Durians Are Not the Only Fruit
Page 1
Copyright © 1981, 2003, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 by Wong Yoon Wah
Translation and translator’s note copyright © 2013 by Jeremy Tiang
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Edwin Thumboo
All rights reserved. Published in Singapore by Epigram Books.
www.epigrambooks.sg
All essays originally published in Chongfanji by Xindi Wenhua, Taiwan, 2010, except: ‘Smelly Beans and Question Marks’ originally published in Shanhailian by Eryu Wenhua, Taiwan, 2013; ‘Nyonya Dumplings for Qu Yuan’ originally published in Yinshi wenxuan by Eryu Wenhua, Taiwan, 2013; ‘Thunder in a Bowl’ originally published in Fanwan zhong de leisheng by Eryu Wenhua, Taiwan, 2011; ‘Mystic Fish’ originally published in Weijue de tufengwu by Eryu Wenhua, Taiwan, 2009; ‘The Pettiest Tree’ and ‘The Queen and the Concubine’ originally published in Liulian ziwei by Eryu Wenhua, Taiwan, 2003; ‘Banishing Homesickness with Nanyang Curry’, ‘Daily-Bleeding Rubber Trees’, ‘Cathedrals of the Tropics’, ‘Cast from Paradise’, ‘Feed at the Raffles’, ‘The Oldest Rubber Tree’, ‘Our Green Heritage’ and ‘The Ants of Yunnan Garden’ originally published in Nanyang xiangtu ji by Shibao Chubangongsi, Taiwan, 1981
Cover illustration © 2013 by Cheng Puay Koon
Cover design by Beh Kay Yi
Consulting Editor: Chua Chee Lay
Published with the support of
National Library Board, Singapore
Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
Wong, Yoon-wah. Durians are not the only fruit : notes from the tropics / Wong Yoon Wah ; translated by Jeremy Tiang. – Singapore : Epigram Books, 2013.
pages cm. – (Cultural Medallion series)
ISBN : 978-981-07-6670-2 (paperback)
ISBN : 978-981-07-6671-9 (ebook)
1. Natural history – Malaysia – Malaya. 2. Natural history – Singapore.
I. Title. II. Series: Cultural Medallion series.
PN6222
S824 -- dc23 OCN856031401
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Introduction
I
THE ESSAY TODAY is a thriving, popular prose1 vehicle for treating every conceivable subject for every conceivable reason. They are anywhere from 500 to 10,000 words long, popping up in all manner of media having space for texts.
The need to tell is inherent, primal. As necessity always primes invention, essays grew where and when there was writing, then more rapidly, at times exponentially, with print and other ways of dissemination, a means to many ends. Chiefly because of versatility in multiplying roles and dextrous re-positioning, they responded across the ebb and tide of history, more amply and sharply than any other genre, serving the new, widening demands of nation, community and individual. Their presence is international, even customary. Board virtually any international flight. They accompany you in the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune. Add The Straits Times if you take Singapore Airlines. Its Opinion and Saturday sections of 2 August 2013 carry, inter alia: ‘Taking the community seriously’, ‘Separate inequality, opportunity issue’, ‘Singaporeans at work’, ‘How important is a university degree?’, ‘Al-Qaeda, Taliban jailbreaks a sign of renewed strength’, ‘Rise of civil activists in China’, ‘There’s no value or merit in unpaid work’, ‘My other self’ (loneliness and angst), and ‘City of wonder, then and still’ (New York). Written by politicians, CEOs, academics and journalists from the world over, they include reprints from leading international papers. These form the bulk of essays today, and continue to entertain and instruct as their predecessors did. ‘Inequality and “conscience laundering”’ (1 August 2013) by Peter Buffett, son of Warren, the American billionaire-investor and philanthropist, left me with two noteworthy phrases: ‘Philanthropic colonialism’, a modifying reminder, and ‘conscience laundering’, a wedge opening doors to high seriousness, to what triggers off our actions, thus strengthening the implicit invitation to read and ponder.
We are familiar with the essay, having written our quota in English through school and university, later tapping that experience to compose reports and submissions. We grow through complex, escalating tasks, moving from the simple and directed to the free-flowing, sporadically adventurous, and the occasionally irreverent, masticating and digesting. We take elements of structure and style to essay new, even strange subjects to domesticate and make them more usual, accustomed.
Unlike China, the essay in England is not indigenous. Literacy spread. National languages expanded in Europe to meet developments unleashed by the Renaissance, rivalry among nations, religious conflict and irredentist energies. Knowledge is power. The Greek and Latin classics, from philosophy to medicine, got translated into these languages. The classics were joined by contemporary works, especially those in the sciences. English grew. It was also boosted by the great faith, spirit and daring of those who risked their lives translating the Bible into what was then early modern English, enriching it while opening the way for secular subjects and themes. But it was secular energies that pushed developments. While subjects were frequently borrowed, that mattered little as the treatment was fresh and the style often rich and distinctive. In Francis Bacon for instance, it ranged from the plain and direct to the terse and epigrammatic, often producing memorable turns of phrase. As the essay was part of the interlacing intellectual network emerging in Europe through shared institutions such as Christianity with the phenomena of the literary phrase ‘the mind of Europe’2, it is not surprising that Bacon’s Essays were translated into French and Italian in his lifetime. An emergent England was essaying back.
While at university in the early 50s, we read Bacon’s Essays, and those of Addison and Steele—co-founders of The Spectator—Johnson, De Quincey and Hazlitt. Tudor England was the early push factor. Later it was a rising middle class, the increasing urbanisation of 18th and 19th century London, the Industrial Revolution, the new sense of Europe, the Americas, and the further world that came with colonial expansion. They fuelled demand for neatly packaged accounts of their life and contacts. They included curiosity in the strange, the odd, the arcane, from the behaviour of exotic birds to opium hallucination. That opened up an infinity of subjects which multiplied further when the newly independent former colonies adopted English extensively. This broadened the essay base by adding a large number of writers belonging to World Englishes. While it led to a noticeable loosening of focus and organisation down the cline, the quantity, variety and quality of the essay in English is stronger than ever. The world is its oyster, yielding many white, pink and black pearls. Any anthologist would have a hard time sifting through the embarrassment of riches to make a selection, even if he had three thick volumes at his disposal.
That would also require systematic arrangement, as the essays are a microcosm of their literary and larger world. They mark off various themes and histories and what elaborates identity. That is hardly surprising as great civilisations have a special genius for classification and systematic self-appraisal and creating spheres of serious, durable influence: Akkad, Egypt, China, India, Greece, Israel, Rome, early Mexico and Peru. And the great religions or moral systems—Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism—especially when they harness or enjoy the support of kingly, secular authority, or incorporate a militant spirit as in Judaism and Islam in different times and places, consolidate a double strength. Control and influence, as well as direct occupation—often more potent for being soft power and harder to obstruct—through writing, religious, philosophical, social and other systems, ideas and organisational structures, material culture, art. Thus arise spheres of influence, South Asia and East Asia formed by India and China respectively.
The geography of the
Chinese-language commonwealth is far smaller than the global grip of Englishes. It is not only native, but emerged almost 2,500 years ago in what is the world’s oldest, longest, unbroken literary tradition. Generated entirely from the qi of her cultural matrix, in the Spring and Autumn (770–476 BC) and the Warring States (475–221 BC) periods, its subjects ranged from war, conquests and contentious politics, competing ideologies and philosophies, to shifts in values and other changes. These required far more space than poetry could comfortably afford to defend a position or develop an argument with strong, convincing detail. Prose had the space, directness and pace, yet had scope for the poetic phrase, allusion and sharp, epigrammatic punch, that made it a genre for all seasons. In Charles A. Laughlin’s review of The Chinese Essay, he says that:
“…the larger cultural themes for which the Chinese essay served as the principal vessel, and which through the essay traditional and modern writing are linked—the cultivation of the art of living, the struggle between transcendent and worldly values, or the contrarian resistance to ‘political correctness’ of every imaginable kind?… memorials to the emperor, philosophical treatises, formal and informal correspondence, prefaces and colophons, travelogues, epitaphs, biographies, etc.”
Despite their polemics and didactic drift, essayists—especially poet-scholars—sought the highest literary quality. Style gave them that edge, that special power, durability and persuasiveness through elements that included imagery, metaphor, symbol, allusion, allegory, without jeopardising argument and logic. The strength of poetry inserted into prose. Consequently, they were a source of proverbs, of neat, memorable phrases, some of which were adopted as mottoes.
The Tang Period saw notable developments mainly through Han Yu with his Mao Ying Zhuan (Mr Brush Tip), Liu Zongyuan with his animal parables, and landscape essay as an art form.3 With six others from the Song Dynasty, Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan were the Eight Masters of the Chinese essay. Their work was an intrinsic part of Chinese education. In Malaysia, Wong Yoon Wah went through what is still the best Chinese education offered outside the Chinese heartland. He then studied Chinese in Taiwan and followed that with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin. His essays belong to this long tradition. The vision behind them is undoubtedly Chinese in origin and trust. While there is this overarching singularity, there are noteworthy differences that do not ultimately undermine its wholeness. The Chinese are to be found all over the world but significant communities relative to the size of the body politic of which they are part are predominantly confined to Southeast Asia.4 They arrived in various parts of the region early and contributed principally to their economic development, especially under Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch and French colonial rule. There are Chinatowns in almost every major city in the world, where they add glamour and variety, especially gastronomically. They prosper, some exceedingly, but do not formally constitute a political or social force as they do in Southeast Asia. They are in Malaysia, where transactions of adaptation carry valuable insights.
II
Wong starts from the fact that with the arrival of a foreign culture—almost always colonial—a two-culture system is created. When immigrants arrive, that system becomes:
“…multi-cultural. Looking at the foods devised locally, from yusheng and Hainanese chicken rice to Nyonya kueh, their preparation methods put one in mind of the construction of local Chinese literature, in that both face a particular challenge: whether a type of food or a literary work, the creation must contain a local flavour, whilst incorporating the original traditions of China.” (58 – 59)
This connection between food and literature is enlarged by linking them to the physical environment, and daily life in a British colony whose politics involved armed conflict and so on. A sense of life and its challenges in such circumstances can be gleaned from Wong’s The New Village: Chinese Poems (Ethos Books, 2012). The vision driving The New Village and Durians Are Not the Only Fruit is indubitably Chinese, a necessary reminder as there are writers with impeccable Chinese names, yet who are relatively deracinated as they know only English. Moreover, while there is this overarching Chinese singularity, significant differences evolved among and between those who settled in Nanyang. These differences did not undermine their basic identity. Instead they added to this ultimate Chinese wholeness. First among these is the desire—and need—to adapt, especially if it is to a multi-ethnic body politic. Multiplicity engenders cultural and identity permutations, and various other processes. Of these at least two are major and overarching. And there is a third, if there is a preexisting community of compatriots. Despite a common inheritance and shared core values—which they, especially the older generation, do all possible to retain—variations blossom. As Wong reiterates:
“There is a huge gap between the culture and political situation of the Singaporean Chinese and Thai Chinese, and even though a Singaporean Chinese and Chinese American both speak English, their world views will be very different… The Chinese will never be able to make themselves non-Chinese, their Chineseness will always be present in some form…The first time Singaporean or Malaysian Chinese visit China, they’re always startled to realise how different they are from the Mainlanders.” (43 – 44)
Adaptation required coming to terms with the physical environment, which is the external context of whatever active legacy that needed transplanting. As visitors, the Chinese first saw the flora, and as uncommitted outsiders, it is the settlers who come to terms with what is new and often strange, to better live with it. Wong uses the durian, central in the life of the region, as a major icon to make the point. Chinese fascination with the fruit started with Zheng He’s voyages, the last of which was between 1430–33.
“Throughout the various countries of Southeast Asia, the durian is considered the king of fruits. It appears frequently in books of the Ming and Qing dynasties such as Ma Huan’s The Overall Survey of the Ocean’s Shores, Ong Tae Hae’s account of the Malayan archipelago, Huang Zunxian’s Within the Human Realm. Ma Huan called it ‘a smelly fruit of the first rank’.” (3)
Unquestionably “smelly”, yet a “fruit of the first rank”, revealing a propensity for hierarchy. That reaction is not unusual: love it or hate it. The Chinese were here well before the May Fourth Movement (1915–21). Often called the New Culture Movement, it led to a loosening of classical stylistic shackles. There was a greater openness to direct experience and observation that suited settler needs, leading to:
“Durian Poems edited by Tang Chengqing, Pan Shou’s eponymous collection, Wu An’s Ode to the Durian, or my collection The Rubber Tree. And also in novels and essays, including Zhou Can’s Under the Durian Tree, Bi Cheng’s The Final Durian, Yongle Duosi’s Yongle’s Scribblings, or my A Walk Amongst Autumn Leaves. Idly leafing through these books, you’ll find plenty of legends about durians.” (3)
Wong continues his walk and talk, this time down memory lane, leading to Durians Are Not the Only Fruit, as it led to The New Village, whose first four sections of six are ‘The myth of the tropical rainforest’, ‘Memories of the Malay kampong’, ‘Impressions of the New Village’ and ‘New Village after curfew’. Both volumes obviously cover the same deeply rooted experiences and themes. They correlate and comment on each other. Being co-extensive, they devote much space to nature, commensurate to its importance in Wong’s growth. Moreover, between them, the poems record his passage to manhood, through an examination of his relationship with the forces that shaped, advanced and at times retarded the society and its people in the future Malaysia. In this sense, it is his autobiography and simultaneously, the biography of his country.
Nature is essential learning. Living closely with her and observing her rich variety to unlock her discourse enabled him—as it has for some of us—to digest his green environment, skimming its profound, life-long lessons. Add narratives—historical, scientific etc.—and you accumulate, deepen, consolidate and kept active an ever expanding store of Wong’s insights. Nature unlocks through our fi
ve senses, and shapes the doors of perception. We recall the words of William Wordsworth:
“Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear:”
(The Prelude, Book 1, lines 301 – 302)
and through them, arrive at the acute and decisive understanding that:
“There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue…”
(The Prelude, Book 12, lines 208 – 210)
These “spots” formed at crucial moments of our lives are healing markers that re-energise without diminishing their capacity. They are occasionally renewed by a rainbow, “an untrodden way”, or a “crowd of golden daffodils”. This link is immemorial, open to all who drink, breathe, embrace and are embraced by her, creating our own “spots”.5
But even in Wordsworth’s day threats loomed:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
(The World Is Too Much with Us, lines 1 – 4)
Striving for the Nation to be strong and stable, and to prosper national principles has not changed since circa 1802, when the sonnet from which the third quote of Wordworth’s is taken was composed. But some key institutions have lost authority as societies increasingly secularised. Chief among them is religion, the one check to the consequences of rampant materialism. In its most extreme form ‘Nature as nurture’ metamorphoses into ‘Nature as cash’. That meant ever efficient means of exploitation. She has been invaded, ravaged, cut down, dug, levelled, blown open, destroyed, despite a growing movement to save her, to help redress the over-emphasis on the bottom line mentality. The resulting mind-set takes over and re-calibrates virtually every aspect of life and expectations.