Lessons from the jungle

In the jungle, the mighty eats the weak.

In the jungle, the weak but cunning lives to see another day.

In the jungle, small creepers can bring down a big tree.

In the jungle, there is no decency or morality. Order is created only by fear.

In the jungle, the only way to get someone high up in the treetops is by being a snake.

In the jungle, it is always first come first serve.

In the jungle, you cannot save except in your roots, leaves and fruit.

In the jungle, predators take only what they need and leave you alone after they have eaten.

In the jungle, you are always hungry.

In the jungle, something will always clean up after you.

The jungle never leaves you. You take it to the city.

The jungle can never really be tamed, in body or in spirit. Suppressed, it patiently waits to rise again.

How I learnt that not all traders are bad

When I was a young boy, my parents always sighed about the lack of money. In my 8-year-old mind, the provision man was to blame because he's the one who always took our money. I simply could not relate the rice I would carry home from his shop to the money he would take for it.

Oh I knew money was not easy to come by. My hardest memory was when father was gravely sick and left us with no income. For a while, we survived only on plain rice and salt. I do not know why but I still have vivid memories of the bowl I used to eat from.

That memory had a deep impact on me. I viewed with suspicion traders and anyone who provided anything for a fee. In my mind at that time, if you are poor, it is their fault. They were the ones who took your money. They became the symbol of my family's suffering. Sometimes, I didn't even think of them as human.

My best friend Ah Chai changed all that. I first bumped into him in my teens. I was cycling home from the kedai runcit (provision shop), balancing a tin of kerosene hanging from one handlebar, a bag of provisions on the other and bag of rice at the back when I hit a hole and fell. The bag of rice hit the ground and burst, spilling half its contents onto the muddy kampung trail. The kerosene also spilt. Luckliy the bag of provisions was intact. I was frightened. My parents are going to kill me, I thought.

I did what I could. Quickly propped my bicycle against a tree, put the kerosene tin upright and squatted on the ground gathering as much unmuddied grains of rice as I could find to put back into the split bag. No one saw me because few people used that particular kampung trail.

As I picked out the rice grains one by one from the ground I suddenly heard a voice from behind me. Aiya, lu jatuh ah? I turned around and it was a Chinese boy. He looked about the same age I was.

It must have been obvious with all that mud on my clothes. Ya, jatuh I said. He stood there with his bicycle looking at me with curious eyes, frozen as if thinking of what to say.

Moments later we were both squatting and hand picking grains of rice from the ground. I didn't know his name. He seemed friendly and genuinely wanted to help. Between us, we rescued about 5 handfuls of rice grain. I said thank you to him and cycled home to a royal scolding.

A few weeks later I took the bus to the nearby pekan (small town) to buy a schoolbag. Of all people, I bumped into him. He was also there to buy something. We immediately recognized each other and got into an excited conversation. His name is Ah Chai, he lived in a house not far away. His father is one of the few small rubber wholesalers in that town.

It was the first time I had ever known someone who had a connection to that murky world of business. Over the next few months and years, I slowly came to know Ah Chai's family members and relatives, one of whom ran a shop in the pekan. Through him I saw a side of shopkeepers I never expected - people who were actually as human as I was. Far from being evil monsters, they had families, were capable of feeling everything I felt, and could be kind and generous. They were nothing like the species I imagined.

The other lesson I learnt from Ah Chai was the concept of fair exchange. I learnt that someone who takes money from you is not a bad person if he gave you back something of fair and honest value. These were things my parents didn't teach me, probably because being simple folk they never ventured further than the rubber trees, the latex collection centre and the pekan.

Nowadays, I am able to treat shopkeepers and hawkers like how I treat my own friends and relatives. Yes, not all of them are saints just like my relatives but at least the monsters are gone, replaced by people with hearts, feelings and aspirations. That was Ah Chai's present to me. Something I thank him for whenever I visit his resting place every couple of years.

[I related this story to a friend who remarked it sounds just like one of Yasmin Ahmad's stories. I just laughed.]

What I learnt in 2009

- Empty plastic mineral water bottles make good slippers. You flatten them, use rafia string to make the harness and you have instant selipar jepun (Japanese slippers).

- I can survive on Rm3 a day.

- The people who tell me I need money to be happy are usually the same ones who say money is the root of all evil.

- Given a choice, I can always count on people to choose something that gets them deeper into trouble. This ranges from choice of food to brides to political preferences.

- The more things I own, the more I suffer. Either it goes before I am ready to let it go or it stays when I wish it doesn't stay.

- Sometimes, the best way to make people worse is to help them, and deny them a painful but necessary lesson in life.

- If you like to pray for longevity, make sure the signs are you won't have to keep toiling to keep food on the table well after your retirement

- You cannot find mee jawa in Java, mee Siam in Siam or nasi goreng America in America.

- There is no worse tragedy than children leaving their parents to die alone in their old age

- No matter what you do, your parents will always love you, even if they don't say it

May 2010 make me and the people around me happier people.

Still searching for a truly Malaysian dish

A few of us sat at the mamak stall this afternoon to have our "Christmas meal" of roti canai and teh tarik. Well it was more a Christmas tea than a meal. One of the things we joked about was to name a true, genuine Malaysian dish.

Years ago, I used to think that soto was Malaysian until someone corrected me. It is Indonesian. So is satay and nasi lemak - which apparently is called nasi uduk there. I rattled off a list of random Malay creations from cendol to belacan. Not one is truly Malaysian my friends said. They've all appeared in Indonesia, Thailand, China and India in one form or another.

Take the karipap, that traditional tea-time snack you find served in many kampung houses. It is actually an English idea (pie) with Indian filling (curried potato). As for mee (noodles), whatever version you had ever eaten must have been prepared somewhere in China before, where noodles first appeared a thousand years ago. Left to a billion people and a hundred generations, what are the chances that someone had never tried out your recipe before?

But what about dishes like rojak Penang or Ipoh sar hor fun? Don't the provincial names mean they are local inventions? Apparenly no. Most likely, the label will tell you where the dish was made popular, not where it was invented.

During the great food debate a few months ago, some people said chicken rice and chili crab are Singaporean inventions. Well, they must have some archeological evidence to be convinced that people never ate boiled chicken with plain rice before Singapura was discovered, although I am not so sure if the people of Hainan island will let them get away with such a claim.

But I still hope we can find a truly Malaysian dish, made with ingredients that can only be found in Malaysia and nowhere else in the world. That's the only way to be sure. Is there such a thing?

What really took the conversation for the afternoon was something one of my friends said: That chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow by a Bengali chef. I checked it up in Wikipedia and nearly fell off my chair.

Changing nature's balance

Someone told me you cannot find stray Siamese cats on the streets of Bangkok or stray Pekingese dogs on the streets of Peking. He explained that these creatures are the offspring of species artificially bred in other countries. I was shocked.

Maybe I shouldn't be. If I can't find Mee Bandung in Bandung or Mee Siam in Siam, how can I expect to find Persian cats in Persia (present day Iran)?

He said people find stubby legs and short snouts on animals cute so we grow these animals to have stubby legs and short snouts. These creatures may be cute but they will not last a week in the wild where they are easily outrun, outclimbed or outbitten by their unengineered friends. Their survival depends entirely on the food and protection given by their human masters. That is why when owners dump their pets, they die off quickly.

The original unengineered dog or cat is the result of millions of years of evolution. Its claws, teeth, fur and tail are there for a purpose. They tell me evolution is a cruel battle of the fittest. There is no compassion for the weak, no assistance for the injured, no right or wrong.

If I am not mistaken, humans went through the same experience too, if you believe in evolution.

You can say this is the law of nature and interfering with it is going against the law of nature. Can you? Whether you can or not, it is easy to confirm that we have found a way to cheat evolution.

This includes what we have become. Some of us breed and thrive under artificial conditions like special physical or economic protection. Some do well under it but when we are placed in an open world of competition, many of us do not survive. Our emotions cannot take it. We are too slow, too weak, too easily hurt to compete.

It is exactly like artificially bred animals who survive only when they are living in the house or compound where their food and protection is assured. But what happens when their house or compound is removed?

What can remove their house or compound? Many things. For example, when water rises due to global warming. A flood or fire. Earthquakes, volcanoes. Even the economy. When I was a teenager, our family's wooden hut was taken away by the authorities who wanted to build a road. There is now a shophouse over the pond where my family members used to take a bath.

During such times, the ones with stubby legs and short snouts are forced out into the wild to fight for their survival. There is a lot of fear in them. Some make it but many don't.

What I am trying to say is there is a price to pay for changing the balance of nature. I cannot say if it is right or wrong because personally I believe we and the cats and the dogs are also the product of millions of years of survival. We arrived from a place where we lived by our own two hands like others did. The only special protection we had were the crude weapons we made with our own hands. A thousand ancestors have paid the price for us to become as clever and resourceful as we are today. A tough but necessary road.

It makes me think about the question of meritocracy, about letting the rich and smart rise up and the not so smart remain as street sweepers and rubbish collectors. What is it like to have a rich but stupid and insensitive person making decisions for the poor, who are not allowed to rise simply because they are poor. If you turn it around, what is it like to have the poor or incompetent make decisions for the rich and intelligent.

Evolution has proved that the weak do not determine the fate of the strong, even if the weak is righteuos and the strong is wrong. However, there is also something objectionable about letting the raw power of nature, or might is right, determine our destiny.

There are a lot of wars and commotions happening in the world. I think this is the outcome of a struggle between the forces of evolution and forces that want to neutralize evolution. I wonder which one will win.

When does the hair turn white

Ask a local why your hair turns white and you're sure to get one of these.

- you worry too much
- you bargain at the market too much
- you saw a ghost
- you have too much sex
- you are getting old already

Did I miss anything?

Of course they never say why you can find white hair on some young people when they've never seen a ghost, never bargained at a market, having too much fun to worry much and are too ugly to have a girlfriend or boyfriend.

The orang puteh has a more direct and unexciting answer. Read this if you like long winded explanations.

Or, more straight to the point,

"It turns grey/white because the cells that color your hair are dying out, thus its kind of impossible to produce them again. If you do eat a lot of vitamins it may stay colored longer. "

Now, on why people go white and then go bald...

Ah Chai

Due to some fluke of nature, I was born with lighter skin than my siblings, and features that made it hard for people to ascertain my race.

Most strangers think I am Chinese, until I open my mouth and confirm their guesses (I am multi lingual). Well, except that I am not Chinese.

But can we ever know for sure what blood flows through our veins? I do know that my mother is of Sumatran heritage, father of Javanese heritage. But except for a few obligatory celebrations, as a third generation family member I very seldom identify with either of these heritages. Race and culture is something I don't normally think about until someone reminds me of it.

I am lucky to have grown up in a true melting pot, to have experienced what its like to have a best friend whose great grandparents didn't come from the same clan or country mine came from. Unfortunately Ah Chai passed away many years ago due to illness. I was the only non-Chinese fellow who attended his funeral. I followed the entourage right up to his burial plot. I felt devastated for his widow and 6 year old son and donated to them what little I had stashed under the floorboard of our house. Money that would liberate me from my bicycle to a motorcycle. Ah Chai lived near the rubber estate I lived in.

Whenever I think of Ah Chai, I feel sad to see what our community has become, yet happy how he and I made possible what others said is not possible.

Does older mean wiser?

Someone asked me this question at my 50th birthday dinner recently.

I don't know if it had anything to do with the tin foil hat I was wearing but I said sure, we are definitely much wiser than you 30-somethings! She must have sensed I was as unconvinced with my answer as I was with the deliciousness of the nasi briyani I was having because they all laughed politely.

Well I honestly don't know the answer to that question, considering that behind most problems plaguing my country, I would find a bunch of old men and women. So how can I convince myself that age follows wisdom hand in hand?

What I do notice is that sometimes, age does more to harden one's conviction than moderate it. You can't teach an old dog new tricks, they say. Maybe that's because people like us have a stubborn tendency to cling to old ways. As far as we're concerned, these are gospel truths, sacred and unchangeable.

What a rude shock we get when we discover how time cuts through our cherished wisdoms like a knife through planta.

When I was a boy, my mother used to tell me to come inside the house before dark, a piece of advice that echoes in my mind to this day. In those days, we lived in an old hut by the jungle fringe where tigers used to roam at night. Mother used to tell me ghost stories just to scare me so I would not wander out and play after dark.

The realities have changed. Where the tigers once roamed, we have the busy roads of a bustling township. Confining oneself indoors after dark seems silly with all the neon lights flashing out there, yet mother still urges me to be careful of the dark.

Keeping an outdated belief or two is harmless, even helpful in building character but clinging to a whole raftful of them and treating them as your survival guide, now that can hardly be called wise.

I think part of wisdom is to be able to ask ourselves if we are wise.

The question I would throw back is, how many elder people are wise enough to ask themselves that question.