The man running backwards hasn’t seen me, so I clear my bike and myself off to the side. It’s only as I come back that way some minutes later, when I see him flailing his arms in another exercise, that I realise how old he may well be – even allowing for my Western/Asian age estimation factor, he’s probably 83-85, or possibly even older. He's not one of the Bollywood extras in the ChatGPT cartoon here, above. I wish it really was like this in my local park every morning, with Bollywood music as well!
I only learned to guess people’s ages here after my first year or eighteen months; I would’ve placed people at a good twenty years younger than they are; not the teens of course – they would then have minus numbers. Not that absurd things don’t happen in Malaysia.
It’s seven am on a weekday, and there are four or five different groups in session. There’s line-dancing, tai chi, qigong (two groups), yoga, plus individual practitioners of everything else. There’s a small group planting a tree or two.
There are pebble reflexology paths in all Selangor parks, it seems. There’s proper stretch and exercise equipment too – you don’t see that in all developed Western countries. If UK parks had these, they’d be vandalised in most neighbourhoods, including areas where visitors would tell me folks have nothing to complain about.
If UK parks had free electricity points for everyone, they’d be in hot demand, with queues of folks feuding over who was there first and how long they could charge their phones for. Long weekends would mean bass beats and parties through till late Sunday night, if not perpetually.
One modest local park personality is Swee Lee An – not her real name – who joins in with line dancing just as devotedly as she teaches tai chi to middle-aged women, mainly – with a massive smile. She can high-kick to heaven, and get down deep into lunges too. She’s the only one who can dip right down through the "Snake Creeps Down" move of tai chi (She Shen Xia Shi, 蛇身下势) and come up again holding grace in her fist, smiling. She’s in her early eighties.
I asked her one day, How is your health? She came straight back with: “I’m just as you see me.”
Talking to frequent park users, several drive in from outlying areas in the south of the Klang Valley. They’re consciously choosing a park that offers around 85% shade, as opposed to the shiny new ones whose trees are too young and too few to offer much respite. It's on these sorts of days, described locally as perfect – the sun firmly hidden behind the clouds – that I notice the occasional youngster circling the park’s perimeter with a parasol hoisted high. I don’t know why; do tell me if you know!
Parklife was also the title of the album by UK band Blur which sealed their success forever, and dried up Oasis temporarily too. I mention it mainly to drop a name here like a clanger, or a Klanger: Clive Brunskill, a school friend of mine, was the photographer whose greyhound-racing pic was picked for the cover of the iconic album. I prompted him for his first ever date! I digress.
& & & & &
Rereading Tim Liardet in a Tropical Climate: Intro
Asian people are, understandably, alienated from the natural environment far more even than I think Westerners are; there’s so much more to get sick and die from here, so much more to fear. For that reason, I imagine, none of my in-law’s generation, in their seventies now, can tell me the name of what I call the mango bird, the one in the Brasil football shirt.
I’m told by a British woman who has been living in Malaysia over forty years, that the mango bird is correctly known as the black-necked oriole, and that the electric blue/turquoise one is the white-throated kingfisher. If somebody could tell me why both of these birds are named for their throat and neck areas rather than their far larger, amazing bodies, I 'd be very interested to know.
One Malaysian friend told me my mid-twenties writing sojourn in the wilds of southern Spain’s Andalusia region – no toilet or electricity, no roads, water from a spring, wood stove at night – sounded like something worthy of writing about. Hmm – I can see why Asians would think so. It was quite unconventional and non-ambitious. I was there to write; I didn’t think it, in itself, would become the subject of some later writing; except I had read US Beat poet/novelist Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur in my teens, about his log cabin time at the Californian coast.
It was not only doable, but hugely enjoyable, entirely because of the kind Mediterranean climate – mostly warm, sometimes hot; never humid and clammy. It was much cooler – cold, even – late at night and early in the morning. Again, I think the main reason my sojourn is newsworthy in Malaysia is that Asians are necessarily alienated from their killer environments. Fear has a function.
The following poem is a sort of reply to London Huguenot poet Tim Liardet's piece, Re-Reading Lolita in a Tropical Climate, in case you were wondering at some of my allusions. Tim was my main poetry tutor for the Creative Writing MA and the degree at Bath Spa University, UK.
Re-reading Tim Liardet’s Poems in a Tropical Climate
The habitat mocks my alfresco penchant:
fire ants piercing page fifty-six
with the twisted scrawl of their Palatino;
mosquitoes munching at covers and calves
(even with my wife as decoy); park grounds
that swamp; and whatever rustles beneath.
Here nature is not your given friend
as on UK summer mornings; I’d give
it ten weeks to jungle over. We use
parasols and Panadol, a timer
for exposure, and cover up with creams
against killer insects. Death rates swell.
No wonder no-one here can name
my “mango birds” in their yellow Brasil shirts,
the sheeny ultramarine turquoise ones
or those upside-down umbrella trees.
There’s nothing sexy here for humans
save efficient muscles, quickened panting,
page-turning shrieks at the work of fire ants.
I like the following poem if I say so myself, but mainly because I love the one that inspired it (link below), as outlined in the poem's strapline. I may even put it in a forthcoming post where it would fit in again – wait and see – for the same reason. Who reads poems anyway? Us poets have to put our work in yer face when we can, I think, if only to burn the notion into the pop mindset, that poetry is much closer to hip-hop than it is to hopeless flowers and endless sunrises. It's not a poem because the author says so either, but that's another lengthy topic.
Contentedness
(A version of Raymond Carver’s Happiness)
So early, the sun hasn’t gripped.
I’m out for the morning walk with my mind
and its regular dull buzz.
I spot the two surviving kittens
and their mother, plus the mangy grandma cat
coming slowly down the alley.
They’re all short fur
of different colours. One’s a cream Burmese.
They are so contented
they aren’t making any sound, these kittens.
I think if I wasn’t here, they would twine
each other’s tails.
It’s earlier than tropical heat,
and they are doing this thing together.
They come on, in cat time.
The sky is taking on colour,
though the moon still rests lightly on the park.
Such brilliance that for this minute
plans and regrets, even truth
don’t come into this.
Contentedness. It comes on
with no push. And pads beyond, really,
any waking thoughts about it.
& & & & &
I flinch almost visibly when I hear the conjunction “So” used to start a conversation; here it is as an intensifier:
So Here
So here –
here in the staunching daylight of the KL forenoon,
too much even for mad dogs and white ghosts
when the sun’s full on; here in the standstill
strike of it, you thrive yourself outwards,
merge with unmentionable sun.
Squirrels squirrel forth,
churning it up, this undivided knowing –
tree and branch and the holding ground;
no preconceptions.
Just so here.
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