservoir in Huaminglou, Hunan, were widely spattered by the beating he received from the brigade secretary, who 186

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continued to pummel his lifeless body in a blind fury. Ou Desheng, party secretary of a commune in Hunan, single-handedly punched 150 people, of whom four died. “If you want to be a party member you must know how to beat people” was his advice to new recruits. In Daoxian county – “everywhere is a torture field”, an investigation team wrote – farmers were clubbed on a regular basis. One team leader personally beat 13 people to death (a further nine subsequently died of their injuries). Some of these cadres were veritable gangsters, their mere appearance instilling fear. In Nanhai county, brigade leader Liang Yanlong toted three guns and stalked the village in a big leather coat. Li Xianchun, team leader in Hebei, injected himself with morphine daily and would swagger about the village in bright red trousers, swearing loudly and randomly beating anybody who had the misfortune to catch his attention. Overall, across the country, maybe as many as half of all cadres regularly pummelled or caned the people they were meant to serve – as endless reports demonstrate. Four thousand out of 16,000 villagers working on the Huangcai reservoir in Hunan in the winter of 1959–60 were kicked and beaten, and 400 died as a result. In a Luoding commune in Guangdong, more than half of all cadres beat the villagers, close to 100 being clubbed to death. A more comprehensive investigation of Xinyang, Henan, showed that over a million people died in 1960. Most died of starvation, but some 67,000 were beaten to death by the militias. The stick was common, but it was only one tool in the arsenal of horror devised by local cadres to demean and torture those who failed to keep up. As the countryside slid into starvation, ever-greater violence had to be inflicted on the famished to get them into the fields. The ingenuity deployed by the few to inflict pain and suffering on the many seemed boundless. People were thrown into ponds, sometimes bound, sometimes stripped of their clothes. In Luoding a 10-year-old boy was tied up and thrown into a bog for having stolen a few stalks of wheat. He died after a few days. People were stripped naked and left in the cold. For stealing a kilo of beans, farmer Zhu Yufa was fined 120 yuan. His clothes, his blanket and his door mat were confiscated, then he was stripped naked and subjected to an accusation session. In one commune in Guangdong, where thousands of farmers were sent to do forced labour, stragglers were stripped of their clothes in the middle of the winter. Elsewhere, in the rush to complete a reservoir, 187

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up to 400 villagers at a time were made to work in sub-zero temperatures without cotton-padded clothing. No exceptions were made for pregnant women. The cold, it was thought, would force the villagers to work more vigorously. In Liuyang, Hunan, a team of 300 men and women were made to work bare-chested in the snow. One in seven died. And then, in the summer, people were forced to stand in the glaring sun with arms spread out (others had to kneel on stones or on broken glass). This happened from Sichuan in the south to Liaoning in the north. People were also burned with incandescent tools. Hot needles were used to singe navels. When farmers recruited to work on a reservoir in Lingbei commune complained about pain, the militia seared their bodies. In Hebei people were branded with a hot iron. In Sichuan a few were doused in petrol and set alight, some burning to death. Boiling water was poured over people. As fuel was scarce, it was more common to cover people in urine and excrement. One 80-year-old woman, who had the temerity to report her team leader for stealing rice, paid the price when she was drenched in urine. In Longgui commune, near Shantou, those who failed to keep up with work were pushed into a heap of excrement, forced to drink urine or had their hands burned. Elsewhere, a runny concoction of excrement diluted with water was poured down a victimâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s throat. Huang Bingyin, a villager weakened by starvation, stole a chicken but was caught and forced by the village leader to swallow cow dung. Liu Desheng, guilty of poaching a sweet potato, was covered in urine. He, his wife and his son were also forced into a heap of excrement. Then tongs were used to prise his mouth open after he refused to swallow excrement. He died three weeks later. Mutilation was carried out everywhere. Hair was ripped out. Ears and noses were lopped off. After Chen Di, a farmer in Guangdong, stole some food, he was tied up by militiaman Chen Qiu, who cut off one of his ears. The case of Wang Ziyou was reported to the central leadership: one of his ears was chopped off, his legs were tied up with wire, a 10-kilo stone was dropped on his back and then he was branded with a hot iron â&#x20AC;&#x201C; as punishment for digging up a potato. In Yuanling county, Hunan, testicles were beaten, soles of feet were branded and noses were stuffed with hot peppers. Ears were nailed against the wall. In the Liuyang region, Hunan, iron wires were used to chain farmers. In Jianyang, Sichuan, an iron wire was run through the 188

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ears of thieves, pulled down by the weight of a piece of cardboard which read “habitual thief”. Others had needles inserted under their nails. In several parts of Guangdong, cadres injected salt water into people with needles normally used on cattle. Sometimes husbands and wives were forced to beat each other, a few to death. One elderly man, when interviewed for this book in 2006, quietly sobbed when he recounted how as a young boy he and the other villagers had been forced to beat a grandmother, tied up in the local temple for having taken wood from the forest. People were intimidated by mock executions and mock burials. They were also buried alive. This was often mentioned in reports about Hunan. People were locked up in a cellar and left to die in eerie silence after a period of frantic screaming and scratching against the hatch. The practice was widespread enough to prompt a query by provincial boss Zhou Xiaozhou during a visit to Fengling county in November 1958. Humiliation was the trusted companion of pain. Everywhere people were paraded – sometimes with a dunce cap, sometimes with a placard on their chests, sometimes entirely naked. Faces were smeared with black ink. People were given yin and yang haircuts, as one half of the head was shaved, the other not. Verbal abuse was rife. The Red Guards, 10 years later during the Cultural Revolution, invented very little. Punishment also extended to the hereafter. Sometimes the corpses of those who had been beaten to death were simply left to rot by the roadside, destined to become pariahs of the afterlife, their wandering ghosts – according to popular belief – never able to rest without proper burial rites. Signs were put up by some graves. In Longgui commune, Guangdong, where one in five died in 1959, some people were hastily buried by the roadside, the site marked by a signboard with the word “sluggard”. In Shimen, Hunan, the entire family of Mao Bingxiang starved to death, but the brigade leader refused to give them a burial. After a week rats had gnawed through their eyes. Local people later told an investigation team that “we people are not even like dogs, nobody buries us when we die”. Family members could be punished for trying to bury a relative who had fallen foul of local justice. When a 70-year-old mother hanged herself to escape from hunger, her child hurried back home from the fields in a panic. But the local cadre was infuriated by the breach of discipline. He chased the 189

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daughter down the road, punched her head and then, when she was down, kicked her upper body. She was crippled for life. “You can keep her and eat her,” he said of her mother, whose body was left for days to decompose. The worst form of desecration was to chop up the body and use it as fertiliser. This happened with Deng Daming, beaten to death because his child had stolen a few broad beans. Party secretary Dan Niming ordered his body to be simmered down into fertiliser for a field of pumpkins. * * * The extent of the violence is difficult to underestimate: in a province such as Hunan, which did not rank as one of the worst in terms of overall casualties, a report by a central inspection committee addressed to Zhou Enlai at the time noted that people were beaten to death in 82 out of 86 counties and cities. But it is harder to come up with reliable figures, and none are likely ever to be produced for the whole country. It was difficult enough for investigators at the time to determine how many people had died during the famine, let alone ascertain the cause of death. But some of the teams sent to the countryside probed further and came up with a rough idea of what had happened on the ground. In Daoxian county, Hunan, many thousands perished in 1960, but only 90 per cent of the deaths could be attributed to disease and starvation. Having reviewed all the evidence, the team concluded that 10 per cent had been buried alive, clubbed to death or otherwise killed by party members and the militia. In Shimen county, Hunan, some 13,500 died in 1960, of whom 12 per cent were “beaten or driven to their deaths”. In Xinyang, a region subject to an inquiry headed by senior leaders such as Li Xiannian, a million people died in 1960. A formal investigation committee estimated that six to seven per cent were beaten to death. In Sichuan the rates were much higher. In Kaixian county, a close examination by a team sent by the provincial party committee concluded that in Fengle commune, where 17 per cent of the population had perished in less than a year, up to 65 per cent of the victims had died because they were beaten, punished with food deprivation or forced into committing suicide. Report after report detailed the ways in which people were tortured, and the image that emerges from this mass of evidence is that at least six to eight per cent of all the famine victims were directly killed or died as a result 190

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of injuries inflicted by cadres and the militia. At least 45 million people perished above a normal death rate during the famine from 1958 to 1962. Given the extent and scope of violence so abundantly documented in the party archives, it is likely that at least 2.5 million of these victims were beaten or tortured to death. There is no simple explanation for the violence that underpinned crash collectivisation. One might very well point to a tradition of violence stretching back many centuries in China, but how would that have been any different from the rest of the world? Europe was steeped in blood, and mass murder took an unprecedented number of lives in the first half of the 20th century. Modern dictatorships can be particularly murderous in their combination of new technologies of power, exercised through the one-party state, with new technologies of death, from the machine gun to the gas chamber. When powerful states decide to pool these resources to exterminate entire groups of people the overall consequences can be devastating. Genocide, after all, is made possible only with the advent of the modern state. The one-party state under Mao did not concentrate all its resources on the extermination of specific groups of people – with the exception, of course, of counter-revolutionaries, saboteurs, spies and other “enemies of the people”, political categories vague enough potentially to include anybody and everybody. But Mao did throw the country into the Great Leap Forward, extending the military structure of the party to all of society. “Everyone a soldier,” Mao had proclaimed at the height of the campaign, brushing aside such bourgeois niceties as a salary, a day off each week or a prescribed limit on the amount of labour a worker should carry out. A giant people’s army in the command economy would respond to every beck and call of its generals. Every aspect of society was organised along military lines – with canteens, boarding kindergartens, collective dormitories, shock troops and villagers construed as the footsoldiers – in a continuous revolution. These were not merely martial terms rhetorically deployed to heighten group cohesion. All the leaders were military men attuned to the rigours of warfare. They had spent 20 years fighting a guerrilla war in extreme conditions of deprivation. They had coped with one extermination campaign after another unleashed by the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek, and then managed to survive the onslaught of the Japanese army in the Second World War. They had come through the vicious purges and bouts of torture which periodically 191

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convulsed the party itself. They glorified violence and were inured to massive loss of life. And all of them shared an ideology in which the end justified the means. In 1962, having lost millions of people in his province, Li Jingquan compared the Great Leap Forward to the Long March, in which only one in 10 had made it to the end: “We are not weak, we are stronger, we have kept the backbone.” On the ground party officials showed the same callous disregard for human life as they had to the millions mobilised into the bloody offensives against Chiang Kai-shek. The brute force with which the country had been conquered was now to be unleashed on the economy – regardless of the casualty figures. And as sheer human willpower was deemed capable of just about any feat – mountains could be moved – any failure looked suspiciously like sabotage. A slacker in the “war on sparrows” was a “bad element” who could derail the entire military strategy of the Great Leap Forward. A farmer who pilfered from the canteen was a soldier gone astray, to be eliminated before the platoon was threatened with mutiny. Anybody was potentially a deserter, or a spy, or a traitor, so that the slightest infraction was met with the full rigour of martial justice. The country became a giant boot camp in which ordinary people no longer had a say in the tasks they were commanded to carry out, despite the pretence of socialist democracy. They had to follow orders, failing which they risked punishment. Whatever checks existed on violence – religion, law, community, family – were simply swept away. As the party purged itself several times during the Great Leap Forward, it also recruited new members, many of them unsavoury characters who felt little compunction in using violence to get the job done. The village, commune or county with the most red flags was generally also the one with the most victims. But red flags could be taken away and given to a rival at any moment, forcing local cadres to keep up the pressure, although the workforce was increasingly exhausted. A vicious circle of repression was created, as ever more relentless beatings were required to get the starving to perform whatever tasks were assigned to them. In the escalation of violence, the limit was reached when the threat of punishment and the threat of starvation cancelled each other out. One villager forced to work long shifts up in the mountains in the cold of winter put it succinctly: “We are exhausted; even if you beat me I won’t work.” 192

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The way in which violence escalated at the time was analysed in an extremely interesting manuscript titled ‘How and Why Cadres Beat People’, written by one of the investigation teams dispatched to the countryside in Hunan. The authors of the report not only spent time collecting incriminating evidence against cadres guilty of abuse of power, but they also interviewed them in a rare attempt to find out what had gone wrong. They discovered the reward principle: cadres beat villagers to earn praise from their superiors. However chaotic the situation was on the ground, violence always followed a line, namely from the top towards the bottom. Zhao Zhangsheng was an example. A low-ranking party member, at first he refused to hit people suspected of being “rightists” in the purges following the 1959 Lushan plenum. He was taken to task by his superiors, and even risked being denounced as a “conservative rightist” himself, but he continued to express reluctance at using violence against party enemies. So he was fined five yuan as a warning. Then, at long last, he succumbed to the pressure, coming back with a vengeance, bashing a small child till it was covered in blood. Peer pressure all too often dragged local cadres down to the same level, binding all in a shared camaraderie of violence. In Leiyang, county leader Zhang Donghai and his acolytes considered violence to be a “duty” intrinsic to the “continuous revolution”: “having a campaign is not the same as doing embroidery, it is impossible not to beat people to death”. Local cadres who refused to beat slackers were themselves subjected to accusation sessions, tied up and beaten. Some 260 were dismissed from their jobs. Thirty were beaten to death. In Hechuan county, Sichuan, cadres were told that “there are so many people working, it doesn’t matter if you beat a few people to death.” Some of the interviews collected by party inspectors in 1961 confronted the perpetrators of violence with their victims. Shao Ke’nan was a young Hunanese who was beaten for the first time in the summer of 1958, at the height of the collectivisation frenzy. Dispatched to work for 12 hours a day in the middle of the winter on an irrigation project in the Huaguo mountains, he was covered in blows again. One of his tormentors was a cadre called Yi Shaohua. Shao knew Yi from his childhood, and recalled that the man had never resorted to violence before the Great Leap Forward. With the unfolding of new political campaigns he changed, beating and cursing 193

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on a mere whim. He punched hard, leaving his victims bruised, battered and bleeding. When Yi Shaohua, in turn, was asked why he was so violent, he explained that the pressure had come from his superior. Yi was afraid of being labelled a rightist. His boss told him that “if you don’t beat them the work won’t get done”. The pressure had to be passed along a chain of command: “the people above us squeeze us so we squeeze the people below us”. In other words, as party members were terrorised themselves, they in turn terrorised the population under their control. * * * Cadres had a choice. They could improve the living conditions of the villagers – against all odds – or instead try to meet the party’s targets. The one came at the expense of the other. Most took the path of least resistance. Once that choice had been made, violence assumed its own logic. In conditions of widespread penury it was impossible to keep everybody alive. There simply was not enough food left in the village to provide even reliable farmers with an adequate diet, and in the climate of mass repression following the 1959 Lushan plenum it did not look as if the problem of shortages was about to be solved very quickly. An expedient way to increase the available food was to eliminate the weak and sick. The planned economy already reduced people to mere digits on a balance sheet, a resource to be exploited for the greater good, like coal or grain. The state was everything, the individual nothing, his worth being constantly assessed through work points and determined by the ability to move earth or plant rice. In the countryside farmers were treated like livestock: they had to be fed, clothed and housed, all of which came at a cost to the collective. The logical extension of these bleak calculations was to cull those judged unworthy of life. The discriminate killing of slackers, weaklings or otherwise unproductive elements increased the overall food supply for those who contributed to the regime through their labour. Violence was one way of dealing with food shortages. Food was commonly used as a weapon. Hunger was the punishment of first resort, even more so than a beating. Li Wenming, deputy party secretary of a commune in Chuxiong county, clubbed six farmers to death, but his main tool for discipline was hunger. Two recalcitrant brothers were deprived of food for a full week, and they ended up desperately foraging for roots in 194

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the forest, where they soon died of hunger. One of their wives was sick at home. She too was banned from the canteen. An entire brigade of 76 people was punished with hunger for 12 days. Many died of starvation. In Longgui commune, Guangdong, the party secretary of the commune ordered that those who did not work should not eat. Describing what happened in several counties in Sichuan, one inspector noted that “commune members too sick to work are deprived of food – it hastens their deaths”. In the first month the ration was reduced to 150 grams of grain a day, then in the following month to 100 grams. In the end those about to die were denied any food at all. In Jiangbei and Yongchuan, “virtually every people’s commune withholds food”. In one canteen catering for 67 people, 18 died within three months after they were barred from the premises on grounds of sickness. Few reliable figures exist, but a team of inspectors who looked closely at a number of brigades in Ruijiang county, Sichuan, believed that 80 per cent of those who had died of hunger had been denied food as a form of punishment. And even those who were given food in the canteen often received less than they were formally entitled to. As one farmer explained, the ladle that was dipped into the pot could “read people’s faces”. By this he meant a phenomenon that many interviewees recalled, namely that the man in charge of the canteen deliberately discriminated against those he considered to be “bad elements”. Whereas the spoon reached deep to the bottom of the pot for good workers, it merely skimmed the surface for “bad elements”, who were given a watery concoction: “The water looked greenish and was undrinkable.” Report after report alleges that the sick were also forced to come out and work in the fields. Of the 24 villagers suffering from oedema who were compelled by cadre Zhao Xuedong to take part in labour all but four died. In Jinchang commune those who were lucky enough to be given medical treatment were driven to perform heavy labour by the local party secretary as soon as they were released from medical care. Throughout the country those who were too ill to work were routinely cut off from the food supply – a decision easily reached by those cadres who interpreted illness as opposition to the regime. In the worst places even those who managed to accomplish their daily task were given only a bowl of watery rice. * * * 195

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“To each according to his needs” was the slogan heralded by model counties such as Xushui, but all too often the reality was much closer to Lenin’s dictum that “he who does not work shall not eat”. Some collectives even divided the local population into different groups according to their work performance, each being given a different ration. Calories were distributed according to muscle. The idea was to cut the ration from those who underperformed and use it as a bonus to encourage the better workers. It was a simple and effective system to manage scarcity, rewarding the strong at the expense of the weak. A similar system had been devised in similar circumstances when the Nazis were confronted with such food shortages that they could no longer feed their slave labourers. Günther Falkenhahn, director of a mine that supplied IG Farben’s chemicals complex, divided his Ostarbeiter into three classes, concentrating the available food on those workers who provided the best return per unit of calories. Those at the bottom fell into a fatal spiral of malnutrition and underperformance. By 1943 he had received national recognition, and the idea of Leistungsernährung, or “performance feeding”, was promulgated as standard practice in the employment of Ostarbeiter. No order ever came from above instructing party members to restrict adequate feeding to above-average workers, but it seemed an effective enough strategy to some cadres keen to obtain maximum output for minimal expense. In Peach Village, Guangdong, the cadres divided the farmers into 12 different grades, calibrated according to performance. Workers in the top grade were given just under 500 grams of grain a day. Those lingering at the bottom received a mere 150 grams a day, a starvation diet that weeded out the most vulnerable elements. They were replaced by others who inexorably slipped down the ranks, edging closer to the end. One in 10 was starved to death in 1960. In fact, throughout the country, as we have seen, units were divided into different ranks, red, grey and white flags* being handed out * During the Great Leap Forward endless meetings at all levels bestowed three categories of designation on provinces, cities, counties, communes, factories and even individuals, all on the basis of their achievements. A “red flag” was granted to those judged to be advanced, a “grey flag” was given to those considered mediocre, and a “white flag” was punishment for the backward. Handed out during meetings after work, these symbolic designations, sometimes drawn on a blackboard next to a unit’s name, had the power to confer shame in a society in which even the slightest lack of political enthusiasm could cause somebody to be labelled a rightist. 196

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to advanced, mediocre and backward units. It was a small step to elaborate the system further and make calorie income dependent on rank. In Jintang county, for instance, one village divided its members into “superior”, “middle” and “inferior” groups, their names respectively listed on red, green or white paper. Members of different ranks were not allowed to mix. Red names were praised, but white names were relentlessly persecuted, many ending up in makeshift labour camps for “re-education”. * * * Suicide reached epidemic proportions. For every murder, an untold number suffered in one way or another, and some of these opted to end their lives. Often it was not so much the pain that pushed a person to end it all as the shame and humiliation endured in front of other villagers. A set phrase was that such and such, having strayed from the path, “was afraid of punishment and committed suicide”. “Driven to their deaths” or “driven against the wall” were also common expressions used to describe self-murder. In Fengxian, Shanghai, of the 960 people who were killed in the space of a few months in the summer of 1958, 95 “were forced into an impasse and committed suicide”, while the others died of untreated illnesses, torture or exhaustion. As a very rough rule of thumb (figures, again, are woefully unreliable), about three to six per cent of avoidable deaths were caused by suicide, meaning that from one to three million people took their lives during the Great Leap Forward. In Puning, Guangdong, suicides were described as “ceaseless”; some people ended their lives out of shame for having stolen from fellow villagers. When collective punishment was meted out, those who felt guilty for having endangered others committed suicide. In Kaiping county, a 56-year-old lady pilfered two handfuls of grain. Her entire household was banned from the canteen for five days and sent to a labour camp. She committed suicide. Sometimes women took their children with them, knowing that they would not survive on their own. In Shantou a woman accused of theft tied her two children to her body before jumping into the river. In cities, too, suicide rates rocketed, although there are few reliable figures. The Bureau of Public Security in Nanjing, for instance, was alarmed when it reported that in the first half of 1959 some 200 people had jumped into the 197

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river to commit suicide. The majority were women. Many killed themselves because their families had been torn apart by collectivisation. Tang Guiying, for instance, lost her son to illness. Then her house was destroyed to make way for an irrigation project. She joined her husband who worked in a Nanjing factory. When the authorities launched a campaign to send villagers back to the countryside, he did nothing to protect her. She hanged herself.

© Frank Dikötter 2010. From Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter, to be published by Bloomsbury on September 6, price £25. To order at 25 per cent off see www.bloomsbury.com/mao or call 00 44 1256 302 699, quoting reference GLR 1HF, by September 30. 198

Poetry Laksmi Pamuntjak

Ellipsis Has nothing changed? Oil lamps and torch lights catching ellipsis in mid-flight, preventing it from reaching the moon: singed, already, by birds on heat. Baked now, in the sun. Flayed to pith but hiding nothing. Certainty makes fools of us. She doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t know her crime, only that she enjoys the increments of the four seasons, and the folds of unswept beaches â&#x20AC;&#x201C; No one telling you whether to sink or swim. 199

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And now the first waves of shadow roll across the square. The fire-folks are gone and the moon is the white of Pierrot. In the morning there will be a sentence; a full sentence at last – as if things were any different spelt out from what is more or less known.

Krishna to Arjuna: On Bhisma’s Final Day The other day I saw a man straggling across a plain; not once did he raise his eyes. He was walking as though in the gathering thunderstorm, under the sky turning mottled green; through the cracks in the undergrowth, he would find the tiny light in his mother’s womb. A bird nosedived into a hole in the darkened earth, whose home whose hell I could not tell, but there was something about the man that was deeply touched, as though through that one gesture a lifetime of trust had been reassembled, and he let the tip of the arrow drive itself in.

The Break-up I’ve seen this in a dream, of course, how we begin with a meal, and a glance at every passing movement along the aisle. How we inch into the quiet ride home, and into the glass of wine at half-light. What I need to tell you, I say, you’ve probably known already. A captured instant: of stillness and dusk. And then: sunt lacrimae rerum. In a tone that can barely convince the moon. 200

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There are tears in things. For a brief moment, I am desperate to say, no, no, letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s go back where we were before the first thought. But so it goes. And each time we sort of wonder, in a fog like this one, heavier than black, blacker than imagining, why in the end everything always comes to this.

A Travellerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Tale Perhaps every journey begins by going down the staircase or trawling through a passage in your grannyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house where a door might lead to shadows and ink stains, a fireside of charred carbon. Folk often mistake the soul for the spirit, and like the key that falls to the sand, we rise to the swarm but forget the man. Or songs stitched in the sky long before cities were erected and signposts staked. The wind may be unfaithful as light selects its aperture; we may give praise to the wrong God, and remember only what illuminates

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the field, the glutinous parts of the map. We scan the spread from the crest of the earth as though the world were merely the consequence of some cosmic spillage, the mountains brittle before the sun, the sea no more than water leaking into space. But lately there is no telling summer from silver, as islands sink and fish gasp in the black hole of unseasonal drought. What stories we may find in our passage through imagining are buried in dead men’s chests or saved by the moon like the face of a stray goddess – such that it comes as a gentle surprise that the pages that leap from certain books hint of something closer to the skin, a mother’s fingerprint, or a bead of sweat that escapes a father’s neck, bent over the very same lines, sending him places with wide-eyed wings.

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My Kind of Town …

Apologies to Woody Allen Stephen McCarty

hapter One He loved Hong Kong. He objectified it out of all proportion. Uh, no. Make that, He subjectified it out of all proportion. To him, no matter which of the two seasons it was, this was still a town that existed in the lurid store-front windows of fashion multinationals and pulsated to the tune of the unsullied capitalist hymn, the Chinese national anthem, played daily at the start of the evening news. Uh ... no. Let me start this over. Chapter One He was too romantic about Hong Kong, as he was about everything else. He thrived on the hustle and bustle of the Central crowds and traffic, how you couldn’t walk on a pavement at lunchtime without ramming into the back of a fellow office worker forced by humanity’s numbers to stop suddenly at one of those newsstands that illegally took over more than half the available walking space, and at the same time inhale a whole lungful of cigarette smoke from a suit, labourer or shopgirl (their IQs were all the same) carelessly exhaled without a thought for the masses marching behind. To him, Hong Kong meant beautiful women and street-smart guys who seemed to know all the angles. Ah, corny. Too corny for a man of my taste. 203

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Let me try to make it more profound. Chapter One He adored Hong Kong. To him, it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture – such as it was in Hello Kitty’s adopted homeland. The same lack of integrity that caused so many people to take the easy way and hire home-help from the Philippines at the minimum wage was rapidly turning the town of his dreams ... No, it’s gonna be too preachy. I mean, face it, we wanna sell some magazines here. Chapter One He adored Hong Kong, although to him it was a metaphor for the decay of contemporary culture. How hard it was to exist in a society desensitised 204

My Kind of Town …

by stinky tofu, a thumping colonial hangover, Canto-pop, collectible McDonald’s figurines ... Too angry. I don’t wanna be angry. Chapter One He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his steel-rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. I love this. Hong Kong was his town and it always would be. Hell, it was even Asia’s World City, if you read the right billboards, although it couldn’t quite sport the “continental cultural nexus” hat with much panache; it tended to slip over one eye while the other stayed beadily on the cash. But if culture was the curse of the thinking class who cared if the museums were largely second-rate and there was rarely an original theatre run in town? 205

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So what if there wasn’t much thought going into it? Editorial inspiration could still be found in improbable places. His morning, late morning, afternoon and early evening coffee fix lay a dozen doors down the street from company headquarters along one of those golden pavements of high-rent real estate. Actually the pavement was made of lumpy, cracked concrete and had seen too many shrieking deaths of snapped stiletto heels: tai-tais down from out of the clouds around The Peak always put their Manolos in mortal danger on the days that they had to stagger a few yards from their chauffeur-staffed Lexuses to their anointed commercial art galleries. But he loved that stretch of the Promised Land – even the part where a parked cement mixer compelled the lunch crowd to walk on the noxious roadway, because in Hong Kong there was always room to wedge in another skyscraper. Not that grubby, cacophonous construction work ever menaced profits. Those galleries were high on their boundless supply of fat pink porcelain babies born to must-have mainland Chinese artists, and those canvases of the paint-by-iMac-numbers school that look so good in utility company foyers. He venerated Hong Kong – he even gave thanks for the coffee from the coffee shop, one of those with the green and white logo. Okay, so it tasted the same as coffee everywhere else, but didn’t that make his city even more cosmopolitan? It could have been New York! Paris! Sydney! The coffee shop was a neat place – it provided a kind of public service, a de facto office for the free-Wi-Fi-between-jobs networkers on their laptops, and a gloomy corner or two for the lugubrious local Sikhs who looked like unemployed maharajahs. Nobody would speak to anybody else in the coffee shop; the free newspapers would be unthumbed and could have been reporting that Bangkok was burning, but nobody would have been reading anything except the next email. He idolised Hong Kong. Hong Kong! Who had time for reading?

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Contributors

ZEFFRY ALKATIRI, from Jakarta, is a lecturer and researcher in the Social Sciences Faculty of the University of Indonesia. In 2001, his poetry collection From Batavia to Jakarta 1619–1999 received the Best Poetry Award from the Jakarta Arts Council. He has participated in numerous international poetry galas and his poems have been translated into English, Dutch, Portuguese, French and Chinese.

PRIYA BASIL was born in London to Indian parents. Her Englishsounding surname resulted from a clerical error made in the 1940s in India, from where her grandparents migrated to East Africa. A slip of the pen and Bansil became Basil: a fragrant herbal legacy bestowed. Priya, raised in Kenya, lives in London and Berlin. Her second novel, The Obscure Logic of the Heart, was published in June. Her first, Ishq and Mushq, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

JOHN BATTEN is a curator, writer and critic on art, culture and urban planning and a former art gallery owner. Born in Melbourne, he has lived in Hong Kong since 1992. He is a Contributing Editor to the Asia Literary Review. An organiser of the yearly charity art event, Hong Kong ArtWalk, he is also a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Australian art magazine Broadsheet.

LOUIS de BERNIÈRES is the author of worldwide best-seller Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. His other award-winning fiction includes the novels Birds Without Wings, The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts, Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord and A Partisan’s Daughter, and the short-story collection Notwithstanding. His situations have included motorcycle messenger, car mechanic, landscape gardener, teacher and cowboy. He lives in Norfolk, England.

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XAVIER COMAS, a Barcelona native, graduated from Barcelona University in Fine Arts before working as a creative director, photographer and illustrator. His photographs have been published and exhibited in Spain, Hong Kong, France, Italy, Thailand, Singapore and Japan. His Pasajero project, featuring perceptions of society, was recently displayed as an installation at the Singapore Art Museum. He is now based in Bangkok. ROBBIE COREY-BOULET covered the trial of S-21 prison commandant Kaing Guek Eav (Duch) while working as a reporter for The Phnom Penh Post. He continues to monitor the Khmer Rouge tribunal in the Cambodian capital in his new role as news editor. He hails from University Place, Washington, northwest United States.

FRANK DIKÖTTER is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong and Professor of History on leave from the University of London. He has pioneered the use of Chinese archival sources and published seven books on the history of modern China, from The Discourse of Race in Modern China (1992) to The Age of Openness: China before Mao (2007). Mao’s Great Famine will be his eighth. He is married and lives in Hong Kong. LIAM FITZPATRICK was born in Hong Kong and educated at King George V School, Hong Kong and Christ Church, Oxford. His poetry has been collected in Vs: 12 Hong Kong Poets and City Voices: Hong Kong Writing in English, 1945 to the Present. He is married with two daughters, lives in Hong Kong and works as a writer and editor for Time magazine.

VIKI HOLMES is a prize-winning British poet and performer who began her writing career in Cardiff. She has been living in Hong Kong since 2005. Her work has been published in Hong Kong, Wales, England, Australia, Canada, Macau and Singapore. Her first collection was titled Miss Moon’s Class and she was co-editor of Not a Muse, an anthology of women’s writing.

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Contributors PEAULADD HUY was born in Phnom Penh. She was eight when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975. In 1980, after her parents had been murdered by the regime, she emigrated to the United States with siblings and other relatives. Her work has been published by Blue Begonia Press, Cha and Nou Hach. She hopes to return to Cambodia with her family.

JOHN JAVELLANA is a freelance photographer based in Manila. He began working as a wedding photographer in 2007 and was invited to shoot for Reuters in 2008, all while still at college. He became a regular contractor for the agency, covering major news stories. He is now completing various personal projects with a view to more documentary work. His photographs have been published worldwide. JAMES KIDD studied English Literature at Liverpool University and University College London. Based in London, he writes for The Independent on Sunday, the South China Morning Post, The Observer, Time Out, The Daily Telegraph and Square Meal magazine. He recently wrote the introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition of Patricia Cornwellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s debut novel Postmortem and has contributed to the volumes A Century of War Movies and The Little Black Book of Books.

ÂŠ Francois May

GOENAWAN MOHAMAD, from Batang, Central Java, has written four volumes of poetry, four non-fiction books on literature and philosophy, seven volumes of essays, three opera librettos, two plays and two scripts for the Javanese puppet theatre. His forthcoming publications are Don Quixote and other Poems and Towards an Aesthetics of Rest. He is the founder of cultural organisation the Utan Kayu Community. LAKSMI PAMUNTJAK was born in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is the author of two collections of poetry, The Anagram and Ellipsis; a treatise on violence titled Perang, Langit dan Dua Perempuan; the awardwinning The Jakarta Good Food Guide series; a collection of short stories titled The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art; and two translations of the works of leading Indonesian poet Goenawan Mohamad, Goenawan Mohamad: Selected Poems and On God and Other Unfinished Things.

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G.B. PRABHAT is the author of two novels, Chains (2000) and Eimona (2006). He has published short stories in newspapers The Hindu and The Indian Express. His stories have also been translated into Telugu and Hindi. Prabhat is the founder and CEO of Anantara Solutions, a consulting and outsourcing company. He lives with his family in Chennai, India.

ANNA SAA-FELICIANO graduated with a B.A. from the University of Santo Tomas in her hometown of Manila. An English instructor, she is also undertaking an M.A. in English Language and Literature Teaching at the Ateneo de Manila University. She presented an academic paper at the 15th Conference of the International Association for World Englishes (IAWE) in Cebu, Philippines, last October.

RON SCHAFRICK completed an M.A. in English Literature (Creative Writing) at Concordia University in Montreal, then spent nine years working as an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. Now living in Toronto, he is working on a collection of short stories, many reflecting his experiences in South Korea. His stories have appeared in The Dalhousie Review, The Prairie Journal and The Antigonish Review.

Art and the Artists WIMO AMBALA BAYANG is a photographer based in Yogyakarta. TISA GRANICIA is a Bandung-based ceramics artist. AGAN HARAHAP is a photographer and illustrator working for Indonesiaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s TRAX music magazine. INDIEGUERILLAS comprise Santi Ariestyowati and Miko Buwono, who are inspired by popular culture, new media and graffiti. SARA NUYTEMANS and ARYA PANDJALU have been collaborating on their Bird Prayers video project since 2007. SIGIT TAMTOMO was a finalist in the 2008 Jakarta Art Awards. Teguh Wiyatno was a participant in the 2008 Jakarta Art Awards.

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No. 17 AUTUMN 2010

AND JONATHAN WATTS China’s unsustainable future Also in this issue: TRAVEL and ART from Indonesia FICTION from India and South Korea POETRY from Hong Kong and Indonesia

Hong Kong: HK$99 China: RMB99 Singapore: S$25 Malaysia: RM35 Thailand: Bt395

Australia: A$20 UK: £9.99 USA: US$11.99 India: Rs295 Canada: C$14.99

ISSN 1999-8511

XAVIER COMAS haunting mysticism in Thailand’s far south PRIYA BASIL a question of faith FRANK DIKÖTTER the barbarism of China’s Great Leap Forward ANNA SAA-FELICIANO on Typhoon Ondoy’s first anniversary

Exclusive: the Khmer Rouge and its legacy of heartbreak Poems from the notebook of Louis de Bernières