stories of southeast asia
TRANSCRIPT
Stories of Southeast AsiaApril Marie Cavile
Southeast Asia has always been a rich and highly diverse region, pulsing with multi
layered life- distinct yet fascinatingly intertwined. This paper will look into the countries of
focus: Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam, their stories twice told. Much of the discussion will
explore issues beneath their geographical values. Two stories from each region don’t concretize
their collective milieu nevertheless I aim to cover gender issues, cultural geography and the
similarities and differences that anthropomorphized these places.
Though problematic, the status of women (especially Muslim women) in Southeast Asia
is comparatively better than in other parts of Asia. It’s interesting to delve into the world of
Muslim wives- how they think, feel and play the role of having a shared husband without losing
themselves just like in the story Her by Titis Basino of Indonesia. Mrs. Hamid was a dedicated
and loyal wife to her husband and children, enduring the hurt when his husband married another
woman without her knowledge. He always talks about her but she just “swallowed her pride with
her rice.” At first she struggled and tried saving face for her children and even her insensitive
husband by making up excuses for his absence at home when her friends, who had the “most
faithful husband”, would ask. But later on she was able to handle the tide and remained as the
“proverbial good woman” even though deep down inside her she wished he’d get tired of her,
the other woman.
She joined a woman’s club in her city and became the vice-chairperson not that she was
all active but because she is the wife of a high official. Soon enough Mrs. Hamid began to accept
her limbo of a life with confidence and with an open mind that her Jealousy became manageable.
In a convention she met her and people were following silently, expectantly for a scene
when Mrs. Hamid was announced chairperson since there were two who stood up. But the other
Mrs. Hamid came to her with a warm smile gesturing her to the podium while everybody was
applauding the unrecognized victories of the original Mrs. Hamid.
Polygamy is a universal guilty-pleasure that most people see as negative yet it’s one of
the mainstream “crimes” that adults seek and loath at the same time (depending on who you talk
to). However, it must be terribly awkward and painful when it’s actually a “legal crime”. To
places like Indonesia, Vietnam and other Muslim countries, polygyny is but a normalcy that
boosts the males and ego-kills the females- one of life’s ironic misfit.
Mrs. Hamid represents one of the complex requirements of Muslim women cornered by
her society- to be steadfast with her devils. At first she was a dependent and jealous wife then
she learned to outgrow her old self, not change things but adapt to things, accept but retain the
balance with grace. Unlike the young country girl, Tam in The Market Girl by Thach Lam of
Vietnam who loses her beauty and her sense of self as the burdens of family life, obligation and
poverty fell on her shoulders single-handedly like most Asian women, as if was their birthright-
an imposed cruelty they merely accepted. As their custom goes, girls “her age should be
married.” Encouraged by her matchmaker aunt and consented by her mother, the worried Tam
halfheartedly agreed to marry Teacher Bai, whom she had fallen in love with even though her
mind was still tied to the onus of her family.
Apparently, her early marriage only sagged her down now that she has a baby and her
husband’s poor family to feed. Though poverty worn her out she pushed herself harder.
Both stories depict the realism of Southeast Asian women’s condition that somehow the
rest of humanity can relate to but the most Asia about it is its close family ties; outrageously
close that it can make one crazy but can also be one’s source of happiness. Although man is
naturally selfish most often we see family as the “purpose” of our existence crowding at the
center of our Asian conscience and it pricks if we neglect them. That’s why we hear, “I live for
my family,” “I’ll do everything for my family,” “I’ll kill for my family,” etc…We’re overdosed!
Sometimes, this whole close family tradition is just too overrated! Similarly in the The
Market Girl and Her we see the super close family ties in Vietnamese and Indonesian society
that any Asian can relate to. When Tam heard her mother and siblings urging her to rest at home
and skip the Sunday market their concern soothes her like a Tiger Balm:
“All her weariness disappeared. Times like these made her forget her fears and worries. She felt
cheerful and in her heart there blossomed beautiful thought of her family.”
They live too thickly in her blood that poverty, misfortune and other human calamities
are OK as long as the concept of family is intact. We seem to have this sticky belief when it
comes to family (must be the sticky-rice effect). Indeed, this Vietnamese proverb justifies that
“the debt we owe our father is as great as Mount Thain son; the debt we owe our mother is as
inexhaustible as water flowing from its source. We must repay their debt in order to fulfill our
obligation as children.”
Given their different background and situation I can comparatively observe that Mrs.
Hamid, a “Koranically” devout Muslim mother and wife cleverly and confidently faced her
troubles and personalized her private life despite the fact that her marriage is communal. She
gracefully accepted the situation and turned it to her favor:
“I was now much more content when he went to her, because I was convinced that she was no less
dedicated to making him happy than I was. She also had a right to a husband, even though fate had decreed that he
also be mine.”
However, Tam (probably a Buddhist) who was rushed because a girl “her age” should
marry somehow handled the situation insipidly and just allowed her miserable and hopeless life
to consume her instead of bravely overcoming it:
“Sadly, she looked at the whole of her life- the life of a market girl from youth to womanhood full
of toil and care, one day woven into the next like a coarse cloth. She lowered her eyes and walked faster into the
dark alley. “
The story reminds me of Maalaala Mo Kaya stories about poor women and their
exploding families. This reveals pessimism and how the characters allowed it as a natural part of
their daily lives.
Things are looking sunny in another story track from Vietnam, “The Day Always Belongs
to the Sun” by Tran Thanh Ha. This time it’s an individualistic point of view rather than focusing
in family or society as a whole. It revolves around the predicament in a separate love situation of
a young professional and her aunt. The problematic narrator, a young teacher goes about
choosing to teach in a far away school over her sweetheart and other better offers (egged on by
her aunt). But the story revolves mostly around her beautiful but “congenitally lame” aunt. She
recounts her Aunt Thuong’s story that her intelligence and beauty didn’t seem to do much to
cover her lameness so she was sent home and did needlework instead. Through her brother’s aid
and beauty as a capital she eventually became successful in her business, owned a decent house
but without a husband to complete the picture. At the latter part the aunt revealed that she’s in
love with a married man and seems satisfied with it plus she was pregnant. Ultimately, the
narrator eventually came to a decision, packed her bags, kissed her aunt goodbye as the sun rose
up pointing to her heart’s choice.
Another point of comparison between Tam (The Market Girl) and Aunt Thuong is that
they were both attractive, people swarm at them but somehow their love lives aren’t as charming
as their faces. A person’s appearance doesn’t go with his or her “destiny” sometimes.
Regardless, their individual characters in handling their misfortunes reflect that of nature as
implied in their endings. Tam “lowered her eyes and walked faster into the dark alley” while for
the school teacher and her aunt, “eyes flashed with the reflection of countless sunbeams.”
Nature, the spiritual realm, incantations and the free-flowing energy that invisibly breaths
harmony into the universe and man is another theme that’s typical in Southeast Asian literature
yet only a handful of writers can captivate us with these materials. One of them is the “bottle
poet” Saturdji Calzuom Bachri whose credo is to “free words out of their meaning.” He believes
that mantra is the true use of words. In his short story “Rain,” Ayesha a girl who’s fascinated by
the rain experiences psychedelically the real nature of it. As she grows up she slowly learnt the
ways of the Rain as it transcends into its most primitive element and morphs into everything and
anything it touches. Now a mature girl, the Rain reveals itself to her and is “calling the rain in
her,” she eventually trance into a dance becoming the Rain herself. Just as she was reaching the
climax of her incantation the door opened interrupting her progression. Her mother entered the
room and saw her wet all over as if she bathed in the rain without a trace. Her mother wiped her
and the contact of the towel in her skin brought her back to the tangible world.
This trippy story is my favorite in the six collections and I think it best represents
Southeast Asia because of its exotic nature, where bizarre is natural; a way of life that
modernism can never annihilate. Also Rain capsulated the allusive nature of literature as a
whole.
There’s beauty in floating words, in being lost and in finding your own way back with a
leprechaun. A story like this is indeed “the high fun of literature” as Robert Alter puts it.
When we immerse ourselves in liquid words washed away from meanings we see things
from a different perspective, pure:
"The pouring rain, with the wind's assistance, brushed the leaves in the garden, changing them into leaves
of rain…jumping from branch to branch, the rain changed the branches of rain. As the rain caressed the roses, the
roses became rain roses. As the rain encircled the guava fruit, the guavas became guavas of rain."
Saturdji’s fluid and free flowing mantra seem to struggle with the material world to
extract and frees us from this physical world through his works. Dissimilarly, in Myanmar the
story “He’s Not My Father” by Nu Nu Yi, poverty, labor and misery is so pungent that it pulled
me away from Rain’s peaceful state and slaps the real filthy world into my consciousness.
The story is about a young boy, Shrimp (9 years old) who uses his wits and convincing
skills to gain money to buy food. He does all sorts of labor in the ferry company, competing with
other kids, enduring bullies just to get through another day. Yet the real gist of this story is his
firm denial of the fact that his father is dead despite seeing it for himself; even people affirm that
that ragged, filthy, hollow man lying in the street was his father. Instead he contends with the
thought “my father went away to work…he’s never come back.”
Unlike the other female-staring stories in this paper, I’d like to turn to the male situation
in “He’s Not My Father” and discuss how the Karen army (imagine ‘ethnic’ NPA) aggressively
press-ganged the males to work as military porters at the front. This reminded me of the twin
Luther and John Htoo, the youngest (age 9) military leaders in war history. Written on May 1992
this story not only opens us to the poor, miserable, shitty life (that’s all the same everywhere) but
also how 50 plus years of ongoing rebellion continuously rip off families just like in the story.
Shrimp’s father was dragged to war as a porter and was brought back corrupted with life. The
boy seems settled with what he had a tiny memory of his father that he can no longer grow; only
the river can remind him:
“When I was little I used to come to swim at this river bank with Daddy- he used to wrap his
arms around me, tight.”
Water connects the two stories (Rain, He’s Not My Father) as a metaphor for life and
death, for sustenance and loss, for freedom and struggle. For centuries the waters of the Salween
River carried across violence and progress, freedom and enslavement, it carried the passenger to
their demise or brought one home. It’s also the very river that Burmese people like Shrimp and
his friends find a sense of community. In a way, rivers are floating societies where people living
near it commune with muddy nature, swim in its whispering memories and somehow find peace
in its mystery. And like Ayesha’s Rain it’ll slip away as consciousness open its Eyes:
"Just as the dance reached its rainy climax, the door suddenly opened. Startled by the sound,
Ayesha stopped her movements. The dance had come to an end."
The government of Myanmar is probably the most killjoy country in all of Southeast
Asia, known for its iron hand censorship in almost everything that’s supposed to be free like
media and literature. The following stories are part of the book, “Inked Over, Ripped Out” by
Anna J. Allott, a PEN American Center “Freedom-to-Write” Report that featured Burmese short
stories and authors to be read by a wider audience.
A Burmese story subtly attacking the failure of Burmese government to modernize their
economic and living condition is portrayed in Ne Win Myint’s “The Advertising Wagon.” The
narrator returns to visit his hometown with evocative sights of his childhood at every road but
after twenty to thirty years, nothing had changed. As he sat in the horse wagon with other
passengers memories came to his eyes like dust, how people crammed in a hut just to watch
videos in a bioscope from Rangoon when it came to their village. That past time was so
integrated into their daily lives they spend most of their time in front of it. Videos were
submitted to the Press Scrutiny Board before it is released to the public but some prohibited
videos leak and that caused some tension from the authorities. The narrator later recounts U
Kyauk Maung, an ingenious bioscope fanatic whose craze over it brought him glory and demise
especially when he started joining with the bioscope troupe from the city. Later on the narrator
saw his childhood friend outside a small hut, Than Doe, son of U Kyauk Maung was repainting
his father’s wagon.
While choosing a realistic framework, some authors go beyond the narrative style, the
use of allegory or the strange, the subtlety of psychological analysis. Indeed, this story is simple
and real yet told with profound criticism. Burmese readers are quick to sense the theme of this
story since they are familiar with their government’s harsh censorship that I think the author
successfully got across. Others interpret this as the new government’s (the SLORC) failure to
bring change and modernization to their country just like the old regime (the BSPP). Indeed, an
apt saying “like father like son” applies to U U Kyauk Maung and his swindler son, Than Doe
who merely repaints his father’s beaten wagon to trick his villagers instead of buying a new one
of finding a decent job. As I get to know more of the ‘inside’ story, I realized that I don’t have to
be a Burmese reader to be able to relate to it because it’s happening here in our country, too
(with only a few leads)! As much as possible, I don’t like to talk about politics here because I
feel like negotiating for a lost cause but yeah this is so Philippines. I’d like to talk about the
repainting strategy though, a very clever allusion to the passed-on-practice of cheap deception:
A weather-beaten man, paint of pot in hand, was painting the wheels. Our wagon driver
guffawed. “Speak of the devil! Than Doe’s giving his Pop’s old wagon a lick of paint!”
The Burmese village’s favorite recreation is obviously video marathon and apparently
where a show of Truth battling Lies and vice versa are played in multi-color, creatively
advertised by U Kyauk Maung. The people are perceptive, yes, but they’re also very tolerant
with bullshit so the cycle goes on until it became so embedded it composed their lives despite
their frustrations to fight it. And probably that’s what banned change, development and maturity
in their country’s overall condition from happening. It seems like the Burmese people live inside
the tv screen, censored, trapped, cut, edited and are forcefully made to play the role of a fool.
And their government? A network of haywire.
I don’t believe in gender equality or that we will ever have an absolute one, but I do
believe in the beautiful human characters that these kinds of adversity reveal to us. Diamond
patience and strong-mindedness for the Muslim women and wedding rings at the pawnshops for
those non-Muslim who can afford divorce, challenging yet simple life family life in the country
side and optimism despite being lame, acceptance and tolerance in things that we cannot change
but only endure. Cuộc sống vẫn tiếp.
References:
Google book: Babel or Behemoth: Language Trends in Asia edited by Jennifer Lindsay, Ying Ying Tan
Pasemon: On Allusion and Illusions by Goenawan Mohamad
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=M6zs7VN9PnEC&pg=PA52&dq=%22sutardji+calzoum+bachri%22&lr=lang_en&as_brr=3&cd=2#v=onepage&q=%22sutardji%20calzoum%20bachri%22&f=false
www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs/INKED-OVER.doc