PARAH or HARAP?

As we were walking towards our car after the last performance of Alfin Sa'at’s PARAH, at Pentas 2 in KLPAC in early February, a friend said about her relative, “My sister won’t get it lah. She’ll say … see, see, see … I told you so!” I guess that would be the reaction of more than a few in the audience. (One person in the audience asked it the book, Interlok, is real.)

 Alfian’s play was like a punch in the stomach, designed to wake one up, to get a grip. But I felt there were many things that were not there. Certainly, the writer and the director would have had to decide what to leave out, or we would have been in Pentas 2 for a week. And as an editor, I understand that the most difficult task a writer faces is what to leave out. This is no criticism of Alfian’s play or Jo Kukathas’s direction -- they both did fantastic jobs, as did the actors. And I liked the way the play was produced in Malay (move out of the way DBP, the language belongs to the people, not to bureaucrats and politicians); English would have sounded so elitist and condescending.

I remember my first awareness of racism. We (my family) used to live in Johor, and we were visiting relatives in Bukit Timah in Singapore. I was sitting with the ‘men’ in the living room, while my mother, sister and my younger brother were in the kitchen. I was about thirteen, I think. My uncle was complaining to Father about his children running around with 'all those Chinese boys'. I dared not breathe. I stole a glance at Father, and saw him keeping a studious silence. He did not say anything apart from a ‘hmm’, which could have been interpreted either as acceptance or rejection.

I had never kept my Chinese and Malay friends a secret, nor did I try too hard to suppress my over-exuberant teenage hormones. My Chinese friends satisfied my nerdy needs, while my Malay friends -- many of whom were from the Police quarters on Jalan Masjid -- were simply great fun. (We loved music, but we also did many naughty things on the side, but in secret.)

During the drive home, I didn’t know if I was going to ‘get it’. I kept very quiet, trying to be as polite as I possibly could without throwing up. (That might have helped -- or not.) Father did not say a word either -- not in the car, not at home, not for weeks, months or years. He never did.

Another time was at the school padang, during the rugby season. I was with the field hockey crowd, and our season was over, but that didn’t stop us from knocking the ball around on the periphery, while watching the rugby game in progress.  Before long, the rugby ball rolled (or tumbled) in our direction, and one of my friends, Yoges (not his real name), decided to be helpful and tried to kick it back. Unfortunately, being aerodynamically challenged, the ball flew off at a tangent. Halim (not his real name), who was running towards us at that time, let out a tirade of swear words in several languages, complete with pariah, keling and 'descendants of slaves', questioned the legitimacy of our citizenships and our births. I was stunned because, first, I thought Halim was my friend and, second, because I had never heard the words being used with such venom. He was quickly escorted away by his friends (all Malay) and we, still stunned, decided to call it a day.

But, it was not until I arrived in KL in May 1969 that I saw how ugly it could get. On the first day in campus, I was forced to choose a side, and if I was seen with someone of a different colour, I'd hear, “Are we not good enough for you?” If you were Indian and you couldn’t speak Tamil you had it (even if you spoke Malayalam or Telugu or some other language at home). My Chinese friends (some of whom were Hokkien or Babas) had to live with the constant snide remarks, “Chinese also cannot speak Chinese,” because they didn't speak Cantonese. One (now a prominent politician) told me, "My parents say I can marry any girl I want as long she is not Kek (Hakka)." The Malays didn’t know what hit them -- yes they were referred to as ‘them’ when one was polite and many other things when one was not. I had never seen such ugliness in Johor.

Coming back to Alfian’s play, I couldn’t help feeling that he was a little unsympathetic towards the Malay character. While Kahoe and Mahesh were subject to racism, Hafiz only freaked out because he didn’t know who his parents were. (It could have been the playwrights metaphor for the Malay condition; having destroyed so many of their roots, they no longer know who they are, and that bothers them.) How about the constant taunts and slights Malays face: Melayu bodoh, Melayu malas, Melayu balek kampong, etc? The polite term in Tamil for a Malay man is Malai-karan, and the derisive reference is normally natukaran -- countryman -- a pretty benign term.  But the Hokkien term, huan-na, savages, is anything but. I have been told by my source that it has similar connotations to the term 'nigger', but she thinks the speakers don't realise how offensive the word is. That might be the case, but it's still a horrible, horrible thing to say. My source also says, she thinks, there is no other word for the Malay people in Hokkien! True? Someone, please, please, please, say it's not. (Indian's are referred to as keling-a, but increasingly the term In-toh is used.)

Two stories:

One, I was giving a ride to two of my wife’s friends. They were talking about this and that and, as usual, it veered towards social justice (or injustice). “It is all for their kind only lah. They can do anything they want, they still get everything.” (I asked my wife when we came home, “Why did they speak like that? They don’t even know me.")

Two, I was driving with three friends towards Pudu looking for bak-kut-teh along the crowded Jalan Tun Perak when I swore, “Aiyah, I wish they’d watch where they are going.” This friend, who was at the back, said, “Never mind, you can run over and kill a few. There are too many of them, anyway.” I was shocked. Sometimes, I think I should have stopped the car and told her to get out. But she was laughing. Did she think it was a joke? Did she think she was being clever? Did she think the rest of us would have agreed with her? Did she speak that way because all her other friends did? Did she think it was fashionable to be a racist? Is racism merely a fashion?

Why the hell did the rest of us tolerate that?

Why are UK books so crappy?

When I finally got my hardcover copy of 1Q84 some two months ago, I was appalled. It was the UK edition – the paper was coarse, the printing uneven, typography chunky and the cover design cheesy. I kept drooling over the American editions I saw online. You can accuse me of being fussy or call me a “Yankee lover’, but facts are facts. I have been selling books for over 12 years, and I have never understood why UK editions of the same titles are so crappy. Britain produces more titles per capita than any other country in the world.

Some years ago, when we were selling the Faber & Faber edition of Orhan Pamuk’s My name is Red, in A-format, another distributor imported an American edition of the same title (albeit in the larger B-format) with a selling price of RM39.90 (that is, 5sen less than the British edition). We took 20 copies immediately, not because it cost 5sen less, but because it was far better designed and manufactured. The difference was so apparent, it was embarrassing. Why are you still selling that crap edition, some customers asked? Yes, the British edition really did look bad. The book was twice as thick, threatened to scream like a vestal virgin if one opened it out by more than 15 degrees (wtf… how does one read it?), had schoolboy typography, was printed on cheap yellowing bulky newsprint, and looked as if it was cyclostyled using a 1950s Gestetner.

Have you ever seen the UK Vintage edition (also-A format) of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace? I will toss it even if it comes with a free magnifying glass. Don’t even ask about the page layout, text margins and alignment, typography, binding and printing. Okay, the A-format is really meant for us poor third-world country cousins; the natives should be grateful. But how does one explain the difference in quality in the B-formats? Take an American edition of a Vintage, place it side by side with a UK edition of the same title, same format, and you will see the difference – quality of paper, design, typography, printing and binding. And you know what? The American book would often cost less. (Even if it cost more, I’d prefer to pay the extra – the book will open smoothly and comfortably to at least 150 degrees, will not threaten to break its spine, be easier on the eyes and will not yellow so easily.)

One can also compare American and UK Penguin paperbacks (or any other common imprint) side by side. UK editions fare less badly in the case of hardbacks, but they still cannot compare with the ones from the US: more stylish, better printed and bound and, usually, cheaper.

Some years ago, Silverfish published a book by an Englishman (who was in Kuala Lumpur for the 2004 literary festival). He bought several copies of his book to give/sell to friends and to place in a local bookshop. He later sent me an email saying how surprised most people were at the quality. In Frankfurt, too, I’ve got very favourable comments (though, to me, the East – the Czech ambassador insists it’s Middle -- European books are to die for).

Recently, I had an interesting exchange of emails with a publisher in the UK. When he was here last year, I had suggested that he print the books in Malaysia to save costs. He had also been impressed with the quality of our books. He sent me an email recently, saying that he was finally ready and asked me to get him a quote. I gave him a list of things I’d need for a proper quote, including a cover design in Adobe Illustrator with proper crop/registration marks and colour bars. The text document he had attached (pdf) was in A4 size and appeared to have been done on a word processor. (I didn’t even bother to comment on the typography.) His return email asked why I wanted all those things – he had his cover design only in Photoshop. When I suggested that Photoshop might not be the best design tool, he threw a hissy fit, saying that’s how it was done in the UK, how they’d simply give printers the pdfs of the text and covers for them to sort out, how what I was asking seemed like a lot of ‘faff’, and that ‘these are book covers, not works of art!’ implying that it was about time tree-dwellers learnt how the modern world worked.

I told him he could do it himself. Sheesh.

A joke, albeit a cruel one, often heard, in the shop is about the quality of books from India – with their crooked layout, ‘potato-printing’ text with missing words/lines/paras and the recycled ‘toilet-paper’ pages. But, the quality of books from India is improving rapidly and, the way things are going, will soon be better than those from the UK.

First, they forgot how to make nice cars. Now, they can’t even make nice books.