• • •
The Nantah grounds are built on a hilltop and resemble The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Yunnan Garden occupies 500 acres of rolling hills, the university’s various departments and administrative buildings dotted throughout the peaks and valleys. To get from the Literature Institute to the library by foot, the shortest way is to climb up Scholar Hill, behind the Politics building. But navigating this set of at least a hundred stone steps under the hot sun is exhausting, even with the corridor of trees shading you from sun and rain. Before I acquired a car, getting around the campus was exceedingly difficult, and I frequently found myself halfway up a slope out of breath, wishing I were as small as an ant. These creatures have the most astonishing intelligence, getting from one peak to another without having to trek as we do. They simply walk across the electric cables, treating them as a road; travelling between the dense trees, they use the leaves as a bridge to get from one to another, shortening their journey. One time, I went on holiday to Kota Tinggi with the head of the History Department, Gu Hongting, and his family. Our villas were built on a steep slope, and hefting our food and supplies from the car at the foot of the hill left me panting like an ox, covered in sweat. At breakfast the next day, Professor Gu pointed outside the window and smiled as he said, “See how much more capable they are.” A turmeric-yellow ant was using a cable outside as a bridge, ferrying a piece of food in its mouth as it went away from the waterfall, presumably having been hunting upstream.
• • •
In the two months I spent walking around Yunnan Garden, I noticed many ants, probably afraid of having to move, constructing their nests in the natural crevices of tree trunks, amongst the roots of parasitic ferns. These holes were safe and lasting, and wouldn’t be destroyed by rain. Many also used the leaves of bushes as their homes. I have observed that the turmeric-yellow ant likes to make its nest on the broad, thick leaves of wild coffee plants. They drag at least two leaves together, joining them with silken strands of adhesive. This way, rainwater won’t be able to enter and disturb their peaceful existence.
I bought a car in my third month on campus. Thereafter, I seldom walked around the grounds, slowly inspecting the miraculous natural world of plants and insects. Two years later, I bought a unit in a condominium seven or eight kilometres from the school. This, along with the fact that all the university buildings have become air-conditioned, has distanced me from the Yunnan Garden ants. They’ve more or less vanished from my life, leaving no trace.
• • •
When I moved into my new home at Parkview Apartments, even though I was on the sixth floor, ants still appeared occasionally. Then we bought a bottle of Panant ant poison, and in a short time all the ant tribes had been exterminated. Panant is a honey-like liquid. I’d dab two or three drops whenever I saw ant activity, and they’d soon organise a troop to come feed on it. The worker ants, having eaten their fill, would bring some back to the nest to share with their queen and other comrades. Twenty-four hours later, when the poison took effect, the entire colony would be killed. By the second day, even before all the Panant was gone, there’d be no trace left of the ants. Noting their absence, thinking how overjoyed they must have felt the day before to discover a new food source, I felt somewhat sad for them, even rebuking myself for being too cruel.
One afternoon at the end of the previous year, several thousand Yunnan Garden ants appeared in my home. One of Dan Ying’s colleagues was celebrating his baby’s first month, and had delivered some cakes to us. After he left, I opened the pink box, only to find both cake and container crawling with tiny red ants trying to escape. This colleague also lived in Yunnan Garden, and the cakes must have been in his house a while before making their way to us. It’s a shame he didn’t notice the ants infiltrating his gifts—and what if they’d made it into every box? What a shame that would have been.
• • •
In the middle of March this year, the black ants of Yunnan Garden—there must have been 10,000 of them—hitched a ride with me on a trip to Malaysia. Our first stop was Kuala Lumpur. After staying there a few days, we headed north, passing the adorable hill town of Bidor where we bought some Cantonese sweets—shaqima and chicken biscuits—tossing them into the back seat next to our luggage. When we arrived at the former tin-mining town of Kampar, we found our desserts covered with vast numbers of black ants. It was only after our trip that I found the nest they’d built in the car and killed them with insecticide. I’m convinced these ants must have come from one particular saga tree, just outside the school gates. I loved the shade of this tree and parked my car there whenever I could. Several times, I’d seen ants crawling along the tyres into the car, but hadn’t thought they were preparing to take up permanent residence. Perhaps they’d realised that living in the car would be more comfortable than their old life in a tree.
Last Sunday, at seven in the morning, Dan Ying was watering our plants when she noticed several thousand black ants in a pot of orchids in the living room, many of them bearing food and grubs—which meant they weren’t here to forage for food but to stay. By nine o’clock, the orchids had been placed in a drain, the better to allow the ants to leave the black charcoal that filled the pot. I looked up idly from time to time, noticing black clouds amassing above the Chinese garden outside. A little later, the rain started.
It’s Wednesday now; it’s been raining every morning for four days. The ants in the orchid pot must have been trying to escape that.
Mystic Rain
YESTERDAY WAS THE tenth of October. I woke to find autumn had entered my bedroom, transforming itself into a cool silk blanket gently covering my body. Since arriving in Taiwan, all summer I’ve dreamed about the air-conditioner falling silent, leaving only the stillness of fall.
I was born and grew up in Malaysia and Singapore, only 137 kilometres from the equator, a tropical region with a rainy, damp climate. Every evening, heat entered my bedroom, and I inevitably awoke bathed in sweat. This torture seemed unavoidable, a feature of living in the region.
When in Singapore, I yearn to wake each morning to the sound of rain. Summer lasts all year round on the equator, but a single shower turns the day to autumn—not the real thing; this is a heavy, wet sheet of humidity gluing itself to my body. Though uncomfortable, this is at least better than the scalding sun. At the end of 1922, a week before receiving his Nobel Prize, Einstein arrived in Singapore on a fundraising visit. He was extremely sensitive to the climate, and noticed in particular that a vigorous humidity attacked his body, leaving him struggling to breathe. I too have felt these assaults, whether indoors or outdoors. If a storm is brewing at bedtime, I lie there unable to sleep, pestered by the cloying heat.
I dislike the damp, but love the equator’s rainy season. It arrives faithfully between October and January, and the rain is precise in its timing too, as if it’s made an appointment to arrive at the same time for a week at a stretch—between six and seven every morning for some time, then switching to a daily shower at noon or 3pm. Tropical thunderstorms arrive without warning, but seldom last more than an hour. And after about 30 minutes, the heat is usually gone.
In Singapore and Malaysia, it sometimes rains when I am out without an umbrella. Standing beneath a roof overhang or in the street, waiting for the downpour to stop, is one of the most poetic moments in Nanyang. Watching the flurry of water drive out the heat before scurrying away itself, leaving the piercing green of rain trees, I continue hurrying along the busy road of life that has yet to end for me.
Marquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude has the South American season of rain—even more mystical than ours. The small post-colonial town of Macondo experiences a storm that lasts four years, eleven months and two days. When the sky finally clears, everyone’s face lights with a smile as if recovering from a long illness.
Mosquito Mystery
SINGAPORE HAS BEEN labelled a ‘Garden City’. From the Central Business District to the residential areas and even out in the jung
le areas, everything is controlled and organised. Yet this overemphasis on tidiness and order has led to Singaporeans being mocked for living in a giant hospital ward.
Recently, though, the Aedes mosquito has suddenly invaded Singapore, and the country has been under siege. Every day, the television and print media carry huge advertisements urging us to guard against these pests. Ninety per cent of the disease-carrying ones are Asian tiger mosquitoes, while the rest are of the Egyptian variety. Both are similar, with dark brown or black bodies and white stripes. The Aedes mosquito originated in tropical and sub-tropical regions across the world, later migrating to Hawaii, Southern Australia, Somalia and Madagascar. In the last few years, its territory has expanded to include Continental America, Mexico, Brazil and some European countries. In 1985, the Asian tiger mosquito was spotted in Texas, and subsequently in almost 30 other states in the US. This little creature is not only a carrier of dengue fever, but also many other insect-borne diseases; the poison it carries is mysterious, able to kill a person in a matter of days. Its appearance in the States caused a great deal of consternation, and it was termed the most serious infestation since World War II.
The behaviour of the Aedes mosquito is also mysterious. It can reproduce in small quantities of clean water, for instance in containers within the house, plant-pot holders or water that has accumulated in corners of the roof. The mosquito chooses the mornings and evenings to suck blood—but only the females do so. When biting, they drink their fill of blood before leaving—whereas the Egyptian variety is able to fly off as soon as their victim moves, proceeding to their next target. The Aedes mosquito absorbs germs when it sucks the blood of an unwell person with a transmittable disease—and when it goes on to feed on a healthy person, the germs will enter his or her body along with the mosquito’s saliva, resulting in a dengue fever infection, known in English as ‘break-bone fever’. The symptoms are simple: a high fever, untreatable by any medicine, potentially causing death within days.
In order to control the serious rate of infection, Singapore is constantly engaged in exercises of mosquito elimination. Environmental officers increased their inspections for breeding grounds from 55,000 sites per month in 2004, to 59,000 per month in 2005. And while they discovered 1,600 instances of mosquitoes reproducing in 2004, by the year after, the number had been reduced to 1,100. Yet it’s inexplicable why, if the number of mosquitoes has gone down, not only are infection rates up, but people are continuing to die.
Many countries have been invaded by the Aedes mosquito, from Asia to South America, and the situation during Taiwan’s summer is serious too. I feel like I’m hallucinating—the environment is getting cleaner all the time, yet there are more and more mosquitoes, and the more we eradicate them, the faster they infect us.
Can it really be that we have now polluted the planet so badly, that nature has seen fit to send a ‘super mosquito’ after us as a warning?
Return to the River of Fireflies
IN 2006, AT the start of the Chinese New Year holiday, I returned to the mangrove forests of Malaysia to see the fireflies once again, revisiting the primeval world of my childhood. This was in the countryside some distance from Kuala Lumpur, in the small town of Kampung Kuantan that never changes, lying sleepily beneath the sun all year long. The town sits at the mouth of the Kuala Selangor River, thick on both sides with berembang mangrove trees and the fireflies that depend upon them, providing a wondrous spectacle every night.
At the start of the 19th century, the British started to establish rubber plantations in this area. Normally they lived like hermits in their small bungalows deep within the jungle, working frantically, only emerging on weekends to forget their troubles in nearby small-town bars, at which they’d meet local women whom they brought back to live with them. As Joseph Conrad discovered, when white people left their ordered society, returning to the darkness of the primeval jungle, their morality crumbled easily—for white people’s barbarity was greater than their reason. Many cases of murder took place in the silence of these rubber plantations, providing material for Somerset Maugham’s stories.
Each time I’m in the small boat that’ll take me to see the fireflies, I think of the British people who left their homes so long ago. At night, as they returned from a bar or from hunting and fishing, lying drowsily in a sampan, the riverbanks growing steadily darker, did they notice the flickering lights of thousands of fireflies? Could their green glow, so ghostly and cold, make a man feel a sense of unreality, perhaps leading to him murdering a lover?
From the 1950s onwards, young people began to leave this area, and the fishermen and farmers too began to move to Kuala Lumpur for work. Then in 1970, environmentalists discovered that the riverbanks by this small town were an ideal habitat for fireflies. These lovers of nature, terrified of destroying this idyll, kept the place secret, not telling others what they’d found—so the small town became their paradise. It was only 10 years ago, when the government revealed plans to build a dam on the Kuala Selangor River, that they broke cover to voice their opposition. Since then, the tourism industry has opened up the area, and it is now beloved by visitors from all over the world.
It’s best to come here on cloudless, moonless nights. The fireflies flit amongst the mangroves, their glow particularly bright between eight and eleven o’clock. In the little boat, you feel you are on a silver river, sailing through dreams, the luminescence between the trees coming and going, your craft rocking with the water—the sensation of tumbling back into a legend, set at the very beginning of the rainforest’s life. No wonder this spot is so popular with tourists from all countries.
The cold light that illuminates the river is actually the product of passionate love. These tiny creatures, only six millimetres long, emit this green light from their bellies—the males brighter, flickering faster; the females less so. After eleven, the glow begins to fade as the fireflies, having attracted each other, begin to mate. Soon, the mangrove forest is filled with darkness again.
Back to the Bahs
I’VE ONLY RECENTLY noticed that the place I lived in as a child, Banir—attractively named ‘Ten Thousand Peaks’ in Chinese—has disappeared from the latest maps. In 1999, the Malaysian Tourism Board released The Map of Malaysia (published by Miller Freeman), to be distributed for free in hotels and airports throughout the country—and Banir was absent from it. The best-selling Periplus map of Malaysia can be found in bookstores throughout the world—and it, too, omits the beautiful name of Banir.
Banir does not, in fact, contain 10,000 peaks. It’s on the southern end of the mountain range that runs through Perak state, in a region of small hills, facing west, midway between Kampar and Tapah—three miles away from either. The major North-South trunk road and railway pass by Banir to the west and east respectively.
Before World War II, the British colonial government opened up the area for rubber planting on a vast scale. Banir became the Malayan colony in miniature, a model demonstrating that the colonial forces used not just military might, but sometimes cultural knowledge and sound management to maintain their hold on power.
• • •
Banir’s durian farms are known as bahs—from the Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka pronunciations, the confluence of many dialects being a part of life in the colonies. The best, flattest land in the centre belonged to, and was managed entirely by, a single British corporation. The plantations to the sides, uneven with rivers and hills, were carved into smaller units and sold to the Chinese. This was how my family came to own our two plots of land, which added up to less than 10 hectares. When all the land for planting rubber had been allocated, the remaining sections on the boundaries, neither big nor small, were turned over to the planting of tropical fruits such as durians, rambutans, mangosteens, jackfruit, cempedak and so on, and sold to Malay-run businesses. And in the large British-run rubber plantations, most of the workers were Indian. This arrangement demonstrated how the colonial government saw the various communities of Malaya: the
European businessmen with both capital and the latest technology, thereby fit to manage the biggest plantations, represented Western authority and received special treatment and advantages; the Chinese, hardworking and self-sufficient, would surely produce much rubber from the small-holdings allocated to them; the Malays, nature-loving and easily satisfied, were temperamentally suited to cultivating orchards; and the South Indian immigrants, traditionally the able helpers of the British colonialists, could be depended on to carry out the work of increasing rubber production.
The British who dominated Singapore and Malaysia not only understood the people they ruled, but had also thoroughly analysed the local flora. In 1929, Lao She spent the spring writing his novel Er Ma in London, and in the autumn came to Singapore to teach at the Chinese High School. In the novel, Ma Wei goes to the Kew Gardens and is surprised to see many plants from the East:
“Imperialism consists not only of taking other people’s land, but also of reducing their countries, appropriating what belongs to those countries and analysing it. Animals, plants, geography, language, customs—each has to be carefully studied. This is the strength of imperialism.”
From which we can see how well Lao She understood the nature of colonialism. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Europeans placed a great deal of importance on the study of nature, making it a key element of their education system. For the British, intent on increasing their dominion in all directions, knowledge was power, and wealth. The experimental planting of rubber seeds in the Singapore Botanic Gardens brought the empire huge returns. And the various officials sent here competed to analyse the history and environment of the region. The best examples are the mighty Stamford Raffles and William Farquhar, who first claimed Singapore for the British. When Farquhar was Resident of Malacca from 1803 to 1818, he studied the natural world of the tropics, and hired local Chinese artists to illustrate all the plant and animal species in the region around Malacca. When he returned to England in 1827, he brought the pictures with him and bestowed them to the Royal Asiatic Society for safekeeping. In 1994, a Singaporean named G. K. Goh bought them for three million Singapore dollars. They have since been donated to the National Museum of Singapore, and are on display in one of the history galleries. There are 477 drawings, from red bananas, jambu fruit and white ginger lilies to the milu deer. Raffles also commissioned paintings of Singaporean flora and fauna, but unfortunately on his return journey in 1824, his boat caught fire and most of them were destroyed. Because he pioneered the study of Southeast Asian plants and animals in the 19th century, when we talk about the natural world even today, we often use the colonial terms. The pitcher plant, for instance, was originally named ‘Raffles’ pitcher’, and Southeast Asia’s biggest flower, the corpse flower—bunga patma in Bahasa Indonesia—is known in Europe as the rafflesia. Even the lucrative rubber plantations carved out space for durian planting, demonstrating that the durian too had been colonised. So I call these the post-colonial durian orchards.
Durians Are Not the Only Fruit Page 15
