A Rush of Memories

I never trusted my memory since I arrived in Malaysia. I just felt that words had ceased all production of meanings. Masjid Jamek, Tun Sumbanthan, Puduraya, Hang Tuah, Majaralela, Tun Abdulrahman and Menara Tun Razak never meant anything to me although I was forced to memorize them everyday just to get to where I was going. Most often, I was going somewhere at the 27th or 30th floor of buildings that all looked the same.
So, just to make friends with these strangers, I kept rolling them in my tongue as I inserted bills and pulled out cards at the Putra Train station, hoping that my mind can accommodate their strangeness. Only to discover a couple of steps from the train platform that they had all slipped away. How can I hold on to something that I didn't possess in the first place? I asked as I grappled with wild moments of panic.
I easily lost the memories of names because I never had any memory of the language in the first place. How many times did I catch Mujtaba (Taba), our Indonesian fellow, bursting with laughter because I mangled words in Bahasa and chopped and inverted names? He snickered when I asked the Indonesian fellow Wahyu, if his full name was Wayuatta instead of Wahyuana.
My mind seemed to be playing tricks on me because I thought the Burmese fellow's name was Zio Meow instead of Myo Zaw. After a short talk with Malaysiakini editor Stephen Gan, I stopped at the train platform to ask Taba again what the word "bumaputri" meant? Mujtaba, who was already having trouble how to juggle his work schedules with the time that his band of Malaysian friends wanted him to spend with them, frowned in confusion.
"Ahh! You mean, bumiputra!" he burst out laughing again.
That was why, after I left my cellphone in a faraway village of Sarawak, I was amazed to find out that I remembered the 12-digit telephone number that was supposed to be my lifeline. It was the only strange proof that my memory was working! On my way back to Kuching, I was prompted to remember a name that Prof. Wong Meng Chou had mentioned, but which I had kept inside my notebook and locked inside my luggage in a guesthouse in Kuching. I did not trust my memory to remember strange Chinese names at all. But all of a sudden, the name of Sem Kiong floated in my mind like magic. He was the person I was supposed to track down the Sarawak village of Belaga (pronounced B'laga here) to get to the bottom of my story.
Now, I know, my memory is working, at last, as I begin to feel comfortable in the increasingly familiar Kuching surroundings!

Restless in Kuching

Barely 12 days before the end of the SEAPA journalism fellowship, the sun rising and setting below Kuching, I've been wrestling with my demons as I tried to befriend words to tell the story. What words? What stories?
In Kuala Lumpur, words escaped me as I grappled with the memories of strange sounds and strange phrases, rolling Masjid Jamek at the tip of my tongue as I inserted ringgits and pulled out cards at the Putra train station, only to lose the phrase just a few steps away, my mind playing tricks on me, rendering me helpless, powerless.
But in Kuching, a benign feeling stayed with me since the day I arrived on a cab driven by a Chinese Malaysian driver. As if there was a benign spirit blowing a warm wind to my face. The city had a charming and welcoming air.
I walked over the whole stretch of its cobbled waterfront to watch the river cruises in the distance or gawk at the white men who looked like the white rajahs of old. I liked to listen to Rudyard Kipling's accent spoken on the streets.
How could I write a story as complicated as Malaysia? How could I put this strange country on the palm of my hand?
The cab driver who brought me from the airport was a Chinese guy who scarcely spoke English but even his presence was rather comforting to a stranger like me. He took me straight to the acacia-shaded yard of the Anglican St. Thomas Guesthouse, a very cozy wooden building over a hundred years old, its floors made of ancient wood.
Elsie, the woman who showed me to my room was a Bidayuh who told me that the guesthouse where I was staying used to be a dormitory in 1950s and the 1960s for girls studying at the Anglican school nearby!
Built by Anglican missionaries in 1848, the whole place did not have the spookiness of Kuala Lumpor's Selesa Hotel where I stayed a few days before I arrived in Kuching. A half-opened door just across my room revealed the outlines of a Dutch woman agitatedly talking on her phone. On the dark, ancient stairs as I rushed out to go, were a couple of cheerful Black Americans to stay the night at the inn.
Kuching simply felt homey and warm. Here, you can walk the sidewalks and feel you've been living here all your life. Even the streets had no sharp bends! They flowed out so smoothly, as if those who built the roads really knew the balance of the yin and yang. Most of the shops that I've seen so far have Chinese characters. Lots of Chinese live in Kuching.
Just a walking distance from the Anglican Church, just across a Chinese temple, is the Medan Pelita building (which looks like a mall), which also houses a seven-eleven and an internet cafe!
The Anglican St. Thomas Inn sat close to everything in downtown Kuching. Room at the guesthouse was only 18 ringgits a day, a lot cheaper than the 80 ringgits I paid the YMCA hostel and that spooky Selesa in KL!
Elsie would have given me quite a big room fit for the whole family (with three beds) and a huge bathroom for only 30 ringgits but I declined because I'm just a very simple person with simple needs.
Besides, I was already missing my Sean and Karl and did not want to heighten the emptiness.