Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

COLLAGES OF BETTERMENT 225Has my year of living in intellectual discomfort weanedme of this dependence? The simple answer is, no. DoI feel that a commitment to these values and modes ofbeing is still necessary? The simple answer is, yes. Then,what more? I ask myself.I caught sight of something other than what I waslooking for, almost at the periphery of my visual field.It is nothing of significance except perhaps to me,nothing new or novel. It is no mountain-top epiphany,and might strike others as rather prosaic and ordinary.Maybe it is something remembered that I had onceforgotten. It requires no drum roll and if I were to blurtit out now, it would probably flounder about, lookingas desperate and as tragic as sea-creatures on the deckof a fishing trawler. This is an image that one oftenglimpses on the Discovery Channel. Perhaps if I renderthe image poetically I just might be able to producean arresting image. This image could be productive ofa re-thinking, making it a counterpoint to this essay.Imagine a trawler, not of fish and edible crustaceans,but of ideas, a trawler tossed about on the high seas aftera successful catch; the once lively catch, now sorted andgraded, lies chilled in its hull.Perhaps this image does not work; it is too easy, anda touch whimsical. Besides, the deck of a trawler is noplace to set out an idea, especially not one so embeddedin my personal history. So I shall begin with a brief prehistory,keeping it as best I can from being an indulgentstory about my life.Singapore and Malaysia, a pre-historyWhen I was a young boy, I would rummage throughold photographs kept in the living room cabinet of mymaternal grandmother’s home in the border town ofJohor Bahru. (The town is so close to Singapore thatyou could almost hear the efficient and pragmatic gearsof government machinery hum, but JB, as we call it, isdecidedly Malaysian, the chaotic other to the unnervingneatness across the Straits of Johor.) The monochromesnaps—not sepia tinge—were like fragments of familymemories, kept rather unceremoniously in a box ratherthan laid out in chronological or thematic order in analbum. The one that struck me most and over whichmy child’s gaze lingered was that of my uncle, whom Iboth feared and adored for some unfathomable reason.He lay, almost reclining, in an “easy chair,” as they werecalled, surrounded by books. An unremarkable image,perhaps, except for the extraordinary fact that it wastaken in a prison cell in Singapore during the turbulentnationalist period of the late 1950s. From that, hissecond term in prison, my uncle produced what isconsidered a seminal analysis of colonial Malaya’seconomy. Since I had neither read the book nor did Iunderstand economics, the awe with which it held mewas clearly not that of intellectual understanding. If Ihad to name it now, I would identify it as a certain effectproduced by the image itself. A muddle of feelings andnotions: it was the sense of authority in the figure of myuncle, the authority of books (to which my mother wasdevoted and to which I later came to make a fetish ofas well), and the bewildering terror of prison and forcedconfinement. As I grew up and encountered a ‘mature’political vocabulary, I borrowed much of it to shoreup that image, propping it up with the then alreadyfaded romance of the socialist-nationalist struggle. Iwould be, from then forth, susceptible to misreadingimages regarding people, ideas and authority. (When Ifirst came to the Philippines, I thought how profoundit was for a nation to choose as its national hero a writerof novels. I found myself corrected on this later in mystay.)Fast-forward: I came of age in the Singapore of the1980s. While the political hegemony of the People’sAction Party had been almost unassailable for morethan a decade, the Parliament witnessed the entry of alone opposition figure at the beginning of that decade.Democratization, irrepressible as it seems to be, was onthe intellectual agenda and stayed on it until the massarrests of what we would now term civil society activistsin May 1987. What was this talk, this discourse, ofdemocracy? What was it informed by, when, in fact,the only competing ideology to the governing regimehad been all but eliminated? By the end of the 1970s,Singapore’s political Left had been erased—as Malaysia’shad been, with its specter last encountered in thehaunting echoes of China’s Cultural Revolution. Thiswas felt most poignantly in the mid-1970s in the worldtheater and the arts. Socialist Realism, as theory andpractice, had had its curtain call, forcibly or otherwise inthe Peninsula. Moreover, not only was there nothing toreplace it, but memories of it and traditions associatedwith it were assiduously erased.I told many Filipinos that I encountered in my sevenmonths there about how the Philippines emerged in myconsciousness as a place, as a society. For my generationin the mid-1980s in university in Singapore, at least, thestruggle against the Marcos dictatorship was probablythe most significant for the region, as the fall of theNew Order regime of Indonesia was for the late 1990s.Despite our lack of ideological moorings, the saga of theMarcos dictatorship had all the elements of high dramaand kept us glued to the radio and newspapers untilthe final twist. Unfortunately, the journalistic offeringsAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows