Exit past to the present
I saw an old radio today, the kind that spanned the entire length of a room, with three foot high speakers, and a cabinet full of old fashioned valves and cores. The kind that made the warm sound of the pasts so rich and alive with history and adventure. Radios that once were the centre of family get togethers as we gathered around to listen to Binaca Geetmals, and serialized stories ... with the hiss and cackle and static of frequencies that came winging from places that seemed wondrously distant those days of ambassador cars, and smokestack trains ... and it reminded me of the radio my granddad had, which was always immaculately shined and maintained ... a radio I have no idea where it disappeared to, after my grandmom died ... a radio that could have been the centerpiece of our house today if we still had it, a radio that could have galvanized into memory a past that can no longer even be held in imagination easily, a past that seems almost like a fairytale world, when we think about the adventures they had then, just living their day to day lives ...
When i visit my dad, which is usually once every year or the other, he always has some stories to share, some from the present ... and invariably he also ends up going back in time to his life in Malaysia, to the days when he'd drive 300 kilometers through dark roads to get to work, managing a few hundred chinese laborers during the height of the civil war between the chinese and the malays in the 70s ... and my mother used to be the same, always ready with a short story or a long one about how they met, how they fell in love, how they moved to Butterworth, about us, how I lost my two front teeth when I fell from a showcase bringing it down on top of me, and how I once walked out from school, missed the bus, got lost and how some kind stranger managed to help me find my way back home again and dropped me off on the motorbike ...
But unlike our stories which they capture in albums, and which they relate back to us as we grow up, we don't have any thing similar to capture their lives. When they are gone, we don't have videotapes of them growing up, of an edited version of their life stories ...
So my plan this time when I visit with dad is to try and get all that down, write it up, see if I can put together a collage of the photographs that survived to punctuate and accent these stories ... because for sure our lives haven't been half as interesting as theirs ... and also because I feel that we also need to know who their fathers and mothers were, who their grandparents were ... and by understanding their history begin to see how much change they've seen ...
We've seen a lot of changes too, and one day our stories might inform our children as well. Show them how much further they have become because of how much we've all had to leave behind ... these stories somehow become more precious when you realize how much sadness there is when you lose someone for good without ever having fully understood them or their lives ...
When i visit my dad, which is usually once every year or the other, he always has some stories to share, some from the present ... and invariably he also ends up going back in time to his life in Malaysia, to the days when he'd drive 300 kilometers through dark roads to get to work, managing a few hundred chinese laborers during the height of the civil war between the chinese and the malays in the 70s ... and my mother used to be the same, always ready with a short story or a long one about how they met, how they fell in love, how they moved to Butterworth, about us, how I lost my two front teeth when I fell from a showcase bringing it down on top of me, and how I once walked out from school, missed the bus, got lost and how some kind stranger managed to help me find my way back home again and dropped me off on the motorbike ...
But unlike our stories which they capture in albums, and which they relate back to us as we grow up, we don't have any thing similar to capture their lives. When they are gone, we don't have videotapes of them growing up, of an edited version of their life stories ...
So my plan this time when I visit with dad is to try and get all that down, write it up, see if I can put together a collage of the photographs that survived to punctuate and accent these stories ... because for sure our lives haven't been half as interesting as theirs ... and also because I feel that we also need to know who their fathers and mothers were, who their grandparents were ... and by understanding their history begin to see how much change they've seen ...
We've seen a lot of changes too, and one day our stories might inform our children as well. Show them how much further they have become because of how much we've all had to leave behind ... these stories somehow become more precious when you realize how much sadness there is when you lose someone for good without ever having fully understood them or their lives ...
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