TRASH
A SOUTHEAST ASIAN URBAN ANTHOLOGY
Edited by
Dean Francis Alfar & Marc de Faoite
TRASH is part of a threesome of Southeast Asian urban anthologies. The other two are called FLESH and HEAT. We chose to interpret ‘urban’ as a state of mind rather than population count or infrastructural development, so a few of these stories and essays take place in very remote places indeed. But they shake it up, they twist and shout, they wanna show you what it’s all about.
TRASH: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology
© Fixi Novo 2016
Editors: Dean Francis Alfar & Marc de Faoite
Copyright of each story is © its respective writer.
Cover artwork by: instagram.com/moribayu
(Based on an idea by Angeline Woon)
All rights reserved. Except for extracts for review purposes, you are not allowed to duplicate or republish this book, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher. Although to be honest the idea of pirated books is kinda cool and we’d secretly take it as a compliment.
ISBN 978-967-0954-41-7
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PUBLICATION CREDITS
“Mrs. Chandra's War Against Dust” was first published in New Village 4 (Malaysia, September 2013).
“The Hunger Houses” first appeared in the Multiethnic issue of the web magazine Innsmouth Free Press on 1 June 2010.
“Baby’s Breath” was first published in A Rainbow Feast: New Asian Short Stories (Marshall Cavendish, Kuala Lumpur, 2010).
“How to Make White People Happy” was first published in The Los Angeles Review, Issue 8 (USA, 2010) and nominated for the Pushcart Nonfiction Prize.
“Flowers for KK” was first published in KL Noir: White edited by Amir Hafizi (Fixi Novo, Malaysia, 2013).
CONTENTS
Intro
Mrs. Chandra’s War Against Dust / Zedeck Siew
The Hunger Houses / Raymond G. Falgui
Trash Talk / Lyana Shah
Baby’s Breath / Dipika Mukherjee
How To Make White People Happy / Timothy L. Marsh
Crush / Richard Calayeg Cornelio
And The Heavens Your Canopy / Ted Mahsun
Higher / Eliza Vitri Handayani
For Your Merry Days are Over / Michael Aaron Gomez
Bleeding Trash / Tilon Sagulu
Blogcaster / Alexander Marcos Osias
Auto-Rejection: An Outro / Nin Harris
life/after / Francis Paolo Quina
Flowers for KK / M. SHANmughalingam
Panopticon / Victor Fernando R. Ocampo
Bios
INTRO
DEAN FRANCIS ALFAR:
Writers from all over South East Asia responded to the call for submissions for this anthology with stories inspired by or about trash. Co-editor Marc de Faoite and I had the happy task of reading each story and seeing for ourselves how authors from diverse cultures and backgrounds interpreted the challenge.
For a few, trash was just trash: refuse and rubbish were prominent in their stories, the discarded remnants of the used and unwanted spun into the lives of their characters.
For others, trash was a representation of excess, a signifier for environmental despoilment, the very picture of poverty. Trash littered streets filled with violence brought about by imbalance of wealth and nature.
Some told stories of wasted lives and used-up opportunities, of tainted relationships or obsolete modes of thinking best thrown away, and of social or cultural pollution.
Some spun trash in a positive way, recognizing the worth in the worthless, and seeing second chances in the castoffs of other people.
We read and selected those that impressed us the most, those stories that elevated discourse or resonated the most or made us think or simply blew us away.
In each of the stories between these covers, there is a definite sense of place and a powerful point of view.
Local color abounds in the setting of many of these stories, situating and contextualizing the narrratives and thus becoming an integral part of what makes them work so well.
English is the main language platform but the names, idioms and turns of phrase are reflective of cultures where it is not the primary language – where it fails, local languages step forward with confidence.
With contributors from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Indonesia, and India, we are happy to present an anthology that showcases varied perspectives and insights on the nature of trash.
Read and enjoy.
— Manila, March 2016
MARC DE FAOITE:
As a child, the weekly visit from the growling garbage truck held a particular fascination for me, but the bin men were an unruly lot and never put the lids back on the rubbish bins – apparently a source of some irritation to my mother. While other boys my age wanted to be astronauts or firemen I aspired to a career in trash collection, and confided in my mother that I would assiduously replace the lid of every rubbish bin I emptied.
That particular career plan never panned out. Yet forty years later I found myself submerged in ‘trash’ – in this case some hundred and twenty stories from throughout South East Asia and beyond, submitted for this collection. As the reader will soon discover, there were gems to be found among this ’trash’, most of which shone on their own, and a few that needed just a little polishing.
Together with co-editor Dean Francis Alfar we tried as much as possible to respect the integrity of the stories, allowing the writers their own voices, rather than forcing them into homogenized enunciations that would please devotees of Messrs. Strunk & White. The voices in this collection are colorful, with some of the writers bravely working through the filter of a second language. Even those that aren’t are still influenced (to a greater or lesser degree) by the inflections and accents of the different languages spoken in their respective lands – for example in Zedeck Siew’s “Mrs. Chandra’s War Against Dust”, there is a deliberate effort to replicate the colloquial English used by sections of Malaysia’s ethnic Indians. To add further authentic local spice and flavor, as per Fixi Novo’s mission statement, colloquialisms and phrases in South East Asian languages have neither been italicized or translated.
The stories included vary in style and theme, but one that I will single out here for attention is Victor Fernando R. Ocampo’s “Pantopticon”, and in particular his use of Spivak pronouns. The reader may already be familiar with Spivak pronouns, but even though they have been around since the mid-1970s (about the same time I was planning a career in garbage collection) I had never encountered them before, and at first mistakenly attributed the “e, eir, em” formulations in Victor’s story to a faulty keyboard.
“I wanted to force the reader to come to terms with the microaggressions of their own gender marking preferences,” said Victor during one of our conversations on the subject.
This sensitivity to gender issues – and subjects more political and personal, pursued by other writers in this collection – captures the zeitgeist of the rapidly changing societies and communities of South East Asia. These writers have sorted through the ‘trash’ and found things that can be valued as still useful, things that deserve to be salvaged, and recycled, or reused, but they also point unflinchingly at structures, strictures, and modes of thought that have clearly served their time and must be discarded and thrown out on the rubbish heap. Enjoy.
— Langkawi, March 2016
MRS. CHANDRA’S WAR AGAINST DUST
ZEDECK SIEW
Down on her knees, Mrs. Chandra squeezes her left eye shut and presses her cheek to the floor.
The marble is covered in tiny particles. She wipes it with a finger, and her finger comes away
smudged with a line of gray and black.
“Dusty, so dusty!” Mrs. Chandra says. “And I just swept and mopped yesterday!”
It is always extra dusty, nowadays. Because of the construction work: down the hill, on the main road there. They tore down all the shophouses – where Tan Brothers and her favorite sundry shop used to be – and now they are building a supermarket.
The front door opens. Mrs. Chandra looks up and sees Mr. Chandra wander in, absorbed in his morning paper. His sandals are still strapped to his feet.
She chases him out the door with a broom.
×××
Down on her knees, Mrs. Chandra presses her cheek to the floor and squeezes her right eye shut.
The marble is covered in dust. She wipes it with a hand, and her palm comes away smudged with a line of black and gray.
“So dusty!” she says, getting up. “And this morning I just swept and mopped!”
The front door opens. Mrs. Chandra looks up and sees Mr. Chandra wander in, shoes still on his feet.
“Ya, you know how it is,” he is saying. “Darling, we’re home! Oh.”
So now Mr. Chandra has his arms up, as if he is trying to be friends with a tiger.
“Sorry, darling, sorry,” he says. He backs away, out the door again – and he bumps into the smiling young man behind him.
“Hi, Mom!”
It is Mrs. Chandra’s son. He has a girl with him: a Chinese girl, in long sleeves and a knee-length skirt.
“This is Sandy,” Mrs. Chandra’s son says.
“Hello, Auntie,” the girl says.
“Hello, hello!” Mrs. Chandra says. “So nice, finally I get to meet you! Always Abhi is talking about you. Aiyo, such a pretty girl.”
She puts a hand on the girl’s cheek; the girl blushes. “Come in, come in,” Mrs. Chandra says. “Sorry the floor is so dusty, why is because this uncle here always likes to wear his shoes into the house.”
“I said sorry, isn’t it?” Mr. Chandra says.
She’d cooked mutton curry and spicy potatoes, her son’s favorites. As she clears the plates, she hears him pester Mr. Chandra to get one of those new smartphone things.
Her son is saying: “Look, look at this thing. It is a very useful thing! It looks at which roads are jammed, then it lets you know the fastest way to take. I use it every day coming back from work. And then: look, look at this thing. With this one, if you hear a song and you want to know what song it is, you turn this thing on, and you put it to the radio, and in a few seconds—”
“I don’t need a new phone,” Mr. Chandra says. “All these new things, you know they’re not for me.”
“As you can see, my parents are dinosaurs,” her son says. His girlfriend giggles.
“As it is, having one phone is bad enough,” Mr. Chandra says. “Last time all my friend’s numbers I had memorized. Then I got this phone. Now, one number also I cannot remember!”
Her son says: “That’s what your contact list is for, isn’t it?”
Mr. Chandra says: “That! That’s my point! You let your phone remember everything for you, do everything for you – when you don’t have a phone, then how? Helpless!”
×××
“One hundred times already I’ve said,” Mr. Chandra says. “I don’t need a new phone. These new things, you know they are not for me.”
“You are such a dinosaur, Uncle!” her son’s girlfriend says.
She is a white girl, her son’s girlfriend. She wears a sleeveless blouse, and a pair of shorts – too short, so high up the thigh! And she has a big tattoo of a naked lady on her right shoulder, top to elbow. Even though it only shows the naked lady’s back, still it’s not decent.
Why does her son bring home girls like this?
Mrs. Chandra says: “Abhi, come help me with the dessert, please?”
Her son slouches into her kitchen. He is not smiling. He knows what helping her with the dessert means.
Through the door, at the dinner table, Mr. Chandra is saying: “You let your phone remember everything, do everything, but when you don’t have a phone, how then? You’ll be helpless. Like a chicken, no head!”
Her son’s girlfriend laughs, “Ha-ha-ha!”
“What do you want, Mom?” her son says.
“I don’t like her,” Mrs. Chandra says. “What happened to the other one? The Chinese one. What was her name? I liked that one. She was very nice, I thought. Maybe nicer than this one, even. What was her name?”
“Sandy.”
“Ya, Sandy, that one! Decent girl. This one, she has such a big tattoo. I know you young people like this kind of thing, but don’t you think it is a bit shameful?”
“Okay, Mom,” her son says. He is not smiling. He is not even looking at her now.
He turns around and leaves her in her kitchen. Outside he tells Mr. Chandra: “Dad, it’s getting late actually, we’re going to make a move.”
“Oh baby, but we can stay,” her son’s white girlfriend says. “Your father is so funny!”
“She’s humoring me.”
“Uncle, I am totally not!” the girl says, touching his shoulder. “Ha-ha-ha!”
But in twenty minutes they are going. Her son and his girlfriend are hand-in-hand and they say goodnight to Mr. Chandra – but her son ignores her. Mrs. Chandra is confused. Why did her son suddenly get angry? She was giving him gentle, mother-to-son advice only.
“I was giving him advice only,” Mrs. Chandra says.
“Again you brought up the Sandy girl?” Mr. Chandra says, slamming the table. “Of course he got upset! What for did you go and do that, woman?”
Mrs. Chandra looks at him, afraid of his sudden outburst.
“What? Why you looking at me like that?” Mr. Chandra says. “You should know what you did wrong, isn’t it? What, you mean to say – what? You don’t remember what happened?”
×××
“Mom, you really don’t remember what happened?” her son asks her. “Are you serious?”
“Your Amma, she is going senile,” Mr. Chandra says. “Again I tell her about it, again she forgets. Own son’s business also cannot keep track.”
“Not my fault, isn’t it?” Mrs. Chandra says. “Who asked Abhi to have so many girlfriends?”
It is years ago now. Her son’s Chinese girlfriend – Mrs. Chandra’s favorite, the one she thought the most suitable – she turned out not to be that suitable, after all.
She was a bad girl. She was Abhi’s girlfriend, but at the same time she had other boyfriends also. And then Abhi found out. He was so heartbroken he came back to live with his parents, for two weeks.
“For two weeks he didn’t come out of his room!” Mr. Chandra says. “Just stayed in there, reading his old books. You were so worried! Every day you were knocking, knocking on his door: Abhi, want to talk? Are you okay? Come out, tell Amma what happened. Every day!”
“You wouldn’t stop nagging me,” her son says. He puts his arm around her, smiling; he kisses her on the cheek.
“Mom,” he says. “You really can’t remember? It might be serious. Seriously. You should go for check-up.”
Mrs. Chandra says: “Aiyo, don’t need to worry, I’m old. Being old is like this.”
Though she is so very, very forgetful nowadays.
The usual thing is forgetting where she put her reading spectacles. And sometimes she mistakes weekends for weekdays. Sometimes she mistakes which days are days to go to temple.
Mrs. Chandra is reluctant to go to temple, nowadays. She worries. What if she goes, but she can’t remember the names of people there? How to show her face, like that?
One morning she wanted to call Mr. Chandra, to remind him to buy soy sauce from the supermarket – but then she realized she didn’t know his phone number; she couldn’t remember it.
When Mr. Chandra got back to the house, he found his wife staring at the keypad of their telephone, on its stand by her dresser, crying quietly.
He put his arm around her and he kissed her.
“Darling, don’t worry darling,” he said. “It’s not a big thing. I’ll get you a phone, and done! Problem solved! No need to memorize numbers anymore; the phone does it for you. It can remember everything for you!”
×××
In the morning Mrs. Chandra finds that they are out of soy sauce, and she wants to ask Mr. Chandra to buy a new bottle from Tan Brothers – but then she realizes she can’t remember where she’s put her phone.
She turns the house upside down looking for it.
Why is it so bad, her memory? How can it be? She is just sixty-plus.
Mr. Chandra’s birthday: 27 June. Every two days he goes to the coffee shop to meet Dr. Rama and Mr. Netto, his cronies. The sports he follows in the newspaper: football, hockey, and – and one more? What is it?
Her son’s favorite dishes: mutton curry, spiced potatoes. Her son’s fiancée: they’ve been engaged for over a year already, and soon he will be getting married. Mrs. Chandra is happy about this. The girl, she is a good girl.
What is her name? Sandy?
Mrs. Chandra feels a little jealous of her son’s fiancée. The young couple, they are young people: they get to do what they like. They go where they want to go. The two of them might be going to France to work.
No chance for her and Mr. Chandra to do those things any more. Go traveling-traveling abroad, and all. She is already fiftyplus. And with memory problems also.
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