Stories of Southeast Asia

April 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 dont 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. Its 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 hed get tired of her, the other woman.

She joined a womans 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 its 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 its 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 lifes 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 birthrightan 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 husbands poor family to feed. Though poverty worn her out she pushed herself harder. Both stories depict the realism of Southeast Asian womens 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 ones 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. Thats why we hear, I live for my family, Ill do everything for my family, Ill kill for my family, etcWere 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 its 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 Thuongs story that her intelligence and beauty didnt seem to do much to cover her lameness so she was sent home and did needlework instead. Through her brothers 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 shes 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 hearts 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 arent as charming as their faces. A persons appearance doesnt 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 thats 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 whos 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. Theres 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 rainjumping 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."

Saturdjis 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 Hes Not My Father by Nu Nu Yi, poverty, labor and misery is so pungent that it pulled me away from Rains 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 workhes never come back.

Unlike the other female-staring stories in this paper, Id like to turn to the male situation in Hes 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 (thats all the same everywhere) but also how 50 plus years of ongoing rebellion continuously rip off families just like in the story. Shrimps 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, Hes 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. Its 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 Ayeshas Rain itll 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 thats 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 Myints 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 fathers 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 governments harsh censorship that I think the author successfully got across. Others interpret this as the new governments (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 fathers 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 dont have to be a Burmese reader to be able to relate to it because its happening here in our country, too (with only a few leads)! As much as possible, I dont like to talk about politics here because I feel like negotiating for a lost cause but yeah this is so Philippines. Id 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 Does giving his Pops old wagon a lick of paint!

The Burmese villages 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 theyre 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 thats what banned change, development and maturity in their countrys 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 dont 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. Cu c s ng v n ti p.

References: y 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=%22sutard ji+calzoum+bachri%22&lr=lang_en&as_brr=3&cd=2#v=onepage&q=%22sutardj i%20calzoum%20bachri%22&f=false y www.ibiblio.org/obl/docs/INKED-OVER.doc