SUMMER 2015
ALR 2014.pdf 1 14-10-27 下午5:46
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
No. 28, Summer 2015
Page 1 ALR-28
1
7 August 2015
No. 28, Summer 2015
Publisher Greater Talent Limited Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Managing Editor Phillip Kim Senior Editors Justin Hill, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Poetry Editor Kavita A. Jindal Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Production Alan Sargent Main Cover Image © 2015 Andrew Chan andrewchanart.com Back Cover Image © 2015 QAGOMA. ‘Nomads 2014’ (detail) by Baatarzorig Batjaral, courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Grant. This issue is published in collaboration with Griffith Review griffithreview.com Special thanks to Julianne Schultz, Jane Camens, Susan Hornbeck and John Tague The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited 2/F 3 Sha Po New Village, Lamma Island, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Subscriptions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Sales@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-12155-5-0 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2015 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2015 Greater Talent Limited
Page 2 ALR-28
2
7 August 2015
Contents Editorial
5
Fiction Man of the People
17
Maggie Tiojakin
Father, Son
42
Anjum Hasan
Black Origami Birds
65
Siobhan Harvey
Stress Management
101
Glenn L. Diaz
A Little Life
133
Sheng Keyi, translated by Shelly Bryant
Supernova
172
Omar Musa
A Cottage for Sale
189
Ploy Pirapokin
Non-fiction Half a Butterfly
9
Ellen van Neerven
The Asian Invasion
50
Jessie Cole
Page 3 ALR-28
3
7 August 2015
Kashmir’s Bitter War
93
Majid Maqbool
Ripples from Hong Kong
158
Keane Shum
Poetry The Umbrella Men
26
Joshua Ip
The Hanged Man Sings Kathmandu
47
Manan Karki
Roll Call
91
Jang Jin-sung, translated by Shirley Lee
Pollen Fever
131
ko ko thett
Vacuum
152
Nicholas Wong
Essay Beating Dickheads
29
Miguel Syjuco
Made in Cool Japan
56
Sally McLaren
Chinese Thinking in the Age of the Internet
80
Murong Xuecun
All For the People, Without the People
115
André Dao
Let Bygones Be Bygones
180
Prodita Sabarini
Contributors
204
Page 4 ALR-28
4
7 August 2015
Editorial Edit orial
Asians and Australians: when one group is asked about the other, the immediate response often abounds with stereotypes. To Asians, Australia has been viewed as a Californicated England – a vastness of middle-class Anglo Saxons enjoying an outdoors life of surfboards, ripe wines and Commonwealth sports. Aussies are what Brits become when clouds and wind are permanently shooed away by a hot, dry sun, and starched collars are discarded for untucked linen shirts. Australia is a land blessed with both abundant mineral reserves and a vibrant democracy – a rare combination in a world where nations are too often endowed with one but not both assets. To Australians, Asians have been their antithesis. The Asian world is one of chaotic growth – other-skinned people scurrying up and away from histories long mired in poverty, conflict and repression. Their energy seems relentless, sometimes threatening. Asia is life spice – a piquancy for an otherwise stable or bland existence, flavouring that enlivens local communities with diversity, energises economies, and stirs up the native cuisine. ‘’Roo tails cooked in coals’ have given way to ‘’roo curry’, according to aboriginal Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven. However, as with all constructive dialogue, continuing engagement reveals a far more complex and subtle picture. Firstly, Australia and Asia are anything but homogeneous: each contains large populations of people whose identities – race, religion, values, politics – differ widely, often violently. To many of them, labels such as ‘Australian’ or ‘Asian’ are too broad to be meaningful. Furthermore, few things are more dynamic or vexing than human interaction. As observer, as analyst, as scribe, any of us at best simply tries to keep up with what’s going on. Inevitably,
5
Page 5 ALR-28
5
7 August 2015
Editorial
labels – inadequate though they might be – can at least provide a useful frame for further questioning. In mid-2014, Australia’s Griffith Review set out to create a virtual community of Australian and Asian literary talent by inviting writers born after 1970 to reflect on contemporary Asia and the tumultuous change that the region has undergone during their lifetimes. The collection was jointly edited by Griffith Review’s Julianne Shultz and Asia Pacific Writers & Translators’ Jane Camens, and produced in collaboration with the Asia Literary Review. This issue of the ALR is a selection of articles that appear in Griffith Review’s New Asia Now, being published in parallel. What themes have emerged from the resulting dialogue? Naturally, many of the Asian authors have chosen certain well-established topics when addressing audiences from Western countries such as Australia. As expected, there is politics, where comparisons between Asian and Australian systems highlight current or past inadequacies – and hilarities – in countries such as Indonesia (Maggie Tiojakin), the Philippines (Miguel Syjuco), Vietnam (Andre Dao) and Malaysia (Omar Musa). Asian contributors have also felt compelled to open up on human rights shortcomings, whether in Kashmir (Majid Maqbool), China (Murong Xuecun), North Korea (Jang Jin-sung) or Hong Kong (Joshua Ip). The Australian writing has a different resonance, some using Asian motifs such as manga (Sally McLaren) and origami (Siobhan Harvey) to tell their stories, while others explore the prickly and seemingly intractable issue of racial tension (Jessie Cole) that exists in some Australian communities. Many of the pieces represent a reaching out by disparate types of people who have shared a common experience (Asia). They acknowledge that many differences in perspective exist, but so too does an irrepressible desire to bridge the gaps. Their writings are a nudge for action or a plea for better understanding. More tellingly, though, many of the works that simply explore an author’s own world reveal an essential universality amongst all of us. Stories detailing family conflict – an unwanted pregnancy in China, father-son alienation in India – speak to anyone confronting the complications of everyday life. The tragedy of death or dementia, whether it occurs in Japan or Thailand, flattens any person whose loved one has
6
Page 6 ALR-28
6
7 August 2015
Editorial
been so victimised. A Nepalese poem that eerily foreshadowed the recent earthquakes reminds us all of our frailty in the face of nature’s stirrings. Yet, in our lighter moments, as we contemplate how information technology has transformed our lives, we also can’t help but wonder about call centres in the Philippines or India and what human melodramas might be playing out amongst their legions of cheerily-voiced agents. Most powerful is the metaphor of Gondwana, the southern half of the Pangaea supercontinent that separated some 200 million years ago to become the continental landmasses familiar to us today. As Gondwana itself fractured, some of it drifted north to collide with Laurasia (the northern half of Pangaea) to form India and the Himalayas, while other parts settled in the Southern hemisphere to form Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. As explained by author Ellen van Neerven in her essay ‘Half a Butterfly’, the geology, flora and fauna between the various parts of Gondwana share much in common, though they are now oceans apart. That many similar species of fauna, including dogs and butterflies, exist in India, Papua New Guinea and Australia owes much to the migration of humans that have continued throughout history. In short, we have been and always will be wanderers, as well as wonderers. Our individual perspectives and fortunes seem forever destined to follow courses that intertwine, then merge. Advancing technologies, widening human liberties and increasing dialogue only accelerate that process. Collectively, though oceans and hemispheres may divide us, our commonality is a seismic force more impactful than the shifting of tectonic plates beneath our feet. Phillip Kim Martin Alexander
7
Page 7 ALR-28
7
7 August 2015
Asia House, a centre of expertise on Asia in London, is an established and exciting part of London’s cultural scene. Presenting over 100 events a year, including the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival and the Asia House Film Festival, we offer an outstanding selection of opportunities to explore, absorb and enjoy the arts of Asia. Some of the world’s leading authors, artists and performers have joined us at our Marylebone headquarters. These include Michael Palin, Jung Chang, Elif Shafak, William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghosh, On Kawara and Lancelot Ribeiro. We also work with the world’s leading institutions, such as the British Museum and the National Ballet of China. Join us to celebrate the best and most interesting art and conversations coming out of Asia today.
Asia House 63 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 7LP 020 7307 5454 www.asiahouse.org
Page 8 ALR-28
8
asiahouseuk Facebook @asiahouseuk
7 August 2015
Manan Karki
Manan Karki Poetry
The Hanged Man Sings Kathmandu I ‘A nation cursed by the Sati.’ A popular Nepali saying. Neither with a bang, nor with a whimper, But with the cries, the shrieks, the curses As of a woman by fire being ravaged Will you go down, Kathmandu, City of ruins and shadows, Where the dead lurk in the eyes of the living And thicken with cries their tongues. II Kathmandu – through a cold drizzle grey, The colour of loss, Of blindness in the eyes of old women Greedy for succour and for lies, Of froth on the floods of foaming rivers Grown turbid with hate.
47
Page 47 ALR-28
47
7 August 2015
Poetry
As in a dream I see you now Smug in your corruption as vermin in their filth Sprawled like a carcass upon whose skin Abominations suppurate. Your mud and your gold are one, Are one and the same now, Kathmandu, And the yellow stain upon your widows’ brows And the crimson upon your brides’ And the fires that consume the flesh of your dead And those in which your living go down Like drowning men – arms flailing, fists Clutching air, desperate eyes distended in The impotence of rage. But once those very eyes had sought the heights Where now in a frenzy of grief the sky Lurches downwards To impale itself upon your golden pinnacles; From there a god had once descended, And captive among them had lived, Who long had sung your graces . . . But who will sing you again, mother? Your lays have all grown tuneless now, And that proud breast that once had suckled gods Is now no more than a pair of shrivelled dugs From which none again shall draw sustenance, None, save this – this aborted foetus Crowned with a wreath of nettles, Lying still, grinning, Hideous in your leprous arms. III Down at the bottom of a dry gulch An old sow gorges on her feast of farrow,
48
Page 48 ALR-28
48
7 August 2015
Manan Karki
And sated lies upon her throne of mulch Belching with grunts a reek of flesh and marrow. Proud empress still, even though her empire be No more than a rubble of tares and stones, And every porcine heir to this debris Nothing but a pile of shit and bones. IV A bitch upon my canker feeds, a dog upon my bone, A curse of whelps upon my knees howl and moan; All the dry summer long the men stabbed with a daggered hope, And amidst caresses the women noosed me with a rope; And hung me out, oh so high, my shame for all to see, Now a dead rat my leprous pride eyes enviously; Father to a bastard son, mother to a whore, I’ve played my parts, and now I’m done, the devil’s at the door. V Over a city choked with soot and ashes The sky in a frenzy of funeral fires seethes. Seethes. Seethes and burns. This is the hour when In my memory Everything burns.
Note: This poem was written well before the earthquakes that have devastated Nepal and its capital, Kathmandu.
49
Page 49 ALR-28
49
7 August 2015
Stress Management Str ess Management Glenn L. Diaz
Glenn L. Diaz
U
nknown to the bosses, all of us on the call desk could tell when they were listening in. Common signals included a split-second, sporadic choppiness or a Darth Vader-like echo, even for agents like Karen, who was known for hiking her already high-pitched voice whenever she spoke to a male heterosexual caller. ‘It’s a strategy,’ she had told us during a cigarette break. ‘Sounding girly and helpless. Letting them think they have the power. Men like that. They let their guard down and shit. Then I sell them something they don’t need.’ We were graduates of marketing and sociology, biology and liberal arts, communications and philosophy. This wanton parade of impracticality. A lot of us were philosophy graduates. But the feedback could get too loud sometimes, and distracting. ‘What was that?’ our bat-eared caller would bark, catching the echo. We were mandated by federal law to admit, at the slightest insinuation, that the call was indeed being recorded. When we did, the customer would sometimes go ballistic, say something like, ‘I knew they were listening in on my calls!’ or lapse into rehearsed nostalgia: ‘It’s never been the same after September 11.’ Sigh. The official rebuttal script was, ‘This call is being monitored or recorded but only for quality assurance purposes.’ Our callers, bless them, would eventually shrug off this caveat as Standard Operating Procedure. In our skyscraper, half a world away from Lower Manhattan, we would coolly step into a well-worn elevator, march into our stations and,
101
Page 101 ALR-28
101
7 August 2015
Stress Management
with a bit of a psychosomatic yawn, put on our headsets, then wait for the beep that would open the floodgates. Beep. ‘Thank you for calling US-Tel Consumer Services. My name is—’ ‘Hello?’ the American on the line would say, already outraged. That night, Brock, the bearish operations manager from Austin, walked over to our spine – ‘Hello, guys!’ – and told us to gather around. Eric, our supervisor, was absent, he said, so he’d taken the liberty of deciding to evaluate our team for call flow compliance. Nothing special, you know, just a routine procedure. Our ally at Quality Assurance hadn’t alerted us about any impromptu monitoring, or was that nonstop frenetic waving supposed to be the signal? In the first four hours of the shift, we had been doing that thing you did when the cat is away. Karen had been caught Googling ‘edible+undies+Manila’ in the middle of a call. Philip, who sat next to her, was arguing with a bunch of tweens in an online forum for American Idol fans. Alvin, who was new and sat next to Philip, was browsing through half-naked torsos on a gay hook-up site. And down the line Macky was playing a spirited game of chess with someone from Lahore. Brock shook his head, his mouth like a deformed rhombus – the way Filipino mothers showed reproach. ‘Good job, guys,’ quipped Mitch, overachieving occupant of the highly sought-after window cubicle. Mitch routinely followed the call flow to a T (the condescension optional). She would arrive at the office forty-five minutes before shift and get to work right away, unlike the rest of us. For Halloween, she would decorate her station with fake cobwebs and Styrofoam tombstones, and dress up like the White Lady of Balate Drive. The rest of us would call in sick then party somewhere else. Mitch cosied up to the Americans (or British, Canadians, Aussies) in the al fresco courtyard-cum-smoking area called the Lung Centre. The rest of us used the stairs to get to the thirty-second floor, if only to avoid sharing an elevator with the white guys. Anyway, Brock said, because of our infractions, they were installing Surf Control in all the computers. That, and we would all need to attend a Stress Management Workshop after shift.
102
Page 102 ALR-28
102
7 August 2015
Glenn L. Diaz
‘But we’re not stressed –’ Philip said. ‘Well it’s either that or suspension, so—’ Brock said. ‘– are we?’ Philip looked at us, mortified. Brock looked at him. ‘If there are no other questions—’ ‘How long will it take?’ Karen asked. ‘Who will run it?’ Macky asked, taking a peek at the tiny chessboard on his monitor. ‘Is it safe to say,’ Alvin whispered to the few within earshot, ‘that we’re stressing over a Stress Management Workshop?’ ‘I heard that,’ Brock pointed out. ‘Brock,’ Mitch cooed, ‘do I have to be there, or is it just the offenders?’ We glared at her, then looked at each other. ‘Yes, Mitch,’ Brock said, clearing his throat, returning to formality. ‘Okay? If there are no more questions. . . .’ He drummed his index fingers on the grey plastic spine that separated the cubicles. The staccato that punctuated his sentence was also our signal to disperse. We didn’t know how we got here. We were excitedly tossing our rolledup diplomas into the air one moment, and the next we were arranged in modular stations, sipping stale vending-machine coffee and answering billing inquiries from Americans. Certainly, few of us imagined it would be as dull and unchallenging as this, although we did like the arctic temperature and the money. The money, especially. Some of us liked the graveyard schedule, too – stepping into the shower just as the chicken adobo for dinner had started to settle in our stomachs, leaving the house as the parade of primetime telenovelas began, and encountering the exhausted homebound jeepneys and buses. After Brock’s huddle, we went to get something to eat at a condemned high-rise in front of GT Tower a block away. The space used to be dark and closed off by rusty, vineswathed GI sheets, before a group of enterprising individuals cleared the debris on the first floor and set up tables and chairs. Voila! Instant food market. It was a hit. The army of call centre employees along Ayala Avenue flocked to the stalls that sold everything from chargrilled quarter pounders to mutton and paneer masala – an unwitting hat tip to our competitors in the subcontinent.
103
Page 103 ALR-28
103
7 August 2015
Stress Management
‘Anyone see Jasmine’s performance last night?’ Philip asked, tearing a chapatti with one hand and scooping a hefty chunk of rubbery mutton. ‘Is she the Hawaiian with the stupid . . . thing?’ Karen asked, plucking an imaginary hibiscus petal from her right ear. Philip’s mouth opened for a moment, then he shrugged. ‘Yep, that’s her.’ As vaguely racist company brochures and government puffery put it, we Filipinos were, unlike the Indians, ‘attuned to American culture’. So of course we followed American Idol. We’d all seen Jasmine’s god-awful performance. We looked at Philip to register the pointlessness of his question, and could he please leave us alone with our lunch, which, for a change, wasn’t from the Subway on the third or the McDonald’s across the street. Tonight it was Filipino fare – tapsilog for Alvin, sisig for Karen, and San Mig Light and Marlboros for Macky. Philip took a furious drag at his cigarette, held his breath, coughed a little and then blew smoke that gingerly drifted to the open air. ‘Guys, guys,’ he said after a moment, pointing in the direction of a graffiticovered wall, dimly lit by far-off spotlights. Mitch, the unflawed Madonna in our section, looked to be buying something from an undermanned dessert stall, her neon ID lace bright amid the marbled smoke from the nearby barbecue grills. She dropped what appeared to be a slice of cake in a carton and erupted in giggles, hand darting to cover her mouth. She picked up the carton, handed it to the vendor, and giggled some more. In her amusement, she tilted her head and saw us, at which point she lifted a hand for a jolly wave. We waved back, in varying degrees of languor. ‘Let’s go?’ someone suggested. We pushed our chairs back and picked ourselves up. ‘She wasn’t in her element,’ Philip said, above the steady buzz of conversation at the Lung Centre, a veritable Pangaea where on-break agents amassed from all over the building. ‘Imagine having to do disco when you’re used to doing ballads and Whitney Houston. I mean, she probably has too much Pinoy blood in her. I wouldn’t be surprised.’ ‘Somebody shut him up,’ Karen said, puffing smoke to her right.
104
Page 104 ALR-28
104
7 August 2015
Glenn L. Diaz
We looked elsewhere. ‘Dibidi, dibidi?’ Macky said in his sheepish, mock Indian accent – a horrible imitation of one of the many Indians peddling pirated DVDs in the shopping plazas, or weaving through public markets astride beat-up Suzukis. In one corner of the Lung Centre, we saw Himmat smoking, his back turned away from the multi-coloured glare of bank logos. Himmat managed the airline reservation account next to ours. His patch of ceiling was crowded with Boeing 747s and Airbus A320s dangling from strings like piñatas. US-Tel had centres in Bangalore, New Delhi and Ahmedabad, wherever that was. It wasn’t uncommon for us to get a call from someone who sounded unmistakably Indian introducing herself as ‘Chloe’. ‘How are you doing today?’ Chloe would ask, then explain that the customer she had on the line had been routed to their site by mistake. Without thinking, we would imagine someone in a colourful sari who resembled the gorgeous Sushmita Sen, only darker, less statuesque, so different from us and our mixed Chinese and Malay blood, our acidwashed Levis and fake Lacoste shirts, but who, like us, had read the same ring-bound Manual for US-Tel Customer Care Associates and memorised the same spiels. ‘I wonder what’s underneath the turban,’ Karen said dreamily. ‘I have a wild guess,’ Alvin said. ‘Hair.’ Himmat flung his cigarette butt into a nearby bin and made his way back towards the building. We took that as our cue to wrap up our own post-meal cigarettes and we followed him across the lobby to the elevator. ‘Fuck,’ Philip said, looking at his phone. ‘Dial Idol says she’s going home. I don’t understand. We always win these texting contests.’ Thirty-second – our floor – was already pressed and lit when a leather shoe stopped the elevator doors from closing. ‘You need a US phone line to vote,’ Karen said. ‘So our loyal armies of bored housewives and tambays can’t—’ ‘What needs a US phone line?’ Brock asked, wedging his torso into the mishmash of bodies. His question hung in the air as the car started its
105
Page 105 ALR-28
105
7 August 2015
Stress Management
ascent. We wondered if the elevator’s sluggishness was only in our imagination. When we got to our floor, Philip pulled us to one side. ‘Listen,’ Philip whispered. ‘I just remembered something.’ A long time ago, he said, he had discovered a way to log off from the system without being detected. After a call, instead of hitting Next, he pressed the switchhook of the physical phone and got a dial tone. ‘What are you suggesting?’ Alvin asked. ‘Well, there’s five of us and four more hours left in our shift. . . .’ Philip said. We disengaged from the mutinous huddle and started walking back to our stations. ‘Hey,’ Philip called out, trying to keep up, ‘Don’t you want to see a Pinoy in the finals of American Idol?’ We kept walking. ‘Beer on me later?’ Back at our stations, prompted by the family photos that decorated our bays, some of us remembered the younger brother in college, the overdue life insurance premium, the number of days before Christmas (forty-three). ‘Log in now, guys,’ Brock called out from his temporary station near our spine. ‘Start logging in. . . .’ That was our cue to steel ourselves, not so much for the irate caller that dependably lurked in the queue – we could always handle that – but for the simple truth that anything short of the devil calling in to inquire about our long-distance rates was probably not enough to make us quit. Speaking of the devil, we watched Mitch reposition her mic and massage her neck, talking in the same firm voice that neither shook nor cracked even when her caller shouted and called her names. Every now and then she nodded gravely, as if the person from across the Pacific could see her dogged earnestness. Four hours later, at 8 am sharp – 5 pm in California – Brock walked over to the middle of the floor and, with a couple of claps, called out, ‘Last call, everyone! Last call!’ There was sporadic applause and some
106
Page 106 ALR-28
106
7 August 2015
Glenn L. Diaz
utterances of joy and relief. He then walked over to our spine. ‘As for you guys,’ he said, ‘please head over to Training Room B, thanks.’ ‘If this were Survivor,’ Philip said as we made our way to the training room across the floor, ‘we could just vote Mitch off the island.’ His voice then hiked to a falsetto. ‘Do I have to be there, Brock?’ When Brock walked in a few minutes later, we were confused, then worried. If the company couldn’t afford a trainer, moving its business back to Naperville couldn’t be far behind, could it? We hated our jobs, sure, but a pull-out was not the way to go. Pull-outs were scary. We straightened up in our hard plastic seats. ‘You’re doing the workshop, Brock?’ Mitch asked. ‘Uh huh,’ Brock said. He clicked on the mouse once, twice – but the first slide of his presentation remained frozen. His index finger tapped hard on the helpless mouse, and then he smashed it repeatedly against the desk. ‘So, stress,’ Brock began. ‘Sometimes we become so used to it—’ ‘Should we call IT?’ Philip asked. ‘Nope,’ Brock said. ‘I can handle this.’ He looked at his laptop and mumbled at it. The computer caught up moments later and moved to the next slide. ‘There you go,’ he said with a sigh. ‘We start off with. . . .’ Onscreen were the letters PERA. Money. We chuckled. When were we less stressed than on the two days a month when, in the wee hours of the morning, raucous cheering erupted from some corner of the floor, bearing news that our above-minimumwage pay had been credited to our payroll accounts? Brock went on. ‘P is for “Prepare”. For example, your attitude. . . .’ An hour or so later, when Brock had reached ‘A’ for ‘Adjust’, Alvin felt a tap on his shoulder. Mitch, who was sitting next to him, lowered her head and leaned closer. She showed him the supple underside of her arm, skin so pale the veins protruded like fossilised worms. ‘Can you?’ she whispered. ‘I’m not going to make it.’ The whites of Mitch’s eyes, Alvin saw, were red and watery. ‘Again?’ he asked. ‘You sure?’ She nodded.
107
Page 107 ALR-28
107
7 August 2015
Stress Management
Alvin ran a hand down her arm, squeezing gently here and there, until he picked a spot somewhere in the middle and, with a nervous force, pinched an inch of skin. Mitch closed her eyes. ‘Thank you.’ She smiled. ‘Now harder. And use your nails.’ By the time Brock finished the last of the slides, everyone in the room was yawning. ‘Any questions?’ he asked. We shook our heads and made a show of checking the identical monochromatic wall clocks on the right side of the room. The clocks announced the time in four different time zones, none of them Manila’s, although Eastern Standard Time, twelve hours away, incidentally did. Mitch raised her hand. ‘I’ve been under a lot of stress lately –’ Philip dropped his empty tumbler on the floor with a loud thud. ‘– and I’m starting to get used to it. Maybe that’s good?’ After a long pause, Brock ventured into something indecipherably long-winded. ‘My generation of Americans, we were raised in a home environment that really nurtured our hopes and dreams, you know? We baby boomers; we were a very promising generation. Very promising. Our parents have been through the worst. The Great Depression. World War II. So for us, growing up, we had these role models to look up to. People who showed us the triumph of the human spirit, who seized their destiny, forsaking material comfort.’ Our open mouths must have betrayed the debilitating headache that Brock’s speech had just hatched in our already heavy heads. Even Mitch, who we surmised could fake a smile through any brutal non sequitur, was speechless. ‘If there are no more questions. . . .’ Brock drummed his index fingers on his desk, and we were on our feet faster than one could say, ‘Pavlov’s dog.’ The following week – Jasmine safely through to the final three, thanks or no thanks to us – we were eating fries at McDonald’s for lunch when Mitch came prancing in. She looked around the store and, spotting us, headed to our table.
108
Page 108 ALR-28
108
7 August 2015
Glenn L. Diaz
‘Guys,’ she said. ‘Sorry, but can I borrow a hundred?’ ‘You’re late,’ Karen said, not so much out of rudeness but disbelief. ‘I know,’ Mitch sighed. ‘Overslept. Is Brock in?’ We nodded. ‘Shit,’ she muttered. Philip handed her a crisp hundred-peso bill. She scampered to the waiting cab outside, waved to us again, then crossed the street to our building, no doubt bulldozing her way through the crowded lobby. ‘That was weird,’ Philip said. ‘Yeah,’ Karen said. ‘You don’t even like her.’ ‘No,’ Philip said, ‘I mean. . . .’ ‘The driver didn’t have change?’ Alvin offered. ‘Otherwise, why would you take a cab if you don’t have any money?’ Macky asked. For the rest of us, McDonald’s was a benevolent refuge, especially during pecha de peligro, the few days leading up to payday. Walking back to our building, we were distracted by a soft whirr from somewhere. We looked up and saw, framed by our skyscraper and the one across the street, the wing lights of a low-flying plane, a blink in the night sky. Back at the floor, we spotted Himmat under the forest of unmoving jumbo jets by his bay, talking to people in suits, mostly white guys, including Brock. Mitch sidled up to us. ‘Did you hear?’ ‘What?’ we chorused. ‘Guard ran the handheld metal detector by his turban,’ Mitch said. ‘Fuck,’ Macky whispered, stifling a laugh. Dibidi, dibidi. ‘Mitch,’ Philip turned to her, ‘everything okay with you?’ ‘What do you mean?’ Mitch asked. ‘Is it something personal?’ Karen asked. ‘Not sure what you guys are talking about.’ Alvin ran a hand up and down her back. ‘You can’t let that ruin your focus,’ Philip said. ‘You’re the best performer in the team. Your output’s equivalent to, what, five, six agents combined? That’s half the team. What will we do without you?’
109
Page 109 ALR-28
109
7 August 2015
Stress Management
When we saw Brock leave the group, we quickly dispersed. ‘Start logging in now, guys,’ he called out, passing by our spine. ‘It’s 3.59. Log in now, people. We have a queue.’ Mitch, when we turned to look at her, was already in her station, already taking calls while tinkering with the assortment of bric-a-brac lined up around her computer – a framed Polaroid of a man in a hammock by the beach, a couple of Agent of the Year trophies, and an antique-looking desk clock from a long-ago trip to Paris. She was already talking in the modulated lilts that all of us, at one point, had secretly tried to eavesdrop on, mildly envious. We took our seats and cleared our throats, took a sip of water. In the final few moments before logging in, the operations floor would always descend into absolute silence. Beep. ‘Thank you for calling US-Tel Consumer Services. My name is. . . .’ Brock had started to walk back to his office when we saw someone approach him with a sheet of paper. He took a look and at once closed his eyes, as if in deep pain. He gave the guy, one of the more senior supervisors, a pat on the back of the head. ‘Guys,’ Brock said to the auditorium full of cold and sleepy agents, ‘do you think what we do here is some kind of a joke?’ ‘Be specific,’ Karen whispered. ‘You think what we do here is funny?’ Brock asked. ‘Well. . . .’ Karen slurred. A few days before, we had received a directive from Naperville telling us to remind switching customers that ‘only US-Tel phone lines stayed up in New York on the morning of September 11’. A rival carrier, using a new technology, had brought down their rates to rock-bottom, and since US-Tel couldn’t compete with their prices, its last resort was the ‘Appeal to Patriotism’. The response from our callers, on the few hesitant occasions when we used this suggested rebuttal, was cold-blooded amusement. Sometimes they would laugh so hard that we had little choice but to join them, a camaraderie so touching and unexpected that a few of them did end up staying with US-Tel.
110
Page 110 ALR-28
110
7 August 2015
Glenn L. Diaz
Brock paced back and forth in front of the hastily called account-wide assembly. There were murmurs, errant yawns and, from a remote corner, someone’s ringtone – the Elton John song that Jasmine had sung weeks ago on Idol – turned heads. Brock stood absolutely still. His right hand, we noticed, was balled into a fist. A few moments passed, and he checked his watch. He cleared his throat. ‘Now,’ Brock began, taking out a piece of paper, the same one handed to him earlier. He said he had just been informed that around a third of the calls from our phones last week were made to a 1800 number that a quick Google search revealed was the hotline to American Idol. ‘I’m not sure why we didn’t find out sooner. I had to hear it from Tim Miller. Tim fucking Miller.’ Some of us thought, ‘Who?’ The rest of us looked at each other. Brock smiled the frigid, hollow smile worn only by people in absolute torment. He then recited, in an overly formal tone, ‘the damage’. Abandoned calls, 291. Customer Satisfaction, 66 per cent. Billable hours, 42 per cent below target, meaning the company had lost nearly half its income for this account last week. Did we derive, he asked, some sick pleasure from thinking that we were somehow able to outsmart the company, the company that for years had provided us with gainful employment denied to so many others? ‘What were you guys thinking? Really, I’m stumped over here.’ We expected Mitch to raise her hand, say something consoling in our defence, something apologetic and maudlin, with elements of nationalism and Catholic fervour thrown in. But when we looked at her, she seemed a little constipated and tense, although Alvin would claim, in a future assessment of the events of that day, that there was the tiniest hint of a smile in one corner of her pursed lips. ‘Unfortunately,’ Brock went on, ‘it’s logistically impossible to find out who made that very first call.’ And suspending all agents who partook in the ‘little operation’ would paralyse the Manila site. So he was going to wait until someone came clean, and, until then, lunch would be cut down from one hour to thirty minutes. ‘We’ve been too lax with you guys. We’re seeing that now.’
111
Page 111 ALR-28
111
7 August 2015
Stress Management
‘You know what the worst part is?’ Brock asked after another long pause. ‘Jasmine’s not even Filipino. Not really.’ In the sluggish march to exit the conference hall, we saw Mitch make her way to Brock. They had a brief chat – Brock occasionally nodding – before they walked to his glass-encased office. ‘His hands were shaking, did you see it?’ Karen said at the Lung Centre, which always looked different, surprising in daylight, as if from being a mystical place it had suddenly become real. She took a long drag at her cigarette. ‘I got it,’ Philip said, blinking rapidly. ‘We don’t go to work tomorrow. We show them that US-Tel needs us more than we need it.’ ‘Right, right,’ Sharon said. Karen nodded. Macky nodded. Alvin looked at us. Mitch appeared from out of nowhere. ‘Hi, guys.’ Smiling, she handed Philip a hundred peso bill. ‘Thanks again. Don’t try to get my phone.’ She giggled. ‘Sure,’ Philip said, looking uncertain. ‘You know, to be honest?’ Mitch said. ‘I did vote for Jasmine once or twice last week. Maybe more. My fingers are super-fast, you guys know that.’ The last two hours of the shift, typically, are a dead time. Supervisors start to clear their desks. Quality Assurance people are done with their audits. The maintenance kuyas have started to empty the waste bins in their assigned rows. Agents, with few calls trickling in, chat with their neighbours over the dividers, their cursors hovering over the logout buttons on their onscreen phones. But when we came back, the operations floor was as alive, as noisy as it had been at midnight when call traffic is at its peak. ‘So I had this customer who wanted to disconnect his line,’ Mitch said, parking herself next to our stations. ‘We need to log in now, Mitch,’ Philip said.
112
Page 112 ALR-28
112
7 August 2015
Glenn L. Diaz
‘So I told him the usual things, right?’ she said. She went through the list of available rebuttals with practised ease – quality of service, value for money, the prestige of having a US-Tel line, even that stupid thing about September 11. When it started to seem hopeless, she offered to move the customer to a lower-priced plan. ‘He freaked out,’ she said. ‘He started cursing and calling me names, asked me how much I made in a year, then finally demanded to speak to an American.’ Mitch went on. ‘So I dialled Brock’s extension and put him on, but he didn’t know the customer was already on the line and he must have recognised my extension because when he picked up, he shouted, “What? What do you want now?” ’ ‘What? Why was he mad at you?’ Philip asked. ‘Anyway,’ Mitch said, ‘the customer, who turned out to be the owner of a chain of international fitness centres, went nuts. He was already mad when I turned him over, then to hear Brock go off like that. . . .’ ‘Where am I calling?’ the customer had shouted. ‘US-Tel offices are based in Naperville, Mr Giuseppe,’ Brock lied. ‘Baloney!’ the customer said. ‘Hilarious!’ Mitch cried. ‘When the call was over, I told Brock I was quitting. He said something about a two weeks’ notice and a potential suit. I told him I had a draft of an email to Tim Miller about the many times his arm “accidentally” brushed against my breasts.’ Mitch’s desk, we noticed for the first time, had been cleared of all her trinkets. She smiled, gave Alvin’s arm a light squeeze before marching away. Somehow we’d always find ourselves surprised by the first light, the glacial, unobserved shift of sky from black to leaden to deep blue, the sun nowhere but also everywhere on this side of the tilting ground. Soon, colours: on the skyscrapers, the horizon of sharp-cornered silhouettes, the solitary aircraft on its final tentative descent. ‘Guys,’ whispered Brock, suddenly behind us. We turned to look at him. ‘Log in now. C’mon. You’re already seven minutes over-break.’ A couple of claps. Quick, playful drumbeats on a vacant desk.
113
Page 113 ALR-28
113
7 August 2015
Stress Management
We put on our headsets and waited for the beep. When it came, our memorised spiels rushed out of us. On cue, we thanked our callers for calling us, introduced ourselves with made-up names and conveyed a most ardent desire to help them, in all the ways we could, and more. The call done, we awaited the next. Beep.
114
Page 114 ALR-28
114
7 August 2015
ADVERT: SUN YAT SEN
Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insider’s perspective. Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn
Page 130 ALR-28
130
7 August 2015
ko ko thett
ko ko thett Poetry
Pollen Fever * Contrary to what they believed, I was never allergic to skin. Or sunrays. I wasn’t a cadre. ** Arrested by three. Tortured by five. Fornication. For negligence. For negation. Wasn’t that a question about a syzygy? Or posture? He even pawned his pearls to pose with my wax figure. I sneezed profusely in their hands. *** First they spoke a language that embraced you like a failed state. Then they switched. Like a passage from winter to summer, the transition was ungovernable, and violent.
131
Page 131 ALR-28
131
7 August 2015
Poetry
**** Damn you all! Indecent infixes, triple consonants and doted vowels! Like Mi Aye, I’ve had it twice. Once for being too yellow. Once for being too white. ***** Even after they’d renamed pollen fever hay, I insisted watchful trees mustn’t bloom. Rain may settle dust, but leave us with wet pyres. For padauk, however, drizzle is never enough.
132
Page 132 ALR-28
132
7 August 2015
Let Bygones Be Bygones Let Bygones Prodit a Sabarini Be Bygones
Prodita Sabarini
‘L
et bygones be bygones!’ Mum and Dad said to me, speaking over each other. Their faces shared a determination to have the last say on the matter. The afternoon light was fading and our teas were turning cold. My parents and I had been shouting at each other for the past hour, debating whether or not Indonesia should apologise to the victims of the 1965 communist purge. Like some Indonesians who lived through the massacre of nearly one million people that brought Suharto to power, my parents are averse to the idea of a national apology and reconciliation for the crimes of 1965. ‘Who would apologise? All the people responsible have died.’ ‘The state,’ I said. ‘It’s in the past,’ Mum snapped. I tried yet again to put my argument. ‘The army did it. The army is a state institution. Therefore, the state should apologise on behalf of the army. It doesn’t matter whether generations have passed. That a state institution carried out the killing is what matters.’ The conversation ended with Mum and Dad saying the president should spend his time tackling poverty and natural disasters. I insisted that someday the state would apologise; maybe not now, but definitely later. We agreed to disagree but I knew this would not be the end of our discussions. My parents’ position did not surprise me. I was more in awe that this heated dialogue was actually taking place. ‘Let bygones be bygones’ has been the national mantra to address the cry for justice from survivors and victims’ families since Suharto fell 180
Page 180 ALR-28
180
7 August 2015
Prodita Sabarini
from power in 1998. The mantra has been used by the Indonesian government, the military and religious groups such as Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama. The army extinguished communism in Indonesia with the help of civilian militias like NU’s youth wing, Banser. NU clerics and their congregations acted as death squads in East Java, at the time Indonesia’s communist stronghold, killings tens of thousands of people. A few years ago, a very limited space opened up for talk about the killings of 1965. After Suharto’s fall, attempts were made to break the silence. Survivors got together to collect testimonies, documentary filmmakers started to record the violence and stigma that families of victims face, and researchers released various analyses of the massacre. But these documents reached only limited circles and their impact was slight. In 2012, the National Human Rights Commission (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia, known as Komnas HAM) released the results of a four-year investigation into the atrocities of 1965 and declared that the army had carried out gross crimes against humanity. But since 2012, the attorney general has continued to reject Komnas HAM’s recommendation for a criminal inquiry. Nevertheless, the documentary film The Act of Killing, and its sequel The Look of Silence, have opened up a larger space to talk about what occurred. Those born after 1965 are now discovering that modern Indonesia is built on horrendous violence. We are asking questions of our elders, and the answers reveal not only that we were lied to by the state, but that we have also been deprived of our families’ histories. It is fifty years since Indonesia’s anti-communist purge. In 1965, with three million members, Indonesia had the largest number of communist party members in the world outside the USSR and China. But in a matter of six months, the army, operating with the help of civilian militias, extinguished communism and nearly wiped out the entire Indonesian political left. The slaughter started in retaliation for the killing of six army generals by left-wing junior army officers. Suharto, the only one among the army top brass who was not targeted in the putsch, blamed the communists
181
Page 181 ALR-28
181
7 August 2015
Let Bygones Be Bygones
for the murders and, as Saskia Wieringa explains in her book Sexual Politics in Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), used a campaign of sexual terror against Gerwani, the communist women’s organisation, to paint a savage and brutal image of communism. Shortly after the assassination of the generals, army newspapers, the only ones allowed to run at the time, libelled Gerwani members. The reports made the public believe a fiction that communist women danced naked while the generals were being tortured. The army also reported that they committed sexual acts with the generals, castrated them and gouged out their eyes. Further into the propaganda against the Gerwani, they were reported to be prostitutes for Partai Komunis Indonesia leaders. The lies were effective. The retaliatory killings did not begin until three weeks after the assassination of the generals, and only after the army had established an image of the PKI as godless, promiscuous and violent. Civilian death squads such as NU’s Banser saw the killing of communists as a religious duty. Party and union members, teachers, journalists, writers, artists and farmers were tortured and slaughtered in a bloodletting comparable to the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia. These mass killings have been universally condemned, while in Indonesia the perpetrators have never been found guilty. Suharto had been in power for sixteen years when Mum gave birth to me. I was sixteen when student protests brought him down in 1998. The babies born that year are now sixteen. Their history books tell the same stories as my history books, painting Suharto as the saviour of the nation. Most Indonesians born after 1965 grow up without knowing the dark history of their country. Throughout his rule, Suharto spooked the public by raising the spectre of atheist communists lurking within Indonesian society, ready for a takeover. Every year until his fall, students were made to watch the slasher-style propaganda movie Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, a three-and-a-half-hour movie about how the communists tortured and killed the six generals on 30 September 1965. The movie dehumanised the PKI and desensitised us to any whispers we heard about the killings.
182
Page 182 ALR-28
182
7 August 2015
Prodita Sabarini
I became aware of the moral wrong of the communist purge only after watching The Act of Killing in 2012. The film follows Anwar Congo, an ageing but jovial death-squad leader in Medan. Inspired by the cowboy image of John Wayne, he created a narrative for himself as the hero killing the evil communists through theatrical re-enactments of how he murdered his victims. At the beginning of the film, the filmmakers, American Joshua Oppenheimer and an Indonesian ‘anonymous’ co-director (we will call him Anon), place the film against its historical background of the massacre of more than one million. After watching the film for the first time, it was hard for me to speak. I was taken back to 2008, when I visited Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh and shivered while walking the paths surrounding the pits in the killing fields, unaware that my own country had a similar story. Walking in Jakarta now feels sinister and nightmarish. Instead of memorials for the victims of the purge, we have monuments and museums that reinforce the narrative of Suharto as the national saviour. In the 1970s, when human rights activist Soe Tjen Marching was young, she liked to lie down by her dad’s side. She would notice that his chest was covered with rounded scars that looked like craters on his skin. She asked him what they were. He would close his eyes, shush her and tell her to sleep. One day as she lay by her dad, she joked about whether these were ant holes. He became furious. ‘Never ask again!’ he shouted. Marching tells this story in the memoir she is writing about her relationship with her father. She knew he had been imprisoned for being a communist supporter and hated him for this, having been taught at school to fear and hate the PKI. She couldn’t understand his sudden outbursts of anger. Marching is now one of the most vocal advocates for victims and survivors of 1965. Only one-and-a-half metres tall, she is small but a force to be reckoned with. Her journey to understanding the events of 1965 and her father’s personal history took decades. She used to wonder why her father would never vote during elections in the Suharto era; why he
183
Page 183 ALR-28
183
7 August 2015
Let Bygones Be Bygones
demanded that the TV be turned off whenever Suharto was on the screen. After seeing The Act of Killing she started to ask her mother questions. She was shocked to find that her father had been one of the committee members of the PKI branch in Surabaya. Nobody in her family knew this except her mother. Marching and her siblings had known only that he was jailed for his involvement in the leftist organisation. ‘He had just been inaugurated but the official letters from Jakarta hadn’t arrived in Surabaya when the systematic attack against the PKI started,’ Marching said. Her parents burnt all papers associating him with the PKI so, when the troops searched their house, they found nothing. But he was eventually named. The image of her father’s sudden flares of anger at the sight of Suharto on TV and his rage at the sound of the presidential court’s chanteuse, Titiek Puspa, reminds me of a quote by Indonesia’s most celebrated writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. ‘I’m enraged alone,’ he told Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira, who published their interview with Pramoedya in 2006. The writer, who spent fourteen years in the Buru island gulag, describes in that short sentence his fury towards the state and the alienation he felt from Indonesia’s people, especially the young, who were not aware of Indonesia’s dark history. Pramoedya’s words resonate with the desolation that thousands of survivors of 1965 felt. Suharto not only massacred the entire Indonesian left, his propaganda ensured survivors were emotionally isolated – by the annual television screening of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, in monuments and museums built to influence Indonesians’ memory of PKI as a traitorous monster, and in the history books of students. In many instances, emotional bonds between survivors and their families are completely severed. It’s not uncommon for Indonesian families to suppress family histories related to 1965. Writer Putu Oka Sukanta told me that his nephew also grew up hating and fearing him. Sukanta was imprisoned for ten years for being a member of a writer’s association deemed close to the PKI. Sukanta makes documentaries about 1965 survivors. In one of his films about female prisoners in Plantungan prison camp in Kendal, Central Java, he interviewed a woman who had lost contact with all her children
184
Page 184 ALR-28
184
7 August 2015
Prodita Sabarini
after being imprisoned. They were adopted by family members and grew up hating her. I decided to ask my close friends about their family histories. My friend Dorita Setiawan, a PhD student at Columbia University, said her mother’s distant uncle was shot dead in 1965. Dorita’s extended family took in his wife and nine children and attempted to erase the background to the death of the family’s patriarch. ‘They didn’t have any other way but to conform,’ Dorita told me. She said her family hid the story about how her relative died, but she had heard whispers in the village. After watching The Act of Killing and other documentaries such as Robert Lemelson’s Forty Years of Silence, she became curious. ‘But they don’t really want to talk about it,’ she said. Another close friend, journalist Ika Krismantari, found out recently that her late grandfather had been imprisoned for eleven years. On a road trip from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, Ika decided to kill time by asking her parents if the 1965 pogrom affected their family. ‘I’m so shocked that I never knew about this,’ she said later. My own family was not immune. Despite my parent’s stance on reconciliation, my dad’s uncle, Subandi, was imprisoned during the pogrom. Subandi was an army soldier who read about Marxism and communism. When the 1965 putsch occurred, the army detained him at the military command in my father’s hometown Salatiga, and later threw him in jail. ‘I used to ride my bike and take food for him,’ my dad recalled. The premiere of The Act of Killing was secretly held in 2012 in Jakarta at Salihara Cultural Centre. In November 2014, the premiere of The Look of Silence drew nearly two thousand people to the open screening at Graha Bhakti Budaya theatre at the Taman Ismail Marzuki Cultural Centre. Organised by Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council, the screening proved so popular the film had to be shown twice. The president did not comment. While The Act of Killing focused on the story of one of the killers in 1965, The Look of Silence followed a travelling optometrist, Adi Rukun, whose brother was brutally murdered. In the film, Adi visits his brother’s killers. Calmly, he confronts them with uncomfortable questions about
185
Page 185 ALR-28
185
7 August 2015
Let Bygones Be Bygones
why they killed an innocent man. At the end of the screening, Adi came on stage to a long, standing ovation. The Act of Killing paved the way for this remarkable event to take place, Anon told me. The Act of Killing was not shown in theatres in Indonesia. But it has been screened thousands of times. The film’s producers send out free DVDs to anyone in Indonesia who wants to arrange screenings. They have sent more than 1800 DVDs to independent screening organisers in thirty-three provinces across the country. Since the premiere of The Look of Silence in November last year, more than 1200 DVDs of this film have been distributed. ‘As of February, there have been 266 open screenings,’ the Indonesian director said. ‘The great thing is more than 80 per cent of the organisers are young people. More than half are students from across disciplines,’ he said. In The Look of Silence, while the perpetrators show no remorse, a daughter of one of the perpetrators of the violence apologised to Adi on her father’s behalf. Adi accepted her apology with an embrace. ‘We tried to show in The Look of Silence that intergenerational reconciliation is a more realistic aim than waiting for the old perpetrators to apologise,’ the director said. ‘We’ve waited so long and it hasn’t happened yet. But if the children can be moved, reconciliation can work.’ Human rights commissioner Nur Kholis, who is now forty-four, is used to hearing the phrase ‘let bygones be bygones’. He heard it many times in 2008 when he started to lead the investigation into the crimes of 1965. He hears it still, after the launch of the Komnas HAM report recommending a criminal inquiry into gross human rights violations in 1965. Nur Kholis said leaders of the Islamic mass organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, whose youth group Banser was involved in the killings in Java, rejected the report and expressed their anger when they met with him. People point to his relative youth – and the fact that he was not there to witness the situation – in questioning his capability to investigate that period. ‘They would say, “How old are you to dare lead a team that would bring a big impact to Indonesia?” ’
186
Page 186 ALR-28
186
7 August 2015
Prodita Sabarini
‘I just listen to them,’ he said. ‘I understand their anger. In this country we have to be able to deal with anger. The survivors are twice as angry.’ Not all of NU rejects reconciliation. The late president Abdurrahman Wahid, who was a long-time leader of NU, apologised in 2000 on behalf of the organisation for its involvement in the massacre. Since the fall of Suharto, NU member Imam Aziz has spearheaded a civil-society initiative for reconciliation between NU and the survivors of the 1965 massacre through an organisation that he founded called Syarikat. The generation born after the atrocities and those who witnessed them have only just begun to see the truth – and we want to remember. Unburdened by fear of ideological wars, we see the massacre in simple terms – a slaughter of helpless civilians. Most who manage to learn about the massacre side with the survivors. The anonymous Indonesian co-director said that his own father condemns the massacre, but thinks if it hadn’t happened communism would have taken over the country. My mum thinks the same way. The Film Censorship Body, a remnant of the Suharto era, seems to think the same way too as it banned public screenings of The Look of Silence in East Java. But there is no turning back the curiosity of the post-1965 generation. In cities like Yogyakarta, Malang and Jember, where anti-communist groups cancelled open screenings, requests increase for DVDs to be screened underground. Banning screenings only increases curiosity. ‘Every time there’s a news report about cancellation in an area, we receive more requests for DVDs in that city for screenings,’ the director said. High school students ask to watch the film in class with their teachers. Some teachers show The Look of Silence and then get students to write essays reflecting on the country’s past. I sat with twenty-nine-year-old university lecturer Windu Jusuf and his friend Berto Tukan, also twenty-nine and a lecturer. The two are now editors of the leftist website Indoprogress that features writings about Marxism, but they were both afraid of the communists when they were children. As part of Suharto’s propaganda against communism, school kids in Jakarta and surrounding cities were often taken on field trips to
187
Page 187 ALR-28
187
7 August 2015
Let Bygones Be Bygones
the Museum of PKI’s Betrayal, built near the memorial site for the assassinated generals in Lubang Buaya, East Jakarta, where their bodies were found in an abandoned well. Suharto filled the museum with dioramas detailing PKI’s treachery towards the nation in different eras. Windu visited the museum at the age of ten and recalls thinking ‘the communist were such dogs’. Berto, who was raised a devout Catholic in a small town in Flores, viewed communists as sinners. At the dawn of Suharto’s fall, Windu’s father showed him newsletters from clandestine mailing lists that revealed forbidden information about 1965. His world was shaken. ‘I became really scared,’ Windu said. ‘I started to ask myself, Who am I really? I ask myself, Who am I as an Indonesian? Have I been fed lies all this time?’ Windu became silent for a while. Then he said to Berto: ‘I think we should make a funny meme at the Museum of PKI’s Betrayal.’ Berto laughed and agreed. ‘We should make people laugh at the obvious lies,’ he said. In the memorial complex at Lubang Buaya, a couple of hundred metres away from the shack that houses a life-size torture-scene diorama, is the Sacred Pancasila Monument, commemorating the murder of seven Indonesian army officers in 1965. Statues of the generals stand in front of a massive mythical Garuda. Below are stone reliefs depicting communist women dancing naked while men (communists) throw the slain generals into a well. Elsewhere on the monument Suharto is seen bringing back order from chaos, symbolised by women cradling their babies with their heads bowed. I looked at Windu posing with a director’s clapboard in front of the torture shack, looked at the monument and then my surroundings. Police cadets leisurely strolled through the grounds, couples held hands as they looked into the deadly well, children peered into the torture shack. Amid the surreal landscape of the monuments, the attempts of Windu and his friend to mock the distortions of history seem the only sane response. In that mockery, I see change happening: when people reject the lies they’ve been fed and start to laugh at the absurdity of how the country deals with history, it marks a true turning point for the nation.
188
Page 188 ALR-28
188
7 August 2015
Contributors Contributor s
SHELLEY BRYANT (translator of Sheng Keyi) is the author of six volumes of poetry and a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai. She has translated works from Chinese for Penguin, Epigram, Giramondo and Rinchen Books, and the National Library Board in Singapore. Her poetry has appeared in journals, magazines and on websites around the world.
JESSIE COLE grew up in northern New South Wales and lived a bush childhood of creek swimming and barefoot free-range adventuring. Her debut novel, Darkness on the Edge of Town (HarperCollins, 2012), was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal, and her non-fiction work has appeared in many Australian publications. Her latest novel is Deeper Water (HarperCollins, 2014).
ANDRÉ DAO is a writer of fiction and non-fiction based in Melbourne. He was the 2014 AsiaLink Arts Resident in Hanoi, and is currently working on a novel based on the lives of his grandparents, who survived more than half a century of war and persecution in Vietnam.
GLENN L. DIAZ has an MA in creative writing from the University of the Philippines. He is the 2013 recipient of the M Literary Residency in Bangalore, India. He lives in Manila.
204
Page 204 ALR-28
204
7 August 2015
Contributors SIOBHAN HARVEY is an author and lecturer in creative writing at the Centre for Creative Writing, Auckland University of Technology. Her most recent books are the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award winner, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014) and, as co-editor, Essential New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House NZ, 2014). Recently, her work has been published in Evergreen Review, Meanjin, Landfall, Pilgrimage, Segue and Stand, among others.
ANJUM HASAN is a poet, magazine books editor and author of a collection of short fiction, Difficult Pleasures (Penguin, 2012). She has published two novels, Neti, Neti (Roli, 2009), and Lunatic in My Head (Penguin-Zubaan, 2007), as well as the book of poems Street on the Hill (Sahitya Akademi, 2006).
JOSHUA IP is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of making love with scrabble tiles (Math Paper Press, 2013), and sonnets from the singlish (Math Paper Press, 2012). He has co-edited two poetry anthologies: A Luxury We Cannot Afford (Math Paper Press, 2014) and SingPoWriMo (Math Paper Press, 2014). He is working on his first graphic novel, Ten Stories Below. His website is at www.joshuaip.com.
JANG JIN-SUNG worked as a senior writer for the Korean Workers’ Party and earned special recognition from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il for his poetry. In 2004, he defected to South Korea. He has published widely in South Korea and represented North Korea at the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012. His memoir Dear Leader (Simon & Schuster) was published in 2014.
MANAN KARKI was born in Kathmandu in 1976 and lives there working as a freelance editor and translator. He has a degree in English literature and a diploma in linguistics. His novel, The Memory of Leaves, was released in Ireland in 2009 and Nepal in 2011.
205
Page 205 ALR-28
205
7 August 2015
Contributors SHIRLEY LEE studied classics and Persian at Oxford University and is currently writing a PhD on North Korea at Leiden University. Lee read at Poetry Parnassus in the London 2012 Olympics, and at the HK and OrientOccident International literary festivals. Her articles, poetry and translations have been published in Wasafiri, Words Without Borders and elsewhere. She is the translator of Dear Leader by Jang Jin-sung (Random House 2014).
MAJID MAQBOOL is a journalist and editor based in Kashmir. His writing has appeared internationally in Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera America, NYT India Ink, Warscapes magazine and several Indian and Pakistani publications. In 2013, Majid received a United Nations Population Fund-supported award for his ‘investigative reporting on the status of women in the conflict region of Jammu and Kashmir’.
SALLY McLAREN lives in an old kimono factory in Kyoto and teaches media studies at Kwansei Gakuin University. Her research focuses on gender, media and power in the Asia–Pacific region. As a journalist she has been writing about Asia for international media since 1997.
OMAR MUSA is a Malaysian–Australian rapper and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He is the former winner of the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam. He has published two books with Penguin Australia, Parang (2014), a book of poetry, and his debut novel Here Come the Dogs (2014), which was long-listed for the 2015 Miles Franklin Award.
PLOY PIRAPOKIN was born in Thailand and raised in Hong Kong. Her work has been published in The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong (Critical, Cultural & Communications Press, 2014) and the journals Hyphen and Transfer Magazine.
206
Page 206 ALR-28
206
7 August 2015
Contributors PRODITA SABARINI is a Jakarta-based journalist and an editor for The Conversation. She was selected as the 2013–14 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow, offered through the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), which included internships at the Boston Globe and the New York Times.
SHENG KEYI is a contemporary Chinese novelist currently living in Beijing. Her works include Northern Girls (Penguin, 2012), Ode to Virtue, Death Fugue (Giramondo, 2014), Barbaric Growth and several short story collections. She has won, among others, the Chinese People’s Literature Prize, the Yu Dafu Prize for Fiction, the Chinese Literature Media Award and the Top 20 Novelists of the Future Prize. Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize.
KEANE SHUM is a lawyer who received his MFA in Creative Writing from the City University of Hong Kong. He is a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, and has also written for the Atlantic, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Age.
MIGUEL SYJUCO is from the Philippines and the author of the novel Ilustrado (Vintage Australia, 2010) which won the Man Asian Literary Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He writes about topics unsuitable for the polite dinner table: politics, religion, sex and human folly. His forthcoming second novel, I Was the President’s Mistress!!, trains its crosshairs on the powerful and corrupt in his home country.
KO KO THETT is a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance. In between, he is a poetry translator, editor and anthologist of contemporary Burmese poetry. His first anthology, Bones will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, was published by the Northern Illinois University Press in 2013. He lives and works in Belgium and writes in both Burmese and English. His collection the burden of being burmese is forthcoming from Zephyr in the autumn of 2015.
207
Page 207 ALR-28
207
7 August 2015
Contributors MAGGIE TIOJAKIN is an Indonesian author, translator, scriptwriter and journalist. She is the author of several books, including Winter Dreams (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2011). She is also the founder of Fiksi Lotus, an online journal of translated short stories. She lives in Jakarta and is currently working on her second novel, Grace.
ELLEN VAN NEERVEN is a young Yugambeh woman from South-East Queensland. She is the author of the award-winning Heat and Light (UQP, 2014) and has published short stories and poetry in McSweeney’s, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and others. She received a Queensland Writers Fellowship in 2015 to work on a new project, ‘Days of Extinction’, a fictional exploration of Aboriginal relationships with megafauna.
NICHOLAS WONG is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), and an assistant poetry editor for Drunken Boat. He holds an MFA from City University of Hong Kong.
MURONG XUECUN is the nom de plume of Hao Qun, one of China’s first internet-based writers. Born in 1974, he studied law at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. A prominent social critic, he became a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times in 2013.
208
Page 208 ALR-28
208
7 August 2015
Page 146 ALR-27 2 April 2015
146
Essential Reading | Subscribe to the
Register and subscribe online for access to exclusive new material, gems from the archive and regular updates: www.asialiteraryreview.com/subscribe Keep in touch on Twitter, Facebook, Weibo and YouTube – visit the website for links. Not online? Write to us at this address or give us a call: ALR Subscriptions 2/F, 3 Sha Po New Village Yung Shue Wan Lamma Island Hong Kong Tel: (852) 63083403 Email: admin@asialiteraryreview.com
Page 174 ALR-27 2 April 2015
174
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
ZZZ ERRNVDFWXDOO\VKRS FRP
BooksActually
||\
est. 2oo5 BooksActually is an independent bookstore located in Singapore. We specialise in Fiction and Literature ĪLQFOXGLQJ REVFXUH DQG FULWLFDO ZRUNVī ,Q RXU ERRN store, you can often find literary trinkets in the form of stationery and other lovely tchotchkes.
We publish and distribute books under our imprint 0DWK 3DSHU 3UHVV :H DOVR KDQGĥVWLWFK QRWHERRNV and produce stationery under Birds & Co.
9 Yong Siak Street Singapore 168645 | +65 6222 9195
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Australian and Asian lives are colliding and colluding as never before. This issue of the Asia Literary Review presents a conversation among writers of these seemingly distinct continents, creating a cultural bridge that renders the space between them diminished, even illusory.
Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading Featuring: Chinese internet ‘shitizens’ – an essay by Murong Xuecun Manan Karki’s poetry foreshadows devastation in Nepal Miguel Syjuco on the tragicomedy of Philippine politics Father/Son dysfunction – fiction from Anjum Hasan Siobhan Harvey’s story of loss following the earthquake in Japan Sally McLaren on Japanese pop culture Ellen van Neerven on the shared fauna of Asia and Australia
‘For decades, Asia’s modern literature, even to us in Asia, was a dark continent. If all this is now changed or changing, ALR has had a lot to do with it.’ Arvind Krishna Mehrotra asialiteraryreview.com
ISBN 9789881215550
9 789881 215550